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Table of contents | Previous chapter Playing with Fire A novel by Scott Lazenby
Chapter Three  he Oregon coast in early summer usually disappoints those who seek a warm beach experience. The Pacific currents bring cold water from Alaska, and the winds off the ocean serve up a random assortment of fog, clouds, drizzle, and — occasionally — sunshine.In the winter, a continuous series of fronts pound the coast. We had friends who kept standing reservations at beachfront hotels during major storms. Awed by the power and beauty of the waves and wind, they would sit with hot chocolate and Irish coffee and watch, warm in the shelter of their room while Mother Nature hurled sheets of rain at the thick plate glass windows. The summers are milder, but the trees at the edge of the beach are permanently bent from the force of the winter winds. Mary had found us a room in the Sand Dollar Motel in Cannon Beach, a block from the ocean. We awoke on Saturday morning to a bank of clouds trapped on the sea side of the coastal range, with a fresh breeze off the water. Trixie had brought a friend named Abbie, and the two of them took turns flying a kite, using the dual control lines to chase seagulls and to swoop down on dogs.  We had lunch of chowder and coffee and bought salt-water taffy in one of the tourist shops. The tide was out, and Trixie and Abbie tugged us back to the water. They sat a few yards from the waves and scooped up handfuls of wet sand. If the slurry was the right consistency, they let it slowly drop into blobs on the beach, building up layer after layer. Mary and I helped build their drift castles, and enjoyed the luxury of aimless conversation.I watched as Mary sprinkled her castle with fine white sand to give it a finishing touch. “Hey, put some of that stuff on my castle too,” I said. “It looks good.” She leaned over on her elbow and let the powder slip through her fingers. The breeze caught a wisp of blond hair by her eyes, and I thought about how pretty she was. Abbie started scooping out a channel from her drip castle to the ocean, to catch the incoming tide. Farther out, children squatted by tide pools at the base of Haystack Rock. After dinner, Mary and I left the girls in the motel room, watching a movie. We pulled on sweatshirts and returned to the beach. The sea breeze had pushed the clouds inland, letting the sun light the spray off the waves. Boats moved up the coast with their catch of salmon, and at the north end of the bay, fishermen retrieved their crab pots. We sat on a driftwood log and watched the sun set. The north coast of Oregon is closer to the North Pole than to the Equator, and in June the sun hangs in the sky until 10 o’clock. Far out over the ocean, lines of clouds turned pink, then crimson. I held Mary close, feeling her warmth against the fresh breeze. We talked about our jobs, Trixie and school, the church activities we had in common, and the strange quirks of our friends and extended family. As the sun’s fire was swallowed by the sea, we stood in a long embrace that reminded me of our courting days, eighteen years earlier. We would have to be satisfied with a passionate kiss — the downside to sharing a motel room with a pair of ten-year-olds. • • • Ten days later, Betty Sue Castle and I sat in Ken Longstreet’s office. The finance director had covered his walls with framed certificates for “Excellence in Financial Reporting” — the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for accountants. A strange concept, if you thought about it.Betty Sue was animated, and behind her round glasses her eyes sparkled. She had placed in front of each of us a stack of spreadsheet printouts and graphs. “I’ve gone through this over and over again,” she began. “Maybe there’s something I’m missing, but this is really starting to look good to me. Let me try to convince you.” “Is this about the fire department again?” I asked. “Uh, yeah.” “I thought I asked you to drop it.” It came out harsher than I wanted. Her shoulders sank. “I know. I did all of this on my own time. I even came in last weekend and worked on it. It didn’t take away anything from my other work, Ben.” I looked at Ken. He shrugged, his narrow shoulders moving almost imperceptibly under his wrinkled white button-down shirt. “All right. Show me what you’ve got.” Betty Sue looked at me warily. She probably guessed I would be looking for mistakes or bad assumptions, but she was bright enough that I would need all my concentration to catch any. “Here are the basic costs we have now,” she began tentatively, pushing her glasses back on her nose and holding up the top sheet on her stack. “There are three stations. Station One has two three-man crews, and the other two have a single crew each. The firefighters work twenty- four-hour shifts and are off forty-eight hours, so there are three shifts, each with its own battalion chief. That adds up to thirty-six firefighters and three battalion chiefs. Each shift also has two spare firefighters, to fill in for vacations and other absences, bringing the total up to forty-two. Using the current averages for salaries, overtime, and fringe benefits, the annual cost is $3.5 million. This doesn’t even count the overhead for the fire