Vertical Burn

by Earl Emerson

  “No. Here’s what happened. You guys got lost, you and Cordifis. My personal theory is you panicked. You know how I know that? You never spoke on the radio. Bill did, but you never did. Later somebody said you were too amped to speak. I’d have to agree with that.”

  “I didn’t speak because Bill had my portable. And we weren’t lost. A wall fell on us.”

  Reese continued as if Finney hadn’t spoken. “The search didn’t sound like it was going well on the other side of the building. Nobody really had a clue where you guys were or how to get to you. It was such a huge complex, and there had been so many remodels. I’d listened to the captain’s directions and thought I knew where to send a search crew, but they were all on the other side. The only person I could find was Bobby Kub. I couldn’t send him in by himself, so we grabbed a couple of spare SCBAs and went in together. We searched a couple of rooms near the entranceway, then went down that long corridor with the jogs in it. That’s where we bumped into you. We could barely understand a word you said. We took you outside and—”

  “You didn’t take me anywhere. I went out by myself.”

  “Anyway, Kub and I continued on, but the fire was getting worse every second. We ended up crawling. We crawled along the right-hand wall. We hadn’t gone far when the heat got so bad we had to put our noses on the floor. We went down the corridor like that, on our bellies, searched a couple of rooms near the end, then worked our way back. It was so hot. I can still remember the sound of my facepiece sliding along the linoleum.”

  “You have any trouble getting over the pipes?”

  Reese stared blankly.

  “In the corridor. You know. The pipes?”

  Reese gave Finney a coy look. “You and I both know that floor was smooth as a baby’s butt. There were no pipes.”

  “Is that a question or a statement?”

  “If you found something on that floor when you were digging, it came down after we got out.”

  “They fell in the corridor as I was coming out. A couple hundred of them right behind me. I heard it. You heard it. I didn’t know what made the noise until I went back. They would have been impossible to walk on and hard to crawl over, and they sure weren’t smooth. You didn’t go down that corridor at all, did you?”

  Reese glanced at G. A. for help and then at Oscar Stillman. “I risked my life, is what I did. You don’t believe me, check out the award on the wall behind my desk.”

  Finney’s mind was racing down new pathways now, and he was furious. The problem had never been his directions. The problem had been the rescue team. The problem had been two liars who’d taken medals for their lies. Bill had been within reach of two masked firefighters who’d refused, for whatever reason, to step off twenty-eight paces to find him. From the first he’d been ill-at-ease with Reese’s version of events, but because Kub went along with it, because it had been their word against his, and because he’d been confused about so many other things, he’d tried to live with their version.

  “You’re a damned liar,” Finney said. “I don’t know what you were doing, but you weren’t looking for Bill. You lied, and then you rode those lies into the chief’s office.”

  The room grew quiet.

  When G. A. stepped forward with the handcuffs, Finney said, “No need for those. Just let me get dressed. Can you do that for me? You know how drafty the King County jail is. Give me two minutes to get some longjohns? One favor. It’s the last one you’ll ever do me.”

  Reese and G. A. exchanged looks. Stillman said, “What if he’s got a gun in the house?”

  “I hope he does,” G. A. said, touching the sidearm on the back of his belt.

  “Two minutes,” Reese said, looking at his wristwatch.

  58. TEN MINUTES TICKING

  1630 HOURS

  Finney could hear voices behind him across the water, maybe two hundred feet off, several men shouting at once. He’d taken his oldest single kayak, knowing he would be forced to abandon it somewhere along the shoreline, had stepped out through the missing wall in his spare bedroom and paddled quietly into the fog on the lake, leaving behind confusion and outrage.

  He knew G. A. would call the police boat stationed on Lake Union and that, if not for the fog, they would be on him in minutes. Still, G. A. couldn’t know for certain he’d taken a water craft. There were three kayaks left in the spare bedroom, the new single, the double, and a half-completed kit on sawhorses. Who would guess he owned four kayaks? When a lull came in the shouting at the dock, he guessed they were conducting a search, possibly extending to the neighbors. Mrs. Prosize next door wouldn’t be happy. The last people to raid her domicile had been Nazis in World War II Poland.

