Flashover Page 18

  Somewhere on the Empire Pipeline. A and E knows about it. Connie knew about it.”

  Marenko looked puzzled. “How do you know?”

  Georgia sank down on a wooden bench with a slat missing and put her head in her hands. She poured out the whole story, starting with Connie’s revelations about Robin Hood, and ending with how she’d been tapped by this Hood character to do the payoff.

  Marenko listened intently. “Robin Hood wants you to make the drop? Son of a bitch—why?”

  “I don’t know, Mac. And I’m scared. First, Connie’s gone, and now this.” Marenko put a reassuring hand on her thigh. “So you think this warehouse fire on Bridgewater Street is the link, huh?”

  “Something was stored in that warehouse—something that wasn’t supposed to be there,” Georgia explained. “I think it basically poisoned the men to death. And now, with the new football stadium going up, I think Robin Hood knows the evidence will be covered over forever, and he’s looking for payback.” She opened the manila envelope she’d been carrying and showed him the DEP form she’d taken from Flannagan’s basement.

  “From the looks of this form, the DEP knew about the problem six months before the fire,” said Georgia. “But either they wouldn’t or couldn’t get the stuff out in time.”

  Marenko furrowed his brow at the yellowed slip of paper. “Tristate Trucking, huh? I got a friend at HIDTA who could run Tristate through his computer.” HIDTA, pronounced high-da, was short for High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a multi-agency program set up by the federal government to compile computerized information on criminals.

  “Problem is,” Marenko added, “Robin Hood can’t possibly be one of the firefighters from Bridgewater. From what you’re telling me, they’re all dead.”

  “But he could be related in some way, Mac. I think he’s a firefighter. He knows fire. He knows the tools. And he knows the pipeline. But I can’t find out any more about the incident. Everyone is shutting me down.”

  “What does Empire think of all this? They’re coughing up the mil, after all.”

  “They’ve got their own secrets to protect,” Georgia explained. She pulled the blueprint of the warehouse out of her folder and showed it to him.

  “The warehouse is gone, but now, the city’s fixing to build a stadium here,” said Georgia. “Maybe Empire doesn’t want their past screwups on this site to become public knowledge. It could make everyone skittish about letting the line run alongside a proposed stadium.”

  A clap of thunder rattled the still air. The sky turned the color of tarnished silver. Marenko stamped out his cigarette. “Maybe you should talk to Brennan.”

  “He won’t listen to me.”

  “Then I’ll do it.”

  “No,” said Georgia. “You’ve got enough problems. I’ll find a way.”

  A couple of fat raindrops dive-bombed the pavement. Marenko rose. “We should go. You’re gonna get soaked. C’mon, I’ll walk you to the subway station.”

  “What about you? Aren’t you going back to Manhattan?” He shrugged, and Georgia suddenly remembered. “Are you going to go visit your grandmother?”

  He kicked at a piece of loose concrete on the cracked pavement without answering.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to ask to come along,” Georgia assured him. She rose and checked her watch. “I should be heading home, anyway.”

  Marenko put a hand on her arm. “She calls me ‘Stashoo,’” he muttered.

  “Who does?”

  “My grandmother. It’s a Polish version of Stanley. My father’s name. And, uh, technically, mine, too. ‘Mac’s’ a…a…” He grew red faced and put his hands in his pockets.

  “A nickname. I know,” said Georgia. “I peeked at your driver’s license once. You never got it changed?”

  He made a face. “I can’t. My grandmother would have a coronary. She says Mac’s a cheeseburger, not a person.”

  Georgia giggled.

  “You think it’s funny? First day of school every year, the teacher would call out, ‘Where’s Stanley Marenko, Junior?’ And the kids would be on the floor when I raised my hand. And when I played football in high school? My grandmother would cheer for her ‘Stashoo.’ Let me tell you, with a name like that, you get good with your fists real fast.”

  “Well…go see her, Stashoo.” Georgia gave him a playful punch on the arm. “She’s probably worried about you.”

  “She doesn’t know,” he said. “Nobody in my family told her. And that’s the way I intend to keep it.”

  Georgia lifted herself up on tiptoes and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Visit her anyway. You’ll make her day.” She turned to leave, and he grabbed her wrist.

