Vertical Burn Part 2

"Don't worry. You will."

6. DODGING THE BULLET.

In the rest area 150 feet from the fire buildings, the radiant heat on Diana Moore's face felt like a fresh sunburn. Crews manning hose lines in the parking lot were directing water, tons of it, into the buildings. Some of the more alert firefighters on the hose lines tried to knock down embers so they wouldn't drift out of the neighborhood and ignite secondary fires, but Diana could see it was a losing battle. Propelled by the tremendous heat rising off the buildings, sparks raced unhindered up into the night sky like antiaircraft rounds.

The structures to the north had taken off first, but now spirals of flame were shooting out the high windows on the warehouse. Electrical wires on nearby utility poles had burned off and were dancing in the street. Pools of water spread under hose connections in the parking lot and drained downslope toward the fire, where the water evaporated. When the moving vans outside the building burst into flame, one ill-fated firefighter was sprayed with hot rubber from an exploding tire.

Across the street the damp from the high hose streams drizzled onto a crowd of spectators. Water beaded up on parked cars and fire engines. Two women in bathrobes huddled under an umbrella watching the fire.

So many spaghetti lines crisscrossed in the street that in places the hoses were layered several feet deep. On the warehouse roof flames leaped fifty feet into the air. Engine companies manning deck guns shot eight hundred gallons a minute into the conflagration.

Diana wished she knew how a pair of experienced firefighters like Captain Cordifis and John Finney had gotten into so much trouble. She had been on the crew all day, had worked with these men, joked with them, and through some serendipitous order of events had escaped tonight's catastrophe unscathed.

Eleven minutes after Finney came out, Battalion Chief Reese and Robert Kub were ejected from the building like corks popping out of a bottle. She'd never seen anything quite like it, and apparently neither had the newspaper photographers who captured it on film: two men running, ducking low, only a couple of feet in front of a fireball that obliterated everything else in the frame.

Moments after Reese and Kub emerged, Reidel approached the fiery doorway from the side, stooped low, and peered inside for signs of Cordifis.

Until she saw the stricken look on Robert Kub's face as he plowed through the gang of reporters, Diana a.s.sumed Cordifis had been taken out another exit by a second team. But Kub didn't resemble a man returning from a successful mission; he seemed like a man in need of a quiet place to cry.

As soon as he whipped off his mask, film and radio crews swarmed Chief Reese like flies on bad meat, pushing their microphones under his nose as they lobbed questions. Over the years Diana had heard contradictory stories about Reese, but it was amazing that he had so much command of both emotion and intellect at a time like this. He'd risked his life but had lost neither his equilibrium nor his composure. Diana watched as the battalion chief looked stolidly at the cameras.

"We went in and within a minute we found one firefighter wandering around alone," Reese began. "He was in a panic and wasn't any help at indicating where his partner was. We guided him outside and then went back down the direction he came from, but there wasn't anything there. We searched as long as we could, but were finally forced out by the heat."

"So who's bringing him out?" one of the reporters asked. "There were two men lost, right? Who's bringing out the other one?"

"To the best of our knowledge, he's still in there."

At that moment a section of the roof collapsed. Diana watched a thin tongue of orange shooting out the top of the doorway Cordifis and Finney had gone in, the doorway she herself had used earlier. It was inconceivable that anybody else was emerging alive from that tinderbox.

For a while Baxter stood next to her. Thomas Baxter was one of those people who talked out his problems, the nexus between his mouth and brain unenc.u.mbered by the normal barriers a.s.sociated with self-censorship or second thoughts.

"How?" Baxter asked in his faded southern accent. "How in h.e.l.l could he work thirty-six years and then have this happen? With all his experience. Christ! John must have killed himself getting out. You see his neck?"

"I saw it," Diana said, shuddering to herself. Most firefighters didn't think about getting burned because it didn't happen all that often. But when it did, it was ugly.

"Bill almost went off a roof over on King Street last winter. House fire. His knees buckled. If John hadn't been there . . . Last couple of years John's been following Bill around like a mother hen. Cordifis should have retired a long time ago. Boy, we sure dodged the bullet tonight, didn't we?"

Diana turned her back to the fiery spectacle. "I guess you could say that."

PART TWO.

OCTOBER:.

FIVE MONTHS LATER.

7. TOUGH t.i.tTY.

John Finney's story was one of the first things the current batch of SFD drill instructors told probationary firefighters when they tried to spook them into quitting.

Finney didn't know how specific the storytelling was, or whether the drill instructors mentioned that Finney was obsessed with Leary Way-that he'd grilled every member of every crew on the alarm, that he'd even constructed a miniature model of the complex as it was before the fire. Finney was well aware that some people thought he was losing his mind. But if people thought he was waging a futile crusade, tough t.i.tty.

