When The Tik-Tik Sings Read online

  It was then the 'B' Shift gang noticed the dark Lexus at the curb. A man inside, handcuffed to the steering wheel, gave Nestor a new reason to laugh. “Should we ask?”

  Erin shook her head. “Just another day at the office.”

  The gang moved past Engine 4, with three lines pulled, two from the bed, one from a side mount, charged, and snaking to three separate structures. “What a fucking circus!” Tuck said.

  It was that, Ben thought, taking it in. A circus with five rings. Only the Calliope music was missing.

  Without an air pack, face-piece dangling from his neck, Ben moved through an open overhead door into the burning garage, eating heat and dragging a charged 2½ line on his shoulder. The fire was floor to rafters in the back wall. He opened the playpipe nozzle and unloaded seventy-five gallons a minute across the base of the flames. Wet on red, that was the name of the game. Everything was pie until he saw movement on the right. Three hunched Duncan Rural firefighters had entered the opposite end of the garage through a walk-in door. Blue lighters! It wasn't that pro firefighters had anything against volunteers; they were well trained, energetic guys. But they faced the monster for love instead of money. How screwed up was that?

  The band of men, three in a conga line, wore full air packs and gear but gave themselves away in black turnout with white reflective tape, as opposed to the yellow and orange of Duncan city. That and the sad fact that between them, they carried one red 1¼ grass hose that made them look like the Three Stooges taking a garter snake for a walk. And they were messing with his fire.

  In the movies, this would have been the instant when an angel appeared on Ben's right shoulder to say, Don't do it, followed by a devil on his left sneering, Go ahead, let 'em have it. But this was real life, where firefighters and incorrigible rogues made split-second decisions. Before his conscience stopped him, Ben pivoted the nozzle blasting the fire, heat, and smoke across the garage and at the volunteers. The trio had no choice but to retreat.

  Ben heard a guffaw and turned to see Nestor, portable radio in hand, leaning on the overhead frame laughing his keister off. “Nice,” Nester said. “Now… if you're done harassing the whistle pricks?”

  “Maybe.” Ben shut down his line and lowered the nozzle. Gray smoke swirled around him. “Why?”

  Nestor waved his radio and pointed at Ben's. “You forgot to turn yours on.”

  “Yeah. Let's go with that. I forgot.”

  Nestor smiled impishly. “Ethridge is politely requesting our presence.”

  The day when 'A' Shift's commanding officer, Captain Booker Ethridge, politely requested anything would be one chilly day in Hell. Both knew it. Even if it had been true, it wasn't by the time the pair arrived at the Incident Command Center. Ethridge was a good guy, but tactless. The grizzled captain, talking to Art Blackmore, his engine driver, when Ben and Nestor walked up, growled, “Grab 1-Boy-18 and get over to the 800 block of High Street. 1-Boy-16 has been in an accident.”

  Nestor moaned. “This is the best fire I've had in years.”

  “Sorry to ruin your good time, Pena.”

  “Can't you send a couple of rookies?”

  “I can,” Ethridge barked. “But I'm not going to.”

  “How bad is it?” Ben asked.

  Blackmore butted in. “We're not there, Court, are we? What do we look like? Swamis?”

  Ben smiled. Blackmore was an ass – which was his problem – but he was also their Union president, which was theirs. Blackmore liked himself a lot. Neither Ben nor Nestor shared his opinion. The result was rancor and a perpetual verbal shoving match. “The man I was addressing looks like a captain,” Ben told him. “You, Art, look like what you always look like, a penis with ears.”

  “Enough,” Ethridge barked. Five fires and he had to play referee? Goddam firefighters and their nonsense; like psychotic kids. “Can we get back to work? I don't know how bad, Ben. They were hit by another vehicle. They're out of service and their burn patient needs to get to the hospital. When you get there, you'll know. Then you can tell me.”

  Ben lost the coin toss on the way to the rig. Nestor got to drive and he was stuck with patient care. There were a hundred places on earth Ben would rather have been.

