Engine Two-seventy-eight was in a two-story redbrick firehouse on a quiet block of mom-and-pop stores in Woodside, Queens. Georgia hadn’t seen Captain Seamus Hanlon since Jimmy Gallagher’s funeral in April.
A firefighter copied Georgia’s name into the company journal—a daily log of the engine’s activities, emergencies and visitors, as well as a list of names of the men on duty. Somewhere in this firehouse, George Skeehan’s name and the shift that took his life at age thirty-nine were hand-copied into a log.
Georgia gazed past a corkboard of firefighter snapshots to a bronze plaque halfway up the metal stairs. It was a relief cast of her father in a firefighter’s helmet and turnout gear, along with the date of the ceiling collapse that killed him. Georgia knew it was there, set into the diesel-smeared white tile wall. But she didn’t trust herself to look at it—even after all these years. Some things, it seemed, don’t get less painful with time.
Seamus Hanlon’s pale blue eyes crinkled softly when he bounded down the stairs and found her waiting for him at the bottom.
“God strike me dead if I don’t think of Jimmy Gallagher every blessed day,” he said as he hugged her. Georgia could smell the soot of a recent fire on his light-blue uniform shirt. Captain Hanlon was a bulky man, not fat so much as broad, with thick walruslike jowls accentuated by a mustache the color of cigarette ash. His crew-cut hair—the same color—stood up like a wire brush on the top of his head. Coupled with the bags beneath his eyes, it gave Seamus Hanlon the appearance of an over-the-hill boxer with a score to settle.
“How’s your mother holding up?” he asked.
“As well as can be expected.” Georgia sighed. “She misses him a lot.”
“God knows, we all do.”
Georgia recalled now that the captain had lost his own wife to cancer not too long ago. “How are you…?” she started to ask, but Hanlon cut her off.
“You work a lot of overtime,” he said with a sad smile. “Kids are all on their own now. House is as empty as a bad gambler’s pockets.” He nodded to the kitchen. “You hungry? We got leftover sausage and peppers from dinner. You’re always welcome.”
“No, thanks,” said Georgia. “I had dinner. But I would like to talk to you—maybe in your office.”
He rocked on his feet and jingled some change in his uniform pants. “And I thought you were here to tell me a couple of good Gallagher stories. I could use a few these days.”
“Oh, we can do that, too,” she said.
He led her up the iron mesh stairs past the bronze plaque of her father. “I wish I’d known him,” Hanlon said softly, nodding at the plaque. The face chiseled out of bronze was rugged-looking with curly hair just like Georgia’s and mischievous eyes. It was her father, and yet not her father at the same time, and it made her ache the same way old pictures of him did.
“In some ways,” said Georgia, “he was a lot like Jimmy.”
“That I can believe. I know Jimmy thought the world of your dad.”
At the top of the stairs, Hanlon turned into a narrow office across from the firefighters’ bunk room. The walls were beige, pockmarked by ink-black smudges and gouges in the plaster that crumbled like glazed sugar. A steel bed frame and a file cabinet piled high with dusty volumes of fire department regulations hugged the wall opposite the desk and computer.
Hanlon flopped into a swivel chair with duct tape covering the rips in the armrests. “Jimmy was a character, I tell you. Most of the time, he worked in Manhattan, but he did a few overtime tours out this way. One time, we had this young kid, Eagan, who was trying to learn the bagpipes. Kid sounded like he was torturing a cat. The guys were going crazy listening to him every tour. They tried hiding his pipes, stuffing them with paper. Kid kept playing. One day Jimmy comes in, hears that God-awful sound and starts singing.”
Georgia laughed. She’d heard Gallagher sing. Or rather, try to.
“Jimmy was many things, but he was no Irish tenor.” Hanlon grinned. “Kid took the pipes home that night. Never heard another word. We owe our eardrums to an Irishman who couldn’t hold a note if it was Gabriel’s trumpet and he had both hands wrapped around it.” Georgia smiled sadly. “He was a great man.”
“Aye, that he was. As dear to me as my own brother, Michael—God rest both their souls.” Hanlon sank back in his seat. They were both quiet a moment. Then he clapped his hands together. “So what can I do you for, Georgia?”
“I need to know about a report you helped Ed Delaney prepare for the Division of Safety. It was back in 1984 when you were a firefighter at Ladder One-oh-six.”
He rubbed a thumb and finger across his thick mustache. “That’s a long time ago you’re talking about.”
“Do you remember the report? It had to do with a fire that took place in August 1978 in North Brooklyn.”
He picked a rubber band off his desk and toyed with it. “Georgia, what in God’s name do you need that for?”
“It has to do with a case I’m working on,” she said. “Were you at that fire?”
Hanlon shot the rubber band across the room. He seemed to be aiming for the clock on the wall. It was the kind of goofy thing Marenko would do to distract himself from something unpleasant.
