Earl W. Emerson

by The smoke room: a novel of suspense

  “Gum?” She is disoriented in the smoke, having ended up behind the desk.

  I am about to follow her when I hear a noise behind me. Tronstad.

  He’s got less than a minute—maybe two if he closes the door he’s left open—to accompany us through the hole in the wall. It occurs to me that I can leave without him and let him die, and that it will be the end of my troubles.

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  As I consider this, something strikes me in the face, a board, a baseball bat, the butt of a rifle—I cannot tell. I see stars and fall backward into the wall, then slump to the floor.

  Tronstad hits me again, across the helmet this time, and the force of the blow knocks me to the side. It is a glancing blow and does not sting as much as the first. My teeth on that side of my head are loosened, and a large section of my cheek is numb and beginning to swell. I can hear Sonja through the hole in the wall, calling my name. “Gum? It’s over this way. Are you coming?”

  It breaks my heart that I cannot go to her.

  45. DISCONNECTING

  W TRONSTAD STANDS OVER me and rains blows across my helmet and shoulders, across the composite air bottle. I curl up like a sow bug, and he beats on the bottle for fifteen or twenty seconds, striking my shoulders and hips with every third or fourth blow. I know if it goes on much longer I will be useless to get Sonja out of the house. All he’s thinking about is money. All I’m thinking about is Sonja. Over the past weeks I have messed up everything, but I am determined to get her out of this house.

  I can tell by the sound it makes on my empty air bottle, by the sting of the blows striking my body through the multiple layers of protective gear, the vapor barriers, the liners, the Nomex outer shell, that he is probably using a baseball bat. The blows are slowly crippling me. I reach out to grab one of his legs, but he is either moving too quickly or I am misjudging his position, because I grasp only smoke and then a corner of Iola’s bed. My left ear is ringing and my face is swollen. He catches me on the hip, and I believe he may have damaged a nerve bundle, because I find my left leg next to useless. Each time he hears the bat ringing on the composite cylinder, he moves the blows up or down, aiming for my legs or my head and hitting each with remarkable ease. He strikes my helmet two or three times more, and it makes my head ring and wrenches my neck. At least the helmet protects me from a disabling concussion.

  I spin in tight circles, sweeping the carpet with my legs, hoping to touch him, to get some clue as to precisely where he is. The bat smacks my left thigh and I scream in pain. I am a tortoise hit by a truck on the highway, waiting for another vehicle to finish me off. Finally I touch something, and without thinking, I lunge. I make contact, and we are immediately rolling on the floor. 280

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  “You gonna tell me where the bonds are hidden? Because if you’re not, you’re—” He is on top of me, slapping my face with his gloved fists. Letting him beat me, I strip off the glove on my right hand and reach up to find the small plastic lever on the nose of his MSA face piece, working the mechanism with the agility of someone who’s practiced it hundreds of times. Before he realizes what I’m doing, I pull his air hose off. He is long overdue for this kind of unpleasantness. Gulping his first lungful of smoke, he fights to locate the end of the air hose, swimming his arms in circles, slapping my face, my hands, my helmet. The smoke has spun him into a panic.

  He coughs and inhales with an ugly sputtering sound, then gets even more frantic, riding me like a drunk on a bronc. When he rolls off me, I hold on to the hose attached to his bottle, and as he struggles he begins to drag me like a man dragging a big dog on a leash. He coughs, and I can hear his inhalations grow shallower as his lungs spasm against the bitter smoke. Breathing is the most basic of human impulses, so it is a cruel twist of fate when those same inhalations draw death into our lungs.

  “Fuckin’ rookie. Fuckin’ cunt. Give me that hose.” He stands up, but I don’t let go of the high-pressure hose that can give his life back. When I look up at the ceiling, all is blackness and superheated smoke, but then for a split second, a flash of orange lights up the mixture. Like a clueless civilian, Tronstad’s left the door wide open behind him, so superheated gases from downstairs have followed him into the room and are rolling across the ceiling above us.