  Being hit by a taxpayer while operating an emergency vehicle was worse than traumatic, it was embarrassing. And a screw up a city employee couldn't live down. It was a shame because it was rarely the firefighter's fault. Nine times out of ten, the blame lay with the citizen. Despite blazing red, bright white, or electric green paint, despite sirens and pulsing phasers, despite reflective tape and the yellow, red, white, and blue flashing lights from stem to stern, one day a citizen was going to slam into your fire engine, truck, or ambulance and claim they 'Didn't see you' and 'Didn't hear you'. That was the situation 'A' Shift paramedics Bennehoff and Cooper were in when Ben and Nestor rolled up. A Caddy had blown a red light and broadsided 1-Boy-16 in an intersection.

  “Take Roger Ramjet, will you?” Ben asked Nestor. “I'll check the patient and crew.”

  Nestor eased past a cop directing traffic and parked 1-Boy-18. Ben tossed their jump kit into his vacated seat, for Nestor, then headed for the wrecked ambulance. Nestor started for the Cadillac.

  It took the New Mexican a minute to track down the driver, who was out of his steaming vehicle roaming, and several more to get him to stand still. He denied injury and angrily refused to be touched. As he had no acute distress, Nestor called another ambulance, from one of the volunteer Mutual Aid groups, to let them argue with the guy.

  1-Boy-16's patient compartment had been stoved in. The same could be said of the pride of the ambulance driver, Shug Bennehoff. Ben found him unhurt but genuinely pissed. “The chief's head is going to explode.”

  Unable to disagree, Ben offered the only salve available. “It'll be an improvement.”

  Sandy Cooper, the paramedic treating the patient when the accident occurred, was sporting what looked to be a broken arm. Ben could barely hear her moans because the burn patient on the cot was screaming his head off. “Has he been like this since the accident?”

  Cooper shook her head. “Before. Been screaming since we left the fire. I don't blame him.”

  “Me neither. What's his name?”

  “No idea,” Cooper said, wincing as she held her arm.

  Ben and Nestor transferred their empty cot to 1-Boy-16 and moved the patient, and Cooper, into their ambulance. Bennehoff, opting to remain with his crippled rig, refused to join them. They took off for the hospital.

  In the back, Cooper treated herself, tying her arm in a sling while Ben busied himself over the burn patient. Sadly, there was little he could do. Cooper, estimating second and third-degree burns over eighty percent of his body, had established an IV and oxygen at the scene before they'd run. All that remained was to keep the wounds clean and the patient cool without sending him into hypothermic shock. To that end, Ben covered him with a sterile sheet and poured saline on the burns. The patient screamed non-stop. But no doctor, Ben knew, would authorize painkillers in the field for burns that severe. There was no point asking. The patient continued to scream while Ben radioed an 'inbound' report to the hospital. Ears ringing, he cradled the mic, silently wishing Nestor would get them there.

  Up front, Nestor was in paramedic heaven. Legal speeding, carefully weaving through the maze of downtown one-way streets, without the stress of patient care. He alternated their emergency tones with a switch in the steering wheel. An ear-splitting 'siren' for the straight-a-ways, a flick to 'wail' for the intersections, and the god-awful 'phaser' reserved for assholes who ignored the others. He gave some phaser to a soccer mom making love to her cell phone. “Curb right for sirens and lights!”

  Northeast Iowa wasn't New York but it wasn't a desert island either. There were plenty of folks in need of medical attention, and in Duncan, they got it at the 300 bed Duncan Memorial Hospital on the edge of the Port District. It had an ER, an Intensive Care Unit, a Psychiatric Unit, and its own Bur
n Unit; music to the paramedics' ears. In Ben's case, make that the paramedic's numb ears. The patient was still screaming. The intensity of his shouts had lessened since Ben had applied the saline, and what seemed to be a word or two were finding their way out between the shouts. But, if they were words, they were foreign and meant only more noise to Ben. “Any idea what language he's speaking?”

  “Nope,” Cooper answered with a frown. “Don't know that either.”

  Though his burned rags had been cut away, the patient still wore a set of dog tags. Ben examined those, found them as foreign as the patient, and returned them having learned nothing. In a way, it made things easier. His inability to decipher the man's cries isolated Ben from the pain. Thankfully he would soon be handing the problem off.

  Nestor took the curving drive to the Emergency Room and backed into a stall. Ben abandoned ship and helped Cooper down. He released the cot and he and Nestor rolled it out. They dropped the wheels to the carport pavement and pushed through the sliding doors as the patient perfectly summed up the trip by screaming at the top of his lungs.

