by Earl Emerson
“Sure. According to the TV there’s a couple of fires down low. They got control of one and then went higher and found another. There’s a third one burning somewhere around fifty-five or sixty. The last half hour or so our air has been getting smokier.”
“You have a plan?” It was Patterson Cole peering over the security man’s shoulder. Cole was the last person Finney expected to see here.
“I have a plan,” Finney said, sitting up on his elbows. Cole looked like an actor, a look-alike playing the part of an old man. But it was Cole all right, his sidekick in the bow tie hovering beside him.
Finney explained that they’d brought ropes and three climbing harnesses and had been planning to lower people down the side of the building to the roof on sixty. Now they had decided they would try the elevator shafts instead. It would take time, but it could be done. They could lower people using a pulley and the brake rack they’d brought along. He and Diana could rig it in five minutes. The air in the elevator shafts was still breathable. It was probably better than the air outside the building.
Several minutes later, the three of them reluctantly climbed to their feet, groaning as they stretched damaged muscles and felt chafed skin where their loads had dug in and where they’d been burned. Finney’s wounds from the Bowman Pork fire were oozing.
With the assistance of the security people, they opened the elevator doors and set up a rope and anchor system. One of the guards had rock-climbing experience and volunteered to go first. Knowing he was fresher than they were, Finney agreed. With the help of his two friends on forty, he would set up a receiving system. Finney, Kub, and Moore would send people down in the three harnesses they’d brought up, recycling the harnesses back by rope. It wasn’t going to be particularly elegant, but once the system was running, they could refine it on the fly. There were, by head count, 189 people to lower, plus the two on forty. There might also be firefighters trapped somewhere, but if so, Finney hadn’t heard about them.
Finney used his portable radio to advise Columbia Command where they were and what they were doing. When he received no reply, he sent the transmission again. After a few moments he heard Reese asking the dispatcher, “Is there somebody on our channel? We’re getting some odd radio traffic. Who’s on channel one?”
Finney keyed his mike and said, “This is John Finney. We have a crew of three on floor seventy-four with ropes and harnesses. We’re going to send people down the elevator shaft to forty.”
“Do not be sending people down without ropes. Repeat. Do not be sending people down without ropes.”
“We have ropes.”
“Clear the channel,” Reese said. “We’ve got fire traffic here. Repeat. Clear the channel.” After their conversation, Reese called Division Sixteen and asked whether anybody had gone up the stairs. Division Sixteen, who may or may not have been the same captain they’d chanced upon earlier, replied, “Negative. It’s too hot in the stairwells for anybody to get past our level. Repeat. The stairwells are not usable at this time.”
They would be receiving no help from below.
69. THE BALLROOM DANCER
Almost immediately upon the arrival of the firefighters, the people on the floor separated into cliques, the family of the young bride in one corner, the family of the groom in another. Most of the staff and hired help congregated in the kitchen area in back by the freight elevator.
Off in a corner, the top of Patterson Cole’s head was visible over a couple of shorter security men he’d kept by his side.
His sidekick, a small, stumpy man with a soft neck that overflowed his collar, broke away from the group and towed the older man across the room, shadowing Finney.
They’d set up the rigging. Diana was managing the lowering operation, and Kub was getting people into harnesses, each teaching their job to others. Finney was examining the system, checking knots and trying to figure out if there was anything they’d missed. He’d given his speech; he didn’t know whether this was going to work or not, didn’t know if these people would make it all the way down to forty or not, didn’t know how tenable forty would be by now if they did. Should the security man they were lowering run into trouble, they would haul him back up.
“Sir? Sir?” It was Cole’s yes-man. His suit had been tailored to make his pear-shaped body look leaner. He had pale, wet skin and tiny silver eyes that were delicate and set too close together.
“What is it?”
“Norris Radford. My name’s Norris Radford. This is my boss, Patterson Cole. We need to talk. In private.”
“Right here is fine,” Finney said.
