Holy Terror

by Graham Masterton

  ‘They’re out of it,’ John Convertino shouted back. ‘They’re on the nod. Crack or smack or Thunderbird Red. If this was a real fire, they’d all be burned alive.’

  Tony Luca leaned close to him and said, ‘You remember the Dauphin Hotel in Chelsea? Seventeen adults cremated, two babies. The Dauphin – that was one of the reasons that Luigi gave up torching hotels.’

  Conor stared at him. Three of his detectives had worked with fire department special investigators for seven months to find out who had set fire to the Dauphin Hotel, and no arrests had been made. Yet here was John Convertino calmly admitting that it was Luigi Guttuso who had ordered it.

  A terrible truth struck him. John Convertino and Tony Luca and Frank Garibaldi and Bruno with the flattened face were quite unworried about discussing their criminal activities with him because they now regarded him as one of them.

  Tony Luca said, ‘Jesus, look at this smoke. This Labrea guy’s going to have to believe us now.’

  Conor coughed and held his hand over his face. ‘Don’t breathe too much of this stuff. Hydrochloric cyanide. Kills more people than the fire itself.’ The chair-seat was still burning and globs of flaming plastic were dropping onto the brown nylon carpet below. That began to smolder, too, much more quickly than Conor would have expected.

  He could see the smoke being sucked under the door of room 525. The alarm bell was still clamoring, so loudly that it began to take on waves and patterns in Conor’s ears. But the door remained shut, and when Conor tried to call Labrea again he didn’t pick up.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Tony Luca. ‘If I was in there, I wouldn’t be in there. I’d be running for the fire exit by now.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate this man,’ said Conor. ‘I put a gun to his head and he didn’t even flinch.’

  Tony Luca wrapped a silk handkerchief around the lower part of his face. Over the noise of the alarm, Frank Garibaldi shouted, ‘Hey, Tony! You look like a bank robber!’ which wasn’t especially funny because it was true.

  The carpet began to char more fiercely, glittering with tiny orange sparks and shedding dense black smoke. ‘Bruno,’ said Conor. ‘You’d better bring us that fire extinguisher before this gets out of hand.’

  ‘Yeah, sure thing,’ said Bruno, and went shambling off along the corridor again, coughing.

  Conor and Tony Luca and John Convertino waited tensely for the door to open. Conor said, ‘Let them all rush out – all of them. Don’t give any one of them the chance to duck back in the room.’

  John Convertino nodded, his eyes reddened and watering over his handkerchief.

  Somewhere, an elevator door was opened, and a sudden rush of air came along the corridor. It wasn’t very much, but it provided enough oxygen for the carpet to flare up. Its glue backing acted as an accelerator, and flames began to sprout all along the wall, like flowers blooming in a speeded-up nature documentary.

  Conor beckoned Bruno to hurry up with the fire extinguisher. He pulled the safety pin, unhooked the hose, pointed it down at the base of the fire, and squeezed. Two or three drips of water fell onto the floor.

  ‘Terrific,’ said John Convertino. ‘Now what do we do? Stay here and choke to death?’

  ‘Yeah, I mean this was a really good plan, man,’ Tony Luca told Conor. ‘You set fire to the whole goddamned hotel and what happens? Labrea doesn’t come out, a hundred people get burned to death, you don’t get your girlfriend back, and the only person who benefits out of this is probably the owner, because he’s been dying to burn it down for years.’

  Further along the corridor, a single door opened, and a thin, bewildered-looking young man with scarecrow hair came staggering out. He looked left, then he looked right. He was swaying so wildly that Conor thought he might fall over. The air from his room fanned the flames even higher. He blinked, breathed in a lungful of smoke, coughed, and then he went back inside, colliding with the door-frame as he did so.

  ‘Hey!’ Conor called. ‘There’s a fire! You need to get yourself out of here!’

  The scarecrow teetered out again and stared at him, trying to focus through the smoke, trying to work out who was shouting at him and what they had said. Then he staggered back into his room again and slammed the door.

  ‘I’m going to have to call the fire department,’ said Conor. ‘This is out of control.’

  ‘In that case, we’re going to have to get the hell out of here,’ said John Convertino, urgently. ‘I’m not being collared for torching a tenth-rate firetrap like this, especially since I didn’t even do it.’

