Where There's Smoke

By Donald McClean

WHERE THERE'S SMOKE is a heist thriller in which four New York City firefighters attempt to bring some sort of karmic payback to a New York slumlord by relieving him of some valuable jewels.

Firefighter Pete Carson is dedicated to his job, bu

• Language: English
• Publisher: Donald McClean
• Release date: Apr 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781960811028

Donald McClean

DONALD McCLEAN is a former Fire Chief and lawyer who was born in Canada. He currently lives with his wife and two teenage children in Manhattan.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Two Years Earlier

The call came just as dinner was starting, because of course.

Which was a shame, because it was a good one: It was Manny Torres’s turn, and he made ropa vieja, a kind of Cuban flank steak stew with plenty of onions, vinegar, and olives. Everybody was at the big table, forks in hand. Pete Carson had turned to answer Chrissy Flournoy, his supposed teammate and supposed partner and person who supposedly had his back. Then her eyes shifted momentarily and she began snickering and looking fake-innocent. He was about to ask what was going on, when the PA coughed to life. A calm female voice said, Ladder Two-One-Six, Ladder Two-One-Six: alarm reported.

Chrissy jumped up, chair skidding backward, and further down the table so did Billy Devlin and Ed Manganaro. Pete was starving and Christ knew when they’d next get to eat, so he shoveled a big helping of beef into his mouth. Big mistake. Chrissy, who was on her feet but had paused to witness this, muttered, Oh god.

Some wise guy—with her collusion!—had doused Pete’s plate with Crazy Cam’s Lunatic Lava, a ghost-pepper-based hot sauce very comparable to radioactive waste and barely fit for human consumption. Pete’s mouth erupted, so to speak. He glared around and spotted Jake Steinberg trying (not that hard) not to laugh. Pete—at six feet not even the tallest guy in the room, with a rough-planed, clean-shaven face a former girlfriend had once described as lived-in—gave an acknowledging nod, to signal very funny.

He spit out the incendiary meat and grabbed the little bowl of sour cream, scooped up two fingers’ worth, shoved it into his mouth, and ran off after the others to the pole.

It took the standard sixty-five seconds to suit up: Bunker pants, Bunker coat, Nomex hood, gloves, boots. You carried your helmet and visor, because you never wore it in the cab, and you placed the Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus on their mounts on the seat backs until you reached the destination.

Billy, the chauffeur, was somehow already in the driver’s seat. He was Pete’s pal, a year younger, and still refining and trimming-to-regulation his brand-new beard-and-moustache ensemble, possibly to add gravitas to his Irishman’s innate boyishness. Pete always marveled at how fast Billy could don the gear. Maybe, when you had to wrangle three young kids, you learned how get dressed superfast.

Showtime, Billy said, as he always did. A minute later, Ed, the captain, was beside him up front. Pete and Chrissy climbed in the back and the Ladder pulled out.

Steinberg, huh? he said to her. You could have said something.

She was five-seven, not yet thirty and the youngest in the firehouse, with short, dark pixie hair and a blunt, snub-nosed kind of unfussy good looks. Not me, man, she said, deadpan but eyes twinkling. I’m one of the guys.

Grudgingly, he nodded. Women in firehouses were nothing new—that door had been kicked in forty years earlier—but there was always a clown who thought that feeling (or acting) victimized by the presence of a woman somehow demonstrated that he was a macho stud. It made no sense, either psychologically nor historically. Pete had yet to meet a woman firefighter who didn’t pull her weight.

Still, that meant that women sometimes had to deal with some bozo’s tacit demand that they prove themselves.

But it wasn’t enough for women to acquit themselves well in the field. They also had to be seen showing loyalty to what someone had called the culture of the kitchen—i.e., the tendency of a bunch of guys, who needed each other every second on the job, to bust each other’s balls with endless dissing and frat-house pranks. Women, so to speak, had to know how to bust balls and to have their own busted. Expecting Chrissy to say, By the way, Pete, someone screwed with your dinner was like expecting her to tattle on the class clown to Teacher.

Traffic was what it was, for a Thursday night in the summer, which meant it could have been worse but, the city being the city, was no bargain. Billy turned on the lights and siren and they made their careful, hurry-up-and-wait way onto Broadway and headed toward Mott Street. There was the usual nightlife and the added pain in the ass of bicycles and, now, electric scooters and ATVs and dirt bikes—on city streets, yes, as though someone had said, "Let’s really see how much we can jam up Broadway." Plus, the weather being warm, there were a lot of pedestrians, not all of whom were careful to stay out of the street as the fire truck roared by.

