“You mean you’re tired of me?”
“That’s right, sweetie.”
“You’re ending our relationship?”
“Is that what it was? A relationship? Yes, I suppose I am ending it.”
“If I’d known you were married, I never would have had anything to do with you.”
“I wear a ring, sweetie.”
“I thought that was from your first marriage.”
“This is my first marriage. It was a lark, sweetie. Something to fill my afternoons. Don’t look so shocked. I was mad at Bernard, so I had an affair. If you weren’t such a bumpkin, you’d understand. It was a hoot. I won’t forget you anytime soon. I’ve always wanted my own little fireman.”
I watched the flashing red lights flicker across Iola’s face. “Were you going to tell me, or were you just going to stop showing up?”
“Oh, you are hurt.”
“I just want to know if you were going to tell me.”
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“I suppose I probably wasn’t. But, hey, men do it to women all the time.”
“Not me.”
“Don’t be so sensitive. It was a simple little flirtation. Now it’s time for you to find a girlfriend your own age. Hush now. He’ll be back soon, and I’d rather you two didn’t meet.”
Frankly, I was struck dumb. Not because I’d been a mere flirtation. Or because she’d dumped me. I’d been on the verge of doing the same to her for weeks. What bothered me was that I’d seen anything at all in this woman, who was about as shallow as a puddle of milk in a house full of cats.
“You’ll live, sweetie. These things can be so messy. Bernard had a little friend once who called the house for months after he was finished with her. It was so tawdry. You don’t want to be like that.”
“There is one thing, though.”
“What is that?”
“I left something at your place. I’ll need to come by and pick it up. Maybe later tonight.”
“Don’t even think about it. Since that pig fell through our roof, Bernard’s been worse than ever. He gets up a couple of times in the middle of the night and checks the yard. He takes a gun to bed with him. I’m not joking.”
“Maybe I could swing by tomorrow morning when he’s not there.”
“What could you possibly have left at our place? A jacket or something? Tell me what it is, and I’ll bring it to you.”
“That won’t work.”
“You’ll have to write it off, then, because this is the last time we’re going to see each other. Now shoo, before Daddy comes back. Shoo.”
“It will just take a second.”
“You show up, I’ll call the police.” It was an ironic threat, because by morning I would most likely already be in the hands of the police. I watched her float away through the bystanders.
After a while, I felt a tap on my shoulder. “There you are,” said Lieutenant Sears. “Come on. We’ve got another assignment. Let’s go do something good for a change.”
21. FULL TILT BOOGIE
W SEARS SWITCHED ON the heavy-duty orange battle lantern he’d been carrying all night, peering momentarily into the cone of light, so that his face took on a curiously impish look. Every once in a while he did something that amused me, and staring into flashlights was one of my favorites.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re going to check the water damage down the road. I sent Ted and Robert ahead.”
“Can we at least take off these backpacks?”
“The backpacks stay.”
On top of all my other problems, I couldn’t help obsessing about the way Iola had blown me off. What made me sore was how much of an ego massage it had been for her. I had the feeling jilting me had been on the program from the beginning, that she’d planned and choreographed the finale during those first minutes of sex at Station 29, that I’d been a pawn in a twisted marriage rite she and Bernard had been playing out for years. It was hard to believe I could feel such gnawing emotional wounds when I was on my way to the slammer, but even a man walking to the gallows can step on a thorn. Sears continued on while I stopped and bent over, hands on my knees, thinking I was going to vomit. When I caught up he was talking as if I’d been beside him all along. “We’re going to track down all this water, Gum. Make sure it’s not doing any property damage. Water can be as damaging as fire. There’s a lesson in that.”
“Yes, sir. I want to keep learning lessons. I’m probably going to be a firefighter for another couple of hours.”
Ignoring my sarcasm, he nodded at a photographer who’d set up a tripod on the sidewalk.
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“How long do you think before you guys put it out?” the photographer asked.
“We’re not going to tap this one, sir,” Sears said. “It’ll burn itself down, but if you want a time line, I’d say another hour, hour and a half.”
Sears led me down a quiet street that ran east and west and terminated at the south end of Lake Union several blocks away. The streetlights were out, and the roadway was vacant. The police had cordoned off the entire neighborhood. Here and there, sawhorse construction signs with flashing orange beacons stood like sentinels to warn people of an ongoing storm drain project that had left temporary holes in the street, some as large as bomb craters.
The farther downslope we proceeded, the deeper the water got as tributaries fed in from thoroughfares, all of it murky runoff from our fire. By the time we’d walked a block and a half, the heavy black water was deep enough that we were in danger of being swept off our feet. We picked our path carefully, hiking the center of the empty roadway, where the flow was shallower.
“Looks like it’s headed for the lake,” Sears said. “We’re flowing over ten thousand gallons a minute, most of it straight out of that building. I wonder if this is causing traffic problems on Westlake. What do you think?”
I said nothing.
