Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [17]
As they drove back to the station, Finney let the full impact of his promotion wash over him. To be truthful, he had butterflies in his stomach. He’d waited a long time to become a lieutenant. Eighteen years.
He had to laugh when highfliers outside the department presumed that remaining a firefighter was the mark of a loser. Perhaps it wasn’t exactly the fast track, but riding tailboard had always suited Finney just fine. Reporting for eight twenty-four-hour shifts a month gave him all the time in the world to keep in shape, to take long, rambling hikes in the Cascades or kayak trips through the San Juans, even to start a second business. For a while now he’d been toying with the idea of building kayaks professionally. He’d already built six of them, sold four, given away two. He liked the work and had every reason to believe that once he set his mind to it, he could make a business out of it.
But first and foremost he loved the straightforward hard work of firefighting. As a lieutenant he would still be fighting fire, and as a captain; but a chief’s job was all paperwork, personnel problems, and incident command. And those dreadful meetings. Finney couldn’t imagine being old enough or tired enough to want to be a chief.
Until recently Finney had worked his entire career on one of the city’s eleven aerial ladder rigs, referred to as trucks or sometimes simply ladders, to distinguish them from the thirty-three engine companies in Seattle.
Engines carried hose, couplings, and nozzles—and usually five hundred gallons of water. The motor served double duty and could run either the rear wheels or a built-in pump. At a fire the driver ran the pump and made the hose connections, while the officer and the nozzleman took a line into the building, where they located the seat of the fire and put water on it.
Trucks carried ladders, including a hundred-foot aerial, power saws, forcible entry equipment, hydraulic extrication tools, and high-angle rescue ropes and hardware. At fires, truck companies performed forcible entry, searched for victims, and ventilated the fire building, which was just as necessary to putting out a structure fire as a chimney is to a fireplace. Ventilation was accomplished either by laddering the roof and cutting a hole with a chain saw, or by mechanical means, with fans.
Finney treasured the unique challenges of truck work, and to him, a lieutenant’s spot on a truck seemed about as perfect as life could get.
10. CHUB O’MALLEY RETIRES
Finney always thought Station 10’s red apparatus doors, in contrast to its pale walls, looked like bright lipstick on a sickly streetwalker. The monolithic, four-story structure at Second Avenue South and South Main Street was in a small corner of old town called Pioneer Square and had been Finney’s home away from home until last June, when he’d requested a transfer after Leary Way. He still loved the place, but there was no way he could work here again. Every time he showed up, he expected to see Bill coming around a corner.
Except for the occasional Saturday-night rowdiness next door at the Fenix Underground and the traffic tie-ups when one of the nearby stadiums scheduled a ball game or a new-car expo, these were sleepy streets, frequented by lost tourists, homeless schizophrenics, and panhandlers trying to put together enough quarters for another bottle of Night Train. Finney and the others on his crew had spent countless hours people-watching from the windows upstairs.
He couldn’t begin to count all the times his father had brought him here as a tot; he still had vivid memories of concealing himself in the cubbyholes around the station. Once, after his father told him how his own dad had thrown him into Lake Missaukee in Michigan to teach him to swim, Finney had leaped into the pool upstairs only to be fished out by kindly Captain Gagliani, who had only three fingers on one hand—a fact that both terrified and fascinated the five-year-old.