Free The Smoke Room by Earl Emerson Page B

shadows of a steamroller economy that wanted to tear down the old and build anew everywhere. Iola Pederson lived above the first layer of housing on the steep hillside.
    The pavement along the beach ran for a total of four miles and at this time of the morning attracted a meager assortment of walkers, bikers, and women pushing strollers. I skated whenever the weather allowed, and some days when even the walkers bailed out. For variety, I skated the Cedar River Trail out of Renton, the three-mile path around Green Lake, the Burke-Gilman Trail out of Gas Works Park, and downtown at Myrtle Edwards Park, but most times I came here. On Thursday nights during the summer a loose group of us got together and skated at midnight through downtown Seattle, up sidewalks and down hills nobody in his right mind would attempt. When the weather was bad, I skated in parking garages with friends, in local pedestrian tunnels, and, when we got desperate, at local indoor rinks.
    My skates of choice were a pair of Solomon TR Magnesiums with 80 millimeter racing wheels I’d hopped up with ABEC-8 bearings, lighter axles, and a superlight oil I’d discovered. Although they were four-wheel skates as opposed to the five-wheelers racers used, they were almost as fast as my five-wheeled Miller Pros. I hadn’t been born with many gifts, but one of them was a pair of lungs equal to a quarter horse and quadriceps like steel. The guys at work could lift more than I could in the weight room, and in drill school I’d had some bad days carrying ladders, but on skates I was headed for mythic territory.
    This was where I retreated when I was frustrated or worried, where I felt most at home with the universe.
    With my legs hanging out the driver’s side of my WRX, I laced and buckled my skates, then locked the Subaru and took off, zipping around four women walking side by side. I would do the first eight miles at cruising speed and then start blasting.
    The temperature was in the low sixties, perfect for hard exercise. On the beach side of the street, sunshine poured down, while across the road morning shadows swallowed the houses and condominiums along the hillside.
    Two years before, when I signed up with the department, I had no clue how much of my identity would be tied up in being a firefighter. I had no relatives who were firefighters. One day I simply decided it was the right career move and began taking entrance tests for various departments.
    Until I was twenty-one I lived at home, attending Bellevue Community College after high school. After receiving my AA, I found temporary work at a janitorial firm, cleaning office buildings between eight at night and four in the morning, polishing floors, scrubbing out crappers, plunking ice cakes into urinals—not a profession I yearned to revisit.
    I’d come to think of Station 29 as a second home, the people who worked there as brothers and sisters, and the job as inextricable from my life as a lung or a kidney was inextricable from my body. I’d joined a community, a select and special community.
    Firefighting was a job that made you tense. You never knew what was going to happen on an alarm, and you never knew when you were going to get one. Although the last firefighter death in Seattle had occurred four years earlier, the department had scraped through several close calls since then, and each gave me pause for thought. Somewhere in the country a firefighter got killed every day.
    For weeks I’d been trying to push the deaths of Fred and Susan Rankler out of my mind. Skating helped. Much as I hated to say it, climbing into the sack with Iola Pederson helped, too. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing with Iola. It was possible our relationship might grow into something more than just a sex-fest, but it was equally possible she would simply fail to show up one day and that would be the end of it.
    It was surprising how much I still didn’t know about Iola. I didn’t know where she was born, where she