  1805 HOURS

  Accompanied by a tall, elegant-looking woman with narrow hips and long, pipe-stem legs, Robert Kub, dressed in slacks and an open-collar shirt under a sport jacket, was exiting his house when Finney’s cab scraped its tires on the curb. Finney thrust a handful of bills at the cabbie and climbed the front steps of Kub’s house.

  Kub began to retreat back inside, but Finney ran up the steps, jammed his foot in the door, and shouldered it open. Walking across the room as Kub backed across it, he pushed Kub’s chest repeatedly with both hands, forcing Kub up against the living room wall. The drapes were open, the television on. Kub always left his television on when he left the house as a deterrent to burglars. Finney reached over and killed the big-screen.

  “What’s going on?” Kub said. “You get my call? They’re looking for you right now. What?”

  “After everything you’ve done, you’re still trying to be my friend?”

  “I haven’t done anything. Tell me one thing I’ve done.”

  “Leary Way.”

  “Where do you come off saying that? We almost got fried trying to get out of there.”

  “Yeah? Tell me about the pipes.” When Kub gave him a blank look, Finney said, “You don’t know any more about the pipes than Charlie did.”

  “You been talking to Charlie?”

  “Enough to find out you’re both liars.”

  “Okay. I’ll bite. What pipes?”

  “You guys never went down that corridor.” Kub had no answer for that. “Where did you search?”

  “Not in that corridor.”

  “I don’t get it. Why lie about it?”

  Clenching his jaws, Kub said, “I never lied.” Kub glanced at the long-legged woman, but oddly, she didn’t seem interested in the proceedings. She sat down in a leather armchair to wait. “I never took no award. I didn’t want it.”

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “God, I’m sorry.” Kub dropped down into a squat, his back propped against the wall, his long fingers cradling his face. “You know how long it had been since I had a mask on?”

  “Save the excuses for your mother. Just cut to the chase.”

  “Shit. I hadn’t been in a fire in eight years. I almost couldn’t even get the mask to work. We were just a couple of guys who hadn’t fought fire in a while trying to do our best. We honestly thought we were going to find you both.”

  “Go on.”

  “We searched two rooms right near the entrance, but the smoke was so disorienting. Then before we knew what happened, we ran into you, and you were like some sort of . . . Your face shield was half-melted, and smoke was coming off your shoulders, and you looked like you’d just been dragged out of a steamer trunk somebody’d put in a furnace. Skin was coming off your ears. You could barely move, but you told us to go down the corridor you’d come up, that we’d hear your PASS device outside a hole in the wall. Twenty-eight steps, you said. Like we were going to go down there and end up looking like you. We were scared, but we were headed that way after you left, and then a gust of heat came down the corridor and forced us onto our knees. Reese was leading, and for the longest time he just knelt there in front of me. Finally I said, ‘Aren’t we going to do anything?’ And he said, ‘Calm down. Wait another minute.’ We couldn’t see
shit, man. It was like somebody put sticks in our eyes. To make matters worse, we heard electrical wires popping. Every time we moved I kept thinking we were going to get electrocuted. Tell you the truth, I think we both figured if we waited long enough, Cordifis would come marching out of the smoke just like you did.”

  “I told you he was trapped.”

  “I know.”

  “How long did you wait?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “A minute? Two minutes?”

  “Longer.”

  “Five?”

  “Longer.”

  “Are you kidding? Ten minutes?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you were practically on top of him.”

  “I kept tapping Reese on the shoulder. He kept saying not yet. It wasn’t like we sat down and said we’d wait ten minutes.” Tears were running down Kub’s face. He wiped them away with his opposite index fingers, moving them side to side like windshield wipers.

  “What were you waiting for? As long as there’s fuel and oxygen, a fire gets worse. You know that.”

  “We were calling him. We never stopped calling him.”

