Into the Inferno (7 page)

12. A BARREL ROLLS OFF A TRUCK

“Look,” said Stan. “Remember that story Newcastle told us? Happened in California twenty or thirty years ago? A barrel rolls off a truck onto the highway somewhere? They send a company of volunteers to check it out. The barrel doesn’t have any markings, so they roll it off the freeway and call the highway department to pick it up. It’s been smacked by a couple of cars and it’s leaking. Nobody wears any PPE. It turns out the barrel’s full of undiluted insecticide. The chemical enters their nervous systems through their skin, and seven of the nine responders end up in nursing homes. Brain-dead.”

“We’ve all heard that story,” I said. “But we haven’t investigated any barrels on the highway.”

“We did
something
.”

Stan’s morbid pessimism was beginning to get on my nerves. Worse than that, down deep somewhere I was starting to buy into this harebrained hypothesis.

Ian Hjorth had been so quiet I’d almost forgotten he was there, arms crossed in front of his muscular chest, listening quietly. A tall man in his late twenties with thinning blond hair and a penchant for pranks, Ian was well-read but not overly opinionated, intelligent but not particularly ambitious. Because of his fun-loving nature, and despite the fact that he teased me ruthlessly about my love life, Ian was one of my favorite people. He had a wife who was young and pretty and who worked for the city. They had a little girl with big brown teddy bear eyes. Britney called her Pimmy.

Ian said, “I don’t buy it, Stan. Newcastle died over a month ago. Joel fell off his roof a week later. Then Jackie had her accident. Okay. Maybe those things happened around the same time. But now we’re a month later. If you guys got this on the same alarm, don’t you think all five of you would come down with it together?”

“There’s nothing says it has to happen that way,” said Beebe. “You heard about the state patrolman who was at the hazardous materials spill directing traffic, accidentally got some chemicals on his trousers, went home, and his wife washed his pants in the same load with his kid’s baby blanket. The baby ended up dying. The patrolman never even got sick. If he’d forgotten those pants in the bottom of his locker and taken them home half a year later the baby would have died six months after the incident and the death never even would have been connected to the haz-mat spill. This could be something with a built-in time factor we’re all tripping in our own way.”

“Jesus,” said Ian, with a sly grin. “If I was dying, I wouldn’t spend my last day with a mug like me or a lady-killer like Jim. I’d be home with my family. Or in Jim’s case, at a whorehouse.” He looked at me and laughed.

“Thought I’d get on the computer and compose my epitaph,” Stan replied grimly. “ ‘He lived a life—he had a wife—he did his best—now he’s at rest.’ What do you think?”

I’d never heard anybody feel so sorry for himself, not even me when I’d dipped into the swamps of self-pity after Lorie ran away. Stan was doing everything but sizing himself for a coffin. If it hadn’t been so pathetic, it would have been almost comical.

“You feeling sick?” I asked Beebe, thinking about the headache I’d woken up with this morning.

“You don’t have to feel sick to be dying.”

“What made you go to the doctor in the first place?” Ian Hjorth asked.

“Three days ago I started falling down. I had this junk on my hands. I knew Joel and Jackie had the hands, so I started investigating.”

“I never noticed Jackie’s hands,” Ian said. “And Joel’s wife wouldn’t let anybody in.”

“She let me in,” Stan said. “I dug up the autopsy report on Newcastle. Same thing. A whitish discoloration of the hands. Then I started thinking about Joel going off that roof. I’d been on a roof when I fell, I mighta got hurt. I’d been driving like Jackie, I mighta crashed. Out in the woods like Newcastle, dead. So I went to Dr. Brashears. He’s the one treated Jackie.”

“What’d he say?”

“He started running tests.”

“And?” I asked.

“He sent my blood away to some special lab in Texas. He sent some hair samples and tissue to Washington, D.C. Won’t find out anything until next week. It’s a pisser, ’cause I won’t be around next week.”

“Of course you will.”

“Don’t believe me, Jim. It’s no never mind to me. But remember what I’m telling you, because after you realize you have it, you’ll wish you’d listened. It’s a seven-day cycle. Who knows what triggers it, but from the minute it starts to the time you sign off . . . seven days. Get your affairs in order. Say good-bye to the people you love.”

“Don’t be telling me I have seven days left.”

“You
don’t
. You have six. The waxy hands come on day two.”

I couldn’t help doing the math. Today was Tuesday. If Stan was right, sometime on Sunday night I’d become a vegetable. Maybe if a team of doctors were telling me this, I might believe it; but this was Stan.

Aware that he had no way of knowing about my headache or the weak feeling in my legs, I asked him to list the symptoms.

“The first day, yesterday for you, the hands start shaking for no reason. Day two: trembling legs, pressure on your frontal lobe, usually in the form of a mild headache, the backs of the hands take on a waxy look.”

He’d pegged the last two days perfectly.

I’d never truly believed all the horrors visiting our department could have been coincidences. On top of that, I’d been living with a feeling of impending doom since visiting Holly. I’d seen too much misfortune land on innocent people in the past few days, and now I was bowing to the all-too-human propensity to concoct a sinister plot to account for it. Grief always went down better if you could follow it with a healthy dose of conspiracy.

I didn’t want to believe Stan, but he’d pointed out my symptoms like a bird dog pointed out a dead pheasant.

“You driving today?” I asked. Tears were dribbling down his cheeks.

“I live out the Mount Si Road. Of course I’m driving.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I’m on day six, man. I’m going down anyway.” He was crying full out now. It was hard to know what to do for him.

“Jesus, Stan. I’m not going to let you drive.”

“Okay. I’ll kill myself here.”

“You’re not going to kill yourself, Stan.”

He looked directly at me for the first time in a couple of minutes, held my gaze, and said, “Don’t try to stop me. You stop me, you’ll be doing the worst thing you’ve ever done.”

“Stan, I’m not going to stand by and—”

Never one to miss out on a melodramatic moment, Mayor Steve Haston suddenly appeared in the doorway behind Stan Beebe, wildly gesticulating and silently mouthing some kind of urgent message to me. I had to assume his daughter, Karrie, had called him and told him about Stan.

I excused myself and left Stan pouring salty tears into his coffee. At the other end of the corridor, Steve Haston whispered, “I hear he’s talking about killing himself.”

“That’s what he says. He was depressed a couple of years ago, too. Newcastle sent him to a doctor and they put him on something. Prozac, I think it was. He needs a doctor. When the medics get back we’ll have them take him.”

“Has he got a gun?”

“Not that I know of.”

“We’ve got to do something.”

“That’s what I just said.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“How about . . . we have the medics take him to the ER?”

“You think that’ll work?”

Just then the bell hit. It was a medic call, which meant we would take the aid car and engine, and the medics, who were out of quarters, would respond from their current location, probably somewhere between Overlake Hospital and North Bend. It would be a good little while before they showed up.

“Listen, Steve. We’ve got a call. We need somebody to stay with him.”

“Me?”

“I don’t see anyone else in the station.”

“I’ve got an appointment in fifteen minutes.”

“Steve. A man is talking about committing suicide here. A friend of ours. I don’t want to come back and find him hanging in the hose tower.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. I guess I can stick around until somebody shows up.”

“Until the medics show up. Or we come back. Don’t be turning him over to the mailman, and don’t leave him alone.”

“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.