En route, Pete took a moment to fear the worst. The streets were narrow, the buildings old and crowded. (He had lost count of how many times one of the crew had said to another, Forget it, man. It’s Chinatown.) This could be one of those massive, ancient warehouse-type structures. If they had fire escapes at all, it would be a miracle if they weren’t rusted stiff. And just because it was night, there was no reason to believe the workshops—read: sweatshops—therein would be empty of workers. Those places functioned 24/7, as their earliest incarnations had since the Industrial Revolution.

Pete could smell the smoke two blocks away. That wasn’t good.

Mott Street, like so much of the city below 14th Street, had been designed for horse-drawn carriages, so even with parking on just one side of the street (or none at all) it could be a nightmare for fire vehicles. They caught one break, at least: cops were already there, blocking car access and hustling onlookers away. It was still light out, so Pete could see the source of the smoke. Eight floors up, the black puffs curled and fluffed out in torrents through a line of what looked like unusually narrow slits—tall, wide, industrial-scale windows that, for whatever reason, only opened a few inches. And, of course, that’s where the fire escapes were. There was no one on them.

Pete began to feel that his fears had been justified.

They got there first and, being search and rescue, pulled up to the front of the building. The Engines parked up the block, by the hydrants. This primo parking spot meant that, even over the siren and the sound of the Detroit Diesel Series 60 engine, they could hear the screams. Pete decided he’d been too optimistic.

Chrissy, take the can, Ed said. He was nearing sixty, under six feet, stocky and solid as a linebacker, with the near-bald head and florid, workingman face of a character actor.

The can was a ten-pound cylinder filled with twenty pounds of water. Got it, she said, grabbing it like a bottle of Evian.

Ed sighed. Billy, it looks bad. Kill the motor and come with us.

They passed the freight lift that stood beside the front door and banged in. The lobby was deceptively small, with a terrazzo floor and pseudo-fancy marble panels on the walls, one of which displayed a black-background, white-letter floor directory probably installed before World War II. The front desk was jammed against a wall and beyond it were two elevators. There were several people in a state of shock or desperation, Asian women, mostly in their twenties or thirties, in their cheapo pastel blouses and oversized seamstress shirts, milling around, dithering, weeping. They seemed to be waiting to be told, or shown how, to leave the building.

Ed led the crew off to the side and into the stairwell. The elevators had been, or should have been, shut down. So far the power was still on, but all it would take was one ambitious flame sneaking in between floors and finding a crack in some overtaxed conduit to short out the building and turn each elevator into an immovable box, its contents waiting to be cooked.

FIREFIGHTERS! COMING UP! COMING UP! Ed shouted.

He almost didn’t have to. Not enough people were coming down—which, given the deserted fire escapes, was another bad sign. One middle-aged woman, eyes wide and face smudged with soot, looked wildly into Pete’s eyes and urgently said, through coughs, something in Mandarin, incomprehensible. Pete could only nod in what he hoped looked like reassurance, pat her arm, and send her on her way.

As usual, his glimpse of his teammates in their getup and gear reminded Pete of nothing so much as a crew of nineteenth-century whalers: heavy waterproof coats, big boots, long sharp irons with hooked tips—they were dressed for rough seas and mustering up to confront what they routinely referred to as the Beast.

How we doin’, Chris? Ed called.

He’d have asked anyone. Between the standard gear and the can, she was humping upwards of one hundred pounds. No problem, Cap came the predictable reply. Otherwise, all they had in their ears was the static and lo-fi transmission of the Battalion Chief giving orders, and crew chiefs acknowledging. By the sixth floor the air was gray haze, visibility down to half. The crew had to move aside to allow women, sobbing or convulsed in coughing, to pass by as they clung to and clutched at the banister, stumbling down and away.

The electricity failed just as they got there.

They were blessed with another break: the emergency lights—indoor floods mounted up in the corners at the ceiling—had functional batteries, and, more importantly, they worked in the stairwell. As the team burst through the stairway door onto the floor itself, the lighting, glaring and crap though it was, afforded Pete an opportunity to take it all in.

The main entrance door to the factory, a giant sliding warehouse-type monster, was only halfway open, jammed or rusted so that it stopped after four feet. The smoke was total, a black avalanche pouring out from a source way in the back of the loftlike space. Pete figured the women they’d passed in the stairwell had been the first to escape, but as the smoke increased, the panic spiralled upward, feeding on itself. And so the workers, choking on the acrid air and with eyes shut against the sting, jammed the narrow exit. Some fell, causing others to stumble on top of them. Some still managed to squeeze through the entrance into the elevator lobby, choking and gasping. But others were simply crushed or paralyzed by smoke inhalation. Barely visible through the dark fog, across the room, were faint red flashes on the windows, a macabre strobe from other arriving units down on the street. It was like the main entrance to Hell.

