Fireplay
Suzanne Chazin
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 2003 by Suzanne Chazin
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
For more information, email [email protected]
First Diversion Books edition April 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62681-739-5
Also by Suzanne Chazin
The Fourth Angel
Flashover
To Tom
my husband, my partner, my best friend
Acknowledgments
This book would not exist without an amazing group of people.
First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to Gene West, retired FDNY fire marshal and storyteller extraordinaire. His expertise as an arson investigator is surpassed only by his fine eye for character and detail. I keep waiting for Hollywood to steal him.
I would also like to thank microbiologist and environmental scientist Michael Blizzard for his amazingly lucid discussions of the Venturi effect—especially its impact on coffee creamer. Thanks also to retired FDNY Bureau of Fire Investigation members Denis Guardiano and Don Vastola for figuring out how to get the most mileage out of the idea.
I’m enormously grateful to my agent, Wendy Sherman, and her associate, Jessica Lichtenstein, for all their handholding and manuscript coaxing. I couldn’t ask for a more dedicated and enthusiastic team. Finally, I’d like to extend my appreciation, as always, to my editor at Putnam, David Highfill, my paperback editor, Tom Colgan, and my publicist, Michael Barson, who have been with Georgia and me from the beginning. Thanks for going the distance.
Half of the results of a good intention are evil;
Half of the results of an evil intention are good.
MARK TWAIN
1
“Hey, kid, loosen up.” Jack O’Dwyer gave Douglas Hanlon a chuck on the shoulder. “Your first kick-ass fire’s always scary.”
Hanlon stared out the window as the truck turned onto West Thirteenth Street in lower Manhattan. A brick warehouse, two stories high, stood in the shadows of an abandoned railway bridge. Gray smoke pulsed out of the seams of a cellar hatch. There were no flames, but it didn’t matter. Even a firefighter as green as Hanlon knew that something big was going on below.
“’Bout time you stopped being a white cloud,” Tony Fuentes ribbed good-naturedly over the squeal of the siren. A “white cloud” was firehouse slang for a firefighter who never saw much action. In the three months since Hanlon had been assigned to Ladder Seventeen, he’d handled nothing bigger than a couple of car fires and food-on-the-stoves. “I’ve pissed out bigger jobs,” O’Dwyer liked to say.
Fuentes gathered up his ax and halligan, a firefighter’s prying tool. Hanlon slipped on the shoulder straps of his grimy yellow air tank and grabbed his six-foot hook. He could feel the throaty bray of the air horn through the soles of his boots. The truck was pulling up to what had once been a meatpacker’s loading dock. Strands of silver garland wreathed the corrugated-tin awning, glowing peach in the early morning sun. Christmas decorations. On a squat, nearly windowless building where bloody carcasses used to dangle from rusty hooks. A copper sign above the front doors wafted in and out of the smoke. Café Treize it read.
“What the hell is Café Trees?” asked O’Dwyer.
“Not Trees—Treize. Rhymes with ‘says,’” Fuentes corrected. “French for thirteen, as in Thirteenth Street. Don’t you read the papers, man? This restaurant’s so hot, Mick Jagger has to wait for reservations.”
“Maybe he can’t pronounce that French shit neither,” O’Dwyer grunted. After twenty-three years of fighting fires, there wasn’t much that impressed Jack O’Dwyer.
“At least it’ll be empty at six-thirty in the morning,” Hanlon offered.
“Kid,” said O’Dwyer, running two meaty hands down his broad, grizzled face. “First thing you gotta learn about fighting fires in New York: there ain’t no such thing as a bona fide vacant building.”
The air brakes hissed as the truck rumbled to a halt on the cobblestoned street. In the cab, Captain Joseph Russo cut the siren. Fuentes jabbed a finger at Hanlon’s bulky black turnout coat with its horizontal stripes of fluorescent yellow and reflective gray. It wasn’t until he took his hand away that Hanlon realized Fuentes had snapped up the coat’s top metal clasp.
