Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [60]
When Finney returned from Eastern Washington, one of his neighbors told him the fire department had interviewed him. By now G. A. Montgomery probably knew there was an hour Finney couldn’t account for the morning of the Riverside Drive fire. The only thing G. A. still needed in order to put the noose around Finney’s neck was for Annie or even a passing commuter to clearly identify Finney as the suspicious character outside the house before the fire took off.
On Tuesday C-shift worked a fairly typical shift. The chief in the Seventh Battalion gave them their monthly drill. Riding Engine 26 with Finney were Lieutenant Gary Sadler and Jerry Monahan. Their drill consisted of running a preconnect with supply and taking the hose line up a ladder to the roof of the station. The chief told them they’d done a good job and left while they were repacking dry hose and flaking the wet sections on racks for the hose dryer in the station. They cleaned up and went out to do building inspections before lunch. In the afternoon they fielded two alarms. One was to a single-family home where an infant’s head was wedged between the rungs of an antique crib. They lifted the squalling baby to the center and gently spread the slats with their hands. The other call was a false alarm to one of the Boeing plants off East Marginal Way.
At five-thirty Oscar Stillman showed up at the back door, squashing his face with its gap-toothed grin flat against the glass. Stillman, a born comic, worked downtown as a confidence testing officer and parked his private vehicle at Station 26 every weekday morning, leaving his department car in the lot each night. His habit was to drop in for a cup of coffee on his way home, making him an ongoing source of information for the members of Station 26. Now that he thought about it, Finney realized it was probably Stillman who gave Monahan the scoop about his not being promoted.
Wearing crumpled gray slacks and his department blazer, Oscar Stillman punched the coded lock box on the back door and sauntered into the beanery. Of average height, Stillman was in his mid-fifties, stocky, and hirsute everywhere except for his head, which was shiny on top but for a few long gray strands crossing from left to right. As always, he was as playful and friendly as a Christmas puppy.
Displaying teeth the size of baby corn, he stepped close and pumped Finney’s hand furiously. His glasses looked as if they’d been designed for a woman. His voice was deep and loud and cracked. “You really got fucked on that promotion, man. I don’t mind telling you. Nobody around here’s been fucked quite like that in a good while. Man, did you get fucked.”
“Thanks,” Finney said, trying to extricate his hand from Stillman’s tenacious grip.
“No. I really don’t know what he was thinking about. It’s hard to say. You know, when a guy gets that far off track . . . I want to go up there and give him a piece of my mind, even though everybody tells me he’d screw me next time he got the chance. But hell, I been screwed before and you know what?” Stillman winked. “I kind of liked it.” Stillman saw the look on Gary Sadler’s face and said, “Is that a little too homoerotic for you, Gary? It is, isn’t it? You know what your problem is? You’re scared to death of homosexuals. What you need is a big fat kiss.”
Stillman glanced at the others with a fiendish smirk, then started across the room. Sadler, afraid to run for fear he’d be chased, stood his ground and fended off Stillman’s grasping arms. In the end, Sadler let Oscar grab his face and give him a buss on the end of his nose.