Pyro Read online

  EARL EMERSON

  Ballantine Books

  New York

  Table Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  About the Author

  Also by Earl Emerson

  Copyright Page

  FOR SANDY, WHO ALWAYS LIGHTS MY FIRE

  Everybody ends badly. There’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Only the lucky ones get to choose how and when. We all die. It’s what vultures are about.

  —E. Slezak

  1. THE PIANO MOVER FROM HELL

  Life has been a rocky road since that morning nineteen years ago when my brother and I killed Alfred. For want of a better term, the police said Alfred was our mother’s boyfriend, but we never thought of him as anything but an interloper, not until the moment Neil and I found our sneakers stuck to the floor in his blood.

  The morning of the murders my brother was eight days shy of his thirteenth birthday. I was ten.

  The papers called it an execution-style slaying, and it was partially due to their distorted portrayal of the event that my brother was tried and sentenced and packed away to a long series of increasingly harsher juvenile detention facilities. We made some mistakes that morning. Not that, given the same circumstances, we wouldn’t kill Alfred again. Because we would.

  In later years, our memories pasted over with hope and optimism, we decided that last drunken squabble between our mother and Alfred T. Osbourne started because Mother had been on the cusp of throwing him out. Maybe she’d found the gumption to do so. We certainly wanted to believe it. She’d never be able to tell us, since she died that morning too.

  We had thought life was about as bad as it could get until Alfred and his stinky feet and seminal flashes of madness came along. He was meaner than a boot full of barbed wire, and more often than not Neil was the object of this meanness. It was a testament to Neil’s courage that he didn’t run away.

  “I’m not leaving him with you and Mother. That is not an option. You just remember where we keep Uncle Oren’s Spanish Civil War revolver if we ever need it.”

  “I know where.”

  When she wasn’t drinking, our mother was too fragile to look out for the family, and when she was drinking, she was too drunk. Neil was the one who looked out for us. He’d been in that role for years.

  It was mystifying how our mother ended up with two men of such differing temperaments as Alfred and our father, but then, she had always been a sucker for a uniform. Our father had been a Seattle firefighter; Alfred, a former King County cop, although by the time we met him, he’d traveled a good distance downslope and was working as a part-time piano mover.

  There are things people never recover from, and for Emma Grant Wollf, it was the on-duty death of her husband six years earlier at an arson fire. Some people bend with adversity. Others break. Our mother fell solidly into the latter camp.

  During those years after my father died, our mother struggled with a string of minimum-wage jobs that seemed to disappear as quickly as the gin she spilled on the carpet, the three of us moving into and out of a dozen apartments and as many schools in half as many years. It wasn’t long before she began going through men as fast as she went through jobs, hooking up with a series of drunks she met in bars and, in one case, at the driver’s license bureau. Mom met Alfred in the Blue Moon Tavern. She frequented the Blue Moon because it was close to the University of Washington campus and she’d heard a rumor that published poets hung out there.

  Despite the cataclysmic change it produced in our lives, or perhaps because of it, that last morning together was so vaguely installed in memory, I found it difficult to bring back details. Odd, considering how much time I spend thinking about the past.

  My brother Neil ended up celebrating his thirteenth birthday in the youth detention center off East Alder, where he became an immediate celebrity in that palace of losers and lost souls, the only thirteen-year-old in the United States to have slain a former cop. “People leave me alone,” he told me during a visit. “They’re afraid of me.”

  The first decade of my life, Neil had been closer to me than anybody, yet for most of the next twenty years the majority of our communication constituted ten-minute collect phone calls from one prison or another.

  One thing I learned early on—happiness is elusive. You learn that when you’re ten years old and your brother’s in the clink and you’re being passed around from relative to relative. It’s elusive.

  Here are the facts as they stand today:

  I’m twenty-nine years old, the same age my father was when he died, the same age Alfred was when we killed him right after he killed my mother. I have one sibling, Neil. For the past eight years Neil has been picking up his mail at the State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. It’s the sixth time he’s been in lockup. You probably should know that in the law enforcement community, Neil is considered unpredictable and dangerous.

  I’m the brother who went straight.

  These days I work for the Seattle Fire Department, just as our father did. Until recently I believed I had a reputation for integrity and probity, and when other firefighters seemed wary of me, I told myself it was because they’d heard about Neil. Obviously there was more.

  For instance, the night I cold-cocked Chief Hertlein.

  It’s not something I’m especially proud of—impulsive violence.

  Say some jerk in a movie theater keeps rattling the cellophane wrapper on his candy. I turn around and object. He objects to my objection. I stand and block his view of the screen. He stands and tells me I’m an asshole. Next thing I know I’m walking out of the place in the middle of the picture and the cops are on their way. Mr. Cellophane goes to the hospital, where they wire his broken jaw shut. I know I’m bad. I
can’t help it.

