Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [66]
“A fire engine?” she asked. “You sure?”
“I know what they look like.”
The officer, who didn’t like his sarcasm, took his license, radioed her superior, and ran Finney’s plate. A few minutes later the sergeant on watch showed up and gave him a sobriety test.
After evaluating the scene for a few minutes, the sergeant spoke to the first arriving officer, whose name tag identified her as D. M. MANSON. “You call the fire department?”
“Yeah. No reported accidents.”
“It was a Seattle Fire Department engine,” Finney said. “It had the decals on the doors.”
“You know which one?” Officer Manson asked.
“I didn’t catch the unit number.”
The two police officers made Finney feel as if he were standing in high-water pants with mismatched socks and flecks of a chicken TV dinner in his teeth. Clearly, they thought his story was fishy. They gave him a case number and told him to call later in the week.
“You’re not going to check fire stations?”
The sergeant looked at Finney. “No point in making work. If the department had an accident tonight, we’ll hear about it.”
33. AIR 26
When Finney arrived at work the next morning and learned Hank Jovi was taking the shift off on dependent care disability, he quickly volunteered for Jovi’s slot on the air rig. There were certain advantages to driving the air rig, advantages he could put to good use on this particular day. For one, he was exempt from Engine 26’s alarms and had freedom of movement between stations. However, he would be responsible for routine delivery of air bottles to stations around the city and would be called to any fire where replacement air bottles were needed.
Finney had tossed and turned all night after the accident. But then, it was no accident. Even if the first pass had been accidental, the second and third charges had been deliberate. In order to avoid hours of scrawling out accident reports, a cagey driver might touch up a scratch on the rig with cardinal red or buff it out with automobile polish, but that only worked with minor scrapes. Last night’s rig had to have some serious damage. If it was a fire department rig, somebody would know about it, and Finney aimed to find out who.
One possibility he was considering was that maybe one of the mechanics from the Charles Street shop, which was only blocks from the accident site, drank a few beers while working late and decided to go for a test drive. He wondered if it was possible one of the outlying fire departments had a unit that looked like Seattle’s, although, unlike Seattle’s traditional red, most of the outlying districts used lime-yellow paint schemes so they would be more conspicuous.
Finney couldn’t decide if the hours he’d spent on Airport Way had anything to do with the attack or if the timing and location had been coincidental.
He’d telephoned the police that morning, but they didn’t have any news. He called the Safety Chief, Stephanie Alexis, a cheerful, good-natured woman with forceful, often controversial opinions on how the fire department should be run, but Chief Alexis reported no vehicular accidents for yesterday’s shift.
As much as he was plagued by Leary Way and puzzled by Riverside Drive, last night’s attack bewildered him even further. More than bewildered—he was pissed. Some damned fool had tried to kill him. He couldn’t believe how angry he was. Maybe he should have been this angry last night. Ever since Leary Way, things had taken longer to sink in, all things, as if his emotions had a blanket around them.
As soon as the housework was finished, Finney drove the air rig to Station 14. In back of the station he could hear the recruits in the current drill school hard at work, the shouting of orders, heavy-duty aluminum ladders rattling, the calflike bellowing of the prime pump on an engine. A bellowing again as some luckless recruit fought to get it right on his second attempt.
Fourteen’s was a Spanish-style building with towers, a tile roof, and stucco walls. Its look hadn’t changed much from the mid-thirties or from 1962 when Finney’s father had been stationed