Pyro (4 page)

7. I KNEW HE KNEW I KNEW IT

         
Dolan and Pickett cut a hole in the roof, heavy black smoke pouring out as soon as it was open. They climbed down just as the officer from Engine 10 rushed up to Chief Johnson and said, “Chief, we got a report of a fire on the other side of the block.”

“Go check it out,” said Johnson, a battalion chief who had a reputation as a nervous Nellie, a man who followed the book so closely that when something came up that wasn’t in it he was struck dumb.

While Johnson was mulling things over, a large maroon Chevrolet with three radio antennae pulled up. Chief William Hertlein was driving.

The last time I’d seen Hertlein, he was flat on his back on the beanery floor at Station 32.

For almost half a minute Hertlein didn’t look at anything on the fire ground except me. No matter what he said, no matter how much power he thought he had, he was afraid of me. He knew it. I knew it. And he knew I knew it. A muscle under his right eye twitched. I almost expected the scene to start moving in slow motion, a haunting musical score building to a crescendo in the background: department bad boy faces down the chief who wants to oust him.

Hertlein abruptly turned to Chief Johnson. “What’s going on, Joe?”

Engine 10 came on the radio and said they had a tapped exterior wall fire on the other side of the block, then asked for a thermal imager. After exchanging looks with Johnson, I sent Dolan and Pickett around the block with our thermal imager. “Radio if you need something,” I said.

The thermal imager was a handheld camera that registered heat in the viewfinder. You could direct it at a row of parked cars and tell which had been driven recently by the warmth of the hoods. In fact, the imager was sensitive enough to trace someone walking barefoot across a tile floor by footprints invisible to the naked eye. In a smoke-filled atmosphere you could spot victims or fallen firefighters. These days it was the standard tool for search-and-rescue teams.

An immense, three-story house loomed to the east. A smaller, raised cottage I hadn’t noticed earlier stood at the rear of the property behind a courtyard and beyond the smoldering garage. Because of the slope and angle of the driveway, the cottage was invisible from the street.

A blond woman in tight pants and a sleeveless blouse was watching us from the cottage porch. I took a couple of steps in her direction, gestured at the main house and said, “Anybody inside?”

“My boss.”

“Just one person?”

“Yeah.”

“Is he home tonight?”

“She. I guess so.”

The house was dark. “She a sound sleeper?”

“Usually.”

I strode through a patch of wet ivy and knocked on a back door. I knocked again. “Let’s go around,” I said to Rideout.

Lieutenant Slaughter shouted at me as we rounded the corner of the house, “Hey! Aren’t you going to help with these cars? We got a salvage job going on here, buddy.”

Ignoring him, we walked around to the front of the house and found a covered wooden porch overlooking Frink Park and Lake Washington. I knocked on the front door. The windows were dark.

Chief Hertlein pulled up in the street, waiting for me to do something wrong while drizzle speckled his windshield. Once again I knocked on the front door. Rideout rapped on a window. “Hello. Hello in there,” she called.

I looked at Rideout. “You smell smoke?”

“The whole neighborhood smells like smoke.”

I put a flashlight up against the window, then stepped back and kicked the front door three times before the frame split and the door shuddered open. Somewhere behind me I heard Chief Hertlein yelling to stop. The foyer was filled with smoke, so we couldn’t see more than eight feet. When he saw the smoke, Chief Hertlein announced over his radio that he had located a fully involved house fire just west of the garage fire, that he wanted a second full response.

“Cover,” I said to Rideout.

“My mask?”

“Yeah. Cover. The neighbor said there’s somebody in there. We have to move.”

We were entering the residence when Chief Hertlein approached the front porch. “Stop! You can’t go in there. You have to wait for a hose line.”

“There’s a victim inside. She’ll be dead if we wait,” I said.

“I’m telling you to wait.”

I looked at Rideout and spoke softer so the chief couldn’t hear. “It’s your choice. Come in with me or stand out here while the lady dies.”

“He said to stay out,” she replied through her mask.

“I can’t hear him.”

I’d placed her in an interesting moral dilemma. Obey the orders of her immediate supervisor who was looking for a fire victim, or obey the chief of fire department operations. She followed me.

