Part 8 (1/2)

”You ever see a trapped person burn to death in a car?”

One of Karrie's weak points was her questioning of authority. It wasn't so bad around the station when she asked if you really really wanted the floor mopped, as if you might change your mind and decide to do it yourself, but fighting fire was a paramilitary activity and obeying orders in the field without hesitation was a vital part of the contract. wanted the floor mopped, as if you might change your mind and decide to do it yourself, but fighting fire was a paramilitary activity and obeying orders in the field without hesitation was a vital part of the contract.

After surviving an initial training period at the state training center, Karrie was now seven months into a one-year probationary cycle. Her primary supervising officer, Joel McCain, had given her a poor evaluation the month previous, not because of lacking skills but because of her att.i.tude, and warned her that if she didn't modify her behavior, her job would be in jeopardy. It was something I would have to deal with now. Something I'd been trying to ignore.

The paramedics had split up, one to a vehicle. The pickup truck had rolled over on the driver's side, and the roof was caved in, the pa.s.senger's side door crumpled. What remained of the winds.h.i.+eld s.p.a.ce had been compressed until the gap was too small to extricate a patient. There were two males inside, both conscious and talking. In fact, one of them wouldn't stop.

The other vehicle was a new Volkswagen Beetle, crumpled all the way around; the driver, a tearful young woman in her early twenties, had gotten out on her own. ”My graduation present,” she said. ”I just waxed it.”

The medic was taking her blood pressure and trying to get her to sit down, while an excited male witness in gla.s.ses and a b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt explained how the Beetle had nearly missed the wreck altogether, that it had been zigzagging through the tangle of swerving cars and only got clipped at the last minute, spinning around like a shot gla.s.s on a table. There were two other damaged cars up the road on the shoulder. The witness said he'd spoken to the drivers and neither was injured. We would check later ourselves.

As Ian dragged a hose line across the highway, I said to him, ”The driver of that truck needs to be extricated and put on a backboard-we'll have to take the roof off and bring him out the top-the pa.s.senger's lower leg is pinned. It's going to take awhile to get him out.”

”I'll get the jaws,” Ian said.

”I'll be with you as soon as I go up here to see what else we've got. I've already asked for more help on the radio. Snoqualmie should be showing in a few minutes.” I turned to the closest medic, Dan Logan, and said, ”You guys check the vehicle in the woods?”

”Not yet.”

Karrie and Ian were off-loading the Hurst power unit for the jaws, a two-person carry unless you were Stan Beebe, who took pride in toting it alone. It would have been nice to have him here today. As shorthanded as we were, it would have been nice to have anybody here.

Heedful of the slippery antifreeze on the road, I jogged along the freeway and stepped off the shoulder, crossed the ditch, and hiked up into the trees. Judging by the skid marks, the third vehicle had crossed several lanes, then shot up into the gra.s.s, up the slight embankment, and buried itself in the thick firs.

The first thing I saw was the International a.s.sociation of Firefighters union sticker hanging off what was left of the rear window. Whoever was inside was either a firefighter or a relative of one. It was a black Ford pickup truck, still hot and stinking of burned rubber, spilled gasoline, and engine fumes. The truck had snapped off enough fir trees that the whole area smelled like a Christmas tree lot.

Squeezing past a bright yellow swatch of blooming Scotch broom, I moved along the driver's side of the vehicle.

The driver's door was intact but wouldn't open. The gla.s.s was broken out of the window, the winds.h.i.+eld popped out, the air bag in the center of the steering wheel deployed and sagging. No driver in sight. Maybe he was one of the Good Samaritans setting out flares on the highway behind me.

I stuck my head in the window.

When my eyes adjusted to the shadows, I spotted him on the floor, his torso and head crushed under a ball of crumpled sheet metal, the twisted seat hiding the rest of him. Or her. Whoever it was hadn't been wearing a seat belt. Body fluids were already congealing on the floor. The vehicle had struck a tree about twenty inches in diameter, shoving the engine through the dashboard.

”How is it up there?” Ian asked, when I got back to the road.

”DOA.”

”Just the one?”

”Unless somebody got ejected. We'd better have some of these lookiloos run around in the trees to make sure.”

I turned to one of the men who'd been putting out road flares. ”Maybe you could gather up a couple of these guys and do a search of the woods? Make certain there aren't any victims we're not seeing?”

”You got it.”

”Thanks. And don't touch anything in the truck.”

”No, sir.”

I loved it when they called me sir sir.

15. FIVE KNUCKLES TO THE SNOT LOCKER.

As firefighters, we're used to the uproar of extrications, but it usually rattles the patients. Our primary tool, after the ten- and fifteen-pound pry bars, is the hydraulic unit we'd purchased from Hurst-the Jaws of Life.

