Pyro

by Earl Emerson

  It’s almost six-thirty and plenty dark by the time I put two dollars worth of gas in the car and read The Stranger whilst sitting by the window in the Starbucks at Twenty-third and Jackson. I’m two blocks from his fire station. The fire trucks come by while I am there.

  It is almost impossible to quantify just how godderned exciting it is to be this close to all those big, strong, mustachioed firemen. And women, although only a few of the women have mustaches. Ha ha. Old Earl can still make a joke. Just like that bastard who was trying to kill me. I’ve heard them laughing together.

  I love to watch those powerful machines drive by, the sounds of the sirens blasting against the buildings in the street. Mom says when I was small I used to wake up crying every time the sirens came past our house. That was the thing about the joint. Twenty-five years without a siren.

  He was planning to kill me. Lieutenant Paul Wollf. So I’m treating it just like the joint. You find yourself with a mortal enemy, you eliminate him before he eliminates you. Wollf is a dead man. Period.

  I check out the sex ads in the back of The Stranger but don’t find anything I can afford in terms of either emotional commitment or finances. I might place my own ad. How about this? “Redheaded cross-dresser seeks hot sex with psycho mama who can appreciate an experienced heating expert.”

  I climb into Mom’s Dodge Dart and wheel around the neighborhood looking for targets, setting the good ones hard in memory when I spot them.

  Somehow I end up in front of the old woman’s place. She spots me out the window, her dyed hair in the doorway now. I walk up the steps to the porch, where she is opening the front door. “Ma’am. I’m a friend of Jaclyn’s. I just stopped by to see if she was in attendance.”

  “Jackie left a long time ago.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I had to let her go. She doesn’t live here anymore.”

  “Do you happen to know where she went?”

  “I’ve no idea. Now, you’re going to have to go. I only came out to tell you to move that car.”

  Jaclyn gone? Was it possible?

  Driving aimlessly, I while away the next two hours scoping out targets, then I go home and park in front of the house. I enter and sniff the fetid odor of cats.

  “What have you done now?” Mom asks.

  “I told you. I had to check up on that job application. If you don’t come in once in a while, they forget about you.”

  She glares at me. “No. Not that. The police called. They want to talk to you.”

  The veins in my brain begin pulsing. “To me? Why?”

  “All I know is they want to talk to you.”

  “Which police, Mom? “

  “Don’t you grab me.”

  “I’m sorry. Okay.” I let her go. I had to have more information. This could be something as easy as my parole officer getting a bug up his butt, or it could be worse.

  “Which police? You have to tell me.”

  “Some man wanted to know if they questioned you twenty-five years ago about some fires. I said twenty-five years ago you were in prison.”

  “How long ago did they call?”

  “Why, just before you walked in.”

  I dig through her purse and take all her money. Her cigarettes. I grab a handful of clothes, my bag of makeup, two wigs, then I make a U-ey in the street. When I get to the top of the hill, I check the rearview mirror. I believe I see a pair of headlights stop in front of our house, but they might be at the neighbor’s.

  There is a liquor store and U.S. Post Office at Twenty-third and Union. I park two blocks away on a side street and walk to the liquor store. I don’t have to wait fifteen minutes before some lunkhead leaves his motor running while he goes in to buy a bottle. It is a Ford Exploder. By eight-thirty I have another set of plates on the Exploder and have transferred my personal belongings from Mom’s car.

  It is time to put the finish to all of this. It isn’t like I don’t know who I need to stop.

  I’ve been a nice guy up until now, but now they have nobody to blame but themselves. Period. I can kill, I can maim, and by golly, they’ve got my dander up, so I’m going to do both. Maybe I’ll go down, but I’ll go down in a blaze of glory. You betch’er butt.

  This is for sure.

  No more little fires. From now on they’re only going to see big fires from this heating expert. Period.