I had a battle lantern in one hand, was feeling along the wall with the other, doing what we called a right-hand search, going in right, following the wall. In short order I knocked over a table of some sort, heard a vase shattering, then bumbled into what must have been a hat stand. I touched Rideout’s shoulder and told her to go left, which she did. I heard more glass breaking on her side of the hallway. The thermal imager would have been invaluable, but Dolan and Pickett had it.

I couldn’t see her flashlight and she probably couldn’t see mine. The smoke wasn’t hot and didn’t appear to be moving, and we were breathing compressed air off our regulators, so we weren’t in any immediate danger. It was the homeowner who was in trouble.

It was only when I realized how large the house was that I told Rideout we were backing out.

Hertlein was gone when we got outside. “Go get a fan,” I said.

Unclipping her high-pressure air supply hose from her face piece, Rideout left the yard at a jog trot while I radioed King Command, as Chief Johnson had designated himself, that Ladder 3 was at the house due east of the fire building, that it was full of smoke, and we were initiating a search.

Waiting for Rideout, I made a couple of quick reconnoiters left and right of the front door, managed to find a staircase and get back to the door before Rideout showed up dragging the wheeled gasoline-powered fan up the stairs. I helped her get it onto the porch and told her to fire it up. Chief Hertlein must have followed her because he was on the sidewalk looking up at me.

“What are you doing?” Hertlein yelled.

“I think he’s talking to you,” Rideout said.

“Fire it up.”

“I think he’s talking to you.”

I looked down at the sidewalk, knowing Hertlein wouldn’t understand a word I said over the noise of the fan. She fired it up and I said, “He’s a fuckin’ idiot.” Hertlein yelled something long and complicated, but neither of us could hear a word over the fan, which sounded like an airplane motor. Rideout placed the fan an appropriate distance from the doorway and reattached her supply hose to her face piece.

According to common SFD practice, we should have first ensured an exit for the smoke before firing it up, yet there was an easier—though frowned upon—method. Fire up the fan and watch the smoke. An experienced firefighter could tell within seconds if there was an outlet for the smoke elsewhere in the building. If there was no exit, the building didn’t clear. But it
was
clearing. So there
was
an open door or window elsewhere in the structure.

Hertlein was headed up the concrete steps with surprising agility for a three-hundred-pound man when I grabbed Rideout and pulled her inside. We found a carpeted stairway and took it up into the grayness. The second floor was huge: three, maybe four bedrooms, two baths, a room that appeared to be a sewing or wardrobe room, a guest suite, all of it empty. There was more smoke up here, but it was moving around now because of the fan. I could see the dim light from a Tiffany lamp in the hallway.

The third floor was smokier, which probably meant our open window was on the second floor.

In a bedroom on three we found an enormous canopied bed with a body in it. Under the glow from my battle lantern we saw a raven-haired woman, nude, a wineglass next to several pill bottles on the night table.

“Ma’am,” I said, shaking her gently. “Wake up. Ma’am.” She didn’t wake up, not then and not when I shook her more forcefully. There was no telling how long she’d been in this smoke.

“Chair carry?” Rideout asked.

“No. I’ve got her. Just walk in front and make sure I don’t trip.”

“I can help.”

“I have her.”

I pulled a sheet off the bed and wrapped her, then scooped her into my arms. Maybe it was because I could no longer direct the beam of the battle lantern, but I had trouble finding my way out of the room. It seemed smokier than it had a minute earlier. Rideout was confused too and opened a closet door thinking it led to the corridor.

The woman was limp and fragile in my arms. I had her under the knees and armpits, carrying her in front of me like a baby. Her heavy head lolled against my shoulder. To her credit, Rideout spoke over her portable radio, “King Command. This is Ladder Three. We’re bringing a victim out of the house on the east corner. We’ll need a medic unit.”

“Ladder Three? Did you say you had a victim?” It was Chief Johnson.

“That’s affirmative,” Rideout answered.

The smoke was thicker in the corridor as we felt our way down the stairs. Somewhere on the second floor the victim awoke briefly and launched into a coughing fit, then just as quickly lapsed back into unconsciousness.

