Earl W. Emerson

by The smoke room: a novel of suspense

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  panicked. He was riding me like a drunk on a mule. We were both getting mouthfuls of water, and . . . In lifesaving you learn . . . once somebody panics, all they care about is breathing air instead of water. The technique is to sink and let them come under with you, because they’ll let go of you and fight their way back to the surface, and that’s how you get free. But with all that equipment on, all I could manage was to break loose and push him away. Instead of moving away from me, he went under. By the time I turned around to pull him out, he’d been sucked into that pipe.”

  “This is all on videotape?”

  “Enough of it.”

  I was leaving out the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Brown and Chief Abbott, but I couldn’t see her keeping a confidence that involved three additional deaths. Nor did I have personal testimony on those. Sears was the only death I’d witnessed start to finish. Plus, if I told her the rest, I might as well put on a suit and go downtown.

  “Were there other witnesses?”

  “The other man on our crew. He and Tronstad are planning to split up what Tronstad stole.”

  “So he won’t be testifying on your behalf?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “This stolen item is worth money?”

  “Enough to buy this duplex. And every house on the block. Maybe the next block over.”

  She thought about it a few moments. “It’s the George S. David loot, isn’t it? That guy who called himself Ghanet? You must have been on the crew who found his body. Who else have you told?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Iola?”

  “Nobody.”

  “That car fire the other day. The driver was a retired FBI field agent. You said your friend set that fire.”

  “I can’t prove it.”

  “Maybe we can.”

  “Maybe.”

  She grew quiet. It was hard to know what she was thinking—that I

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  was involved in these deaths. That I was a killer. That I was a thief. That she needed to get up and leave before the place got raided. Or before I told her anything else. I’d left so much out. If only she knew. “Jesus, Gum. You’re in more trouble than anybody I’ve ever met.”

  “Even people you arrested?”

  “Anybody.”

  38. THREE THINGS

  W THAT DAY AT Station 29 two things happened—no, three things. The first was Robert Johnson began haranguing me about the bonds, becoming more belligerent as the day wore on, admitting finally he’d overextended himself and was in the process of buying vacation property in Palm Springs, and that he needed forty thousand dollars by the end of the week. “You got to give me my share today. I just want those bonds. Can’t you see what sort of trouble I’m in?”

  “I didn’t tell you to buy property you don’t need with money you don’t have.”

  “Jesus, you’re hardheaded, Gum. You used to be such an easygoing guy.”

  As the day wore on, I watched him grow angrier and more aloof. We had four alarms, and he went bad on three of them while I sat in back and let him take the wrong route to the wrong block. Our extra man for the day gave me a look that told me rumors of Johnson’s ineptitude would be hotfooting it around the battalion for weeks to come. Later, basking in the October sunshine, our arms folded against a chilly wind that portended winter’s early arrival, we had another chat in the Safeway parking lot while Lieutenant Muir and Jim Snively, the detail from Station 32, went in to buy dinner. Considering the bitterness that had passed between us, it was curious that Johnson and I could chat like old friends, but we could.

  “Robert?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If a woman’s stepmother is having an affair with a guy and then her stepmother breaks it off, do you think there’s any way that woman would be interested in the guy her stepmother was balling?”

  “I don’t see how. To start off with, he’d be too old for her.”

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  “Supposing the stepmother has an affair with a younger guy.”

  “You ever see that movie The Graduate ? Young guy is porking the mother, then runs off and marries the daughter? Wait a minute. This is you and the stepdaughter of that older babe you were banging, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Whooo. That is weird, man.” Johnson turned and looked at me, breaking into a broad smile. “A mother/daughter deal. Whooee. How many guys have dreamed about that?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t put it like that. I don’t know if it could ever work out, but I like her a lot.”

  Johnson chuckled. “Gum, you got more surprises than anybody I know. I mean, there was the way you went into that fire at Arch Place. Two rescues all by your lonesome. Then there’s the bonds. I never dreamed you wouldn’t give them up the instant we asked. And then you beat the hell out of Tronstad with the hose line.” He laughed. “Now you want to bang the daughter of the woman you were banging last week. Gum, you take the cake.”

  The second thing that happened was Ted Tronstad didn’t show up. Since I’d attacked him, he’d broken into my house twice and my mother’s once, so it stood to reason he was afraid I’d assault him again. Or sic the cops on him.

  The third thing happened just before dinner. I walked into the beanery and found Sonja Pederson sitting at the table alongside Lieutenant Muir and Snively. Snively was reading the newspaper, oblivious of Sonja in the same way he’d been oblivious of us most of the day. Lieutenant Muir was making small talk while Sonja filled out a police department form she’d brought in.

  Lieutenant Muir was a handsome man and reminded me of Sears in some respects, a fire nut who subscribed to Fire Engineering and frequently Xeroxed articles to pass around to firefighters who clearly didn’t care as much as he did about the best way to disable the batteries on a fork lift, or how to dispatch units to an airplane crash in a train yard. He was a tall man, larger and thicker than Snively, who was large himself.

