Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [118]
“I’ve been back there. I cleared out the corridor where we met that night. I found the exact spot.”
“Have you now? What an astronomical waste of time.”
“Bill knew something was going to happen at Leary Way. One of you guys must have given it away somehow. I’m thinking you didn’t realize just how much he suspected. The night of the fire Bill ran into Stillman and cursed him out. I heard him call Oscar a bastard, but I thought at the time it was in jest; now I know he was serious. I didn’t hear what he said after that, but I think he was probably accusing Oscar of having something to do with that fire. A few minutes later when Bill got into trouble, Oscar steered the rescue teams to the wrong side of the building. And you, Charlie, you went in on the good side and made sure nobody found him from there.”
“You actually think we went in to keep Bill from coming out?” Reese’s face didn’t often show emotion, but he was incredulous now.
“You wanted Bill to die the same way you want me in jail. To shut him up. To shut me up.”
“This is bullshit!” G. A. said. “Let me cuff him.”
“No, no, no,” Reese countered. “I find this intriguing. Go on. Please. Weave your web. Let’s hear more.”
“I excavated that corridor where we met. My PASS device was maybe seventy-five feet straight down the corridor, twenty-eight paces. There was no way you couldn’t have heard it.”
“We never said we didn’t hear it. We heard it. We just couldn’t find it. Your directions took us in circles.”
“You said before that I didn’t give you any directions at all. And there weren’t any circles. I can take you or anybody else there right now and show you there were only two directions you could have gone: the way I showed you or back down the corridor the way you came in. The only other possibility was a corridor to the left, and that had a locked gate closing it off. You either went out or you went in. You couldn’t have gone around in circles.”
One of those people who only pretended to listen while waiting for his own turn to talk, Charlie Reese found an opening now and began telling his story, a story that had been told so many times it came almost by rote.
“No. Here’s what happened. You guys got lost, you and Cordifis. My personal theory is you panicked. You know how I know that? You never spoke on the radio. Bill did, but you never did. Later somebody said you were too amped to speak. I’d have to agree with that.”
“I didn’t speak because Bill had my portable. And we weren’t lost. A wall fell on us.”
Reese continued as if Finney hadn’t spoken. “The search didn’t sound like it was going well on the other side of the building. Nobody really had a clue where you guys were or how to get to you. It was such a huge complex, and there had been so many remodels. I’d listened to the captain’s directions and thought I knew where to send a search crew, but they were all on the other side. The only person I could find was Bobby Kub. I couldn’t send him in by himself, so we grabbed a couple of spare SCBAs and went in together. We searched a couple of rooms near the entranceway, then went down that long corridor with the jogs in it. That’s where we bumped into you. We could barely understand a word you said. We took you outside and—”
“You didn’t take me anywhere. I went out by myself.”
“Anyway, Kub and I continued on, but the fire was getting worse every second. We ended up crawling. We crawled along the right-hand wall. We hadn’t gone far when the heat got so bad we had to put our noses on the floor. We went down the corridor like that, on our bellies, searched a couple of rooms near the end, then worked our way back. It was so hot. I can still remember the sound of my facepiece sliding along the linoleum.”
“You have any trouble getting over the pipes?”
Reese stared blankly.
“In the corridor. You know. The pipes?”
Reese gave Finney a coy look. “You and I both know that floor was smooth as a baby’s butt. There were no pipes.”
“Is that a question or a statement?”
“If you found something on that floor when you were digging, it came down after we got out.