Pyro by Earl Emerson Read Free Book Online Page A

the fan properly. I delayed starting it because Chief Hertlein was talking and I knew the moment I pulled the cord we wouldn’t be able to hear him. Wollf seemed irritated with the delay. Then it shut off while we were inside. I suppose that’s my fault too.
    (2) The second negative Wollf might write about me concerns the rescue. When we got upstairs to the third floor and found the woman, I wanted to take her legs, at least—the easy end—but he brushed me off and picked her up in his arms like a baby.
    So what did I do? I got all turned around. I took us into another bedroom and we bumped into things, and all this time that poor woman was getting sicker and sicker.
    This morning the medics called and told us her CO readings had been high but not fatally high and that she was going to make it. I’m so glad.
    (3) The roof. Wollf told Dolan to let me open the roof. But then Dolan went up with the chain saw before I could stop him! Pickett told me I was Wollf’s partner, so I went to join Wollf. Later, I found out he made it up.
    Pickett gave me a lot of tips yesterday, but the theme was basically that firefighting’s a challenging job
most
people can’t do. He never said I was
most
people, but I’m beginning to think that’s what he meant.
    The more I think about it, the more I think he saw a chance to step in front of me and make me look bad, and he went ahead and took it. I hope that’s not true, because I don’t want to be thinking bad thoughts about anybody and, in spite of all his pontificating, I was ready to like Pickett.
    After the Engine 25 guys came out of the basement with the mattresses and determined there had been no extension to the house itself, Lieutenant Wollf and I finished ventilating the house. Those gas-powered fans have large wooden blades that move 22,000 cubic feet of air per minute. They blow air in a cone that spreads as it leaves the fan blade. The idea is to seal up the entrance point with the largest part of the cone. The house gets pressurized. It amounts to the same thing as trying to blow up a balloon. Except, obviously the walls of a house aren’t going to stretch like a balloon. So now all that smoky air is looking for someplace to exit. You open an exit somewhere on the far side of the house and you watch all that smoke go shooting out.
    Here’s something funny. Wollf and I were in the hallway on the second floor, and he was looking at pictures on the walls and said, “Patricia Pennington.”
    “What?”
    “I thought I recognized her. Patricia Pennington. She’s an actress. Her career extended back to the Forties and Fifties.”
    Pennington had been featured in mostly B movies, Wollf said. She had dated some of the biggest male actors of all time. She’d even gone out with Howard Hughes. I think he was filthy rich.
    He started naming her movies. I can’t remember any of the titles, but he knew them all and all the leading men she costarred with. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy, Mickey Rooney. Those are the names I recognized. It was weird the sudden surge in adrenaline I saw in him—the excitement—like nothing I’d seen during our fires. He handled those fires like they were piecework. But this!
    I followed him to her bedroom, where he pointed out a poster for a movie called
River Brand Riders.
It must have been printed forty years ago. The date was at the bottom in Roman numerals, but I didn’t stop to figure it out. She costarred with John Payne and Andy Devine.
    Wollf was examining the pill bottles and wine decanter on the bedside table. “Darvon. Taking this with wine would knock her out for a week. No wonder she couldn’t wake up.”
    “You think there’s an Academy award lying around here somewhere?” I asked.
    “She never won an Academy award. She
was
on the list of top ten female performers three times in the early Forties. Then her career did a slow nosedive. Had a lot to do with the advent of television and the fact that they weren’t making