Free Vertical Burn by Earl Emerson Page A

the back door. Finney crossed the room and opened the door. It was his brother, Tony.
    “Just thought I’d come by and see how you were.”
    “You heard?”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    Monahan rose and scratched the back of his head. “I better go see if I got November seventh off. I’ve been asking about it all day.”
    “Why do you need the seventh off?” Finney asked.
    “My wedding anniversary,” Monahan said, nervously. “I forgot last year. You can bet your booties there was heck to pay. Thirty-two years. I get anything wrong this time, the little woman’ll really pin my ears back.” Monahan stepped around the corner into the corridor and knocked on Lieutenant Sadler’s door.
    “Some place we can talk?” Tony asked, giving Monahan a sour look as he left the room.
    They walked out into the cold apparatus bay behind Engine 26 and stood facing each other on the concrete floor.
    Taking after their mother’s side of the family, John was blue-eyed, easygoing, and genial. Tony resembled their father, penetrating dark eyes, blond hair. A captain at Station 17, Tony was three years older and four inches shorter than Finney. Tony and their father were the hardnoses in the clan, both calculating and intense, and each with a mean streak, though recently they’d both worked at taming it—Tony, perhaps because of the bad marriages; their father, because of the cancer.
    “He’s not trying to put this off on Leary Way, is he?” Tony asked.
    “Maybe a little.”
    “You know, when he was a captain at Thirty-one’s, somebody dumped a dooter in his helmet. You ever hear that story? You got to really hate somebody to drop a hot turd in his helmet.”
    “Thanks, Tony. Thanks for coming by.”
    “You should have called the minute it happened. You got anybody else to talk to? How about Laura?”
    Finney had been divorced from Laura almost six years. “Not likely.”
    “Jesus, you’re right. I know how pissed Doris gets at me when we’re not married. God, I was at Seventeen’s to pick up my check, and they were saying you and Reese almost came to blows. Until now everybody’s pretty much been waiting to figure out his style. But this goes against all tradition. You were top dog on the list. By rights you should have snagged that first job. Nobody’s ever been head man on the list and not gotten a job. Now everybody’s going to ask why the hell they should even take the test.”
    “I didn’t screw up at Leary Way.” Finney hadn’t meant to say the words; they’d just come out.
    “I know that, John. We all know that.”
    “You might. Plenty of others don’t. And I didn’t almost come to blows with him.” Finney sat next to Tony on the cold steel of Engine 26’s diamond-plate tailboard, looking out at the darkness through the windows in the roll-up rear door of the apparatus bay. He and Tony had never been close, and Finney wished it hadn’t taken their father’s illness to unite them.
    For some minutes neither spoke. Then Tony opened his billfold and handed Finney fifty dollars. “Two weeks ago. Remember?”
    It was a rare month when Tony didn’t put the touch on him. In the past it had been the horses, but these days he spent his free time at the Indian casinos, a predilection that was beginning to rock his third marriage the same way the horses had rocked the two marriages to Doris. So far his new wife, Annette, was more forgiving than Doris, but Finney could see the handwriting on the wall.
    “Thanks for dropping by, Tony.”
    “The gossip about Leary Way is bound to speed up after this. Not too many people like Reese, but he’s the man in the catbird seat. Watch your backside, too. Balitnikoff’s been telling everyone the reason you and Cordifis were paired up at fires was because Bill was baby-sitting you.”
    “You kidding?”
    “I know; I know. Anybody ever worked with you two knows it was the other way around. But a rumor is like busting a feather pillow in a windstorm. You never get all the