The smoke room: a novel of suspense - By Earl W. Emerson

1. HOWLING IN THE DEEP BLUE TWILIGHT

W EXP ERT S ESTIMATED THE pig fell just over 11,000 feet before it plunged through Iola Pederson’s roof.

The lone witness had been snitching cherry tomatoes from a pot on his neighbor’s front porch when he looked up and spotted the hog as it tumbled through the deep blue twilight. Whether the hog had been howling because he was delighted with the flight or because of the rapidly approaching earth, nobody ever knew. Ultimately the critter pierced Iola Pederson’s roof with the sound of a man putting his foot through a rotten porch. The pig’s demise pretty much signaled the end of all my ambitions. My name is Jason Gum. Just call me Gum.

At the time, I was twenty-four years old and had been a Seattle firefighter just under two years but was already studying to take the lieutenant’s examination in another year. I was aiming to be chief of the department. It was ambitious, I know, but the way I figured it, you need goals if you are going anywhere in life—goals and a straight and narrow pathway.

Engine 29 runs out of a sleepy little station in a residential district in West Seattle. Four people work off the rig: an officer, a driver, and two of us in back. On the day we got the call to check out Iola Pederson’s roof, I was working a rare turn on B shift. Stanislow had less time in than I did, and I could tell she was looking to my lead as we raced toward the scene of what the radio report said was a rocket into a house. I knew not to get too worked up until we’d evaluated the scene ourselves.

“I wonder if it’s an accidental firing from the submarine base across the water,” said Stanislow. “Christ.”

“It’s probably nothing,” I said.

As we sat in the back of the crew cab watching the streets unfold be-4

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hind us, Stanislow and I slipped into our MSA harnesses. They’d also dispatched two more engines and two aerial ladders, a chief, a medic unit, and probably an aid car; yet even with all that manpower, Stanislow and I would be first through the door. Life on the tailboard. Cash money couldn’t get a better seat to every little bizarre extravagance of human behavior. The address was on Hobart Avenue SW, a location drivers from stations outside our district were going to have a hard time finding. Siren growling, Engine 29 moved through quiet, residential streets until we hit the apex of Bonair Drive, where we swooped down the hillside through a greenbelt that was mostly brown now—Seattle enjoying the driest August on record.

The slate-blue Puget Sound was spread out below us like a blanket. West over the Olympics the sunset was dead except for a few fat razor slashes of pink along the horizon. A hawk tipped his wings and bobbled on air currents over the hillside. Above us a small plane circled. The house was the only single-family residence on a street of small apartment buildings. The lieutenant turned around and said, “Looks like smoke. I want you guys to lay a preconnect to the front door.”

The driver placed the wheel blocks under the rear duals and started the pump, while I jumped down and grabbed the two-hundred-foot bundle of inch-and-three-quarters hose preconnected to an outlet on the rig and headed toward the house, dropping flakes of dry hose behind me. The officer busied himself on the radio, giving incoming units directions to our location. Because the driver on this shift was noted for filling the line with reckless speed, I moved quickly, not wanting the water pressure to knock me down the way it had Stanislow at her first fire. In front of the house a man with one of those ubiquitous white Hemingway beards you see on so many old guys sat cross-legged on the turf, covered in blood. Behind him, the living-room windows were broken out, pieces of plate glass littering the lawn like mirrors and reflecting distant city lights, a twilight sky. The roof had a hole in it the size of a duffel bag. All I could think was that the man on the lawn had been burned and wounded, possibly in an explosion.

“Anybody inside?” I asked.

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“My daughter,” he gasped. “My daughter’s in there! I think she’s in there. God. I’m confused.”

Stanislow