Vertical Burn (33 page)

70. LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE

Oscar Stillman was upset with G. A.—he’d wasted a lot of time separating his men from the frenzy and getting them down to the meeting room. Supposedly, G. A. was to have distributed the communications equipment, which would have made it a whole lot simpler, but he confessed to Oscar that he hadn’t had time to stop by Kmart, as if this were a grocery item he’d forgotten to bring home for the wife and she could divorce him if she didn’t like it.

Had Oscar been in charge of communications, they would have been purchased out of town a month ago with cash, and long since passed along to the troops.

Now they had only their fire department radios, which they didn’t dare use lest their exchanges were immortalized on the master tape down at the alarm office.

They held their meeting three floors below the command post and directly opposite the entrance to Fourth Avenue in a small back room adjoining a closed taco stand.

Oscar had found Marion Balitnikoff and the Lazenbys in the standby area on four playing dumb. He’d seen Tony Finney walking up the frozen escalators carrying his bunkers and boots in a large red canvas tote bag.

There was a great deal of tension in the room, even more than these men had shared after Leary Way.

G. A. tended to get flustered at every little snafu, and tonight they were compiling a litany of snafus and he was beside himself. Monahan had set the fire nearly seven hours early. They had no walkie-talkies. Reese, after months of granting their every request, was not listening to them. And worst of all, John Finney and company were somewhere loose inside the building. The only lucky break was that Monahan was injured and wouldn’t be able to deploy that silly contraption of his.

“Are we all here?” Stillman asked. “There should be six of us.”

“All except Jerry,” Paul Lazenby said. “Can you believe it? She hit him with an axe.”

“Bitch,” Balitnikoff said.

“Listen up,” said Oscar. “I want you to bear with me. I know everything hasn’t been going exactly as we thought it would, but I don’t see any reason why this building is not going down.”

“You don’t consider that wedding party up there a problem?” Michael Lazenby grumbled.

“Not our affair,” Oscar said.

“How do you figure?”

“Those people just ran into some misfortune.”

Michael, who’d been edging forward, said, “Anybody who put a little thought into it might say we’re about to murder two hundred people.”

“Don’t say that,” Oscar warned. “Don’t ever say that.”

“You shouldn’t have called the meeting,” Balitnikoff said. “Just gives people a chance to bitch.”

“Called you here because there’s been a modification of plans. G. A. and I have decided we need to go upstairs and make sure”—he turned to Tony and gave him a questioning look—“that John doesn’t make it back down.”

“What’s my brother got to do with anything?”

“He’s at the top of the building,” Oscar said. “Him and two others. Don’t ask me how.”

“I don’t get it,” Paul Lazenby said. “Those stairs . . . I was in ’em. It’s one thing to have some smoke hanging around, but those stairs’d roast a lobster.”

G. A. said, “They must have used an elevator.”

“Elevators aren’t working,” Stillman said. “The elevators are fucked, and only me and G. A. know how to unfuck them. I guarantee they didn’t use an elevator. In a few minutes we’ll turn one on for you guys, but they’re not going to work for anybody else.”

“We’re going up, I’d just as soon do it in an elevator,” Michael said. “Standing in those stairs is like sticking a road flare up your ass.”

“That a new sex game you boys are playing?” Balitnikoff asked.

“The point is,” continued Oscar Stillman, pacing, “he has to be stopped. Anybody have any problem with that?” All eyes in the room turned to Captain Finney.

Biding his time, Tony looked around the group. Until now he had done everything asked of him. He’d made no secret of the fact that he needed the money as badly as any of them, that there were loan sharks who wanted to break his toes with a sledgehammer. He turned to Paul Lazenby and then to Balitnikoff. “Down on Marginal Way. That fire in the pig factory? That was a setup, wasn’t it?”

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” said Paul Lazenby, laughing.

“Shit happens,” said Balitnikoff with a shrug.

“Bad luck,” said Oscar.

“We tried to arrest him so he wouldn’t be part of this,” G. A. said. “Didn’t we, Oscar?” Oscar nodded. “Be safe in a cell right now if he hadn’t run.”

“He’s trying to do his job. That’s all he ever wanted.”

“What he’s trying to do,” Stillman said, “is put us away for life. Think about it.”

G. A. folded his arms across his chest. “Don’t kid yourself. There won’t be any life sentences. Not with these corpses piling up. Think more along the lines of the gallows or some ten-dollar-an-hour prison medic putting a needle in your arm. Your choice.”

Oscar saw Balitnikoff fingering the pistol in his bunking coat pocket, a hammerless five-shot .38 designed to be carried in a purse. Balitnikoff would never shoot Paul or Michael, his own crew members, but Oscar had a feeling he’d do Tony in a heartbeat. Balitnikoff had never been pleased with Captain Finney’s inclusion in their club, had never been a fan of the Finney clan, father or sons.

All eyes were on Tony, who said, not too convincingly, “I got no problem with this.”

