Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [13]
Even as he spoke, the bell in the corridor clanged.
Lieutenant Sadler came bustling down the hall from the beanery and immediately began tripping in the lengths of loose cable Monahan had left on the floor. He stood at the console waiting for the printout with the alarm information on it. Half a foot taller than Finney, Sadler had a thick black mustache that dominated his long face and a shock of salt-and-pepper hair he combed to one side. He spent much of his free time at the station talking on the phone to girlfriends, former girlfriends, prospective girlfriends, ex-wives, and women whose phone numbers he’d collected but whose names he’d lost or forgotten. Finney felt sorry for all of them.
“Four Avenue South and South Main Street?” Sadler said, scanning the run sheet on his way to the apparatus floor. “This has got to be a mistake. That’s nowhere close to our district.”
“They’ve got two working alarms in the north end,” said Monahan with an exuberance Finney found out of character. There were firefighters who responded to every fire call as if they’d just been handed a ticket to the World Series, but he knew Monahan typically reacted to each alarm as if he were about to have his ass sewn shut.
A mile from the station, turning off East Marginal Way onto Fourth Avenue South, Finney heard the radio crackle. “Engines Twenty-six, Twenty-two, Thirty-two, and Eleven; Ladders Twelve and Six; Aid Five, Medic Sixteen; Air Twenty-six, Battalion One: Four Avenue South and South Main Street, the Downtowner,” said the dispatcher. “Channel two. Engine Twenty-six?”
Lieutenant Sadler keyed the mike in his hand. “Engine Twenty-six, okay.”
“Engine Twenty-six. This was a pull station activated on floor seven.”
“Engine Twenty-six, okay.”
Sadler pressed the mechanical siren button on the floor. After all these years the growling of the old-fashioned siren still gave Finney a bit of a thrill. These days it was about the only thrill left.
8. FOOD ON THE STOVE
Racking the microphone on the dash, Lieutenant Sadler wrenched around in his seat and raised his voice so Finney could hear him over the siren and the roar of the diesel motor. “That’s your old stomping grounds, isn’t it? Ten’s district?”
“The Downtowner’s a residential hotel,” said Finney. “The panel’s inside the front door on the left.”
Formerly a hotel serving travelers from the King Street train station a block away, the Downtowner was now a low-rent, nine-story apartment building inhabited by elderly pensioners, immigrants who spoke little or no English, alcoholics, the formerly homeless, and the recently paroled. Nine times out of ten a call there was a false alarm. In eighteen years at Station 10, Finney had been there hundreds of times.
It was a long drive up Fourth Avenue through the industrial area, past Sears, the new baseball stadium, the Amtrak depot, and into the lower reaches of Chinatown. This area had been tide flats a hundred years ago. As they passed Station 14, Finney caught a momentary glimpse of recruits practicing behind the tower. His brother had told him they all knew him by name and his story. It pissed him off that most of them probably felt superior to and sorry for him.
Driving faster than department regulations decreed or his own skills dictated, Jerry Monahan gripped the wheel tightly, his body tipped forward. Monahan was one of those people who, no matter how much training he had under his belt, would still panic in an emergency.
Finney knew it was a trademark of the Seattle Fire Department that ineptitude such as Monahan’s would be either studiously ignored or steadily rewarded—never punished, rarely corrected, and in most cases barely acknowledged. Common sense having been crippled by an elaborate set of civil service regulations and union rules, chiefs tended to shuffle their problems to other battalions or isolate them in quiet stations where they could do the least amount of damage. In order for Monahan to lose his job or even be demoted from the coveted driver’s position, he would have to be convicted of a felony or commit