The Smoke Room (10 page)

“Around here we gotta shut up about this,” said Johnson.

“No shit,” said Tronstad.

I didn’t want the bonds, and I certainly didn’t want the trouble they were dragging down on us, but the only escape I could see was a confession. What worked in my favor was that Tronstad and Johnson had both squandered money and I hadn’t. What worked against me was the fact that they would both be pissed enough to tell lies about me and, worse yet, the truth about Arch Place. It didn’t help my case that I was in possession of the bonds. In fact, it sort of made me look like the ringleader.

13. LAST CHANCE TO RESIGN

AFTER HEATHER LEFT
the building, Lieutenant Sears came into the beanery and shut the door, sealing us off from Chief Abbott in the other room. He tossed the wrinkled Sierre Leone bank bond note onto the table. “Okay. One last chance. Tell me where this came from.”

My heart began pounding in my ears. This was my opportunity to send Tronstad to jail and avoid it myself, my opportunity to make everything right, to take the pain in my gut and medicate it with truth and justice. The problem was, I wasn’t sure I had the nerve to send a co-worker to jail, somebody I’d worked with for two years, somebody who’d made me laugh, somebody who’d protected me when nobody else would. What made it even tougher was that he was sitting right next to me. I needed time to think.

The three of us sat at the table while Lieutenant Sears looked at each of us in turn.

Johnson scratched his chin. “Gee, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what?” Sears asked.

“He don’t know what you’re talking about, Lieut,” said Tronstad. “None of us do. See, that piece of paper you got there? You’re right. It came from—at least I think it came from—Ghanet’s place. Musta had something sticky on my boot, because I found it in the rig on the floor. I was showin’ it to Gum and Robert the other morning when you walked in and copped it. I wonder if it’s worth anything.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?” Sears said.

“Is that an official fire department question?”

Sears eyeballed Tronstad and then me. He’d been looking at me more than the others, and I had the feeling I was his lie detector, as if something in my face confirmed or denied veracity. I didn’t think I was quite that transparent, but perhaps I was. “I’m just asking,” he said.

“Because if that’s an official fire department question,” said Tronstad, with a smirk, “I need to call my union rep.”

“You’re taking this pretty lightly.”

“I’m not joking,” Tronstad said.

“Neither am I.”

“Trust me. You’re all wet on this one, Lieut.”

“I hope so.”

A few minutes later, the detail from 32’s showed up and Sears left. The detail was a man named Bob Oleson, one of those big-boned men who’d come into the department a few pounds overweight but who had recently ballooned to even larger dimensions. Later, when Oleson was out of earshot, Tronstad looked at me and chuckled. “Even if Sears gets somebody to listen, how’s he going to explain he thought we were thieves and then left me in charge?”

Somehow I didn’t believe Sears’s foolishness nor Tronstad’s reasoning was going to sway the FBI. We were in trouble here, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I was beginning to feel like that flying pig, whizzing through the deep blue twilight, no way to slow myself, much less stop.

I had a lot to think about as we rode around the district taking care of the tasks Lieutenant Sears had left us: testing hydrants, doing a couple of building reinspections, visiting a preschool. He’d asked us to run three wet drills, too. Johnson, Oleson, and I were willing, but Tronstad sprinkled water on the hose bed so it would look as if we’d pumped water through it, saying, “The bastard drills us enough without
us
drilling us. It’s like asking a kid to go out to the woodshed and paddle himself.”

In the back of my mind was the thought that I might end up in prison over this. I didn’t think so, but it was possible. Going to prison would keep me separated from my mother during her last year of life. After the way she’d dedicated her life to me, I couldn’t do that to her.

Finding herself pregnant at seventeen, my mother left Spokane and centered her life around me. I never met my father. The official story is that my mother divorced him before I was born, but by the time I was ten I knew that was bogus.

Her parents were hard-line Christians and never forgave her for her out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Mother was the youngest of five siblings, raised after the others had left home, so she wasn’t close to my aunts and uncles. My grandparents are in their eighties and now live in Spokane, a six-hour drive from Seattle, a couple of cold fish who for twenty-five years have treated my mother like an outcast. We rarely saw them when I was growing up, though I now visit on my own once or twice a year.

My mother has good days, as the last four had been, days where you almost wouldn’t know she was sick, and then she has days where she gulps painkillers and gets a distant look in her eyes. All along she’s been desirous of the same privacy in death she enjoyed in life and has refused to inform anybody in the family she’s sick.

