Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [28]
Trying not to look at my own flaking waxy hands as I dialed, I called Tacoma General hoping to get a description of Holly’s hands, but nobody would talk to me about her condition.
Reluctantly I called Holly’s home number, where I knew Stephanie Riggs was staying. I got Holly’s answering machine, Holly’s voice still on the tape. “Hi. If this is somebody with good news or money, please leave a message. Everybody else call back.” She’d been cute in all things, having taken her phone message from the play A Thousand Clowns.
It was sad and a little bit eerie to hear her voice again.
I stewed about it for a while and then went into the officers’ room and began filling out next month’s night and weekend schedule. Our station was staffed with full-timers until five in the afternoon each day, volunteers the rest of the night; sleepers, we called them. The same thing on weekends. It was a complicated business keeping the station staffed, and I was worried about what might happen to our ability to do so once Beebe began spreading rumors that we were all dropping from exposure to some unidentified substance. It was a fruitcake theory, but rumors had a way of taking on a life of their own.
An hour later as the medic unit returned to the station, the bell hit for the second time that morning, an MVA on I-90 between the old winery and town, eastbound. It was promising to be a busy shift.
Three vehicles involved. Persons trapped. This might be good.
14. MOI—THE MECHANISM OF INJURY
The stretch of freeway where the accident had taken place ran straight for maybe a mile, firs on either side, a slope on the right, a distant glimpse of the blue mountains down at the end where the highway made a left sweep toward North Bend.
By the time we arrived, citizens were putting out road flares. The Bellevue medics, Rachel Heimeriz and Dan Logan, were peering into two of the wrecked vehicles, a car and a truck, the truck crossways in the center of the highway, the Volkswagen near the left shoulder. They were separated by about two hundred feet, the roadway a pastiche of broken glass, plastic parts, oil, and streaks of green antifreeze.
A third vehicle had gone off the highway into the trees on the right shoulder. If there was anybody still inside that one, we couldn’t tell from the road.
I told Karrie to get the pump running and lay a precautionary hose line, while I walked across the now-closed highway in front of the rows of waiting vehicles to see what the medics had.
“Sure you want a hose line?” Karrie asked.
“You ever see a trapped person burn to death in a car?”
One of Karrie’s weak points was her questioning of authority. It wasn’t so bad around the station when she asked if you really wanted the floor mopped, as if you might change your mind and decide to do it yourself, but fighting fire was a paramilitary activity and obeying orders in the field without hesitation was a vital part of the contract.
After surviving an initial training period at the state training center, Karrie was now seven months into a one-year probationary cycle. Her primary supervising officer, Joel McCain, had given her a poor evaluation the month previous, not because of lacking skills but because of her attitude, and warned her that if she didn’t modify her behavior, her job would be in jeopardy. It was something I would have to deal with now. Something I’d been trying to ignore.
The paramedics had split up, one to a vehicle. The pickup truck had rolled over on the driver’s side, and the roof was caved in, the passenger’s side door crumpled. What remained of the windshield space had been compressed until the gap was too small to extricate a patient. There were two males inside, both conscious