“Don’t know what we’ll find down there, Dougie,” said Fuentes with a wink. “You ain’t toastin’ that lily-white Irish skin on my shift.”
Hanlon nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak. Adrenaline flowed freely through his veins and he both loved and feared the sensation. Ever since he was a little boy, sliding the pole at his dad’s firehouse, he’d hungered for this sense of belonging and purpose. It was a feeling he never could quite put into words. Sometimes he tried to, late at night when he and Kerry were snuggled in bed, his arm wrapped around her widening belly, gently thumping as the baby kicked inside. He told Kerry it was excitement, which it was in a way. A heart pounding rush that made him feel like Rambo in turnout gear. Made him love every firefighter he worked beside, even if he’d just told them to go screw themselves ten minutes earlier. The blood in his veins, the breath in his lungs never felt quite so pure, so focused, so above reproach as that moment when he and his brothers beat back the fire. He felt—for one shining moment—like a hero.
But as Doug Hanlon looked over at the billowing smoke—so thick that it blotted out the faded, hand-lettered sign on the railway trestle advertising oxtails and lamb shanks—he knew there was another emotion inside of him, too. And this one felt just as powerful as the excitement. Maybe more so. It churned his stomach, parched his throat and brought a tingling to his limbs. It made him feel small and brittle. He never admitted these feelings to Kerry or his dad; it would worry them too much. But he couldn’t hide them from Jenna. The little girl seemed to grasp them with the intuitive purity that only a four-year-old can.
“Everybody’s afraid of something, right, Daddy?” she asked him one night after a bad dream. “Even monsters. They’re afraid of bigger monsters. Even you. You’re scared sometimes, right, Daddy?”
Even you.
Fuentes and O’Dwyer jumped off the rig while the chauffeur, Dave Jansky, was still maneuvering it into position. O’Dwyer headed to the roof to break open the skylights and vent the heat. Fuentes and Captain Russo hustled over to the cellar hatch. Hanlon stumbled to a compartment on the outside of the truck and grabbed the portable fire extinguisher—the men’s only source of water until the engine’s hose could be put into operation. As the junior man, Hanlon had to lug the twenty-five-pound extinguisher. Already, it was slowing him down and he pushed himself to keep up. His thirty-pound air tank shifted uncomfortably on his shoulders. He remembered too late that he’d forgotten to buckle the tank’s waist strap, which would have distributed some of the weight to his hips. He cursed his ineptness. He couldn’t put down his tools to buckle it now.
Fuentes used his halligan to pry off the padlock on the cellar doors. Then he swung them open. A torrent of hot, dark gray smoke flew at their faces. Hanlon coughed violently, embarrassed and panicked by how easily he had succumbed to the fumes while Russo and Fuentes barely coughed at all.
“Catch your breath, son,” Russo told him. The captain had a calm, clear baritone th
at always sounded gentle and patient, even in the worst emergencies. It’s what Hanlon liked about him. Russo surveyed the basement interior from the top of the stairs, then got on his handy talkie to the chief.
“I need a firefighter from Ladder Two-Nine to stand at the base of the stairs with a flashlight,” he told the chief. Then the captain turned to Fuentes. “Get the life rope.”
Fuentes pulled a face. “It’s a warehouse, Cap. The basement’s gonna be wide open. Eighty feet, front-to-back, tops. We can search it without a life rope.”
“We got a probie with us, Fuentes,” said Russo. “Don’t try to be a cowboy.”
Fuentes fetched the rope. A firefighter from Ladder Twenty-nine hustled over with a flashlight. Captain Russo handed him the rope and told him to remain at the foot of the stairs and feed them the line. “Masks on,” the captain ordered.
Hanlon put on his mask, then secured it in place with his fire retardant hood. The mask smelled of smoke and plastic. The whoosh of his breathing sounded mechanical and rigid—a good imitation of Darth Vader in Star Wars.
