Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [143]
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