Through the Fire (19 page)

He patted my shoulder. “You’re good. Go.”

I charged across a driveway, hose threading to the ground.

A cedar-paneled fence door blocked my way to the backyard. I pushed on the latch.

Locked.

I dropped the pack and pulled out the Pulaski. I rammed it against the one-by-six edge. Two blows busted the bolt free.

Smoke eddied over and around a low black metal fence on the far side of the yard. I bent to pick up the pack when the oven door flapped open.

I felt a sudden searing on my cheeks as the fire mounted the fence and rose on its haunches, a half block of burning bearlike aggression. It stretched and grew, twisting in a vortex. Back on the lawn Lowell pulled on his face shroud, twirling his finger in the air. “Water comin’!”

I fastened my shroud around my mouth and nose. The flames folded over and down toward the house. I dropped to my belly, gripping the nozzle, sucking air between grass blades.

The flush of water shot up behind me and under with squirt gun streams spurting from the couplings. I twisted the nozzle.

Left for life.

Air escaped and flitted past my helmet. I took a quick breath before the rush of water came. I fanned it into a fog stream shaped like an umbrella. Lowell crouched behind and lifted the hose. We duck-walked forward.

Come get me, beast.

A shower of droplets covered my goggles, colors blurring through the water fan. The fire shook, flipping back and straightening. Surprised by the onslaught, angered by the imposition, it rolled inward and then unfurled out along the ground. I narrowed the stream and dug in my heels, sweeping from side to side. Flame fingers hissed, vanished, leaving blackened smoky wisps. It regrouped and rose back by the fence.

I moved in, the soles of my boots burning beneath. “Get back to
Gehenna
!”

Lowell leaned in. “What?”

I kept my helmet tilted, shielding my face from the heat, peeking out just enough to see my water stream evaporate into the air, confused spastic smoke shaking and coughing like a car motor searching for the right flammable mixture.

I had it off balance. I wanted to knock it over the edge, force it to scurry back down to the pit from where it came.

Kat transmitted over the radio, “We’re at quarter of a tank.”

I closed the bale halfway and held our ground. The engine only carried seven hundred fifty gallons. Seven hundred fifty separating the fire from the house. Seven-fifty keeping the fire from us.

A minute later, Butcher announced, “Kat’s got the hydrant. Show no quarter.”

I opened the bale and pushed us forward. Lowell stretched a second hose line connected to a gated valve from the hose pack. We flanked with two fronts. The fire retreated to the opposite side of the fence, sneaking glances in and under the bars. It tried to slither through, wicking in every way possible, fighting to keep its fingertip grip on the ground it had gained.

But it relented. We had it. The smoke lightened to gray. The last remaining fire disappeared into the draw, swallowed by a blackened smoky moonscape dotted with flickering sagebrush torches.

Lowell coughed and spit. I doused white root ash to the sound of bubbling bellows.

Butcher strolled through the waning fog, radio held close to his ear. He staked his shovel handle in the smoldering grass. “Don’t get too comfy, boys. Sounds like the other side is losing it.”

CHAPTER
35

T
alk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The fire had taken two wood-shingled houses and was well on its way with a third and fourth by the time we redeployed. We got there quickly, but Butcher had been ordered by an overzealous staging manager not to move until they sorted out incoming rigs.

Fortunately for the neighborhood, a favorable wind shift drove the fire up the mountain and away from the houses. It spread into the timber and into high, rocky, and inaccessible-by-engine topography.

I sat back in the hose bed with Lowell and watched the Army Guard Chinooks hover like upended phone receivers, twin rotors fore and aft beating the air above the head of the fire, dropping thousand-gallon bucket loads of water. Single-engine air tankers played chase with smaller lead planes, following them in low and banking descents to blanket the hillsides with scarlet slurry lines in the sand to retard the fire’s forward progress.

“That was old Captain Peterson’s house right there,” Lowell said.

I stared at the empty ash piles off-gassing, angled pipes protruding through a steamy and littered foundation. A simple fireplace and chimney stood surrounded by rubble. “That house right there?”

He nodded.

Then, in the most twisted and fitting way, I found myself entirely unsurprised to see Blake’s gray-suited form scuffling and searching through the silt of the foundation. He wore rubber turnout boots and a white Prevention helmet, his leather gloves sorting and separating charred debris.

