Hell's Kitchen (35 page)

Sonny wouldn’t have realized that the gun was single action. You had to cock it before you could shoot. In the delay Pellam staggered outside and shouted for help.

There might’ve been a person at the end of the block, looking toward him. He wasn’t sure. He tried to wave with his good arm but felt the gritty kiss of the ends of the broken bone in his other. Nearly fainted. Pellam shouted again but in his haze he couldn’t tell if the person—if anyone was actually there—heard or noticed him.

Sonny spit the chemical from his mouth and followed. Glancing back, Pellam had an image of a white face, slits of blue eyes, the white hand holding the black pistol. White hair, dancing like smoke.

Oh, man, that hurts. He gripped his arm tighter and stepped into the middle of the street.

The twin eyes of a car flicked toward him. The vehicle approached and then paused. Choosing not to see him, the driver stared ahead with the uncomfortable distraction of someone late for a dinner party and sped on.

Pellam continued away from the theater, back toward the Tower itself.

A wave of pain flowed through him. Sweat flowed. Every jar of his boots multiplied the agony. He wanted to pause, just catch his breath.

Don’t stop. Keep going.

A glance behind. Sonny was stumbling too but he was gaining on him. Pellam assumed he’d figured out how the gun worked. In a minute or so he’d be close enough to shoot. Pellam ran through an alley toward the back of the Tower, speeding over glints from bits of foil and bottles and syringes. Crack vials. The sparkle of ground glass smoothed into asphalt.

The blond man’s feet sounded behind him.

Crack.

A bullet shattered the window of a deserted tenement.

Another shot.

Somebody might hear and call the police.

But no, of course not. Who’d pay any attention? This was just the soundtrack to an average night in Hell’s Kitchen. Ignore it.

Keep walking, eyes down, people would be telling themselves.

Stay away from the window.

Come back to bed, lover. . . .

It’s a white man’s world. . . .

Pellam staggered out of the alley, turned into the middle of Thirty-fifth Street. He was now a block away from the theater and its festivities, and this street was even emptier than Thirty-Sixth.

The only motion he could see was moths beating themselves to death on the heavy lenses of street lamps.

The sound of rock music was faint. At least, he thought, he’d led Sonny away from the people in the theater. The guests would smell the liquid and evacuate the building.

Pellam cocked his head and found himself in the middle of the street, on his knees. Looking back, he saw Sonny, lips blood red and puffed up from the chemical, getting closer, the handcuff dangling from his wrist. Pellam stood and struggled again down the street, which was in shadow, like the boarded-up tenements and the construction site and the alleys. He came to the fence that surrounded the base of the Tower and slipped through a gap in the chain-link gate.

Here, in the construction site, he’d be safe. It was
very dark. Sonny’d never find him among the construction sheds, stacks of lumber and plywood, compressors, equipment, scaffoldings decorated with red, white and blue bunting. Plenty of shadows in which he could lie. Plenty of vehicles to hide under.

Places where he could stop running and lie down, stop the terrible pain.

He staggered to a small metal shed and climbed into the murky space beneath. Sonny approached. The chain link fence rattled once. Did the young man just test it and pass on? Or did he enter? No, no, he slipped inside too. His footsteps were nearby.

The steps passed very close.

“Hey, Joe Buck . . . Why’re you running?” He sounded perplexed. “We’re going together.” The jingle of the handcuffs. “You and me.”

Pellam opened his eyes and saw feet in tattered white shoes moving slowly over the gravel and dirt. One shoe was untied and the laces dangled gray and muddy. He thought of Hector Ramirez and the stolen Nikes.

Sonny padded over the gravel.

My blood, Pellam realized. He’s following the trail of my blood to my hiding place. But why hasn’t he found me yet? It was too dark, he supposed.

Metal grated on metal.

A resonating sound like a steel drum, a bell.

Then, a gushing sound as liquid began flowing on the ground. He clutched his arm more tightly. What was Sonny doing?

A second gush joined the first. Then another.

