Pyro (11 page)

24. NOBODY EVER GOT HURT ON ONE OF MY RIGS

         
Rideout looked at me and wiped a tear off her brown cheek as the medics worked on Pickett. There were black and red marks down the sides of his face in the shape of parallelograms.

You could tell he had drugs on board, because he spoke with the failure of restraint you see in a mouthy drunk.

“We went through the first two rooms,” Pickett said. “I guess that’s where I heard a window breaking.”

“That was me,” Rideout said. “I broke the kitchen window.”

“I don’t know why. We had an exit for the smoke.”

“We did?”

I spoke gently. “You turn the fan into the doorway of a place that small and if you don’t have an exit you know right away because it comes right back on you. You had one, all right. So you had the fan running?”

“We fired it up and went in,” Pickett said. “The hose line was right behind us.”

“The hosers never came in. We ran into them in the doorway when we came out,” said Rideout.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“We were headed down this hallway toward the bedrooms. It was hot, but then all of a sudden it starts to get
real
hot. My face felt like it was getting burned around the edge of my face piece, you know, like I didn’t have my hood sealing the face piece, so I tried to adjust it. When I moved the hood a little bit, I got burned.
That
was when I knew my hood was already in place.”

“Are you okay?” I asked, turning to Rideout.

“I’m fine.” The upper half of the Ladder 3 decal on the front of her helmet was singed. Maybe she hadn’t been burned, but she’d come close.

“Was there anybody in the apartment?” Pickett asked.

“No,” I said.

“I think it was the fan,” Rideout said.

“What about the fan?” I asked.

“I don’t think it was on when we came out.”

“It wasn’t,” said one of the paramedics.

“Maybe you were too aggressive,” said Chief Hertlein, placing his enormous bulk in the doorway of the medic unit behind Rideout. “I’ll expect to see that reflected in her report.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“It’s pretty obvious she was too aggressive and got her partner burned because of it.”

“That’s not what happened, Chief.”

“They were way too aggressive. Both of them. I want you to write her up.”

“Since when are we looking for timid recruits? When I was teaching drill school, we drummed it into recruits that they needed to be aggressive. First one through the door gets the job.”

“There’s a difference between being aggressive and being stupid.” Hertlein gestured at Pickett. “That’s the difference right there.”

“Hey, Chief,” Pickett said. “Sometimes it’s just a hazard of the profession.”

“Every time anybody gets hurt,” Hertlein said, “you look around, you’ll find somebody did something stupid.”

“So walls never fall on anybody?” I said. “Bricks never pop out of chimneys?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t think I do.”

“Nobody goes inside in front of a hose line.”

Pickett tried to sit up, but the female medic put four fingers on his chest and pushed him back down.

“Nobody goes inside in front of a hose line?” I said. “Are you kidding me? Maybe we better start stuffing hose in that ladder compartment. Then when we go up to a house fire, we can carry a fifty-five-foot ladder, a couple of fans, a generator and light cord, our chain saws, and a couple hundred feet of hose too. That would be terrific.”

Towbridge laughed.

Silencing Towbridge with a look, Hertlein swept his eyes back to me. “Listen to me, you blasted idiot. You damn well better learn how this man’s fire department operates! To start off with, you never back-mouth a superior officer. Especially one that can move your butt to the commissary warehouse tomorrow morning.”

Last summer when I popped him, I hadn’t been angry. Violence often erupted out of a deadly calm deep inside me. Now I was so angry I could barely get any words out. What frightened me was that I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had no idea.

Sometimes things simply happened. Bad things.

“When I worked on Three Truck,” Hertlein continued, his voice growing soft, “we had more fires than you’ve probably seen in your entire career. In all that time nobody who ever worked for me got hurt.” One of his sentences would be whisper-soft, the next shouted. It was as if he wanted you to turn your hearing aid up so he could yell into it. “You’re lucky I don’t transfer your ass right now, tonight!”

“I been transferred before, Chief. It doesn’t bother me.”

