Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [26]
“I didn’t screw up at Leary Way.” Finney hadn’t meant to say the words; they’d just come out.
“I know that, John. We all know that.”
“You might. Plenty of others don’t. And I didn’t almost come to blows with him.” Finney sat next to Tony on the cold steel of Engine 26’s diamond-plate tailboard, looking out at the darkness through the windows in the roll-up rear door of the apparatus bay. He and Tony had never been close, and Finney wished it hadn’t taken their father’s illness to unite them.
For some minutes neither spoke. Then Tony opened his billfold and handed Finney fifty dollars. “Two weeks ago. Remember?”
It was a rare month when Tony didn’t put the touch on him. In the past it had been the horses, but these days he spent his free time at the Indian casinos, a predilection that was beginning to rock his third marriage the same way the horses had rocked the two marriages to Doris. So far his new wife, Annette, was more forgiving than Doris, but Finney could see the handwriting on the wall.
“Thanks for dropping by, Tony.”
“The gossip about Leary Way is bound to speed up after this. Not too many people like Reese, but he’s the man in the catbird seat. Watch your backside, too. Balitnikoff’s been telling everyone the reason you and Cordifis were paired up at fires was because Bill was baby-sitting you.”
“You kidding?”
“I know; I know. Anybody ever worked with you two knows it was the other way around. But a rumor is like busting a feather pillow in a windstorm. You never get all the feathers back. No point in trying.”
“Rumors are the least of my worries.”
“I’m glad you’re taking it so calmly.”
But he wasn’t taking it calmly. Balitnikoff. Besides having worked at Station 10 for the past three years, Marion Balitnikoff had been in and out of Finney’s life since he’d known Bill Cordifis. Finney had long ago been conscripted into the weekly Cordifis clan get-togethers, and frequently this meant spending time with Bill’s department pals, Marion Balitnikoff among them. Finney and Balitnikoff had crossed swords more than once. Uneasy about the way he ogled Heather, Cordifis’s youngest daughter, Finney had mentioned it to her father, who, either unwilling or incapable of thinking ill of his friends, dismissed Finney’s concerns out of hand. Balitnikoff was a family friend, and that was that. To make matters worse, Cordifis, for some reason, told Balitnikoff what Finney had said. Balitnikoff had never forgiven him.
Tony picked a piece of lint off his younger brother’s collar. “God, I was worried for you that night. We pulled in just as the roof on the west side caved in and fired up the sky. I thought you were going to die. They must have been working on you, oh, fifteen minutes, had all your clothes except your jockeys stripped off and were putting ringers into you, when one of the medics decided to get a core temperature. A hundred and six. The doctors told me hallucinations start at a hundred and five. Can you imagine how hot you must have been twenty minutes earlier when you were inside?”
To Finney’s way of thinking, the modern fire service had gone overboard in mandating protective equipment. During his first years on the job full bunkers had been optional. He’d worn a heavy bunking coat, a helmet, gloves, cotton—and later Nomex—pants, along with steel-toed work boots. Only at night or at the more hazardous fires would he climb into knee-high rubber bunking boots and the heavy bunking pants that came with them. In the old days their ears, necks, and skin around their facepieces were exposed. People who’d worked with that system liked it because, despite occasional steam burns, it gave them a valuable temperature gauge.
Now, mummified in a variety of heavy, fire-resistant garments, they often went so far into fire buildings they couldn’t get out safely. There was no way to tell how hot it was until it was too late.
And though the manufacturers touted the latest materials in heat transference properties, the fact was that even the best-conditioned firefighters