Vertical Burn by Earl Emerson Page B

the floor and told him he was turning into Aunt Julie. That was what saved him—Tony’s admonition and the vision he’d carried of a drunk Aunt Julie over all those years. That was all he needed to hear. He hadn’t had a drop of alcohol since.
    For months now he’d been obsessed with his own role at Leary Way, grappling with the generally accepted theory that his disorientation and failure to find an exit quickly was the cause of Cordifis’s death. He’d talked to everyone who had been at the fire, trying without success to fill in the incomplete pieces from his memory. There was nothing concerning Leary Way that was either too small or too large for him to dissect.
    He had an indistinct recollection of telling Reese and Kub that Bill was twenty-eight paces back, directly along the passageway he’d come down. But was that a memory or only a dream? Reese, the self-appointed spokesperson for both himself and Kub, said the two of them had heard nothing out of his mouth but babbling. It was a fact that he’d babbled a few minutes later when Soudenbury found him standing inside a doorway in the smoke. It was a fact that he’d babbled in the medic unit, and he knew he hadn’t made much sense in the hospital.
    The doctors said his confusion had been caused by a combination of smoke inhalation and heat stress, that he’d been lucky to survive. They assured him nobody would have been coherent in that condition. What they couldn’t tell him was when it was likely to have begun.
    It was small comfort to Finney. Bill Cordifis remained dead, and he was taking the rap for it.
    He had been obsessed for the past four months with his own actions at Leary Way and it was getting him nowhere. Maybe he needed to look in a different direction. Since the last shift he’d worked, when they’d been called to the food-on-the-stove at the Downtowner, he’d been thinking about the larger picture. On the surface the call to the Downtowner couldn’t have been more dissimilar to Leary Way—a routine alarm, no loss of life or property, nothing to think twice about. But Finney noticed a disturbing similarity to the night of June 7. Because there were so many other alarms going on in the city, and because there were no other units available, Engine 26 had been first in—far outside its normal response area. Just like the night of Leary Way. Because of citywide tie-ups, Ladder 1 had been called outside its normal district. None of the first arriving units normally responded to Leary Way. None knew the layout of the buildings or what was inside. Finney couldn’t remember such involved tie-ups at any other time during his career. He had to wonder how it could have happened twice in five months.
    He walked across the bedroom, fired up his computer, and logged onto the website for the Seattle Fire Department. Among other things, the site gave details of every alarm the department had fielded in the past five years, these divided into fire and medical calls for each twenty-four-hour period, all listed in chronological order.
    Finney checked the run lists for the last shift he worked and found a striking increase in alarms throughout the city around the time of the Downtowner incident. A lot of them were false alarms, although there had been two fires going on and the Downtowner was genuine enough.
    He went back to the night of Leary Way. In Seattle, taverns closed at two A.M. , and between two and three on a Friday or Saturday night there would often be a marked increase in car accidents, stabbings, beatings, man-down calls, many of which required EMS responses from the fire department. But June 7 was a Tuesday, and the taverns didn’t have anything to do with the report of a natural gas leak at Sand Point at 0225 hours that tied up one chief, two engines, two truck companies, an aid car, and a medic unit for two and a half hours. Firefighters who’d been on that call told Finney they never found a gas leak. Nor did the taverns have anything to