Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [120]
“You guys never went down that corridor.” Kub had no answer for that. “Where did you search?”
“Not in that corridor.”
“I don’t get it. Why lie about it?”
Clenching his jaws, Kub said, “I never lied.” Kub glanced at the long-legged woman, but oddly, she didn’t seem interested in the proceedings. She sat down in a leather armchair to wait. “I never took no award. I didn’t want it.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“God, I’m sorry.” Kub dropped down into a squat, his back propped against the wall, his long fingers cradling his face. “You know how long it had been since I had a mask on?”
“Save the excuses for your mother. Just cut to the chase.”
“Shit. I hadn’t been in a fire in eight years. I almost couldn’t even get the mask to work. We were just a couple of guys who hadn’t fought fire in a while trying to do our best. We honestly thought we were going to find you both.”
“Go on.”
“We searched two rooms right near the entrance, but the smoke was so disorienting. Then before we knew what happened, we ran into you, and you were like some sort of . . . Your face shield was half-melted, and smoke was coming off your shoulders, and you looked like you’d just been dragged out of a steamer trunk somebody’d put in a furnace. Skin was coming off your ears. You could barely move, but you told us to go down the corridor you’d come up, that we’d hear your PASS device outside a hole in the wall. Twenty-eight steps, you said. Like we were going to go down there and end up looking like you. We were scared, but we were headed that way after you left, and then a gust of heat came down the corridor and forced us onto our knees. Reese was leading, and for the longest time he just knelt there in front of me. Finally I said, ‘Aren’t we going to do anything?’ And he said, ‘Calm down. Wait another minute.’ We couldn’t see shit, man. It was like somebody put sticks in our eyes. To make matters worse, we heard electrical wires popping. Every time we moved I kept thinking we were going to get electrocuted. Tell you the truth, I think we both figured if we waited long enough, Cordifis would come marching out of the smoke just like you did.”
“I told you he was trapped.”
“I know.”
“How long did you wait?”
“I’m not sure.”
“A minute? Two minutes?”
“Longer.”
“Five?”
“Longer.”
“Are you kidding? Ten minutes?”
“Maybe.”
“But you were practically on top of him.”
“I kept tapping Reese on the shoulder. He kept saying not yet. It wasn’t like we sat down and said we’d wait ten minutes.” Tears were running down Kub’s face. He wiped them away with his opposite index fingers, moving them side to side like windshield wipers.
“What were you waiting for? As long as there’s fuel and oxygen, a fire gets worse. You know that.”
“We were calling him. We never stopped calling him.”
“I’m sure that gave him some comfort as he burned to death.”
“When it started coming down on us, we turned around and made a run for it. By then we could hear flame ripping down the corridor. Man, it sounded like a freight train. I’ve never been that scared. Next thing I know, I’m trying to cool off under a jiffy hose and Reese is in front of the cameras. I never heard what he said until the next day. I swear. Then what was I supposed to do? Call a news conference and say he was conning everybody? You know how I freeze up in front of a camera. After a while I thought, why not make it all a little more heroic than it was? What was it going to hurt?”
“Oh, yeah. You didn’t hurt anybody.”
“I didn’t think about you until later. All I knew was I couldn’t start a scandal, and nothing I said was going to bring Cordifis back. Then, after a few days, Reese told me if I contradicted him, it would blow any opportunity I might have as an insurance investigator for a private company. You know I been counting on that second income after retirement. The way that fire was running, we probably couldn’t have got him out anyway. You know that.”
“You’ve had a lot of time to work on your excuses, haven’t you?”
Somewhere in the room a pager went off. As Kub went to get it, Finney became