Table of contents | Previous chapter Introduction | Cast of characters   Playing with Fire A novel by Scott Lazenby   Chapter 21 e were immediately hit with a sequence of events that, in hindsight, might have been predictable.       First, the Fire Association, with the encouragement of the Citizens for Good Planning, circulated a petition for the recall of Mayor McTavish and Councilors Rosenberg and Arnold. The petition listed as the basis for the recall “an overall inability to reflect the will of the people,” and cited the Nova housing and fire privatization issues as the only specific examples. The recalled council members would be replaced by a slate of three candidates — one of which was Todd Pritchard — with the first order of business being to terminate the city manager’s contract.       Second, a petition began circulating that would amend the city’s charter to prevent the city council from ever contracting out any aspect of fire or emergency medical services.       Third, Oregon Ambulance Services filed suit against the city, claiming a violation of their franchise agreement.       Mayor McTavish was seething. She paced back and forth in my office hurling a string of curses into the air. I could only mutter out a few words of sympathy before the next onslaught began. Finally, she just leaned her head against the wall and moaned, “Goddamn it anyway....”       I stood up and walked around, ostensibly to get a cup of coffee. If this was going to be an aerobic meeting, I didn’t want to feel like a slacker. I filled my mug and leaned against the windowsill, waiting.       McTavish gave me an absent look, then flopped into one of the conference chairs, her eyes focused somewhere in the distance. A small bead of sweat gathered on her forehead.       Suddenly, she snapped out of it and pulled herself together. I quietly slipped into a chair and opened my notepad.       “It isn’t that I’m worried about my job, you know,” she said. “I’d be more than glad to give up this twenty-to-forty-hour-a-week thankless chore that doesn’t pay a dime in order to spend more time with my family.”       She scrunched up her eyebrows and looked at me. “Matter of fact, you’re the one that needs to be worried about the job, since you’re the one that gets paid. Sorry, didn’t mean to rub it in.”       I shrugged.       “No, what really rips me is their arrogance. What if every unpopular decision got slapped with a recall, a charter amendment, and a lawsuit? The city council would be a revolving door without any latitude to make decisions and the lawyers would run the place. What kind of future is that?”       I figured it was a rhetorical question.       “Oh, hell.” She picked at a thread in the cuff of her blouse. The seam started to unravel by the time she realized what she was doing.       “You know,” she said, more quietly this time, “that this is going to mean a change in our strategy, don’t you?”       “You mean a preemptive strike?”       She gave me a quick glance.       “Yeah, but go on, tell me what you have in mind.”       “Okay,” I said. “We can’t afford to let that charter amendment get on the ballot. We’ve got to get something there before then. And I’m afraid that it will have to be something like what Rob Titus proposed — an advisory vote on the fire contract. There’s a big risk there, but I would rather lose the battle than the war.”       She nodded pensively. “I’m afraid so, much as I hate to admit it. When’s the next special election date?”       “May 10.”       “Then time is on our side. They’ll never get enough signatures to put their measure on the ballot by then, but all we have to do is pass a resolution at the next council meeting. That still would give us time to file with county elections, wouldn’t it?”       “Yes, I already checked with Twila on that.”       She smiled, then turned serious again. “You think we’re just playing into their hands?”       “Maybe. But look at it this way. Taking it to the people isn’t the end of the world. We’ll just have to lay out all the arguments, the same ones the council looked at. I’m sure City/County Fire will put a few bucks into the campaign. The vote could well come out the same way it did for the council.”       “You think so, huh?”       “Well, it’s possible. When I took economics in graduate school, one of the key assumptions that economic theory is built on is that people make rational decisions: If faced with two choices, they will make the choice that makes the most economic sense.”       McTavish snorted. “Yeah, but in the real world, the voters aren’t encumbered by concepts of economic rationality.”       I shrugged. Maybe she was right. She had hung on her office wall a framed cartoon that was signed by Scott Adams. In it, Dilbert asks, “Do you think love is the strongest force in the universe?” Dogbert replies, “No, I’d have to go with stupidity. Followed closely by its cousin: ignorance. Then you’ve got selfishness, lust, fear, money and luck.” “But love is in the top ten, right?” Dilbert asks. “It’s fourteenth, right after foolish optimism.”       We sat in silence for a few moments. McTavish rubbed her eyes.       “What about the lawsuit?” she asked.       “Pete says there’s nothing to worry about — they’re just blowing smoke. He reckons they were talked into filing it by the Firefighters Association just to put more pressure on you.”       “Uh huh, figured as much. We’ll have to call their bluff, but it pisses me off that we have to incur legal expenses on it.”       “Me too, but that’s the way it goes.”       “Where’s Max in all this?”       “Still on our side, at least on the surface, but to tell the truth, I really don’t know.” •      •      •       I found out soon enough. Oakley called and asked if I could come over to his office. I agreed, but with some apprehension. I hadn’t been in the fire station for a while.       As I walked up to the building, a half dozen firefighters were polishing the chrome on a pair of American LaFrance pumpers. They paused and looked at me in silence.       Oakley closed his office door behind me, and motioned me over to his meeting table.       He skipped any attempt at small talk. “I have a proposal that I believe you should consider.”       “Okay, shoot.”       He polished the crystal of his Rolex with his sleeve, and carefully began.       “I have been approached by Willamette Valley Fire about the possibility of annexing the City of Trillium into their district. Our existing department would be merged into theirs, and the city would be relieved of the financial burden of the entire fire department.”       I sat back, stunned. The Willamette Valley Fire District was huge. It had started out as a simple rural fire district, but they had picked up a lot of urban assessed value before the State of Oregon tried to close the door on sprawl. One by one, many of the suburban cities had annexed themselves to the district, or contracted for its services. Because they had gained so much industrial and commercial land — which pumped in enormous tax revenues but had next to no demand for medical service — they were able to undercut most city fire departments. Their employees were the highest-paid in the Portland area, and most firefighters were eager to be assimilated.       “I didn’t think they came out this far,” I said. “Where does their boundary end?”       “About eight miles away. But I have researched this issue, and ascertained that we don’t need to be contiguous. They can have separate islands of territory in their district. In fact, there’s a district in Deschutes County that’s done the same thing.”       “It would mean an election.”       He nodded. I scratched my head, thinking through the implications.       “What’s their tax rate now?”       “About $2.50.”       “So most residents would see a tax increase of three to five hundred dollars a year.”       “Yes.”       “What do they get for that?”       “They get their lives saved,” he said, without smiling.       “Maybe we should hold the election in a revival tent.”       “Revival tent?”       “Never mind. How about your staff — how would it affect them?”       “Willamette Valley has had extensive experience in this. The employees are transferred straight across, and they take with them their seniority and accrued vacation and sick leave. But they are moved to higher pay ranges, and they have more promotion opportunities. I think you will find that the staff are very supportive of this.”       “Oh? Do they know about it?”       “No. Not from me, at least.”       “And how about you? How do you fare in this kind of deal?”       “I would lose my status as chief. They have talked about creating a position responsible for strategic planning. But my interests are secondary to finding a solution that is best for the department and for Trillium.”       A charitable sentiment, but I would put money on the fact that his position with Willamette Valley would pay more than his current position — and that he would still be called “chief.” The district had at least a dozen assistant, deputy, and battalion chiefs, and they all went by “chief” for short. Sort of like bank vice presidents.       I thought about my conversation with Mayor McTavish, and wondered how much of it I should share with Max.       “You know, with the threat of this charter change initiative, the council might be more willing to put the City/County proposal on the ballot.”       “Why do that? Why not abandon the privatization scheme, and simply put our efforts behind annexation to Willamette Valley Fire? If that passed, it would certainly address your budgetary concerns. The privatization issue would just cause confusion.”       I found a loose paper clip on his table and started unbending it. “I’ll tell you why, Max. As a resident and taxpayer myself, I think being part of Willamette Fire would be an absolute rip-off. If contracting out doesn’t get the support of the voters, maybe we could look into it, but I personally think it’s nuts.”       “I see.”       “Besides, the fire district can’t get involved in an election. Who would come up with the bucks for a campaign?”       He smiled. “I think that could be arranged.”       The association’s war chest again, no doubt. Indirectly funded by the taxpayers through the union dues that were withheld from the payroll.       The paper clip bent one too many times and broke. I let the pieces fall on his table. “Well, Max, I want you to drop that idea for now. I don’t want any more complications over this issue than we’ve already got. Okay?”       He looked me in the eye, but didn’t say anything. •      •      •       I started coaching another season of Trixie’s softball team. It was a safety valve from the problems at work. But I couldn’t completely escape them. I watched Trixie laughing with her friends, and wondered if she would have to find a new set of friends next school year. If the recall passed, I’d be out of a job, and in the city management profession, that almost always meant moving to another town. It didn’t seem fair to put her — and Mary — in jeopardy for something they didn’t have anything to do with. But there wasn’t much I could do about it.       