Leary Way had ripped his life in half. Since that night in June he had not once gotten more than five hours of sleep in a twenty-four-hour period. Leary Way was all he thought about, and he knew it was all others thought about when they saw him. He wasn't the same as before the fire, and he wouldn't be until he'd tamed the fundamental conundrum. Would Bill Cordifis be alive if Finney had done anything differently? And had he panicked after leaving Cordifis?

Most people said nothing to his face, but his brother, Tony, relayed the rumors, the worst of which was that at Leary Way he'd been running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Chief Reese had publicly announced that Finney had panicked, and n.o.body could forget that. n.o.body wanted to fight fire with a fireman who'd panicked.

But he hadn't panicked and he knew it.

Still, not an hour pa.s.sed without Finney wrestling to understand what went wrong. Heat stress and carbon monoxide poisoning from that night had blanked out much of his memory, and what he did remember he didn't trust to be true. He knew he'd been hallucinating in the hospital but couldn't be certain whether he'd been hallucinating during the fire itself. It was impossible to know in the confusion caused by heat exhaustion and smoke inhalation whether he had imagined telling Reese and Kub that they had to go twenty-eight paces to find the hole in the wall, or whether he'd actually told them.

Reese said Finney hadn't told them anything. In dozens of interviews he'd implied that Finney's primary concern was getting out of the building, not helping them find his partner. What Finney didn't understand was how they'd missed Cordifis. Reese and Kub had been inside the building eleven minutes after Finney left them, plenty of time to find Bill, dig him out, and carry him to safety. Still, if they hadn't known where to look . . .

n.o.body blamed Bill's death on him, not directly, but even so, the indictment floated about in the ether. If he'd been coherent enough to get himself out of the fire, why hadn't he done as much for his partner?

Finney was beginning to believe it was not possible for a man to endure as many sleepless nights as he had without stepping over the precipice into madness. He had moods that n.o.body knew about, fugues that he hadn't mentioned, even to the tight-lipped psychologist the department sent him to, a woman who gawked at him over the top of her tortoisesh.e.l.l reading gla.s.ses and urged him to tell her what he was feeling. What did she think he was feeling? He and Bill Cordifis had gone into a burning building together. He'd come out alone. It didn't get any simpler than that. He felt guilt. Grief. He felt incompetent. Dim-witted. Alienated. Evil, even.

It was bad enough to lose a partner. It was untenable to be the cause of that loss, unconscionable, and, ultimately, unendurable.

Leary Way was the sort of catastrophe that might happen to a firefighter at his first fire, yet Finney had been wading through smoke for eighteen years. Firefighting ran in the family blood. Finney's brother had been in the department twenty-one years. And just a few months ago, after nearly forty-two years of service, their father had retired with the rank of battalion chief. Their grandfather had been a volunteer in his youth during the Depression in Michigan. Accounts of unexpected endings, ill-fated victims, and unimaginably bad luck had been ricocheting around the supper table since John Finney's childhood, yet as far as he could tell, until now no one in the family had ever been the cause of one of those cataclysms.

He knew there was usually some permanent damage that went along with something like this. So far, aside from the skin grafts on his neck and wrists, he'd been left with an ineluctable and sometimes incapacitating depression. The possibility that he could no longer trust his own skills on the fire ground-or anywhere else-plagued and horrified him. First and foremost he was a firefighter. Losing that, even in spirit, was more painful than anything he could imagine.

Finney was, as always, obsessing on these thoughts in the officer's room of Station 26 on a Tuesday morning in late October. He stared at his own reflection in the computer screen, trying to figure out who he'd become. The image he saw didn't tell him anything new: dark brown hair, a relatively square face with only a few telltale lines to suggest his thirty-nine years, a blocky jaw. He saw a strong face, not quite handsome, with blue eyes his ex-wife had once called dreamy. Later, during the divorce, she'd decided they were vacant. Now they were underscored with dark circles.

Situated near the southern city limits of Seattle, Station 26 was the kind of sleepy little firehouse that Finney had discovered attracted misfits, misanthropes, bathroom philosophers, backyard mechanics, geezers on their way to retirement, or people who habitually reduced their life philosophy to a few words on a b.u.mper sticker. Finney had been transferred here to be the acting officer while Lieutenant Sadler was on disability, but Sadler had returned unexpectedly, and now Finney was stuck riding the tailboard. He wasn't particularly happy about it, but then he wasn't particularly happy about anything these days.

In the officer's room with him was Jerry Monahan, one of only a handful of firefighters whose att.i.tude toward Finney wasn't influenced in some manner by Leary Way. "Whatcha doin'?" Monahan asked.

"Trying to track down the last band member from the fire. I've talked to the others. This guy's supposedly moved to Montana."

"Don't you think you'd be better off putting all this behind you, John?"