Thinking of my mother made me even angrier that Johnson and Tronstad had splurged on new cars. We might have given the money back anonymously, but our chances of that were dwindling by the minute. I had assumed that under all their silly pranks they were mature individuals, but now as I viewed them through the clarifying prism of their greed, I knew I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I saw how weak Johnson was, how flighty and vain Tronstad was. Johnson, who didn’t know his district and refused to study it, should never have been the driver on Engine 29. Anybody with a smidgeon of pride would have either learned his district or given up the post, yet he did neither. The department might have turned him out of the spot, but that wasn’t how things worked. Johnson liked to palaver about the fact that he was a small cog in a big machine, that he didn’t have control over his life, philosophizing endlessly without ever coming to any useful conclusions. Outwardly, he was jolly and always in a pleasant mood, but under the surface there was a layer of brooding most people didn’t notice.

Tronstad was a different cat altogether; no deep thought there.

Nobody who worked with Ted Tronstad ever forgot the impromptu stand-up comedy routines he put on at the drop of a hat. He was funny in a Robin Williams way. Everybody said he should audition for
Saturday Night Live.
He was gregarious and championed his friends, as he had me after the incident at Arch Place, yet on the downside, he had money problems, women problems, and a bunch of long-haired, tattooed, Harley-riding buddies who’d spent more of their lives in taverns and prisons than I cared to think about.

One thing Tronstad didn’t have that Johnson did was a kind heart. Johnson rarely spoke ill of anyone, while Tronstad rarely missed a chance to mock or denigrate just about everyone he met: every client, patient, and fellow firefighter he came into contact with. I’d always dismissed it as some sort of slanted attempt at black humor, but it was more; it was a cover-up of his basic insecurity. He had a negative outlook on life, and that outlook made him see the worst in people.

Even though he choked up when we were around injured kids and could be as empathetic as anyone with certain adult patients, there were times when I believed Tronstad’s heart was made of chilled titanium. Perhaps the callousness came about because his father beat him when he was a child. Or because his mother did, too. Or because he’d left home at seventeen to join the Army, where he had a rough go of it, switching to the Air Force three years later.

After lunch Johnson came into the beanery stealthily, closing the door behind him with exaggerated care. Tronstad was reading the sports page and I was rereading the article on Charles Scott Ghanet, or whatever his name really was. The chief had been gone for hours.

“Oleson’s on the other side sawing the z’s in front of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
We need to talk. We gotta figure out what we’re going to do,” said Johnson. “To prove we’re not guilty.”

“We don’t have to prove shit,” said Tronstad. “That’s the beauty of this country.
They
have to prove
we
are guilty. And they can’t do it.”

“The cops have the bond,” I said. “Or they will when Sears gives it to them. And you both bought new vehicles, plus you’ve got that new watch. They’ll trace your transactions at the bank. Don’t say they’ve got nothing. We need to turn that stuff in now.”

“No way. To start with, Sears is not exactly Columbo. He’s not going to prove anything. Split three ways, those bonds should be worth four million each. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to Costa Rica, where I’m going to have me a different chick for every day of the week. With that much bread, they’ll probably make me
El Presidente.
”

I’d pretty much decided to come clean with Sears when he returned that evening. I wasn’t guilty of theft, and I didn’t want to be guilty of conspiracy, either. I should have done it that morning, but I hadn’t yet steeled myself against these two. They weren’t going to get away with this, and even if they were, I didn’t want stolen money.

Johnson and I looked at each other, knowing that the only things keeping Tronstad in the fire department were the biweekly paychecks and the fact that he was behind in his rent, credit card payments, and other bills. He didn’t know any other way to manage his life and bought ice cream by the pint because if he took home half a gallon he’d horse it down at one sitting and get sick. A bundle of money would be gone in months, perhaps weeks.

Johnson and I continued our conversation late that afternoon in the basement, where he lifted weights and I pedaled the stationary bicycle. “I’ll tell you this,” said Johnson. “If Tronstad gets his hands on a penny of that money, he’ll spend it before we can blink.”

“You didn’t do such a bad job yourself.”

“I didn’t know Ghanet was famous when I went to that dealership and the jewelers.”

“What kills me about this is, I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You and I are in the same boat there.” I glanced over to see whether Johnson was serious. I hadn’t spent any money and I hadn’t reneged on my promise to take the bonds back. In fact, I’d tried to take them back when I drove past Ghanet’s place that next morning. If the cops hadn’t been there, the bonds would be on his property now. I couldn’t see how Johnson and I were in the same boat. Not at all.