  “Come with me,” he said huskily. More rain was falling now. A scattershot of hard drops darkening the pavement.

  “No,” said Georgia, shaking her head.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it makes you uncomfortable.”

  “But it’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Not this way, Mac. Not because you feel pressured into it.”

  Marenko wiped a hand down his face. The rain was falling harder now. Georgia could feel it beating on her shoulders.

  “Jesus, Scout. I’m standing here, asking you and you’re not…If you want to come, you should come.”

  Georgia folded her arms across her chest and stared at him. “Why?”

  He lifted his gaze to the clouds swirling above like smoke. “Because the sky is gonna piss down on us…Because my grandmother’s house is closer than the subway…”

  “—So long, Mac.” She began to walk away. He ran a hand through his wet hair and cursed.

  “Because I couldn’t have gotten through the last twelve hours without you, all right?”

  Georgia turned and saw something flicker in Marenko’s eyes she’d never seen before. Something raw and sincere. It filled her more than any words.

  “Shouldn’t you call first?” she asked. “Just showing up with me might make your grandmother uncomfortable.”

  Marenko laughed—the first real laugh he’d tossed off since Connie’s disappearance. It was a deep, rich sound and it always made her ache with longing.

  “Scout, the pope in drag couldn’t make Ida Marenko uncomfortable.”

  28

  Rain. Flowing in rivulets down the gutters, turning the pavements as slick as polished granite, chasing the squealing children from the park. Rain washes the streets—of garbage, of heat, of people. But not of memories. Memories, Robin Hood noticed, seemed to blossom like clover in the rain.

  Bear had loved the rain. He never minded being wet. He used to say that feeling the icy runoff of a fire hose down the back of his turnout coat on a ninety-degree day was the sweetest sensation in the world. Even after he got sick, Bear loved being out in the back of their row house during a soft summer shower. He loved lightning and thunder. He had a laugh like thunder—rumbling deep down in his gut so that you could feel it like a dog’s growl when you got near him.

  Hood grabbed a sandwich in a small deli and stared out windows fogged with condensation. Cars roared by, kicking up a spray of water along the curb. It had rained like this when they were burying Bear at the cemetery, too—rained so hard the hole was nothing but mud and everybody’s shoes were ruined. Water stains, mixed with lime, running in wavy white lines on black patent and flat leather. Hood remembered the ruined shoes more than anything else that day. Funny what you remember.

  Don’t let them forget. That’s what Bear had always said. Don’t let them forget, or I’ll have died for nothing. So Bear told the tale and the child learned it note by note and breath by breath, as if that terrible night belonged to them both.

  The night air was fit for the breath of a dragon. A hot August evening when just sitting puts sweat on your skin and the air feels as damp as an errant mist off Long Island Sound. Back then, the city was reeling from municipal cutbacks and neighborhoods were burning up like candles on a cake. Three or four fires a
night were the norm. Big fires, too. But this? This was no big deal. “A walk in the smoke,” they called fires like this.

  The 10-33 came in around 2300 hours. A 10-33 is a smoke condition. Twenty-three hundred hours: eleven P.M. Everything in the fire department is on military time. A passing oil delivery truck noticed a few wisps coming out of Kowalski’s warehouse on Bridgewater Street. Ladder One-twenty-one and Engine Two-oh-three were first due. Captain Patrick Flannagan was in charge of the ladder, Lieutenant Frank Lopasio, the engine. All the men working under them were experienced hands—all except for Mickey, the twenty-four-year-old probie, or first-year firefighter. He was brand-new to Ladder One-twenty-one. Gerry Mulrooney, with twenty years on the job, took Mickey under his wing.

  “Stick with me, kid, and do as I tell you, you’ll be all right,” he growled. “Ain’t a fire been made that can put me in hell ’cause I’ll just piss it out.”

  Kowalski’s Carting and Hauling was sprawled across two acres on Bridgewater Street. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped off with razor wire. The gates were padlocked. The men took bolt cutters and snipped off the chain. Inside the fence, the pitted land resembled a moonscape. Nothing grew—not a cluster of dandelions or a thatch of crab grass. All around them were rusting hulks of fifty-five-gallon drums and piles of discarded tires. It had rained the night before, and small puddles swirled blue, green and purple in the men’s flashlights, viscous like bubbles in a lava lamp. But the smoke poking out of the roof vents in the warehouse looked innocuous enough. It was gray—not black. A good sign.