Cap, where’s triage? Pete heard Billy ask.

Sixth floor, two down. Ed started stepping over bodies in the doorway. Let’s go.

John Kovalchek’s crew, right behind them, started removing the piled-up bodies. Pete teamed up with Chrissy and they followed Ed and Billy in. The two pairs started the preliminary search on their knees, crawling along the floor through zero visibility. The four of them, about two arms’ lengths apart, began on the right. The idea was to literally just keep moving, slowly and methodically, until you ran into something—a body, which you dealt with, or furniture, a supporting upright, anything to contribute to a mental map of the area.

For the first few feet they felt nothing but floor, not counting when Pete bashed his elbow on the upright of one of the work tables. It was the kind of darkness you couldn’t get accustomed to, because it wasn’t uniform or steady. For a few seconds it might thin out a bit, and you could see a foot forward, but then a new wave of sooty, black smoke would roll in and the murk would thicken again and become opaque.

Pete was just starting to hope that they’d somehow dodged a bullet—that the casualties were all up front, and most workers had escaped—when his groping hand hit something meaty and soft and not-floor. Maybe it moved a little in response. I got one, he said, hoisting a body. In the absence of textbook-specified signs of death—decapitation, decomposition, transection—there were no decisions to be made. You couldn’t tell who was alive and who wasn’t, but you didn’t have to. When in doubt, get ’em out. This one instantly relaxed into dead weight, which was always a challenge. (Try hefting a grown man who’d blacked out: it was the equivalent of lifting and carrying a 180-pound sack of potatoes that you must not let bang into anything.) At least today the victims were mostly petite Asian women and relatively light.

He waited for Chrissy to find someone to evacuate. He could have just gone on without her, but in this lightless hellhole he didn’t want to risk losing track of his partner. When he heard her say Let’s go, he turned and led the way back to the entrance and the elevator lobby.

This time he took advantage of the emergency illumination to not look at anything, and to keep his eyes fixed on his feet, and then on the hand-off to Kovalchek’s evac team. Pete had long ago learned one of the lessons of rescue: Don’t look at their faces. Don’t pause to empathize. Don’t try to tell if they’re unconscious or dead; don’t wonder what they’re feeling or if they’re feeling anything at all. If, afterwards, you run into any EMTs, don’t ask them who made it and who didn’t. Because that way madness lay: the job wasn’t to feel deeply but to act efficiently and get as much done as possible. The emotions would come later, for better or for worse—usually for worse.

Still, when you handed them over to someone else, or you put them down, you couldn’t help but look at the face, hoping for a moan or a convulsion—anything to indicate life. When you didn’t see it, you swore you’d never make that mistake again, until next time.

Back at the entrance, in the smoke-hazed lobby, Pete and Chrissy handed off their victims, then stood aside as Ed and Billy arrived with theirs.

You work with someone long enough, especially in a physical job, and you acquire a subliminal familiarity with their posture. You get fluent in their body language. When Ed lay the motionless young woman into the arms of Norm Watts—a young hotshot bopping in place with nervous energy, eager to transport her downstairs to the triage unit—Pete noticed Ed’s head turned resolutely aside—which was normal—and his shoulders and arms slumped despairingly, which was not. Should he say something? No—or, rather, yes, but not now.

Back to it, Ed said.

Something in his voice didn’t sound right.

You okay? Pete asked.

I’m great.

They moved back into the loft and through the area they’d already scoured and resumed the floor-level search. Things actually seemed to be marginally improving. The smoke seemed less dense, which meant the ventilation teams had begun making headway, so the hoses would soon be up and running. Nobody on Pete’s team had seen a bit of flame yet, which further suggested that the seat of the fire was in a back storage or utility room. And that made sense, too, since that’s where they’d store bins and barrels of waste material, the frayed, dried-out cotton scraps and the dribs and drabs of faux-silk, shiny polyester used in these garments, the former ready to ignite if you looked at it funny, the latter harder to get burning but a bitch to put out and breathe in, that landed on your skin like melting plastic, which is exactly what it was.

Ed’s portable radio sputtered to life and they heard Command’s confirmation: the fire was confined to the back storage room, and, thanks to its two broad windows, now well and truly shattered by the vent guys, should be easy to snuff out.

The team did one more shuttle—four more bodies, or victims, or survivors. Who knew? Four more hand-offs near the elevators. Another opportunity to stretch, flex, and observe each other in their soot-covered splendor in the dismal light. Then change to a fresh air bottle. (It was pressurized, regular, good old air. Entering a fire with a tank of oxygen would be lunacy.) And then back inside, where you still couldn’t see much apart from the flashing reds on the windows.

