Pyro Read Free

.”
    There had been half a dozen small fires in Station 6’s district, mostly late at night. So far nobody was overly concerned. “Don’t worry about it. We fight an arson fire just like we fight any other fire. We catch the guy. I break his neck. It’s that simple.” I grinned.
    She laughed nervously.
    “I just wonder about these arsons. What if it’s a terrorist?”
    “If terrorists were setting fires, they’d do a better job than these piddly-ass calls. This is just some dingbat.”
    At that moment Lieutenant Slaughter poked his head in my door, smiled warmly, and said, “Hey, cocksucker.”
    “What’s up, gramps?”
    “So you finally decided to come where the action is?” It wasn’t until he pushed the door open that Slaughter realized Rideout was in the room. “Sorry. I didn’t see you. Excuse my French. Paul and I go way back.”
    “Steve was my first officer,” I said. “He tried to can me.”
    “Bullshit. I was keeping you on your toes.”
    Slaughter stepped into the room, making it even smaller, and we all three looked at one another for an uneasy moment. I had the feeling from a fleeting look I saw behind his heavy glasses that Slaughter thought there was something illegitimate about my closed-door meeting with Rideout. There’d been male officers in the past who’d harassed female recruits, and I knew of at least one woman who got her job by sleeping with an officer. There’d been women on the receiving end of bad reports who claimed the officers evaluating them tried to pressure them into having sex. These were by no means common problems, but we’d all heard the stories.
    “You’ll both like this station,” Slaughter said. “We’re busy. We do our work, but we have a lot of fun too. We call it the God Bless America Firehouse and Lounge.”
    Rideout laughed. I said, “We heard you’ve been having some arson fires.”
    “Nuisance crap. It’s not like when Paul Keller was running around. Or the other one, the one we never caught.”
    Slaughter was a big man, imposing, six feet, 250 pounds, with thick, black-framed glasses, a shock of brown hair, bushy eyebrows, and a walrus mustache he let creep over his lip. He was a firefighter’s firefighter and had the kind of face advertisers slapped on fire appliance calendars.
    Before we could continue our conversation, the station alerter went off. At Six’s the engine got more calls than the truck, but this one was for us.
    It was a water job.

3. FIRST SHIFT AT SIX’S
    Cynthia Rideout
    D ECEMBER 5, T HURSDAY , 2331 HOURS
             
As far as I know, everybody else in the station is asleep. I can hear Zeke Boles snoring on the other side of the lockers. Poor Zeke. Slaughter and Gliniewicz had worked themselves into a lather by the time Zeke finally walked in at 0835, almost an hour late. Apparently this isn’t the first time they had to call Zeke at home.
    After he got here, some chiefs from downtown showed up and they all went back in the engine office. He ended up working the shift and getting disciplinary charges for a failure to report. Zeke seems to be a gentle, kindhearted man. People say he has a drug problem, but I think they’re just saying that because he’s always late and he’s black.
    When they all went into the office, Mike Pickett, my partner on Ladder 3, griped that we were going to catch some of their aid alarms because the engine wouldn’t be in service to take them. I never dreamed there were firemen who didn’t want alarms.
    The unofficial department policy is that firefighters can go to bed after ten at night, but Jeff Dolan, our driver, was asleep by nine-thirty. He’s the hardest worker on the crew and pretty much does what he wants. Pickett was on the phone all evening, so I have no idea when he turned in. Pickett seems to be Ladder 3’s resident complainer. He and Bill Gliniewicz, the driver on Engine 6, bitch for hours on end.
    I can’t sleep. I’m in the bunk room tucked up in the corner of