  “Hey, Gum,” Sonja said, standing and kissing my cheek. “I’ve been thinking about what you said this morning. We need to talk.” Snively 242

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  glanced up from the paper and raised his eyebrows, while Muir opened the station repair journal and pretended to make an entry. The equipment on Sonja’s Sam Browne belt jangled as she picked up her portable radio and the pad she’d been writing on and walked out of the room with me. I knew this story would fly round the battalion, a companion piece to the tale of Johnson’s driving. We went outside, where we stood on the grass next to her patrol car.

  “You’re not going to like this and you probably won’t agree, but you have to turn yourself in.”

  “Spoken like a true law-enforcement officer.”

  “The Major Crimes Unit downtown would be the people to see.”

  “Turn myself in, or turn Tronstad in?”

  She stared at me blankly, while a subtle breeze made her hair stand up in little spikes. The sky was blue to the north, overcast to the south. Her pale blue eyes searched mine. “Tronstad. You. Both. I’m serious. Listen, I’m not even supposed to be here. I left my sector just to see you. I’m worried about you. You have to make the decision.”

  “Do you hate me?”

  “Of course I don’t hate you. You know I don’t.” She stepped close and kissed my cheek. “I have to go now. If you want me to be there when you go in, call my cell phone. I’ll talk to my sergeant and we’ll go do it.”

  Turning in the bonds and telling the authorities the truth had been the right course of action from the start, even if it meant abandoning my mother to die alone. I was fairly certain I’d committed at least one crime and possibly dozens and that once my story saw the light of day they’d put me away like a rabid dog.

  I had never been able to jump into a cold lake or swimming pool without dithering around the edges for a long time, but I’d been steeling myself to take this plun
ge for too long. Sonja was right. Even though it would feel as if I were stepping into the propeller blades of an airplane, I needed to step forward.

  She kissed me again. “I’ll be off tonight after eight. I’m staying with my folks for a couple of days, so I’ll be close by. Call if you want some moral support.”

  She got into her cruiser and disappeared up Walker toward California

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  Avenue, waving two fingers. I had a feeling it was the last time I would speak to her.

  When I went back into the station, Robert Johnson, who had been watching us out the window, said, “That was her? She’s a cop? No wonder you’re turning into Dudley Do-Right.”

  39. HERO-SLASH-MADMAN

  W I STAYED UP late, watching a movie in the beanery the way a kid stays up late on the first night of a vacation, knowing there’s nothing in particular to get up for in the morning. Nowhere to go. Nowhere but jail. For all useful purposes, my life was over.

  “I suppose we’re going to have a jet crash into the station tonight,”

  Snively said at one-thirty, when he pulled himself up out of his chair to go to bed. We hadn’t spoken in over an hour. Snively was a tall, saturnine firefighter who rarely smiled or conversed but, once started, could bellyache until the cows came home.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “ ’Cause you guys are the bad-luck assholes of the department.”

  Several times during the day Snively had voiced misgivings about working with us, claiming the majority of the department believed there was a curse on our station and on us.

  Snively began to list our bad luck. Abbott’s death at Station 14. Sears’s drowning at the Dexter Avenue fire. My own near-drowning. My assault with an inch-and-three-quarters hose stream and Tronstad’s eye injury last week. All of which had become common knowledge in Battalion Seven. I’d noticed during the day that the interim chief, Lieutenant Muir, and Snively all treated me with the deference you might treat a celebrity, or maybe a legend. Until recently, I’d just been the new guy, the rookie, the inexperienced youth, so it was almost amusing to be perceived as the hero-slash-madman of Engine 29.

  While cataloging our misfortunes, Snively added the fire deaths at Arch Place and the crispy critters in the Lincoln Town Car. “You could go your whole career without seeing somebody burned alive, but you seen four of ’em in a month.”

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  “The first two weren’t burned,” I said. “At Arch Place it was smoke inhalation.”

  “Yeah, yeah. It all started when that pig fell out of the sky.”

  “That was the other shift,” I said. “The pig.”

  “But you were there. And what worse luck is there than having a pig fall through your living-room roof ? Twenty-nine’s is supposed to be this sleepy little backwater where nothing ever happens, but you three guys—

  for you the sky caves in.”

  As much as his assessment irked me, I had to grudgingly give him credit for putting his finger on the pig, because that was what started it all.

  “Weird shit happening up here,” Snively said.

  “If something happens tonight, it’s your fault.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “We already used up our bad luck.”

  “Bullshit.”

  We were the only ones awake in the station, the lieutenant and chief slumbering in their respective offices down the hall, Johnson in his bunk on the other side of the apparatus bay in the bunk room. I’d been assigned the night watch and had made up my bed and brushed my teeth but was too tired to drag myself away from a Mel Gibson movie about paranoia.

  “We picked straws to see who would take this detail. Nobody wants to work with you guys.”

  “You’re not going to let it alone, are you?”

  “I thought you should know. No, I mean it. You guys are bad news.”

  He scratched his butt. “Anyway, six more hours and I’m outta here.”

  “We’ll give you a door prize on the way out.”

  “You know, there’s people saying the suicide almost a week ago was all part of the same bad luck.”

