Earl W. Emerson

by The smoke room: a novel of suspense

  “You know what this is? This is a goddamn witch hunt. You’ve had a hard-on for me since the minute you walked through the door.” Tronstad stalked out onto the apparatus floor.

  Sears stared after him for a few moments, then turned and signaled me with a glance. I walked down the corridor with a sense of foreboding. In his office he flung himself into the swivel chair, while I sat carefully in the straight-backed chair next to his bunk. It was a small room, cramped and intimate, with a tall window in the corner on the west wall. The light coming through the window was the same pinkish hue as it had been the evening we killed Abbott. Thank God he wasn’t questioning me about that. I would have folded like a garage-sale pup tent. In fact, thinking about it made my hands sweat.

  Stroking his thick mustache with two fingers of one hand, Sears stared at me. It was chilly in the station, but Sears was wearing his immaculately pressed short-sleeved uniform shirt.

  “I don’t know if this bond is worth anything or if it’s play money, but you three gave me a story a couple of shifts ago about how you came to have it. Frankly, after talking with Robert and Ted, I don’t believe you.” He stared at me.

  “You don’t?”

  “No. For beginners, when I asked him about it, Robert went into a song and dance about the Lord and a bunch of other peripheral issues to put me off the scent. Tronstad pretended to be enraged over the insult to his integrity, as if Tronstad has any integrity. I’ve seen both guys use those

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  same defense mechanisms before when they were feeling uncomfortable about a situation. What I want from you, before I turn this over to the police, is for you to tell me what really happened.”

  “You’re turning it over to the police?”

  “As soon as we’re finished talking. But right now I want you to be as honest and forthright as I know you can be. Make me proud, Gum. I don’t want to see you go down on a sinking ship with those other two.”

  He’d chosen an apt metaphor. A sinking ship was exactly what it was. Sears, who’d been tilting back in his chair with his hirsute arms folded across his chest, leaned forward and placed both elbows on his knees, his face three feet from mine. “Tell me what happened,” he said,

  “and don’t try to pass off that bull about Tronstad finding the bearer bond on the floor of the crew cab. I know that didn’t happen.”

  I inhaled deeply. There were a lot of paths to take, and for a split second I wasn’t certain which would have my footprints.

  “The other night,” I began, “at Ghanet’s place, while you were talking to the neighbor, Tronstad brought three garbage sacks out of the house. I told him to put them back, but he said all they had in them was useless paper. At the station I found out they were full of bearer bonds. I didn’t even know what a bearer bond was. Robert wanted to take them back, too, but by morning Tronstad persuaded him they might be worth something. That was when things got complicated.”

  “Three bags? Are you sure you don’t mean three bearer bonds?”

  “No, sir. Three bags. Stuffed full.”

  “Holy shit. Where are the bags now?”

  “I hid them.”

  “Yo u hid them?”

  “It was only until we figured out what to do. We were planning to give them back.” I could tell by his tone of voice, the look on his face, and the way he scrunched his bushy eyebrows downward that my level of involvement disappointed him.

  “It’s been two shifts, Gum. You could have given them back a hundred times over.”

  “I know. But a lot has happened.”

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  “Gum, you’ve let me down. I figured those two were a bad influence, but I never thought they would drag you into something like this.”

  “It isn’t what you think. They were going to get into a fistfight over them, so I agreed to hold the bonds, but only so we could give them back at a later date. That’s all I was doing. Heck, they were only in my possession a couple of hours. I didn’t think they were worth anything.”

  “But you hid them away somewhere?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Gum, you’re as guilty as they are.”

  “I would have turned them in if I could have figured out how to do it without Tronstad losing his job. I didn’t want to see him flush everything away because of one mistake.”

  “You know as well as I do that Tronstad hasn’t made just one mistake. He makes a mistake every time he turns around. The first thing Abbott told me when I got here was that there was a thief in the station and he thought it was one of you three.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, yeah. A bunch of stolen items.”

  I was flabbergasted. If station members were losing personal articles, I had not heard of it. In fact, although Sears obviously did, I didn’t believe it. It was typical of the sort of unverified gossip Abbott had been in the habit of spreading.

  “I’m afraid this little escapade is going to send you to the calaboose.”

  “I know I should have come to you right away, but you were out of town and then at that meeting all day. And then Abbott died. Maybe those are lame excuses, but can’t you see the bind I was in?”

  “Who has the bonds now?”

  “I do.”

  “Jesus, Gum.”

  “Lieut, they wanted to fight. That was the only reason I took the bags. We were going to give them back.”

  “And that’s why you guys all bought new vehicles?”

  “I didn’t. Listen, I’m not a thief.”

  He swiveled around in his squeaky chair and picked up a pen and legal pad from his desk. “Okay. What I need from you are details. When

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  exactly did Tronstad remove these three bags? And who saw him do it?

  Was it just you, or did Robert see him, too? Or did Robert help?”

  “There’s gotta be a way we can work this out. You said we were going to work this out. They’re your friends, too.”

  “Gum, this isn’t a game of tiddlywinks where you got caught cheating and everybody starts over. This is the real world. You men took something that might be worth thousands of dollars from a private residence. Don’t be naive, Gum. You’re going to prison. The whole lot of you. You knew that.”

