Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [65]
Up the street he could hear the blatting of the Jake brake; fire vehicles were the only diesel trucks allowed to use compression brakes within the city limits. They worked off the engine and made a loud coughing sound when the driver eased off the accelerator.
It had all happened so quickly.
As he thought it through, he realized the driver might have felt Finney wasn’t moving over properly and decided to teach him a lesson by coming close, then had misjudged. He knew how frustrating it could be to drive an emergency vehicle through city traffic. Few people actually obeyed the law and moved over. They ignored you. Or stepped on the gas trying to race you. They braked in the middle of the street. They stopped in the fast lane next to traffic that had already stopped in the slow lane, blocking the entire street. All sorts of stupid things.
As Finney inspected the damage to his vehicle, the engine turned around in the middle of the block.
The officer was probably on the radio right now calling for the safety officer, Battalion 1, and the police, informing the dispatcher that somebody else would have to handle the alarm they’d been on. Now the engine was facing him.
Finney began moving an instant after the driver floored the accelerator. The exhilarator, Captain Cordifis had jokingly called it.
Finney dove through the open passenger door, turned the key in the ignition, and pulled the Pathfinder forward so fast his tires smoked and the passenger door slammed shut with the movement.
Gusts of black diesel smoke thundered out the tailpipe as the engine accelerated toward him. His stomach was doing flip-flops. This guy was trying to kill him.
Finney steered for the concealment of a pillar, but the left wheels of his Pathfinder refused to negotiate the curb.
The engine had no such trouble; it bumped up over the curb and ran for fifty yards with two wheels on the sidewalk. For a moment they were on a collision course, and then Finney wrenched the wheel and the engine only nipped the left rear quarter panel of the Pathfinder. The jolt turned the Pathfinder counterclockwise so that it spun off the sidewalk and ended up in the street facing the direction the engine had come from.
The air horn on the engine had blown at the moment of impact; Finney’s ears were ringing.
He watched the fire engine swing around in a lazy circle down the street. Try as he might, he could see no crew, no officer—nothing more than a silhouette in the driver’s seat. This was crazy. In all his years in the department he’d never heard of an engine driver going berserk like this.
When he put the Pathfinder into reverse, the vehicle stalled. His front bumper was crumpled against one or both tires. He pushed down on the accelerator, and the Pathfinder made more noise and rocked and then settled back where it had been. Cold air blew in through the broken window onto his sweaty face. He couldn’t back up. He couldn’t drive forward.
And the maniac in the engine was coming back. Finney began to panic.
Like a man trying to rock his truck out of a snowy ditch, he shifted the transmission into first, gave it gas, slipped it into reverse, gave it gas. The fire engine began picking up speed, the wigwag headlights bearing down on him.
Once again, he shifted into first. Then reverse, where he felt something disengage. Suddenly he was racing backward across the street in a semicircle.
The engine swerved to react to his maneuver but caught only a part of the front fender. The crash shook Finney like a rag doll. The noise was horrendous, as if he were inside a garbage can being rolled downhill.
Five minutes later the first police cruiser arrived.
The officer’s hair was chopped short and dyed beet red, and she approached Finney with a curious look in her dark brown eyes. “You got a story?” she asked, taking in Finney’s Pathfinder. The engine had long since disappeared. Finney tried to make sense of it as he explained what had happened, but there was