The unit consisted of a heavy gasoline-powered pump with twenty feet of double hydraulic hoses coming off it, each set of hoses powering a single handheld unit.

We have a pair of spreaders, a huge, plierlike tool we insert into crevices on a wreck to pry the surfaces apart. It also squeezes like pliers and can compact or crush jagged f.l.a.n.g.es. Along with the cutting unit resembling crab claws, it was the extension used most often. With these tools we can take a car down until it's only a pile of tin.

Unless circ.u.mstances dictated otherwise, the strategy we'd been using the past couple of years with trapped occupants was this: We laid a hose line in case of fire. We calmed the patients as best we could and explained what we were doing. We treated them through the openings if necessary and put blankets or tarps around them to protect them from gla.s.s and flying sparks. We stabilized the vehicle so it wouldn't roll, usually by flattening the tires. We removed the winds.h.i.+eld, cut the posts that held the roof on, and either folded the roof back or cut it completely off. We put notches in the outer frame at the base of the dashboard and pulled the dash away with our hydraulic tools. Often that was the point at which a firefighter climbed into the backseat to stabilize the head and neck of a patient in the front seat. We cut the doors off, cut the seat loose, pulled the steering wheel out of the way, and at this point, if not before, we were generally able to extricate the patient and slide him onto a backboard.

The driver of the rolled pickup, who had alcohol on his breath, was removed without much ha.s.sle, especially after the crew from Snoqualmie arrived to help; but the pa.s.senger had a broken femur, was pinned in the wreckage. He screamed every time our tools touched the truck. It took twenty-five minutes to extricate him.

”Dirtbags,” Ian Hjorth said. ”Drunk as skunks. They killed that guy up in the trees. I hope they go to jail forever.”

We'd packed both patients from the truck into transport units and were walking up the slope to the third vehicle in the woods. Ian and I had been carrying the heavy Hurst power unit between us, Snoqualmie firefighters picking up the cables and tools and following like a wedding train. The medics had already confirmed our next patient was dead. The State Patrol had finished taking photographs and measurements. The medical examiner's people were on scene. Our job now was to pull out the body.

”s.h.i.+t,” Ian said as we set the power unit on the ground. ”This looks like Stan's truck.”

What had I been thinking? Stan talks about death all week. Stan comes to the station drunk. An hour and a half later we get a call to an MVA, and there's a truck that looks like Stan's with an IAFF union sticker in the window.

And yours truly doesn't connect the dots.

I put my head and shoulders through the window until I could see his hands in the shadows on the floor. The skin was dark, the backs of the fingers covered in a waxy-looking substance.

Just like mine.

Just exactly like mine. It was Stan all right.

I couldn't help thinking we might have saved him. We couldn't have, but the idea wouldn't go away. It proved to be hogwash after we dismantled the truck, because Stan's chest and head had been crushed when the impact pushed the motor back through the fire wall. Stan was dead before we left the station.

Weeping, Karrie said, ”We were just talking to him.”

We were all in shock. It hit us, as Stan would have said, like five knuckles to the snot locker. The firefighters from Snoqualmie. Even the state troopers, when they found out who it was. What made it worse was the guilt I felt over not having taken Stan under my wing earlier. I should have tapped us out of service the minute the word suicide suicide came out of his mouth. We could have driven him to the hospital ourselves in the aid wagon. came out of his mouth. We could have driven him to the hospital ourselves in the aid wagon.

Had I taken his truck ignition key, an option that hadn't even occurred to me until now, he might be alive still.

The lieutenant riding the rig from Snoqualmie, a man named Meyers, came over while Ian and I were carrying Stan to the medical examiner's gurney, and said, ”This is going to be a hard one. Telling his wife.”

I placed one of Stan's shoes next to him on the gurney, thinking that stray misshapen shoe was about the saddest thing I'd ever seen.

”It's going to be tough telling her,” Meyers repeated.

My brain seemed to be lagging behind everyone else's. As the senior officer of North Bend Fire and Rescue, it fell on me to inform Stan's wife. In another town the chief or the mayor might do it, but we didn't have a chief and our mayor was pretty much worthless for that sort of thing-had in fact already proved himself useless in regard to Stan today. There'd been a lot of bad news doled out in North Bend the past few months, and Steve Haston had done even more ducking and weaving than I had when it came time to appoint bearers of bad news. The Mountain Rescue Team had pulled the short straw after they found Harold Newcastle's body. When Jackie Feldbaum nearly decapitated herself in her Miata, Joel McCain bit the bullet and told Jackie's old man at the lumber mill.

Yesterday Stephanie Riggs told me about her sister, but if I used her methodology, I would be dragging the stretcher into Marsha Beebe's living room and saying, ”Hey, take a look under the blanket.”

Before we left the site, I located the state trooper in charge of the investigation and asked how it had happened.