  “I’m sure that gave him some comfort as he burned to death.”

  “When it started coming down on us, we turned around and made a run for it. By then we could hear flame ripping down the corridor. Man, it sounded like a freight train. I’ve never been that scared. Next thing I know, I’m trying to cool off under a jiffy hose and Reese is in front of the cameras. I never heard what he said until the next day. I swear. Then what was I supposed to do? Call a news conference and say he was conning everybody? You know how I freeze up in front of a camera. After a while I thought, why not make it all a little more heroic than it was? What was it going to hurt?”

  “Oh, yeah. You didn’t hurt anybody.”

  “I didn’t think about you until later. All I knew was I couldn’t start a scandal, and nothing I said was going to bring Cordifis back. Then, after a few days, Reese told me if I contradicted him, it would blow any opportunity I might have as an insurance investigator for a private company. You know I been counting on that second income after retirement. The way that fire was running, we probably couldn’t have got him out anyway. You know that.”

  “You’ve had a lot of time to work on your excuses, haven’t you?”

  Somewhere in the room a pager went off. As Kub went to get it, Finney became aware they’d been hearing sirens for some minutes. “I gotta go,” Kub said wearily when he returned. “They got two multiples going on. Plus, there’s something at the Columbia Tower.”

  PART FOUR

  59. THURSDAYS WITH SHEILA

  Patterson Cole watched Norris remove the contracts from the safe and pack them into the briefcases, musing that there was something about Norris that made him look like a poof, something about the way he used his hands. He’d had this thought before, and deep down he supposed it didn’t really matter whether Norris was a poof or not, but still, it bothered him. The bow ties bothered him. The manicured fingernails bothered him. Did he actually apply polish? Norris was using a cane today, had stubbed his toe walking to the pissoir in the middle of the night. Norris was always nursing some sort of ache. Just thinking about it made Patterson old. Maybe after this was all over, he’d send Norris to Sun Valley to oversee his Idaho holdings with Dithers. Maybe it was time Norris had a little change of scenery. Time he did, too, for that matter.

  Norris Radford and Patterson Cole had taken a series of elevators to forty-two where they’d removed forty-seven thousand dollars in cash from the safe in the main office. Now they were on floor seventy-three in Patterson’s private hideaway. Nobody ever came up here but Norris and, every other Thursday, a woman named Sheila from the service. It was a luxury apartment with a desk, computer, fax, and in the back room, a double shower, a Jacuzzi, and a bed about half the size of a tennis court. When he wasn’t using the bed for his play time with Sheila, Patterson would sneak up after lunch to take a siesta, maybe twenty, thirty minutes of shut-eye. It was his guilty secret—well—one of them.

  They’d planned this meticulously, and now all they had to do was empty the other safe and skedaddle. Everything else was taken care of. After tonight all of Patterson’s troubles would be over. He would pay off the damn bitch, sign the divorce papers, and in time, they would rebuild this tower with more safeguards than the original.

  Why couldn’t they all be like Sheila? No fuss. No muss. He’d found her ad in the back of The Stranger: ALL THE COMFORT YOU WANT FROM A WOMAN, $175. NO EXTRA FEES. NO DISAPPOINTMENTS. She wore a little too much makeup, but her body was as advertised. And it didn’t hurt that she was fifty years younger than he was. The one thing he was going to miss about this building was Thursdays with Sheila. He’d have to find another cozy spot.

  Looking around the office, Patterson saw several personal effects he wanted to take with him. Sure, the firemen had told him to leave everything, but there was a montage of photos on the desk he needed, photos of his first wife, Ruth, their two children when they were toddlers, and shots of himself as a young lumberjack. They’d worked his ass off at Weyerhauser, but he found more and more he was looking back on those days as the happiest of his life. He picked up the montage and stuffed it under his coat.

  “What do you want out of this safe?” Norris asked, looking up at him from across the room.

  “The bonds. There’s some jewelry in that black box. Any cash.”