  “I drove past Ghanet’s house the next day looking for a way to put them back!”

  “I really should tap us out of service,” Sears said, more to himself than me. Tronstad was right. Sears would hang us all and do it with gusto. “I should get the chief in here. This is going to be on the news. In fact, given Ghanet’s history, it’ll be big news.”

  “Can’t you see I’m trying to make this right?”

  “What I see is that the three of you lied to me when I asked where this bond came from. That you stole bonds and hid them, and you’ve been hiding them for over a week despite knowing the authorities were combing Ghanet’s place for stolen money. What I want you to do now is tell me where the bags are. And by the way, what else have you stolen?”

  “I’ve never stolen anything.”

  “Oh, come on. I know the three of you have been stealing on aid runs.”

  Dropping my head into my hands, it was all I could do to keep from crying. Maybe Tronstad was right. Sears was the enemy. Why couldn’t he understand that I’d never stolen anything in my life, and that making this right was as simple as fetching the bags and returning them?

  Of course, there was more than just the bearer bonds to think about. At the funeral I’d agonized over the events surrounding Abbott’s death until I thought I’d go mad. Abbott had the bond and was asking questions, and because of that Tronstad killed him. The more I looked at it in that light, the more I knew this was going to get uglier than a high school football team mooning a choir bus.

  Lieutenant Sears picked up the phone and called the dispatcher. “Hey, 126

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  th
is is Sears on Engine Twenty-nine. Can you put us out of service here? We’ve got a personnel situation.” He listened for a few seconds and said, “No, we’ve still got four men on board if you need us. It’s just—” He listened again. “Okay. Yeah. Well, we can stay in service if that’s what’s going on. No problem.” He racked the phone and looked at me. “They’ve got a four-eleven downtown. They’re going to send us.”

  “They never send us downtown.”

  “I know, but there was a house fire earlier up in Thirty-seven’s district, so everything’s all screwed up.” Even as Sears spoke, the house bells hit and the overhead lights came on. “Oh, and by the way, Gum?”

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t tell the others what you told me, okay? It’ll make things easier at the fire. I want your word on that.”

  “You call me a liar and a thief, but you want me to do you a favor?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But I’m not a thief. I’ve never taken anything that didn’t belong to me.”

  “Except for those bonds.”

  As we headed east down the hill on Admiral Way, we could see the glow in the sky on the far side of Elliott Bay, the black thermal column rising to three or four times the height of the Space Needle. It was a warehouse fire not far from the Seattle Center, and it was impressive, to say the least. I could tell from the way he was driving that Johnson was as nervous as a tick in gasoline.

  I’d been to one other fire this large, so I knew this would be what we called a surround and drown, a defensive fire. Instead of going inside, we would sit in the street and pour hundreds of thousands of gallons of water into the conflagration.

  I felt sick to my stomach. It was hard to tell whether it was from the pall of smoke hanging over downtown or my mishandling of the interview with Sears.

  “You asshole,” Tronstad whispered.

  “What?”

  “You told him, didn’t you?”

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  “I . . .”

  “Jesus Christ, Gum!”

  We were entering the smoke zone, which encompassed most of down-town Seattle south of the fire. “I couldn’t help it.”

  “You stupid asshole.”

  “I’m not going to argue with that.”

  19. WEARING YOUR ASS FOR A HATBAND

  W SIT TING IN THE crew cab facing backward, it was hard to see what was going on, but every time we caught a glimpse to the north, the thermal column was thicker, the smoke rising faster. It was hard to worry too much about the fire when I knew I was probably headed for jail, that at the very least I would soon be out of a job. Still, you see a fire that large and know you’re about to tackle it, there’s a lump in your throat. Anybody who says there isn’t is lying. The bigger the fire, the greater the chance of getting killed.

  As we got closer and the smoke thickened, we gradually came to a crawl behind Ladder 3, which was headed the same place we were. Stationed in the Central District, where they got a lot of fires, Ladder 3 was probably taking this in stride, while in our crew even Sears was jacked up, having all but forgotten he was riding with three villains. Drifting smoke in the street slowed us to five miles an hour. We’d smelled the toxic smoke a mile earlier, but as we drew closer, it began to take on a hellish taste. Eyes watering, we proceeded in tandem with Ladder 3 until we both parked behind a long line of fire rigs. When Sears turned around and spoke through the open window into our crew cab, he sounded angry, an emotion I’d noticed some fire officers using to displace fear. “Okay, men. Get your masks on and report to staging with spare bottles. I’m going to talk to the IC. I’ll meet you in staging. And carry a spare bottle up there for me.”

  “Oh, and carry a bottle for me, would you?” Tronstad mocked after Sears departed. “He’s such a goddamn kiss-butt. ‘ I’m going to talk to the incident commander. Everybody else reports to staging, but I’ll go straight to the head of the line.’ Shit! I don’t even know why we’re here. We’d be better off hailing a cab. Get our money and a good head start.”