  68. BATTALION GOSSIP

  Cynthia Rideout

  JANUARY 6, MONDAY, 1259 HOURS

  This morning everybody was talking about the firefighter in Ballard who slid off a wet roof, fell two stories, and broke her back in two places. She may end up paralyzed. Dolan almost died. Tow could have died with him. It sure makes you think about the job.

  The other news is Chief Hertlein turned off another fan. Up north. It was a house fire, and apparently it was real smoky. The word was firefighters were bailing out windows and doors left and right.

  Wollf convened a station meeting this morning. He said it was true his brother was in prison, his mother had been murdered, and his father had died in a fire in 1978. He said it was also true he didn’t want to talk about any of those things. He said he wouldn’t be answering any more personal questions after the meeting, so if we had any, we’d better ask now. Towbridge said he’d been called at home by a couple of media people and what did Wollf want him to say? “My friends won’t say anything,” Wollf told him.

  Gliniewicz said, “Let’s be frank here. Everybody read those articles the other day. I mean, didn’t we? So what’s the big deal?”

  “Anything else?” Wollf asked.

  Slaughter turned around and left the room. After the door closed, Zeke spoke in that mellow voice of his. “I have a question.”

  “What is it, Zeke?” Wollf asked.

  “Well . . . uh . . . you talked to this person, didn’t you? Didn’t you talk to the torch workin’ our district?”

  “I did.”

  “Did he say he was planning to quit?”

  Towbridge laughed. “He ain’t gonna quit, Zeke. He ain’t never goin’ to quit.”

  “Why not?”

  “ ’Cause he’s a fruit loop, that’s why not. He can’t stop hisself.”

  “I don’t understand why he don’t get tired and quit,” Zeke persisted. “It’s a lot of work, what he’s doin’. It don’t make sense.”

  “No shit, it don’t make sense.” Towbridge laughed. “That’s why he’s a fruit loop.”

  Somebody said, “But they have the guy’s name. Surely it’s only a matter of time before he gets picked up. His face is all over the TV. I saw it this morning on CNN.”

  “Maybe he ain’t a guy,” Towbridge said. “When the lieutenant ran him down, he was wearing a dress and a bra.”

  “I didn’t see a bra,” Wollf said. We all laughed. Wollf was in a bad mood, but he was funny too.

  Later in the morning Lieutenant Wollf went over last month’s report with me. He gave me above average marks and told me to stick with it. Yaaaaay!

  JANUARY 7, TUESDAY, 0046 HOURS

  I can’t sleep. I’ve been thinking about a phone call I received from Gwen Verdings. Gwen works at Thirteen’s on the other shift, so she’s plugged into all the battalion gossip. Her chief told them that our chief, Eddings, had just had a lawsuit filed against her by a woman from the class in front of mine. It seems Eddings used to visit this firefighter after lights-out, that she used to sit on her bed and touch her. She asked Eddings to leave, but Eddings said—and this is Gwen’s quote, “It’s just us girls here,” which is what she said when she was touching me.

  Gwen said Eddings asked her to sign a statement saying she’d never done anything like that to her. “Are you going to sign?” I asked Gwen.

  “I don’t know. The trouble is two years ago she did do something like that to me. I don’t know if Eddings forgot or if she wants me to lie for her or what. Maybe she doesn’t think visiting your bunk and touching you is wrong.”

  “She did it to me too,”
I said.

  “Can you imagine what would happen if a male officer did that? He’d lose his job in a heartbeat. You think this suit has a chance?”

  “If we both stepped forward and testified against Eddings, it would.”

  “For a long time I didn’t understand why they don’t give her a desk job. But then I overheard a couple of chiefs talking about it. They think she’s less of a liability to the department if they leave her in operations. Out where she might get somebody killed. Isn’t that a hoot?”

  “It’s not a hoot if you have to work with her. Gwen, what are you going to do?”

  “I haven’t decided. I don’t want to lie, but I don’t want to get dragged into this lawsuit either.”

  It’s become clear why Eddings wants to fire me. I’m just one more female firefighter who can confirm allegations of sexual harassment against her. But if I get canned, it will look like anything I say is sour grapes.