8. TIG OLD BITTIES

         
We got turned around on the second floor. It didn’t take long to get straightened out, but the woman in my arms didn’t need any more smoke. I’d been hoping to be out of the house in sixty seconds, but a minute had passed and we were still goofing around on the second floor where the smoke was even denser than it had been on our way up. The smoke and gases had thickened and we were blind now, working from memory.

At last, with great caution, we found and descended the final flight of stairs, Rideout in front, her hand on the victim, guiding me step by step.

Halfway down the staircase I realized why our visibility had decreased. The fan was no longer running. To make matters worse, the front door had closed on us. By this time the woman was beginning to sag in my arms. We wore close to fifty pounds of gear. This woman weighed 130, easy, so here I was carrying 180 pounds at three in the morning.

When we finally got the door open and stepped out past the dead fan on the porch, it was raining. Huddled under the hoods of their foul-weather jackets, two fire department paramedics waited in the street with a gurney. They had a yellow disposable blanket over the gurney to keep the bedding dry. A civilian with a news camera hustled toward us from Jackson Street. Zeke Boles stood at the bottom of the steps in full turnout gear, looking disheveled and confused.

The blanket had slipped off our patient’s shoulders so that her torso was bare from the navel up. Rideout flipped the blanket back over her. I recognized this woman, but I couldn’t quite think of where I knew her from.

Judging by the wrinkled flesh of her arms and lower neck, she was in her late seventies or early eighties, though her breasts looked as if they belonged on a porno queen. Her lips had been pumped up with silicone too. You could see where her neck had been tucked and tightened, the skin around her brow and ears pulled unnaturally tight.

At the bottom of the stairs I startled Zeke by placing the victim in his arms—then headed back up the stairs. The cameraman began taking pictures of Zeke with the woman.

Rideout followed me.

“What happened to the fan?” she asked.

I leaned over and checked the settings—it had been shut off. I pulled the cord and it fired up.

We’d searched all of floor two but only one bedroom on three. It would be a lousy deal to save one victim only to have another die somewhere else in the house. Because the smoke was quickly dissipating under the pressure from the fan, we raced through the first floor. In the kitchen when I took hold of the cut-glass knob and opened a basement door, a cloud of dirty smoke smooched my face like a drunken lover. It was the first warm smoke I’d felt in this house. I closed the door. We had a basement fire.

It wasn’t much, because a good fire would have blown me across the room.

“Upstairs,” I said to Rideout.

“But the fire.”

“We’ll finish our search. People first. House second.”

We raced up two flights of stairs. I was moving as quickly as I could without breaking into a full sprint, gasping for breath. Rideout’s alarm bell began ringing just as we reached the third floor landing. Despite the fan, it was smoky enough up here that we had to search each room by walking around it. Two bedrooms, a bath, and some sort of sitting room. All empty.

We were downstairs and back out on the wet sidewalk when
my
warning bell began ringing. Over my portable radio I said, “King Command from Ladder Three. Secondary search all clear.”

The dispatcher replied, “Secondary search all clear, Ladder Three. Did you receive, King Command?”

The medics had wheeled our patient away, and now a bewildered Zeke Boles was standing in the lights of a news camera while a woman with a microphone shot questions at him.

Engine 25 was rolling up the street. When the officer jogged up to me to ask what was going on, I said, “Basement fire. Everybody’s out. The door is in the kitchen in the back. The smoke didn’t seem that hot.”

“Okay.” The captain turned around and began shouting orders to the three men on his rig.

Rideout and I went back to Ladder 3 to exchange our empty air bottles for full ones. A medic unit was parked catty-corner from our ladder compartment in back, the rear doors cracked open. I stepped inside and spoke to the medics for a few moments, then to the old woman, who had regained partial consciousness.

I was kneeling on the wet street changing my air bottle for a fresh one when I looked up and saw Hertlein beside me. “That was the worst display of firefighting I’ve seen in ten years,” Hertlein said.

“How do you figure?”

“To start off with, you never,
ever,
go into a house fire in front of a hose line. That’s how people get hurt.”

“If we waited for a hose line every time, we’d never get
anyone
out.”

“That’s bullshit. I told you not to go into that house.”

“Did you? I didn’t hear.”

“Did
you
hear me?” Hertlein said, looking at Rideout.

