Into the Inferno Read online

  “Mr. Stuart? I’m Lieutenant James Swope with the North Bend Fire and Rescue in Washington State. Some of our people are having health problems we’ve connected to a truck accident last February outside of town here.”

  “That’s too bad, Lieutenant, but I don’t see how that has anything to do with us. We work with rocket propulsion systems.”

  “There was a box on the truck with your company’s logo on it. At least, I’m pretty sure there was. It was a big accident, and we know quite a few of the packages on board were damaged. Some of them were leaking. We’re trying to ascertain what sorts of products you might have been shipping.”

  “Well, the first thing you need to recognize is that we weren’t shipping anything last February. Most all of our trans-state shipping takes place during the warmer months.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive. All of that goes through our office here. Sorry we couldn’t be more helpful.”

  “Sorry to bother you.”

  So much for slap-shot, hit-or-miss technique. I’d do the rest of this by the book. One step at a time. Making sure of my facts before I wasted any more time.

  “Come on, guys,” I said to the girls, who were still in the room. “We’re going to take a little drive.”

  Seattle was thirty miles away. These days with all the new housing developments infringing on the green hills above Snoqualmie and Issaquah and with the traffic feeding off Highway 18, I-90 was a mess. Still, it wasn’t until Mercer Island that we found ourselves stuck behind a mile of vehicles, the cab of my truck filling up with the odor of exhaust. My headache was worse than ever.

  So this was it.

  The last week of my life.

  Sitting in a traffic jam. Terrific.

  23. ALL THE CHICKEN STRANGLERS

  Continental was located in a dusty industrial section of town several miles south of Seattle’s core, just off of East Marginal Way on Colorado Avenue, gray, dingy buildings and storage yards for blocks in either direction. We heard the nearby toot of a train whistle, and while I parked in the lot, Allyson and Britney watched a 727 coming in low for a landing at nearby Boeing Field.

  I left the girls in the truck and went into a narrow building, where two men were sorting paperwork and slapping staplers at a long wooden counter. A woman sat at a desk on the far wall. Nobody looked up.

  “North Bend Fire and Rescue. I called earlier?”

  The man who spoke was maybe forty, husky, with thickset shoulders, knuckles like new potatoes, a wide face, and blue Steve McQueen eyes a susceptible woman might fall into. His curly hair was a faded rust color. He wore jeans and a plaid work shirt. His name was Cleve according to his name tag, and he didn’t look at me. Not once. Not until I started in on him.

  “What can we do for you?” he asked.

  “I need to see a manifest for one of your trucks that was involved in a wreck outside North Bend last February.”

  “You the guy that called?”

  “Yes.”

  “February? Jesus H. We’re not librarians. I told you on the phone we don’t transport anything that would cause health problems. Go over to Mainland Freight on Utah Avenue. They do hazardous materials.”

  “Holly Riggs was driving.” I could tell the woman at the desk knew Holly by the way she raised her head. With a shrug of his shoulders, Cleve turned his back to me and began filing papers in a metal cabinet. “Listen, we have people in a nursing home over this.”

  “Try Mainland.”

  “Holly Riggs wasn’t driving for Mainland. She was driving for you.”

  “Look, pal. What I want right now is to see you pucker up and skeddadle out that door.”

  “Holly Riggs is in a coma. I think there’s a chance whatever put her in the hospital was on that truck.” The woman at the desk was getting more and more interested.

  “Out.”

  There was no reason for his intransigence, no reason other than hubris and lassitude—or else he was trying to hide something. I wanted to smack him. It was the first time in years I’d felt like hitting someone. The Sixth Element of the Saints of Christ followers had been taught to avoid altercations, to heal the severed ear, to turn the other cheek.

  When two truck drivers entered the room, the other man behind the counter assisted the first one while Cleve finished up his filing and headed for the driver beside me. I’d been dismissed.

  Their small talk was just warming up when I stepped into the prissiest voice I could muster and said, “Cleve, sweetie. I’m sorry about last night. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” The room lapsed into a silence you could feel on the small hairs of your arms.