He turned around and confronted Eddings, whose face was pale and blank. “I want them here after everybody else is gone,” Hertlein said. “Make them the last unit to go. Put ’em on fire watch. And don’t let them give you any bullshit about wanting to go up to the hospital to see Pickett. By the way, young man.” He gave me a long look through his misty spectacles. “I’m going to talk to Safety. There
will
be a report.”

Hertlein stalked off. Eddings raised her eyebrows and gave me a look, then sighed. Maybe I was wrong, but I had the feeling what I was seeing on Eddings’s face was respect. She’d been in her share of hot water over the course of her career, and I think she recognized in me a kindred spirit—two shit magnets in the same battalion.

Eddings walked away, rolling on the outer edges of her feet. Towbridge followed for a few feet, mimicking the waddle perfectly.

“You going to be all right?” I asked Pickett.

“Long as they keep shooting me up with morphine. I don’t know how I’m going to get my fix when I get back on the street.”

“You’re gonna have to start turning tricks,” Dolan said.

Everyone laughed except Rideout. Nothing in the world could have made her laugh.

“You guys have yourselves a nice fire watch,” Pickett said. “I’ll be up in the hospital playing footsie with the nurses.”

“Look,” I said to Rideout after the medic unit left. “It wasn’t your fault. It was up to him to know how much heat there was around him.”

“He looked so dreadful. I got in his way. I think I delayed his exit.”

“Hey,” said Dolan. “Like we told you, Pickett gets hurt at every fire he goes to.”

“We’re not shittin’ ya,” Towbridge said. “At the potato warehouse fire down on Rainier last year he got his leg caught in a ladder. Was hanging upside down when we found him.”

We were side by side replacing equipment in compartments on our rig, standing under the upraised compartment doors to shield ourselves from a chill rain that had started to drop out of the night, when Dolan turned to me. “Maybe he never got anybody on
his
crew hurt, but he sure as hell banged up some other crews.”

“Who?”

“Hertlein. I thought he was my friend. Now he goes and keeps us out here all night on fire watch. They don’t need no fire watch out here. Why did he have to go and do that? I helped him build the deck on his house.”

“What do you mean he banged up some crews?”

“Instead of running the saw up and over the rafters to save the frame and then picking the roof sheathing off with axes, you know, leaving some integrity to what you’re standing on, he would dip the saw blade down in and cut the whole thing out, a big old chunk. Roofing, sheathing,
and
rafters.”

“Didn’t the section drop into the house?”

“You bet it dropped into the house. I kept telling him he couldn’t do that. First couple times we got lucky and the roof landed in the attic. Then one night we’re on this duplex and there’s a good fire underneath us and he cuts this huge piece out of the roof, maybe six-by-eight. It dropped into the house and hit three firefighters from Thirty-three’s. All three of ’em went to the hospital. We were lucky they didn’t end up quadriplegics.”

“What came of it?”

“It got swept under the rug. And you know what else? He hates fans. Hertlein sees a fan at a fire, he turns it off.”

“You’re kidding me, right? That’s like sending a guy down a hole and then cutting his rope.”

Towbridge looked at me. “Maybe he turned off Pickett’s fan.”

“We should ask those Engine Twenty-five guys,” Dolan said. “They were in the doorway. They would have seen it.”

25. LASALLE, CONNOR, AND FIVE SNOT-NOSED ARSONISTS

         
It was pouring rain when the two investigators from Marshal 5 showed up, LaSalle and Connor. Our job was to secure the fire scene and provide lights and manpower for their investigation, to secure the property after they were finished, and then sit around for the rest of the night, since Hertlein had ordered us to stay.

LaSalle’s father had been mayor of Seattle thirty some years ago, and LaSalle was a paunchy, soft-looking replica of the old man. Marsha Connor was softer than LaSalle. She had what Towbridge called a teacher’s underbelly, a mound of flesh below her belt that sedentary people sometimes accumulate in middle age. In fact, now that I thought about it, LaSalle and Connor looked like a doughy husband and wife who’d been eating in the same restaurants for decades. That’s where the resemblance ended. LaSalle was as cocksure of himself as Connor was fraught with uncertainty.