Rideout stared at the chief and then at me. It was a few seconds before she replied, her tone apologetic. “Sir. The fan was so loud I honestly couldn’t catch what you said.”

This clearly was not the answer Hertlein wanted, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. I said, “You runnin’ that fire over there, or did you bring in somebody who knows what they’re doing?”

“If you’re such hot shit,” Hertlein said, walking away, “how come Boles made the rescue?”

After Hertlein was out of earshot, Rideout said, “But
you
carried her out.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

By the time we got back to the house on the corner, Engine 25’s crew was dragging a smoky mattress out the back door of the basement, throwing it down alongside a second smoldering mattress they’d already hauled out. Lieutenant Slaughter was hosing the burning materials down with a limp stream from his 1
³
⁄
_⁴
-inch line while firefighters began picking at the mattresses with knives to sort out the burning materials.

There had been two separate fires on this property, as well as a third fire on the other side of the block. We had a pyromaniac.

Steve Slaughter dropped the hose and threw a heavy arm over my shoulders. “By God, don’t you and I make a team? Huh? We put out two fires with just our two rigs. And a rescue to boot, eh?”

“I guess—”

“You’re just about twice the fire officer that Crocker was. God, he was in your spot two years, and it seemed like all he ever did was laugh like a hyena. I’m telling you, Paul, he just about drove me nuts. He wasn’t too bad at a fire, but man, all that laughing.”

I wasn’t as certain as he was that we were a matched team. I’d been watching him all day and wasn’t sure I liked what I saw. Around the beanery table he was calm and reasonable and had a story for every occasion, most of his tales well told and to the point. He wasn’t even the hero of some of them. But at each of our fires he’d found a different reason to scream at the same people he worked so hard to charm in the beanery, as if yelling at a fire was the normal thing to do. I wondered if, when he was gracing us with tales of his exploits hunting elk, hooking salmon, and killing cougars, he wasn’t leaving part of the story out—the part where he’s screaming maniacally at his stunned prey or his hunting partners.

The shouting hadn’t touched my crew yet, but I knew from discussions with Dolan and Pickett that it would, and when it did I’d have to decide what to do about it. For me, being around a volatile personality was worrisome, because even though I managed to keep it under wraps most of the time, when it came to the nitty-gritty, I was a lot more volatile than Slaughter ever dreamed of being.

What I knew about fire scenes was this: Yelling tended to stifle communication. It inflamed the emotions and took the focus off the task at hand. Firefighting was a team effort, and teams worked best when they worked cohesively. A well-drilled crew of firefighters didn’t need to be berated in public. Outwardly, Dolan, Pickett, Gliniewicz, Boles, and Slaughter all got along well, but I knew Dolan and Pickett seethed over indignities Slaughter had inflicted on them in the past, even though, as the Attack 6 officer, Slaughter had no real authority over them on the ladder truck.

When Jeff Dolan and Mike Pickett came back with the thermal imager, Dolan was angry because he’d missed the rescue on this side of the block. “It was out before we got there,” he said. “They didn’t even need an imager. It was just two shingles.”

“I coulda pissed and put it out,” said Pickett.

Dolan said, “You see the tig old bitties on that old lady in the back of the medic unit?”

Rideout remained silent. I said, “She took a lot of smoke. She might die.”

“Oh, shit. Really?”

“You know what Chief Hertlein was doing out here, don’t you?” Pickett said.

“What? What was he doing?” Rideout asked.

“Cruising for fires. He’s trying to make himself look good in the papers. I never seen a firefighter wanted to be in the papers more than him.”

“
We
found that fire,” said Rideout. “The lieutenant did. The chief didn’t even get out of his car.”

“Ain’t that a bitch?” Dolan reached down beside the rear duals on our rig. “Who the hell put this here?” It was a Shasta soda pop can, diet black cherry, the liquid sloshing around. He sniffed the opening, made a disgusted face, and heaved the can off toward the north end of the nursing home, where we heard it crash into the blackberries.

“What’d you do that for?” I asked.

“It was full of piss.”

“Was it there when we pulled up?”

“No way.”

“You sure?”

“ ’Course I’m sure. The piss was still warm. I wonder who put it there.”

An ugly feeling began to grow inside me.