California Fire and Life by Don Winslow Read Free Book Online

walk around naming every piece of wood in the skeleton half. Name it—“door buck, stud, collar beam”—then identify the size and type of the lumber—pine 3 by 6, 2 by 4, so on and so forth. Once the whole class can do that, they go over to the finished-off side and now they have to get into window sashes, types of glass, chair rails, balusters—all the stuff that Jack has come to know as “dead load,” fuel for the fire.
    Jack aces construction.
    Next thing they look at is appliances. Go into a big empty warehouse with fire extinguishers all over the place and light fires under television sets, blenders, radios, alarm clocks, you name it. They learn how these behave when introduced to varying degrees of heat. Which is like, badly, because these puppies don’t want to burn. I mean maybe if you’ve spent forty-seven minutes giving yourself carpal tunnel syndrome on the remote control box and still can’t find anything worth watching you might want to set fire to the old Panasonic twenty-inchwith picture-in-picture, but what Jack learns is that this is no easy task. You want to toast the TV, you have to bring some serious heat.
    So all day they’re setting fire to stuff and at night Jack humps the books. No suds sessions now; the work’s getting harder and all you have to do to get your locker cleaned out is screw up one exam. Guys are dropping like fat men in a marathon. Like,
Timmmberrrrrrr!!!!
    So Jack’s up half the night cramming Ohm’s law (“The current flowing through resistance is equal to the applied voltage divided by the resistance”) into his brain, or trying to memorize the ignition temperature of magnesium (1,200°F) or the length of time it will take an inch of number-two lumber to burn at a temperature of 4,500°F (forty-five minutes).
    Like all day they’re running electrical engineers at them, fire investigators at them, heating contractors at them. They’re even running freaking lawyers at them, so at night Jack’s not only boning up on the explosive properties of methane, the ignition temperature of magnesium and the decomposition of cellulose under an open flame (C 6 H 10 O 5 + 6O 2 = 5H 2 O + 6CO 2 + heat), now he also has to learn the significance of
Michigan v. Tyler
and
The People v. Calhoun
and he also has to master the Federal Rules of Evidence regarding the collection and preservation of evidence at a fire scene for the purposes of an arson prosecution.
    Dig it, this is the same Jack Wade who couldn’t force-feed himself two chapters of
Moby-Dick
and now he’s writing papers covering constitutional law. This is the dude who punked out of Algebra 101 and now he can tell you how much carbon monoxide will be produced by a specific mass of polyurethane burning at a given temperature.
    Jack is hanging in there very strong.
    Learns how to document a fire scene: how to draw a floor plan, how to overlay the progress of the fire on that plan, how to take photographs, what photographs to take and how to light them, how to take notes, how to take samples, how to collect and preserve evidence, how to interview suspects, how to interview witnesses, when to make an arrest, how to testify in court.
    Guys are washing out—there are more empty desks in the classrooms, more available stools in their rare sessions at the bar—but Jack is hanging tough.
    Surprising himself.
    Taking all they can give.
    Then they bring in Captain Sparky.

15
    His real name isn’t Sparky.
    It’s Sparks.
    You got a guy named Sparks who becomes a fireman anyway, you got a tough guy. You got a guy who doesn’t give Shit One about what anyone else thinks.
    It’s Jack who hangs the nickname Captain Sparky on him, because it’s kind of inevitable. Sparky has no apparent sense of humor. Captain Sparky is as serious as a CAT scan, and he tells the students right off the bat that he’s out to get them.
    Captain Sparky stands in front of the class in his dress blues and says, “Gentlemen, the whole reason you are