  69.THE DOSIMETER

  Right away you could tell these fires were different.

  Same guy. Same technique. Same materials.

  But you could tell now he was trying to hurt somebody, whereas in the past, excepting the night where Dolan and Towbridge went through the roof, the fires in our district had been pretty much haphazard targets of opportunity. You could see in our first three calls today the goal was to create confusion, tie up rigs, to hurt people.

  Ladder 3’s first call was to a U.S. postal box at Twenty-third and Union outside the post office door. We took it on a single. Smoke was pouring out of the box. We tore the door off the box and retrieved the unburned mail. There wasn’t much, but it was a federal crime and we needed to keep the site secure until the feds arrived, which took us out of action for the next forty minutes, during which Crapps, our detail, went ballistic listening to the sirens all around us.

  “Shit. We’re missing everything,” he said. Rideout and Towbridge exchanged weary looks. There were some people who never got enough action, and rangy, basketball-playing Crapps was one of them.

  During the hour we were out of service, our section of the city had four more arsons.

  While we waited for the postal inspectors, I thought about Vanessa. I’d been thinking about her for days. Thinking about how nice she was to me, how accepting of me. About how good she made me feel when we were together. Thinking about the way I’d frozen her out. The way I’d hung up on her. The way things were but didn’t have to be. The way things always ended up.

  I thought about it all morning, and then when we were on our way back from the Red Apple, I had Towbridge stop the rig in the bus zone while I dashed across Twenty-third to the flower shop at the corner on Jackson. I bought flowers and had them sent to her work. I tore up three cards trying to get my apology right. I finally settled for saying I was sorry I’d acted like a jerk, that she was the best thing that ever happened to me, and that I hoped she would give me a second chance.

  It would be nothing short of a miracle if she would.

  By ten o’clock at night, when I still hadn’t heard from her, I realized she was either waiting for me to call or she didn’t want anything more to do with me.

  When we finally got put back into service, all the units around us were out on alarms. “Damn it. We missed all the fires,” griped Crapps.

  “We usually catch up,” Towbridge said, laughing.

  “I don’t get it,” said Rideout. “They have his picture. Hasn’t anybody seen him?”

  “Maybe he’s wearing a different shade of lipstick,” said Towbridge.

  The city was on hyperalert. People were out looking for the firebug, groups of young men and women on almost every corner. Twenty-third and Cherry had so many people cluttering the sidewalks it looked like the early stages of a riot.

  We parked on the ramp. There was no point in backing the rig into the station. I signed us into the daybook and was headed toward the computer in the inspection room to write my fire report when I saw Rideout and Crapps in the beanery staring at the large message board under the TV. Somebody had scrawled across the board, You basturds!!!! feel my rath tonight!!!!!!!

  A long red arrow pointed from the message to the chalk tray, where we found a small tubular object that looked like a fountain pen, dingy and worn from handling. No one else seemed to know what it was, but I knew at once.

  “God,” said Rideout. “What if he’s still in the station?”

  “I got a gun out in my car.” Crapps made a run for the basement stairs.

  “Call the dispatcher,” I said to Towbridge. “Put us out of service and tell them we think the pyro has been in the station. We need SPD and maybe a dog team.”

  “How did he get in?” Rideout asked.

  “I can think of at least two ways to get into a fire station without leaving a trace,” I said.

  “What if he has a gun?” Rideout asked as I launched a search of the building.

  “He couldn’t possibly have enough bullets,” I replied. I could feel the same poison I’d felt the night I was seventeen years old and beat Rickie Morrison half to death in less than a minute.

  I searched the officers’ quarters first, then worked my way around the floor in a counterclockwise direction, opening closet doors, checking bathroom stalls. By the time I got to the basement stairs, Crapps was pointing a .357 Smith & Wesson at my chest. “What the hell are you doing? You know you can’t have a gun in the station,” I said. “Get rid of that.”

