Fire Lover Page 4

  But then, he was asked, “Could you work day shift?” They couldn’t get cops to work the day shift. The look on his face was enough and the security boss said, “When can you start?”

  He gave notice at 7-Eleven and started at Sears the next week.

  John Orr was a crime crusader. In his first few months at Sears, he caught thirty people for the police, and an additional twenty whom he admonished and sent on their way. He also nailed one dishonest employee and two car burglars. The arrest of a husband-and-wife shoplifting team led to the recovery of thirty thousand dollars’ worth of Sears property.

  “I found that I had a cop’s sixth sense” is how he explained the change that had come over him. “For those off-duty cops it was just a job, for me it was like hunting. I loved going to work.” He would have done the job for free.

  Lots of the merchandise boosters were addicts. Some carried knives and a few had guns in their cars. John Orr wasn’t just making more arrests than anyone, he was in more foot pursuits, risky foot pursuits. The police chiefs administrative assistant also worked off duty at Sears, and he helped the new employee to get a concealed-weapon permit, one of only six issued for the entire city.

  Now he could legally carry a gun, and he began hanging out at bars where cops gathered, entering into all the cop talk, as badge-heavy as any of them, with a noticeable swagger. And soon, around the fire department and the police department, John Orr became known as a “cop wanna-be.”

  After a few months the wanna-be took a few days off from fire fighting and shoplifters, loaded his car with camping gear and his lady, and headed for a weekend in the desert. And since they were in the desert anyway, and so close to Las Vegas … It was on a “whim,” he said. They got married: his second, her fourth.

  So, what does a wanna-be who packs a piece do when he’s back to a fire-fighting job that doesn’t challenge him? He requested and got assigned to the hill patrol, driving a Chevy three-quarter-ton pickup that carried a pump and water tank, doing fire inspection and prevention. It beat lying around the fire station, tits up, staring at the tube, waiting for second-alarm fires. When you came right down to it, the hill patrol was more like police work: cruising alone, watching, always watching. Ready for action.

  During the 1970s there was an arson series in Glendale; two of the fires were at Webb’s Department Store. The local news media harped on the failure of both the fire and police investigators to come up with a likely suspect. Then one Friday night, Webb’s Department Store experienced its third and final arson fire. The point of origin was in a pile of luggage and boxed items, and it was set during business hours, near closing time. John happened to be working one block away at the Sears store that evening. And he happened to be on his way home, he said, when he spotted the flames. He went into action and fought the fire along with several engine companies, for two hours. The entire building was destroyed. The serial arsonist was never caught.

  John Orr knew he was creating too much work for the Glendale cops with his stalking of Sears shoplifters, but he could not stop. One of the reasons he was so good at the security detail was his appearance. People always described him as an “average-looking” guy. Ordinary. Not tall, five foot nine, maybe twenty pounds overweight, most of it around the middle and starting to round out his face. His slate-blue eyes were a bit narrow and almost lashless, making one think that as he aged, puffiness might tend to make those eyes look a bit amphibian. He had very straight, dark hair just starting to recede, and uneven pointed teeth. He wasn’t good-looking, he wasn’t bad-looking. He was just ordinary-looking. But he had a very pleasing voice and excellent diction, like one of those mellow radio announcers who played cool jazz.

  Such an ordinary-looking guy could easily melt into the background at Sears, lurking in clothing racks, peering under, over, and around, like Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. In fact, Glendale cops called him “Clouseau.” Let them, he thought. He’d never worked at anything he enjoyed as much as this.

  Maybe it was that radio voice and the sense of humor and a certain cleverness, whatever it was, he did seem to net more than his share of babes. One of his harshest critics said, “Well, you throw your line in the water often enough …”

  His wife didn’t like the hours he was keeping with fellow firefighter Don Yeager. The duo did a lot of hunting together, and both worked at Sears, enjoying generous employee discounts that helped with those hunting trips.