  Cleve looked directly at me and said, “What are you talking about?”

  “Cleve, come back to my pad tonight and nothing like that will ever happen again. Why, just this morning when I called here, I said to myself, Cleve is still thinking about me. I know he is. And that was good, because I was thinking about you, too, Cleve. Good thoughts, Cleve. Only good thoughts.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Everyone had a trigger point, and, by some instinct I couldn’t name, I’d put my finger on his.

  “You and me, sweetie. You know what I’m talking about. Now don’t get fussy. You know Doctor said fussy is bad for your LDL.”

  “What the hell do you want?” He turned to the others. “I don’t even know this asshole!”

  “What I want is the shipping manifest for the truck Holly Riggs was driving the night she had the accident.”

  Fists bunching at his sides, veins on the side of his neck distending, he strode to the end of the counter where I was standing and spoke through clenched and crooked teeth. Some of them looked like they were going to break. “What’s this crap about last night? If you don’t get off the premises in ten seconds, I’m going to climb over this counter and make you sorry you were born.”

  “You’re actually going to lay hands on me?” I smirked lewdly at the others. “That would be so darn thrilling, Cleve. Don’t count to ten. Do it now. Come over that counter and hurt me, baby. Hurt me bad.”

  The woman at the desk was shaking her head, warning him, all the while looking at me, curious, confused, and a little frightened. This office hadn’t been so shaken up since the Nisqually earthquake.

  “Trust me, you’re not going to like it,” Cleve said.

  “Baby, I’ll take what’s coming to me, and I’ll love you even more. You know that, don’t you, sweetie?”

  “Quit calling me sweetie!”

  “Get the manifest and the MSDS.”

  “I’ll knock you straight to hell.”

  “That would be soooo romantic, Cleve. I’ll save the newspaper clippings for my scrapbook. ’Gays Duke It Out at Truck Yard.’ ”

  I winked at the others.

  Exasperated, Cleve glanced around the room. I had the feeling he ran roughshod over these people and that they were enjoying this. The men at the counter feigned disinterest and glanced away quickly. “What are you looking at?” Cleve barked at the woman.

  “Nothing at all . . . sweetie.”

  All three men at the end of the counter laughed explosively.

  Minutes later I had a Xerox copy of the manifest and the MSDS for the shipment Holly had been carrying last February. Cleve would have given his left nut and his firstborn son to get me out of there.

  On the drive back to North Bend, we got trapped in traffic again.

  On an impulse, I exited the freeway at 156th Street and drove to a nearby Toyota dealer. These guys had skinned me pretty bad a few years ago when Lorie and I bought the only new car either of us had ever owned.

  Just to make the rest of them crazy, I picked the dumbest-looking salesman in the place, spent all of twenty seconds selecting the most expensive vehicle they had in stock, and bought it. If my life was going to fade out in a traffic jam, at least I could do it in air-conditioned comfort. It wasn’t as if I was worried about making the payments. When they pressed me for extra insuran
ce, I bought it all, including the disability insurance that paid off the car in the event I lost the ability to work. They thought they’d found a rube, but I would essentially have free use of the car for the week, and afterward my estate could sell it and put the money in trust for my daughters.

  Morgan drove the truck with the Big Gulp container still glued to the roof back to North Bend. Allyson rode with her, while Britney rode in the new Lexus with me.

  “Daddy, you always said we couldn’t afford a new car,” Britney said.

  “We can afford this.”

  “It smells funny. Doesn’t it smell funny?”

  “That’s what they call new car smell.”

  “We’ve never had a new car, have we?”

  “We had one once. Your mother took it.”

  “Because she needed it more than we did, right, Daddy?”

  “That’s right. You know I love you, don’t you, Britney?”

  “You always say that when we start talking about Mommy.”

  “I guess I do, don’t I?”