A sense of reckless empowerment came over me. And crazy in the way that abandonment comes, I climbed right off the rig with a beeline trajectory for Inspector Blake Williams.

Lowell shifted. “Where you going?”

I didn’t look back. I stepped into the cinders and the temperature lifted.

Man’s floor, hell’s roof.

Blake bent over by the chimney, staring into the fireplace. I stopped a few feet away, unnoticed.

I wondered what was going through his head. Did he find and dispose of the incriminating evidence? Did anyone have the slightest suspicion? He probably thought he was home free. He was Irish Spring, clean as a whistle. Nonchalant. Unassuming.

Not an arsonist . . .

Cheater . . .

Murderer.

He scraped in the back corner of the firebox.

I spoke louder than normal. “Looking for evidence?”

He jerked his head up, striking his helmet on the upper hearthstone. “Ow. Hey, Aidan. How’s it going?”

“How does it look like it’s going, Blake?”

His expression flicked like the pixilation of an image. He grinned. “Right. I guess sometimes they get away from us.”

I took off my helmet and scratched my head. “It can only get away if someone lets it loose in the first place.”

He stared, his expression traversing from confusion to suspicion. He shifted his focus to the charred scraps at his feet. He knelt and started picking them up. “So. Were you guys on these ones here?”

I stared at him. I wanted to see him sweat, to see his pores open on his cheeks and brow. How long had he been sneaking behind my back? How long had he been at all of it? Did his deeds date back . . . to a warehouse, and a brick wall, and to me compressing my father’s chest in that mad midnight ambulance ride?

“Why’d you do it, Blake?”

He shuffled the debris between hands, still looking down. “I’m sorry?”

I crouched to his eye level, adjusted my helmet. “I know you did it. I know all about it.”

He froze in profile. He swallowed, took a deep breath, and straightened. “Do you, now?”

I stood, arms just out from my sides. “Is it for the rush? You like seeing all the pretty lights and sirens? You like watching people’s stuff burn?”

He stepped closer. “Aidan, lower your—”

I shoved him, both hands into his chest, knocking him backward against the chimney. “You don’t get to speak.”

“What is your—”

“You don’t!” I shoved him again. “How long?” I brought my helmet rim to his. “Let me be even more specific. Where do I start, Blake?”

“Aidan, I do not know what you’re talking about.”

I gripped tight the lapels of his suit beneath his open fire coat, his silk Armani lapels. Always so proud of his image, his status, his look. “Christine tell you to buy this one? Is that it? She your personal fashion consultant, Blake?”

“Aidan!” He brought his arms against my chest and tried to push me away. “Get. Off. Me.” But I had him off-balance, my weight leaning into him like a steel strut. He grunted and relaxed.

I pinned him against the brick, my elbows over his shoulders. “How long? How long have you been cheating with her when I was at work?”

Hearing myself say it pulled the drain plug on my indignation. Swirling despair sank in my chest. I loosened my grip and stepped back. “Why’d you do it, Blake?”

His right hook surprised me, landing on my cheek and sending me reeling. A second strike knocked me flat on my back. My helmet tumbled off. I shifted to my feet and drove a solid fist into his gut. He let loose a sound like a balloon deflating.

I rose over his bent body. My jaw numb and hot. “You did it, didn’t you? Couldn’t get what you wanted from the department, could you?”

He turned to look at me, and I struck his face, knocking him down.

“Get up!”

He placed his gloved hands in push-up position.

“Get. Up.”

Thick crimson ropes dangled from his nose. He spit into the ashes. “You’ve got it wrong, Aidan.”

“Get up!” I wanted to hit him again. I wanted to pound into him and out of him every anger and boiling hate inside of me. “You think you can take whatever you want, Blake? If they don’t give it to you, you burn it. Is that how it works, Blake?” I used his name like an invective. “So what is it? Was it good for you, Blake? What gave you more pleasure? The fires? My fiancée? Or my father’s funeral?”

He pushed to his knees, shaking his head. “You’re wrong, Aidan.”

“Shut up!”

“You’re wrong.”

I kicked him in the side. It sounded like branches snapping. He buckled.

My legs trembled; my torso shook.

