“You afraid of an old man?”
“I’m afraid of that old man.”
Tronstad only grinned.
30. EDITED FOR BITTERNESS
W AS WE LEFT the station on an alarm, I spotted the black thermal column five or six blocks away, smoke rising into the cobalt sky with incredible rapidity, racing to the heavens as if pouring out of a deep fissure in the earth in a rapid series of interconnected bubbles. In my two years in the department, we’d responded to any number of vehicle fires, and they’d all been like this, the smoke so thick that it looked like you could surf on it. A couple of hundred pounds of petroleumbased plastics lining the interior made it a fait accompli that almost nothing burned quite as hot as a car fire. The dispatcher had sent Engine 29 on a single. Just the four of us. Before Tronstad even got to the apparatus, I had my heavy coat snapped tight, the collar up, and had pulled my Nomex hood around my neck for later deployment over my head. Though he was hyperactive in every other area of life, and as a kid had spent years on Ritalin, until Sears showed up and coached us Tronstad had been slower than ketchup getting onto the rig. Today he was back to his old habits. When he finally climbed into the crew cab beside me, he was carrying his bunking coat instead of wearing it. He smiled as if we shared some delightful secret. I hated this sudden chumminess he was determined to inflict on me, as if now that we were killing officers together, we were es- pecially good friends. I hated that he’d turned me into a co-conspirator and an accessory to murder, and despised myself for not being able to find a way out of this labyrinth. I didn’t want to be in the same city with him, and I certainly did not want him thinking we were buddies.
“Yahoo!” Covington said, as we sped up California Avenue toward the intersection with Admiral Way, the key intersection in this end of West Seattle. “Would you look at that?”
It was a large American car sitting askew in the center of the intersec-200
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tion, as if the driver had lost control at the last moment. Oily rafts of smoke and orange balls of flame boiled out of every orifice and roared out of the radiator, shooting so high the flames were melting the lenses in the stoplight above the car. Shards of window glass glittered on the street around the vehicle.
The intersection was jammed up in all directions, most of the occupants of the nearby vehicles standing next to their car doors so they could gawk. As we rolled up, a pair of elderly women made a dash for the sidewalk and two big-bellied men in T-shirts danced around the periphery, dumping portable extinguishers ineffectually. The heat was so intense, the men couldn’t get close enough to make their handheld extinguishers do anything but lay down a white film of chemical dust over the broken glass surrounding the car.
Before we stopped rolling, Covington turned around. “Preconnect, boys. Make sure you mask up tight. Earflaps down. I’ll get a bar for the hood.”
Tronstad should have been masked, covered, and gloved up when we came to a stop, but he wasn’t anywhere close, so I was on my own. The preconnect was a two-hundred-foot section of hose, preplumbed, so that all we had to do was pull it out of the hose bed at the rear of the rig, stretch it out, and kick the kinks out of it so water would flow freely. A good driver would fill the hose line while you were still running, nudging flakes off your shoulder with the water pressure. The Task Force nozzle gave us 165 gallons per minute, and the tank on Engine 29 held 500 gallons. That meant, discounting the water it took to fill two hundred feet of inch-and-three-quarters line as well as the plumbing inside the rig, we would have just under three minutes wide open. In theory it would give Johnson plenty of time to connect to a hydrant while I tapped the fire. As we rolled to a stop, Covington gave a radio report while Johnson did his in-cab procedures and jumped out. Outside he would set the wheel blocks, give me water on the preconnect, then go to the hydrant with one end of a supply hose and hydrant wrenches. Even though I was fifty feet away, I could feel the heat as I climbed
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down from the crew cab. I had my mask on, my gloves, my Nomex hood over my face piece, and my helmet: enough gear that I could walk through flame if I had to, at least for a few seconds. As I approached the car with the hose line, a front tire melted and blew out with a muffled thump. I heard the pump revving behind me, heard the sound of water under pressure as it filled the hose line, then took a good a grip on the heavy nozzle, ready to buck the pressure when I pulled back on the bale. I opened the nozzle and moved in, getting closer than I probably should have, feeling the heat on my neck through the Nomex hood. The whooshing water made the burning materials inside the car crackle and turned the black smoke white. I kept at it, moving closer, waving the water stream in circles, bouncing water under the vehicle to put out the burning oil and gasoline on the pavement, and angling the stream in the windows.
In the backseat I saw something hunkered next to the door. It startled me because for some reason I’d assumed the car was empty. It was a body in semi-repose, arms upraised as if posing for a boxing photo. I recalled from training that burn victims frequently curled into a pugilistic pose after the fire shortened and tightened the tendons in their arms. It was a female, hair and clothing burned off, charred beyond recognition. I couldn’t figure out what was on the left side of her torso until I realized she had one silicone breast that had boiled over and dripped down her front like a raw egg. A cancer survivor, I thought. To survive cancer and die here . . . The rest of her was all char and grimacing teeth and wisps of smoke.