Good, Oscar thought. Once they turned on each other, nobody would feel safe. All they had to do was get through one night. In a month Oscar would head for Central America, where he would live like a king with the most beautiful women on earth. Paul and Michael had their eye on a condo in Cancún, where they figured they could party for the rest of their lives. Tony would pay off his gambling debts, and after that, even though he thought he was going to Tahiti, he would fritter away the rest of his share, probably at an Indian casino. Tony was the weak link they all knew would eventually end up in prison—that is, unless he was eliminated by G. A. or Balitnikoff after this was over.

“I don’t want any more mistakes tonight,” Oscar Stillman said.

“Don’t be jumping down our throats.” Paul Lazenby’s voice grew louder. “It was your pal Jerry who started early. We had a schedule.”

“I’m not jumping down your throats. I just want everyone to be particularly conscientious from here on out. And Tony. I know this isn’t going to be easy, but it’s him or us. It’s not like we have a choice.”

“I know.”

“I don’t understand why we have to go up,” said Michael Lazenby, stepping to the door of the small room. “Everybody above eighteen is as good as finished anyway. Right?”

“Maybe,” Stillman said.

“It’s bullshit,” Michael said. “We set this up to happen at two in the morning. Then all of a sudden we have twenty minutes to do our shit. If everybody had done what they were supposed to do when they were supposed to do it, there wouldn’t be anybody upstairs and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“If ifs and buts were nuts and candy, this would be Christmas,” said Oscar. “Don’t go all Boy Scout on us. You guys are going up, and you’re going to make sure Finney and his friends don’t come down. If he’s found dead in the building, G. A. can make a pretty good case he started the fire, just like he started Riverside Drive. Riverside Drive didn’t give him the glory he wanted, so he tried this. But the minute he sashays down here and starts talking to reporters, we’ll have a whole ’nother kettle of fish.”

Michael Lazenby unsnapped his bunking coat and said, “It was supposed to be a couple of janitors. Maybe one or two security guys. We’re talking two hundred people.”

“Get over it,” G. A. said, his voice flat. “None of us are happy, but we’re stuck with it.” G. A. took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat off his chin. His face appeared to be sliding off one damp layer at a time. “Tomorrow morning before breakfast we’ll be counting out shares.”

“So who’s going up?” Michael Lazenby asked.

G. A. said, “I think it should be Engine Ten. You guys work as a team anyway. It’ll look more natural.”

“I’m coming,” Tony Finney said.

“Sure. The four of you. Oscar and I will handle things down here until you get back.”

“I still don’t like this,” Michael said.

“Quit your bellyaching,” said Balitnikoff. “We ride up on the goddamned elevator. They turn their backs, the rest is history.”

“We don’t even know where they are,” Michael said. “I think this whole thing stinks.”

“It stunk from the beginning,” said Stillman. “That’s why we’re being paid so exorbitantly. Exactly because it stinks to high heaven.”

G. A. said, “And no guns. They find a firefighter with a bullet in him, the investigation will run into the next millennium.”

“Only as a last resort,” Balitnikoff said.

“Not at all,” said G. A. Then, as the others filed out the door, Stillman felt G. A.’s touch on his shoulder. “Got a minute?”

“Sure.” Oscar was finger-combing his hair, staring at his warped reflection in the chrome on the refrigerator near the door. He wondered what a balding, aging gringo looked like to a seventeen-year-old señorita in Costa Rica. Probably not too bad.

The others were out of earshot before he realized G. A. had slipped something around his neck, at the same time closing the door with his foot and pushing his shoulder into the middle of Oscar’s back so that Oscar bumped up into the corner behind the door. It wasn’t G. A.’s habit to wrestle for fun. Balitnikoff, sure. Or those damn brothers. But G. A. preserved the personal space around himself with a fierce self-regard.

Oscar turned as far as G. A. would allow and saw a look in G. A.’s eyes that told him he wasn’t playing. Hell, he was strangling him. It was his necktie around Oscar’s neck. “I’m okay,” Oscar said. “I don’t—”

The tie was being tightened from behind, tightened and pulled and tightened some more. Had G. A. gone mad? The idea was to go upstairs and get rid of Finney, not each other. Oscar wanted to speak, to reason this out, but his windpipe was closed off, his face squashed against the wall so hard his dental plate was twisting out of place. He tried to reach for the knot at the back of his neck, but G. A. was a large man, surprisingly strong, and he held him like a lion holding a young wildebeest.

He began to see stars, and it was then that he remembered what he’d learned in his emergency medical training. Once the carotid artery was blocked, unconsciousness occurred in as little as fifteen seconds. Sometimes only seven or eight seconds. Sometimes . . . the last thing Oscar heard was a gurgling in the bottom of his own throat.

71. THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON FIRE

Norris was making a second call to his mother when one of the waiters who’d been loitering near the freight elevator burst into the men’s room and whispered loudly to his friends who were passing around a joint. Intrigued by their words, Norris slogged through a haze of marijuana smoke and followed them out of the john.