bureaucracy — the captains, assistant chiefs, fire marshal, and all that.” Ken watched Betty Sue and me, and hardly glanced at the spreadsheet. He’d already heard the presentation, I guessed. “Now for the hardware,” Betty Sue said, warming up to her speech. “Each station has a pumper, and Station Two has a smaller rescue rig. Station One has a ladder truck. Just looking at the operating cost, we spend around $400,000 a year on fuel, parts, insurance, and so on. Add in another hundred grand for uniforms, tools, repairs, training, and so on.” Ken added, “The cost of the trucks themselves is high, but we’re paying for most of them through bonds, so they don’t affect the general fund budget.” I nodded. “So the basic cost to respond to fire and medical calls totals around $4 million a year,” Betty Sue said. “This was the easy part. From here on, it gets more speculative, but I think the numbers are close. I talked to Oregon Ambulance Service — ” “You did?” I asked, feeling my shoulders tense. “Didn’t you think the word would get right back to our own fire department?” “Yeah, I thought about that,” she said calmly. “They promised to treat the conversation as a confidential inquiry, and not to share it with anyone. But about all I got out of them is that they run two-man crews on eight-hour shifts. The OAS guy was pretty evasive when I asked him about his costs, so I dug up their franchise agreement with Multnomah County. The basic cost to provide a crew and ambulance is about $80 an hour, for twenty-four-hour coverage.” “That’s not so bad,” I said, trying to sound a little more encouraging. “How come you hear about these astronomical bills when someone has to get carted to a hospital?” Ken answered for her. “That’s between them and the insurance companies. Besides, the hourly rate is based on a contract cost for round-the-clock service, so the overhead costs are spread out. When they charge private parties, they have to recover all their costs through a relatively small number of billable trips.” Betty Sue nodded and continued. “I dug out some of the call data from our own fire department — I had to get the records out of the city hall archives, so they aren’t real current, but I figured it was a starting point. Anyway, based on the call stats, I guessed that for medical calls, we could easily get by with four two-man crews during the day shift and swing shift, and three crews during the graveyard shift. I even used queuing theory to take into account the fact that the calls don’t spread themselves evenly through the day, but instead come in bunches.” Queuing theory? I vaguely remembered something about it from graduate school. It was good to have an egghead on staff. “So what’s the bottom line?” I asked. “Be patient, I’m getting there. Using the OAS hourly rate, it would cost around $2.2 million a year to provide medical response. But we still need to put out some fires. I think that a cop with a fire extinguisher in the trunk of his car could put out most of the fires, but we can leave that for later. Even looking at all the fire calls, two three-man crews, both housed out of Station One, could handle them and still have plenty of time for playing checkers and volleyball.” Ken noted, “There is still the problem with some calls bunching up, and major fires that take more than two pumpers to deal with. We could contract with a neighboring jurisdiction for additional coverage, and Betty Sue has included a cost for this. But another option would be to train other city staff as volunteer firefighters. A colleague of mine is the chief accountant for Scottsdale, and he volunteers for Rural Metro there. It works because he is only called out on major fires, which don’t happen all that often.” A welcome relief from bean-counting? Betty Sue said, “You wanted the bottom line; so here it is. If you look at the difference between what it costs now and what it might cost if we re-aligned the service, we could save as much as a half-million bucks a year.” She put her papers down and gave me a triumphant look. I rubbed my eyes, then shuffled through the printouts. I was stuck in a corner. Betty Sue’s work looked good, and she knew that with a total general fund budget of $9 million, I couldn’t ignore a half-million dollars in potential savings. I looked for a way out. “This hinges on contracting with some outfit like OAS. What if that doesn’t work out?” “We anticipated that,” Betty Sue said, her curls swirling around her neck as she shook her head. “Suppose we staff our own two-man ambulances. Even if we assume a ten percent pay boost as an incentive to switch to an eight-hour work shift, the net savings is still around three hundred and fifty to four hundred thousand. There would be a lot of start-up costs, like buying the ambulances, but we could cover most of this by selling some of the surplus fire equipment. I’m convinced the dollars are there.” I continued to leaf through the printouts. Betty Sue and Ken sat silently. “I don’t know,” I said. “We’re treading on sacred ground here. If it were any other city service — recreation, public works, library — we could get away with stirring things up. But here we’re talking about motherhood and apple pie. I think you’re probably right about the savings. But I just can’t see how we could get from here to there. There are too many forces in the fire organization and in the community to let it happen.” “I have an idea on that,” Ken said. I listened to his plan. • • • My first challenge was Max Oakley. If life were fiction, I would have pursued Betty Sue’s idea with single-minded determination, and I would have dealt with the fire chief straight away. But I was bombarded with a thousand distractions. One of them was my planning director, Bess Wilson, who had an amazing ability to complicate my life. Before I could prevent it, I was roped into a meeting with Bess, City Attorney Pete Koenig, and Jake Wildavsky, the public works director.