Earl W. Emerson

by The smoke room: a novel of suspense

  “Smoke in the vicinity.” Engine companies get these calls every day. Sometimes they are fires, but more often they are yokels arc-welding in their garages, kids setting off fireworks, woodstoves running amok, you name it. Most of Engine 29’s “smoke in the vicinity” calls turn out to be smoldering beach fires.

  Beside me, Oleson gets his gear on and twists the knob on his compressed air bottle. I follow suit. All we have to do now is pull our face pieces on and we are ready to rumble.

  Halfway down Bonair and within a couple of blocks of the Pederson house, we slow to a crawl. “You guys smell anything?” Lieutenant Muir yells through the open crew-cab window.

  “Nothing,” says Oleson, peering out the side window next to his jump seat. Even though it is contrary to department policy, I stand in the crew 260

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  cab and peer out over the top of the rig, past the light bar, a dangerous move at best because of the possibility of getting decapitated by a lowhanging branch or wire. I pray this is something as silly as a beach fire, but deep in my gut I suspect otherwise.

  We are two-thirds of the way down the hill when I spot an orange truck parked outside a duplex on the right-hand side of Bonair. “Stop!”

  I yell.

  Johnson brakes while Lieutenant Muir turns around and speaks through the crew-cab window. “You see something? You got smoke?”

  Without replying, I climb off the apparatus and leap to the ground before the engine stops moving.

  Tronstad’s pickup is partially hidden in a carport. Nobody else would have a license-plate holder that reads, “Dial 911. Make a firefighter come.”

  “Smoke? You see smoke?” Lieutenant Muir asks.

  Wearing all my gear and my air bottle, I sidle between a carport wall and the truck. Inside the cab are empty beer bottles, greasy McDonald’s wrappers, and soft-drink cups. Tronstad is not in the truck and I know he doesn’t live here. We’re about a block and a half from the Pedersons’. Before I can do anything else, I hear the sound of breaking glass farther down the hill.

  Johnson and Lieutenant Muir have heard the sounds, too, because the engine begins rolling down the hill without me. I give chase, fifty pounds of air bottle and heavy turnout clothing weighing me down, my helmet almost four pounds by itself. The engine turns into Hobart Avenue, and as it completes the turn, it blocks my view. All in all, I run a block and a half before I see the Pederson house. I am breathing like a racehorse.

  The front doorway is on fire. So is the large picture window to the right of the doorway. Hastily, I scan the house for signs of life, but except for the fire, it is as still as every other house in the neighborhood. Johnson is climbing out of the apparatus to set the wheel blocks and run the pump. Lieutenant Muir is yelling something I can’t understand. Oleson is stretching a hose line from the side of the engine toward the

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  house. I assist him, still breathing heavily from my run, the two of us dragging two hundred feet of preconnected inch-and-three-quarters line to the front of the house.

  We nudge the kinks out of the hose line with our boots so they won’t lock up when the water flows, and Oleson shouts for water. We continue to draw closer to the house, and I see flame inside the living-room window, lots of flame. Much of the glass in the window is broken out. It is Tronstad’s work, of course—Tronstad, who’s often bragged about the Molotov cocktails he made and tossed as a youth, mostly by the river in the woods near Redlands, California, but at least once into the mayor’s convertible and, weeks later, the mayor’s replacement convertible. He’d been an incorrigible teenager, hauled into juvenile court half a dozen times.

  Oleson holds the nozzle firmly and rinses the area around the front door, then begins moving to his right, toward the window. He is wasting water, bouncing it off the siding, and I want to tell him to stop, but before I speak he aims through the living-room window and blasts away, knocking out window glass as he goes. The water stream knocks the blinds down, and Oleson swirls the water in circles, shooting into the living room, which by now is pretty much an inferno. The flames don’t dampen one little bit. A hundred fifty gallons a minute, and it’s as if we’re not even there.