  The men split up. Flannagan’s firefighters in the ladder, or truck, company needed to break into the warehouse, search it for victims and break windows to allow heat and smoke to escape. Lopasio’s men in the engine needed to unfurl the two-and-a-half-inch hose line, hook it up to the hydrant and then get the hose into the warehouse to put out the fire. Since getting a hose into a structure is always a slower operation than doing a search, the first-due truck company often works without any water backup.

  Mickey went to fetch a mask and air tank, and Mulrooney frowned.

  “Kid, ya gotta learn to eat smoke or you’re in the wrong business.” Mulrooney wasn’t wrong, either. In those days, rigs carried only two or three masks and air cylinders, and those lasted fifteen minutes at best. Taking smoke was part of the job—and no one could do it better than Gerry Mulrooney. He stood up in fires that would make other men throw up or pass out.

  The steel door to the warehouse was padlocked. The men used the bolt cutters again to open the door. A wad of thick, gray-green smoke wafted over them. It smelled like rotten eggs and bitter almonds and stung their throats like salt in a raw wound. “Take some air out here,” Mulrooney coached Mickey. “Then get down low and don’t panic. It’s just smoke. It won’t kill ya.”

  Captain Flannagan took the lead, crouching low, his flashlight attached to his helmet, passing a dim light over the dark, hazy interior. Behind him were his four company firefighters. He stopped in his tracks and got on the radio to Lopasio outside.

  “Hey, Frankie. Tell Dispatch and Chief Nickelson we need a second alarm.”

  None of the firefighters had to ask why. From floor to ceiling, the warehouse was stacked with fifty-five-gallon drums, some with skulls and crossbones on their labels. Worse still, the drums were plonked randomly in the warehouse so that there was no straight path from the front to the back. The only route appeared to be a zigzag.

  Flannagan crouched low and headed to a dim shape that appeared to be a window. He ordered Gerry Mulrooney to take it with his halligan. Mulrooney lifted his halligan and swung hard at the window, but the halligan bounced off. It was covered with a sheet of unbreakable Lexan plastic. One of the men took the pronged end of the halligan and tried to pry the Lexan off, but the plastic never budged.

  By now, the firefighters were breathing hard. Their eyes and throats burned from the smoke, which had blackened and was shot through with shafts of acid green. Tears and black snot poured down their faces. Wiping their eyes and noses did nothing but make it worse. They still couldn’t see the fire, but it didn’t matter now. Their skin tingled like a bad sunburn. Captain Flannagan ordered a retreat, but when they turned for the door, the smoke that had been haze just moments before, turned as thick as the sea on a moonless night. The men couldn’t see the door. They couldn’t even see each other. All they could see were steaming drums that glowed phosphorescent blue, yellow and purple—bright enough to cut the smoke.

  “Stay together,” Flannagan choked out. He radioed Lopasio that they were lost, but Lopasio’s men were already in the warehouse as well. And they, too, were lost. Engine Two-fifty-two and Ladder One-forty-eight had arrived as backup. They told the two companies to stay calm. They would extend a lifeline from the entrance door and feel their way forward through the maze. Mickey started to hyperventilate. Mulrooney tried to calm him.

  “You’re doing great, kid. Stories for your scrapbook. Fuck it, I’ll buy you a beer tomorrow and we’ll laugh.”

  And then it happened. Like kernels of popcorn in a microwave, the drums began to explode and hurtle through the air. The men saw fire now—lots of it. Flames, some blue as well as orange—danced across a viscous sea of slippery, yellow-green muck.

  Battalion Chief Nickelson arrived on the scene. He got on the radio. “All units, back out of building ASAP. We’re going to a surround and drown.” An exterior operation. Once the men were out, tower ladders would douse the building with water from the outside. The building would be a total loss.

  It was too hot and smoky for the firefighters to stand. On their knees and their bellies, covered in an oozing slime they could barely see, the firefighters of Ladder One-twenty-one held on to one another and tried to crawl out of the warehouse. Barrels flew overhead, crashed, exploded and rained down upon them until they were soaked through to their underwear.