The insurance company cleared the paperwork quickly, and a contractor was already at work repairing the siding on our house. Filing the claim for the shed was more difficult. With the years’ accumulation of junk, it was hard for Mary and me to remember what all we had in there. If nothing else, it looked like I was going to get a new lawnmower out of the deal. The issue of arson was still an open question, but it didn’t seem to be affecting the insurance claim. The threats had ended — at least for the moment — but I still had the uneasy feeling that at any moment the other shoe was going to drop. •      •      •       The day after my conversation with Max, our office fax picked up an urgent message from the League of Oregon Cities. Our own representative, Lynn Pennington, had, in the final days of the session, introduced a bill to prevent cities from contracting out “essential” services like police and fire. The deadline for new bills had passed, but she used the venerable “gut and stuff” procedure where the entire contents of an existing — and dead — bill were replaced by the new language.       By doing so, she had clearly picked sides in our struggle with the fire union, so there was no way I was going to talk her into withdrawing the bill. On a whim, I got in my car to see if Bo French had as much influence with her as he had claimed. Stranger things had happened lately.       I didn’t see him sitting outside his camp, so I wandered into the plant office.       “Hi, Cap. Have you guys seen Bo lately?”       “Nope. Not for a while. Why?”       “Just need to talk to him about something. No big deal.”       “Well, it’s not like he carries a cell phone or anything, so you’ll have to track him down if you want to talk to him. Or just take a whiff of the air.”       “Easy for you to say in the middle of a sewer plant.”       “Hey, it smells sweet to us.”       I walked back to the camp and called out. No answer. I hesitated a minute, then ducked under a tree branch to get to Bo’s lean-to. I gingerly pushed aside the flap of an old army surplus tarp and looked inside. Bo was asleep inside, peaceful as an angel. I decided to just let him be.       There was a cup of minestrone soup outside the flap door. I felt the metal cup. It was cold. I called Bo’s name, softly at first, then louder. Nothing. I took a breath, then stepped in and shook him by the shoulder. His body was stiff.       I stood there. Maybe it was all I had gone through, or maybe I really did care for the guy, but whatever the reason, my eyes welled. Bo French had been dead for a while and nobody had even noticed.       After a few minutes, I shook myself out of it. I wiped my eyes with my shirtsleeve and trudged over to tell the plant operators. They would have to deal with tracking down Bo’s sister and figuring out what to do with the body. Part of the “other duties as assigned” in their job description, I supposed. •      •      •       The one piece of good news was that the Nova plant was well under construction, in spite of the chain-saw incident. I walked through the shell of the factory with Bess Wilson and one of our building inspectors. It was enormous, and the construction contract alone was already making a difference in our economy.       The inspector poked a flashlight at some tags hanging off a fire sprinkler pipe. Bess spun around and took in the scene as if she owned the place.       “Bitchin’, huh?” she said. “Isn’t it great?”       “Yeah, chips on the whole block.”       “Huh? Is that some kind of pun? Besides, they don’t make chips, they make high-tech ceramic stuff. Here, check out the airlocks for the clean room.”       She led me through some stainless steel and glass doorways with unfinished air ducts hanging from the ceiling. The inspector caught up with us.       “How’s it look, Tom?” Bess asked.       “Fine, so far,” he said. “They still got a lot of finish work to do, though. It’s moving so fast it takes one of us out here pretty much full-time.”       “Don’t sweat it, the building permit alone was eighty grand,” she said.       We continued the tour. I felt some of the same excitement as Bess. It was Nova’s plant, but I felt some small sense of ownership in getting it there.       “Any more word from that guy, Costoso?” I asked.       “Nope. I heard a rumor about a Wal-Mart looking at the property, but I called John Collins to see if there was any truth to it, and he said it was news to him. I don’t know, but I think I believe him. Then again, Costoso and the boys in Japan could be keeping him in the dark.”       “If they are, they’re smart. If people thought there really was a Wal-Mart going out in that farmland, they’d go ape. And it wouldn’t have much connection with this factory, except the workers would have a place to go and buy their caramel popcorn.”       Bess laughed. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to congratulate you on finessing the fire union deal.”       “How so?”       “By getting Willamette Valley Fire into the mix. Either way — private contract or annexation to the district — you win. No more ass-biting pygmies to deal with.”       “Where did you get that information?” I asked, trying to hide the concern in my voice. “About Willamette Valley Fire, I mean.”       “Oh, I don’t know. I heard it from someone, don’t remember who. They said the city was looking into getting annexed to the district.”       “Well, there’s nothing to it. Just a rumor, that’s all.”       “Hey, but it would make your life easier.”       “Maybe, but do you really think my motivation for doing things is just to make my life easier? If that’s the case, I’ve really screwed up over the last year, haven’t I?”       “Ha. Good point. I still think you planted the idea in Max’s head.”       I let the comment pass. Next chapter: the falling ax Copyright © 2001, Scott D. Lazenby. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the author is prohibited. Illustration: Paul Salmon