The Smoke Room (22 page)

31. ALL THE THINGS YOU CAN NEVER SAY TO ANYONE—EVER

THEY ENDED UP
calling a medic unit for Tronstad while I awaited the verdict across the street, next to a blue-and-white SPD cruiser. Meanwhile, the SPD had cordoned off the intersection for the inevitable accident investigation, taking statements from witnesses and directing cars out of the chaos.

We waited while the burned-out hulk steamed in the center of the street, while the two bodies cooled under their yellow disposable blankets. The half-melted traffic light blinked uselessly, and civilians watched from nearby shop windows. The marquee on the movie theater a few doors down advertised
Cold Mountain.
I’d seen it there with my mother.

Johnson picked up the wet hose, eyeing me quietly as he walked past. I could tell he thought I was insane. Medic 32 showed up from Station 32 up the road, and while they worked on Tronstad, Covington huddled with them, presumably to verify the extent of Tronstad’s injuries. The burned-out car continued to cool, every once in a while letting off small snapping sounds. A team of detectives from the police department showed up. The fire department’s investigators arrived. On the far side of the intersection somebody put a large white patch across one of Tronstad’s eyes. I knew Tronstad did not want me in jail, where I might be tempted to talk to the authorities, and where I wouldn’t be around to retrieve the bonds for him.

The cop who’d spoken to Covington earlier was an older man with a graying crew cut who’d looked at me in a kindly way. I knew I appeared young enough that he no doubt assumed these were the first dead people I’d seen. Hell, I was up to my neck in dead people.

The medics finished with Tronstad and left on another call at about the same time I noticed a female police officer five feet in front of me. She may have been there all along, intermingling with the other officers on traffic duty, though I didn’t recognize her until that moment.

She looked different; yet even in her bulky bulletproof vest and Sam Browne belt, fully loaded with 9 millimeter Glock, nightstick, flashlight, handcuffs, and Mace, she was as thin and reedy as ever. Drawing close, Sonja spoke in a low voice. “You seem to have gotten yourself in a jam.”

“They’re not going to arrest me.”

“People who act like you shouldn’t get cocky.”

I inhaled slowly. Except for those hours skating last night, it might have been the first full breath I’d taken all week. Despite the fact that I’d seen her three times previously, and she’d beaten me up two of those times, she had a calming influence on me.

Standing close, she said, “You’re right. He’s not going to press charges. Why did you do it?”

“Long story.”

“What’s going on, Gum? You want to talk?”

Oh, how I wanted to talk. I was bursting with secrets. I wanted to tell her about the bonds and my complicity, and I wanted to tell her about Chief Abbott and the smoke room, and how he’d tried to torture information out of us. I wanted to explain how I hadn’t had anything to do with Sears’s death even though, if things went south, I might get convicted of it. Trouble was, if I told her any of these things it would be the last time I’d see her. Or daylight.

When a minute passed and I still hadn’t replied, she said, “I guess the firefighter you hurt wrote a letter to the chief of the department about you.”

“Complaining? Already?”

“No, before. He wants you to get an award for trying to save your lieutenant.”

“I didn’t save him.”

“For trying.” She looked me over. I knew that just as she looked different in her uniform, I looked different with my helmet and my collar turned up, sweating from the body heat my turnout gear captured. “You’re a surprise a minute, Gum.”

“So are you, Pederson.” For a fraction of a second, I thought I saw her blush. Maybe it was the touch of vulnerability that made me blurt it out. Maybe I was coming to the end of my rope. “I think Tronstad set fire to that car.”

“The guy you just knocked down? Wasn’t he at the station with you when it started?”

“These people were visiting our station. They left, and then this happened.”

“Are you all right, Gum?”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are. Do you realize you just accused a fireman you work with of a double homicide? Did he know those people? Did he have something against them?”

“He met them once before.”

“Why would he want to kill two people he met only twice?” She’d been giving me the look she would have given a favorite crazy brother right before she was forced to commit him to the loony bin. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe you can go over and put the bug in the detective’s ear? Maybe if they put some pressure on him, he’ll say something incriminating. Could you do that without telling the detectives it was me who put you on to it?”

