Earl Emerson - Pyro: A Novel of Suspense

EARL EMERSON

Ballantine Books
New York

Table Contents

FOR SANDY, WHO ALWAYS LIGHTS MY FIRE

Everybody ends badly. Theres not a damn thing we can do about it. Only the lucky ones get to choose how and when. We all die. Its what vultures are about.

E. Slezak

1. THE PIANO MOVER FROM HELL

Life has been a rocky road since that morning nineteen years ago when my brother and I killed Alfred. For want of a better term, the police said Alfred was our mothers boyfriend, but we never thought of him as anything but an interloper, not until the moment Neil and I found our sneakers stuck to the floor in his blood.

The morning of the murders my brother was eight days shy of his thirteenth birthday. I was ten.

The papers called it an execution-style slaying, and it was partially due to their distorted portrayal of the event that my brother was tried and sentenced and packed away to a long series of increasingly harsher juvenile detention facilities. We made some mistakes that morning. Not that, given the same circumstances, we wouldnt kill Alfred again. Because we would.

In later years, our memories pasted over with hope and optimism, we decided that last drunken squabble between our mother and Alfred T. Osbourne started because Mother had been on the cusp of throwing him out. Maybe shed found the gumption to do so. We certainly wanted to believe it. Shed never be able to tell us, since she died that morning too.

We had thought life was about as bad as it could get until Alfred and his stinky feet and seminal flashes of madness came along. He was meaner than a boot full of barbed wire, and more often than not Neil was the object of this meanness. It was a testament to Neils courage that he didnt run away.

Im not leaving him with you and Mother. That is not an option. You just remember where we keep Uncle Orens Spanish Civil War revolver if we ever need it.

I know where.

When she wasnt drinking, our mother was too fragile to look out for the family, and when she was drinking, she was too drunk. Neil was the one who looked out for us. Hed been in that role for years.

It was mystifying how our mother ended up with two men of such differing temperaments as Alfred and our father, but then, she had always been a sucker for a uniform. Our father had been a Seattle firefighter; Alfred, a former King County cop, although by the time we met him, hed traveled a good distance downslope and was working as a part-time piano mover.

There are things people never recover from, and for Emma Grant Wollf, it was the on-duty death of her husband six years earlier at an arson fire. Some people bend with adversity. Others break. Our mother fell solidly into the latter camp.

During those years after my father died, our mother struggled with a string of minimum-wage jobs that seemed to disappear as quickly as the gin she spilled on the carpet, the three of us moving into and out of a dozen apartments and as many schools in half as many years. It wasnt long before she began going through men as fast as she went through jobs, hooking up with a series of drunks she met in bars and, in one case, at the drivers license bureau. Mom met Alfred in the Blue Moon Tavern. She frequented the Blue Moon because it was close to the University of Washington campus and shed heard a rumor that published poets hung out there.

Despite the cataclysmic change it produced in our lives, or perhaps because of it, that last morning together was so vaguely installed in memory, I found it difficult to bring back details. Odd, considering how much time I spend thinking about the past.

My brother Neil ended up celebrating his thirteenth birthday in the youth detention center off East Alder, where he became an immediate celebrity in that palace of losers and lost souls, the only thirteen-year-old in the United States to have slain a former cop. People leave me alone, he told me during a visit. Theyre afraid of me.

The first decade of my life, Neil had been closer to me than anybody, yet for most of the next twenty years the majority of our communication constituted ten-minute collect phone calls from one prison or another.

One thing I learned early onhappiness is elusive. You learn that when youre ten years old and your brothers in the clink and youre being passed around from relative to relative. Its elusive.

Here are the facts as they stand today:

Im twenty-nine years old, the same age my father was when he died, the same age Alfred was when we killed him right after he killed my mother. I have one sibling, Neil. For the past eight years Neil has been picking up his mail at the State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. Its the sixth time hes been in lockup. You probably should know that in the law enforcement community, Neil is considered unpredictable and dangerous.

Im the brother who went straight.

These days I work for the Seattle Fire Department, just as our father did. Until recently I believed I had a reputation for integrity and probity, and when other firefighters seemed wary of me, I told myself it was because theyd heard about Neil. Obviously there was more.

For instance, the night I cold-cocked Chief Hertlein.

Its not something Im especially proud ofimpulsive violence.

Say some jerk in a movie theater keeps rattling the cellophane wrapper on his candy. I turn around and object. He objects to my objection. I stand and block his view of the screen. He stands and tells me Im an asshole. Next thing I know Im walking out of the place in the middle of the picture and the cops are on their way. Mr. Cellophane goes to the hospital, where they wire his broken jaw shut. I know Im bad. I cant help it.

I escape that one. I escape them all through happenstance and a remarkable string of good fortune. Eventually I wont escape. Eventually Ill be in prison with my brother.

For years Ive known where Im headed. Ive known it and thus far have been unable to do anything to stop it.

Before I punched out Chief Hertlein, I was assigned to Station 32 in West Seattle at the top of the hill near the YMCA. The station housed Attack 32, Medic 32, and Ladder 11. I was the lieutenant on Ladder 11.

Even though his home base was miles away at Station 29, most days you could find Hertlein in our beanery bullshitting, eating our food, and throwing his weight around. Because he protected us from other chiefs and rarely drilled us, we tolerated his bad jokes and around-the-clock presence, though I found him annoying and boorish. He was a bully and a butt-kisser, and in our department the latter made him a fast-tracker. It was rumored he was up for a deputys position.

The day it happened, the entire house was dispatched to an alarm at 1048 hoursthe engine, the ladder truck, the medic unit, and the chief all swooping down off the hill to Pier 28 on the Duwamish waterway, just about a mile due south of downtown, where we found black smoke billowing from the hatches of a three-hundred-foot oceangoing ship.

By noon there were fifteen engine companies, six trucks, and God knows how many chiefs in the dock area. While other firefighters poured water onto the fire, we pumped the excess accumulation out of the holds lest the ship sink from the added weight. In the end we sealed the hatches and filled the holds with CO2, beginning a process that would take days to complete.