The street was a ghost town, dark and empty, just us and the black water. We used our lights to keep from stepping into holes. I kept thinking that now that we were a few blocks from the fire, I might make a run for it. Maybe if I got to the Pedersons’ place in West Seattle before Iola and Bernard did, I could retrieve the bags and escape. I had no idea what I would do with the bonds, for I had no intention of spending stolen money, but I knew I couldn’t leave twelve million dollars in bearer bonds lying around.
It was the closest to hope I’d been in hours. It wouldn’t be as if I were running from the police, because the police didn’t know about me yet. I wouldn’t be running from anybody but Sweeney Sears, followed in a few hours by the full force of the federal government, of course. The feds 144
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would figure out right away that we had some or all of Ghanet’s money. Flight would keep me out of jail momentarily, and like every fugitive, I had already begun planning my life minute by minute instead of week by week or year by year. Postponement was not the same as exoneration, but it was beginning to feel as if it was the only goal I had a shot at. Knowing I wouldn’t have more than a few minutes to stuff a sleeping bag and a knapsack with essentials, I rehearsed what to pack when I got home. It went without saying that my Subaru WRX would be useless. They would put an APB out on the car first thing.
“Ten thousand gallons a minute, and every drop is headed for the same place,” said Sears. “We should have looked into this a long time ago. What do you think, Gum? You want credit for averting a disaster?”
“Will it get me a lighter sentence?”
Again, Sears pretended he hadn’t heard me.
Tronstad and Johnson were right. Sending the three of us to jail meant nothing more to Sears than another line in his résumé; three more rungs to scrape his boots on as he climbed up through the department infrastructure.
“You know, Gum, there was a period when I believed I could make you into a good firefighter.”
“Being a good firefig
hter isn’t all there is to life.”
My statement stopped him cold. He actually stopped walking. I knew why. Being a good firefighter was all there was to his life. “Gum,” he said angrily, “if you’re a good firefighter, you’re also a good human being. The two go hand in hand.”
“So if you’re not a good firefighter, you’re not a good human being? I know a lot of people who aren’t capable of doing this job who are marvelous human beings.”
“You’re distorting my meaning.”
“I know exactly what you mean. You really do think being a good firefighter is the point of life. It makes you nervous, doesn’t it? That I know about you.”
“I’m just committed to my job. Listen, Gum. I know you’re angry, but you have to believe me when I say I feel bad about this.”
“I don’t have to believe shit.”
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Sears looked at me hard. “What did Ted tell you anyway?”
“He said you asked them who might want to come up to Twentynine’s to replace me.”
“I admit I might have thought about some manpower switches. It didn’t have anything to do with you personally.”
“Sorry to be such a disappointment.”
He turned and once again began walking downslope toward Lake Union. By now, even in the shallows, the rushing water was well past our ankles. Had we stepped into the gutter, the stream would have eddied up over the tops of our tall boots.
“Where the hell are they?” Sears asked. “I told them not to scout too far ahead . . . Jesus, you don’t think they took a flyer, do you?”
I looked him in the eye for the first time during our walk. “I have no idea how bad they want to stay out of jail, sir.”
“I can’t believe I sent them down here alone. Oh, shit. That was a—”
When he grabbed my arm to make certain I didn’t escape, too, I jerked it out of his grasp. He tried to grab me again, and I pulled away a second time, as we approached a side street that was wall-to-wall water. The water on this street was flat and black and lumbering instead of shallow and racing. Half a block away on the side street, I spotted Tronstad crouched in the center of the roadway, next to a couple of flatbed trucks and a backhoe. From where we stood, it looked as if Tronstad was ankle deep in a long, black mirror. Johnson was several hundred feet beyond Tronstad.
This area was darker and quieter than the other streets in the neighborhood, bordered by windowless two-story parking garages and what appeared to be a manufacturing building, also windowless. Still in a crouch, Tronstad skimmed the water’s surface with his fingertips. “What do you have?” Sears shouted. “You got something?”
“You gotta see this.”
“What is it?”
“You gotta see it.”
Holding to the shallowest part of the stream, we headed down the center of the street, and as we drew closer I noticed Robert Johnson running toward us in what he would have termed a full-tilt boogie, splashing 146
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in the water, yelling something I couldn’t make out. I’d never seen him run like that, certainly not in full gear.
“What is it?” Sears shouted.
“You gotta see it! It’s unbelievable,” Tronstad replied. Once again Johnson shouted something unintelligible. Sears began jogging toward Tronstad, his equipment jangling, his boots splashing. It took a few seconds to realize what was happening. I began sprinting, hollering for Sears to stop, but by the time I closed the gap and put my hand on his shoulder, it was too late for both of us.
“It’s a trap,” I said, as the two of us plunged into the sinkhole at the same time.
At first all I knew was that water had rushed up my nose and was bogging down my turnout clothing. My helmet hit the water like a miniparachute, and the chin strap wrenched my neck. Then I was under the surface, maybe three or four feet under. My boots filled quickly. I tried to swim, and kicked and splashed and attained the surface, caught a momentary glimpse of Johnson and Tronstad thirty feet away before I was dragged under. I gulped some air. Just enough.
Water rushed into my face again, and I swam with my arms, kicked, tried my best to resurface, yet the more I strained to reach the surface, the deeper I was pushed. Sears was holding me. Grasping my helmet from above, using me as a stepping stone, using my buoyancy to supplement his own.
