29.’
Tony: ‘Are there casualities on the bus, 14? Do you see casualties, over?’
I looked at the clock. It was quarter past two. If we were lucky, the bus would’ve been coming, not going — arriving to take the kids home from making their pots and jars.
‘Bus appears empty except for the driver. I can see him — or maybe it’s her — slumped over the wheel. That’s the half in the fire and I’d have to say the driver is DRT, copy?’
DRT is a slang abbreviation the PSP picked up in the ER’s back in the seventies. It stands for ‘dead right there’.
‘Copy, 14,’ Tony said. ‘Can you get to where the kids are?’
Cough-cough-cough. He sounded bad. ‘Roger, base, there’s an access road runs alongside the soccer field. Goes right to the building, over.’
‘Then get in gear,’ Tony said. He was the best I ever saw him that day, as decisive as a general on the field of battle. The fumes turned out not to be all that toxic after all, and most of the burning was leaking gasoline, but of course none of us knew that then. For all George Stankowski knew, Tony had just signed his death warrant. And sometimes that’s the job, yes.
‘Roger, base, rolling.’
‘If they’re getting gassed, stuff them in your cruiser, sit them on the hood and the trunk, put them on the roof hanging on to the lightbars. Get as many as you can, copy that?’
‘Copy, base, 14 out.’
Click. That last click seemed very loud.
Tony looked around. ’29-99, you all heard it. Assigned units, all rolling. Those of you waiting for switch-over rides at three, get Kojak lights out of the supply room and run your personals. Shirley, bend every duty-officer you can raise.’
‘Yes, sir. Should I start calling OD’s?’
‘Not yet. Huddie Royer, where are you?’
‘Here, Sarge.’
‘You’re anchoring.’
There were no movie-show protests about this from Huddie, nothing about how he wanted to be out there with the rest of the crew, fighting fire and poison gas, rescuing children. He just said yessir.
‘Check Pogus County FD, find out what they’re rolling, find out what Lassburg and Statler’s rolling, call Pittsburgh OER, anyone else you can think of
‘How about Norco West?’
Tony didn’t quite slap his forehead, but almost. ‘Oh you bet.’ Then he headed for the door, Curt beside him, the others right behind them, Mister Dillon bringing up the rear.
Huddie grabbed his collar. ‘Not today, boy. You’re here with me and Shirley.’ Mister D sat down at once; he was well-trained. He watched the departing men with longing eyes, just the same.
All at once the place seemed very empty with just the two of us there — the three of us, if you counted D. Not that we had time to dwell on it; there was plenty to do. I might have noticed Mister Dillon getting up and going to the back door, sniffing at the screen and whining way back low in his throat. I think I did, actually, but maybe that’s only hindsight at work. If I did notice, I probably put it down to disappointment at being left behind. What I think now is that he sensed something starting to happen out in Shed B. I think he might even have been trying to let us know.
I had no time to mess with the dog, though — not even time enough to get up and shut him in the kitchen, where he might have had a drink from his water bowl and then settled down. I wish I’d made time; poor old Mister D might have lived another few years. But of course I didn’t know. All I knew right then was that I had to find out who was on the road and where. I had to bend them west, if I could and they could. And while I worked on that, Huddie was in the SC’s office, hunched over the desk and talking into the phone with the intensity of a man who’s making the biggest deal of his life.
I got all my active officers except for Unit 6, which was almost here (’20-base in a tick’ had been my last word from them). George Morgan and Eddie Jacubois had a delivery to make before heading over to Poteenville. Except, of course, 6 never did get to Poteenville that day.
No, Eddie and George never got to Poteenville at all.
THEN:
Eddie
It’s funny how a person’s memory works. I didn’t recognize the guy who got out of that custom Ford pickup, not to begin with. To me he was just a red-eyed punk with an inverted crucifix for an earring and a silver swastika hung around his neck on a chain. I remember the stickers. You learn to read the stickers people put on their rides; they can tell you a lot. Ask any motor patrol cop. I DO WHATEVER THE LITTLE VOICES TELL ME TO on the left side of this guy’s back bumper, I EAT AMISH on the right. He was unsteady on his feet, and probably not just because he was wearing a pair of fancy-stitched cowboy boots with those stacked heels.
The red eyes peeking out from under his scraggle of black hair suggested to me that he was high on something. The blood on his right hand and spattered on the right sleeve of his T-shirt suggested it might be something mean. Angel-dust would have been my guess. It was big in our part of the world back then. Crank came next. Now it’s ex, and I’d give that shit away myself, if they’d let me. At least it’s mellow. I suppose it’s also possible that he was gazzing — what the current crop of kids calls huffing. But I didn’t think I knew him until he said, ‘Hey, I be goddam, it’s Fat Eddie.’
Bingo, just like that I knew. Brian Lippy. He and I went back to Statler High, where he’d been a year ahead of me. Already majoring in Dope Sales & Service. Now here he was again, standing on the edge of the highway and swaying on the high heels of his fancy cowboy boots, head-down Christ hanging from his ear, Nazi twisted cross around his neck, numbfuck stickers on the bumper of his ride.
‘Hi there, Brian, want to step away from the truck?’ I said.
When I say the truck was a custom, I mean it was one of those bigfoot jobs. It was parked on the soft shoulder of the Humboldt Road, not a mile and a half from the intersection where the Jenny station stood . . . only by that summer, the Jenny’d been closed two or three years.
In truth, the truck was almost in the ditch. My old pal Brian Lippy had swerved way over when George hit the lights, another sign that he wasn’t exactly straight.
I was glad to have George Morgan with me that day. Mostly riding single is all right, but when you happen on a guy who’s all over the road because he’s whaling on the person sitting next to him in the cab of the truck he’s driving, it’s nice to have a partner. As for the
punching, we could see it. First as Lippy drove past our 20 and then as we pulled out behind him, this silhouette driver pistoning out his right arm, his right fist connecting again and again with the side of the passenger’s silhouette head, too busy-busy-busy to realize the fuzz was crawling right up his tailpipe until George hit the reds. Fuck me til I cry, I think, ain’t that prime. Next thing my old pal Brian’s over on the shoulder and half in the ditch like he’s been expecting it all his life, which on some level he probably has been.
If it’s pot or tranks, I don’t worry as much. It’s like ex. They go, ‘Hey, man, what’s up? Did I do something wrong? I love you.’ But stuff like angel dust and PCP makes people crazy.
Even glueheads can go bonkers. I’ve seen it. For another thing, there was the passenger. It was a woman, and that could make things a lot worse. He might have been punching the crap out of her, but that didn’t mean she might not be dangerous if she saw us slapping the cuffs on her favorite Martian.
Meantime, my old pal Brian wasn’t stepping away from the truck as he’d been asked. He was just standing there, grinning at me, and how in God’s name I hadn’t recognized him right off the bat was a mystery, because at Statler High he’d been one of those kids •who makes your life hell if he notices you. Especially if you’re a little pudgy or pimply, and I was both.
The Army took the weight off— it’s the only diet program I know where they pay you to participate — and the pimples took care of themselves in time like they almost always do, but in SHS I’d been this guy’s afternoon snack any day he wanted. That “was another reason to be happy George was with me. If I’d been alone, my old pal Bri might have gotten the idea that if he put the evil eye on me, I’d still shrivel. The more stoned he was, the more apt he was to think that.