The Secret of Fire 5 by Jack Olsen

Author:Jack Olsen [Olsen, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crime Rant Books
Published: 2019-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

Many’s the time I helped break in a new loot or house captain, but when you’re on the butt end it’s another story. The guys all know I have trouble getting to sleep but I always wake up like a cannon shot. I’m out of bed and into my gear practically before the bells, so they take advantage. They wait till I’m in a deep sleep, then four of them pick up my rack and move it a quarter turn. They flip the light switch on and I pull on my turn-out gear and run into the wall, blink my eyes and spin around and hit the wall again. Everybody’s in bed laughing.

Then it gets to be a contest, see how far they can move my rack with me sleeping in it. They haul me into the crapper one night, Steicher wanders in and wakes me up. “What the hell you sleeping in here?”

I look around, take in the sights, and I says, “Well, I dunno. Evidently I hadda take a leak,” which I calmly walk over to the urinal and shake off a few drops.

The next night Fenstermacher’s on watch. He’s a regular fireman now, no more probie, but there’s still two or three tricks he hasn’t learned. Four o’clock in the morning Plummer telephones him in the watch office and says, “Hey, this is the dispatcher. Your alarm busted?”

Fenstermacher says huh, he don’t know, what time is it, what’s happening anyway, and Plummer snaps, “Hit the alarm button!”

Naturally the kid hits it, and naturally Lieutenant Charly Sprockett slides the pole and it’s just me and the rookie standing in the dark watch office. All the other guys been tipped to ignore it, they just roll over and snicker.

“Well?” I ask the kid. “Where we going?”

“That was just a test, Loo,” he says, like he’s talking to some kind of amateur. “You weren’t suppose to turn out.”

“How the hell was I suppose to know it’s a test?” I yells. But you can’t stay mad at this kid. Always has that simple grin under that dumb tousled head of red straw, looks like Huckleberry Finn. I sit him down and acquaint him with some of the old dodges so he won’t fall the next time and take me with him again. But I forget to warn him about the tarp drill, and the next day the guys call a tarp drill and wrap poor Wally in it and spray his balls purple. He don’t care, he laughs and giggles like he’s in his right mind. It’s not like the time we’re gonna paint Tyree’s nuts purple, we de-pants him and discover they’re already purple, so we wind up spraying them flat white, which Tyree takes it as a racist insult and reports us to the Black Firefighters Association.

“Might as well have our fun now,” Mike Mustache says the day after they paint the rook. “Them firebroads come along, it’ll all be dull around here.”

“Yeh, how’re we gonna initiate a fireginch, Charly?” Ax says.

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