Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [137]
“Let’s check the elevators,” Finney said.
“Even if they work, we’d be crazy to use them,” Kub said.
“We wouldn’t be crazy to use the shaft.”
67. ROGUE PENNY
All three took off their MSAs and dropped the cylinders and backpacks onto the floor near the elevators. They took off their helmets and hoods and opened their coats. Diana’s hair was plastered to her head with sweat, her bare shoulders sleek and tawny. Though his torso was lean and muscular, Kub’s face looked haggard and drawn.
Finney opened the hardware bag and began rigging carabiners on a sling that he draped over his shoulder, clipping a small loop of webbing onto each carabiner. “See if you can scrounge up a coat hanger, anything we can use for an elevator key.”
He took out a pulley and extra webbing of various lengths. He got out a pair of thin, leather gloves he kept in his inside coat pocket for rope rescues, stepped into a waist harness, and cinched up the leg and waist straps. He put a carabiner through the ring on the front of his belt, tied a figure eight in the end of a six-hundred-foot rope, and clipped himself in.
“Let’s see if this’ll work.” Diana went to the elevator and inserted a long elevator key into the small hole on the upper right side of the door.
“Where’d you find that?” Finney asked.
“In the box.” She nodded at a small, red box on the wall next to his head.
Elevators had two sets of doors, the inside door was attached to the elevator car and traveled up and down the shaft with the car. It was generally finished on the inside, innards exposed when viewed from the outside. In addition, each landing had its own door that was finished on the tenant side.
From inside the car, the doors could be opened with hand pressure. From the landings, the outer door required a special key consisting of a piece of steel tubing, the end of which flopped down on a hinge. The key was inserted into a pencil-size hole in the door, placed just far enough inside for the shorter portion to flop parallel with the door, so that when twisted the end fell across a latch mechanism and released the door lock.
Working together, it took Diana and Finney thirty seconds to open the door.
It was perfect. The shaft was four cars wide and there was a ladder on the wall.
Out of a perverse whimsy, Finney found a rogue penny in the thigh pocket of his bunking pants and tossed it into the shaft. For a second he thought he’d lost the coin, but then he heard it ping far below.
“I’ll string up a lead line. One of you can follow, and then we’ll haul up the equipment. Then the last one can come up.”
“Sure you’re strong enough?” Diana asked. “Those stairs were no picnic, and you’ve had a rough week.”
More like a rough year, he thought, and no, he wasn’t sure. But there were two reasons why he needed to go himself. The first was that Kub wasn’t a truckman and didn’t know how to rig ropes. The second was that (and he hoped this wasn’t only male vanity) even in a weakened state his upper body strength was greater than Diana’s. “I’ll manage.”
“What if fire breaks through the elevator doors on one of the lower floors?” Kub asked.
“Then you two go back down and be safe.”
“John,” Diana said. “We’re on twenty-four. You’re not planning to climb all the way to seventy-six? That’s got to be over five hundred feet.”
“If I remember the prefire for this building, these elevators only go to forty. We’ll regroup there.”
Finney couldn’t shake the feeling that he was asleep and he would awaken in a hospital bed. Or a box. After all, it had happened before—the hospital bed. The box was yet to come. Far in the future he hoped. Though it could easily be tonight. For some time now he had the feeling he was going to die, and as he readied himself to step into the elevator shaft, the feeling intensified.
“You okay, John?” Diana touched his face with a bare hand.
“Double-check my rigging. I’m going to put a carabiner on every floor. You two belay me. Find an anchor point down here, and we’ll feed the rope through a couple of prusiks. That way if I fall, I won’t