Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [34]
“He told you I would be here today?”
“Said sometime after lunch.”
Outside in my truck, I opened the envelope with a deliberation verging on dread.
Inside I found a small sheet of paper torn off a stationery pad. The note said: Jim, my friend. Your turn to carry the torch. A three-by-five card fell out of the envelope, one side blank. The other side had a hand-printed list:
Day 1: Tingly hands that shake.
Day 2: Waxy hands, weak legs, and mild headache.
Day 3: Worse headache, dizziness, falling down.
Day 4: Headache goes away, cannot keep food down.
Day 5: Stomach problems disappear. Blurred vision, ringing in ears, syncope.
Day 6: Everything seems fine except the ringing in ears is louder.
Day 7: Now you a zombie.
Good luck, my friend.
It was signed: Stan.
I said, “Good luck to you, too, my friend.”
17. SEVEN SACRED DAYS INSIDE STAN’S LOCKER
Somebody convinces you you’re going to be brain-dead in a week, believe me, it gets the gears whirring. They can get to whirring pretty fast. For a few seconds there on the drive home, I thought I was going crazy.
A million courses of action raced through my mind. I wanted to call Jackie Feldbaum’s common-law husband and ask whether in the days immediately preceding her car accident Jackie had experienced any of the symptoms from Stan’s list. I wanted to ask Mary McCain about the circumstances of Joel’s fall.
Now that I thought about it, Joel’s roof was practically flat. How do you fall off a flat roof?
I’d scoffed at Stan’s theories, but now I knew why. From the first there had been a strain of truth to what he’d proposed. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall kill you.
If Stan’s theory was correct, I was on day two of my last week as a recognizable human being.
Apprehension and dread were beginning to make my stomach queasy.
I wanted to convene a presidential commission to investigate. I wanted to call the FBI, the CIA. I wanted the Vatican in on it. I wanted somebody important to tell me this was all a mistake.
Whether Stan’s end had been a self-fulfilling prophecy or an inescapable bullet of destiny I could not say. Stan obviously felt getting crushed under the wheels of an eighteen-wheeler was preferable to years with a brain that functioned below the level of that of your common house cat. But was that really where his brain had been headed? On the other hand, maybe he’d turned into a zombie out there on the highway. Maybe losing his mind had caused the accident.
If Stan’s hypothesis did nothing else, it introduced a comprehensive theory of what had been happening to North Bend Fire and Rescue in the past weeks. The only comprehensive theory I’d heard.
Parking across the street from the station, I got out of my truck just as one of the volunteers showed up, a community college student named Jeb Parker, a happy-go-lucky young man who reveled in the camaraderie of our little fire department.
“Forgot your Big Gulp?” he said, laughing at the large cup still glued to my roof.
I went into the station, jogged up the stairs past Ian and Karrie, who both asked, “How’d it go?,” and found Stan’s clothing locker in the bunk room. Padlocked. I jogged back downstairs to the apparatus bay and retrieved a pair of bolt cutters from a side compartment on the engine.
“Pretty bad?” Ian asked, having followed me upstairs the second time.
“He’s been telling her something was going to happen all week.”
“What do you mean, ‘something was going to happen’? Like what?”
“Like what happened.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
Squeezing the bolt cutters, I watched the shackle on the lock split in half and fall to the floor. All of Stan’s clothing had been removed from the locker, the remaining articles arranged neatly: two cans of soup on the top shelf, a pair of sunglasses, a pencil, several three-by-five cards, and a manila envelope labeled in Stan’s cramped lettering: HAROLD LEVY NEWCASTLE AUTOPSY REPORT. Poor Stan had squandered a portion of his last week making certain nobody had to clean up after him.