  I’ve never seen a hose line so ineffectual. I smell raw gasoline and know immediately Tronstad has saturated the living room with his favorite Shell product. In addition, the living room has pine-wood paneling instead of the standard fire-resistant wallboard most modern houses contain, which gives it a colossal fire load even before the gasoline. I know also from my visit in August that the stairs to the bedrooms are directly behind the living room, and that Oleson is pushing the flames up the stairs and into the sleeping area on the second floor. A large piece of the window that had been hanging on the top of the frame drops like a guillotine blade and narrowly misses cutting Oleson off at the wrists.

  “The fire’s in the front,” I say. “We’re pushing it up the stairs toward the bedrooms. Let’s take the line around back and push it out here.”

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  “Good idea.”

  He closes the bale on the nozzle, drops the hose line, and begins covering, as do I. I don’t want to cover here, but I don’t want to be out of sync with him, either. It will take thirty seconds to get our face pieces secure, get the air flowing, pull the Nomex hoods over our heads, and refasten our helmets.

  I finish masking up before Oleson, pick up the nozzle, and begin tugging the end of the hose around the side of the house. With two hundred feet of line, we should have more than enough. Because of the intensity of the fire, this is the best way to keep the flames away from people inside. Twenty feet behind me, Oleson drags hose and helps me get it around the corner of the house. From the outside, it is a simple structure, rectangular with a steep roof and one gable on the front and another gable in the back—a box, really, painted white with blue trim. I drag the hose around the house to the right, and as I peer down the side, I catch a glimpse of a figure in fire gear walking away from me into the backyard. No other units are on scene yet. From the way he moves, I know it’s Tronstad.

  When I get the hose line around the corner into the backyard, Tronstad is fifteen feet from the house, a greasy look of exuberance on his face. He wears full turnouts and one of our standard MSA bottle-and-backpack combos. He is ready for fire.

  I am hoping to see three pajama-clad people in the backyard, but there’s nobody but him and me.

  He grins, then cocks his arm back and throws something at the house. I don’t realize what it is until I see it in midair, whirring as it hurtles through the early-morning twilight. A Molotov cocktail disappears through a ground-floor window.

  He turns back to me and grins again, as if there is something hugely amusing about firebombing a house with people inside. With Tronstad, everything is a joke.

  “You stupid shit!” I say. “I know those people in there!”

  “Oh, are there people inside? Gee whiz.”

  “Have you gone insane?”

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  “Come on, man. Let’s get in there and get them bonds before they burn up. You better get your shit out while there’s still time.”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask, yanking more hose into the backyard.

  “The bonds, man. They’re gonna burn.”

  The machinations of his plot become instantly clear.

  “You followed us back from Beach Drive.”

  “You bet your ass I did.”

  “You never had the bonds at all.”

  “I will. Just as soon as you get them.”

  His earlier claim to have retrieved the bonds had been contrived in order to deceive me into leading him to them, which I’d foolishly done by having Johnson drive by here so I could check on the Pedersons. He and Johnson both knew about the pig—everybody on the West Coast did—

  but more than that, they knew where Iola lived
and that I’d been bopping her. I hadn’t spotted him following us, but it is easy enough to tail a fire engine by sound alone, especially when the streets are quiet and you know the two or three basic routes back up the hill.

  “I knew you had ’em stashed somewhere in the district. I just couldn’t figure out where until you swung by here to check on them.”

  “I wasn’t checking on the bonds, asshole! I came by to make sure you hadn’t hurt anyone.”

  “Hurt anyone? I’m not here to hurt anyone.”

  I spot three more gasoline-filled wine bottles in the grass, wet rags dripping from their necks like turkey wattles. He is going to continue pitching Molotov cocktails into the house unless I stop him. It takes Tronstad a second to realize what I am doing, another second to reach for the gun jammed into the belt of his MSA backpack. He doesn’t quite get a grip on the pistol before I slam into him at full speed, hitting him squarely in the chest with the gray composite forty-fiveminute bottle on my back. We both go down, but I roll in the grass and come up on my feet. He is on one knee, bloodied, cradling his arm as I walk over and heave the pistol into the darkness.