Nervously looking around, Radford said, “Some fool saw The Towering Inferno last week. They drew numbers in the movie to determine what order to go in, so we drew numbers. Mine is going to put me at the tail end of this Chinese dragon. Mr. Cole’s is even higher than mine. There’s no way we’re going to make it before the fire reaches here.”
“Things should move along pretty quickly,” Finney said.
“I don’t see how. The television people are saying it’s climbing at the rate of thirty minutes a floor. It’s on sixty now, and it’ll take twenty minutes to lower each of us . . . you can do the math.”
“First off, I doubt the fire is climbing at thirty minutes a floor. Second off, the first few people we lower will take longer than the rest, but nobody is going to take twenty minutes.”
“Whatever it takes, it won’t be fast enough.”
“Sure it will.” Finney made a point of sounding more certain than he was, if not for Radford, then for those bystanders listening in.
Finney knew this was like trying to swim a horse across a swift river. You might make it. You might not. Whatever you did, you didn’t stop in midstream to calculate the prospects. Once you launched out, you kept moving and you didn’t think about anything except the opposite shore. Besides, trapped or not, these two were part of the machine that had initiated this. He’d just that minute recognized Radford as the little bastard at Bowman Pork who’d told them there was a family in the warehouse. He wanted to beat the tar out of him, but there were too many witnesses and not enough time.
“You weren’t listening to the mathematics,” Radford said. “We’re not going to make it.”
“If you’re not, I’m not, because I’m not leaving until everyone’s down.”
“But you people have those oxygen tanks.”
“Compressed air. And they’re almost empty. If the rest of these people are willing to go with their numbers, you should be, too.”
“They don’t have a choice. We do.”
“Oh?”
Radford looked at his boss, who, until now, had been letting Radford do all the talking. Cole took a deep breath, scratched an ear with an arthritic finger, and said, “You take us down on the elevator. You’ll have to keep it on the QT. Otherwise we could cause a stampede.”
“Even if we could call a car to this floor, I wouldn’t get in an elevator under these conditions.”
“Why? It’s dangerous? What’s more dangerous than burning to death?”
“Mr. Cole, I think you started this fire. Or had it started.” He turned to Radford. “And you were at Bowman Pork. You’re the one who set us up. They gave you numbers? Keep the numbers. If it was up to me, I’d throw you both out the window.”
When Finney began to walk away, Radford tried to grip Finney’s bare shoulder, still slick with perspiration. Then he stepped ahead of Finney and danced backward, carefully wiping Finney’s sweat off his hand with an embroidered handkerchief. Finney had a feeling from his intricate foot movements that he was a fair ballroom dancer.
“Let’s make a trade. I’ll give you information, and you give us lower numbers. My eyes are already bloodshot. Can you see this?” Using his thumb, he pulled on his right eyelid.
Finney addressed his next statement to Patterson Cole, who was following them. “No trades. You killed my partner.”
Cole said, “How do you figure I killed your p
artner?”
“You had somebody set the fire at Leary Way. Bowman Pork, too.”
“You’ve lost two partners?” the old man asked.
“That’s right. And you’re responsible directly or indirectly for both.”
“I’ll pay them. The family. Whatever you think they need. I’ll write his wife a check right now. Both wives. I’ll write you a check. Thirty thousand each sound okay? No, that’s a little on the cheap side. A hundred? You’re looking at a man who still saves used tin foil in a drawer. Let me think. A widow. Lost her husband. Your friend. A million?”
“The price isn’t for the widow. The price is for your life, isn’t it?” Finney and the old man stared at each other. Finney didn’t think Cole and Radford were going to die up here, but he didn’t mind if they both believed they were. A little bit of hell was just what they needed. “Tell you what,” Finney said. “You go out to the cemetery and you dig up Bill and then you dig up Gary and you breathe life back into them. You do that and I’ll get you out of here before these others. A couple of walking, talking corpses would put you right at the head of the line. You like to play God. Go ahead. Bring ’em back.”
Finney turned and walked away.
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.”
