Pyro (31 page)

A fraction of a second after I hit them, the bag explodes in the tangle of our feet.

Above us Ward has disappeared in the smoke.

The collision has broken Eddings’s glasses. She is trying to get out from under somebody’s legs, shrieking that I am an idiot and deserve to be fired, that I am on suspension as of now.

Having seen the event from start to finish, Chief Hertlein discounts her rants and says to me, “Nice move. I want you to get in there and ventilate that building. Right now, mister! Get your troops moving.”

“You’re going to have to assign the next-in truck. We’ve got rescues. Nobody’s searched yet.”

“You ventilate that place and the rescues’ll take care of themselves.”

“The hell they will. We’ve only got a few minutes. Maybe less.” It is usually true that a well-ventilated building is easier to search, but this building is already like a sieve. It has too many openings for the fans to work effectively. Or at all.

“Chief! God damn it, Chief. You gotta get us more teams in there,” says Slaughter, interrupting. “We don’t have any backup, and we’ve got one helluva basement fire.” Slaughter’s face piece is dangling around his neck, his reserve bell ringing. He is furious.

“Nobody’s been giving us a lick of help. We were in that basement all by ourselves! We took a beating you wouldn’t believe. You don’t do something fast, you’re going to lose the whole goddamn building!”

Flames and heavy smoke are coming out at the east end. Heavy black smoke is being pumped out the center window on floor three, where the old woman had been.

“I’m going to call this a defensive fire,” Hertlein says. “I want all our personnel out now.”

I move toward Ladder 3, signaling to Rideout with my eyes that I want her to follow. Behind, I hear Eddings screaming my name, cursing like a sailor. The others know it, but she is too angry to realize I’ve just saved her life.

72. RESCUING HALF-WITS

         
Rideout and I cover and jog up the painted concrete steps in front of the building, stepping over hoses, feeling more secure as we get under the fascia over the entranceway, where at least we don’t have to worry about sacks of cement falling out of the sky.

I can’t help but wonder why Earl Ward is still in the building. Why he’s throwing projectiles at us like a man in a besieged castle. Usually he’s long gone after setting a fire. Is it possible he’s stuck in his own trap? It’s obvious from the smoke patterns that he’s set multiple ignitions. There is too much smoke on two and three for a lone basement fire.

We are alone inside. The crew of Engine 2 is on the sidewalk, and Zeke and Slaughter are outside getting fresh air bottles. I can only guess why they ran out of air so quickly. The fire has been declared a defensive battle, which means hose streams will be directed from the sidewalk rather than from inside. We aren’t supposed to be in here, but I am not going to leave possible victims to fend for themselves while we squirt water through the windows from the sidewalk.

We search two apartments using the thermal imager; both units are filled with smoke and empty of inhabitants. At the west end of the floor, flames lick out a doorway that leads to the basement. Farther down the hallway near the center of the building we locate another stairwell. It is a long upward flight and is clogged with dense smoke.

Despite the fact that we can’t see the walls, we manage to search the entire first floor in less than two minutes, kicking in locked doors, dashing through each apartment in search of the young, the old, the inebriated, the handicapped, anybody in need of rescue. Some of the apartments have only light smoke in them. Others have smoke down to the floor. Midway through our search we run into two incoming members from Engine 2 who are looking for the basement fire. We point them in the right direction. Apparently they haven’t gotten word that this has turned into a defensive fire. That, or Hertlein has changed his mind.

We hear a phone ringing in one of the apartments. Except for two televisions left on, the first floor is devoid of life. Oddly, one of the smoke-dimmed televisions displays live video of this very building from the KIRO TV chopper. It is shocking to see the thick column of smoke above us.

The secondary stairwell to floor two is located at the east end of the building. The door at the top has been removed, and I see flame. It sounds almost as if a natural gas pipe has broken and ignited. I pray that floor two is vacant, because we aren’t going to make it up the stairs.

“Oh, shit,” says Rideout, peering up the stairs alongside me. “If you think it’s a go, I’m with you.”

I grin at her, but she can’t see it inside my mask. She doesn’t know we aren’t going up, but she is game to try. This will look good on her report.