"No."

"It was me, I'd move on and try to forget it."

"No, you wouldn't."

In his late fifties, Jerry Monahan was a roly-poly man with an ingratiating smile and rumpled clothing. His skin was so gray it looked like ash. There was always something a little off about Monahan; Finney regarded him as a real-life "what is wrong with this picture?" puzzle. This morning it was a brown shoelace in one of his black boots. Monahan overflowed with elaborate government conspiracy theories and was a frequent caller to extreme-right-wing radio shows. Finney had reason to believe he often went several days without bathing. He suspected Monahan was allergic to soap and the federal government in equal proportions.

While Finney stared at the computer screen, Jerry Monahan sat on Lieutenant Sadler's bunk next to the desk and fiddled with a Teflon-coated cable on an aluminum spool, explaining how the spool fit into a contraption he'd designed to evacuate civilians from high-rise fires and how the whole thing was going to make him a billionaire. Finney had heard it all a hundred times before.

"Calling it Elevator-in-a-Can," Monahan said. "What do you think?"

"Catchy."

"All I need is a little luck. Just a little luck and two hundred grand for promotion. The potential with this dealybobber is staggering."

"I'll bet."

Finney knew that plenty of people in the department called Monahan a crackpot to his face, and he found it easy to a.s.sume this latest invention would never work, much less make Monahan wealthy. It was an undeniable fact though that Monahan had already collected fortunes from two similar schemes. But then, true to his karma, he had never been wealthy for long and had quickly reinvested each of those fortunes in doomed projects.

"Quiet," Monahan whispered, as an alarm came over the radio in the other room.

Finney followed as Monahan dragged the snarl of cable out into the watch office at the front of the station and stood next to the radio scanner. The dispatchers were adding Engine 38, Engine 17, and Ladder 9 to an ongoing incident in the Northgate area. There had been heavy radio traffic all morning, but this was the first time Finney paid any attention to it.

"All of the Fourth Battalion is tied up at that ship fire, and now they're calling for more units," Monahan said. "Two major alarms at once. There won't be a rig in service north of the ship ca.n.a.l."

The term in service in service referred to an apparatus that was ready to respond. A rig that was out of service was one already on an alarm or one that couldn't be dispatched because of mechanical problems or some other reason. referred to an apparatus that was ready to respond. A rig that was out of service was one already on an alarm or one that couldn't be dispatched because of mechanical problems or some other reason.

"The whole town's going to be jammed up," said Monahan excitedly.

"A couple of fires aren't going to overwhelm us."

"You watch. This is going to be nuts."

Even as he spoke, the bell in the corridor clanged.

Lieutenant Sadler came bustling down the hall from the beanery and immediately began tripping in the lengths of loose cable Monahan had left on the floor. He stood at the console waiting for the printout with the alarm information on it. Half a foot taller than Finney, Sadler had a thick black mustache that dominated his long face and a shock of salt-and-pepper hair he combed to one side. He spent much of his free time at the station talking on the phone to girlfriends, former girlfriends, prospective girlfriends, ex-wives, and women whose phone numbers he'd collected but whose names he'd lost or forgotten. Finney felt sorry for all of them.

"Four Avenue South and South Main Street?" Sadler said, scanning the run sheet on his way to the apparatus floor. "This has got to be a mistake. That's nowhere close to our district."

"They've got two working alarms in the north end," said Monahan with an exuberance Finney found out of character. There were firefighters who responded to every fire call as if they'd just been handed a ticket to the World Series, but he knew Monahan typically reacted to each alarm as if he were about to have his a.s.s sewn shut.

A mile from the station, turning off East Marginal Way onto Fourth Avenue South, Finney heard the radio crackle. "Engines Twenty-six, Twenty-two, Thirty-two, and Eleven; Ladders Twelve and Six; Aid Five, Medic Sixteen; Air Twenty-six, Battalion One: Four Avenue South and South Main Street, the Downtowner," said the dispatcher. "Channel two. Engine Twenty-six?"

Lieutenant Sadler keyed the mike in his hand. "Engine Twenty-six, okay."

"Engine Twenty-six. This was a pull station activated on floor seven."

"Engine Twenty-six, okay."

Sadler pressed the mechanical siren b.u.t.ton on the floor. After all these years the growling of the old-fashioned siren still gave Finney a bit of a thrill. These days it was about the only thrill left.

8. FOOD ON THE STOVE.

Racking the microphone on the dash, Lieutenant Sadler wrenched around in his seat and raised his voice so Finney could hear him over the siren and the roar of the diesel motor. "That's your old stomping grounds, isn't it? Ten's district?"

"The Downtowner's a residential hotel," said Finney. "The panel's inside the front door on the left."

