Chapter 49 The Move
The call wasn’t a fire. That was the part that got into my chest and stayed.
Dispatch had a report of a smell in the two-flat on Larch, the corner one, the one I could have walked to blindfolded by then because I’d spent so many evenings on its downstairs porch pretending I was there to talk about the case and mostly just watching Birdie fail to admit she’d made me a plate.
A neighbor two doors down had phoned it in.
Odd smell. Sweetish. Nobody hurt, nobody panicking, a Tuesday.
I had the truck moving before dispatch finished the address.
Birdie answered on the first ring, which she never does, because she has a whole routine about letting a phone ring three times so nobody thinks she’s the sort of person who waits by the phone. “It’s on Larch,” I said. “Somebody smells accelerant in your building. Where are you.”
“Hollis,” she said. The store. Downtown, six minutes on a good day.
And then her voice did the thing I’d only heard it do a handful of times, the thing that had made me start watching her in the first place, back at Founders’ Day, back before I knew what I was watching.
It went flat. It went clean. Every ounce of flutter dropped out of it, gone like a coat off a hook. “Wes. Is anyone inside.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Find out. Don’t send anyone up. Don’t let anyone go up looking for the smell.” A pause I could hear her thinking through. “It’s him. It’s not a scare this time. He’s off the money and he’s angry and this is the one where he means it. Get people off that block.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m two minutes out. Get here.”
“Six,” she said. “I’ll be four.” And the line went dead, and somewhere in downtown Halford I knew for a fact that the jumpiest woman in the county had just left a customer standing at the register with his rebar clips half rung up.
We could not see the clock. A fire you can read: subject to verb to object, ignition to fuel to air, a grammar.
But a device that hasn’t gone yet doesn’t tell you when.
It doesn’t tell you if. It sits in a building being a maybe, and you stand outside doing arithmetic with people’s lives as the variable, and there is no number counting down for you like in the movies.
There’s just a smell, and a neighbor’s phone call, and 4:40 in the afternoon on a full block, and your own pulse doing the counting and refusing to tell you the number.
I want to say a word here about the arithmetic, because people think a fire marshal at a scene like this is running toward the danger, and the truth is I spent the first four minutes doing the opposite, spending every ounce of what I had on moving people who did not want to be moved and had no idea why they were being moved.
That is the job. That is nearly the whole of the job on a day like this one.
I have a certain reputation in this county for being calm.
I am not calm. I am afraid the entire time, and I have learned to make the fear come out of my mouth as short flat sentences that other people can follow, because a scared man who gives clear short instructions and a calm man who gives clear short instructions are indistinguishable from the outside, and only one of them exists.
I came around the corner onto Larch and the street was doing its ordinary thing, which was the worst possible thing.
A woman with grocery bags. Two boys on bikes doing lazy figure eights in the road.
Mr. Petrakis and his ancient beagle stopped at the hydrant.
Fran from the diner up on her own porch shaking out a rug.
None of them knew. That’s the part nobody tells you about this work, the part I could never explain to anyone before Birdie, who already knew it in her bones.
The danger is invisible and the people are just living their afternoon, and it’s your job to walk into their ordinary Tuesday and take it away from them for their own good, and they will be annoyed with you, and some of them will argue, and you have to do it anyway, gently, fast, before the arguing costs them.