  I escape that one. I escape them all through happenstance and a remarkable string of good fortune. Eventually I won’t escape. Eventually I’ll be in prison with my brother.

  For years I’ve known where I’m headed. I’ve known it and thus far have been unable to do anything to stop it.

  Before I punched out Chief Hertlein, I was assigned to Station 32 in West Seattle at the top of the hill near the YMCA. The station housed Attack 32, Medic 32, and Ladder 11. I was the lieutenant on Ladder 11.

  Even though his home base was miles away at Station 29, most days you could find Hertlein in our beanery bullshitting, eating our food, and throwing his weight around. Because he protected us from other chiefs and rarely drilled us, we tolerated his bad jokes and around-the-clock presence, though I found him annoying and boorish. He was a bully and a butt-kisser, and in our department the latter made him a fast-tracker. It was rumored he was up for a deputy’s position.

  The day it happened, the entire house was dispatched to an alarm at 1048 hours—the engine, the ladder truck, the medic unit, and the chief all swooping down off the hill to Pier 28 on the Duwamish waterway, just about a mile due south of downtown, where we found black smoke billowing from the hatches of a three-hundred-foot oceangoing ship.

  By noon there were fifteen engine companies, six trucks, and God knows how many chiefs in the dock area. While other firefighters poured water onto the fire, we pumped the excess accumulation out of the holds lest the ship sink from the added weight. In the end we sealed the hatches and filled the holds with CO2, beginning a process that would take days to complete.

  An hour before we were sent back to the station to clean up, a captain named Bill Coburn tripped on a hose line and fell down a gangway. In his mid-fifties and married to a younger female firefighter, Coburn was somebody who’d worked with my father and told me things nobody else ever did. I liked him. A lot. The fall killed him.

  I was in a pretty bad mood when Hertlein arrived back at the station just after we did and made a tasteless joke about Coburn’s voluptuous wife needing a fireman to “comfort“ her now that she was a widow, illustrating with a crass sexual gesture involving his meaty hand and thick hips. It was the type of thing Hertlein did all the time, though not usually under such dour circumstances.

  I was the only one who thought to slug him. Or maybe we all thought of it and I was the only one with the guts to follow through.

  You get an opportunity for a freebie with a guy like Bill Hertlein about once every hundred years, so I gave it everything I had.

  Turned it into a work of art.

  Hertlein, who was six feet and almost three hundred pounds, stagger-stepped away from my right cross, eyes rolling into his skull, his bulk striking the floor with a sickening thump that sounded like a waterlogged sofa falling off a truck. One member of my crew let out a barking laugh and then caught himself.

  Flat on his back, Hertlein began snoring.

  “He went down like a tree in a windstorm,” said one of the medics, spitting a plum pit into the nearby garbage can.

  “You really whacked him,” said the other medic, sipping his tomato soup.

  “It was a good one, all right,” Donovan added, through a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

  Rostow, who’d been out of the room when it started, felt the chief’s body shake the building and rushed back to find five of us standing over Hertlein. “Tell me you didn’t hit him,” said Rostow. “Jesus. Boy, this is sure going to be the end of your career. Please tell me you didn’t hit him.”

  I picked up my salad and walked over to the table with it.

  One of the medics knelt to attend the chief and said, “It’ll be interesting. Yeah, it’ll be real interesting to see what they decide to do with this one.”

  2. THE GOD BLESS AMERICA FIREHOUSE AND LOUNGE

  Chief Hertlein wanted to call in the cops but was soon talked out of it. The administration didn’t want his comments about Coburn’s widow to be made public. The witnesses were sworn to silence, in some cases threatened into it.

  While the story changed from telling to telling, everybody knew I was now the department bad boy. For months afterward I was transferred from one station to the next. Perhaps because he’d been promoted and was using his newfound power to bounce me all over the city, to the rank and file Hertlein had become the goat and I the hero. The bad boy hero.

  My current assignment was one I could walk to, Station 6, on the corner of Twenty-third and Yesler, catty-corner from the Douglass-Truth Library and directly west of the Catholic Community Services building. Six’s was an Art Deco style firehouse with a stubby flagpole above the center of two bright red apparatus bay doors. At night neon lightning bolts above the doors dazzled children and drug addicts alike.

  The building housed two units, Attack 6 and Ladder 3. I would be working on Ladder 3, my first truck assignment since June. I was ecstatic.

