Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [96]
“I could be wrong about this,” Sadler said. “So I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention it to anyone.”
“Sure. What’s that you got around your neck? That a cross? You ain’t gone Jesus on me?”
“Yes, sir. Not that I’m perfect, mind you. I guess Jesus is why I came by today. He told me to ask if there was anything I could do to make you more comfortable.”
“I figured when I got sick, religion would grab me by the nads, but it didn’t. I still think it’s for suckers. But you can do one thing for me. Would you try to make things work with John? Even if he don’t know it, Leary Way’s eating a hole right through him. He needs every scrap of understanding he can get. That’s what you can do for me, Gary. Be a friend to John. Look out for him.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Thank you.” The old man shook hands with Sadler, his grip weak, his palms sweaty.
Driving across the West Seattle viaduct toward I-5, Gary couldn’t help thinking about the night of the Leary Way fire. Gary had been on Engine 26, the only unit in the south end not at an alarm at four in the morning. The three of them had been in the watch office—Sadler, Monahan, and Jenkins.
A worried dispatcher had called on the main phone and told Sadler they’d been out of contact with Chief Finney for nearly an hour, that he’d disappeared from a fire in the Fifth Battalion. They’d used the radio, they’d paged him, they’d called on his cell phone. Even though he wasn’t supposed to be at Station 29 where he was stationed, they’d hit the bell there repeatedly. The vanishing act had begun a few minutes after the dispatchers told him they’d tracked the distress signal at Leary Way to his son’s radio. Nobody realized until later that Finney had left his radio with Cordifis.
Monitoring channel fourteen, the channel reserved for ordinary department business, Sadler and the crew on Engine 26 climbed onto the rig and began driving the south half of the Seventh Battalion. Just before dawn they found him parked on the grass in a small park, Riverview play field, where he had a somewhat obstructed view from the promontory that looked out over Harbor Island, downtown Seattle, and beyond that, Queen Anne Hill. The red Suburban’s motor was running. In the distance he’d been watching the glow in the sky from Leary Way.
Even after they told him his son was alive, he didn’t snap out of it.
They ended up driving him home, Sadler and his crew sitting with Chief Finney in his living room, his wife beside him in a nightgown, none of them knowing quite what to do until the medics got there.
Two weeks later, Chief Finney retired.
47. THE LAUGHING FIREFIGHTER
When the bell hit at twenty minutes before midnight on Monday, November 3, the overhead lights came on automatically with the alarm, just as they always did. Finney found himself laughing. He wasn’t sure why, perhaps because he’d been awakened from the first truly deep slumber in recent memory, perhaps because he’d been dreaming about the good time he’d had with Diana the other day. They’d spoken on the phone at work, too, just before going to bed. As he pulled on his socks and stepped into his rubber boots and bunking trousers, the dispatcher’s urgent voice awakened him fully.
“Time out: twenty-three forty hours. Engines Eleven, Twenty-six, Thirty-six, Twenty-seven; Ladders Seven and Eleven; Battalion Seven; Aid Fourteen, Medic Ten, Safety One; Air Twenty-six: West Marginal Way Southwest and Southwest Michigan Street. Channel one. Engines Eleven, Twenty-six . . .”
After the dispatcher gave three rounds of response information, she added, “A large volume of smoke reported from Bowman Pork Products.”
On the apparatus floor, Jerry Monahan wore a sleepy grin, his gray hair erupting from the sides of his head like whipped cream. They’d barely exchanged ten words all day—Monahan had been secreted away in the spare room working on his invention—and now this ingenuous