Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [21]
She left him to his own devices in a large office with a tall ceiling and a desk sporting photographs of Reese’s family. Hanging on the wall behind the desk, where you couldn’t miss it if you tried, was a Governor’s Lifesaving Award, praising BATTALION CHIEF CHARLES REESE for his actions the night of June 7. Surrounding it were framed photos and newspaper clippings chronicling Reese’s meteoric career, including a photo from Time magazine of Reese and Robert Kub running out of the Leary Way building in front of a ball of flame. It gave Finney the creeps. Maybe they should all chip in and buy Reese a scrapbook for this stuff so he wouldn’t have to plaster his ego all over the walls.
The search for Bill Cordifis had been the pinnacle of Reese’s career. Written up as a hero in the regional and national papers, Charlie rode his renown into the chief’s office three months later.
It occurred to Finney that Leary Way was the defining moment in the careers of both Reese and himself. Finney went into the burning building with a partner and forty-eight minutes later came out alone, burned, confused, disoriented, barely able to walk. Even though he, too, failed to bring Cordifis out, Reese went into that same burning building and came out as chief of the department. Finney sometimes wondered if his dislike of Reese was nothing more than envy—but no, his opinion had been formed eighteen years before, when they entered the department in the same drill school.
It was twenty minutes before Charlie Reese showed up, which was about ten minutes after Finney figured the chief had succeeded in making his point.
At five foot five, Reese was a short man in a profession of giants. He had unwavering eyes and wavy black hair. He wore loose-fitting trousers and an off-white dress shirt, the collar of which captured a wedge of soft flesh just below his chin. He’d been handsome once, and would still have been handsome, Finney thought, if he hadn’t let so much of his personality leach out into his face.
After shaking hands, Reese smiled slowly. “Whoever would have thought, huh? You and me. Here in this room.” He laughed.
“From day one you said you were going to be chief of the department.”
“And now here I are.” Reese laughed again, then walked around the desk and sat heavily in the leather chair. “So tell me, how’s your old man?”
12. UNTIL THEY PRY MY COLD FINGERS OFF THIS DESK
“Six months ago when they diagnosed it,” Finney said, “they told him aggressive treatment might give him a year at the outside, but he opted out of that. He doesn’t want to live the twilight of his life driving back and forth from the hospital. Mostly, he’s playing golf. When he has the strength.”
It was bad enough that his father was dying, worse that he was dying of cancer, an occupational hazard among firefighters, and it prompted Finney to wonder what toxins had banked up in his own system during the nearly two decades he’d been a firefighter. He knew that because of the twenty- to thirty-year gestation period of many cancers, firefighters frequently retired just in time to discover they had six months to live.
“He was a stubborn old fart,” said Reese, grinning.
“Still is.”
Finney resisted the temptation to toy with the set of lieutenant’s bars in his pocket, a gift from his father, who couldn’t get enough of the fact that his younger son, with whom he rarely saw eye-to-eye, was finally going to be an officer. If his father didn’t live long enough to see him make captain, at least he would see Finney wearing his own battle-tested lieutenant’s bars. Finney’s older brother, Tony, the apple of his father’s eye, made lieutenant twelve years ago and captain shortly thereafter, all according to the old man’s schedule. The fact that Tony then went into a long tailspin precipitated by a gambling habit and two volatile divorces from the same woman somehow evaded their father’s radar, a situation Finney