It was twelve long steps into the cellar. The light faded quickly. The heat slammed up against them with almost physical force. Sounds took on a detached quality—magnified in some cases, muffled in others. The clink of their air tanks seemed to echo off the dank walls while the crunch of their boots across wooden pallets had the soft, dreamlike quality of tree branches snapping under heavy snow.
Hanlon kept his right hand on the life rope as he followed the captain. Fifteen feet inside the cellar, the smoke billowed at them in a black mushroom cloud of gases. The darkness was absolute. Even the men’s flashlights couldn’t penetrate it. The beams just shone back on them like head-lights in heavy fog. They moved forward, single file, Captain Russo rolling out the life rope and leading the way. Hanlon’s eyes were useless, his sense of touch diminished by heavy gloves. There were so many noises—from the whoosh of his mask to the crackle of voices over the captain’s handy talkie—that his ears felt overwhelmed. Yet over the din, Hanlon felt certain he could hear a far-off roar punctuated by the occasional pop and hiss of what sounded like exploding cans. Above him, he could hear a faint sound of air rushing through the ceiling.
Yet he still hadn’t seen a single flame. Hanlon recalled the movies his dad used to take him to when he was little. The flames would dance about on the screen like butane torches. There was never a wisp of smoke in sight.
“Is that what fighting a fire’s like?” Hanlon once asked his father.
“Not even close,” the old man laughed. “You take a camera into a real fire, all you’ll come back with is a lot of black film and an X-rated sound track.”
“But what about all those flames the actors are running through?”
Hanlon could still remember his father’s solemn reply: “In a real fire, Dougie, no one who runs through that much flame ever gets to tell about it.”
They were maybe forty feet inside the warehouse basement when the heat began to rise sharply. Hanlon could clearly hear a rumbling and crackling in the distance. His fire extinguisher was useless. Two and a half gallons of water wasn’t going to be any help in this situation. The excitement he’d felt earlier had turned into something that seemed to burn white-hot inside of him. His breathing accelerated. His heart pounded in his chest. Fear seized hold of his muscles and made them quake against his will. He tried to take a deep breath. He was relieved that he was nearly invisible to the captain and Fuentes. He didn’t want them to see how frightened he was.
“We’re turning around,” Captain Russo shouted through his mask. This time, Fuentes didn’t argue. They reversed direction with Fuentes now in front, and felt their way backward along the life rope. Russo yelled into his handy talkie to relay his decision to the deputy chief now on the scene. The chief brooked no argument. Hanlon felt relieved—that is, until Fuentes stopped in his tracks. Hanlon could hear him poking around.
“Cap,” Fuentes shouted through his mask. “Some kind of shelving’s fallen on the rope. I can’t lift it off.”
Hanlon and the captain crawled forward and crouched beside Fuentes. They tried to maneuver their gloves underneath the heavy brackets of shelves. Hanlon was certain he could do it. He was only twenty-six years old, and at six-feet-three and two hundred and twenty pounds, there was very little he couldn’t lift. It felt good to put his twitching muscles and panicked thoughts to something concrete. But in the darkness, it was impossible even to get a handhold on the shelving, never mind move it off the rope. None of them had any idea how big the unit was or whether the rope underneath would even be intact. After several tries, the captain tapped his shoulder.
“No way we’re gonna move this. We’ll have to try to pick up the rope beyond the shelves.”
They moved cautiously forward, trying to feel their way back to the line. Overhead in the ceiling, Hanlon noted a wisp of orange through a crack in the tiles. It wasn’t air above them in those ceiling ducts. It was fire.
Fuentes stopped again. “There’s a wall here, Cap. We’re gonna have to turn around.”
We’re trapped. Hanlon’s breathing, already rapid and shallow, began to accelerate. He knew he was gulping too much air. Fuentes seemed to sense his panic. He put a hand on the probie’s shoulder. “Relax, Dougie,” he yelled through his mask. “Slow down your breathing. You’re with the best—okay? Ain’t nothing gonna happen to you.”
