Pyro (16 page)

36. HOW AND WHEN

Cynthia Rideout

D
ECEMBER 17,
T
UESDAY, 0545 HOURS

         
I’m here on my bunk too tired to sleep. We caught our one really good fire at 0400 and just now got back to the station and cleaned up our equipment. We’ve only got an hour and fifteen minutes before the hitch, when we have to get up anyway.

Everybody in the station is jazzed because a crew from
60 Minutes
is following Katie Fryer on B-shift. This morning they were filming her out on the ramp washing the rig. Dolan said Katie was showing off for the cameras and that the water was turning to ice on the ramp, that it was dangerous. I haven’t told anybody they asked to film me—or that I turned them down.

I know why they asked me first. I’m a woman, I’m a recruit, I’m an Indian. A poster child for all their liberal biases. But no way do I want cameras following me around while officers and firefighters are spreading rumors and trying to sack me. No way do I want them saying on national TV how two of my brothers are alcoholics. Or showing the shack where I grew up and embarrassing my family.

Katie Fryer was a perfect choice. Outspoken. Colorful. Not a bit shy.

Here’s what’s been happening.

First, the department cancelled their flyer and alley inspection policy. The last straw was when the rank and file started griping to the national media. Dolan was right. From the beginning it was a feel-good program so the department administration could tell the press they had implemented this program to stop the arsons. It was never going to stop anything and they knew it.

Sunday’s paper was full of stories about a dog kennel in Ballard where they lost nineteen dogs in a fire. There were pictures of firefighters giving CPR to dachshunds, along with a sidebar article about the breed. Pickett came in at lunchtime on his way back from the hospital, all bitter over the fact that the dogs got more coverage than he did. Towbridge has been making jokes about it all day.

I’ve been thinking about that postfire critique. I know Eddings is out to crucify me. I can live with that.

What hurts is all those people who knew the truth and wouldn’t speak up.

Those guys can crawl into a burning apartment fire that’s 1200 degrees, but they can’t talk back to a chief. It’s a strange combination of physical courage and moral cowardice.

All weekend I kept thinking about Lieutenant Wollf standing up for me.

Wollf is so deliberate around me, saying only what needs to be said. And yet he’s direct and always looks me in the eye when he’s talking, as if I’m the only person in the world he’s thinking about. I like him so much. Sometimes I wish I
was
the only person in the world he was thinking about.

We got the call for our big fire Friday night when we were parked in the alley near Rainier and Atlantic. Attack 6 got there about the time we did.

There were four houses in a row, all built maybe sixty years ago. All four houses were so close together you could spit out the window of one and into the window of another. The fire had been set between houses one and two counting from the right, had gone up the wall of house number two, gone into the living and dining rooms on the first floor and snaked up into the attic on the exterior.

When we got there, the front door was open, smoke was pouring out, flame coming out the windows on either side of the house. Wollf told us to do search and rescue. At three in the morning with the front door wide open and nobody in sight it was the obvious call.

Dolan got up on the porch, where he hooked up his face piece. I got myself on air just as Wollf came around the front of the apparatus, clicking his pressurized hose to his MSA mask, giving himself air. Which meant we were all three ready at the same time. On his knees, Dolan tried several times to go into the house, but each attempt was rebuffed by the heat. I wanted to tell him to stay back, that he was going to get burned like Pickett, but Jeff Dolan has twenty-four years in the department and doesn’t want my opinion.

“Let’s go,” said Wollf, who simply stepped over Dolan—no hesitation—and disappeared into the house. Seconds later he was walking in the fire. Walking, not crawling. I saw him in what appeared to be the center of a large yellow ball of flame. Dolan couldn’t get in. I couldn’t get in. Wollf walked right over us.

At first we thought if
he
could do it,
we
could, but in the few seconds we deliberated, the heat grew more intense.

The smoke closed down again, and a burst of orange flame came out the front door and chased us off the porch, which definitely cancelled any plans either of us had for following Wollf inside.

The crew of Attack 6 was still in the front yard.

“God, he’s crazy!” said Dolan, looking into the flames. “He’s gonna die.”

“We’re all going to die,” said Towbridge, leaping up onto the porch beside us. “It’s just a matter of how and when.” It was an expression Wollf used.

A minute later, as Zeke and Slaughter were going through the doorway with the 1
³
⁄
_⁴
-inch line blasting, Wollf stuck his head out the second-story window above us, black smoke arching out around him. Over his portable radio he said, “Atlantic Command from Ladder Three. Primary search all clear.”

Chief Eddings, who was in the street behind us, didn’t reply.

Dolan and I followed Attack 6’s hose line inside. They used a lot of water in the doorway. On my way through the living room I stopped and pulled more hose. Again I heard Wollf on my portable. “Atlantic Command from Ladder Three. Primary search all clear. Do you copy?”

After a moment the dispatcher came on the air and said, “Atlantic Command. Ladder Three reports primary search all clear. Did you receive?”

Again Eddings said nothing. A moment or two later she was on the air. “Attack Six. Have you finished your primary search?”

It took Slaughter a moment to drop whatever he was doing and answer. “Negative, Command. We haven’t done any searching.”

“That’s what I thought,” Eddings replied, which was both an unnecessary radio transmission as well as a slap in the face to Wollf, who’d already told her the house was clear.

It’s dangerous for an incident commander to ignore a radio message. To pretend someone on the fire ground was not being heard. And then to pretend the dispatcher hadn’t relayed the message.

If Wollf had been calling for help, would she have ignored that too? It was bad enough she had everybody searching the house a second time.

After the fire was tapped and we were changing our expended bottles for fresh ones, Dolan looked at Wollf. “Man, you tryin’ to get killed?”

