Into the Inferno Read online

  “Of course not,” Haston said, heading for the beanery with an air of confusion about him.

  The dispatcher sent us to Edgewick Road. Ian Hjorth drove the aid car; I drove the engine.

  As we headed south through town and toward the freeway, Karrie said, “You think he’s going to be all right?”

  “I think so. He was pretty depressed a few years ago. He snapped out of that one.”

  “There’s a lot to be depressed about. The chief. Joel. Yesterday was terrible.”

  “I know.”

  A few moments later Karrie looked into the mirror on her side and said, “I think she’s following us again.”

  “Who?”

  “That woman from yesterday.”

  Now even the probies were mocking me.

  13. STICKING A PINKIE IN BEN’S COFFEE

  On our way to the alarm, I tried to convince myself Stan Beebe was off base about whatever it was he thought we were all coming down with. He was a nice guy, but we all knew he was not exactly a brain surgeon. He’d gotten the facts wrong. Had to have.

  I tried to distract myself by focusing on North Bend as we raced through town. It was a funny little place. The dinky downtown district had at one time been bisected by the major east–west route that traversed the Cascade Mountain Range, which separated the dry half of the state from the wet half, where we lived. These days Interstate 90 skirted the town by a good quarter mile. The old highway was now the main drag in town, the speed limit twenty-five MPH.

  When Lorie and I first moved here as newlyweds, the occasional stray dog could be observed sleeping undisturbed in the middle of any of the side streets. Most locals didn’t even bother to honk their horns—knew the dogs and the owners, just pulled around or waited for the pooch to wake up and move. The town was small enough then (under twenty-five hundred people) that we all felt like neighbors. Then came the outlet mall and fast-food chains next to the freeway and later the upscale housing developments.

  These days people drove faster, meaner, gunned their engines at stoplights, rode your bumper, gave you the bone. Just like everywhere else.

  The fire station was a block north of North Bend Way, on a street still quiet enough that sometimes in the summer we dragged folding chairs out in front of the station and drank iced tea. Immediately north of the station was a small cluster of housing, a stray apartment building, and the North Bend branch of the King County Library. Farther north, things became rural, although new houses were going up all the time.

  My daughters and I lived farther north, our lot snug under Mount Si, the four-thousand-foot monolith rising almost straight up from the flat valley floor.

  Mount Si was the first vista strangers saw driving into town and the last one they saw upon leaving. The mountain never failed to inspire awe, especially in the winter, when the top third was encapsulated in snow and ice. The west face, the face that hovered over town, was almost a sheer cliff. In the still of the night we could sometimes hear rock slides rumbling down the face like cannon fire, taking out trees, forging long, rocky chutes above my house.

  There were ancient boulders in the field next to our house, evidence of rockfalls that surely would have swept away our home had it been there five hundred years earlier. In the middle of the night, when we heard the mountain rumbling, the girls would climb into my bed. Helen Neumann from next door would call and ask in a tremulous voice if we were evacuating. We never were.

  To the west of town, the South Fork of the Snoqualmie River ran near the heavily guarded Nintendo plant. There was a winery that had burned down years earlier, pastureland that developers and the town were squabbling over. As always, the developers would prevail. I had no doubt of it.

  East of the city center, a golf course had been cut up, paved over, and converted into minuscule lots with monstrous houses sitting on them. Joel McCain lived in one of these. More houses and planned developments could be found off the Mount Si Road, which ran parallel with the pass highway. Clusters of new housing surrounded Truck Town farther east.

  Just as the freeway began working its way up the foothills to three-thousand-foot Snoqualmie Pass, Edgewick Road took off south and snaked into the hills, dead-ending near the Cedar River Watershed, which fed freshwater to a good portion of the Seattle metro area. Generally, people didn’t take Edgewick Road unless they knew somebody up there.

  That was where we were headed.

  Our alarm had been phoned in by Max Caputo.

