Free Vertical Burn by Earl Emerson

station, her face less than a foot from his. Apparently she’d been in front of him for some time. It was Annie, one of their regulars. From dawn to dusk Annie roamed the streets of South Park, the neighborhood Station 26 protected, pulling a two-wheeled wire shopping cart behind her, obsessed with making right-angle turns, which meant she had surely been in his direct line of vision for the last thirty feet of her jaunt. Annie was a small woman in her early sixties who wore old-fashioned hiking boots, white knee socks, and, as always, a denim skirt and a lightweight raincoat.
    As a courtesy, the Seattle Fire Department tested blood pressures for citizens during business hours; every station had their regulars, and Annie was one of 26’s. He knelt beside her, wrapped the blood pressure cuff around her arm, and put the stethoscope to his ears. It was, as always, 120 over 60, perfectly normal.
    As she put her raincoat back on, she said, “You going to be here for the war?”
    “What war?”
    She removed a
Wall Street Journal
from her cart and showed him an article on the front page announcing an agreement between two Mideast powers to lower the price of oil. “Don’t you see it? They’re lowering the crude prices to lull us into complacency. These men have nuclear weapons. They say they don’t, but they do. We’re all standing in a pool of gasoline, and now these sick chickens have matches. What I need to know is whether you’re here at night.”
    “Somebody’s always here, Annie. We work twenty-four-hour shifts.”
    “You. I’m talking about
you
.”
    “I won’t be here every minute. But somebody will.”
    “I want you here. I’m scared.”
    Finney patted Annie’s shoulder. He knew the worlds of the mentally ill and the mentally broken weren’t far apart, and even though he had survived those hellish weeks after Leary Way, they were as vivid to him now as if they’d happened yesterday. He’d tiptoed along the abyss, and there were a few hours scattered over several of the worst days when he’d come close to losing his mind. He identified with Annie in a way no one else in the station could.
    “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to work out fine no matter who’s here. You have a good day, Annie.”
    “Bet’cher ass, sweetie.”

14. THE DOOTER IN THE HELMET
    After they’d done the dinner dishes, Finney and Jerry Monahan collapsed in the station recliners, Monahan channel-surfing with the remote control, Finney unable to motivate himself for even the simplest task. The whole battalion knew Finney had lost the promotion, the topic picked over by the twin vultures of gossip and Monday-morning quarterbacking; they were bound to connect it to his performance at Leary Way. It ate at him to know that everybody was talking about him again.
    “I didn’t want to tell you before you went down there,” Monahan said, “but I knew you weren’t going to get the job.”
    “What? How did you know that?”
    “Somebody who works down there told me. I’d rather not say who.”
    “Jesus. Why didn’t you warn me?”
    “Are you kidding? Who wants to tell a guy a thing like that?” Monahan let his belt out a couple of notches. They’d made fajitas, the four of them—Finney, Sadler, Monahan, and Iverson, who was manning the air rig, Air 26—and except for Finney, who’d lost his appetite, they’d eaten too much. Iverson was hiding out on the other side of the station with a calculator and a stack of personal bills. Sadler was in his office on the phone.
    Monahan ballooned his belly out, lifted his leg, and farted. He wouldn’t swear out loud, but he would fart in a cathedral. “Geez-Louise, why do I eat so much?”
    “Same reason you break wind in public,” Finney said, still smarting over the fact that Monahan had known in advance about his not getting the promotion. “Lack of character.”
    Passing off the insult, Monahan chuckled as if it were a joke and turned his head at the sound of knocking at