  Patterson sat in the leather office chair and rolled it over to the window. Four floors lower than the famous women’s rest room stalls with their panoramic view, it looked out over the same vista: the east portion of the city and, beyond that, Lake Washington, the growing city of Bellevue, and the bedroom community that was Mercer Island. The lake was fuzzy with fog, and most of the east side was already sketchy. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Six-fifteen. Plenty of time.

  His eighty-fourth birthday would be coming around in March, and he knew he was slowing down. He’d thought about retirement, but then who would run things? He had two sons, in their sixties now, but they were both numbskulls. One, Hardy, hadn’t spoken to him in four years, not since he married the bimbo.

  The whoop-de-whoop mechanical screeching in the corridor outside the office started without any warning. The fire alarm.

  “Go see if you can get that turned off,” Patterson said. “Also, you get the lottery numbers today?”

  “Yes, sir.” Norris was heading for the phone, but he stopped, took a notebook out of his pocket, and began reading numbers off, while Patterson compared them to a pair of tickets in his arthritic fingers. No winners tonight. Norris made the phone call, spoke for a few seconds, then hung up.

  Cole said, “I suppose they think a bunch of false alarms will put everybody off their guard, make it that much easier, eh?”

  “I’m not entirely sure this is a false alarm, sir. Apparently there’s smoke on one of the floors below us.”

  “Some idiot burned his popcorn in the microwave again?”

  “Quite a lot of smoke.”

  Patterson turned away from the window. “What do you mean?”

  “A lot.”

  “You got everything out of the safe?”

  “Just about.”

  “Get the rest. Let’s get moving.”

  “Yes, sir. Shall I call the garage and have the car ready?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Five minutes later Patterson Cole stood near the elevators. “Is that smoke I smell?”

  “Sure seems like it.”

  “What the hell’s wrong? Where’s this elevator?”

  “They don’t work when the building’s in alarm.”

  “I know that, goddamn it. But they work with that special key. The firemen have it. The security idiots downstairs have it. Why aren’t they up here? Get somebody up here.”

  “Yes, sir.” Norris Radford set the briefcases at his feet and took a cell phone from a pocket. “This is Radford. I’m on sev
enty-two with Patterson. You need to get somebody up here with an elevator. Now.” He listened for a few seconds. “Uh, huh. So where are the engineers? Uh, huh. Okay. Call us when you’re ready.” He gave a phone number.

  “What is it?” Patterson said, thumbing the elevator button again with a gnarled index finger.

  “They can’t make them work even with the key, and they don’t know why. They’ve got a couple of people running up the stairs to see what’s happening on twenty-six. That’s where the alarm is.”

  “Shit, boy. You look like you need to hose out your trousers. This’ll work itself out. Let’s go up to the restaurant and get some grub while we’re waiting.”

  “How are we going to get there?”

  “We could walk,” Cole said. “Or don’t you think you can handle four flights.” The old man was already headed for the stairway.

  Hobbling along with his cane and the two briefcases, Norris passed the old man and opened the door for him.

  “God! What the hell is that?” Cole said, as a blast of smoke came out the door. “Close it, for Christ’s sake! Close it!”

  “I thought it wasn’t supposed to start until two A.M.,” Norris said, his eyes watering. Cole wondered whether it was from the smoke or because Norris was such a damned pansy.

  “The bastards started early,” Cole said.

  Norris glanced around helplessly at the empty floor, his brow beginning to bead up with perspiration. When the lights in the corridor went out, he said, “Now what do we do?”

  “Give me that goddamned phone.”

  60. THE WEDDING PARTY

  Because of a shortage of rigs in the city, Diana and the other overtimers had been forced to walk the few blocks up the hill from 10’s to the Tower. On the west side of the Columbia Tower, on Fourth Avenue, uniformed police officers in bulletproof vests and winter coats began taking charge of the street. When Diana looked up, she couldn’t see anything but dark windows, and then, near the ten-story mark, just above the reach of the tallest aerial ladder, a halo of fog.