  John described their “hunting” trips to the desert as diversions where they’d end up at hot spring spas surrounded by “desert flora, fauna, and females.” Not surprisingly, he divorced his second wife and moved into a two-bedroom cottage in Glendale, close enough to Engine 6 to ride to work on a bike, and close to his two favorite saloons.

  This was when John began his writing career in earnest. He rewrote a manual for fire-patrol procedures because the old one was outdated, and that extra effort alienated him from colleagues who didn’t want their responsibilities so tidily delineated. He said that this served to enhance his image as an “eccentric,” which is how he described himself. The Glendale cops and firefighters who were not his fans replied that every neurotic thought of himself as “eccentric.”

  His patrol responsibilities widened. The fire patrol had to inspect one thousand vacant lots, many of them on hillsides in residential areas where a brush fire driven by Santa Ana winds could be catastrophic. The fire patrol’s job was to locate the property owners, write warning notices, and instruct them to clear their property of dry brush. And there were pesky fire-alarm boxes that the kids liked to pull on their way home from school.

  John began to use what he called his “shoplifting skills” to bag the little bastards. He’d park his Chevy patrol truck, which, like all of the Glendale fire rigs, was painted a god-awful lime yellow, and he’d “hide in plain sight,” by just blending into backgrounds they were used to seeing. He bagged so many kids on his alarm-box surveillances that the other firefighters increased the moniker file to include “Officer Orr,” “Dirty Harry Jr.,” and more.

  And he even snared some young firebugs, kids who liked to set trash fires. Many times he’d con them with the “phantom witness” gag, as in: “Son, a lady down the street told me you were right by that trash fire when it started. Did you maybe drop a match and it struck the edge of the trash can, and you didn’t mean to do it?”

  He had a way about him, he said, like a priest in confession. But as the 1980s approached, he needed bigger game. Nailing shoplifters was getting too easy; grabbing juvie fire setters was getting boring. He was sick and tired of shooting arrows at skunks, as it were. He wanted the real thing. He wanted to detect and arrest real arsonists.

  It was rumored that the Glendale Fire Department was going to hire a full-time arson investigator. This person would work directly for the head of the fire-prevention bureau. He wanted it badly, but nobody else did. As a measure of how most firefighters feel about work that resembles police work, John was the only applicant at the time.

  He almost got killed during a shoplifting shift at Sears on a day when he was not wearing a .38 in his ankle holster, but carrying a big gun, a .45-caliber semiautomatic. He got a page from an employee at the Sears automotive garage about a guy who tried to “pick up a car” that the employee suspected didn’t belong to him. The man had been turned away and was last seen crossing the parking lot and getting into a Mustang.

  John quickly located the Mustang and saw a wire in the thief’s hand, who was too busy hot-wiring the Mustang to even notice him. This was a real felony and he drew his gun.

  John yelled, “Give it up, asshole!”

  But the guy got the Mustang started, jammed it into reverse, and floored it. John couldn’t jump fast enough, and got clipped by the front fender, flopping onto the pavement and rolling out of the way. The Mustang crashed into two parked cars and stalled.

  Then the Sears sleuth was on him, but there was a problem. John Orr had all the moxie in the world, but not the t
raining. He didn’t know the law. The bastard had hit him with a car. Did he have the legal right to dump him?

  The car thief got the Mustang started again, with John yelling, “Move an inch and I’ll drop the hammer, you son of a bitch!”

  For emphasis, he actually cocked the hammer, and now he was a few pounds of trigger pull away from a fatal shooting. But did he have the right and the authority?

  “I had the balls to cap the asshole,” he later said, but he just wasn’t sure that he was legally justified.

  His dilemma was resolved by a Glendale motor cop who’d been drinking coffee at a hamburger joint across the street. The cop hadn’t heard the crash, but heard John hollering and cussing, so he moseyed over, coffee cup in hand, to have a look. And the car thief saw the motor cop and surrendered meekly.

  Why had the guy refused to give it up to John, even when he was about to be dropped by a goddamn .45? Why had he cried uncle the second he laid eyes on a real cop? John pondered it as he drove to the police department for the arrest reports, and decided that a real cop would’ve dropped the hammer.