“They’re going to want to talk to
you.
”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe a police dog could sniff out explosives in his locker . . . This sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

“Just a little.”

“The driver roughed him up.”

“They’re saying he was sixty-eight. How could he rough up anybody?”

I was trying to think of a way to explain without getting dragged into it, but of course, that was impossible. “Okay. Off the record. Can you talk to me off the record?”

“No. I don’t know what you’re going to say.”

“Okay. Forget I said any of this.”

“Now you’re telling me your friend didn’t set that fire?”

“I’m saying I must have been delusional. Duress. Can you accept that?”

“I suppose.”

I turned to walk away. “One last thing?”

“What is it?”

“I hate to bring this up again, but I left something at your stepmother’s—”

“Anything between you and her stays between you and her. Leave me out of it.”

In addition to the rest of it, there could be little doubt in her mind now that I was obsessed with Iola.

32. FINDING JESUS AND KILLING YOUR FRIENDS

ODDLY ENOUGH, WE
got another car fire at a little after five in the morning, another plume of royal black smoke arching into the sky in billowing coils. This one was in an area of apartment houses near the Alki Point Lighthouse. In my mind I could still feel the stiff and crinkly charred pelts of the two dead bodies earlier.

Four of us responded to the second car fire: me, Johnson, Lieutenant Covington, and a firefighter called in on overtime, whose name I forgot as soon as she told me. Tronstad had been sent home on disability, his eye injury chalked up to an accidental splash of water at the first fire.

Considering the crimes I’d been associated with, I was beginning to wonder if there was
anything
I could do that would land me in jail. I had stolen millions, been involved in four murders, lied to one and all, not been believed the one time I told the truth—to Sonja—yet remained free as a bird. Could I be bulletproof?

The afternoon after the first car fire, Tronstad found me just before he left the station. I was slumped in front of the television in the firefighters’ quarters.

“You fuckin’ murderer,” I mumbled, without taking my eyes off the tube.

“You’re getting a nasty mouth in your old age.”

“Fuck you. You just burned two people to death.”

“First of all, you can’t prove shit. Second of all, like I already told you, you say a word to the cops, you’re the one who’ll end up in jail.”

“Fuck you.”

“You got my cell number. Tomorrow noon at the latest. Call when you get them. You don’t, you’ll wish you had. And by the way, I’m cutting your share down for all this stalling.”

“I don’t want a share. I never did.” But he was gone. I felt like a coward for not going to the police. I was afraid he was right, that they wouldn’t be able to prove he’d done anything and that I’d end up in jail because of the videotape. I needed time to think. I could always turn him in later, but I wasn’t going to accomplish anything sitting in a cell.

The second car fire went smoother than the first, perhaps because I was working alongside the overtimer, a tough, brown-eyed woman who usually worked on a downtown company. We hit it with a semi-fog pattern, and by the time Covington met us with the five-foot pry bar, the fire was knocked down.

As far as I could tell there were no witnesses. Nobody in any apartment windows. No bystanders. Just us and a 1999 Toyota some poor boob of an owner was going to find burned out and half-filled with dirty water.

As we were picking up the hose, Johnson and I found ourselves separated from the others. “It was Tronstad,” I said.

“What was Tronstad?”

“This fire. And the first one. He lit Brown’s car. Tronstad killed those two people.”

“Oh, come on . . .”

“No. Listen to me. When we were talking to Brown I saw him sneak out front with something in his hands. He rigged their car.”

“He could have been doing anything out there.”

“When the alarm came in he gave me a funny look.”

“Oh, now you’re beginning to sound like—”

“He did that eyebrow thing. You’ve seen it. Like we had this secret together.”

“The eyebrow thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, man! That’s why you knocked him down. You really think . . . ? Jesus. They
said
it was an incendiary device. That’s what Marshal Five came up with. Covington said when they found out he was ex-FBI they figured maybe somebody he sent to prison came back with a grudge.”