  “Jesus,” said Rideout.

  The SPD dog team arrived, and a German shepherd named Otto went through the station like a blur.

  “What’s this?” asked a police officer, picking up the tubular object that had been left on our chalkboard, holding it by the edges.

  “It’s a dosimeter,” I said. Everyone in the room looked at me. “To measure radiation levels. Years ago department members used to carry them.” I’d seen one among my father’s effects.

  This one had sfd stamped on it as well as a department ID number. Everybody in the department had a four-digit number that followed them to retirement. The number went onto all your personal paperwork and was inputted to the computer each morning to tell the dispatchers who was working on which rigs.

  When Attack 6 returned, Slaughter walked into the beanery. “What?” he said. Gliniewicz and Zeke piled up in the doorway behind him.

  “We had a visitor,” I said.

  Crapps pointed to our message board.

  “You ever see this before?” I said.

  “It’s a dosimeter,” Slaughter said.

  “It’s your dosimeter. That’s your number.”

  “We turned those in years ago.”

  “Somebody found an old dosimeter and decided to print your number on it?”

  “I guess. I don’t know.”

  LaSalle and Connor, from Fire Investigation, came through the door.

  I said, “We think the pyro was in our station sometime in the last hour. He left this.”

  “He coulda got it anywhere,” Slaughter said. “Who knows what the department did when we turned them in? Probably threw them in the trash out behind Station Ten.”

  “So he goes through the pile, saves one for twenty-five years, and it turns out to be yours?” I asked.

  “He’s a psycho.”

  “Wouldn’t it be more likely you had some sort of contact with him and you dropped this? He picked it up?”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “He told me a firefighter in civvies beat him up the night my father died. That wouldn’t have been you, would it?”

  “Abso-fuckin’-lutely not.”

  We stared at each other. I knew there was a reasonable chance Steve Slaughter was the man who put my father into that burning basement.

  The main phone rang. Zeke picked it up in the watch office, listened for a moment and said, “Can the truck go in service?”

  I nodded.

  Zeke spoke into the phone. A moment later we began hearing the tones on the radio scanner. A fir
e call. It was 0122 hours. As Slaughter and I left the room, LaSalle said, “You know what I think?”

  I turned back. “What do you think?”

  “I think this asshole is self-destructing. I think he knows he can’t go home and he’s going to do it all in one big last fling. You guys watch yourselves.”

  70. RUB-A-DUB-DUB

  According to Earl Ward

  Tonight I drive over to Cherry and park two blocks away for a good getaway, then go into The Harvey through the side entrance. Two young men step out and hold the door for me. My disguise fools them. I hobble in, making them wait.

  When I get to Hollywood, my talent is going to be appreciated. Producers will pay for my meals. I’ll get blowjobs from groupies in the back of taxicabs. Jaclyn will come crawling back. I may even give her a part in my first feature.

  I check my supplies on floors one and two. Paint thinner. Discarded furniture. I’ve got the oily rags all set to go in the basement. I was so lucky to find this place. The ongoing remodel and the fact that they ran out of funds and had to stop was perfect. Two units are empty on floor three, one right over the main entranceway. This is godderned perfect.

  I climb stairs that smell like barbecued ribs, sawdust, and urine. When two women come out of a unit on two, I pass them in a hitching gait. I tell you, there’s no respect in the country for the elderly. Absolutely none. Ha ha ha. I walk past the sawhorses and the tools in the top floor apartment, past the items I’ve separated for my own use, the sacks of mortar mix and paint cans, the turpentine.

  I take my lock off the unit and go inside.

  Sometimes when I think about what I’m about to do, I feel like my bowels are going to cut loose. It scares me, but then these people haven’t given me much choice, have they? In minutes I’ll start the ball. Then we’ll dance, Mr. Wollf. We’ll dance and I’ll settle me some scores. Period.

  First, I check the babies in the tub. Wrapped in pastel pink and blue blankets. Three very quiet babies.