  What was it? Was there something the dirtbag read in his face? That he wasn’t a real cop? That he was just a wanna-be? Was that it?

  His next caper actually got in the newspaper. It happened on a warm winter afternoon when the Santa Ana winds were blowing in from the desert. While he was on his fire patrol he spotted a couple of Latino homeboys wearing those trademark long-sleeved Pendleton shirts that cover track marks and those shitty “BORN TO LOSE” jailhouse tats, sitting at a bus bench. He said they “lighthoused” him, but it’s hard to understand why, in that most vatos couldn’t care less about a fireman in a lime-yellow pickup truck. But that’s how he saw it, and his reporting was just a tad lurid: “Behind my sunglasses I locked onto them like the guidance system on a cruise missile. My sixth sense was functioning. Heart racing, my grip tightened on the steering wheel. If I was a German shepherd I’d be growling and pulling at my chain.”

  John circled the block, parked, pulled out his binoculars, and watched. He didn’t dare call for a police unit because if it turned out to be nothing, he’d catch tons of crap from those assholes. But he knew the fire dispatcher on duty that day at Verdugo Dispatch Center, so he keyed his mike and said, “Verdugo, patrol twenty-one. Can you contact GPD and see if they have any cars near Glenoaks and Idlewood?”

  “Patrol two-one,” the dispatcher answered. “Are you requesting a police unit?”

  “Not yet,” John responded. “Not yet.”

  “Ten-four,” the dispatcher said, and then came back a moment later to say that there did not seem to be any police units on patrol in that area.

  John fired up that ugly lime-yellow beast of a pickup and headed down the street after one of the dudes began walking toward an alley. He turned the pickup around and rumbled through an alley parallel to the vatos. Then he got out and sneaked up on foot, spotting one of them standing beside a blue Toyota with its trunk open.

  He jumped back in the truck, fired it up, and in a minute or two the yellow pickup and the blue Toyota were heading toward each other, passing in the alley. He looked down into the Toyota and spotted a small TV, a blender, and several shopping bags. On top of one of the shopping bags were a camera and a clock, and those hadn’t come from any supermarket! And if that weren’t enough, the dude on the passenger side held a ten-inch kitchen knife by his left leg. That did it.

  He keyed the mike and said, “Verdugo, patrol two-one. Go to tac two.”

  “Go ahead, John,” the dispatcher responded on tac two, the less formal channel.

  And while the dispatcher’s mike was open, John could hear another dispatcher laughing an “Oh shit! What now?” laugh.

  The dispatchers got their answer on the open radio mike when they heard the yellow truck’s engine rev and the tires squeal as it made a screaming U-turn and peeled out of the alley.

  “Residential burglars!” John yelled into the mike. “Blue Toyota, no plates, two male Latinos, twenty to twenty-five years!”

  Shit! The Toyota spotted him closing in, then it hung a U-ee, rubber smoking, and wheeled off onto a side street. But when the ugly yellow fire truck clattered after them, the Toyota whipped it around again and roared right at him.

  He scarcely had time to jerk the wheel and get out of the way. His truck bounced and clattered over a curb with all kinds of gear crashing around the truck bed, and the Toyota’s passenger laughed as they sped by. And flipped him off.

  Nobody was scared of a fireman driving something that looked like a Tijuana taxi. Well, they didn’t know this fireman. He flicked on the red lights, and the chase was on, with his overloaded rig sliding and skidding and clanging around corners, and everybody on the street wondering what in hell the fireman was up to.

  “Verdugo!” he yelled into the mike, pulling out all the stops now. “They’re running! Eastbound on Glenoaks! No … southbound now!”

  “Patrol twenty-one, patrol twenty-one,” the dispatcher said. “Are you in pursuit?”

  It was unbelievable! A cop-style pursuit? Of burglars? By a fireman in a ratty yellow truck?

  John was still afraid to officially announce a cop-style pursuit. So he said, “No! I’m not in pursuit. I’m just following. Real fast!”