Formerly a hotel serving travelers from the King Street train station a block away, the Downtowner was now a low-rent, nine-story apartment building inhabited by elderly pensioners, immigrants who spoke little or no English, alcoholics, the formerly homeless, and the recently paroled. Nine times out of ten a call there was a false alarm. In eighteen years at Station 10, Finney had been there hundreds of times.

It was a long drive up Fourth Avenue through the industrial area, past Sears, the new baseball stadium, the Amtrak depot, and into the lower reaches of Chinatown. This area had been tide flats a hundred years ago. As they pa.s.sed Station 14, Finney caught a momentary glimpse of recruits practicing behind the tower. His brother had told him they all knew him by name and his story. It p.i.s.sed him off that most of them probably felt superior to and sorry for him.

Driving faster than department regulations decreed or his own skills dictated, Jerry Monahan gripped the wheel tightly, his body tipped forward. Monahan was one of those people who, no matter how much training he had under his belt, would still panic in an emergency.

Finney knew it was a trademark of the Seattle Fire Department that inept.i.tude such as Monahan's would be either studiously ignored or steadily rewarded-never punished, rarely corrected, and in most cases barely acknowledged. Common sense having been crippled by an elaborate set of civil service regulations and union rules, chiefs tended to shuffle their problems to other battalions or isolate them in quiet stations where they could do the least amount of damage. In order for Monahan to lose his job or even be demoted from the coveted driver's position, he would have to be convicted of a felony or commit some other egregious act. Finney feared that what would finally do Monahan in would be running over an innocent pedestrian on the way to a false alarm.

When they were a mile away, the dispatcher fed them an update. "Engine Twenty-six, we have a report of smoke on floor seven."

Facing backward in the crew cab, Finney was already in his tall, rubber bunking boots and multilayered bunking trousers. He'd put on his coat and slipped his arms through the straps of the MSA backpack and air cylinder stored behind the seat. As they approached the address, he saw people spilling out the main entrance onto the sidewalk. This should have been routine for him, the Downtowner, but these days, all he could think about when they went to an alarm was not s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up.

"Jesus Christ, stop here," Sadler yelled at Monahan, who had bypa.s.sed the front entrance and was rolling toward the northwest corner of the building. "What the h.e.l.l's wrong with you? You should have parked at the front door."

Meek as a kitten, Monahan said, "Aren't we going to charge the standpipe? It's a fire call, right? A high-rise . . . I charge the standpipe at a high-rise, right?"

"You stop in front when I tell you to stop in front, G.o.dd.a.m.n it!"

These two had been going at each other for the past week. It was hard for Finney to keep from laughing. He'd never worked on a crew quite like this.

Sadler gave his radio report and then he and Finney jostled their way through the crowd at the front entrance, Finney carrying a heavy dry-chemical extinguisher, Sadler a pressurized pump can. Inside, the alarm bell was deafening.

When a high-rise went into fire mode, elevator cars were supposed to return automatically to the lobby, but the elevator wasn't there. "Where the h.e.l.l's that car?" Sadler yelled to no one in particular.

A man with several missing teeth approached through the pack of evacuating citizens covering their ears with their hands. Like Sadler and Finney, he was a head taller than everyone else in the lobby and probably one of the few people in the building who spoke English. "The manager took it up to check on the fire."

"To floor seven?" Sadler asked.

"I guess so. The way I-"

Finney and Sadler ran to the narrow stairs leading from the back of the lobby and began climbing. In their c.u.mbersome gear they left little room for nervous civilians, who flattened out against the walls when they saw them coming.

"Cuidado!" Sadler shouted at the descending citizens, his voice echoing in the marble staircase. Finney realized Sadler didn't know much Spanish, but he liked to flaunt what he did know. Sadler shouted at the descending citizens, his voice echoing in the marble staircase. Finney realized Sadler didn't know much Spanish, but he liked to flaunt what he did know. "Cuidado!" "Cuidado!"

Before they'd gone two flights, Finney could hear Sadler's heavy breathing, the tax for a lifetime of smoking. Including the weight of the extinguishers, they were each carrying more than eighty pounds of protective equipment. If nothing else, Finney knew he was still one of the fittest firefighters in the department. He would run Sadler into the ground and pretend it was easy. He could do that.

By floor three Finney was breathing hard, too. By four he felt as if the dry building air was scarring his lungs. Three floors left. Two left. As he approached seven, his legs grew noticeably wobbly. Still, he was far ahead of Sadler.

Finney waited for Sadler on the seventh-floor landing, breathing deeply. When he finally caught up with Finney, Sadler banged his pump can noisily onto the landing, dropped to his knees, and tried to catch his breath.

Finney took a few more deep breaths and said, "You all right?"

"h.e.l.l, no, I'm not all right."

"Want me to go back and get the Lifepak?"