  With a low whoomph that hits me like a blow to the gut, the ceiling area near the door bursts into a bowl of orange. We’re seconds from being incinerated.

  “Goddamn it, Gum!” he wails.

  It occurs to me that I’ve never seen Tronstad eat smoke. Not at fires and not in the smoke room the night Chief Abbott ran us through our paces. Most people panic in smoke in the same way they panic underwater. Heavy smoke makes you feel as if you are drowning and smother-

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  ing at the same time, makes you feel as if Lucifer and all his dark angels have just farted down your windpipe.

  I hear Tronstad crashing into the wall, screaming in rage inside his face piece.

  Stooping low, I let go of his high-pressure hose and squirm through the hole in the wall. For a few seconds I am stuck, and then on the other side, the temperature drops precipitously.

  “Sonja?” It is dark in here. The light on my helmet is missing.

  “Sonja?”

  She is directly under the window, in a stupor from the heat. It doesn’t take long to get her on the ladder. Oleson, who’s been waiting at the bottom of the ladder, rushes to help, climbing, looking at me past Sonja’s ass. “Anybody else in there?”

  Pretending not to hear him, I turn away from the window to deal with Tronstad. This room is shielded from the fire in the hallway because the hollow-core door is closed. It’s a simple thing, a closed door, but it can protect from 1200-degree temperatures. The protection won’t last forever, but so far it’s preferable to the room next to us. As most hollow-core bedroom doors, this one is rated at twenty minutes, though I doubt it will last that long.

  Walking across the room, I drop to one knee and peer through the hole in the wall into the dense smoke in the next room. My hip hurts and my shoulders are bruised, and the smoke and exertion have wilted me like a flower. My legs feel as if I’ve climbed Everest. Tronstad is thrashing around like a bull in a pen, making anguished and increasingly frightening sounds. Abject panic is what I’m hearing, as he bangs into walls and tramples furniture. He’s not even crawling the perimeter of the room, seeking escape. He seems to be banging around aimlessly.

  Because he’s cheated on all his tests, has gone on disability to evade the more serious exercises, and is a master at finding reasons not to go inside a house that’s on fire, Tronstad’s eight years in the department have provided him with only the bare minimum in training. As I wait, Tronstad steps close to the hole, close enough that I can 282

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  reach out and touch his boot with my hand. I can save his life with a touch. He’s two feet from salvation. Or I can let him move on, and become his executioner. I sit on my haunches and let him walk past.

  Watching his boots disappear in the smoke, I feel no emotion, only the wetness on my face and the knowledge that I’m weaving a major crime into the textile of my soul, mutilating my future as profoundly as if cutting off a limb. In a month surfeited with appalling moral choices, I’ve made the most appalling of the lot. Here, I do not even have the excuse of calling myself a hapless onlooker. Here, pure and simple, I am engineering a murder. I tell myself Theodore Tronstad has been running loose long enough. That he’s killed, burgled, set fires, assaulted my mother, blackmailed me, and crapped on my carpet. That he deserves this. Below us, bullets pop off. Outside the window behind me, I hear men shouting. Fresh air gusts into the room and punches a hole in the smoke. And then, in a moment of clarity, I realize I cannot do this. This is not in my nature. I cannot kill a man and walk away from it. I’ll take him outside, and they’ll arrest him for arson and maybe they’ll arrest m
e, too, but that’s the way it’ll have to be.

  “Tronstad. Tronstad. Over here.”

  “What?” he gasps. “Where are you?”

  “Over on the other side of the wall. Come here. I’m in the room with the ladder.”

  And then he’s in front of me, kneeling in the smoke. “You fucker. Where are the bonds?”

  “I told you. The garage. They’re outside.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “I looked in the damn garage. They’re not there.”

  “You must have missed them.”

  “You liar. I know they’re in here.”