“We have an opportunity to close this deal, but we need support from you and the city council,” Bess said. She was tall and wore her long gray hair in a simple ponytail. In addition to her planning director role, Bess Wilson was a master at economic development. Most developers and business owners found her flamboyant, almost reckless style a refreshing change from the bureaucrats they were used to dealing with. I appreciated the fact that they liked her, but she gave me a constant feeling of impending doom. The deal that Bess was working on involved a high-tech ceramics plant that made components for the electronics industry. The company, Nova Ceramics, was jointly owned by American and Japanese corporations. It had closed the purchase for some industrially zoned property at the west edge of town, and was on a tight schedule to open the plant in nine months. It was a major coup for the City of Trillium, since the factory was slated to employ up to 1,000 workers, all fairly well paid compared to the service jobs that were typical of Portland’s satellite cities. We had managed to get a low-interest loan, backed by the Oregon state lottery, for the water, sewer, and street improvements that would serve the plant. Nova had signed an agreement to make the loan payments, secured by a lien on their property. “They already have their contractor out there doing site prep,” Bess said. “They want to go ahead and get the public improvements done at the same time. They don’t want to wait around while we go through the friggin’ bid process.” I looked at Pete Koenig, the attorney, dapper in a red bow tie and matching suspenders. “Developers do their own work for public improvements in subdivisions. So why is this any different?” I asked. Pete slid over a memo on flimsy paper. As an act of defiance toward the computer age, he pounded out all his legal opinions on an old Remington. When he typed “cc:” on the bottom, it literally meant “carbon copy.” He went through a box of carbon paper a week. I was surprised he could still buy the stuff. “The complication here is the state loan,” Pete said. “Technically, that makes it a city project, even if Nova is paying for it. So it falls under the state bidding laws. But the statutes allow the city council to grant exceptions under certain circumstances — I outlined them in my opinion. One of those is a case where overriding the bid process will save money. We could make the argument that the city would have to pay a premium to get the work done in time for Nova’s schedule, when the time for the bid process itself is taken into account.” Jake said, “We figure the premium could add up to a hundred and fifty grand, assuming that the contractor would have to pay overtime for around four hours per day. The bid process would take at least two months, and Nova’s contractor is already there.” “How do we set the cost for the contract, if we don’t get a bid on it? Couldn’t Nova inflate the cost just to get a line on the state’s loan money?” I asked. “Good idea — why didn’t I think of that?” Jake scratched his head. “Seriously though, our engineers will make an independent estimate of the cost, and we’ll hold them to that. As long as it’s reasonable, it doesn’t matter too much, since it’s all their money anyway.” Under the table, Bess’ leg was rocking like a sewing machine. It made ripples in my coffee. She said, “Other cities use their own funds for the infrastructure to attract good jobs. Here they’re not even asking for anyone else to pay for it — they just want to be able to get on with the project. It’s not much to ask.” “Okay,” I said. “Go ahead and put it on the next council agenda. Tell me, though — how did you find out we might have a problem with the bid laws?” It wasn’t the sort of thing that Bess Wilson would normally think about. “It came to her after her second pitcher of beer with the Nova guys at the Chinook Pub,” Jake said, snickering. “Show’s what you know, Wildavsky,” Bess said. “After the second pitcher we were wondering if we could find an upstairs room to close the deal. Seriously, though, the building inspector was on the site, looking at the grading plan, and the contractor mentioned that they were going to run the water line in soon. The inspector asked one of Jake’s engineers if the project had gone out to bid. See, it’s his fault for even bringing it up.” Jake shrugged. • • • After work I picked up Trixie and the gear bag and drove over to Trillium Grade School. Coaching a softball team made up of fourth- and fifth-grade girls was a healthy diversion from work, but at times the two didn’t