  “What suicide?”

  “You know. Your lieutenant’s wife.”

  “Muir?”

  “The other lieutenant.”

  “Covington was only here one shift.”

  “Sears.”

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  “Heather? I just saw her last week.”

  “She’s dead, bud.”

  “She can’t be.”

  “You didn’t know that? Jumped off the Aurora Bridge.”

  “She wasn’t . . .”

  “They’re callin’ it a suicide. Depressed because of Sears’s death and all. Didn’t you hear about this? Everybody was talking about it at Thirtytwo’s this morning.”

  “Nobody was talking about it here.”

  “Yeah, well . . . I suppose you coulda missed it. It was just a little article, and her last name is—”

  “I know her name.”

  “I forget the name she goes by.”

  “Wynn.”

  “Right. Fire boat pulled her out of the canal four days ago. They figure she jumped Friday night. Aurora Bridge. What’s that? A hundred eighty feet?”

  My mind couldn’t help replaying the events on Beach Drive a week ago Friday. Tronstad had scheduled her arrival for half an hour after our visit.

  I’d always admired Heather’s independent spirit. Given her strongwilled temperament and her determination to find out what had been going on in the station before her husband died, suicide didn’t seem a plausible prospect. It was more likely Tronstad had staged her death the way he’d staged the other deaths.

  After Snively hit the sack, I sat alone in front of the movie. If I’d done the right thing at the beginning of this whole fiasco, none of this would have happened. It was all my fault. I was going to the authorities first thing in the morning.

  At two a.m. I dragged myself to bed.

  The station bells hit at 0315 hours, the tones signaling a fire rather than an aid call. I’d been sleeping so soundly, I mistakenly thought it was the morning hitch, that the entire night had elapsed, and that I’d been in bed five hours instead of one. I was so exhausted I could barely pull myself out of the bunk.

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  Our chief for the shift, a large woman named Cindy Polson, came out of her office in her black trousers, white chief ’s shirt hanging out, pager beeping. “Where is it?”

  “Beach Drive. Go down Admiral to Sixty-third and head south. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks.”

  By the time I came fully awake, the rig was roaring down the hill on Admiral Way, the chief ’s Suburban behind us. I was slinging the mask built into the seat back, cinching up the shoulder straps and waist belt, getting ready to go into a fire building with my reluctant partner, Snively.

  “Goddamn fucking station,” Snively repeated over and over. “I knew this was going to happen. Goddamn fucking . . .”

  The address was on Beach Drive SW. Engine 32’s district, or Engine 37’s. It was the house where we’d met Tronstad the other night, but I was too sleepy to run through all the mental gymnastics required to figure out what that might mean.

  As we arrived and parked behind Engine 32 and Ladder 11, we smelled smoke in the air. Chief Polson ordered Engine 29 to take a line into the house to back up Engine 37’s crew, who were already inside looking for the seat of the fire. In seconds Snively and I were carrying two hundred feet of the same interconnected line, fifty pounds for each of us, plus the fifty pounds of protective gear we were wearing. Muir and Johnson would follow after they got their bottles on. There was no doubt in my mind Tronstad had killed Heather Wynn and was belatedly attempting to destroy the scene of the crime.

  “Goddamn it,” Snively said, as we carried our hose bundles up th
e dark driveway. “I knew something like this was going to happen. I just fuckin’ knew it.”

  “You don’t want fires, you could transfer to the park department.”

  “Fuck you.”

  The driver on Engine 37 took our wye, attached it to a discharge port on his engine, and told us he’d give water when we called for it. The first line in the driveway was already hard and pulsing. The front door to the house was wide open, the hose line running across the front step into the smoke. The outer walls of the house were 248

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  blackened and wet where they’d already poured water, the burn pattern spreading horizontally along ten feet of outer wall. Fires didn’t routinely spread horizontally. They went up, generally in a V pattern, so this indicated an arsonist. But then, I already knew that.

  Heavy black smoke rolled out the front door. Inside we heard glass breaking and the sound of a nozzle opening and shutting as firefighters endeavored to use only enough water to tap the fire.

  “Oh, shit,” Snively said. “Fuck! Fuck!”

  “Water!” I yelled. Seconds later the hose line stiffened at my feet. Snively had been in the flower bed putting his mask on, but now he was grabbing his wrist and spinning in circles as if trying to unwind himself. He grabbed his neck. For a moment I thought he’d stepped into a hornet’s nest.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “What is it? Come on, man. The other crews are going to run over us.”

  “Jesus! Fuck! Shit! Would you look at this?” He held up his left hand. Switching on my helmet’s flashlight, I spotted a fishhook through his glove, a line from the fishhook strung to the rhododendron he was standing beside. He was tethered to the bush by half a dozen sections of fish line. One hook had bit into his neck, others snagging his bunking coat.

  “Just a minute,” I said, pulling a small, folding knife out of the thigh pocket on my bunking trousers.

  Just then, Lieutenant Muir and Robert Johnson arrived and began masking up. “What’re you doing?” Lieutenant Muir asked. “You’re supposed to be inside.”