  Three

  Scrub suits and lab coats came out of the woodwork as the paramedics rolled their cot into the exam room. The patient screamed on, pain peppered with, apparently, his three or four favorite words in a language nobody spoke. And he'd added a new trick, struggling to get off the cot. “Aswan,” he cried, or something like it. Then a scream. “Mennon! Gal!” Then another scream. And then, God knew why – Ben certainly didn't – the patient shouted, “Tick. Tick!” as if he were a clock. It wasn't funny; the guy was hurting. Still it was hard not to laugh as he started over. He had the attention of all assembled; pharmacy tech, lab tech, respiratory therapist, two nurses, and the ER unit clerk. “Aswan!”

  “Whoa!” one of the techs said, covering her ears.

  Ben caught the O2 bottle trying to jump the cot rail. “You should have been in the rig.”

  “Mennon! Gal! Tick tick! Tick tick!”

  The charge nurse shushed the patient, with little result, and rolled the bed sheet in her hands. “One. Two. Three.” The patient was lifted to the bed. The hospital staff moved up. The doctor entered, looking grim.

  “Sorry, Doc,” Ben said, “I treated the burns, but failed in rendering psychological aid.”

  The doctor slipped between an x-ray and a lab tech, took one look, and told a nurse, “Start another Ringers, wide bore. What's his name?”

  “No idea,” Ben said. The patient screamed again. “That's been his whole conversation.”

  “Any notion what he's saying? What language it is?”

  Ben shook his head and looked at his partner.

  Nestor shrugged. “Some of it's sort of familiar, but it's mostly gibberish. Don't think it's either language I speak. Not sure – I got a C in Spanish.”

  “He's wearing dog tags,” Ben said. “But I'm not certain what army they're from.”

  “If they're from an army,” Nestor put in. “Lot of people wear those as decorations.”

  Snapping on a glove, the charge nurse lifted the tags. “The surname is… impossible to pronounce. The first name looks like Soomnalung.” She let it roll off her tongue. “Soom-na-lung? Asian? Korean? Filipino? Do we have an Asian translator?”

  Nestor snorted. “There's no such thing as an Asian language. Asia is fifty different countries.”

  Ben stared in amazement.

  “What?” Nestor asked defensively. “I can know things.” Stray laughs were cut off when the patient screamed again. Nestor pointed. “That one word he keeps shouting, Aswan or whatever, that's familiar for some reason. My wife is from Manila.” He stole a look at the tags over the nurse's shoulder. “Yeah,” he said. “The letters look Filipino.”

  “Can you read it?”

  Nestor shook his head. “Recognize it; seen their money. They speak over a hundred languages on the islands. Mostly Tagalog. And English. And something my wife calls Taglish.” The New Mexican smiled. “It's all Greek to me.”

  The nurse frowned, giving up on Nestor, and turned to the doctor. “Should we see if there's a Philippine translator in the hospital?”

  “No. Let's worry about keeping him alive first.” The doctor eased the buds of his stethoscope into his ears. “Make soothing noises to him now. We'll talk to him when and if we get him stabilized.”

  Ben and Nestor filled out paperwork in the conference room while their patient screamed in his room across the hall. It remained the same, agonized squawks, repeated gibberish, and the tick, tick of a spastic clock. Finally, with an infusion of morphine, it had gone from toe-curling to just annoying. Still, the paramedics were ready for someone to change the record.

  Cooper wandered in, her iced arm supported by a nifty new sling, and took a chair.

  “Broken?” Ben asked.

  “No break, thankfully.” Her relaxed smile suggested the burned man wasn't the only patient with a pain killer on board. “How's our Garfield guy?”

  “His name's Soomnalung. He's just like you found him,” Ben said. “Well done and screaming.”

  “He wasn't.”

  “Wasn't what?”

  “He wasn't screaming when we found him. He wasn't doing anything.” Cooper adjusted her arm. “He crawled out of that basement like something slithering up out of Hell, then he just sat down on the stoop. That's how we found him. House exploded, basement burning, and him quietly sitting there like he was waiting for the mail. He didn't start screaming until we loaded him up.”