A pause. Then a gunshot sounded very nearby. Pellam jumped in shock. There was a huge flash of light and Pellam realized that Sonny had opened drums of
gas or diesel fuel in the construction site and set the liquid ablaze with the gun.

What had been dark now became dazzlingly bright.

“Ah, Pellam . . .”

There, clearly visible in the shocking, yellow light, was the trail of Pellam’s blood, leading to his cave. Still, he remained where he was. No way, he thought, can I outrun him. In the fiery illumination he could now see Sonny prowling madly in the far end of the construction site, not far from the still-wrapped statue, looking for Pellam.

Pellam felt heat from all around him. The burning fuel was flowing into the scaffolding and piles of wood, setting everything aflame. And two, no, three of the wooden sheds. Then another. A truck caught fire. Tires burst and melted amid vibrant orange flames and turbulent black smoke. Wood snapped like bullets and there were explosions as fuel tanks—gas and propane—cracked apart, firing hissing buckshot through the night.

The whole site, a half block long, was suddenly awash with fire. More trucks ignited. The sheds, stacks of wood and rich, dark paneling—destined perhaps for Roger McKennah’s penthouse—crackled and blazed. He saw timbers spontaneously sprout flames and the roiling hot wind passed the fire to pallets resting against the shed where he hid. Pellam scrabbled into a corner, away from the tempestuous inferno.

The noise of the fire was like a subway train.

At this moment—when the entire lot was enveloped in flames, when there was virtually nothing left untouched by the fire—a small half moon of red, white and blue bunting ignited. Unlike the massive tide of
flame in the yard this scrap burned placidly. The hot, rising air carried it aloft.

And it was this shred of patriotic cloth, not the gallons of fiery gasoline or stacks of blazing wood, that finally ignited McKennah Tower itself.

The burning scrap wafted onto a stack of cardboard boxes in the open atrium. The cartons began to glow then burn brightly. In a few minutes the flames were in the lobby, rolling over artists’ conceptions of offices, over the tall palm trees that had so astonished Ettie Washington when she watched them being delivered, over piles of linoleum and wallpaper, buckets of paint. More propane tanks, on parked forklifts and high-climbers, exploded, shooting shrapnel throughout the lobby and shattering the huge plate glass windows.

Fire everywhere.

The paper wrapping of the statue burned away but Pellam, stumbling toward the gate, still couldn’t make out what it was.

Finally he could wait no longer. The flames were too close, the heat too much. He eased from his hiding space as the window of the shed popped out in a quiet burst and scattered scalding glass around him.

Only one exit remained—the way he entered, though the chain link. Sonny knew about that. But there was nowhere else to go; the plaza and atrium were completely engulfed.

As he staggered out from his hiding place and made his way to the fence he saw a rich glow in windows on the second floor of the Tower, then the third, then the sixth or eighth, then higher. The fire had been sucked quickly into the gullet of the building.

Huge sheets of Thermopane windows burst, glass shards and black pellets of plastic rained down.

He stumbled to the chain-link and still could not see Sonny.

A stone of the heart . . .

He managed to squeeze through the opening in the gate but one side sprung out of his grip and struck his broken arm. For a moment he passe out completely and then found himself on his hands and knees. He inhaled deeply and crawled away from the site into the middle of Thirty-fifth Street. Behind him was a tide of yellow flame and tornadoes of orange flame and spouts of hissing blue flame. Windows exploded and walls collapsed. Heavy bulldozers and sheds and dump trucks settled down to die.

Then the hands got him.

Sonny’s snake-like grip ratcheted the cuff around his good wrist. The young man began pulling him back into the job site.

“Come on, come on!” Sonny cried.

Pellam expected to feel the blow of a gunshot but Sonny’d tossed the Colt aside. He had something else in mind and was steering for a pit in the dirt near a contractor’s shed. It was filled with flaming gasoline. He dragged Pellam toward it. He fell against his shattered arm and fainted again momentarily. When he came to he found that Sonny’s manic strength had pulled him to the brink of the pit.

