by Earl Emerson
“Jason Gum. I work here on Engine Twenty-nine.”
“You’re just a punk. Sure you’re not a cadet or a Boy Scout or something?”
“No.”
“What do you know about that money?”
“What I read in the papers.”
The pressure on my thumb increased until I yelped. Johnson started to say something, then yelped, too. “Jesse,” said the woman. “Ask them where the pole is. I thought fire stations were supposed to have a fire pole.”
It had been a long time since I’d felt this much pain. “The station’s all on one level,” I managed. “We don’t have a pole.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“On the other side.”
“Tell me about the man you knew as Ghanet,” Brown said. “He used to have a fondness for women. You ever see any women at his place?”
“No.”
“The night he died? What happened?”
“The night who died?” Tronstad asked, coming into the room. “How come you guys are on the floor?”
Now that there were three of us, Brown let Johnson and me get up. Tronstad was a loose cannon, a fact that was instantly apparent to anyone who looked into the wild blackness of his eyes, or saw his manic gestures, or the bobbing and bouncing around even when he was standing still, his movements like those of a methamphetamine freak. In fact, the thought occurred to me that maybe he was a methamphetamine addict. It would explain a lot.
“I’m here as a representative of the United States government,” Brown said. “Who are you?”
“Bond. James Bond,” Tronstad said, in a perfect imitation of Sean Connery.
“Glad to meet you, Mr. Bond,” Brown said, extending his hand. Tronstad reached out to shake and was quickly brought to his knees with the same judo or jujitsu that had taken us down.
“Goddamn it!” Tronstad shouted. “Let go, motherfucker.”
“Watch the mouth. There’s a lady present.”
“You fucker!”
“Keep mouthing off, I’ll break it.”
“Okay, okay. Just give the digits a rest, huh?”
Brown eased the pressure enough so Tronstad, who’d had the back of his head almost on the floor, was able to get back on both knees. Johnson and I looked at each other, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. There were three of us, and he was an old man.
Neither of us budged.
“What’d you find at Ghanet’s place the night he died?” Brown asked.
“A dead body and a shitload of flies.”
“I told you to watch your mouth.”
“And junk. You ever seen that place? You drop a five-year-old in there, you wouldn’t find him for a week.”
“Was it locked when you got there?”
“Fuck you,” said Tronstad. “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”
As Brown applied more pressure, Tronstad grew silent, sucking air through his clenched teeth.
“It was locked,” I said. “He had security locks on everything. Even the bedrooms.”
“But you broke them open, didn’t you?” Brown asked.
“We were looking for the body,” Johnson said.
“Shut up, assholes!” Tronstad shouted. “Can’t you see this guy’s a treasure hunter?”
“I’ve done some research on you three,” Brown said, exposing his long front teeth and their yellow stains. “Seems you’ve come up with some extra spending money lately. What’s that all about?”
At that moment the door from the apparatus bay opened and Heather Wynn walked in, eyes awash in tears. “What’s going on here?”
“Who are you?” Brown asked.
Sizing up the situation, she said, “I’m the person who’s going to call the police. I mean it. My brother’s a Seattle detective.”
Realizing the interview was over, Brown let go of Tronstad and moved to the outside door. Tronstad crawled across the floor and struggled to his feet.
“I’m Linda Brown,” said the old woman. “This is my husband, Jesse. I was wondering if you might give us a tour of the fire station . . . as long as we’re here and all.”
“You better leave,” I said. Maybe it was the sheer weight of numbers, or the fact that Heather’s brother was a Seattle cop, but Brown opened the door and stepped outside.
“You coming, Mother?”
“We’re not going to get a tour, are we?”
“Not today, Mother.”
In a free-for-all, Brown could have handled all three of us and Heather thrown in for good measure. You could only guess what he’d been like in his prime.
“I shoulda bitch-slapped him,” said Tronstad, after they were gone.
“Nobody was stopping you,” Johnson said.
“Who was he?” Heather asked.
“Some crazy old gummer claiming to be with the FBI.”
“He’s going to get his ass kicked,” Tronstad said. “Come in here bustin’ our chops.”
“We should call the police,” Heather said, moving to the phone on the watch desk.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Tronstad put his hand over hers.
Johnson said, “I didn’t know you had a brother in the police department.”
“I made that up. I thought it might scare him.”
After Heather left, Tronstad and Johnson caught me in the bunk room in my underwear as I was changing. “Things are starting to get hot,” Tronstad said. “This place is going to be crawling with treasure hunters. We need to pick up the money tonight.”
“And do what?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you one thing. You’re not giving it back. You give it back, you’ll go to the big house for what happened to Sears.”
“You show the tape, I’ll tell the cops about the bonds.”
“You tell the cops about the bonds, I’ll fuck up your mother.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I know she’s dying, and I feel for you, Jason. I feel for you both. But if you mess with me, I swear . . .”
“There’s no need to get rough here,” Johnson said. “Give us the bonds and everything will work out. You’ll see.”
I tugged my jeans on and stood in my socks, trying to think. “I’ll need some time.”