  We’d seen Caputo before. He’d lived in North Bend all his life, could barely read, and if he could write, I didn’t know anybody who had proof of it. His grandfather, father, and uncles had come to the region fifty years ago looking for trees to cut down, but now that the logging industry was dying, the older Caputos had retired and the younger ones had turned to more traditional blue-collar occupations: butcher, house builder, auto mechanic, and, in Max’s case, floral deliveryman, along with the occasional petty theft.

  Caputo lived on wooded property in a double-wide trailer that was in a constant state of disrepair. He was one of those men who had so much trouble staying organized, he would be living on the streets if not from the periodic help of family. Besides burglaries, Max Caputo had been arrested for shooting deer out of season, bearbaiting, and allegedly killing one of his neighbor’s dogs by feeding it a quarter stick of dynamite.

  You had a neighbor like Caputo, you kept the police on auto-dial.

  He lived like a hermit, taking in the occasional unkempt live-in girlfriend, most of whom didn’t last more than a week and served mostly as drinking companions or drug connections. He was a small, wizened man who appeared to be in his midfifties but who, at thirty-three, was actually a year younger than me.

  When I pulled the fire engine into the circular dirt drive, Caputo’s two Dobermans tried to hang themselves on their chains, standing on their hind legs, barking, two of the most vicious dogs you would ever see. Two years earlier one of our volunteers had been bitten when we’d come out here after Caputo somehow put a crossbow dart through his thigh. Caputo claimed the dog had only grabbed the volunteer, prompting Newcastle to quip that he didn’t know Dobeys had opposable thumbs. Six months later when Caputo accidentally shot himself with a handgun, another volunteer got bit.

  Today Caputo was shirtless, covered in blood, sitting on the front step of his trailer home holding his left hand, his fist wrapped in a bloody white T-shirt. A table saw was still powered up and whirring in the yard. When the weather allowed, Caputo kept his power equipment on wooden blocks in the front yard, fending off the rain with tarps stamped UNIFIED FISHING TACKLE. If you’re missing a table saw, we know where it is.

  “I think we were followed,” Ian Hjorth said, glancing out the driveway at the road.

  “Karrie already tried that one.”

  “No. I really think we were followed.” Nobody could play straight man better than Hjorth.

  It was hard to hear anything between Caputo’s yelling at the dogs and their barking.

  Max Caputo had sliced off the last three fingers on his left hand. By the time he’d gotten his dogs chained up and phoned us, he’d deposited a pretty fair blood trail.

  When Karrie took his blood pressure, Caputo fainted. And then, as if the barking had all been a show for their master, the dogs grew silent.

  Ian stanched the flow of blood while I retrieved the fingers from the table saw and dropped them into a plastic bag. After the medics arrived, we helped them get a line into Caputo and put him onto the stretcher.

  We cleaned up the blood on the floor of the trailer, unplugged the table saw, turned off the radio and two TVs that were blaring inside the trailer, fed the dogs, and locked up.

  Before we left, Ian said, “I wonder if I could get those fingers back. You know? If they’re not going to sew them back on?”

  “What do you want with them?”

  “Well, two of ’em I’d tie on a string and hang in the doorway of the garage for the cat to play with. The pinkie I
want to put in Ben’s coffee.”

  Karrie said, “Ugh! That’s sickening.”

  I couldn’t help laughing, not at the joke, but at the demented Jack Nicholson look on Ian’s face.

  The station was empty when we got back, no sign of Stan Beebe or his truck. Or of the mayor. I couldn’t believe it.

  After we scrubbed down, I dialed Beebe’s house, but nobody answered. I told Ian where I was going and took a portable radio, intending to seek out Mayor Haston in the city offices next door to the fire station.

  “What happened?” I asked Haston in his office. “Where’s Stan?”

  “He wanted to leave.”

  “And?”

  Haston shrugged. “He wanted to leave.”

  “You let him?”