“If you’d been inside, you wouldn’t have wanted me to wait.”

“You coulda got killed.”

“We’re all going to die—”

“It’s just a matter of how and when,” Towbridge finished.

Wollf’s air bottle had blistered from the heat. His helmet was filthy black, the L-3 insignia patch melted and unreadable.

Later, Dolan whispered, “Do we really want to be working with somebody who’s got a death wish?”

“I been thinkin’ the same thing about you ever since I been on Ladder Three,” Towbridge said. We all laughed at the look on Dolan’s face.

But I’m beginning to think Jeff is right. I’m beginning to think I’m working for a man who wants to die in a fire.

Not that I wouldn’t follow my lieutenant through the back door of hell itself. Because I
would.
But I don’t want another partner hurt, and I certainly don’t want to see
anybody
die.

It turned out the residents were across the street at a neighbor’s house, watching us out the windows—they had no idea people were risking their lives for them.

37. GUARDING THE CAN

         
While we were waiting for Marshal 5 to show up and investigate, I walked the perimeter of the premises with a battle lantern. Two front rooms had been fully involved when we got there, heat and smoke traveling up the stairs, burning pictures off the walls, charring light fixtures, discoloring mirrors, and ruining the contents of the upstairs closets. The residents had been lucky to escape with their slippers and the cat.

Engine 30 had come in behind us and used their 1
³
⁄
_⁴
-inch line to douse the outside of the second house. Slaughter had yelled at them, “You don’t attack a fire from outside, you idiots!”

“We’re hitting the exposures,” one of the Engine 30 guys replied amicably.

“Just don’t be pushing the fire onto us when we’re inside!”

“That’s not what we’re doing.”

“Assholes!”

At fires everything with Slaughter had to be a contest. When I was a boot, our first fire together had been in an abandoned house. We’d gone in low, him screaming at me the whole way. Finally I turned around and said, “Don’t yell at me.” I must have intimidated him, because he never did it again. That was about the time he began writing negative reports on me.

Slaughter’s yelling wasn’t the panicked screaming you got with Eddings. It was more of a bullying tactic he’d copped from his father, long since retired as the driver on Engine 18, an ornery cuss who called anybody who didn’t follow his lead a “pussy.”

After ten minutes of searching I found what I was looking for.

“Whatcha got?” Slaughter asked. “What’s that?”

“It’s a Shasta diet black cherry can,” I said. “Same as the one we found at the Pennington fire.”

“Let me see that,” Slaughter said, reaching for it.

“Don’t touch it!”

“Don’t get your tits in a wringer. I wasn’t going to put any prints on it.”

“Weren’t going to put any prints on what?” Rodney LaSalle approached, followed at a distance by Marsha Connor, who
always
followed at a distance. LaSalle carried a camera, Connor a notepad. Both wore coveralls and rubber fire boots. As usual, there was a wedge of unease between the two fire investigators, just as there was between myself and Slaughter.

I directed the battle lantern onto the container. “You found one of these before?” LaSalle asked.

“Two.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell us?”

“I did.”

LaSalle knelt and sniffed the mouth of the can. “Nice find. It’s piss.”

When Connor took a turn at smelling the can, LaSalle laughed and said, “You never smelled piss before?”

She got up and said, “It’s piss if they’re drinking ninety-one octane. That’s gasoline.”

“Really?” LaSalle tried to laugh off his mistake. “I burned out most of my olfactory glands smoking Marlboros. Why don’t you take a picture?” He handed the camera to Connor. “I’ll scout around.”

“That’s the third one I’ve seen. There must have been others.”

“As far as I know, we got
one,
” LaSalle said.

“But it
is
a signature?”

“Like he’s deliberately leaving ’em? Could be.”

Slaughter was staring off toward Rainier Avenue. “Back in the late Seventies there was a series of arson fires in this district,” I said. “At the time, somebody was leaving Shasta diet black cherry cans at the scene.”

LaSalle scratched his head. “Late Seventies was a little before my time. Like twenty years before.” He turned and looked at Slaughter. “Steve? Weren’t you in FIU in the late Seventies? You remember the arsons he’s talking about?”

“Vaguely.”

“And?”

“One day the guy just up and disappeared. We never saw him again.”

“Didn’t a firefighter die?” Connor asked. “Seems to me I remember that.”

“My father,” I said.

None of them knew how to react. Connor’s eyes watered up. Slaughter stared at the street. LaSalle looked at me with undisguised curiosity. “You’re kidding. Your father?”

“That’s what I said.”

“So you two both had fathers in the department? Working at the same time? How did he die?”

I looked at Slaughter. “Ask
him.
I was four years old.”

Slaughter looked at LaSalle and said, “I don’t recall the details. I do seem to remember something about pop cans.”

“Shasta diet black cherry cans,” I said.

“We’ll look into it,” said LaSalle, heading down the street toward Chief Eddings.

“Can you two guard the can for a minute?” Connor asked. “I’m going to get a box to put it in.”

When we were alone, I looked at Steve Slaughter. “You never told me you were working in Marshal Five when my father died.”

“Do the math. It happened twenty-five years ago. I’ve been in twenty-seven. A lot of us were around.”

“Not in fire investigation.”

“We never even had a viable suspect. The arsons stopped. Kerrigan in FIU swore he’d track down the bug and make him pay, spent years on it. He never came up with diddly.”

“You must have been frustrated.”

“If I saw him now? Tonight? I’d break his goddamn neck.”

“You never had a hint who it might be?”

“Nope.”

When Connor came back, she gave me a sympathetic look. “You know, what we might have here is a copycat, somebody who knows about those old arsons.”

“Either that or he’s back,” I said.

“Not fuckin’ likely,” said Slaughter.