“Tomorrow night,” Tronstad said, handing us each a folded real estate flier. “Beach Drive down by the Fauntleroy Ferry Terminal. Place has been vacant for weeks. The old woman got killed in her kayak by a speed boat out in the Sound, and the old guy moved to Thailand or someplace. Tomorrow night, eight o’clock. You’re not there, I’m going to your mother’s.”
“You do, and I’ll kill you.”
“Hey, guys,” Johnson said. “Calm down.”
“Just get the shit.”
“I’ll get it.”
25. I BEEN PRAYIN’
TEN MINUTES LATER Robert Johnson and I left the building together. I walked to my sweet little WRX and wondered idly what would become of it when I was in prison. My mother couldn’t drive a stick . . . What was I thinking? She wouldn’t even be around to store it.
Johnson followed me to my car, smiling bashfully. “Don’t worry about it, Gum. I have a feeling everything is going to work out.”
“You fucker.”
“Hey. Don’t—”
“Tronstad killed Sears, and you helped. And Abbott. He killed him, too.”
“Don’t be like this, Gum. Sure, we’re in a little bit of a mess here, but I’m with the Lord now, and I’m not going to make any more mistakes.”
“He moved those signs, didn’t he?”
“By the time I figured out what he was doing, it was too late.”
“It’s not too late to go to the police.”
“How can I? He goes to prison, I go, too. And you? He’ll show that video and you’ll go to prison. He’ll go for Abbott, and you’ll go for Sears.”
“Not if you tell the truth.”
“And the bonds will go back to the government. I didn’t want to be a party to murder
, Gum, but it wasn’t my fault. If I knew how to swim it might have been different.”
“Don’t kid yourself. I’ve been using the same kind of half-assed logic all through this. If I hadn’t been screwing Iola in the basement the night of Arch Place, none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t have missed the rig, and Tronstad and I would have gone inside together, and we would have brought those people out, and they would have lived. I wouldn’t have owed Tronstad, and I would have ratted him out on those bonds.”
“You were porking a woman in the station? Where? Out back in your car?”
“The basement.”
“Where in the basement?”
“All I’m saying is, if it hadn’t been for my screwup and the fact that you guys covered for me, I wouldn’t have had to keep my mouth shut when Tronstad took those bonds. And if I’d turned him in, he wouldn’t have been around to lock Abbott in the smoke room. He wouldn’t have drowned our lieutenant.”
“Gum, you don’t really think you would have saved those people at Arch Place?”
“He and I would have gone in together. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. The buddy system. He was forbidden to go in without a partner. That’s why he was hanging out in the front hallway. He didn’t want me to get in trouble, so he didn’t tell Sears I was missing. Those people died because he was trying to save my ass.”
“You don’t know Tronstad very well. He was trying to save his own ass. He could have told Sears you weren’t there and gone in with Sears. But Tronstad didn’t want to go in with Sears because he plain didn’t want to go in. Sears would have seen he couldn’t face fire. Sears would have written him up. Tronstad wasn’t going in under any circumstances, and you not being there was perfect for him. I watched his feet under the smoke in the doorway. He never moved. You don’t get it, do you? Tronstad doesn’t go into fires. He always has some kind of excuse. If you’d been there, you still would have been rescuing those people on your own.”
“He was downstairs protecting my back with the hose line.”
“He wasn’t protecting anything. Hell, he was on the porch most of the time you were in there dragging those people out. Outside on the porch.”
“I don’t understand.”
“At a good house fire Tronstad’ll always back out on you. He’s backed out on me a bunch of times. That’s what he does, Gum. Tronstad looks out for Tronstad, and that doesn’t include going into a fire building if he can figure a way out of it. He had plenty of time to crawl inside and tap that fire. I would have done it. You would have done it. Sears would have done it, too, if he’d known you weren’t there. Tronstad didn’t make the effort, because that’s not what Tronstad’s about.”
“So you’re saying—”
“I’m saying you didn’t get those people dead. Tronstad did. I’m saying Tronstad cannot be trusted at a fire.”
“If I’d been there earlier, they would have gotten out sooner.”
“Maybe. But Tronstad wouldn’t have been helping.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I figured you were on his side.” It took me several seconds to realize what he was getting at. “That’s right. The white guys against the brother. I half expected you to split the bonds with Tronstad and blow town.”
“Geez, Robert. You should know me better than that.”
“I do now.” Johnson grinned. “Don’t worry. I been prayin’. If we can go this far without getting nabbed, we can go the distance. I’m convinced of it.”
Though I was thoroughly convinced of the opposite, I didn’t argue. Let him have his delusions.
26. WRESTLING WITH WOMEN IN THE DARK
HOW COULD ANY of our lives turn out to be normal? Two men were dead, and Ted Tronstad was groping the recent widow like an inbred cousin at a clambake. I knew retrieving the bonds and handing them over to Tronstad would only make things immeasurably worse, but if I didn’t, he’d blame Sears’s death on me.
The fleeting thought occurred to me that he’d set up our meeting in a vacant house because it was a convenient spot for another murder, and that once he was in possession of the bonds, there would be nothing to keep him from silencing me. A conspiracy has no place for a man with a conscience, and Tronstad knew that. He knew I’d confessed to Sears and no doubt feared I would confess to others.