It was only then that I remembered Sears couldn’t swim. I tried to breaststroke in the direction of Tronstad and Johnson, but Sears was keeping himself above the surface by holding me under. I’d become his personal flotation device. His panic was needless, because our equipment trapped enough air that it would have kept him afloat for a good little while. Had he relaxed for a few seconds, he would have seen that.
Without control of my head, I couldn’t swim, and not being able to swim, I couldn’t resurface. Nor could I dive under to escape, the way I’d been taught in Red Cross lifesaving. Through the water I could hear Sears shouting for help.
For a few seconds I relaxed and took stock of my situation, straining
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to reach out with my feet, hoping to find the bottom and push off, but the water was simply too deep.
When I turned on my flashlight, I was able to see a surprising distance underwater. It was maybe eight or ten feet deep here, deeper at the end of the pool where Tronstad and Johnson were standing. Somewhere in the depths, right about where my light lost its effectiveness, I spotted a whirlpool—near the bottom of the pit—spiraling like a gigantic bathtub drain, an underwater tornado. It was what had dragged us down at first, and it frightened me more than the man riding me. It frightened me more than anything I’d seen in a long while. 22. THRILL ME, KILL ME
W WE ’D BEEN PO OR when I was growing up. Eat-the-crusts poor. One of the few things my mother could afford to do for me in the summers was to take me to a public swimming pool for inexpensive lessons. We used to hitch rides with the neighbors to Colman Pool below Lincoln Park. When I got older I walked three miles each way, or we’d ride the bus up to the YMCA pool across from Station 32. My mother, who had never learned to swim, was terrified about living in a city where there was a body of cold water in every direction, afraid I would drown the way a neighbor’s child had. Consequently, I had lessons from the time I could walk, swam like a dolphin by the time I was eight, then went through lifesaving courses and worked as a lifeguard during my last two summers of high school.
Had the two of us been in swimming trunks, slipping away from Sears and hauling him to safety would have been easy. A drowning man won’t ride his flotation device under the surface, so I would have dived out of his grasp and swum around behind him, grasping him across the chest from behind and towing him to safety.
All of this was made difficult if not impossible by the fact that we were both wearing our complete complement of firefighting gear: fifty pounds of crap—nineteen pounds of compressed air cylinder and backpack, in addition to helmet, turnout trousers and turnout coat, knives and tools in our pockets, and portable radios. Plus rubber boots that came almost to our knees and were rapidly filling with water, which would soon turn into anchors.
Before I could consciously think of what to do, I slipped my thumbs under my chin strap and let Sears have the helmet, then ducked low and began swimming forward. It wasn’t easy making headway with all that gear on. A lot of the problem was that I bobbed to the surface almost im-
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mediately, giving Sears another opportunity to grab me, which he did, his dogged tenacity outstripping even his first effort. Sputtering, choking, gasping for air, he rode me. He climbed onto my backpack, pushing me under. I let him push and then went as deep as I could, and this time he released me.
Underwater, I fumbled with my MSA backpack, unfastening the waist belt, taking longer to loosen the chest strap, and dropping the cylinder, which bobbed to the surface. When I surfaced
beside it, Sears began moving toward me like an eggbeater, intent on riding me one more time. I kicked once and moved away, keeping just out of reach. He was dangerous now, having lost, as does any drowning man, all sense of honor and purpose beyond keeping his head above water.
Without warning, something jerked me under.
Before I knew it, I was so far down I couldn’t see any light. Spinning in circles. It took me a while to realize the whirlpool I’d seen earlier was sucking me deeper and deeper, until I didn’t know east from west, up from down.
I stretched out my hands and feet, trying to stop, and found myself gripping a piece of rebar that jutted from one of the walls of the pit, holding on fiercely until I stopped spinning, though the water continued to suck at me. Eventually I was able to bring my waterproof flashlight around and orient myself.
Above were other flashlights. Below was a large black opening: a pipe. It was from this pipe that the whirlpool was originating. A drain at the bottom of this pit was sucking down great masses of water, and trying to suck me through it. If I let go of the rebar and headed for the surface, the suction would seize me again. Next time I might not be lucky enough to grasp something. Next time I might go straight into the pipe. For the first time since we hit the water, I thought about dying. The pipe below me was the diameter of a standard garbage can, and the suction took all my strength to resist. I couldn’t hold my breath forever, and I couldn’t swim to the surface, so for half a minute I thought I was going to drown. Unable to let go, I was like a bird stuck on a wire in a windstorm. Then, for no reason that I could discern, the funnel-shaped whirlpool, which had been drifting like a spinning top, slowly released me. 150
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Placing my feet on the concrete, I gave a mighty shove upward. I’d been under for well over a minute and barely had enough air left to reach the surface. Once I felt the cold air on my face, I took in as much oxygen as I could, gasping, then stroked toward Tronstad and Johnson. Though they were both within easy reach, neither stuck out a hand to help. Behind me, Sears, who’d obviously swallowed some water, was in even more trouble than before.
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