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  I kick him in the head with my steel-shanked rubber boot and manage to kick him once more before Oleson pushes me aside and stands between us. Tronstad rolls to his hands and knees, heavy dollops of bright scarlet dribbling out of his mouth and dangling in thin chains. “Better go get your shit,” he says, undeterred, looking up at me in the darkness.

  “It’s Ted Tronstad,” Oleson says. “For God’s sake, get a grip, man.”

  “I know who it is. He set this fire.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Look at those bottles. How’d he get here? Why’s he wearing his bunkers? He set it.”

  Oleson turns to the side in order not to expose his back to Tronstad.

  “You told everyone he set that other fire.”

  “He set both of them. I just now saw him throw a Molotov cocktail through that window.”

  Oleson looks past me toward the broken pebbled bathroom window. Behind the window is a room full of flickering orange. When I turn back, Tronstad is running into the shadows near the Pederson garage. He’s got one of the Molotov cocktails in his hands. Oleson gives chase. I fling the other two Molotovs, unlit, into the darkness of the yard and check my gear to make sure I don’t have any bare skin showing. I key my radio and say, “Dispatch from Engine Twenty-nine. This is an occupied house. Flames showing front and back. We have three possible victims. At far as we can tell, nobody’s out yet.”

  The dispatcher repeats my words, so I have the confidence that firefighters arriving on scene will know what to expect.

  “Sir? Sir? Can you help me?”

  When I look up, Iola Pederson is in the gabled window above the fire room in a baggy sweatshirt, hair disheveled. I hear burning wood crackling inside the house as the fire heats up on the first floor. She looks past me into the shadows, where Oleson and Tronstad are wrestling. It must be a bewildering sight, to spot two firefighters in full gear rolling in the darkness.

  “I can’t breathe.”

  “Keep your door closed.”

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  “My husband said to open it.”

  “Close it. I’ll be right up.”

  “The stairs are on fire. We can’t get downstairs.”

  “I know. Stay there. I’ll get a ladder. Is Sonja with you?”

  “Sonja?”

  “Your stepdaughter. Is she with you?”

  Iola looks back into the room, as if uncertain just who is with her and who is not, then puts her head back out the window. “Do you know Sonja?”

  “Stay there.”

  I jog around the side of the house, detach the heavy twenty-six-foot ladder from the side of Engine 29, and lug it on my right shoulder to the back of the house. It hurts my shoulder and is hard to balance. Generally, two people carry it, but tonight there is no one to help. Muir and Johnson are getting water. Oleson is wrestling with Tronstad. The living room is burning pretty heavily now, flames from the window licking lazily up the outside wall of the house. I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve used the correct tactics. The fire in the living room looks amazing. It’s startling what a little dab of flammable liquid will do. Hustling around to the rear of the house, I dig the spurs into the sod and raise the ladder in one motion. I begin pulling on the halyard, raising the flies, then I let the ladder drop against the building with a metallic clank.

  43. THE NEIGHBORHOOD CUCKOLD FIRES

  LIVE ROUNDS AT YOURS TRULY

  W I AM HALFWAY up the ladder when I feel somebody climbing behind me. Oleson. Behind him, jogging across the yard toward the base of the ladder, is Ted Tronstad. “Watch out,” I say. “He’s crazy.”

  “I figured that out.” Oleson turns around in time to get pulled off the ladder by Tronstad. They fall with a clatter like a couple of knights in battle armor. I continue climbing. Oleson is heavier and taller than Tronstad, so I figure he can handle himself. Even if he can’t, I have other priorities. We’ve already squandered too much time.

  As far as I can tell, the fire hasn’t moved off the first floor yet, but it will. The staircase will act as a chimney, conducting heat and flame upstairs. In no time the second floor will be hotter than the first. We’ve been on scene maybe three minutes, and no other fire units have arrived.