Johnson said, “I may not be the brightest penny in the jar, but I’m not stupid. When the dust settles I might buy some jewelry for Paula, and I’m pretty sure I’ll go out and get a new computer for LaQuisha, but other than that, I’m not going to do anything to attract notice. Oh, and there’s a gun I want. A nine millimeter. I
was
thinking about putting money on some vacation property in North Carolina on the shore where my folks live, but I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

“Robert, we have to give it back. All of it. There is no other option.”

“I can’t get out of the lease agreement on the car.”

“I thought you said you were taking the car back.”

“I signed papers, man.”

“You can get out of a lease.”

“Well, yeah, maybe. But that ride is sweet.” Johnson grinned at me, and I knew right then that as soon as I got off work the following morning I would recover the sacks and hand them over to the FBI. If they wanted to arrest me, I would have to live with it. “
I
can be discreet with money,” Johnson continued. “Our trouble will be reining in Ted.”

Johnson did a set of bench presses, huffing loudly each time he pushed the bar up. It was demoralizing to realize I would be turning him in for theft along with Tronstad.

“I read about Lotto winners,” he said, swinging his legs to one side of the bench as he sat up. “Interesting stuff. The money almost never makes them happier. In fact, for most people it flat out ruins their lives. They did a study of twenty past winners of our state’s lottery, and eighteen of them came out worse than before, both financially and emotionally—bankruptcies, divorces, lost friends, alcoholism. Two suicides. But I know that won’t happen to me. I’m smarter than that. I’m praying for us, Gum. I’m praying Sears forgets all about that bond, and I’m praying the cops don’t come sniffing around. I’m praying they find some money Ghanet was hiding and that it’s in the Cayman Islands or someplace and they stop looking here. I’m praying for you, too, Gum. I’m praying for your mother. I’m praying for all of us.”

“Thanks, Robert.”

“What’s all this praying about?” Neither of us had heard Chief Abbott descend the wooden steps to the basement. In fact, I hadn’t heard him drive into the station. “You weren’t talking about this, were you?”

Chief Abbott pulled a slip of paper out of his waistband and stretched it between his pudgy fingers. It was either the bond Lieutenant Sears had been carrying or a duplicate.

14. THE SMOKE ROOM

I DON’T KNOW
that I’ve ever met anybody who wanted to be liked more than Russell Abbott, or who had fewer clues on how to go about it. Yet, under the tail-wagging, waiting-to-be-petted puppy display he put on, there lurked a surly mongrel that snapped without warning.

Today he was wearing new sneakers, freshly laundered shorts that stretched halfway up his round torso, and an ironed fire department T-shirt. He held the bearer bond with a look on his round face that approached glee.

“Where’d you get that?” Johnson asked.

“The bigger question is, where did you get it?”

“Sears gave it to you?” Johnson asked.

“Or an investigator.”

“What do you mean
an investigator
?” Johnson was unable to conceal his growing panic. The more nervous he got, the tighter his smile became and the shinier his black cheeks. “Are you talking about a fire department investigator? Or are you talking about the police?”

“I don’t know. Which would be worse for you?”

“Don’t have nothing to do with me.” Johnson flattened his back against the weight bench and reached for the bar. He’d been bench-pressing his body weight, 240 pounds. I continued pedaling. When it became obvious we weren’t going to beg for information, the chief stood in front of the full-length mirror and began waving his arms in small circles. His practice was to do light calisthenics for exactly twenty minutes, no more, no less, then take a half-hour shower, all of which he called his fifty-minute workout. Without prompting, you could get Tronstad to do a hilarious spoof of the workout, which had made Sweeney Sears laugh so hard one evening, he cried.

After several more minutes of torturous silence, Johnson went upstairs and left me alone in the basement with the chief.

“You boys concoct a story to tell Sears when he gets back tonight?” Abbott asked when we were alone.

“Sir?”

“What kind of story are you going to tell your lieutenant?”

I shrugged.

“Oh, come on, now. You tell me where the bond came from, and I’ll make sure you’re not included in the fallout. I know those other jerks got you into it. How many of these bonds did you boys steal?”

I would tell Sears later, but I wasn’t going to tell this bastard. “Tronstad thinks he brought it out of Charles Scott’s stuck to his boot.”

“But
you
were on the call. You were inside Ghanet’s house. You helped find the body.”

“I was there.”