Covington still hadn’t gotten the hood up, so I hit the flames through the radiator, then screwed the nozzle to straight stream and bounced water off the street under the car one more time. Tronstad was behind me now, pulling the heavy hose line so I could move freely around the car. I couldn’t help noting he still wasn’t covered, his MSA face piece dangling off his chest, which meant as soon as we got near any smoke he would vanish.
The predominant winds were from the north, so as I moved around to the south side of the car and cooled the tires, I found myself in a wash 202
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of hot, oily smoke that permeated my clothing. In the smoke and steam, I could barely see the car. Not surprisingly, the driver’s door was open, a second body half in and half out, having apparently gotten tangled in his seat belt, possibly as he turned around to help the woman. He was burned, though not as badly as the woman. His hair was gone, his face blackened and unrecognizable.
A wave of depression swept over me. Perhaps because I’d already been depressed all week, or because I didn’t have enough years in the department to handle so many deaths in rapid succession. Life was supposed to be simple. You were conceived and born. You suckled and grew. You lived your life, and if you were lucky you left others behind who could take over where you left off. At the end of it all, and sometimes before the end of it all, you died. Humans participated in this natural and inevitable progression, yet we spent our lifetimes trying to protect ourselves from the reality of it, society having worked out 1001 ways to buffer us from the truth: the quest for possessions, the lust for big houses, extravagant vacations, sex, big cars, stocks and bonds, gold, religion, spiritualism, yoga, belief in flying saucers, you name it. Five months ago I’d come up against the ugly bluntness of life when my mother told me she had less than a year to live. She was forty-one. I was twenty-four, and the last thing I wanted to think about was her death.
One of the first things you learn as a firefighter is to divorce yourself from sentiments you’d normally entertain in the presence of a dying man or woman or child. In that sense, we were like doctors and nurses, and maybe like executioners. The more death we saw, the easier it became, and until this past week I thought I was immune to death. Now, looking at these two corpses, I realized I was a child in a man’s job. I was a tyro. A ninny. I wasn’t immune to anything.
Tugging the door wide, I opened the nozzle in short bursts, watering down all the nooks and crann
ies I hadn’t reached earlier. When the driver rolled over, I couldn’t tell whether the movement was because I’d bumped him or because he was still alive. For a few seconds I studied him for signs of breathing, listening to the residual crackling of steel and glass cooling. I checked his carotid artery with a bare finger. His skin was hot and stiff.
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When Covington was finished under the hood, I said, “You know we got a coupla DOAs here?”
“We what?”
“You didn’t see them?”
Covington walked around to the driver’s door, stopping six feet shy of the first corpse. “Fuck,” he said into his mask. “Fuck this shit.”
When the lieutenant told Tronstad to get a couple of yellow disposable blankets to cover the corpses, Tronstad got the blankets but handed them to me. I dropped the nozzle on the street and wrapped the driver, accidentally touching his face through the blanket as I tried to secure the material against a breeze that was ripping along the street, the same breeze that had fanned the flames and helped make the fire so hot. I couldn’t reach into the backseat, but I stuffed the second blanket through the window and more or less concealed the woman from gapers. When I stepped back from the car, Tronstad said, “He don’t look so tough now, does he?”
“What are you talking about?”
“That asshole from the FBI.”
I looked at the car again. It was a Lincoln Town Car, the same vintage and color Brown and his wife owned. And the shoes on the driver. One was burned, but the other was outside on the ground, polished all to hell. The dead driver was Agent Brown; the passenger, his wife.
“You gave me a look when we left the station. You knew who it was before we left. That’s why you weren’t helping.”
“Don’t be stupid. I just now recognized him.”
“How?”
“It smelled like a burning asshole.”
“You bastard!”
“It sure was hot,” Covington said, coming up alongside us.
“Hotter’n a whoopee cushion at a farting contest,” Tronstad said. Covington gave him a look and might have said something in the way of a reprimand, when a police officer spotted Covington and summoned him across the street. After he left, Tronstad said, “Now, don’t be accusing me of this.”
“Why not? You did it.”
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“You accuse me, I’ll have to release that videotape. And nobody can prove I did anything. We start accusing each other, chances are you’ll go to prison and I’ll fly like a birdie. You wouldn’t like that.”
“You lousy bastard. You put some sort of incendiary timing device in their car. Jesus, he was FBI. You don’t think his friends are going to be on us like white on rice?”
“Was he FBI? Did he act like FBI? Does the FBI go around twisting people’s digits?”
“Jesus, Tronstad. What about his wife?”
“You want to save her? Go ahead. Drag her out and initiate CPR.”
“She didn’t do anything.”
“She shouldn’t have been hanging out with an asshole.”
Tronstad couldn’t have seen it coming, because I didn’t see it myself. Even though the nozzle was turned off, the water pressure made the end of the hose stiff as a board.
Swinging the hose and nozzle with all my might, I whacked him across the side of the head, knocking his helmet off and sending him to the pavement.
“Jesus, you fucker!” he yelled.