  “Yes.” Even at the best of times, Haston and I had never been friends. I hadn’t hung out with him when he was a volunteer, and after Chief Newcastle threw him out of the department, I didn’t miss him. His ex-wife and mine had been friendly, so we’d seen each other socially from time to time. In fact, we’d been studiously avoiding each other since our respective divorces. When he showed up to talk with me about Stan, it was the first time he’d been in the station since Newcastle died.

  “Where did he go?” I asked.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Did you even ask him?”

  “No.”

  “He just got up and walked out?”

  “What did you want me to do? Wrestle him? I wasn’t going to wrestle him.”

  “Did you even try to stop him? Shit, Steve. This is priceless. I just hope to God he’s okay.”

  “Sure, he’s okay. He’s just a little down. I get down all the time.”

  I went back to the station, pissed. I’d had some time to think about it and figured Stan Beebe’s theory was a good dose of paranoia induced by a vastly overactive imagination. I would never have said this aloud, because I liked Stan for both his good-humored nature and his eagerness to work hard, but he had never been the sharpest pencil in the box.

  I was no genius myself, but at least I knew bunk when I heard it. It was bunk that there was a syndrome, and it was probably bunk that he was going to kill himself.

  While I disbelieved his theory, it frustrated me to no end that I couldn’t definitively prove it wrong, that I couldn’t think up even one fact to refute it. What bothered me most was that he’d ticked off every symptom I had. After speaking with Haston, I went back to the station and asked around, hoping perhaps it was the summer flu making the rounds—but nobody had heard of a bug going around.

  Trying not to look at my own flaking waxy hands as I dialed, I called Tacoma General hoping to get a description of Holly’s hands, but nobody would talk to me about her condition.

  Reluctantly I called Holly’s home number, where I knew Stephanie Riggs was staying. I got Holly’s answering machine, Holly’s voice still on the tape. “Hi. If this is somebody with good news or money, please leave a message. Everybody else call back.” She’d been cute in all things, having taken her phone message from the play A Thousand Clowns.

  It was sad and a little bit eerie to hear her voice again.

  I stewed about it for a while and then went into the officers’ room and began filling out next month’s night and weekend schedule. Our station was staffed with full-timers until five in the afternoon each day, volunteers the rest of the night; sleepers, we called them. The same thing on weekends. It was a complicated business keeping the station staffed, and I was worried about what might happen to our ability to do so once Beebe began spreading rumors that we were all dropping from exposure to some unidentified substance. It was a fruitcake theory, but rumors had a way of taking on a life of their own.

  An hour later as the medic unit returned to the station, the bell hit for the second time that morning, an MVA on I-90 between the old winery and town, eastbound. It was promising to be a busy shift.

  Three vehicles involved. Persons trapped. This might be good.

  14. MOI—THE MECHANISM OF INJURY

  The stretch of freeway where the accident had taken place ran straight for maybe a mile, firs on either side, a slope on the right, a distant glimpse of the blue mountains down at the end where the highway made a left sweep toward North Bend.

  By the time we arrived, citizens were putting out road flares. The Bellevue medics, Rachel Heimeriz and Dan Logan, were peering into two of the wrecked vehicles, a car and a truck, the truck crossways in the center of the highway, the Volkswagen near the left shoulder. They were separated by about two hundred feet, the roadway a pastiche of broken glass, plastic parts, oil, and streaks of green antifreeze.

  A third vehicle had gone off the highway into the trees on the right shoulder. If there was anybody still inside that one, we couldn’t tell from the road.

  I told Karrie to get the pump running and lay a precautionary hose line, while I walked across the now-closed highway in front of the rows of waiting vehicles to see what the medics had.

  “Sure you want a hose line?” Karrie asked.

  “You ever see a trapped person burn to death in a car?”

  One of Karrie’s weak points was her questioning of authority. It wasn’t so bad around the station when she asked if you really wanted the floor mopped, as if you might change your mind and decide to do it yourself, but fighting fire was a paramilitary activity and obeying orders in the field without hesitation was a vital part of the contract.