seem much different. The girls had the usual mix of personalities — and personality conflicts — and their parents could be as demanding as any city taxpayer. The league had its own set of arbitrary rules and power struggles. But at least we were working outdoors.The outfield was still soggy from months of rain, but the girls didn’t seem to mind. In fact, they were oblivious to just about everything. School had been out for a few weeks, so the practice was a great time to catch up on news and gossip. My attempts at coaching seemed to be an annoying intrusion in their social life. I was philosophical about it — it was a recreational league, and they were just supposed to have fun. We did some batting practice and ran a few sprints, then played a short practice game with a few of the parents filling in for the outfield. The girls were disorganized and tentative, but I figured I had time to work on team dynamics. We ended the practice with plenty of daylight left, and had a late dinner. That evening, I set my alarm for 2:30. When it went off, I turned on the light and called a number on a piece of paper on the bed stand. Mary buried her head under her pillow. “Hello, ma’am. This is Ben Cromarty, the city manager. You called me a couple of weeks ago about a street light that was out. Our staff contacted Pacific Electric to have it fixed, and I’m calling to make sure it got taken care of. Could you check if the light is on?” “Huh? Oh.” A yawn and a long pause. “Okay. Just a minute.” I waited. “Yeah it’s on.” “All right. Glad we could be of service, ma’am. Good night.” Mary squinted at me from under the pillow. “You’re twisted,” she said, and rolled back over to sleep. • • • Fire Chief Max Oakley’s office was furnished in dark mahogany, an appropriate backdrop for the framed picture of his Ferrari. Your average public servant doesn’t usually drive a car like that, but Max had retired from a California city with a full pension. He was probably drawing $60,000 from California, so with his Trillium paycheck I figured he was pulling down a hundred and forty thousand a year. No wonder state legislators and judges tried to get into the public safety retirement system, with its low retirement age. Job stress was probably a good reason for street cops and firefighters to bail out after 25 years, but how could you justify it for jailers and paper-pushers? There was a time when the pension system made up for low salaries, but the unions had finally fixed that, and the dreaded threat of “salary compression” pushed up the whole wage scale. Okay, so I was envious.And on top of that, Max’s mother-in-law had died a couple of years ago, and left them with something like one and a half million dollars. I could never hold the threat of firing over him — he wasn’t working for the money. Oakley wore a white uniform shirt and a badge. His gray hair, trimmed gray moustache and tan face gave him a distinguished look that he used to full advantage. It must have taken some work — a tan in Oregon in June was probably artificially induced. From my seat I could see Mt. Hood to the east, still white with snow. Betty Sue Castle organized her notes, and began to go over her observations about fire and medical services. She spoke naturally and with a calm self-confidence. Nice job. I could see her pulse in the light that reflected off her neck, and she wasn’t as calm as she looked. Max kept a poker face, occasionally nodding or stroking his moustache. When Betty Sue finished, he raised his eyebrows and glanced at me. “So what do you think?” I asked. He paused. “I’m open to any ideas. There may be parts of this worth pursuing. But it’s not as simple as you think,” he said, turning to Betty Sue. His voice was deep and controlled . “Many of our calls require a fire and medical response. A good percentage of our medical calls are related to vehicle accidents, where there is typically a danger of fire due to gasoline and other combustibles. Conversely, many structure fires have a potential for injury, not only to the public but to our own personnel.” “That may be true,” Betty Sue countered, “but there’s a risk of injury when our utility crews go into a trench to fix a water line, and we don’t send firefighters to those calls, do we? And how many of the traffic accidents really involve a fire danger? Even our supporters complain when they see a police car, fire truck, and ambulance all respond to a fender-bender. But I do respect your experience in this. Just let me go through a year’s worth of hard data on your calls and see what kinds of trends pop up.” “I have no problem with that,” Oakley said. “In fact, I’ll ask my staff assistant to assemble the reports and bring them over to you. Some of my men might get anxious about someone from city hall poking through our files.” Eight of Oakley’s “men” were women, but Betty Sue let the comment pass. She glanced at me. “There’s one more thing I need. I’ve had to make some assumptions about the cost of providing medical service. Oregon Ambulance Service should have good numbers, since that’s what they do. But I can’t find the right person to talk to. Who would you suggest I call? Just to get an idea of some of the cost of providing medical service, not to talk about contracting out.” Oakley’s jaw tensed. “I cannot help you there. You will not get much out of them. They are a private, for-profit business and they would not be willing to share operational data. And don’t forget that our paramedics have a higher level of training and certification, so you run the risk of comparing apples to oranges. That wouldn’t be fruitful.” Max didn’t crack a smile. Didn’t he catch his own pun? Betty Sue gave Max a level gaze. