Vertical Burn Hardcover - 2002

Excerpt

I WAKE UP SCREAMING

When the lights came on, John Finney found himself admiring the arch of Diana’s lower back through her ribbed undershirt, adjusting her supple thigh muscles as she swung her legs over the edge of the bunk, and the way two hours of sleep had frizzed her chestnut hair. Her back was to him as she stepped into her boots and pulled her pants up over blue silk running shorts.

It was 0304 hours, June 9.

On their way out of the bunk room they passed evidence of Engine 10’s earlier departure: twisted blankets, pillows darkened with swirlies of drool, a set of reading glasses askew on a Fire Engineering magazine. Finney always turned his pillow over when they got a run in the middle of the night. He reached the hole just as Moore grabbed for the thick brass pole. In a voice husky with sleep and as rough-edged as Rod Stewart’s, she said, “I guess this is the most dangerous thing we’ll do all night, huh?”

“It’s a long drop,” he joked.

She wrapped herself expertly around the pole and vanished. They’d been bantering back and forth all evening, flirting really, and she was teasing him for warning her about the long drop at Station 10. Finney cautioned everyone. Two years earlier a sleep-addled firefighter let go of the pole ten feet too soon and woke up screaming.

By the time the bearlike captain lumbered around the front of the rig and climbed into the high cab, Finney had fired up Ladder 1’s diesel engine and turned on the department radio. Reidel, the tillerman, checked in through Finney’s headset. “Ready to rock ’n’ roll, boss.” Reidel kept at his fingertips an ample supply of the worst action movie lines. Finney grinned.

“How the hell could we possibly be the first-in truck all the way out on Leary Way?” asked Captain Cordifis.

“I don’t know,” Finney said. But it had surprised him, too. There were thirty-three engine companies and eleven aerial truck companies in Seattle, and at least five of those truck companies should have been dispatched ahead of them.

As they traveled north through downtown on Third Avenue, the electronic whoop of the siren reverberated off the tall buildings. Finney heard the familiar clinking of the alarm bells on the MSA air masks Moore and Baxter were donning in the crew cab behind him. Then, from the east shore of Lake Union on Westlake, he saw smoke in the northern sky. Lots of smoke. They had a good one. This was what Finney was bred for, fighting fires.

He glanced at Cordifis, who was putting a piece of chewing gum into his mouth. Bill Cordifis had been to the Ozark Hotel fire, where they lost twenty-one civilians. He’d been at the Villa Plaza apartments, where eight hours of fire burned more than two hundred people out of their homes. He’d seen a woman jump six hundred feet off the Space Needle. Smoke in the sky didn’t bother Cordifis any more than it bothered Finney.

Engine 22’s radio report came over the air. “Engine Twenty-two at Leary Way Northwest and Eight Avenue Northwest. We have a three-story warehouse approximately seventy by fifty. Constructed of tilt-up concrete. Heavy black smoke coming from the rear of the building. Engine Twenty-two laying a preconnect and establishing Leary Command.”

Captain Vaughn was riding Engine 22 tonight, and if Cordifis didn’t take command from him, he would be the Incident Commander until a chief showed up.

The building was set back from the north side of Leary Way, a couple of blocks north of the Lake Washington Ship Canal in a neighborhood that was evenly divided between residential and commercial properties. When they got close, the smoke in the street forced Finney to slow to a crawl. He didn’t want to run over anybody.

Then the wind shifted, and it became clear that Vaughn had under- estimated the size of the building by at least half. In front were several moving vans parked close enough to the loading dock that radiant heat would ignite them should the fire grow worse. But it wasn’t going to grow worse. They would go inside and put it out just like they always did.

Media reviews

“Earl Emerson gives the reader enormous insight into the grueling and dangerous life of firefighters. Vertical Burn is a riveting story of conflict, deceit, murder, and redemption.”
–JOHN SAUL

“Earl Emerson’s plotting is original, suspenseful–so well done that the richness of his writing seems almost a bonus. . . . [He] has taken his place in the rarefied air of the best of the best.”
–ANN RULE

“Earl Emerson is a writer’s writer. In every book he tries something new, and he always comes up a winner.”
–AARON ELKINS

“Emerson writes with the richness and grace of a poet.”
–ROBERT CRAIS