They reversed direction. They moved left, then right. Each turn brought them to another dead end. The captain felt for the speaker of his handy talkie. It was clipped to his shoulder strap. He lifted it to his face. “Mayday, mayday,” he said calmly. “Ladder One-Seven. We’ve lost our rope. Need assistance.” His voice bore no hint of fear but his words were unmistakable. A mayday was always serious business. Instantly, the chief came on the line.
“Russo—we’re sending in other companies. How far inside the building are you?”
“Fifty feet maybe, Chief.”
“There’s a back entrance to the cellar. O’Dwyer’s holding a flashlight at it. Can you see him?”
Russo tried to stand, but Hanlon could tell that he saw nothing. And now, they had a new worry. In the darkness, they could hear a high-pitched whirring sound. It was coming from the air tank on Hanlon’s back. He had about six minutes of air left in his tank—maybe less, given how fast he was breathing.
“Just relax, son,” shouted the captain. “We’ll get you out of here.”
Above them, the ceiling was cooking. Some of the acoustical tiles had already burned away, revealing sinews of orange that pulsated like a living organism. The heat radiated down on them, pressing them into a tight crouch, their bellies almost touching the floor. Hanlon crawled behind the captain, amazed that the heat could turn his hulking body into a meek and tentative shadow of its former self.
Captain Russo told the chief he couldn’t see O’Dwyer. There were companies scrambling to find them. Hanlon could hear them picking their way through the debris behind them, the water from their hoses turning to steam on the falling debris. But he couldn’t see any of those men. And now the captain’s and Fuentes’s low-air alarms began to go off, too. Hanlon didn’t have to be told that they were in deep trouble. It seemed as if they were crawling between little cubicles like rats in a maze. They no longer knew whether they were nearer the front of the building or the back.
Then suddenly, Hanlon saw it—a firefighter’s flashlight, cutting in and out of the smoke. The firefighter was maybe forty feet away. He couldn’t see them, but they saw him. The three men crawled toward the beam. But something yanked Hanlon back by the straps of his air tank. He called out. Russo and Fuentes scrambled to his side. Fuentes examined Hanlon’s back. “Shit,” said Fuentes. “He’s tangled up on a goddamned bicycle.”
Hanlon’s low-air alarm rang wildly now. Sucking on his mouthpiece felt like trying to breathe inside a plastic bag. In panic, he ripped off his mask. His nose and cheeks began to burn. His airways felt like he’d i
nhaled pepper. He thrashed about, coughing violently. But he was still tangled in his straps, still joined to the bicycle. Fuentes pushed his own mask on the probie’s face.
“Breathe, Dougie. C’mon, man. You’re gonna make it.”
Hanlon took a couple of breaths until his coughing died down, then pushed the mouthpiece from his lips. “No. I can’t take your mask—”
“Shut up,” Fuentes told him between hacking coughs. “Just fuckin’ breathe, okay?”
The flames above them were an open river now. The heat was unbearable. They would all die if they stayed here much longer. Hanlon knew that. Survival was in reach for Fuentes and Captain Russo. They were still inside because of him.
Hanlon shared Fuentes’s mask while the captain tried to cut Hanlon from his tank straps.
“Got it,” Captain Russo shouted. “Now run.”
Run. Hanlon heard the word in a part of his brain so instinctive he didn’t question it. And so he ran. Toward the flashlight beam. Toward air. Toward life. When the ceiling collapsed behind him, when the burning debris tumbled down, he kept on running until he felt the reassurance of two strong hands yank him out by his collar and drag him up the basement stairs.
“Relax, kid. I gotcha. You’re gonna be okay.” It was Jack O’Dwyer. His gravel-choked voice seemed to move in and out of frequency. “Where’s the Cap? Where’s Fuentes?” O’Dwyer asked.
The probie’s blistered lips moved but no sound came out. He blinked back tears as he glanced behind him at the flaming pile of debris. And the realization hit him.
Doug Hanlon thought he’d finished running. Now with a jolt, he understood: the running had just begun.
2
“…Battalion Two to dispatch. Alert EMS. We’ve got firefighters down…”
Fireplay Page 1