It seemed a pair of waitresses had noticed that for no particular reason and without any fanfare the freight elevator had returned to seventy-four, empty. So far twelve waiters, one supervisor, eight waitresses, and three chefs knew about it, and word was spreading. Everybody knew the responsible thing would be to alert the firefighters in the other room, but nobody budged. Most had picked high numbers in the lottery.

Since the building alarms had gone off, the staff had been more or less relegated to the back room like servants, and then just before the numbers were drawn, one of the wedding party, an older man with silver sideburns, had suggested the help not be included in the drawing. Although they eventually had been included, it was hard to ignore the underlying group arrogance and assumed superiority that led to his suggestion. Everybody in the back room had taken umbrage.

The freight elevator was behind several tall wheeled carts, in an area that smelled of baked halibut and smoke from the fire that was climbing toward them from below.

While the waitresses and kitchen staff debated whether or not to use it, Norris knew instinctively what needed to be done and, in one of the few truly decisive moments of his life, he returned to the main room and retrieved Patterson Cole and both briefcases. They brushed past the group of debaters to the rear of the car. Norris proceeded to unbuckle his belt and loop it around the waist-level metal bumper in case anybody tried to remove him forcibly. They might get Cole out, but he was strapped in.

The stampede that took place next may have been provoked by the belt business or by the recognition of Patterson Cole. By now everyone on the floor knew Cole owned the building and that he’d been working his way around the room trying to purchase a lower lottery number than the one he’d drawn.

For just a second, the area outside the freight elevator was silent. Then, like an implosion, people filled the car—waiters, chefs, waitresses. Several women shrieked as their feet were stepped on, and one chef began to look faint as his toque was knocked off and he was flattened up against a wall. As the car filled to capacity, the stronger men and some of the women in the forward part of the car began pushing latecomers back out. A shoving match ensued. Fists were doubled up, blows exchanged, and then a woman stopped the melee by saying, “The firemen! They’ll stop us if we don’t leave now.”

A contract was entered into wherein the car would transport the first load down to the street and then quickly be sent back for the others. Norris did some rough calculations. Say they were taking twenty-five down at a time—that would be seven, no, eight trips.

When the doors closed, Norris found it difficult to breathe. Men cursed. A woman giggled. Somebody passed gas. It would be intolerable if he didn’t realize the alternative was waiting to be burned to death.

Norris found himself scrunched sideways, the wall on one side, a lanky waitress pressed up against the other. He began to smell body odor and bad breath. He was glad he had thought to fill his cheek with Tic-Tacs in the bathroom. He didn’t complain. They would soon be safe, while those left behind had nothing to look forward to but headaches from the smoke and whatever came after that.

Somebody pushed a button and the car began a rapid descent. For a few moments Norris felt as if he were floating on sheer relief. In minutes they would be cooling off in the fog in the street.

Somebody jokingly said, “I wonder what the weight limit on this baby is?”

A man with a rich baritone voice said, “About four hundred pounds.”

Muffled laughter broke out. They were headed toward freedom, and a feeling of conjoined euphoria was sweeping over them.

Norris’s ears started to pop, but he stifled the yawn, wanting to savor the sensation of escape, of descent. They’d only been moving ten or twelve seconds when the elevator began to lose speed. One didn’t descend seventy-five floors in a few seconds. Everybody knew it was too soon. Norris had worried about a lot of things, about the sheet metal in the walls collapsing, about the elevator crashing into the basement, about not getting unbuckled before they sent it back up, but it hadn’t even crossed his mind that they might end up on the wrong floor. This was terrible. Now the firefighters would not be able to find them. Now they’d never get their spot in line back.

When the car came to a halt, one woman who didn’t understand the implications of their abbreviated trip said, “Oh, goody, we’ll be home in time to watch
The X-Files
.”

The doors opened, and a wave of heat engulfed them.

Then came the crushing weight against the rear of the car, the screams, more heat. And more. Norris would have sworn he heard bones breaking. For many long seconds he couldn’t breathe or move or even think.

He tried to squat, but there were too many people crushed up against him, and besides that, he was buckled to the rail. Suspended in place by the crush, the woman next to him lost consciousness. The pressure against Norris at the rear of the car became greater.

Norris realized with a start that he smelled burning hair. For a few moments as the hot smoke rolled in and enveloped them, he had a flashback to his childhood. Once, while baking peanut butter cookies with his grandmother in Iowa, he’d stood too close to the oven, so that a blast of heat struck him in the face when the oven door opened, frizzing his eyebrows and causing him to cry out. He’d been seven, and his grandmother had spanked him for getting too close. He never forgot that searing heat. Even as an adult it defined hell for him.

“Close the doors,” Norris whimpered. “Please close the doors.”

He had no idea how long he remained upright, or how much heat he endured, or what the temperatures were, but after a time, maybe ten seconds, maybe a minute, the pressure began to moderate. Not a lot, but enough. The deafening screeches began to wither away, and Norris sensed a space under two women next to him. He tried to move but found himself hanging by his own belt on the railing. Burning his hands on the metal, he unbuckled himself and dove under the women. It wasn’t until then that he discovered the lower he got the cooler it was. He began burrowing.