He got almost to his feet, his hands still in the glass on the street, when I turned the nozzle on and knocked him down, holding it on straight stream. The intense water pressure pushed him backward and washed him up against the car. He held his hands up to protect his face, then yelped and rolled away from the still-hot sheet metal of the car, turning his face away from me now to protect himself, curling into a ball, trying and failing to get up or to crawl away while I bombarded him with the water stream.
He screamed as if in a great deal of pain, but I knew it couldn’t possibly hurt as much as I wanted it to.
“You motherfucker!” he screamed while I walked behind him, never once letting up. Each time he tried to scramble away from me, the stream knocked him off his hands and knees.
Then they shut the water off on me. When the hose went limp, Tronstad picked himself up, limped away, and said, “You goddamned motherfucking butt fucker.” I stepped forward to punch him, but a pair of burly
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cops came up behind me and restrained my arms. “You pimply cheese ass! You’re going to be sorry you did that. God. I think you took my eye out.”
While one police officer escorted Tronstad across the street, towing him by the sleeve of his wet bunking coat, two others held me. “You okay now?” Covington asked.
I removed my helmet, peeled off the Nomex hood, released the face straps, and popped off my face piece. “Yeah.”
“What was that about?”
When I didn’t reply, one of the police officers said, “You going to handle this in-house, or you want us to take over?”
Covington looked across the street to where Johnson and a couple of concerned civilians were attending Tronstad’s injuries. Dropping his hand on my shoulder, Covington said, “Why don’t we hold on for a minute? I’ll go see how bad it is.”
31. ALL THE THINGS YOU CAN NEVER
SAY TO ANYONE—EVER
W THE Y ENDED UP calling a medic unit for Tronstad while I awaited the verdict across the street, next to a blue-and-white SPD cruiser. Meanwhile, the SPD had cordoned off the intersection for the inevitable accident investigation, taking statements from witnesses and directing cars out of the chaos.
We waited while the burned-out hulk steamed in the center of the street, while the two bodies cooled under their yellow disposable blankets. The half-melted traffic light blinked uselessly, and civilians watched from nearby shop windows. The marquee on the movie theater a few doors down advertised Cold Mountain. I’d seen it there with my mother.
Johnson picked up the wet hose, eyeing me quietly as he walked past. I could tell he thought I was insane. Medic 32 showed up from Station 32
up the road, and while they worked on Tronstad, Covington huddled with them, presumably to verify the extent of Tronstad’s injuries. The burned-out car continued to cool, every once in a while letting off small snapping sounds. A team of detectives from the police department showed up. The fire department’s investigators arrived. On the far side of the intersection somebody put a large white patch across one of Tronstad’s eyes. I knew Tronstad did not want me in jail, where I might be tempted to talk to the authorities, and where I wouldn’t be around to retrieve the bonds for him. The cop who’d spoken to Covington earlier was an older man with a graying crew cut who’d looked at me in a kindly way. I knew I appeared young enough that he no doubt assumed these were the first dead people I’d seen. Hell, I was up to my neck in dead people. The medics finished with Tronstad and left on another call at about the same time I noticed a female police officer five feet in front of me. She
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may have been there all along, intermingling with the other officers on traffic duty, though I didn’t recognize her until that moment. She looked different; yet even in her bulky bulletproof vest and Sam Browne belt, fully loaded with 9 millimeter Glock, nightstick, flashlight, handcuffs, and Mace, she was as thin and reedy as ever. Drawing close, Sonja spoke in a low voice. “You seem to have gotten yourself in a jam.”
“They’re not going to arrest me.”
“People who act like you shouldn’t get cocky.”
I inhaled slowly. Except for those hours skating last night, it might have been the first full breath I’d taken all week. Despite the fact that I’d seen her three times previously, and she’d beaten me up two of those times, she had a calming influence on me.
Standing close, she said
, “You’re right. He’s not going to press charges. Why did you do it?”
“Long story.”
“What’s going on, Gum? You want to talk?”
Oh, how I wanted to talk. I was bursting with secrets. I wanted to tell her about the bonds and my complicity, and I wanted to tell her about Chief Abbott and the smoke room, and how he’d tried to torture information out of us. I wanted to explain how I hadn’t had anything to do with Sears’s death even though, if things went south, I might get convicted of it. Trouble was, if I told her any of these things it would be the last time I’d see her. Or daylight.
When a minute passed and I still hadn’t replied, she said, “I guess the firefighter you hurt wrote a letter to the chief of the department about you.”
“Complaining? Already?”
“No, before. He wants you to get an award for trying to save your lieutenant.”
“I didn’t save him.”
“For trying.” She looked me over. I knew that just as she looked different in her uniform, I looked different with my helmet and my collar turned up, sweating from the body heat my turnout gear captured.
“You’re a surprise a minute, Gum.”
“So are you, Pederson.” For a fraction of a second, I thought I saw her 208
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blush. Maybe it was the touch of vulnerability that made me blurt it out. Maybe I was coming to the end of my rope. “I think Tronstad set fire to that car.”
“The guy you just knocked down? Wasn’t he at the station with you when it started?”
“These people were visiting our station. They left, and then this happened.”
“Are you all right, Gum?”
“I’m serious.”
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