  Conor couldn’t believe how rapidly the fire was taking hold. He had attended fire department training sessions and he knew just how voracious fire could be. But he had reckoned without the highly inflammable materials which lined the corridors of the Madison Square Marquis – the carpet adhesives and the wax polishes and the varnish on the plywood wall-cladding. The styrofoam ceiling tiles which could give off gases that were deadlier than Zyklon-B. One lungful and you were history.

  He beat on the door of room 525. ‘Fire! You have to get out of there now!’

  Still there was no reply. Tony Luca and John Convertino were growing increasingly twitchy, their guns pointing at the door but their eyes darting nervously along the corridor.

  ‘Come on, man, this isn’t going to work,’ said Tony Luca. ‘The cops and the fire department are going to be here at any minute.’

  ‘Fire!’ roared Conor. And as he did so – as if he had commanded it – the flames in the corridor leaped up to the ceiling and came rolling toward them, right above their heads. Bruno was nearest to it, and even though he covered his head with both hands, his hair caught alight. Tony Luca slapped it out, and then shouted, ‘That’s it! We’re out of here!’

  Just as he was holstering his gun, the door to room 525 burst open. A young man in a black turtleneck and black pants came hurtling out, followed by another. Lacey was next, with Victor Labrea gripping her arm. The smoke in the corridor was so thick that they didn’t realize at first that Conor and Luigi Guttuso’s men were there; or who they were. Other doors were opening now, and people were stumbling out, coughing and retching and shouting in bewilderment.

  Tony Luca slammed the first young man against the wall, frisked him, and tugged a revolver out of his belt. John Convertino did the same to the second man. Conor pointed his Browning directly at Victor Labrea’s forehead.

  ‘Lacey – are you OK?’

  Lacey looked dazed and there was a huge crimson bruise on the side of her mouth. Her hair, usually so fine, was greasy and stuck to her scalp. ‘I’m OK,’ she told him, in a high, panicky whisper, as if she were frightened to speak.

  ‘Well, how about that,’ coughed Victor Labrea, spitting onto the floor. The flames had subsided a little now, but they still flickered fitfully through the smoke and lit up one side of his face. ‘You’re even more goddamned crazy than I gave you credit for.’

  ‘Let her go, Labrea,’ Conor ordered him.

  Labrea said, ‘You’re making life very difficult for me, Mr O’Neil. I’m a very dedicated man, very driven. What I put my mind to, I like to see it through, right to the bitter end. That’s why I don’t like people making life difficult for me.’

  There was another breathy roar, and flames came rippling along the floor of the corridor like a shallow tide.

  Conor said, ‘Let her go, that’s all you have to do, and get the hell out of here.’

  Not far away now, they could hear the wailing and blaring of approaching firetrucks. ‘Come on, Captain O’Neil,’ Tony Luca urged him. ‘We can make it out of the back way.’

  ‘If we don’t go now, we won’t stand a chance,’ put in John Convertino.

  ‘That’s right, men,’ said a sharp, sarcastic voice. ‘You won’t stand a chance.’

  Conor turned. Walking steadily toward them through the smoke was Drew Slyman, holding up a gun in both hands.

  ‘Hi, there, O’Neil. Surprised to see me? You shouldn’t be.
Didn’t you always tell me that the best way to hunt anybody down wasn’t by keeping a watch on their friends, but on their enemies? Sooner or later they always show up to get their revenge.’

  He came closer, keeping his gun pointed directly at Conor’s head. ‘I’ve had a tail on Mr Labrea here ever since we released him this afternoon. And lo and behold, who should come looking for him, but New York’s most wanted, Conor O’Neil.’

  He nodded his head toward Luigi Guttuso’s men. ‘Friends of yours?’

  ‘That’s right. Friends.’

  ‘Look like wise guys to me. Isn’t that John Convertino you’ve got there? How’re you doing, John?’

  ‘Been better, lieutenant. And it’s Mr Convertino to you.’

  Slyman said, ‘Put down your weapon, O’Neil. You’re under arrest.’

  But John Convertino lifted his gun and pointed it at Slyman, and said, ‘I don’t think so, lieutenant. Not this time. Captain O’Neil happens to be here under the personal protection of Mr Guttuso.’

  ‘Oh, really? And what will you do if I drop him, right here on the spot?’

  ‘I’ll drop you.’

