Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [62]
“Trust me, this was a freak deal.”
I’d watched the blast send Haston’s helmet flying a hundred feet across the yard like a lost prayer. Saw a crow with a broken wing on the roof of a house, having fallen out of the sky. Later, the doctors found particles of aluminum from the outer walls of Caputo’s trailer embedded in Haston’s face. They removed several small pieces of insulation from under his scalp.
Pieces of Engine 1 had become projectiles. Strips of metal and burning debris had rocketed over our heads across the yard, striking the house or landing in the woods beyond the house. Twenty seconds after the blast, heavy metal parts were still dropping all around us.
A large chunk shook the ground when it landed forty feet away. A second later a sliver of metal knifed into the ground where the four of us had been moments earlier, burying itself eighteen inches in the turf.
Morgan began crying. Britney and Allyson looked out from under the motor home where they were hiding, their eyes huge and round and curious, just a little bit pleased with the whole thing. They didn’t want to miss any of this. I winked at them. Allyson winked back, but all Britney could do was scrunch up her face. In other circumstances it would have been hilarious watching her efforts.
When I figured everything that could fall out of the sky had fallen, I buttoned my coat, straightened my helmet, and stepped out onto the lawn to survey the situation.
Two of our volunteers dragged Haston back behind the motor home to protect him from a secondary blast, should there be one. On the radio, the Snoqualmie unit warned about the possibility of more blasts. We all knew from the antiterrorism classes we’d taken that planned terrorism events often came in pairs, the second explosion designed to catch the police and first-in rescuers off guard.
Trouble was, this wasn’t an act of terrorism. At least I didn’t think it was.
This was the work of a moron.
Except for Haston, whose face was almost as black as his truck, all the survivors on this side of the motor home looked pale.
Haston was shaking his head and repeatedly screwing his fingers into his ears, his temporary deafness a situation Hjorth and Arden were determined to exploit to the limit. “Trying to put another nickel in the meter?” Arden asked.
“Maybe it would work better if you shoved it up your ass,” Hjorth said. “A guy like you should always keep a pile of nickels up his ass. That way whenever you need change you can fart nickels.”
Hjorth and Arden laughed uproariously at the thought. Either they had gotten over the explosion more quickly than anybody else or they hadn’t gotten over it at all and abusing the mayor was their way of coping. It was hard to know with them.
A quick survey of the fire-ground personnel told me that except for an assortment of ringing eardrums and a few minor cuts, Mayor Haston had sustained the only real injuries.
We’d started out with five civilians—Haston, Caputo’s mother, my girls, and Morgan—along with eight firefighters, four paid and four volunteer, so it was a relief nobody had been killed. North Bend could easily have lost thirteen people.
Fourteen, depending on where Caputo was.
We waited five minutes. During that time the officer on the Snoqualmie rig got on the air to ask if we were all right. I gave a status report and added that they’d better start searching for spot fires, because from our vantage point we could already see at least one off in the trees. Nothing burned faster than a dry Douglas fir, and the area was well populated with them.
When I got off the radio, Caputo’s mother confronted me, eyes empty, lips quivering. “What does this mean? Where’s my son?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. I don’t know where your son is.”
“What’s this?” She gestured at a large chunk of pink insulation from the trailer’s walls that had drifted out of the sky like a piece of cotton candy. “Tell me about this. Can anybody tell me what this means?”
Ian gave me a beleaguered look and draped his