Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [122]
“Go see if you can get that turned off,” Patterson said. “Also, you get the lottery numbers today?”
“Yes, sir.” Norris was heading for the phone, but he stopped, took a notebook out of his pocket, and began reading numbers off, while Patterson compared them to a pair of tickets in his arthritic fingers. No winners tonight. Norris made the phone call, spoke for a few seconds, then hung up.
Cole said, “I suppose they think a bunch of false alarms will put everybody off their guard, make it that much easier, eh?”
“I’m not entirely sure this is a false alarm, sir. Apparently there’s smoke on one of the floors below us.”
“Some idiot burned his popcorn in the microwave again?”
“Quite a lot of smoke.”
Patterson turned away from the window. “What do you mean?”
“A lot.”
“You got everything out of the safe?”
“Just about.”
“Get the rest. Let’s get moving.”
“Yes, sir. Shall I call the garage and have the car ready?”
“Absolutely.”
Five minutes later Patterson Cole stood near the elevators. “Is that smoke I smell?”
“Sure seems like it.”
“What the hell’s wrong? Where’s this elevator?”
“They don’t work when the building’s in alarm.”
“I know that, goddamn it. But they work with that special key. The firemen have it. The security idiots downstairs have it. Why aren’t they up here? Get somebody up here.”
“Yes, sir.” Norris Radford set the briefcases at his feet and took a cell phone from a pocket. “This is Radford. I’m on seventy-two with Patterson. You need to get somebody up here with an elevator. Now.” He listened for a few seconds. “Uh, huh. So where are the engineers? Uh, huh. Okay. Call us when you’re ready.” He gave a phone number.
“What is it?” Patterson said, thumbing the elevator button again with a gnarled index finger.
“They can’t make them work even with the key, and they don’t know why. They’ve got a couple of people running up the stairs to see what’s happening on twenty-six. That’s where the alarm is.”
“Shit, boy. You look like you need to hose out your trousers. This’ll work itself out. Let’s go up to the restaurant and get some grub while we’re waiting.”
“How are we going to get there?”
“We could walk,” Cole said. “Or don’t you think you can handle four flights.” The old man was already headed for the stairway.
Hobbling along with his cane and the two briefcases, Norris passed the old man and opened the door for him.
“God! What the hell is that?” Cole said, as a blast of smoke came out the door. “Close it, for Christ’s sake! Close it!”
“I thought it wasn’t supposed to start until two A.M.,” Norris said, his eyes watering. Cole wondered whether it was from the smoke or because Norris was such a damned pansy.
“The bastards started early,” Cole said.
Norris glanced around helplessly at the empty floor, his brow beginning to bead up with perspiration. When the lights in the corridor went out, he said, “Now what do we do?”
“Give me that goddamned phone.”
60. THE WEDDING PARTY
Because of a shortage of rigs in the city, Diana and the other overtimers had been forced to walk the few blocks up the hill from 10’s to the Tower. On the west side of the Columbia Tower, on Fourth Avenue, uniformed police officers in bulletproof vests and winter coats began taking charge of the street. When Diana looked up, she couldn’t see anything but dark windows, and then, near the ten-story mark, just above the reach of the tallest aerial ladder, a halo of fog.
Inside at the security desk they found a bewildered county chief surrounded by three county firefighters and a couple of building security people. There were alarms on twenty of the seventy-six floors, floor sixteen being the lowest, the highest seventy-six, although the report by phone to the security desk was that the smoke on seventy-six was extremely light. The first real smoke was on sixteen.
Nobody’d been able to make the elevators work, so a team of county firefighters ran up the stairs to sixteen, where they reported via portable radio that the stairwell was full of thick, black smoke. They’d been forced to axe open