Blake gritted his teeth, pushed himself up on one knee, and with an arm around his abdomen rose to his feet.

I shook my head, my lips quivering. The gray powder beneath us lifted with a strong gust. It spiraled up and over our heads. I shut my eyes as dirt pelted my face, filling my hair. I blinked through specks and eyelash grime to see Blake squinting, a hand shielding his forehead.

The wind settled. Salt streams cut the dusty chap on my lips. My voice found little volume, only simple conviction in a straightforward sentence. “You’re setting these fires and sleeping with my fiancée.”

Blake shook his head and pulled the fingers of his gloves. “You’re wrong, Aidan.” He wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re wrong about the fires.”

CHAPTER
36

A
voice echoed from a distant corridor. “Hey, buddy. Hey, you can’t sleep here. Hey.”

My eyelids opened to a blur of blue shirts, haloed streetlights, and Gerald Montegue’s unmistakable stare, his deep Basque eyes like sheltered caves.

“Aidan?” He bent at the waist and put a hand on my shoulder.

Why did I have to be woken by A-shift?

“Aidan, what the—”

I struggled upright. “It’s all right.” My words slurred as I spoke. I wove a hand in the air and then brought it to my numb face, feeling with my fingertips the diamond pattern of the bus stop bench I’d passed out on.

Other guys on the crew laughed and shuffled. I felt humiliated. How many drunk patients had I run on like this? What day was it anyway? How’d I get there? I stared at my clothes for clues. “You guys seen my car?”

“No way.”

“I think he’s gone from Guinness to McCormick.”

Gerald straightened me with arms on my shoulders. “Come on now, buddy. This isn’t you. What’re you doing down here?”

I opened wide my eyes and blinked. Memories slinked in like late-arriving guests. “I . . . I think I was walking home from Patty’s?”

Montie said something to a fireman behind him. A captain with a clipboard nodded. With the streetlamp backlight I couldn’t make out his face. The fireman Montie spoke with came into focus.

Timothy Clark.

“Hey, Timoshee,” I said. “Working overtime?”

He came beside me and put my arm over his shoulder. “Just a straight trade, bud.”

Montie lifted my other arm. “Let’s get you a bed inside.” They stood. I tried but felt myself slipping between them. “Come on now, bro. There you go.”

I don’t remember getting into the back of the engine, or how I ended up in my cube on the third floor of the station. I woke a couple times to the sounds of alarms but quickly faded into sleep, unable to make sense or understand my place in it all.

The sound of diesel engines jostled me from a dream, something about skeletons selling suits on a beach. I was an empty-pocketed traveler. The brightness of the day inhabited the dorms, a clear reminder that the earth kept turning regardless of my schedule. I couldn’t stand up straight without a kettle ball knocking inside of my head, so I hunch-walked to the showers to cleanse the sweat and stench from me.

My knuckles were scabbed and my jaw clicked when I opened it. The washing of water brought a recollection of events. Like wiping dirt from a page, the story came clear.

After the fight with Blake, I didn’t go home when shift was over in the morning. I had stalled in the station kitchen, drinking coffee and reading the paper and not really talking to anyone. The C-shift crew disappeared. And among the oncoming A-shift guys my stay outlasted the easily excused. Questions kept popping up like, “You working this morning?” or “What rig are you on today?” and “Did you get a full twenty-four hours of overtime?” So I slid the pole and slipped out the back while the A-shift crews held roll call in the dayroom.

I had sat in the Cruiser with no destination in mind, but somehow my autopilot steered me to Patty’s, where I had to knock on the back door. He let me in and I helped him clean and prepare his few grilled and deep-fried menu items. He didn’t once ask why I was there, just swapped stories and shot the breeze and toasted a shot every hour on the hour.

The rest is fuzzy, with progressive dimming, like details of a landscape that slip away with the dusk. I had retired to the backseat of my conscious mind, setting cruise control to navigate the rest of the evening. Little flicks of images and flashes of feeling appeared like power poles and billboards through slanted back windows. The world went dark until I opened my eyes to see a four-man engine company staring down at me.

And there I was on this morning, drying from a shower. A-Shift leaving and B-Shift coming on. I called a cab to take me back to my car still sitting at Patty’s.