  After surviving an initial training period at the state training center, Karrie was now seven months into a one-year probationary cycle. Her primary supervising officer, Joel McCain, had given her a poor evaluation the month previous, not because of lacking skills but because of her attitude, and warned her that if she didn’t modify her behavior, her job would be in jeopardy. It was something I would have to deal with now. Something I’d been trying to ignore.

  The paramedics had split up, one to a vehicle. The pickup truck had rolled over on the driver’s side, and the roof was caved in, the passenger’s side door crumpled. What remained of the windshield space had been compressed until the gap was too small to extricate a patient. There were two males inside, both conscious and talking. In fact, one of them wouldn’t stop.

  The other vehicle was a new Volkswagen Beetle, crumpled all the way around; the driver, a tearful young woman in her early twenties, had gotten out on her own. “My graduation present,” she said. “I just waxed it.”

  The medic was taking her blood pressure and trying to get her to sit down, while an excited male witness in glasses and a button-down shirt explained how the Beetle had nearly missed the wreck altogether, that it had been zigzagging through the tangle of swerving cars and only got clipped at the last minute, spinning around like a shot glass on a table. There were two other damaged cars up the road on the shoulder. The witness said he’d spoken to the drivers and neither was injured. We would check later ourselves.

  As Ian dragged a hose line across the highway, I said to him, “The driver of that truck needs to be extricated and put on a backboard—we’ll have to take the roof off and bring him out the top—the passenger’s lower leg is pinned. It’s going to take awhile to get him out.”

  “I’ll get the jaws,” Ian said.

  “I’ll be with you as soon as I go up here to see what else we’ve got. I’ve already asked for more help on the radio. Snoqualmie should be showing in a few minutes.” I turned to the closest medic, Dan Logan, and said, “You guys check the vehicle in the woods?”

  “Not yet.”

  Karrie and Ian were off-loading the Hurst power unit for the jaws, a two-person carry unless you were Stan Beebe, who took pride in toting it alone. It would have been nice to have him here today. As shorthanded as we were, it would have been nice to have anybody here.

  Heedful of the slippery antifreeze on the road, I jogged along the freeway and stepped off the shoulder, crossed the ditch, and hiked up into the trees. Judging by the skid marks, the third vehicle had crossed seve
ral lanes, then shot up into the grass, up the slight embankment, and buried itself in the thick firs.

  The first thing I saw was the International Association of Firefighters union sticker hanging off what was left of the rear window. Whoever was inside was either a firefighter or a relative of one. It was a black Ford pickup truck, still hot and stinking of burned rubber, spilled gasoline, and engine fumes. The truck had snapped off enough fir trees that the whole area smelled like a Christmas tree lot.

  Squeezing past a bright yellow swatch of blooming Scotch broom, I moved along the driver’s side of the vehicle.

  The driver’s door was intact but wouldn’t open. The glass was broken out of the window, the windshield popped out, the air bag in the center of the steering wheel deployed and sagging. No driver in sight. Maybe he was one of the Good Samaritans setting out flares on the highway behind me.

  I stuck my head in the window.

  When my eyes adjusted to the shadows, I spotted him on the floor, his torso and head crushed under a ball of crumpled sheet metal, the twisted seat hiding the rest of him. Or her. Whoever it was hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. Body fluids were already congealing on the floor. The vehicle had struck a tree about twenty inches in diameter, shoving the engine through the dashboard.

  “How is it up there?” Ian asked, when I got back to the road.

  “DOA.”

  “Just the one?”

  “Unless somebody got ejected. We’d better have some of these lookiloos run around in the trees to make sure.”

  I turned to one of the men who’d been putting out road flares. “Maybe you could gather up a couple of these guys and do a search of the woods? Make certain there aren’t any victims we’re not seeing?”

  “You got it.”

  “Thanks. And don’t touch anything in the truck.”

  “No, sir.”

  I loved it when they called me sir.

  15. FIVE KNUCKLES TO THE SNOT LOCKER