  “Tronstad. The fire’s on top of you. Get out.”

  “I’m going for the bonds. I know what I’m doing,” he gasps, moving away from the opening.

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  “Come back.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I hear him exit the room, whimpering as he pushes past his limits, and for a split second, I contemplate squirming through the hole in the wall and chasing after him, but I know it would be suicide. Feeling woozy, I walk to the open window and climb onto the fire department ladder, where I am able to draw in the first clean air I’ve had in ten minutes. I fill my lungs and begin to feel light-headed. My legs are heavy, and my arms barely have the strength to grip the ladder. I do not want to fall two stories, but I’m in danger of doing just that. The house is roaring, flames leaping out every window except the one directly above, and then, as I descend, flame bursts out that window, too. 46. TWENTY-FOUR SECONDS

  W I SCAN THE twilight until I spot Sonja in the corner of the yard being attended to by a medic, a sheet from the medic unit draped around her shoulders. “Gum?” she shouts across the yard. “Are you all right?”

  I nod, although I’m far from all right.

  At the bottom of the ladder, I stand motionless, my thoughts dull and unfocused, the heat from the windows warming me. It seems like weeks since I had that ladder on my shoulder, and I wonder vaguely where I got the strength to carry it. I can barely keep myself upright. In fact, my legs are trembling, as is my upper lip, my cheek, and a muscle running along my spine.

  A firefighter in a yellow helmet stands in front of me with a hose line. The insignia on the helmet tells me he’s from Ladder 7. “Fuckin’ A. You made another rescue? Damn, did you make another rescue? Fuckin’

  A. I bet that’s some sort of record. How many people have you brought out in the past couple months? We’re going to have to retire your number.”

  As he speaks, a bullet breaks out a piece of the plate-glass window in the frame beside us. We move away from the house, and I stumble and fall on my face in the cool grass. I’m not asleep, but I’m not awake, either. I’m not unconscious, but neither do I have the willpower to get to my hands and knees.

  After a while, somebody helps me out of the backpack. I feel like puking, but as long as I don’t move, I’m okay. People carry me around the house to the medic unit on the street the way they might tote a dead dog, my head sagging.

  On my back, I lie on the gurney listening to sounds of the fire ground outside the medic unit. They’re putting a line into my arm. The veins are

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  good, and they insert the needle without any problem. As they work, I zone out, able to talk but preferring not to. I hear Sonja’s voice nearby. Then Iola’s. Sonja is asking about me.

  Unless a miracle happens, Tronstad is dead.

  There are certain truths that will govern the next few days. I will tell lies designed to get the authorities off my back and dissuade Robert Johnson from resuming his hunt for the bonds. I know from experience that one lie begets another, that dishonesty will breed like fruit flies until a fierce swarm of fictions surges out of my mouth.

  I might tell them about Tronstad now, but that would create a circus with a hundred or more people standing around waiting for the body recovery. With that many witnesses, I would be unable to retrieve the bonds until later. With that many people roaming the property, the bonds might get discovered by accident. I decide to keep mum. Right or wrong, I’m not killing him. He’s already dead. It will make no difference whether they find his body now, in five hours, or in five days.

  “You don’t see one like this very often,” says the medic who’s working on me.

  “Gum! Hey, Gum!”

  “What?”

  A firefighter in full gear climbs into the medic unit and sits beside me, Lieutenant Muir. “Where’s your stuff ? They want to know if you left your PASS device inside. The guys on the back of the building think they hear a PASS device.”

  “In the house?” I ask.

  “In the house. There’s a bunch of bullets firing off, too, but there’s this sound like a PASS device. They think it’s on the second floor.”

  “Is Oleson out?”

  “Oleson’s over in the rehab area.”

  “He was my partner.”

  A PASS device, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, is built into our MSA backpacks and gives off a high-decibel signal when the wearer stops moving for more than twenty-four seconds, the idea being to alert fellow firefighters that there’s a man down.