  I reach the window in the gable and peer inside using my flashlight. If the Pedersons make a habit of keeping their second-floor doors closed, the rooms will be relatively smoke free, but they don’t and they aren’t. The room lights are on, the fixture on the ceiling glowing like a dull sun straining to burn through fog. Because the design of the gable and the slope of the roof don’t allow room elsewhere, I’ve placed the tip of the ladder under the window. I climb over the sill and lever myself onto the floor, where the smoke is thinner. The room is crowded with furniture, a desk, bookcases laden with computer manuals, and several file cabinets.

  The woman on the floor with her back in the corner is clad in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, knees tucked up against her chin. “Iola?” She looks up, striving to recognize me through the smoke and my face piece. “It’s me. Gum.”

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  She’s been crying, a ring of soot around her nostrils, tea bags of loose skin under her eyes, hair in strings.

  “No. Don’t stand up. It’s too hot. We’ll crawl.” When I start to move us toward the window, she doesn’t budge, so I sit back on my heels, take off my gloves, and place my arm gently around her shoulders, urging her along. When she does move, she hobbles along like an old woman who’s had too much to drink, and after thinking about it a few seconds, I realize she has had too much to drink. Over the weeks of our affair she made frequent references to polishing off a bottle of Chardonnay every evening. What luck—to end up blind drunk the night a sociopath firebombs your house. But then, if you’re drunk every night . . . When she sags against me and stops moving, I urge her on, but quickly realize I’ve accidentally palmed one of her breasts under the sweatshirt. My intimate touch brings her back to life. “Oh? What? Who’s that?” I readjust my grip and feel her stomach sag slightly as she crawls alongside me. Odd how different her body feels now than it did three weeks ago, when the feel of her torso as she moved thrilled me to the bone.

  Tonight she is simply a woman in need of rescue. She cries all the way across the floor to the window, where I say,

  “Time to climb out.”

  “I don’t do heights,” she replies, placing the top of her head against the wallboard. “I can’t.”

  “I’ll put you on the ladder.”

  She begins to stir. “Are you coming with me?”

  “I have to get the others. Where are they?”

  “My husband’s in the other room.”

  “What about your stepdaughter?”

  “I haven�
�t seen her.”

  With some maneuvering on my part and a good deal of whimpering on hers, I assist her out the window and onto the ladder, where the rungs bite into her bare feet. Oleson comes up behind her, encapsulating her with his thick arms. Her knuckles are like white chocolate on the rungs, and as she descends, Oleson has to pry her hands loose from each one. It’s 268

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  like taking a terrified child out of a tree. Tronstad is below Oleson, in the grass. His face is bleeding.

  I walk across the room and crack open the door. The smoke in the hallway is so hot, I drop to my hands and knees. I’ve already put my gloves back on.

  Down the stairway I can hear the fire crackling. I know from my initial visit that a long hallway runs the length of the upstairs, with a bathroom at one end and a staircase leading down to the first floor at the other. The room I’ve laddered is closest to the stairs. I head left, toward the bathroom at the opposite end of the hallway, feeling along the wall for doorways or bodies. I hear wood beams cracking on the floor below and feel the intense heat roaring up the staircase, rolling over my back, the racket coming at me like a freight train. I can feel the heat and heavy smoke through my thick turnout clothing. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m breathing cool, compressed air, I might easily panic. About where I expect to locate it, I find another doorway on my left. I crawl in. As was the case earlier, there is less smoke in the room. There are clothes on the floor: shoes, a boot. A pair of trousers, twisted and flat on the rug. A pillow. I reach up to flip the light switch on the wall, but it is already on and is having no effect in the smoke. Using the flashlight on my helmet, I make my way to the bed, which takes up most of the width of the room. There is no window, a skylight instead. In the smoke the beam of my flashlight moves like a saber in front of me. What I want more than anything is for the beam to alight on Sonja Pederson’s face.