Any attempt on my life, or on Robert’s, seemed a dumb move on Tronstad’s part, but if you looked at everything else Tronstad had done since he found the bonds, he’d made a lot of dumb moves. Any sane person knew the police would focus on him if any more members of our crew died, but Tronstad’s reality didn’t always correspond to the real world.
When I got home, I found evidence that somebody had tried to force my back door: jimmy marks on the door next to the dead bolt. They hadn’t gotten in. Mrs. Macklin, who lived in the other half of the duplex, was an older woman with acute emphysema, and because she was tied to an oxygen bottle, she was usually home. “I haven’t seen nobody,” she said when I asked her about it. “Been sick all week. Can barely get to the bathroom. Can you come in and help me with my garbage?”
“Maybe later.”
I mowed Macklin’s lawn, took out her garbage each week, and picked up items at the grocery store for her. Twice she’d overflowed her commode by stuffing in half a roll of toilet paper, and twice I’d cleaned it up for her. There were certain people, you gave them an inch, they took a mile.
The prowler could have been anybody, but I suspected Tronstad, or “Agent” Brown, the latter prospect infinitely more frightening than the former. While Tronstad was demented and dangerous, I figured as long as I had the bonds I could at least reason with him. Brown was an unknown quantity.
That evening I found my mother at the kitchen table in her tiny third-floor apartment on California Avenue, sitting in a chair she rarely moved from. She’d covered her bald head with a pink-and-white flower-print bandanna, a gift from me. She’d taken to wearing hoop earrings, which, along with the bandannas, lent her a vaguely exotic air, like a gypsy or a Caribbean fortune-teller. Her face was pale and drawn, dark circles under her eyes not unlike the chronic circles under Tronstad’s eyes.
Though we didn’t speak of it, I often wondered if suicide hadn’t crossed her mind. Given my current circumstances, it was easy enough to understand why people in dire straits resorted to offing themselves. There was a sullen comfort to be had in knowing you wouldn’t have to face the consequences of your actions. Chagrined that the thought had occurred to me, I did my best to put it out of my mind.
I sat on the worn sofa near the living-room window.
“What’s the matter, Jason?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve been down for well over a week.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to bring any of this on you. It’s just that I never in my wildest dreams thought I could be in this much trouble.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“I can’t.”
“Is it money trouble? You’ve been paying for so much around here lately. My rent. My prescriptions.”
“Mom, it doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“I wish you would talk about it.”
I took my mother to dinner down the street from her apartment building, at a Chinese restaurant, where she barely touched her food and I barely touched mine. Even though we knew she wouldn’t eat them later, we boxed up the leftovers and took them with us.
It was dark when we got home. We’d spent the meal discussing politics, which she followed ardently and believed had deteriorated to a dismal state over the course of her lifetime.
“You want to come up and keep me company?” she asked. “We could watch TV.” Mother had been a reader her whole life, but the drugs wouldn’t let her concentrate on the front page of a newspaper, much less a book. I knew she detested the fact that watching TV, catnaps, and looking out the window had becom
e the primary staples of her day.
“Thanks, but I have errands.”
“So late?”
“I love you, Mom.”
“Love you, too.” I kissed her brow and she gave me a long look before she closed the car door and walked across the sidewalk to her apartment building, dutifully carrying the plastic bag of pork fried rice and moo shu beef.
I waited for her to get inside, popped in a Built to Spill CD, and drove around West Seattle, shifting gears like a rally driver, taking corners as fast as the WRX allowed, using the familiar feel of the car and the long nervous minutes of insane driving in a fatuous attempt to restore my sanity. I drove past Ghanet’s place and found it dark and quiet, with a sign I couldn’t read from the street nailed to the front door.
Dropping down the hillside to Beach Drive, I revved the motor until I was traveling sixty-five miles an hour, then eighty, eighty-five, ninety, passing the rare car on the road, driving like a dead man—or a man who wanted to be dead. Working on Engine 29, I’d come down here and picked up bodies produced by precisely this sort of reckless motoring. For reasons I couldn’t guess, I slowed to below the speed limit just seconds before a cop passed me headed in the opposite direction. He did a U-turn in the street and followed me for two miles, then abandoned the surveillance. No doubt some citizen with a cell phone had reported me, but once again, lady luck had thrown her hat into the ring on my behalf.
After twenty-five more minutes of aimless cruising, I drove back down to the water near the lighthouse and headed east with homes, apartment buildings, and condominiums occupying all the available land on the hillside to my right. On my left lay a sandy beach, and beyond that the dark Puget Sound. I turned onto Bonair Drive and headed up the hill. Passing Hobart Avenue slowly, I kept driving and parked two blocks away. Carrying my keys, a pair of wool gloves, and a small flashlight, I hiked down the hill.
Perched on the side of the wooded slope overlooking the Sound, the Pederson home lay in a small cul-de-sac that had been notched into the hillside. Above it, a small greenbelt was forested with elms and maples, the trees only just beginning to lose their green. To the right on an embankment sat a high apartment house and parking lot, so that the Pederson place appeared to sit in a flat-bottomed hole.