The Smoke Room (12 page)

Johnson and I considered Tronstad for a few seconds and then ran through the beanery and out of the building. The sudden movement made my legs feel heavy and uncoordinated. I marveled at how much devastation a few minutes of carbon monoxide could wreak on the human body. When we got outside, Tronstad was still next to the beanery window, the deviltry gone, his face a mask. The smoke-room door was closed, the rope and body loop arrangement intact, still wrapped around the eye bolt. “Where’s the chief?” Johnson asked.

Tronstad stared at us without expression.

“Are you crazy?” I said, sprinting up the half flight of steps, fumbling with the rope and loops and pushing the door open.

As a tidal wave of hot smoke slapped my face, the door jammed against a body.

16. THREE-LEGGED DOG IN A CAGE

“JESUS CHRIST,”
I said. “Help me get him out of here. What the hell were you thinking, Ted? He’s unconscious.”

“He can’t be. He was talking to me until I went to get you guys. I didn’t even jam up the crack under the door.”

“I don’t think he’s breathing.”

“Of course he’s breathing.”

“This is a joke, right, Gum?” Johnson said.

Abbott was even heavier than he looked, and he looked heavy, so I wasn’t going to move him far on my own. “Help me get him out of here.”

Johnson turned to Tronstad, who said, “Don’t look at me. You’ve seen how much he eats. The man was a heart attack waiting for a place to land.” He made the face of a man having a heart attack, which might have been funny under different circumstances.

“Come on, guys,” I said, sticking my head into the smoke. “Every second counts.”

It’s difficult enough to move a limp body out of a tight space, but trying to haul Abbott’s rotund and cumbersome bulk out of this smoky atmosphere after already having taken a previous dose was practically impossible. The three of us struggled, and as we did, I couldn’t help noticing Tronstad was less willing to eat smoke than Johnson or I, lollygagging at the doorway before vanishing altogether, even though he should have been fresh.

“Get back in here,” I snapped. “What the hell?”

Tronstad took a deep gulp of clean air and ducked back into the room, holding his breath. We grabbed Abbott’s arms and dragged him out of the smoke room and onto the landing and down the stairs into the open drill court, his feet and shoes skidding down the concrete steps and along the tarmac.

“He said we were all doing it,” Tronstad stammered. “The worst I thought would happen was he’d shit his pants.”

“How long was he in there?” Johnson asked.

“You guys were in longer.”

I knew that was a lie. By my calculations Abbott had been in the smoke room just shy of ten minutes.

After we laid him down and rolled him over, I checked his breathing a second time, then placed two fingers across his carotid artery. “No pulse. No breathing. We gotta do CPR.”

“It was a heart attack,” Tronstad said. “Hell, he could have had it on the shitter. It wasn’t my fault, guys. A harmless practical joke, that’s all it was.”

“We gotta work on him,” I said. “Call the medics.”

“We gotta get our story straight first.” Tronstad’s hard eyes were black in the evening light.

“Why do we need a story?” Johnson asked. “Why don’t we just tell the truth?”

“Tell the whole fuckin’ world we locked our battalion chief in the smoke room and killed him?” Tronstad said. “Are you shitting me? You want to go to jail?”

“He locked us in longer,” Johnson replied.

“That’s not true,” I said. “And you’re the one who locked him in, Tronstad. Why should we lie about it?”

“Because you helped.”

Johnson and I looked at each other, and I wondered if he saw the same doubt and dread in my eyes that I saw in his. The truth here was an anchor being thrown overboard, and while the line was wrapped around Tronstad’s feet, it was also wrapped around Johnson’s and mine. If Tronstad went overboard, Johnson and I would follow.

“He’s right,” I said. “I gave him my body loop, and neither one of us let Abbott out.”

“We were pissed,” Johnson said, “because he locked us in.”

Johnson and I
were
part of this. There was no use pretending we weren’t. Either one of us could have pulled Abbott out when he banged on the door, or stuck around to ensure he was freed after a minute.

“Okay. What’s the story?” I said, unsnapping the chief’s bunking coat, removing his helmet, tearing open his shirt, and scissoring his undershirt down the middle with my Buck knife.