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  Lieutenant Muir and one of the medics leave. A minute later the door opens and the medic climbs back inside.

  “They going in?” I ask.

  He is breathing heavily. “Are you kidding? The owner said he had five thousand rounds of ammunition in there. Plus, it’s burning like a kiln.”

  “Crazy.”

  “It sure is.”

  47. THE KING OF NOT GETS KISSED AND SLAPPED

  W BY SE VEN A.M. the fire has mostly burned itself out, so they send Engine 29 back to the station to clean up and exchange crews. Even though the medics want to truck me up to Harborview for further evaluation, I refuse and return to the station with Lieutenant Muir, Robert Johnson, and Oleson. I am dizzy and a tad spaced out but have no intention of lying in a hospital bed with doctors and nurses hovering over me while I brood about my dead friend.

  So far, nobody except me knows there’s a body in the house. Oleson thinks Tronstad fled the scene and has said as much. At the station I find the oncoming crew has put my bedding away, so I take a long, hot shower, hunkering under the spray until I’ve revived myself to the point where I can plan the rest of my morning. I am disoriented from the smoke and lack of sleep and from simple exhaustion. I do not speak about the fire to anyone, not my crew, not the oncoming crew, and not the new chief, Mortimer, who tries to question me about the rescues. “It all happened pretty fast,” I tell him from the shower stall, when he comes into the bathroom to question me. Embarrassed by my anemic responses and the flashes of nudity he has exposed himself to, he withdraws.

  I stand under the hot shower for a long time and eventually sense the rumble in the floor when Engine 29 fires up and retires from the building. The fire is tapped, but Marshal 5 is investigating, and they will need fire crews to stand by with hose lines and strong backs as a precaution against a rekindle, and to help with the removal of debris, which comes up layer by layer as the investigators ply their trade. After Tronstad’s body is discovered, they’ll be even more thorough. Engine 29 will be out all morning.

  Under the hot spray, I hawk up gobs of gray phlegm, slimy souvenirs 288

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  from my minutes in the smoke. My eyes are bloodshot, and when I screw a washcloth into my ear with one finger behind it, the cloth comes back sooty. Even after three shampoos, my hair reeks of smoke. Johnson emerges from the restroom while I’m dressing and stands near my locker in flip-flops, a large white towel wrapped around his waist, with a puckered scar zigzagging the top of his chest. If he notices the bruises Tronstad has left on my shoulders and back, he doesn’t mention them.

  “Tronstad set that, didn’t he?” Johnson said. “Just like he set Be
ach Drive. And the car the other night. And the Browns. Oleson said you saw him with a firebomb.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t want to talk about this?”

  “I took a lot of smoke. I’m pretty sick.”

  “You should have gone to the hospital, man.”

  “I don’t like hospitals.”

  “Your mother. I forgot about your mother. You know, they found an empty five-gallon gas can in the yard. They were guessing he broke that front window and poured a couple of gallons of gasoline into the living room before anybody could do anything about it. You think?”

  “Maybe.”

  “No wonder it was burning so hot. I mean, you guys put that line into the living-room window, and it didn’t seem to have any effect at all. It musta been hot upstairs. You see a lot of fire up there?”

  “Mostly smoke.”

  “And all that ammunition. It sounded like the Fourth of July. You know, a bullet clipped our light bar. I thought I was going to get plugged. I’m surprised you didn’t catch a bullet yourself, inside. The homeowner said he almost shot you by accident.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sound tired.”

  “I am.”

  “So where did Tronstad go? You see him leave? Oleson said they were fighting in the backyard. I wonder why Tronstad lit that particular house. That part has me stumped.”

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  “It belongs to Iola Pederson.”

  “The house?”

  “Yeah.” My short replies, general reluctance, and lack of eye contact are beginning to dim Johnson’s enthusiasm.

  “Is that the woman you were banging? With the tits?”

  “They all have tits, Robert.”