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said. Max paused for a moment, then turned to me, “If we’re done with this, I have a personnel issue I need to discuss with you.” If Betty Sue resented the implied dismissal, she didn’t show it. She silently got up and left the office. I watched her go. “What is it?” I asked. “I was forced to dismiss one of my firefighters.” “Oh? On what grounds?” Max leaned back in his chair, relishing his role as hard-nosed administrator. “Unsuitable behavior in public. Apparently the individual in question — and this has been backed by several witnesses — went to some kind of party at a house in the woods near the Coast Range. He became intoxicated and unruly to the point that when he left the house, they locked the door behind him. He tried to return and was upset about the locked door. So he took a shotgun out of his pickup truck and blew it open.” I tried to picture it. “I imagine that had a sobering effect on the party.” “Yes, they called 911, but being out in the country, it took some time to get a response from a deputy, so one of the people at the house finally had to wrestle him to the ground to get the gun away from him.” “And you fired him?” “Yes, today, after I completed my investigation.” “The union will probably protest, saying that we can’t control what a person does on their own time.” Max shrugged. “Possibly. But I will not allow that kind of behavior by someone in my department, whether or not they are on duty at the time. We are in the business of protecting lives, not threatening them.” “Well, it sounds like you did the right thing.” Max added, before I could leave, “By the way, I don’t very much appreciate a kid two years out of college presuming that she knows how to operate a public safety department. I think you will find that a radical restructuring of the fire service is unacceptable.” I bristled. Betty Sue was five years out of graduate school, but more than that, I didn’t like the idea of a department head telling the city manager that anything was unacceptable. Especially a department head who leaned on the chain-of-command whenever he needed to justify his own decisions. “Don’t be too defensive, Max. You’ll make me think you’re trying to hide something. At this point, we’re just exploring options. But I do think that Betty Sue is on to something here. All I’m asking is that you keep an open mind. To tell the truth, I want more than that. I want you to help me make it work. And I want you to put your PR skills into this, and help me deal with roadblocks we’re bound to run into. Will you do it?” “I don’t know. I don’t believe the savings are there, and even if they are, I don’t think it would be worth the hassle. Besides, the fire chiefs association would excommunicate me.” He cracked a smile. Amazing. “Yeah, I know this doesn’t sound like the path to professional stardom,” I said. “But hey, maybe you’ll become famous.” “Great, I might as well go on the lecture tour — with just a skeleton fire crew and a few paramedics, what would there be to do around here?” “Don’t knock it. You wouldn’t have to spend all your time watching your back with the union, since they wouldn’t have all that free time to sit around and stew about their salary and working conditions and your management style.” Max was stone faced. I had hit a nerve. In another part of the buildings, the equipment bay doors opened. Max looked down at his pager. “You know,” I said, “Simon will probably retire at the end of next year. If you really do have extra time on your hands, we could look at some options there. Instead of hiring another police chief, I could create a public safety director position, over both police and fire. It’s been done in other cities.” “And it never seemed to work very well,” Max said. “I don’t know about that. And besides, maybe it’s harder when you try to run a combined department that’s really just a traditional fire department and police department. But if we can pull this scheme off, we’ll end up with a medical response team that looks a lot more like a police force, with eight-hour shifts and vehicles that are free to wander around in the city. Before you know, we’ll have to buy them doughnuts. It may really make sense to manage it like a combined department with three or four divisions.” Max looked noncommittal, but this was the kind of bait that he couldn’t ignore. “Anyway, give it some thought,” I said. “All right. I still believe that there are flaws in the concept, though. Nevertheless, I will support you on whichever direction you choose to go. That’s my professional duty.” The battalion chief stuck his head in the doorway. “Do you want to join us on this one, Max? It looks like it’s a real fire.” “Yes. Ben?” “Sure, let’s go.” Max drove his own car. We caught up with one of the pumpers and followed it. The dispatcher said the