Pete stood next to Billy as they took a breather. Billy said, So, yeah, the source— and stretched out his arm, finger pointing, as he turned away with a sweeping gesture toward the rear. Something—instinct, good hearing, dumb luck, divine intervention—made Pete look up and then launch himself at his friend, tackling him and shoving him away from where they stood. Just then an entire bank of fluorescent fixtures, rattling like giant old-fashioned ice cube trays, came crashing down in a clatter of thin metal framework and a series of percussive bangs and powdery white puffs from the exploding light bulbs. The unit had somehow pivoted almost ninety degrees en route and would have smashed Billy in the head. Had they not been wearing air tanks, everyone in the vicinity would have had to hold their breath and scram, to avoid inhaling the bulb gases.

Pete could feel the glass splinters rain on his coat, their meteorite heat palpable even through the thick material. The FUCK— Billy said. Ed and Chrissy helped the two of them get up. Once on their feet, Billy said, I owe you one.

You already owed me one, Pete said. Now you owe me two.

No, I DID owe you one, but I gave you one. Two weeks ago at that bar. Where that thing happened. In that situation.

Pete hesitated, then nodded. Okay, you owe me one.

Ed pointed and said, I’m surprised that doesn’t happen more often.

They had been standing beside a table half the length of the entire loft. Along each side, in offset alternations like a setting for the world’s weirdest dinner party, was a line of sewing machines—say twenty to a side. Each one featured a power cord snaking up out of its base and rising to the ceiling, the old Indian rope trick, where it was plugged into the base of a fluorescent light. It was like a skein of rain forest vines descending from the canopy. Apparently Billy’s gesture had gotten him snared in some cords, put strain on the lighting instruments, and dislodged them from their mounts.

The team skirted the long table and continued the search along the wall of windows. The smoke was abating and the noises of the ladders and the hoses had ramped up. There was no threat of the building’s structure being affected or of the fire spreading. For that matter, maybe it was just as well that the power had gone out, because here came the water: runoff along the floor, washing ash and charred fabric and miscellaneous crud from the site of the blaze, and drifting clouds of steam, white mist joining the black smoke, two disembodied specters, old friends reuniting.

The floor, at least the part they stood on, was wood, ancient and gouged, with wide, thick planks showing a century’s worth of cracks, warpage, separations. Which meant the water—some of which would have flowed around the bodies that had not yet been removed—would drizzle down to and all over the seventh floor, or at least its ceiling. So even if the fire itself never got close to seven, and most of the smoke wafted up or out, neighboring stuff would get totally waterlogged and compromised. That was the thing about fire: when it arrived, it did damage; and then the smoke did damage; and the only way to get rid of all that was to do a different kind of damage.

Need a refill, Chrissy said.

No one was surprised. Her thirty-minute air tank actually sometimes lasted her a good twenty minutes—she was, after all, smaller than the men and had smaller lungs. But she was lugging the can, so she’d used up her air in the same fifteen-minute interval as the guys invariably did. The standing joke was that the way to make your thirty-minute tank last the full half hour was to leave it at the firehouse.

Let’s do that, Ed replied, and he led them out of the loft toward the elevators. A team behind them had shlepped replacement air bottles up the stairs and deposited them against a wall. Ed’s team made the switch and trooped back into the mess.

There were no bodies, alive or dead, along the far wall, and no one trembling and desperate under the tables. It gave Pete an opportunity to glance out one of the windows and to discover why each one was only opened a few inches: because each frame, left and right, had wooden chocks nailed into it just above where the top and bottom sashes met in the middle. Raise the bottom window and, after three inches, you banged into those blocks and went no further.

He had heard of this sort of thing but hadn’t actually encountered it. Of course, it rendered the fire escapes useless. It severely hindered ventilation during hot days—and, given the nature of this establishment, nights. But at least it enabled the owner or the landlord or the leaseholder or some other son of a bitch to prevent the workers from climbing out onto the steel for a smoke or, God forbid, some fresh air, thus compromising productivity.

Ed saw him looking at the window frames. Ed looked at them, too, and then their eyes met. Ed shook his head and waved a hand to signal, Don’t even start. He said, Let’s finish the sweep and then do it again.

They finished the sweep and did it again, until it was clear that any possible survivors had been evacuated. Then their air ran out, the suppression teams were all over the place with their hoses, and they were finished for the night.

Exhausted, filthy, reeking of smoke, they trudged back down the stairway and out to the truck, past the Dragon Fighters’ Engine 9 over from Canal Street, with its Asian lettering and gold dragon affixed to the grille. Over 150 Years in Chinatown and still going strong.

Then came the inevitable swarm of news vans, floodlit reporters doing their stand-ups, and onlookers clustered behind police lines,