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could have happened anyway, and if he d gone down while all three of us
were in the smoke room with the rope tied to his waist, he would have
sealed us in and we d all be dead. Suddenly I was pissed at how close he d
come to killing the three of us.
As Tronstad recounted the story, his voice grew subdued with
dummied-up grief humble, almost quivery. Like a lot of stand-up
comics, he was an excellent dramatic actor when he needed to be.  The
chief called us down here to drill. We smelled smoke, but knowing it was
112 E A R L E ME R S ON
Friday and there was a recruit school in session, we figured it was residue
from the smoke room. We went inside to wait for Abbott, and then after
fifteen minutes or so we noticed the Battalion Five Suburban parked out
on the court. It was Gum who found him behind the door in the smoke
room.
Not the story we d agreed on, but close.
 What the devil was he doing in the smoke room? Lieutenant Sears
asked, turning to me.
 Probably investigating that burn barrel, Johnson said.
 It s true, Tronstad said.  There s still a fire in the barrel.
Sears looked at me.  He was in the smoke room?
 Yes, sir. On the floor behind the door.
 Holy Mother of Mary, said Sears.
 That s exactly what we said, replied Tronstad.
 The only thing I can think of, said Sears,  is they left the burn bar-
rel smoldering by accident. Abbott went up to investigate and had a heart
attack. When he fell, his body closed the door.
 Hmmm. Could have happened that way, said Tronstad.
When the safety chief showed up, Tronstad repeated his fable. A few
minutes later he repeated it again to the chief of the department, Hiram
Smith, who d arrived with a small entourage, including the public infor-
mation officer for the department, Joyce Judge. Later we heard Smith re-
peating the story word for word to a television news interviewer. By that
time, Medic 10 had taken Abbott s body downtown to the King County
Medical Examiner s office in the basement of Harborview Medical Cen-
ter, where it would undergo an autopsy in the morning.
I wandered over to the base of the tower to escape the hubbub and
was appalled to see the rope and the two body loops still attached to the
smoke-room door handle, Tronstad s four-digit SFD ID number written
plainly on his body loop in black grease pen, my own number on the
second loop. When I saw Lieutenant Sears hoofing it in my direction, I
dashed up the stairs, slipped the rope off the door handle, and stuffed it
and the body loops into my large bunking-coat pocket just before he
arrived.
T HE S MOK E R O OM 113
 Right behind the door here? he asked, peering into the smoke
room.
 Yes, sir.
 Can I borrow your light?
I detached the small department-issued flashlight from my bunking
coat and handed it to him. He poked around in the concrete room longer
than I would have, considering it was still full of smoke, then emerged,
ever the stoic, refusing to gasp for air, pretending he was tougher than
snot. Maybe he was.
Hours later, after the lights were out in the bunk room and Johnson
and I were lying in the darkness, Johnson s voice floated from the other
end of the room,  Gum? You awake?
 Yeah.
 You think we did the right thing?
 I don t know. I m really worried about it. Tronstad blackmailed me
into lying.
 He sure did. But what choice did we have?
 We could go over and tell Sears right now.
 But it was an accident, right?
 Ten minutes in the smoke room? I don t think so.
 We better stick to the story we told. Otherwise they re going to want
to know why we lied. Tronstad s right. A guy s going to have a heart attack,
he s going to have it. What difference is there if he has it tonight or tomor-
row night? Hell, we gave him the best care anybody could give, didn t we?
Gum?
 Ten minutes in the smoke room for a guy with a heart condition is
not the best care in the world, Robert.
I thought about it for a couple of hours that night and eventually fell
into a fitful sleep, waking at five, only to relive the night s events for an-
other two hours. In the morning the Seattle Post-Intelligencer carried an
article in the second section. Seattle Fire Battalion Chief Succumbs on Drill
Court.
After the oncoming shift relieved us that morning, the three of us
congregated on the west side of the station, where Johnson patted his
114 E A R L E ME R S ON
new Cadillac SRX as if it were a horse.  What the heck. Paula and I can af-
ford this. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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