Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [69]
“That’s so ridiculous.”
“Until you start examining the evidence.” Kub inhaled on his cigarette and peered up at the overcast sky.
Diana took off her heavy bunking coat and let the breeze cool her sweat-soaked SFD T-shirt. “What evidence?”
“I wish I could talk about it, but I can’t.”
“Any chance he actually had anything to do with it?”
Kub watched a quintet of gulls riding an air current thirty feet away. “I’ll tell you this. When it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck . . . We came in together, me and John.”
Kub withdrew a crumpled packet of Camels from his windbreaker pocket and, cupping his hands, set about the ritual of igniting another cigarette. In Elliott Bay a ferry steamed toward the dock from Bremerton. They watched in silence, while behind them the racket from a chain saw reverberated inside the tin-walled warehouse. The air smelled of cigarette smoke, salt water, sawdust, and from somewhere among the tourist shops on Alaskan Way, cotton candy.
“Does he seem different to you?” Diana asked.
“You mean after Leary Way?”
“He used to be so . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Confident?”
“That’s it.”
“Yeah, well, one way or another, it’ll work itself out.”
“I wish I were that optimistic.”
“You ever notice when a guy goes nuts—I’m not saying he’s nuts—I was just thinking about this . . . you ever notice when a guy goes nuts, he’s always the center of the universe? He’s always the only one who can get the secret formula to the president on time. Ever notice?”
Whatever Kub was trying to say, it didn’t make sense. “John’s not nuts,” Diana said.
35. THE KNOX BOX KEY
Although nobody had made any requests, at 2100 hours Finney told Lieutenant Sadler he was taking Air 26 out to deliver bottles.
Sadler and Brinkley were draped in recliners watching a prizefight on cable television, Sadler making sniggering comments about the blond in the bathing suit who circled the ring between rounds holding up a sign. Jerry Monahan was half-asleep in the empty office near the front door, a book in his lap titled Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance. Finney still found it hard to believe he was involved in anything as sinister as arson. But then it was also hard to believe Monahan was a firefighter. Or that he’d made and lost several millions of dollars. Or that he’d been a semipro football player.
Finney picked up his hooded foul-weather jacket and went out onto the dark apparatus floor, where he stepped up onto the officer’s side of Engine 26, opened the door, and reached across to an orange light on the dash. He unscrewed the plastic lens cap and disengaged the bulb so that when the current was tripped it wouldn’t light up, then replaced the cap. He lifted the spring-loaded lid on the small metal box that he’d always thought would make a good rodent casket, removed the most valuable key any department rig carried, and closed the lid. With the dashlight disengaged, no one would be the wiser.
He was taking a calculated risk that Engine 26 wouldn’t receive an alarm while he was gone, and if they did, that neither Monahan nor Sadler would notice the disabled light or the missing key. Probably because it had never happened, the department had not concerned itself with people stealing Knox box keys. The administration assumed that most people didn’t know what a Knox box key was and wouldn’t know where to find one if they did.
A Knox box was a small metal security box holding a building key, which could be installed by a property owner usually on a wall near the front door. Once sealed, a Knox box couldn’t be accessed by the property owners or even the police—only the fire department. The department’s assurance to property owners was to use Knox boxes only when lives or property was threatened, allowing emergency access without costly damage to expensive doors and windows.
Finney drove Air 26 to Airport Way past the Makado Brothers buildings and around the block to Eighth Avenue South. The buildings were dark. Below the freeway on Airport Way there was almost no traffic.
It was doubtful