“He actually
was
ex-FBI? I didn’t hear that.”

“But if Tronstad set fire to Brown’s car, why would he come back and do this one?”

“He’s giving us a message. He’s mean and he’s dangerous and he lights things and we better toe the line or he’s going to make us wish we had.”

“You might be right.”

After we got back to the station, I found myself alone with Johnson in the bunk room. “You awake, Gum?”

“I’m awake.”

“I’m glad I have Jesus on my side, because this whole thing is getting too weird. You been saved, Gum?”

“Not recently.”

“Don’t you think it’s about time? Gum, I’d feel a lot better if you’d accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. Can you tell me you know Jesus loves you and you’re going to dedicate your life to the gospel?”

Other firefighters and one former girlfriend had saved me before, and each time I’d found it relatively painless. If it made him happy, undergoing another religious conversion was no skin off my butt. “There
are
a lot of answers I’ve been needing lately.”

“Accept the Lord. It would mean a lot to me. Tronstad’s never going to find Jesus, but you’re a horse of a different color. If you were a partner with the Lord, you’d be a partner with me, too.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior.”

“That’s it?”

“There’s more later, but that’s it for now.”

“Okay.”

“You have to say it. I accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal Savior.”

“I accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal Savior.”

“Gum, that’s great. Will you come to church with me?”

“If I’m not in jail.”

“You don’t know how happy it makes me, Gum, that you’ve accepted the Lord.”

“No problem. It should make prison easier.”

“It won’t be easy to live up to.”

“I know what to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Refrain from stealing anything else and don’t kill any more people.”

There was a long silence in the darkness before I heard Johnson coming toward me, sitting heavily on the foot of my bunk, the thick material of his turnout trousers crinkling. “You making fun of me?”

“You don’t really think you’re going to heaven?”

“Gum, are you making fun of me?”

“It’s just that I don’t know how to square up Bible-thumping with what we’ve done.”

“What have we done?”

“To start off with, we stole twelve million dollars.”

“I didn’t steal anything.”

“Split hairs all you want, but Jesus isn’t going to look at it that way.”

“Okay. What else?”

“What do you mean, what else? How about Chief Abbott’s death?”

“Abbott died of smoke inhalation because he fainted.”

“Is that why we lied about it?”

“We can’t do anything about the people who are dead. Him or Sears. Or them old people. It’s best to forget them.”

“And just go on our merry way?”

“No. I’ve been thinking, and I think you and I should do something about Tronstad.”

“Christ, Robert. Are you . . . are you telling me—”

“I been thinking about it for a while, but these car fires clinched it. You got a gun, Gum?”

“Don’t say anything else.”

“Gum, you—”

“Not another word. I know he’s unhinged now, but he was my friend once. He stood up for me.”

“He didn’t stand up for jack shit.”

“At Arch Place.”

“Man, didn’t I already tell you he never wanted you to show up at Arch Place? He told the lieutenant you guys were on the rig, that you were both ready. That’s why we left the station without you. Don’t you see? He was in a win-win situation. He goes inside, but he can hide. You can’t tell on him because you’re not there to know about it, and Sears can’t tell on him because he doesn’t go in with him, and if anybody asks what he was doing, he was looking for you.
You
would have taken the rap for everything that happened there.”

“I
should
have taken the rap.”

“You know what else? He told me the old man was alive when he got there. That he heard him calling for help. But he just stayed in that hallway. There wasn’t even that much fire when we got there. He could have marched right down that hallway and got that old man, but he didn’t move from the doorway.”

“Why did
you
stand up for me?”

“I seen you go in there and I thought . . . well, I thought that was really something. First you come out with the old man. Then you come out with the woman. I thought that was really something. Besides, we all done things might have cost us our jobs.”

“I never did. Not until that. It seems to be an everyday occurrence now. I’ve made so many mistakes. Sometimes I think I’m the unluckiest bastard on the planet.”

In the darkness I could see Johnson’s teeth as he smiled, trying hard to convince himself that Tronstad’s operating principle was one we should adopt, doing something wrong to make something right.