Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [60]
On the other side of the street, I set my daughters down and looked back as Ben, Karrie, and Ian ran across the road behind us. “You girls hide behind that motor home. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Something in my voice told them not to ask questions.
I jogged back to Caputo’s driveway just as a black pickup truck pulled into the drive and plugged the opening.
I stepped around to the darkened driver’s window and found myself confronting Steve Haston. He wore full bunking gear and a white chief’s helmet. He’d never been a chief. For the last five years he hadn’t even been a volunteer. Then, I noticed he had Newcastle’s gear on, Newcastle’s gear that had been hanging on a hook in the firehouse for the past month, the gear nobody had the heart to dispose of. The coat was too short in the arms by about five inches.
He said, “The fire’s behind you, Jim. You got everybody going the wrong direction.”
“Get your truck out of here. Even if this place wasn’t a powder keg, nobody parks their personal vehicle in the driveway at a fire scene. You know better than that.”
“Powder keg? What are you talking about?”
“The trailer is full of ammonium nitrate.”
He laughed. “Ammonium nitrate? Isn’t that fertilizer? By the way, you’d better tell Snoqualmie to get down here. They’re back a ways pulled off the road.”
“The trailer is on fire, and it’s going to blow. Now get the hell out of here.”
“No can do, buddy boy. I’m taking over as incident commander.” By now everybody else was off the premises. Accompanied by a thick, fast-moving plume of black smoke, flame began to emerge out the front door of the trailer. The pump on Engine 1 was still running, although somebody’d shut off the siren. “I’ve decided, in light of how you people lost control of the department with the health issues and so forth, that somebody needs to get on board and take charge. I guess that’s going to be me. Now you get those people back in here and fight some fire.”
“Good-bye, Steve,” I said, walking away. “I’ll see you get the best funeral the city can afford.”
“What?” he shouted out his window. “What?”
Moments later Haston’s truck sped across the road in front of me. In reverse. He parked on the lawn in front of a ranch-style house about seventy feet beyond where my girls had taken refuge. The way he was driving, we were lucky he hadn’t run over anybody.
We were not quite directly opposite Caputo’s place, shielded by a motor home, as well as by a small hillock on the edge of Caputo’s property. I figured we were almost two hundred yards away, but somehow it didn’t seem far enough. I had no idea how much ammonium nitrate was in the trailer or how much of an explosion it might produce, or even if it would explode. Years ago in Kansas City, when a burning construction trailer blew up and killed six firefighters, windows were knocked out over a mile distant. The noise was heard ten miles away.
Like a mother bird spreading her wings, I opened my bunking coat and enveloped my daughters under the fire-retardant Nomex material. When I motioned to Morgan, she gathered close, too. “Is there really a bomb?” she asked in a small voice.
“I guess we’ll find out.”
As we huddled, I began to have misgivings. In my twelve-year career, I’d never seen anybody pull everyone out of a fire building. I was going to look either prescient or remarkably stupid. It was possible I’d misread the evidence. After all, what had I uncovered? An injured dog, some empty sacks, a couple of oil barrels.
And why would Caputo turn his trailer into a makeshift bomb?
Stump blasting. Of course. He’d been blasting stumps. Why hadn’t I thought of that sooner? Now that I thought about it, stump blasting made a whole lot more sense than anything else. Whether or not the materials were inside the trailer was another story.
Beside us now, Ian Hjorth said, “Did I hear you say bomb?”
Ben Arden unbuckled his backpack