Up the stairs we can see flame boiling paint off the broken door, plates of wallpaper curling off the walls from the heat. We can see beyond the top of the stairs, where the flame is blue and purple and deep red. The flames are incredible. I can
almost
understand why Earl Ward sets fires. I want to stay and watch, but I have a job to do.

Going up the stairs at either end of the hallway would have been foolish without a hose line. Even if we made it through the flames and found somebody to bring down, anybody in civilian clothes coming down those stairs would be burned beyond recognition.

Channel two is busy with conflicting messages. It appears Hertlein and Eddings are both trying to run the fire, quite possibly from different sides of the building. I press the button on the remote microphone clipped near my collar. “Command from Ladder Three. Primary search on floor one complete. All clear.”

Interfering radio traffic cuts off any answer. The fire ground is filling with firefighters and equipment, and channel two is bogging down as fresh units confirm assignments and request orders. Engine 8 arrives. Ladder 6 announces they are putting up ladders to the front of the building.

As we walk back toward the main entrance we hear a loud burbling over the radio. It is Eddings’s voice, though her words are indistinguishable. This is probably the biggest fire she’s ever presided over—it certainly rivals anything I’ve been to since the Armitage Furniture Warehouse. Perhaps because of this, she’s once again lost her composure, if not her mind.

When we go outside, two crew members from Ladder 6 are throwing up a thirty-five-foot ladder near the entranceway. I advise them that floor one is clear and to keep an eye out for the asshole who’s been throwing bags of concrete out the windows. This is the first they’ve heard of it.

At the corner, I spot two civilians above me. The first is a middle-aged Caucasian female on three. Oddly, she is peering down at us as if there is no peril at all. Her apartment lights are on, revealing a modest amount of smoke in the room. Directly above her on the roof stands a figure in a wig and a dress. He has a blowtorch in his hands and is staring at me. It is as if he’s challenging me to come up and get him.

As we climb the five vertical steps to the base of the aerial on the back of Ladder 3, I turn to Rideout. “He’s trying to kill us. You stay clear.”

“I want to go.”

“Then stay behind me.”

Towbridge is moving the tip of the aerial ladder to the third floor, where the victim in the window seems about as concerned with all the activity in the street as if she were watching it on television. For that matter, maybe she is.

I climb toward the victim on the third floor. Ward has disappeared. When I reach the window, I motion for Towbridge to move the tip a few inches to the left. I take my service axe out of the scabbard and break out the glass. The resident acts frightened, as if she’s being stalked by a very large and very dangerous cat.

“You alone?” I am speaking across the now-clear space between us.

Moving as if her knees are splinted, she backs away.

“Seattle Fire Department. Lady, your building is on fire.”

The bottle on my back catches on the window frame as I climb through. The resident, who appears to be in her late forties or early fifties, is smoking a cigarette.

“Ma’am. We’re going to have to walk you down the ladder. Can you do that?”

“You get on out of here now.”

“Your building’s on fire. You’ll have to come down with us.”

“They told me it was a false alarm.”

“Who told you?”

“Some man running up and down the hall in a dress.”

“This is no false alarm. Where do you think all this smoke is coming from?” The aerial jiggles as Rideout climbs toward us. Before I can stop her, the woman fumbles open her front door, but her plan backfires as a column of filthy black smoke marches in and overwhelms her, knocking her to her knees.

I close the door and remove the cigarette from her hands. I lift her up and walk her toward the window.

When she and Rideout are ten feet down the ladder, the abandon-building signal sounds in the street, a loud high-low siren on the chief’s buggy. Over the speaker on the tip of the aerial, Towbridge says, “Lieut. They want everyone out of the building.”

“Has somebody else searched floor three?”

“Far as I know, you’re the only one up there.”

“Then I’ll be searching.”

“You know you’re not supposed to be up there without a partner.”

“Leave the stick where it is.”

“Oooookay.”

The corridor on three is filled with hot smoke, like a dense fog, growing hotter by the minute. I can hear the fire crackling at the far end of the hallway. Using my six-volt battle lantern, I manage to see the walls and doors in some spots, but I can’t see dick in others. I no longer have the thermal imager with me.

