Pyro by Earl Emerson Read Free Book Online Page B

B movies for double bills anymore. She never quite made it onto the A-movie list.”
    Wollf knew every movie she’d ever been in, her marriages, divorces, costars. The affairs she’d had. Then, right before he clammed up, he told me the first personal information I’d heard out of his mouth all day. He said he had over eight thousand videos of old movies. That he’d collected every movie Patricia Pennington ever made. That he had every movie Marilyn Monroe made. Jane Russell. Clark Gable. Paul Newman. Joan Crawford. Bette Davis. Lon Chaney, whoever he was.
    Remarkable. Under all that brawn and fire department professionalism there actually beats the heart of a human being.
    We were really starting to get chummy, I thought. Wollf must have thought so too, because he stopped talking.
    When we got back down to the first floor, a woman was waiting for us on the front porch. She’d obviously put herself together in a rush. She wore jeans and a white ski jacket and was a couple of years older than me.
    “Hi,” she said, looking at me instead of the lieutenant. Maybe she didn’t realize the red helmet was the boss; the yellow helmet with the big recruit number fifteen on the back was the flunky. “I’m Vanessa Pennington. This is my grandmother’s house. I just spoke to her in the medic unit. The chief said you might let me walk through the house?”
    “I’d have to escort you,” Wollf said.
    Looking at her, you automatically thought money. Later we saw her driving a BMW, white to match her ski jacket. She had dirty-blond hair that fell to her shoulders. I could see right away she’d never make it in the fire department. She was too skinny. But she
was
pretty.

10. FIRE
    Vanessa Pennington
             
It was just a good thing it was the middle of the night and there were no police cars around. The drive to Nanna’s normally takes ten minutes, twenty if traffic is heavy, but I made it tonight in under seven.
    I’ve been so worried about her lately, and then Jackie wakes me up to tell me Nanna’s garage is on fire and what should she do. What should she do? This is just the kind of thing that makes me want to get Jackie out of there. “Call nine one one,” I said. “I’m on my way.” Later I find out she never did call 911. The fire department discovered the fire on their own. Jackie is such an incompetent. I’ll never understand why Nanna doesn’t fire her and hire a housekeeper and companion who isn’t likely to get her killed.
    There were so many fire department vehicles in the street I ended up parking half a block away. I found Nanna’s front door broken open, the house full of firefighters and residual smoke. One of them told me I couldn’t go in, that the fire department hadn’t released the property back to the owners yet. When I asked where my grandmother was, a helpful black firefighter named Zeke told me she was in the medic unit with the man who’d rescued her.
    When I got there I told them who I was, and they were kind enough to let me sit with her for a few minutes before they took her up to Harborview. Everybody was so nice. But when I asked permission to go inside and secure Nanna’s things, I had to go through the chain of command, just like the army or something. They sent me to a lieutenant named Wollf, the same fire officer who’d been in the medic unit when I first got there. He’d been holding Nanna’s hand. Nanna was barely conscious, and he was talking to her as if she were
his
grandmother and not mine. The sight impressed me more than I can say.
    Later, he seemed inexplicably tense around me.
    “Pardon me,” I said. “I’m Patricia Pennington’s granddaughter. They said you might take me inside the house?”
    He seemed shy and tongue-tied. It was painful to watch—but cute too, especially for such a big, brawny guy. Finally he said if I could wait a minute he’d take me inside and show me what they’d broken. He must have seen the look on my face because he