Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [131]
Before he’d proceeded five more rungs, another body hit the street, a woman in a skirt that had blown up over her waist on the descent, her mouth and nostrils ringed with soot and blood. She didn’t bounce. She just broke and lay splayed out ten feet from Spritzer. They looked like a pair of discarded rag dolls. It was odd, Finney thought, that neither had made a sound during the plunge. In the movies they always screamed.
63. THE OLD MAN TRIES ONE MORE TIME
For almost a full minute, Diana watched Robert Kub pounding on the plate-glass window with his service axe, the pick head bouncing off with no discernible result. They all knew the designated breakout windows in a high-rise had white dots in one corner, but nobody had ever bothered to tell them how to locate them from the outside, especially when the windows were tinted.
After a while Diana heard the sound of glass breaking and looked up to see parts of a window dropping to the sidewalk. She could hear the two men talking through the intercom at the tip of the aerial.
“Damn,” Kub said, gasping. “If I’d known it was going to be this much work, I wouldn’t have volunteered.”
“You never did like work,” Finney joked.
“Look who’s talking. I’ll be dragging your sorry ass up those stairs.”
“I’ll clip a carabiner to your backpack to make it easier for you to give me a tow.”
The next voice Diana heard was so close it startled her. “Listen to me.” Jerry Monahan was on the turntable behind her, one of his eyes beginning to swell shut from Finney’s fist.
“There’s no stopping this,” Monahan said. “Bail out now, while you can.”
Tinny and laced with the sounds of rubber boots on broken glass, Finney’s voice came across on the speaker. “Diana. Come on up.”
They’d left a spare hour bottle, the Halligan/flathead axe combination, and a bag of webbing for her to carry, the tools banded together with a strip of rubber. It was going to be tough enough without battling Monahan. As she reached for the spare bottle, Jerry Monahan took her in a bear hug from behind, from which she quickly managed to extricate both arms, though he kept hold of her torso.
“Let me go.”
“No can do, Miss Moore. I’ve done some boneheaded things in my life, but one of them is not going to be letting you get yourself killed.”
Diana freed the flathead axe from the tool package and dropped the Halligan. “Let me go.”
There was an intimacy to the assault that Diana couldn’t escape, this old man breathing into her ear like a lover, smelling of cloves and hair oil and perspiration and the blood on his face. “Listen to me. Finney doesn’t have anything to prove. Finney didn’t have anything to do with that woman in the burn ward.”
“The police think he did.”
“Paul was at Riverside Drive that morning. After Finney left, Paul set the fire. That old woman just happened to get in the way.”
“Lazenby?”
“Yes. When he realized that old woman could ID him, he hit her over the head and dragged her upstairs; tied her up with some twine.”
“What about Gary Sadler?”
“They set that other fire to get rid of John and Gary both. Gary was on to me. They hauled Gary back into the building. It was hard for me when I found out. I mean, I worked with both those guys. None of this has been easy. But we can change that. We can do something good here. We can use my invention to get those people out.”
“Let go.”
“I know it doesn’t make any difference in the real scheme of things, but I can’t let you guys die the way Gary did.”
With the flat head leading, Diana swung the axe between her legs. A short, crisp blow. Monahan dropped onto his side, then rolled off the apparatus and fell eight feet to the ground. She’d broken his leg.
64. HERDING CATS
Using a grease pen, Oscar Stillman scrawled a floor plan for the building on the wall next to the stairwell. Chief Reese had appointed him information officer in charge of briefing the stairwell teams. The teams would, directly after speaking to him, climb to floor sixteen, take a short breather, and from there go to the fire on eighteen.