I kick in the next apartment door and wander into an apartment almost as murky as the corridor. There is no fire, but I run into a wall of smoke. No people—only mussed beds that tell me they fled in haste.

The next two units are vacant. The door is off one, ajar on the other. Both are on fire. In the second apartment the fire has banked up and is starting to rip out the door and burn along the ceiling. I crawl close, reach around the corner into the heat and buy some time by pulling the door closed. The heat abates instantly.

I travel less than two-thirds of the way along the corridor on my hands and knees before I am forced to turn back. There is fire below me, fire behind me, and maybe even fire above me. I am alone and have no hose line. Nobody knows where I am. If I’m not careful, I’ll end up in the same situation that killed my father.

73. WHAT’S BLACK AND WHITE AND FLIES AT NIGHT?

         
As I crawl back to the end of the corridor, temperatures abate somewhat so that I am able to stand. I hear thumping on the roof above me. We haven’t put anybody up there that I know about.

There is more noise above me now. Footsteps.

How he thinks he is going to get off that roof is a mystery. But then, with a pyro, thinking ahead isn’t always a speciality.

If the interior access to the roof is on this side of the building, I will go up and surprise him. If not, I will ride the aerial up . . . and surprise him. Surprising people is
my
speciality.

I don’t normally get jacked up at fires the way a lot of people do, but every time I lay eyes on the pyromaniac, I find myself ready to explode. I’ve seen him three times tonight, and each time I feel blood pounding in my ears. It’s as if all my plasma has converted to adrenaline. My need to kill him has outrun everything else.

Setting fires is a cutthroat hobby, but when you sit down and think it through, you are forced to admit the actions involved are fairly passive. You light a match; you walk away. There is nothing inherently violent about it. It isn’t like clobbering somebody with a baseball bat. Girl Scouts light matches every weekend. People light wood stoves, debris piles, fireplaces. The crime is in what you touch the match to and what happens afterward.

Tonight he’s turned violent. Even a mouse will bite when cornered.

As I work I hear Eddings’s voice on the radio requesting firefighters to abandon the building.

I push my mike button. “Ladder Three primary search complete on east half of floor three. All clear. Somebody needs to search the west half of three.”

My report is answered with an indecipherable caterwauling. After thinking about it, I realize she’s said, “Ladder Three, you cocksuckers get your butts down here now! Get your asses out now. Now! Now! Now!”

The stairwell to the roof is on the third floor, around a corner at the end of the corridor, narrow and steep. I climb the stairs, but the door at the top won’t budge.

The smoke is so thick even with a flashlight I have to place my face against the door to ascertain the lock has been broken. The door
should
open. I know this much—without a mask and air bottle, he isn’t coming down through here. Without compressed air the entire third floor is untenable and getting worse by the minute.

I shoulder the door and push. The door shifts a fraction of an inch, then slams shut. He’s piled something against it. Taking my service axe out, I brace my legs against the inner wall and push with all my might.

I pop through the doorway and onto the roof, roll, and come up with the axe in my gloved hands. Moving on adrenaline and twenty-five years of hate, I’ve taken the door completely off its hinges. A huge gush of gray-black follows me onto the roof, which is already smeared with smoke from several sources. The stairs are a natural chimney and now act like a smokestack for the building.

All along the roof, smoke is seeping through the tar roofing material. The smoke in the sky over the front of the building reflects the flashing red lights from below.

I am on a flat, black, torch-down tar roof with a knee-high parapet around the edges, a small penthouse enclosure at the east end to accommodate the doorway I’ve come through. The roof has a smaller footprint than you would think.

Not a soul in sight. There are stacks of roofing materials and racks of five-gallon buckets tall enough to hide behind. He might be in the smoke. Or behind me on the far side of the penthouse door housing.

The roof under my feet is spongy and I stomp as I walk, feeling the tremors move through the roof, listening for footsteps behind me and trying to guess how much fire is under me. The danger here is falling through. A danger that escalates every moment we’re up here.

The smoke on the west end of the roof is thicker.