fire was at the edge of the city, in an area with large lots and relatively little development. It seemed to be a house fire that was called in by a neighbor. We flew down a gravel driveway. Max parked on a grass field to get his car out of the way of the rest of the equipment. It looked like the front of the house was a sheet of flames. Firefighters had hooked the first pumper to a tanker truck, and as we got out of the car, a blast of water shot into the ground. We skirted around the fire trucks to get a better view. As we got closer, it seemed that it wasn’t the house that was on fire, but something close to it. Max found the battalion chief. “Do you know what it is?” Max had to raise his voice over the noise of the engines. “No. Looks like there’s something in a pit there, but we can’t see much.” “Is the owner around?” “Nope. The guys said they saw someone running down the road, barefoot. Don’t know what that’s all about. I wish we could find someone who knows what’s burning in there.” I could feel the heat of the flames on my face. The firefighters played out a line from the second pumper and shot a stream at the house. “Is the house burning too?” I asked. “No,” Max said. “They’re just keeping it cool to make sure it doesn’t ignite.” The flames seemed unaffected by the attack. The firefighters dragged the hose around to hit the fire from a different direction. I pulled out my mobile phone and hit the speed dial for the police department. “Hi, Karen? This is Ben Cromarty. Listen, could you do me a favor? Have you been monitoring the fire call out here on Cougar Drive? Could you look up the address and get me the owner’s name? And while you’re at it, the fire guys saw someone running down Cougar — said he was barefoot or something. Can you check to see if any of your patrol officers have seen him, or know anything about it?” I gave her my phone number and thanked her. Slowly, the flames were being beaten back. The firefighter on the end of the hose was relieved by one of his colleagues. He walked over to join us, and pulled off his helmet. His face and neck were drenched in perspiration, and his turnout coat was gray with soot. “It’s a hot one, but at think we’ve got it now,” he said. “Good work, Phil,” Max said. “Do you have any idea what’s in there?” “Not sure, but it sort of looks like a camper trailer. Doesn’t make any sense though.” I watched as he walked over to one of the pumpers and got a bottle of water out of the cab, then sat on the ground. Suddenly the flames retreated. All we could see through the steam was the blackened top of some kind of frame. We walked over for a closer look. Inside the huge hole were the charred remains of what looked like a 30-foot-long travel trailer. Glass splinters from the windows were still stuck in the frame. Sheet metal flapped slowly in the heated air currents. The hoses had filled the pit with a couple of feet of water, and two of the firefighters set up a gas-powered utility pump. The motor coughed into life, and black water gushed onto the lawn. The water level in the hole slowly fell. The battalion chief was talking on the radio in his vehicle. I felt fairly useless, and I had a lot of work waiting back at the office, but I didn’t want to drag Max away until he was ready. I felt the cell phone vibrate in my pocket. “Cromarty here.” “Ben, this is Karen at PD. We found the owner’s name, Ronald Boake. And guess what? One of the guys picked up the man you described, and it turned out to be this Boake. What do you want us to do with him?” “How about bringing him out here? I think the fire marshal wants to talk to him.” “You’re at Boake’s house?” “Yes.” “Okay, will do.” The firefighters opened their coats and pulled off their helmets and leaned against the side of the fire engine to catch their breath. One of them wandered over to the pit to check the water level. “Hey, look at this.” “What is it?” “I don’t know. Looks like a bunch of propane tanks.” The entire group moved to the edge of the hole and peered over. “Well, I’ll be. Must be a dozen of them.” “What should we do with them, chief?” The battalion chief said, “Well, I don’t know. We could leave them there until everything cools down, or we could try to fish them out to make sure they’re well away from the hot stuff. Think it’s cool enough to go in there?” “Sure, I’ll go,” one of the firefighters said. Someone slid a ladder down into the pit. The firefighter put his helmet back on and descended. He approached the tanks cautiously, and pushed the closest one with his boot. Satisfied, he lifted it, and said something. “What?” He lifted his face mask. “Feels like it’s full.” He hoisted the tank on his shoulder and climbed the first step on the ladder. Another firefighter gripped the top of the container and pulled it out of the hole. It was hard work — each tank must have weighed around 50 pounds. By the tenth tank, both men were getting tired, and their gloves were wet. As the tank was being passed up, it slipped out of their hands. The firefighter in the hole fell on his back, putting his arms up to protect himself from the falling tank. It missed him, but hit the ground hard. An invisible stream of propane shot out, hissing furiously. “Holy shit!” Instinctively, we all jumped back. Suddenly, one