Tronstad paced beside me. “When we arrived, he wasn’t here yet, so we went inside to wait. After a while, I came out to see what was up and found him in the smoke room. I called you two.”

I found my landmarks on the chief’s bare chest and began compressions, a hundred a minute.

“Fuck it. I’m not telling any more lies,” I said, pumping on Abbott’s chest.

“Then I’m not helping.”

“Come on,” Johnson pleaded with me. “Do what he wants.”

“Talk to
him,
” I said.

“You know how stubborn Tronstad is. If we have a chance of bringing the chief back, it has to be you.”

“I want a promise,” Tronstad said. “Otherwise I let him go. You rat on me, I’ll tell everything. Arch Place. The bearer bonds. I’ll drag you both in.”

“Okay. I won’t say anything
tonight.
After that I’ll have to think about it.”

They ran to the rig, where I heard Tronstad on the apparatus radio. “Dispatch from Engine Twenty-nine. We’re on the drill court at Station Fourteen. Ongoing CPR. Give us a medic unit.”

“Okay, Engine Twenty-nine. One medic unit to Station Fourteen. Engine Twenty-nine? Is that a still alarm at Station Fourteen?”

“No. We have a firefighter down.”

They secured the ventilation kit and Lifepak, and we hooked the Lifepak leads to Abbott’s chest, all three of us aware that once the Lifepak lid was open, everything we said would be recorded.

We’d been pumping on Abbott several minutes when Medic 10 arrived from downtown, carrying two medics, a male and a female, plus two paramedic students. Johnson was bag-masking; I was doing the chest compressions. Abbott was naked from the waist up, diaphoretic and even sloppier and rounder than I thought he’d be. I’d never seen him with his shirt off before, and his pink nipples and the paleness of his naked skin were strangely disconcerting.

The medics hooked up their twelve-lead system, and the female medic scanned the screen on her machine. “He’s asystole.” She turned to her partner. “Want to keep working?”

“He’s one of ours. We keep working.”

A person generally didn’t come back from cardiac arrest unless his heart was in defibrillation. A patient whose heart was asystole, or a straight line on the graph, did not come back. Less than a one percent chance.

We slid a wooden backboard under Abbott, moved him onto Medic 10’s gurney, and put him in the back of their vehicle, where we continued CPR. Seattle medics normally would have left this to the students while they supervised, but these two did everything themselves, put lines into Abbott’s arm, called the Medic 1 duty doctor, and got permission to inject drugs. Bicarbonate. Epinephrine. They moved rapidly and efficiently.

We worked on him for twenty-seven minutes, but in the end, he was just another dead man in the back of a medic unit, with a plastic airway jammed down his throat and taped across his mouth. In the end, he was dead and I’d helped kill him.

When I stepped out of the back of the medic unit, Sweeney Sears greeted me with a melancholy look. If he’d been watching our resuscitation attempt, I hadn’t seen him. I wanted to look around for my crew in the deepening darkness of the courtyard but couldn’t rip my eyes off Sears long enough to locate them.

“You okay?” Sears asked.

“Yeah. Sure. I guess.”

“You look kind of pale. Like you’re going to faint.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. “

“Is that the smoke room? The recruits forget to clean it up?”

This was my chance to confess. I needed a moment or two to think this through. There were clearly two options here: go along with Tronstad or tell the truth. Our critical error had been leaving Tronstad in charge. Yet at the time I’d been so irritated from the smoke and so pissed off, I didn’t care what happened.

If I told the truth, Tronstad would go to jail. Tonight. He would be in jail, and the authorities would find out—if not from him then from Sears—about the bearer bonds. Once behind bars, Tronstad would implicate Johnson and me in the bonds, as well as in Abbott’s death.

“Hell, Lieut,” Tronstad said, appearing out of the darkness. “Give the kid a break, would you? He’s taking this pretty hard.”

“Were you with Abbott when it happened?”

“We were all inside.”

“I know you must be in shock,” Sears said, taking me by my shoulders, “but I need details here. The chief of the department’s on his way. We need to know exactly what happened.”

“I . . . I’m not sure.”

“Well, yeah . . .” Sears took me by the elbow and walked me over to the sideboard of Engine 29 to sit me down next to Robert Johnson. Tronstad followed. “You need something to drink?” Sears asked.