The plastic skylights are melting.

What I don’t need is to become the second Lieutenant Wollf this bastard kills. I don’t need to let him sneak up behind me and push me forty feet to the street.

At the west end of the roof I find the tip of a fifty-five-foot ground extension ladder fully extended. As I approach the top of the ladder, a long fold of black smoke curls up from below the parapet and envelops the entire west end of the rooftop. When I look down, four men are pulling the ladder out from the building. It is easy to see why. Huge ragged gouts of flame are roaring out the windows below me.

Then I hear the screams on the roof. Two in quick succession.

I am in the smoke now, heading east, stepping around stacks of roofing materials, TV antennae, guy wires, and vent pipes. Black smoke is oozing out the broken door I came through. Somebody is in trouble. I wonder if some of the building occupants didn’t come up here to escape the fire.

As I approach the stairwell housing, a firefighter steps over the high doorsill onto the roof, glancing around in the smoke. It’s Rideout.

As our eyes meet, a blur of movement comes from behind the stairway housing and knocks Rideout down the stairs and into the smoke. A figure follows Rideout, and they tumble down the stairs together until they are out of sight.

The figure is in a paisley, ankle-length dress. He is in blackface. Has a blowtorch in his hands.

I dive in after them.

Once inside the stairwell, I can’t see a thing. Not until I draw close. Rideout is on the floor, Ward straddling her with the flame from the propane bottle held at waist height.

When he sees me, he stabs it at my face.

The impact of my first blow is dulled by my gloves.

He flies sideways and rebounds off the wall, the propane bottle rolling to the side. I pick up Rideout with one hand and drag her away.

“You all right?” I ask.

“I sprained my ankle.”

I toss the propane bottle up the stairs onto the roof.

Then I pick up Earl Ward, the material of his dress ripping in my gloved hands. I grab him and propel him up the stairs. “Get up there, you sorry sack of shit.”

He starts coughing as soon as I let go. When I am certain he is on his way to the roof, I walk Rideout back through the apartment and make certain she is safely on the aerial.

“You going to be okay?” I ask.

“Aren’t you bringing him down?”

“He’ll be down in a minute.”

I key my intercom. “Tow? I’m going back to the roof.”

“They moved all the hose lines outside, Lieut. I don’t know how long this rig can stay here. The paint’s peeling off.” He laughs. Towbridge loves conflict. To be the centerpiece of an incident where we burn up a fire truck will produce a humorous tale he can spin for years to come.

“Use your judgment. I’m going to the roof. I’ll need a way down.”

“I’ll put it up there for you.”

The warning bell on my MSA is ringing as I head back up the stairs. In order not to give my presence away in the smoke, I remove the low pressure hose regulator from my face piece and turn the bottle off at the knob behind my hip until the bell no longer rings, then proceed up the stairs. I suck dark smoke all the way up. It tastes like the undercarriage of a fertilizer truck might.

I won’t be able to take much of this. Very quickly the chemicals in the smoke will incapacitate me: carbon monoxide, cyanide gas, the rest of it.

Ward lies in a heap twenty feet from the doorway, coughing spasmodically. His nose is broken and is leaking blood onto his dark makeup. He’s lost the wig.

The propane torch has rolled to a spot between us and is burning a hole in the roofing material. Not that it matters. Flames are coming out one of the skylights in the center of the roof now. In various spots around us the tar is bubbling. In one area thirty feet away the gases from the tar have ignited and are burning lazily.

I kick the torch off into the smoke.

When I walk over to him, he says, “I didn’t mean for this to get so big.”

“Bullshit. You meant for it to get exactly this big.”

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“What’s black and white and flies at night?”

“Huh?”

I pick him up and start running him through a mushroom of smoke toward the edge of the roof.

I release him in a perfect trajectory for the street in front of the building. He will land just about where the concrete sacks hit. He is moving so fast he can’t stop. He keeps running, arms flailing. Half a step before the edge of the roof, he cracks his leg on a vent pipe and sprawls onto his face against the bottom of the parapet.

I’m not a murderer yet. Not yet.