  Except that when he got to a busy intersection and had to pop the siren, the dispatcher heard it over the open mike and came back with, “Patrol twenty-one. Will advise Glendale PD that you’re not in pursuit. Just following real fast. Riiiiiight.”

  The Toyota jerked a hard left into another alley, and the driver jumped on the brakes, seemingly ready to bail out.

  John thought about that big knife as he chugged in behind them. He reached for the bag next to him. His .38 was unloaded, but he’d also stashed a .22 automatic in there. He grabbed both guns, but the burglars didn’t bail. The Toyota took off again.

  After another block or two of crazed driving the Toyota went into a wheel-locking slide right into the Greyhound bus depot. The doors blew open and they were gone.

  One guy headed for an industrial park and got away. The other hotfooted down a residential street, the asshole that had flipped him the bird, so John racked a round into the chamber of the .22 and lit out after him, with two police units, sirens howling, headed his way.

  After rounding a corner, the burglar, who was in worse shape than the overweight fireman, had had enough. He made a halfhearted attempt to climb a block wall, but gave up.

  It was a neighboring Burbank Police Department motor cop who got there first. He looked at the prone burglar, then at the Glendale fireman, then at the little .22 pistol in the fireman’s hand, and he said in disbelief, “Is that your fire truck back there?”

  “Yes,” John responded. “Don’t make me explain right now, ’cause I don’t feel too …” Then he threw up. He tossed his cookies all over the burglar, who by now couldn’t believe any of this shit, nor could the Burbank motor cop.

  It turned out that the addicts had burgled an apartment, and their Toyota was loaded with a few thousand bucks’ worth of loot. John made a self-effacing claim to his colleagues that though the pursuit was undeniably exciting, he “didn’t want any attention for it.”

  And their answer to that was the same given by the Verdugo dispatcher: “Riiiiight.”

  When they gave him the Deputy Dawg horseshit again, he said, “If I was a straight police officer this caper would’ve been chalked up as a righteous bust.” He was absolutely right. He added, “But because I’m a half-breed wanna-be I’m a target of ridicule.” And he was absolutely right about that too.

  The Glendale News-Press grabbed the story and published it the next day, and every fire station in the city and beyond heard about the swashbuckling fireman who ended up getting a commendation from the city council for his derring-do. The fire marshal gave him thirty merit points in his personnel file, but took back fifty for the offense of carrying a firearm in a fire department vehicle.

  It was getti
ng hard for the fire marshal to decide what to do with this guy.

  John said that the next time he went to one of those cop bars, a young officer who actually seemed to get a kick out of the Glendale fireman’s reputation sent the wanna-be a half-pitcher of margaritas. Now that was a bit of recognition, coming as it did from a real cop.

  John Orr enjoyed it immensely, and drank the pitcher dry, and played his favorites on the jukebox: Neal Diamond and the Doors. And of course, everybody loved the Doors’ signature song: “Come on baby light my fire!”

  3

  THE BIG SHOW

  During the early eighties John Orr enrolled in a few more fire-investigation courses with his firefighter colleague Don Yeager and a Glendale cop, Detective Dennis Wilson, who attended because the police were still handling the arson cases for the city of Glendale. Arson, according to the cops, was part of “the garbage detail,” not like handling homicides or robberies.

  There was one aspect of those training sessions that John found fascinating. It was the staged fires where furnished rooms were set alight and allowed to burn. They got to watch the ignition and progression, and to examine the aftermath. He said it was a “privilege” to observe the before and after of a fire scene, something many firefighters never got a chance to see.

  When the training was finished, the fire marshal, only too aware of John’s job enthusiasm, approved of his being called out after hours on unusual fires. John Orr was becoming a de facto arson investigator even though the responsibility still resided with the police department. His primary task still lay in inspecting vacant property for brush and weed abatement, and issuing citations to recalcitrant property owners, which wasn’t always easy.

  He said it would have been if he were a six-foot-three-inch cop in a blue uniform, carrying a six-inch Magnum, wearing mirrored shades. But no, he was just a five-foot-nine-inch fireman in a pale blue work shirt, like a “towel guy at a car wash.”