Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [105]
It would be better if he died. They would give him a hero’s funeral, shed a few tears when the bagpipes played, start a college fund in his name.
Media mavens had flown in from as far away as L.A. and San Francisco, and Oscar knew that as long as the story remained ongoing, as long as Gary Sadler was missing and the outcome of Finney’s hospital stay remained in question, there would be hourly updates. Breaking news, they called it. Chief Reese milked his minutes in the limelight, joking with the large-jawed news lady from KSTW-TV in Tacoma as if she were an old girlfriend, or as if he wished she were. Reese knew that once Sadler’s body was recovered, the media would stop focusing on the minute-by-minute events and begin digging into why it happened. When it came to that business about not promoting Finney, Reese was going to look damned near prescient.
At noon Oscar tucked his shirt in and wandered over to the traffic enforcement babe under the light at West Marginal and Michigan, a dishwater blond with a thick waist and an officious air about her that amused Oscar. They chatted for five minutes, and when he asked for her phone number, she pulled her lips into a thin smile and informed him that she had a boyfriend. Oscar said her having a boyfriend didn’t bother him in the least. Unlike a lot of Seattle males, Oscar Stillman wasn’t afraid of women. He told her so, said he’d grown up with six sisters and four aunts, had three daughters, and had been married and divorced three times. He liked women and they liked him, too.
He was still talking with her at 1300 hours when John Finney turned up. He was supposed to be dead, or close enough you couldn’t tell the difference, so Oscar was as surprised as anyone. Finney wore combat boots, hospital greens, and a pale blue woman’s cardigan sweater that was too small, most of the buttons in the wrong holes. The getup made him look like a mental patient on furlough. It was obvious he shouldn’t have been released from the hospital. He had bloodshot eyes, and his posture, which had always been erect and proud, was slouched and hunchbacked. He moved with the left-slanting gait and wobble of a dying goldfish swimming across the bowl, at times leaning on Diana Moore’s shoulder.
No matter what delusions he was harboring, no matter what crimes he might be guilty of, here was a fellow firefighter in obvious physical and emotional distress, and Oscar knew, no matter how many others kept their distance, the Christian ethic was to be friendly. It was Oscar’s practice not to abandon the Christian ethic unless there was some profit in it.
“John. John, how the hell are you?” Oscar said, approaching the duo as they made their way through the mute clusters of firefighters. Stillman had to step in front of Finney to get his attention. “Hey. Hey, how are you doing, guy? Aren’t you going to talk to your old buddy?”
“They find him?” Finney asked, his voice thick.
“You took a hell of a beating in there. We’re proud of you, boy.”
Finney, who had been staring into space as the crane removed a huge slab of concrete from the rubble, turned to Oscar, his eyes moist from the wind. “You’re what?”
“We’re proud of you.”
“You don’t even know what happened,” Finney said, brushing past him in a clear dismissal.
Oscar molded his lips into a smile as Diana Moore came abreast and gave him an apologetic look. Nothing like getting jerked off by a moron, Oscar thought. God, she was pretty for a firefighter. Up close her skin was flawless. And the gray in those eyes was something you could look into forever, like a lake you’d discovered up in the mountains that no one else knew about. She was a work of nature, all right.
As did many of the others during the