“And you didn’t see any bearer bonds? Oh, come on, now, sweet cheeks. I find that hard to believe.” He’d never used “sweet cheeks” on me before, although I’d heard him use it on others, and the condescension made me angrier than I thought it would. “What would you say if I told you I took this to a bank today and they told me it’s as real as a Saturday night headache, that they were going to hand over a thousand smackeroos, no questions asked. You believe that, Gum?”

“If you say so.”

“You trying to tell me you haven’t cashed any yourself?”

“There’s only the one.”

“It gets deeper and deeper, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

“Go ahead and play dumb. It’s all going to come out soon enough.” He gave me a self-satisfied smile. “By the way. I’ve scheduled a drill for your crew this evening. Sears called and won’t be back until around ten. I thought we’d go down to Station Fourteen and see what sort of props they have set up. How would you like that?”

“Great.”

“I thought that’s what you’d say.”

Drilling for Chief Abbott, who wielded practice sessions more as a form of punishment than as a learning tool, was always a contest of wills. Tronstad had it right when he said, “Abbot likes to see you smile while he’s fucking you in the ass.”

In the beginning, I thought surely Abbott’s tales of his own prowess on the fire ground were at least partly true, that years ago he’d been stronger, fleeter, and trimmer and had fought fire with the best. But the old-timers at Station 32, where Russell Abbott had worked as a firefighter and then ten years later as a lieutenant, told us he’d been worse than useless on the fire ground—that he’d been downright dangerous. Over the years he’d been the cause of several firefighter injuries, unsafe with a chainsaw and dangerous with a hose line, and after a fire, when confronted, he always denied his inappropriate actions.

What confused me in the beginning was how sensible and calm he seemed around the station. His stories, mostly of others screwing up at fires, were detailed, witty, and often displayed an impressive store of firefighting tactics and strategy.

There were other clues, though. Once while responding on an alarm on Admiral Way in the battalion chief’s red Suburban, Abbott got cut off in traffic. When he pulled alongside the dilapidated Buick that had cut him off, the driver, a steel-mill worker on his way home from work, gave Abbott the bone. Abbott, by now code-greened on the original alarm, began chasing the Buick, something he was not trained or authorized to do. He radioed the dispatcher to send the cops, updating his location and direction of travel every minute or so, his exclamations growing more shrill as the chase lengthened. Abbott ended up ambushing the Buick at a stoplight and holding the incredulous driver for the police.

During the commotion, Abbott began to feel chest pains and called for a medic unit. When the medics arrived and told him his heart was healthy, that he was only hyperventilating, he threw a temper tantrum that got him into such a state, they put oxygen on him and transported him to Harborview Medical Center. A year later he found himself in another dispute with a civilian, this time at the scene of an accident, after which he called the medics and told them he thought he was having “another” heart attack. Nobody bothered to remind him that he’d never had a first one.

Battalion chiefs drilled engine companies at their discretion, and in our battalion everybody knew if you crossed Abbott, you drilled. There was some speculation that perhaps he also drilled his wife and eight children when they got out of hand.

We made enchiladas, and the five of us—Abbott, myself, Tronstad, Johnson, and Oleson—enjoyed a meal that was so pleasant, we were taken aback when afterward Chief Abbott pushed himself away from the table and said, “Well, boys. You ready to do it?”

“Shit, Chief,” said Tronstad. “You’re not still thinking about taking us out, are you?”

“I’ll meet you at Fourteen’s.”

“That stinks, Chief,” said Tronstad. “We had a busy day. Besides, we did three wet drills this morning.”

“Then you’ll be especially sharp, won’t you? Of course, we
could
sit around and talk about that bearer bond,” Abbott said, leaning his thick arms on the dinner table, drumming the tabletop with his fingertips. Bob Oleson was the only one in the room who didn’t know what he was talking about.

“I must have tracked it out of that place without knowing it,” said Tronstad.

“Sure. Great,” said Abbott, standing. “By the way, I’ll call the dispatcher and put you out of service. And I’ll swing by Thirty-two’s and drop off Oleson. No point in drilling
him,
is there? Or would you like to drill with them, Bobby?”

Oleson said, “Uh, actually, I tweaked my back earlier.”

“That’s what I thought. Just the three of you, then. Station Fourteen. Half an hour.”

Bob Oleson transferred his equipment from our crew cab to the chief’s Suburban, and we all left the station.

Fire Station 14 sat on the reclaimed tide flats in the industrial area just south of downtown Seattle and was a working fire house as well as the training center for the department. Drill schools were conducted in the classroom inside the station and on the court in back. As we drove, I could hear Johnson and Tronstad griping that it was getting dark, and that Abbott wasn’t drilling any other companies. That this was some sort of revenge. That Abbott was a butthole.