  The salesman had thrown in some CDs, and Britney was playing Andy Williams’s Branson City Limits, had taken a liking to “Moon River.”

  “I wish things could have turned out differently with your mother.”

  “Like you wish she didn’t steal my piggy bank?”

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “She ’pologized. Told me not to tell you. She said she was going through a rough time when she left.”

  “When did this conversation take place?”

  “On the phone at Easter. She said she would give anything not to have left us. Said if she had to leave us with anybody in the world, she wanted it to be you.”

  “You made that part up.”

  “Well, yeah. That last.”

  “You scamp,” I said, running my fingers through her hair.

  “Daddy. Morgan just fixed it.”

  “Looks nice.”

  “It would look nicer if it was like Audrey Hepburn’s.” A couple of nights earlier the girls had seen Roman Holiday and, like filmgoers everywhere, had fallen in love with Hepburn, as well as with her gamin hairstyle. I was still trying to decide whether they would regret cutting their hair.

  On the drive into town on I-90 we passed the accident site where Stan Beebe lost his life. The only reminder that there’d been a fatality was a swatch of small trees his truck had knocked down. I imagined Marsha would come out and put up a white cross to mark the spot. Or maybe some members of the department would do it. Anyway, I wouldn’t be around to see it.

  At the fire station Ben and Karrie quickly took all three girls under their wing, while I went into the watch office and used my last few minutes before the noon meeting to glance at the shipping manifest I’d picked up at Continental.

  The manifest sheets were all copies, but Cleve had handed me several other pieces of paper that were originals. I hadn’t bothered to look at any of it on the way home or at the car dealership. Some sort of procrastination thing. Trying to hold back my own demise. It’s harder to investigate your own end than you would think.

  Holly’s load had originated in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she’d made several stops to pick up merchandise. I wasn’t good at reading things like trucking manifests with all their columns and abbreviations, but I did manage to scribble down a list:

  26 crated bicycles—Spears Bicycles Partners, to Seattle

  44 boxes of bicycle accessories—Spears Bicycles Partners, to Seattle

  32 boxes of paper towels—Bounty, to Seattle

  16 boxes of hot sauce—Tamale Brothers, to Seattle

  10 containers of Coca-Cola “product”—Coca-Cola, Inc., to Seattle

  4 boxes books—Canyon View Systems, to Redmond

  3 boxes miscellaneous—JCP, Inc., to San Jose via Seattle

  3 bales comic books and assorted magazines—Spencer Publishing, to Bellevue

  6 large boxes clothing—the Gap, to Seattle

  8 small boxes miscellaneous—DuPont, Westinghouse, to Seattle

  12 boxes assorted goods—Pacific Northwest Paint Contractors, to Tacoma

  “Hey, Jim,” Ian Hjorth said, peeking into the office. “The meeting next door is about to start.”

  “Sure.”

  What caught my eye on the list was that three of the boxes marked miscellaneous had been shipped from Tennessee to Seattle but were ultimately destined for San Jose. The shipper was JCP, Inc., which most likely stood for Jane’s California Propulsion, Inc. But I’d already called them and they’d denied shipping anything through the Northwest last February.

  “Jim?” It was Hjorth again.

  “I’m coming.”

  When I’d called Jane’s earlier, I’d wondered how Mr. Stuart could have been so certain without checking. People that cocksure, in my estimation, were frequently wrong.

  I was now certain that our woes had originated in Holly’s rig, not the chicken truck.

  Surely we wouldn’t have been the only people to contract this had our problems originated with the chicken truck. Wouldn’t we have heard about zombie chicken stranglers at the local chicken plants?

  As far as I knew, all the chicken stranglers were still wrenching heads.

  At five minutes before twelve, I walked next door to the city offices, where a crowd of officials had gathered. It was almost intimidating to see what I’d triggered.

  I was under immense pressure to sway these folks to my viewpoint, yet I had no physical evidence to present, nothing but stories and speculation that now began to seem outlandish. I would have felt a whole lot more secure in my arguments if Stan Beebe had allowed events to unfold on their own, so that we knew what would have happened to him. It was a selfish thought.