As I watch him curl up in agony, something in me changes. I don’t know exactly what it is or how long it has been coming on, but it’s like a jar has shattered inside me and all the murky waters have filtered to the ground at my feet. It is very odd. I am watching his pain, and I’m not happy that I caused it. In an instant I know that no matter how much I detest this man and no matter what he’s done, I am not the person to mete out his punishment. I will bring him to justice, but I no longer feel the incredible passion to kill him myself.

Just like that. It is gone. I’m sane again. Maybe for the first time in my life. Maybe it is because I’ve lived through the act, essentially, of killing him, even though he survived.

I’m having one of those epiphanies we get three or four times in our lives—if we’re lucky. I’ve lived my life thinking this man was the cause of all my troubles, but he wasn’t. My primary source of problems throughout my life has been my own hate, a hate that filled me with tension and anger that boiled over at inopportune moments and in brutal ways. Hate always destroys the vessel that carries it. I remember other epiphanies in my life. The night I decided to try out for the fire department. The night I almost beat Rickie Morrison to death and decided I wasn’t going to drink again. The morning my mother was murdered and I shot Alfred, the morning I realized they were taking Neil away from me.

What I did to Earl Ward felt wrong in a way that it never had in my fantasies.

I hadn’t felt anything like this since the morning I put five bullets into Alfred. I
could
kill Ward the same way I’d killed Alfred. In fact, here on this roof I would probably get away with it. But I wouldn’t be my father’s son. And whether I wanted to admit it or not, I needed to be my father’s son. I was in
his
uniform, holding
his
rank, doing
his
job. I’d never known my father, really, but I wasn’t going to betray him now.

What makes this all so sad is that it was only a freak accident that saved Ward’s life.

As these thoughts wash over me, the strangest feeling of peace takes hold.

I pick him up. He thinks I am going to pitch him off the roof and struggles until I throw him back toward the center. Behind, I hear men and machines in the street. Another skylight begins burning through with a Rice Krispies sound; flames emerge and disappear as the physics of fire plays tricks inside the building. I will never get another chance like this. Once they lock him away, Ward will be out of my reach forever.

“Wha’dya got there?” It’s Steve Slaughter, his face piece off and dangling on a strap around his neck. He’s breathing hard from a combination of the climb up the aerial and the smoke on the roof, dripping sweat off his nose and out of his helmet, walking toward me in that peculiar John Wayne gait. I look behind for his partner, but he is alone. “This him?”

“This is him.”

“You like fire?” Slaughter asks Ward. “Sure you do.”

“I don’t,” says Earl Ward, without meeting Slaughter’s eyes.

“You always miss the best part, don’t you?
We
get the best part. Come here. I’ll show you the best part.”

Grabbing him by the collar, Slaughter drags him until they are beside the nearest burned-out skylight, torrents of hot smoke rushing skyward from the four-by-four-foot opening where the skylight had been.

“No. Noooooooo.” Fitting the nape of his neck into his gloved hand, Slaughter squeezes him like a struggling fish, then pulls him over to the opening and pushes his face into the smoke. “Don’t do this,” Ward begs. “Please don’t—”

Ward’s sentence is cut off by a coughing fit. He chokes. It is as if Slaughter is holding his head underwater. He gags and finally vomits.

Slaughter brings him back into relatively fresh air on the south side of the hole, allows him to regain his equilibrium, then pushes him back into the smoke. Ward tries to hold his breath again, but it doesn’t last. He is coughing violently when I say, “Stop it.”

Pulling Earl Ward out of the smoke, Slaughter tosses him to one side, where he flops like a sparrow that’s hit a window.

“I’m taking him down.”

Slaughter grins. Nearby another skylight melts through and we hear the fire on three. I am surprised the roof hasn’t collapsed. Smoke rushes out of the skylights with a woofing sound that could only be described as dogs walking on marshmallows. Lots of dogs. Lots of marshmallows. Lots of smoke.

“Fuckin’ bastard.” Slaughter looks down at Earl Ward and kicks him hard in the kidneys. Ward rolls over and curls into a fetal position. “This is Attack Six on the roof. I’m bringing down the Ladder Three officer and one civilian.”