Into the Inferno by Earl Emerson Page A

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