  I couldn’t help having misgivings about the outcome of this meeting. For one thing, Stephanie Riggs hadn’t shown up yet.

  Also, I’d been counting on the shipping manifest to include some exotic chemical or biohazard, had been hoping the Department of Defense had been shipping germ cultures for their latest secret weapons. That would have at least given our search for an antidote some sort of direction. I could hardly claim we’d been poisoned by bicycle parts or hot sauce. I wasn’t happy that the guy at Jane’s had lied about shipping in February, but there could be other explanations for that.

  I was stuck with Stan Beebe’s story, our fire department victims, and, of course, my own symptoms, which I was not planning to put forth for public review. Tell these people I was a goner, and inside of thirty minutes every busybody in town would know. Who wanted all the neighborhood biddies bringing over casseroles? People would want to pray with me. Could you imagine? The Toyota dealer would repossess the car. My phone wouldn’t stop ringing.

  Besides, I was still trying to figure out how to tell my daughters, and I certainly didn’t want them to hear it through the grapevine.

  Karrie, the two Bellevue medics on duty that day, and Jackie Feldbaum’s common-law husband were all in attendance. I mingled with the fire personnel from other departments, making small talk until Steve Haston asked everyone to gather upstairs in the meeting room, where we found a long table surrounded by folding chairs. Latecomers, of which there were over a dozen, were forced to stand against the wall. Me included.

  Mayor Haston took his place at the head of the table. He’d never been much of a commander, but he’d taken this task upon himself, his somber mood and height dominating the room. Introspective, prone to being overly fastidious in small things, when he did take charge of something Steve Haston was known as a control freak, so that city council meetings became almost unbearable as he flustered and quibbled endlessly over trivialities. He’d been like that as a volunteer firefighter, too. Had driven everyone nuts.

  After Lorie and Gloria skipped town together, local gossips told me he’d been a domineering husband, that he’d thrown a fit when Gloria wanted to work outside his office, that he’d controlled family expenditures with an iron fist and hadn’t allowed her
to have her own friends, that every major decision concerning Karrie had been his. Without a shred of proof, I’m ashamed to say I believed every word of it. Which made me wonder what people believed about me and Lorie.

  After introducing each of the principals and reading off their credentials from notes typed up beforehand, Haston thanked everyone for coming and introduced me.

  24. BURY ME SLOWLY; I MAY HAVE A FEW LAST WORDS

  By nature I was not a public speaker, yet I’d had enough experience in front of groups at Six Points that it didn’t bother me.

  What made it troublesome today was that I was trying to talk these citizens into saving my life.

  I knew it. They didn’t. And wouldn’t.

  I told the group about Chief Newcastle, about the autopsy report and the discovery that his hands were coated with an unidentified white substance that looked like candle wax but did not come off. I detailed the events and symptoms surrounding the accidents that Stan Beebe, Jackie Feldbaum, and Joel McCain all had. Using the grease board in the front of the room I listed the seven-day progression of symptoms as Beebe and Holly had delineated them. Anybody who noticed my hands were blemished was circumspect enough not to mention it. I told them about Holly, the truck accident, the fact that the only place all of these people’s paths intersected was on I-90 in February.

  Sadly, I could tell from the looks on their faces my discourse had not won them over. At least, not all of them.

  Dr. Brashears spoke after I did. Brashears was a heavy man, balding, with a wide, flat, florid face and eyes windowed by black-framed glasses. After equivocating about doctor-patient privilege, he confessed he’d had two patients recently, Jackie and Stan, both members of the fire department, whose symptoms had not been dissimilar to the symptoms on the list on the board, that one of them had sustained massive brain damage that had presented very much like a stroke. One of Joel McCain’s doctors spoke next, had discovered the same basic symptoms pertained to Joel and confirmed that his fall had not caused his brain injury. This doctor left for an appointment as soon as he finished speaking.