  The men knew what they had to do. They formed a human chain. Flannagan, as captain, took up the rear. He would see that all his men got out before him. Mulrooney yanked Mickey by the collar of his turnout coat and put him between Flannagan and himself—the most protected place on the chain. O’Rourke took the lead, big enough to push objects out of the way and Battaglia, somewhat smaller, fell in behind him. The five men moved forward efficiently, without panic, though their eyes were swollen shut from the smoke, their throats were raw and their lungs were as taught as stretched rubber bands.

  “Cap, I’m having a beer when we get back,” croaked Mulrooney over his shoulder. “And I don’t give a fuck what Chief Nickelson says.”

  “I hear you, Gerry,” Flannagan gasped.

  They made it out—all four companies. The men who first went in, and the others who extended lifelines to get them out. They fell on the dirt and vomited where they lay. Twenty men in black rubber turnout coats as slick as babes straight from the womb. They tried to drink and gagged from the burning in their throats and chests. Other fire companies hosed them down, but already, the men’s eyes were pink and swollen, their skin covered with tiny red bumps that looked like measles. Mulrooney insisted on getting to his feet without assistance, only to stagger three steps before falling again. “Ach,” said the forty-three-year-old in disgust. “I’m getting old. Can’t take a little smoke no more.”

  Although a hundred men responded to the fire at Kowalski’s Carting and Hauling that night, only twenty went into that warehouse. When they came out, Nickelson ordered the tower ladders to rain down water from above. The warehouse was not to be saved.

  The men weren’t either.

  Gerry Mulrooney had trouble swallowing six months after the fire. His doctor diagnosed throat cancer. He was dead within two years. He was the first.

  Sikorsky in the engine company was next. He noticed a brown spot on his arm eighteen months after the fire. He ignored it—and died of a heart attack following surgery for malignant melanoma four years later. Brain cancer took Chris McGinty in Ladder One-forty-eight inch by inc
h. It was still taking Vinnie Battaglia the same way. Bobby Niernoff in Engine Two-oh-three thought he’d beaten “the big C,” as the men called it—until Lou Gehrig’s Disease turned him into a quivering bunch of neurons that made cancer look almost preferable. Frank Lopasio let a fire take him before three separate diseases could.

  Mickey developed thyroid cancer and beat it, only to learn he had stomach cancer and multiple sclerosis. “I wanna go out with something left in me—the way Gerry Mulrooney did,” he vowed. He was already a beaten-up shell of a man when they say he put a revolver to his mouth and ate a bullet. Mickey Hanlon was forty-one.

  The rain stopped. Outside the delicatessen, taillights made the puddles shimmer with a deep red glow, and steam clouds rose from subway grates. Hood watched people begin to trickle back onto the sidewalks. Soon, the tragedy would be behind Hood. Not the deaths—the deaths would always be there. But it wasn’t simply the deaths that made Hood grieve. Or even that the men had died forgotten. The tragedy was that they had died for nothing. They saved no lives in the warehouse that night—only the reputations of a few powerful men. It was the injustice of that equation that made Hood burn.

  And now—thought Hood—others will, too.

  29

  Like most people who have reached the ripe old age of eighty-nine, Ida Marenko was usually home. Mac didn’t call. He just sloshed through the downpour with Georgia until they ended up at a tidy, aluminum-sided row house on Kent Street, soaked to the bone. Fortunately, Ida Marenko had a tin awning over her front door and they caught their breath underneath it.

  “I can’t meet your grandmother like this,” said Georgia, breathing hard from the dash. “I’m a mess.”

  Mac pushed back a clump of wet, black hair from his face and grinned. “I kinda like it,” he said. Georgia noticed now that her white blouse had turned semi-see-through from the rain.

  “Great. She’ll think I’m a streetwalker you just rescued.”

  “She won’t think that.” He pushed the doorbell. A short, stocky woman answered. She had hair dyed strawberry blond and swept up in a neat bun. She wore a loud floral-print dress with matching chunky jewelry and had long fingernails done up in bright red nail polish that matched the tint of her lips. An eighty-nine-year-old coquette. She frowned at the huge, dripping man before her for only a second.