  ‘And I’ll drop you, too,’ said Tony Luca, bringing out his gun again.

  ‘You don’t have the guts,’ Slyman sneered at them, without taking his gun away from Conor’s head. ‘You know what kind of a sentence you’d be looking at, for killing a cop?’

  Conor said, ‘Let’s forget all this Mexican standoff stuff. I want Lacey out of here, Drew. That’s all I came here to do.’

  From behind Lacey’s back, Victor Labrea produced a .38 revolver. ‘Sorry to disappoint you-all. The girt comes with me. And Mr O’Neil comes with me, too. We’ve got some unfinished business.’

  ‘Drop the weapon, dickhead,’ Slyman ordered him.

  ‘I don’t think I’m going to do that, sir,’ Victor Labrea replied, quite matter-of-factly.

  ‘Jesus, we got a double-triple Mexican standoff here,’ coughed Tony Luca. ‘Everybody’s going to shoot everybody else, and even if they don’t, everybody’s going to fucking burn to death.’

  Victor Labrea said, ‘This is the way it’s going to happen, gentlemen. Everybody is going to put down their guns, and then me and this lovely lady are going to leave, with Mr O’Neil following right behind us. Nobody is going to move until we’re out through that door, got it?’

  Conor cocked his automatic and stiffened his arms. His hair prickled at the back of his neck. His rage was so intense that even John Convertino gave him an alarmed, sidewise look, and said, ‘Take it easy, captain. One false move and suddenly everything’s blue.’

  But then – without warning – chaos intervened. Five or six more people came bursting out of the smoke. A large Filipino woman was screaming in the same key as the fire alarm and waving her arms around. Two hollow-eyed men dodged past them like basketball players, carrying bottles of whiskey in both hands.

  ‘Save us!’ screamed the Filipino woman, seizing Tony Luca’s arm. ‘Mother of God, save us! We’re all going to die!’

  Her husband came careering out of the smoke, an even fatter man in a green flowery shirt, basted in sweat and whining in terror. He stumbled over the burned-out chair and fell heavily against Bruno’s back. Bruno lost his balance and staggered into Victor Labrea and Lacey. Victor Labrea tipped backward, Lacey threw herself sideways. Conor dropped to the floor and rolled over, firing up at Victor Labrea twice. He hit him once in the shoulder and once in the neck. Blood flew everywhere, and Labrea collapsed against the corridor wall.

  Conor twisted around to shoot up at Drew Slyman, but Slyman had seized hold of Lacey as she threw herself away from Victor Labrea. He clamped his left arm tight around her waist and jammed his gun against her right temple. Lacey’s eyes were squeezed shut in terror.

  ‘Drop the weapon!’ Slyman screamed at Conor. ‘Drop the fucking weapon!’

  The Filipino woman screamed even more shrilly. ‘Save us! Save us! Everybody here is going to die!’

  Slyman thumbed back the hammer of his automatic and his eyes were bulging. Conor dropped his gun onto the floor and slowly stood up, his hands half raised.

  ‘I was going to make you a proposition,’ said Slyman. ‘I was going to make you a proposition and you were so goddamned righteous you didn’t even call me.’

  ‘Let her go, Drew. You can take me now, if you want me. But she’s done nothing to you. Nothing.’

  ‘When I realized how much fucking money you were going to be making out of this deal …’ said Slyman. ‘When I realized that you were going to be making millions… Why do you think I sent those two guys after you on Staten Island?’

  Conor said nothing, but kept his hands cautiously raised. He glanced sideways. John Convertino still had his gun pointed at Slyman’s head. The Filipino woman had blundered away now, and was screaming at the fat man in the flowery shirt.

  ‘You blew them out, those two guys. Jed Ferris and Martin Yapko. Good cops, both of them. Well, not good enough, obviously. So I thought to myself, if I can’t cut myself into this little moneymaker by force of arms … maybe I can make a proposition. A ten per cent share in return for your immunity. But what happened? You didn’t even call me.’

  The smoke rolled thickly between them, and Slyman coughed. ‘The proposition still stands, if you’re interested. Think about it, O’Neil. No more running and hiding. No more price on your head. Ten per cent, that’s all I’m asking.’

  Conor said, ‘I don’t have any of the money, Drew. It’s not even in the country any more. I was used, that’s all. Can’t you believe that? I’m innocent.’