  The north side of the bay housed the engine, the south side the truck, both pieces of apparatus stuffed into their tiny spaces like bratwurst into a glutton’s mouth. From outside it didn’t look as if either rig could squeeze through the doors.

  I was placing my turnout boots-and-pants combo, coat, and helmet on the officer’s side of the truck in the tight, shadowy quarters up against the south wall of the apparatus bay when a woman in uniform edged around the front of Ladder 3.

  “Cindy Rideout,” she said, sticking out her hand. “I’m here for my probationary truck work.”

  We shook. Her grip was soft and damp. “This your first shift in the station?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Mine too.” I smiled. Rideout was a Native American, five-eight or -nine, with black hair, eyes so dark they too looked black. She was pretty enough that the other guys in the barn were sneaking looks at her. “How long have you been in?”

  “Almost four months, sir. I’ve been up at Thirteen’s.”

  “Is that your permanent assignment?”

  “It was. It looks like it might be up in the air now. Any special place you want me?”

  Jeff Dolan, the driver, had just stepped up onto the running board alongside his seat and was making silly smiles at me across the engine compartment while pointing to a spot between us in the front where nobody ever rode.

  “Ride behind me in the number three position,” I said.

  After we signed into the daybook in the watch office, Rideout and I inventoried the compartments one by one. The barn was humid and filled with the sounds from Twenty-third Avenue. A passing bus. Squawking kids on their way to school.

  In the six months since the Ocean Pride fire and Coburn’s funeral, I’d worked on all four shifts and in seven different stations, which had to be some sort of department record. I might have appealed for clemency to the chief of the department, but Hiram Smith, an alcoholic, was a man who surrounded himself with people whose job it was to keep him from looking inept, and it wasn’t his practice to contradict the orders of the men who were actually running the department. The odds of him interceding were almost nil. Besides, I didn’t want to give Hertlein the satisfaction of thinking he was anything but a tick on my thick hide.

  And . . . I was beginning to grow fond of the notoriety.

  There would be four of us riding Ladder 3. As lieutenant, I sat up front in the officer’s seat next to Jeff Dolan, the driver; Mike Pickett, a seven-year firefighter, and the probie, Cindy Rideout, would ride in the jump seats behind us.

  Sharing the station with Ladder 3 were the firefighters assigned to the engine, known as Attack 6: Lieutenant Stephen Slaughter, Bill Gliniewicz, and Zeke Boles. Slaughter was their ramrod. He and I had a mixed history. Gliniewicz was the driver on Engine 6 and Boles the tailboard man.

  Gliniewicz and I had worked together a time or two. He was one of those people who never met anybody he couldn’t say something bad about. All I knew about Boles was that he was rumored to be a crack addict and alcoholic. Slaughter had been my first offic
er in the department, which meant he’d taken up the approximate space in my life I would be taking up in Rideout’s. His father and grandfather had both been firefighters, and he was about as gung ho as you could get and not be in an institution. I was pretty sure he had an American flag stuffed up his ass and chewed red, white, and blue gum. On September 12, 2001, as a tribute to the firefighters who’d died the day before, he’d had the initials NYFD tattooed on his left forearm. It wasn’t until later that he learned New York’s Fire Department goes by the initials FDNY. Nobody laughed about it, though. At least not to his face.

  He was a hard man and intimidated people, including any number of chiefs. For reasons I never understood, he had written negative and what I believed were biased reports on me for a good long while as my first officer.

  After the housework was done, I called Rideout into my office. It was a tiny room with a bed in the corner—uncomfortably intimate, with the rain beating on the windows and the dark skies outside. Rideout was a high-breasted, long-legged woman with fine copper skin who made me nervous as hell.

  I told her the same thing I told every recruit I worked with. I told her how to stay alive. I told her she could increase her odds by staying hydrated and keeping physically fit. I told her what I expected from her. She listened and seemed eager to learn. Her probation would last another eight months, and for the time being I would be writing daily and monthly reports on her. It was a task I took seriously. If I let somebody through who wasn’t right for the job, he or she might end up dead. I didn’t want that on my conscience. And I didn’t want me or anyone else to end up dead because of them either.

  I told her what happened at the Mary Pang fire. What happened at the Leary Way fire. I told her about Coburn and the Ocean Pride fire last summer.

  She held my look—confident, self-assured, without any real idea of what she was getting into. She had recently turned twenty-two.

  “Any questions?” I asked when I was through.

  “Sir? There’ve been some arsons in the past week. I’m just wondering . . .”

  There had been half a dozen small fires in Station 6’s district, mostly late at night. So far nobody was overly concerned. “Don’t worry about it. We fight an arson fire just like we fight any other fire. We catch the guy. I break his neck. It’s that simple.” I grinned.