of the firefighters leaped into the hole. I crept to the edge, ready to run, and saw the firefighter dive toward the tank. He twisted the valve and the hissing stopped. “You’re crazy, Sven,” one of the firefighters yelled. “Hey, I didn’t want this thing lighting up in here,” he shouted back. “It could have toasted Sully.” He looked at his comrade, who was picking himself up off the ground. “You okay?” “Yeah, I think so. Hey, thanks man.” “No problem.” The battalion chief shook his head. Max nodded approvingly. “You won’t find a finer group of men in any agency in this country,” he told me, and he was right. The rest of the tanks came out without incident. As the cleanup process continued, a black and white patrol car pulled into the driveway. The officer got out and opened the door for his passenger, a sheepish looking unshaven man in his early thirties. Sure enough, he wasn’t wearing shoes. The battalion chief walked over to them, accompanied by Bernice Jenkins, the fire marshal. Max and I followed. “Who’s this?” “Ronald Boake, the homeowner,” the officer said. “Okay, Mr. Boake, my name is Bernice Jenkins, and I’m the Trillium fire marshal. So, what can you tell about this?” “Well, uh, it’s like this. I was welding a cover to put over the hole, and I guess a spark fell down there and caught the trailer on fire. So I panicked and ran — thought the whole thing was going to blow. Uh, sorry about that.” “You know, the thing I’m having trouble figuring out is what a travel trailer is doing down in the bottom of a pit. Can you help me with this?” “Oh, sure. See, there’s the Armageddon computer virus that’s going to wipe out the world’s computers in the next three months. If you’ve read about that, you know that the experts are saying that there will be real mayhem, lots of looting and stuff like that, when civilization ends as we know it. So I was building me a bunker to ride it out. I was packing it with plenty of food and water and fuel to get through anything. You never know what kind of crazies are out there.” Bernice and the bat chief shared a glance. “So when we go through the debris, all we’re going to find is the remains of the trailer and maybe some cans of beans, stuff like that?” “Yeah.” “Nothing else?” “No! Well, like what, weapons? Cause I hadn’t put them in yet, needed to get it secured with a roof and proper entrance first. They’re all ...” Boake glanced at the police officer. “They’re what?” Bernice asked. “They’re all locked up in the house. But they’re all legal, bought them all through the proper authorities, you know.” “Well, I’ll leave that for Officer Sandler here. What I’m trying to sort out is this fire. So you were welding? Where’s the welding gear? Was it an arc welder or oxy-acetylene?” “An electric welder. I guess I left it there when I ran for it, and it must have fallen in the bunker. I can have a look if you want.” “That can wait. I doubt there’s much of it left.” “Oh. Do you reckon my insurance will cover it?” Bernice laughed. “If you had waited for Armageddon, then it might have been an act of God, but now. ...” Boake raised his eyebrows. “Sorry sir, it was just a joke. You’ll have to take that up with your insurance agent. I imagine if you have some kind of homeowner’s policy, it might cover some of this. Come on, let’s have a look at what’s left with your bunker.” Max turned to the battalion chief. “Tell your men thanks for the good work. I’ll be heading out now.” “All right. See you Ben, Max.” On the drive back to the station, I asked Max, “What was Bernice getting at, with those questions about what that bozo was storing in his trailer?” “I’m sure she’s thinking it was a meth lab or grow operation. The computer virus story just sounds too farfetched. But even if that was it, he probably hadn’t moved any equipment in — he wouldn’t want to do that until he got the thing covered up.” “Hmm. But we’ve got enough survivalists who are paranoid about computers and other things they don’t understand. Remember all the hoopla over the Y2K bug? Maybe he was telling the truth.” “Could be. But it doesn’t really matter to us. I become concerned whenever anyone stores large quantities of propane in holes next to flammable materials, regardless of what crazy reason they have for doing it.” • • • When I got back to city hall, Terri Knox gave me a look of supplication. I paused before going on into my office. She was surrounded by files and stacks of papers, and her normally neat black hair looked like it had been caught in a windstorm.“What’s going on?” I asked. “Oh, Todd Pritchard came in while you were gone. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request for copies of a bunch of documents. I told him we would have to charge fifteen cents a page. He said, ’Fine,’ but it’s still a pain.” “What documents does he want?” “All reports, correspondence, and records of phone conversations involving the Nova Ceramics company. There’s a bunch of it, spread through a bunch of files here and in Planning.” “Hmm,” I thought, with a sinking feeling. Now what? Next chapter: enter the union Copyright © 2001, Scott D. Lazenby. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the author is prohibited. Illustration: Paul Salmon |
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