“I was at that fire,” he said softly.
“Can you tell me about it?”
He leaned back in his chair and stared at the peeling paint rippling across the ceiling like a bad sunburn. “It was at a warehouse on Bridgewater Street in Greenpoint. My company, Ladder One-oh-six, responded on the third alarm. By the time I got there, it had been turned into an outside operation. The men who went in came out. The rest of us never went in. Chief Nickelson—he was the deputy chief on the scene—he ordered a surround and drown. They brought in the tower ladders and got the job done in under six hours.”
“Did the Empire Pipeline have anything to do with the fire?”
“I seem to recall that they thought a leak in the pipeline might have touched off the blaze. It ran near the warehouse, I believe.”
“Were any men injured at that fire?”
Hanlon raked the back of his hand across his lips. His pale blue eyes had a razor’s edge to them. “Nobody went sick at the scene, if that’s what you mean.”
“How about later?”
Hanlon’s face grew dark. He palmed the bags beneath his eyes. “It was a long time ago, Georgia. The men are dead. Can’t bring ’em back. Nobody really knows what happened that night. Leave it be.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He stared at her now. “Because I busted up my liver not leaving it be. Almost lost my job.”
“Over the fire?”
“Nah.” Hanlon got up from his chair and walked over to the room’s only window. The bottom half had an ancient air-conditioning unit inserted into it with plywood fitted around the casing. It rumbled like an elevated train. He stared out at a potholed street.
“A lot of stuff started happening in my life right around that time.” Hanlon didn’t meet her gaze. “Things got out of control. Lieutenant Delaney—Chief Delaney now—he helped me shake the monkey off my back, if you know what I mean.” Hanlon turned to her now. “I’ve been sober fifteen years,” he added with a nod that suggested it was still a battle of wills every day.
Georgia recalled faintly that Jimmy Gallagher had referred to Hanlon as a “hellraiser” in his youth. “Hellraiser” was Gallagher’s gentle euphemism for an alcoholic.
“It happens to a lot of guys on this job,” Georgia reassured him.
“Yeah, well…” Hanlon sighed. “I want to help you, lass. For Jimmy’s sake. For the memory of your father. But this fire—I don’t really recollect the details anymore. And I’m not sure I want to. It was such a long time ago.”
“Do you know if any firefighters applied for line-of-duty disability pensions as a result of that fire?”
“Applied? Yes. Received? No. There were these two doctors back then.” Hanlon made a face. “We called them the hitmen of the One-B Board. They turned down line-of-duty pensions like they were St. Peter at the gates of heaven.”
“Louise Rosen and Charles Dana,” said Georgia. Hanlon started.
“Yeah,” he said warily. “How did you…?”
“—They both burned to death within the last twenty-four hours.”
“Holy Mother of God. Accidental?”
“We don’t know yet,” said Georgia. She wasn’t about to divulge specifics that might compromise the case. “But that’s why I’m here. Would you know any firefighters who’d want to do something like that to them?”
“No disrespect to the dead, lass, but I could fill a union hall with the men who got shafted by those two.”
“Any particular names pop out?”
“It was so long ago. I just don’t remember anymore.”
“How about the report you helped prepare on this warehouse fire back in 1984?” Georgia pressed. “Is there any way to get a copy? All I have is Ed Delaney’s cover letter.”
“I’d have to go through Delaney, and right now, I’d feel funny asking him,” said Hanlon. “You’ve heard the rumors, right?”
Georgia gave him a blank look. She’d been a little preoccupied for rumors.
“Word is, Chief Delaney is Mayor Ortaglia’s top pick to replace Lynch as fire commissioner. I don’t think this is the time to ask him about the report.” He saw her crestfallen face. “I still have a couple of contacts at the Division of Safety,” Hanlon offered. “Maybe I can get them to dig it up for you.”
“That’d be great,” she said.
Downstairs, near the door to the firehouse, Hanlon grabbed a photo off the corkboard and pressed it into Georgia’s hand.
“For your mother,” he said, then turned and hustled back up the stairs as if he didn’t trust himself to say more.
When Georgia got outside, she looked at the snapshot. It was of a group of men and boys on a fishing boat on Long Island Sound. Their names were scribbled on back. Irish names, mostly: Hennessy, Dugan, O’Rourke, Mahoney…Seamus Hanlon was there. He looked about ten years younger. His jowls were less fleshy, his hair less gray. His arm was around a shorter, stocky man with hair just beginning to turn silver, holding up a two-foot perch. It was a great picture of Jimmy Gallagher—the way Georgia would always remember him, all sunshine and roguish good humor. Hanlon had given it away for the same reason that Georgia’s mother would probably stick it in a drawer and never look at it again. For the same reason that Georgia would not set foot again in Engine Two-seventy-eight for a long, long time.
Some things were just too full of memory to go back to.