  “Must have been the shock,” Ben said. “Before his mind got the message he'd burned his ass off.”

  Across the hall, Soomnalung shrieked again. “He's making up for lost time.”

  “Well, I've had enough,” Nestor said. He turned to Ben. “Ready to get out of here?” Then to Cooper. “We're going to see if they left any fire for us. Want a ride?”

  Cooper eased back into the plush chair. “I'm going to sit here and enjoy the meds for a while.”

  On the way to the exit, cot piled with replacement equipment, Ben felt a tug on the gurney. The New Mexican had stopped and was staring into the waiting room at a middle-aged man, checking the coin returns of the vending machines. Nestor whispered, “It's Rickie.”

  Before Ben Court or Nestor Pena were thought of, Richard Savage III had been a Duncan mainstay. Called 'Rickie' by the locals, even transplanted locals like Ben and Nestor, he was as recognizable as any tourist attraction in town. Every day, without fail, Rickie could be seen riding his bike, delivering newspapers, collecting bottles, and checking the coin returns of every pay phone, soda box and candy machine from one end of town to the other. For thirty years he was the 'slow' guy or the 'retarded' man. Then the city's mental health professionals cheered themselves by labeling him, first, 'emotionally and educationally challenged', then, 'developmentally disabled'. Rickie didn't know the difference and couldn't have cared less. None of the titles changed his life a bit. He was sixty-ish; with the mind of a twelve-year-old. His ever-present crew cut had gone gray. His stomach had grown round. But after half a century of riding the Mississippi bluffs, Ben guessed, the guy probably had the legs of a Greek god.

  “Rickie,” Nestor repeated, this time to Rick Savage himself. “How you doing?”

  Ben sighed. “Don't pick on him.”

  “Who's picking? Did you ever talk to this guy?”

  Only once, Ben thought, remembering the incident too vividly. He'd talked to him as a patient and the child-like Rickie was deathly afraid of ambulances. It had been no treat.

  Nestor was going on. “He's smart as hell. If he played his cards right he could be the next fire chief. Hey, Rickie!”

  Stooped and about his work, Rickie answered without looking up. “Hi.”

  “Find anything?”

  Rickie stood, empty-handed, but not disappointed. He picked up a cold can from the table beside him. “Got a pop. Want to buy it?”

  “Nah. You keep it. Hey, Rickie, there's a big fire across town.”

>   “Six fires,” Rickie said, correcting him. “Five houses, one garage.”

  “Oh, you know about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aren't you going to go watch?”

  “Did. Can't get near.”

  “Those mean firemen keeping you away?”

  “No. Police.”

  “Yeah. You gotta watch those cops, Rickie.”

  Rickie tilted his head and stared. Apparently there were a few paramedics he thought needed watching as well. He gave up on Nestor and lifted the can toward Ben. “Want to buy it?”

  “How much?”

  “Dollar.”

  “I can get it for a dollar from the machine.” Rickie just smiled. “No, you keep it. You found it.”

  Outside, Rickie tucked his soda into a heaped plastic bag in the front basket on his bike, climbed aboard, and pedaled happily away. Ben and Nestor, reloading 1-Boy-18, watched the old guy go.

  “Tough life, huh?” Nestor asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Being challenged like that.”

  “Don't you have any challenges? From my little experience, life seems pretty tough for everybody.”

  “Yeah, but how would you like to survive by checking pop machines for change?”

  “I wouldn't. But maybe it works for him.”

  “Nobody would choose that life.”

  “Nestor, you're a snob. You've got everything in life; a beautiful wife, a child on the way, an incredible house, a decent job that lets you sit on your ass all day. So you pity Rickie. Why? Because he wasn't lucky enough to be born you? Then you give yourself points for compassion. And none of it helps Rickie a bit. Outside of the fact he hates ambulance rides, I don't know a thing about him. Could be you're right. Could be Rickie's miserable and I should be ashamed; or maybe he's happy. Maybe he gets laid three times a week. Maybe he's rich as Caesar. For all I know, he fingers pop machines because he's kinky. Maybe he's trying to do the best he can with what life's handed him, like the rest of us who weren't lucky enough to be born you. All I know is… I don't know.”