Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [6]
“No she isn’t. I’m dying. I got a syndrome.”
I turned from the window. “You serious?”
“Serious as a heart attack.”
“You seen a doctor?”
“Three of ’em. Brashears and the two specialists he sent me to.”
“What did they say?”
“Said something’s going on. Some sort of syndrome. They don’t know what. They ran tests. I’ll get the results next week.”
“There you go.”
“There I don’t go. By next week I’ll be dead.”
“You can’t know that.”
“But I do know it. They told the Fire Plug she was all right, too.”
“Jackie had a car wreck.”
It was true that North Bend Fire and Rescue had been suffering a string of bad luck. A month ago Chief Newcastle had set out on a weeklong solo hike, trying to get in shape for an ascent of Mount Rainier he was planning with a group of volunteers. Eventually the rangers found his pickup at a trailhead in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. Four days after that, a quartet of hikers found Newcastle’s body facedown alongside a spur trail near Painter Creek, just below Icicle Ridge. Except for some small animal bites, there wasn’t a mark on him. He’d been fifty-six. The autopsy concluded he’d died of hypothermia. A close friend and coworker dies sudden like that, it scares you.
A few days after the funeral, Jackie Feldbaum managed to drive her Miata sports car under the rear of a tractor-trailer rig on I-90, where she missed being decapitated by inches. She was now living—if you could call it living—in room 107 at Alpine Estates Nursing Home.
Ten days after Newcastle’s funeral and seven days after Jackie’s accident, Joel McCain, one of our other permanent-position firefighters, fell off his roof while pressure-washing moss off his shingles. Joel’s family had been keeping him under wraps for the last month. I couldn’t fathom the reasoning, though Beebe, who was friendly with the family, explained they were Christian Scientists and didn’t want any “mortal thought” to keep them from a “demonstration.”
“Three down, three to go,” Beebe said. “Newcastle, Joel, and the Fire Plug. You, me, and Karrie. We’re next.”
“Ridiculous. Newcastle probably had a CVA. And Jackie . . . you know she drank more in a week than you or I ever put down in a year. She’s lucky she didn’t hurt somebody else. Joel never was good with heights. He’ll be back.”
“Joel’s not coming back.”
“His wife said he was.”
“One of the volunteers ran into his brother-in-law in the store. He said Joel can’t even follow cartoons on the TV. No way he’s coming back. Trust me.”
“That’s just a rumor.”
“Maybe.”
Beebe had a tendency to blow things out of proportion. On top of that, I’d noticed when things began to go wrong he tended to slip into a vortex of self-pity, his mood precipitating more problems than the events spurring it.
“I’m scared,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Of falling off a roof. Dying in the woods. Crashing my car. Drowning in the tub. Think about it. They all lost control. All three of them.”
“You’re right about that.”
“Damn right.”
Stan Beebe was one of the few African Americans in the valley. These days we had urban commuters coming out our ears, but not too many years ago the town had been primarily made up of forest workers and their families, many of whom migrated to the Northwest after the timber ran out in the Southeast, bringing their Southern redneck attitudes with them. Crackers, Newcastle called them. Beebe managed to win them over to a man.
Beebe was a big man, the color of dark chocolate, round through the chest, with biceps like ham hocks and forearms thicker than a peckerwood’s neck; he routinely did repeats on the bench press downstairs with four hundred pounds. Occasionally he overheard a rude comment or got a look from one of the local crackers, but he was so good-natured, if it bothered him he never let anyone know, although a year ago Chief Newcastle sent him to Dr. Brashears for what he described as clinical depression. Beebe came back with a prescription for Zoloft and seemed better after that.
As titular head of the fire department, it would be my duty to send him back for more treatment if this current