“I’m okay.”

“You don’t look okay.”

Tronstad’s story was succinct. I listened without comment, as did Johnson, who I could see was entertaining the same doubts I was about whether or not to blurt out the truth. He must have known there was a possibility Ted had deliberately killed the chief to keep him from pursuing the bearer bond as doggedly as we knew he would.

I told myself that in all probability Abbott got overexcited, the way he always did around smoke, and had an MI—a myocardial infarction. It could have happened anyway, and if he’d gone down while all three of us were in the smoke room with the rope tied to his waist, he would have sealed us in and we’d all be dead. Suddenly I was pissed at how close he’d come to killing the three of us.

As Tronstad recounted the story, his voice grew subdued with dummied-up grief—humble, almost quivery. Like a lot of stand-up comics, he was an excellent dramatic actor when he needed to be. “The chief called us down here to drill. We smelled smoke, but knowing it was Friday and there was a recruit school in session, we figured it was residue from the smoke room. We went inside to wait for Abbott, and then after fifteen minutes or so we noticed the Battalion Five Suburban parked out on the court. It was Gum who found him behind the door in the smoke room.”

Not the story we’d agreed on, but close.

“What the devil was he doing in the smoke room?” Lieutenant Sears asked, turning to me.

“Probably investigating that burn barrel,” Johnson said.

“It’s true,” Tronstad said. “There’s still a fire in the barrel.”

Sears looked at me. “He was in the smoke room?”

“Yes, sir. On the floor behind the door.”

“Holy Mother of Mary,” said Sears.

“That’s exactly what we said,” replied Tronstad.

“The only thing I can think of,” said Sears, “is they left the burn barrel smoldering by accident. Abbott went up to investigate and had a heart attack. When he fell, his body closed the door.”

“Hmmm. Could have happened that way,” said Tronstad.

When the safety chief showed up, Tronstad repeated his fable. A few minutes later he repeated it again to the chief of the department, Hiram Smith, who’d arrived with a small entourage, including the public information officer for the department, Joyce Judge. Later we heard Smith repeating the story word for word to a television news interviewer. By that time, Medic 10 had taken Abbott’s body downtown to the King County Medical Examiner’s office in the basement of Harborview Medical Center, where it would undergo an autopsy in the morning.

I wandered over to the base of the tower to escape the hubbub and was appalled to see the rope and the two body loops still attached to the smoke-room door handle, Tronstad’s four-digit SFD ID number written plainly on his body loop in black grease pen, my own number on the second loop. When I saw Lieutenant Sears hoofing it in my direction, I dashed up the stairs, slipped the rope off the door handle, and stuffed it and the body loops into my large bunking-coat pocket just before he arrived.

“Right behind the door here?” he asked, peering into the smoke room.

“Yes, sir.”

“Can I borrow your light?”

I detached the small department-issued flashlight from my bunking coat and handed it to him. He poked around in the concrete room longer than I would have, considering it was still full of smoke, then emerged, ever the stoic, refusing to gasp for air, pretending he was tougher than snot. Maybe he was.

Hours later, after the lights were out in the bunk room and Johnson and I were lying in the darkness, Johnson’s voice floated from the other end of the room, “Gum? You awake?”

“Yeah.”

“You think we did the right thing?”

“I don’t know. I’m really worried about it. Tronstad blackmailed me into lying.”

“He sure did. But what choice did we have?”

“We could go over and tell Sears right now.”

“But it was an accident, right?”

“Ten minutes in the smoke room? I don’t think so.”

“We better stick to the story we told. Otherwise they’re going to want to know why we lied. Tronstad’s right. A guy’s going to have a heart attack, he’s going to have it. What difference is there if he has it tonight or tomorrow night? Hell, we gave him the best care anybody could give, didn’t we? Gum?”

“Ten minutes in the smoke room for a guy with a heart condition is not the best care in the world, Robert.”

I thought about it for a couple of hours that night and eventually fell into a fitful sleep, waking at five, only to relive the night’s events for another two hours. In the morning the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
carried an article in the second section.
Seattle Fire Battalion Chief Succumbs on Drill Court.