  Slyman slowly shook his head. ‘I don’t believe you, O’Neil. And I’m going to make you an ultimatum, right here and now. Ten per cent, or Lacey gets it. And I won’t even kill her. One downward shot to the pelvis should do the job. Instant hysterectomy, just to make sure that the world isn’t plagued by any more O’Neils.’

  He took the gun away from Lacey’s head and pressed it against her back. ‘Come on, then. What’s it to be? I’ll give you five. One – two – three—’

  At that instant, a huge gout of flame burst out of the corridor. Victor Labrea sat up and screamed like a banshee. The heat blew over all of them, and Drew Slyman lifted his gun-hand to shield his face.

  John Convertino shot him in the upper back, and then again, in the body. Slyman dropped to the floor on his hands and knees and Conor immediately snatched up his gun and pointed it at him.

  Tony Luca reached out his hand and pulled Lacey away. ‘Conor – don’t!’ she begged. ‘Conor, leave him, let’s just go!’

  Slyman began to crawl away down the corridor, dragging his gun along the floor. The smoke was so dense now that Conor had to crouch down to see him. ‘Let go of the weapon, Drew! There’s no place to go!’

  Slyman sat back against the wall, right next to Victor Labrea, couching his automatic loosely in his lap. Victor Labrea’s head was slumped and his hair was singed but he was still breathing.

  ‘Put the weapon down, Drew. I don’t want to have to shoot you again.’

  Slyman twisted himself around and managed to climb onto his feet. He took a step backward, and then another. There was an extraordinary look on his face, almost beatific, as if he expected to be sanctified. The smoke billowed all around him and through the smoke Conor could see biblical tongues of flame.

  ‘Come on, Drew. It’s over.’

  ‘Forget him,’ urged John Convertino. ‘We have to get out of here, like now.’

  Slyman retreated further and further into the smoke, until all that Conor could see of him was a blurred, shadowy shape. Conor went after him, step by step, holding his gun rigidly in front of him, his eyes streaming from the smoke, his upper lip stained with a soot mustache. The heat in the corridor was almost unbearable, and the flames kept doing nervous little jumps, as if they were practicing a leap for the ceiling.

  ‘Come on, man,’ John Convertino repeated, and took hold of Conor’s arm.

  �
�Take Lacey and go. I’ve got to finish this.’

  John Convertino hesitated a moment longer, and then he said, ‘Your funeral, captain,’ and turned away. The Filipino woman and her husband had disappeared; and the two men who had been guarding Lacey had escaped. Bruno and Tony Luca were halfway down the corridor already, hurrying Lacey toward the stairs.

  Conor and Slyman remained in hell, facing each other, although they were almost invisible in the smoke.

  ‘It’s all over, Slyman. Come on out before this whole place goes up.’

  ‘You think it’s over? Hah! Not for you, O’Neil. It’s never going to be over for you. If you won’t give me the money then I’ll take what I was after in the first place – you, with your brains blown out.’

  He paused, and coughed. Conor couldn’t even see him now. He remained crouched down to try to get beneath the smoke, keeping his gun raised in case Slyman tried to surprise him.

  Slyman coughed again, and said, ‘Anyhow… you didn’t seriously think that I was going to let you live, did you, even if I did get the money? This is a blood score, O’Neil. This is something I’m going to settle before I die, I swear to God.’

  ‘Come on out, Drew. If you don’t come on out of there, you’re going to choke to death. This smoke’s lethal’

  ‘Screw you, O’Neil.’

  Slyman coughed, and coughed and couldn’t stop. Keeping his hand pressed over his nose and mouth, Conor cautiously stepped forward into the gloom. He was tempted to cough himself, but he suppressed it. The heat in the corridor was well over 120 degrees and the smoke had the throat-searing taste of burned varnish. He knew that he had already stayed here too long, and that he was risking his lungs and even his life.

  ‘Come on, Drew. This is your last chance.’

  But Slyman didn’t even get the chance to say no. With an extraordinary scream that was almost human, the flames at the end of the corridor made a sudden jump for the ceiling, and the whole corridor exploded in a dark orange fireball.

  Conor didn’t hesitate. He ducked down and ran. He could feel a huge blast of heat chasing him down the corridor like a blazing rhinoceros. His hair was scorched and he clamped both hands on top of his head to stop it from catching alight.