“So who’s been setting fires up north?” Dolan asked. “We been hearing units on fire calls all night.”

“There’s at least two of them now,” said Connor. “Maybe three.”

“Two pyromaniacs?” My voice must have betrayed something, because everybody looked at me. I could feel the poison coursing through my bloodstream like acid.

“Or three,” said Connor.

“Three? There’s probably five of the snot-nosed bastards,” corrected LaSalle.

They both wore jeans and windbreakers, fire department sweatshirts under the windbreakers. Connor wore heavy, steel-toed work boots, while LaSalle wore sneakers. Stepping into the fire unit, LaSalle turned back to the doorway and grinned at me, displaying the gap between his front teeth. “Nice work. You got this place lit up like a condom shop at Mardi Gras.”

Connor turned around and twitched an eyebrow at Rideout, as if to say, “Boys.”

LaSalle said, “I heard Pickett got hisself burned.”

“How bad was it?” asked Connor.

“Just a little on his face,” said Towbridge.

“A lot on his face,” said Rideout.

“Hertlein’s going to hang somebody out to dry. You his partner?” LaSalle asked, turning to Rideout.

“Yes, sir.”

“Sir?” LaSalle looked at the numbers on Rideout’s helmet and said, “Sir. I like that. Can the rest of you guys call me sir too?”

Dolan said, “Sir Asshole or Sir Ignoramus?”

LaSalle laughed.

It was a two-bedroom unit. The fire had emerged from a narrow corridor leading to the bedrooms to the left of the living room. You could see where it had spread downward from the ceiling, the walls charcoal at head height, gray down low, until, a few inches from the floor, they retained their original color. Even in the corridor, where the fire had burned hottest, the bottom few inches on the wall were clean.

Until LaSalle and Connor began pulling burned material out of the bathroom and examining it piece by piece, we assumed the fire had been started by the carelessness of one of the young women who lived here. She had already told us she had lit a candle in the bathroom and left it burning when she went out. LaSalle and Connor decided the fire started in the ceiling fan over the commode. Faulty wiring had ignited the fan motor and set the ceiling on fire. After it burned awhile it weakened the ceiling plaster enough that the fan unit fell onto the countertop, where the fire quickly melted the candle and the false marble countertop.

I turned to Rideout. “Did they teach you how to read a fire in drill school?”

“A little.”

“When there was enough smoke and gas built up from the fire in the bathroom, the smoke began following a natural path to the window in this bedroom. When you guys turned the fan on at the front door, the pressurization helped push the gases out the bedroom window. From the bathroom through this bedroom. It was perfect.”

“So when I broke out the kitchen window, I changed the air flow and got Pickett burned?”

“That puny little window wasn’t enough to do that,” said Dolan.

I said, “What brought the fire out toward the living room was the fan getting shut off. All of a sudden the apartment was no longer pressurized, so the heat began heading toward the largest opening. The front door.”

“If the fan had been on, Pickett wouldn’t have been burned,” Towbridge said.

“It don’t help,” said Dolan, “that we’re forced to wear all this damn equipment. This hood. And now they even say they’ll write charges on us if we go into a fire without our collars up. What a crock of shit. In the old days, you went in with your ears exposed. When a room got too hot, you could feel it. You backed out. Now your gear gets hot and you don’t even know it. You get burned before you can take it off. Did you see those lines on his face? Those were contact burns. His face piece and hood burned him. He got burned by his own equipment.”

“You close to nabbing your arsonist?” I asked LaSalle.

“It’s just a matter of time. They
all
get caught.”

But they didn’t
all
get caught. My father’s killer was still out there. “At two of the arsons we found Shasta diet black cherry cans,” I said.

“You save them?”

“At the last one I had Slaughter mark it for you guys.”

“He never said shit to us.”

LaSalle gave me a look. Connor said, “Next time try to preserve anything you find in place.”

“It’s probably nothing,” said LaSalle. “There’s been a lot of trash around these sites.”

The casualness with which LaSalle treated my tip put things into perspective. He was right. There had been a lot of debris at our fire sites. Discarded furniture. Fast-food wrappers. Bottles. Cans.