Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [10]
Eleven minutes after Finney came out, Battalion Chief Reese and Robert Kub were ejected from the building like corks popping out of a bottle. She’d never seen anything quite like it, and apparently neither had the newspaper photographers who captured it on film: two men running, ducking low, only a couple of feet in front of a fireball that obliterated everything else in the frame.
Moments after Reese and Kub emerged, Reidel approached the fiery doorway from the side, stooped low, and peered inside for signs of Cordifis.
Until she saw the stricken look on Robert Kub’s face as he plowed through the gang of reporters, Diana assumed Cordifis had been taken out another exit by a second team. But Kub didn’t resemble a man returning from a successful mission; he seemed like a man in need of a quiet place to cry.
As soon as he whipped off his mask, film and radio crews swarmed Chief Reese like flies on bad meat, pushing their microphones under his nose as they lobbed questions. Over the years Diana had heard contradictory stories about Reese, but it was amazing that he had so much command of both emotion and intellect at a time like this. He’d risked his life but had lost neither his equilibrium nor his composure. Diana watched as the battalion chief looked stolidly at the cameras.
“We went in and within a minute we found one firefighter wandering around alone,” Reese began. “He was in a panic and wasn’t any help at indicating where his partner was. We guided him outside and then went back down the direction he came from, but there wasn’t anything there. We searched as long as we could, but were finally forced out by the heat.”
“So who’s bringing him out?” one of the reporters asked. “There were two men lost, right? Who’s bringing out the other one?”
“To the best of our knowledge, he’s still in there.”
At that moment a section of the roof collapsed. Diana watched a thin tongue of orange shooting out the top of the doorway Cordifis and Finney had gone in, the doorway she herself had used earlier. It was inconceivable that anybody else was emerging alive from that tinderbox.
For a while Baxter stood next to her. Thomas Baxter was one of those people who talked out his problems, the nexus between his mouth and brain unencumbered by the normal barriers associated with self-censorship or second thoughts.
“How?” Baxter asked in his faded southern accent. “How in hell could he work thirty-six years and then have this happen? With all his experience. Christ! John must have killed himself getting out. You see his neck?”
“I saw it,” Diana said, shuddering to herself. Most firefighters didn’t think about getting burned because it didn’t happen all that often. But when it did, it was ugly.
“Bill almost went off a roof over on King Street last winter. House fire. His knees buckled. If John hadn’t been there . . . Last couple of years John’s been following Bill around like a mother hen. Cordifis should have retired a long time ago. Boy, we sure dodged the bullet tonight, didn’t we?”
Diana turned her back to the fiery spectacle. “I guess you could say that.”
PART TWO
OCTOBER:
FIVE MONTHS LATER
7. TOUGH TITTY
John Finney’s story was one of the first things the current batch of SFD drill instructors told probationary firefighters when they tried to spook them into quitting.
Finney didn’t know how specific the storytelling was, or whether the drill instructors mentioned that Finney was obsessed with Leary Way—that he’d grilled every member of every crew on the alarm, that he’d even constructed a miniature model of the complex as it was before the fire. Finney was well aware that some people thought he was losing his mind. But if people thought he was waging a futile crusade, tough titty.
Leary Way had ripped his life in half. Since that night in June he had not once gotten more than five hours of sleep in a twenty-four-hour period. Leary Way was all he thought about, and he knew it was all others thought about when they saw him. He wasn