  What I found odd was that Sears was calling us men for the first time

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  in memory. Ironic that we were men now that he was sending us off to the slammer. Maybe that was his way of distancing us, or of setting it firmly in his mind that we were the masters of our own fate, that we’d chosen our downward path, not him. I’d been nuts to tell him. I still didn’t know quite why I did. Maybe it came from having a mother who’d raised me to believe there was nothing more dear than a clear conscience. We began walking north alongside a long line of parked fire apparatus, and as we got closer I could see 40-foot-high flames leaping from the roof of a wooden building maybe 150 feet wide and two stories tall. Every once in a while a barrage of smoke rolled down the street into our faces.

  There were over a hundred firefighters, even more civilians, and scads of newspeople present. Many of the firefighters were visibly nervous, faces pale, glances fleeting and edgy. The fire building occupied half a city block, and a good third of the middle part of the structure was alight. It was more than hellish, I thought, as an interior wall collapsed and the implosion ushered a flurry of sparks toward the sky. It was also astonishingly beautiful.

  “Jesus, we’re in some deep shit,” Tronstad sputtered.

  “I wouldn’t be worried,” Johnson said. “A fire like this, all you do is squirt water from the sidewalk. We might not even get out of staging.”

  “I’m not talking about the fire. I’m talking about jail.”

  “Jail? You said yourself, we keep quiet and there’s not a thing anybody can do.”

  “Nice plan,” Tronstad said. “Except for big mouth here.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Johnson asked, grinning at me. “What? You accidentally let something out? He guessed? What?”

  “Tell him, Dubble Bubble. Go ahead. Tell him how you fucked us.”

  We’d stopped in the dark in the middle of the closed-off street, so Johnson couldn’t see me clearly. Even though they’d initiated the crime, I felt as if I were solely to blame for our predicament.

  “My Lord, Gum. Tell me you didn’t tell Sears the three of us are sitting on all them bearer bonds. Jesus, Lord, have mercy on my poor black ass. Why the fuck did you go and do a fool thing like that? What were you thinking?”

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  “I honestly thought he would help us.”

  “You mean you thought he would help you, ” Tronstad said, punching me in the shoulder. “Jesus, you friggin’ idiot.” His blow didn’t hurt through the thick bunking coat, but it was the first time he’d ever hit me, even in jest, and I took note of it. “You’re a fuckin’ squealer, is what you are. Nobody would have known if you’d kept your mouth shut.”

  “He was going for the cops before I said a word.”

  “Sure he was.”

  “He was.”

  Johnson put his hand on my shoulder where Ted had socked me.

  “We’re in this together, but lordy, Gum, that was a dumb move. That was just plain dumb.”

  “Maybe if we get an attorney, we could make a deal. They don’t prosecute and we keep our jobs.”

  “Dream on, peckerwood,” Tronstad said.

  Johnson’s eyes were locked on the flames a block away. “We’re not going to get the money, and we’re going to lose our jobs. I didn’t have anything to do with it, but I’m still going to have to explain why I bought that Cadillac SRX.”

  “I know this.” Tronstad faced Johnson squarely as if I weren’t there.

  “Somebody besides Sears, maybe we could cut him in. Split it four ways instead of three. But you can’t reason with Sears.”

  Tronstad turned to me. “And you . . . I oughta wring your fucking neck.”

  “We’re going to be here a couple of hours,” Johnson said. “We’ve got that long to plan.”

  “I don’t know about you guys,” said Tronst
ad, “but I’m going to bug out of here.”

  “Like hell,” Johnson said. “You leave, and we’re no longer a crew. He’ll have us arrested the minute he sees you’re gone. I see you make a move, I’m yelling for a cop.”

  “Then let’s all go.”

  “No. We need to think it through.”

  “This is bullshit! We should all go!”

  “And how long before Sears notices all three of us are missing?” John-

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  son asked. “If you weren’t wearing your ass for a hatband you might be able to help us puzzle our way out of this.”

  “Sears is going to hang us,” Tronstad said.

  “He’s doing what he has to do,” I said.

  “You’re a dumbass if you believe that. He’s been trying to bone us from the first day.”

  We were in staging now, an area set aside in a parking lot two hundred yards south of the fire building, where incoming crews reported while waiting for assignments. Including us, there were maybe thirty-five extra firefighters milling about. Most of the smoke boiled over our heads, but every once in a while a cloud rumbled down the street like a herd of black elephants through the massed firefighters.

  As always, I was struck by how large the average firefighter was, most well over six feet, many over 250 pounds. This was before adding the 45 to 50 pounds of protective gear, MSA backpacks, and the compressed air bottles we all wore. I always tried to make up for my lack of bulk by working twice as hard as the next man, and I wanted to be especially diligent tonight, for this would be my last fire. The mood in staging was subdued. If they weren’t thinking about the fire in front of us, people were thinking about Abbott’s funeral eight hours earlier. Across the street behind Battalion 2’s Suburban, a cluster of chiefs in white helmets conferred. Every other company officer had followed protocol and gone to staging with his or her men, while Sears waited beside the chiefs like a lapdog expecting treats.

  “We should make that fucker disappear,” Tronstad said. “This would be the perfect place to make him disappear.”