“Where did he even get that bond?” Tronstad asked.

Johnson said, “There isn’t any chance he got one of the bags, is there, Gum? You didn’t do something stupid like hide them in the hose tower?”

“Of course not.”

“Shit,” said Tronstad. “Sears promised he’d keep this between him and us. I can’t see him breaking a confidence. He’s too buttoned-down for that.”

“I think it’s weird that Abbott took Oleson back to Thirty-two’s,” said Johnson. “After he drills us, how’s he going to get us back in service with only three guys? Are we going to go pick up Oleson again? Why not include Oleson in the drill?”

“He doesn’t want witnesses,” said Tronstad. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not.

Station 14 was an off-pink building with red barn doors and a tile roof that looked as if it belonged in Southern California. While Fourth Avenue in front of the station was busy with truck traffic, Horton Street along the south side of the station was a dead end that provided a wide access to the drill court behind the station. I’d driven there every weekday for twelve weeks of drill school, where I had marched and worked and fallen on that drill court in the rain and heat until I thought I couldn’t stand up any longer. I’d put up hundreds of ladders to the seven-story training tower and hooked up to the hydrants too many times to count.

When we pulled into the parking area behind the station, it was just after seven in the evening, so we’d missed the ongoing recruit class by an hour. The pavement was still damp from the hose drills they’d been doing all day. Off to the side, three reserve rigs were parked and tarped for the weekend.

Behind Station 14 was a wide-open parking area maybe 200 feet by 150, bordered on the west by the rear of the fire station, on the north by a fence and a tin-walled manufacturing facility of some sort, on the east by railroad tracks and a Metro bus route, on the south by Horton Street, and across that a pest control facility. Beside the door stood a seven-story tower with no glass in the windows and a fire escape on one side; the tower rose eighty feet.

You could smell the pungent odor of smoke as we drove up, a smell that brought back sharp memories of my first twelve weeks in the department. The smoke room. In my recruit school we’d done it five weeks in a row, always on a Friday so recruits would have Saturdays and Sundays to recover.

Situated at the bottom of the tower, the smoke room was a small, concrete-walled room that always reeked. After the third or fourth week of recruit school the instructors would haul a burn barrel into the room, set a fire in it, then, after the fire got hot, stoke it down in order to produce as much smoke as possible. The windows would be shuttered. The door sealed. An instructor in full self-contained breathing apparatus, SCBA, would tend the fire. In groups at first, and then alone, recruits would be herded into the room, the door shut behind them.

The first exposure would be a minute. In later weeks it would be two minutes. In order to make certain recruits weren’t holding their breath, they would be forced to answer questions and perform tasks such as looking for a bolt on the floor. You quickly learned the best air was low, maybe an inch off the concrete floor, and you just as quickly learned to crawl with your face on the floor, even if somebody in front of you had puked. The rules were simple. If you couldn’t handle the smoke room, you were dismissed. In my class two recruits had been given the boot because they failed this bizarre job hurdle.

Even though we wore SCBAs at fires, there was always the possibility the SCBA would fail or you would get lost or trapped and your air would run out. The department needed to know you weren’t going to panic when the smoke got thick.
You
needed to know you weren’t going to panic. Your partners needed to know.

I couldn’t help thinking about my drill school experiences as Johnson parked the rig and the three of us walked to the back door of Station 14. “They must be on a run,” Johnson said, glancing at the empty beanery windows.

“I didn’t hear them on the radio,” I said.

Tronstad ducked into the tower while Johnson thumbed the combination lock on the back door. A moment later Tronstad stuck his head out the second-floor window of the tower and said, “Hey, guys. Check it out. They left the burn barrel going.”

“They’re supposed to clean all that up,” I said. “
We
always did.”

“The guys on Ladder Seven are going to be pissed when they get back,” said Johnson. “The last thing they want to do is come out here and clean up after a bunch of recruits.”

The other two went to the TV room on the first floor while I walked to the watch desk at the front of the station and learned from the day book that Ladder 7 and Aid 14 were attending a first-aid class at Station 25. They would be gone for hours.

In the TV room, Tronstad flipped through the channels with the remote while Johnson and I speculated on what drills Abbott would throw at us. The department had a whole roster of preprogrammed drills, much like football plays, in which each member on the apparatus played a specific role.

“Hell,” said Tronstad, tuning in a lingerie show on one of the cable channels, “there’s only seven or eight basic hose lays. How can you forget ’em?”

“You should be going over these with us,” said Johnson.