“Isn’t it beautiful, isn’t it lovely?” Sonny called, staring into the swirling fire and smoke at his feet.

He reached down—just as Pellam kicked out with a boot. Sonny slipped on the edge of the trough and fell up to his waist into the burning fuel. He began to
scream and in his crazed state, jerking back and forth, thrashing, began to pull Pellam after him.

Blinded by the smoke, seared by the flames, Pellam had no leverage. He felt himself being tugged closer and closer to the inferno. A memory of Ettie’s voice came to him.

“Sometimes my sister Elsbeth and me’d go where they led the lambs along Eleventh Avenue over to the slaughterhouses on Forty-second Street. They had a judas lamb. You know ’bout that? It’d lead the others to the slaughter. We used to yell at the judas and throw rocks to lead him off but it never worked. That’s one lamb knew his business.”

And then he heard:

“Pellam, Pellam, Pellam . . .” A high voice, panicked.

A vague image through the smoke. It was a person. A thick coat of smoke enveloped him. He dropped to the ground. Sonny’s thrashing body pulled him closer.

Pellam squinted, looking through the smoke.

Ismail, tears running down his cheeks, stood at the fence. “Here! He over here!” He was gesturing madly toward Pellam.

Then another figure. They both eased through the chain-link.

“Get back!” Pellam shouted.

“Jesus,” Hector Ramirez said and grabbed Pellam’s wrist just before he slipped over the edge into the pool of flame.

Ramirez pulled a black gun from his waistband,
pressed the muzzle against the links of the cuffs and fired five or six times.

He hardly heard the shots. In fact, he hardly heard the roar of the flames or Ramirez’s voice as he pulled Pellam away from the fire. The only sound in his ears was Ismail’s voice saying, “You be okay, you be okay, you be okay . . .”

The roles were reversed.

Now it was Ettie Washington’s turn to visit Pellam in the hospital. Unlike him, she’d had the foresight to bring a present. Not flowers or candy though. Something more appreciated. She now poured the smuggled wine into two plastic cups and offered him one.

“To your health,” she said.

“Yours.”

He swallowed his in one gulp. Ettie, as he remembered her doing when he gazed at her through the viewfinder of the Betacam, sipped hers judiciously. She was the epitome of a frugal homemaker, having learned those skills, Pellam recalled, young from Grandmother Ledbetter.

The private room in which Pellam now lay was below the one where Ettie’d been arrested and above the room where Juan Torres, the poor child, had died. Where would Sonny’s body be? he wondered. The morgue was probably in the basement. Or maybe he was in the city morgue. A routine autopsy then a final trip to Potters’ Field would be his fate.

“People keep asking me what happened, John. Asking me—because I know you. The police, that fire marshal, reporters too. They want to know how you got away from that firebug fella. They think you know but you’re aren’t talking.”

“Miracle,” Pellam offered wryly.

But Pellam wasn’t going to complicate the lives of his improbable friends by telling anyone how Ismail hadn’t gone back to the YOC at all but had hung around waiting to spend more time with Pellam, had seen Sonny’s attack, and had run up the street to summon Hector Ramirez.

“Well, that’s between you and the doorpost,” Ettie said, echoing a favorite expression of her grandfather’s. “And that fire marshal said something else. Which I didn’t exactly understand. He was saying that you might want to think about leaving the city before your name becomes Mr.
Un
lucky. . . . So. That what you going to be doing, John? Leaving?”

“Not hardly. We’ve got a film to finish.”

“That boy came by to see you. When you were asleep.”

“Ismail?”

Ettie nodded. “Gone now. Has quite a mouth on him for a youngster. I put him in his place, though. Talking to grown-ups that way . . . He said he’ll be back.”

Pellam didn’t doubt it.

I be your friend.

Well, I be yours, Ismail.

That’s the marvelous thing about debts. Even after you repay them, they never go away.

Ettie had also brought him a
Post,
the huge headline (“Towering Inferno”) next to an equally huge photo of the flames consuming McKennah Tower.

There’d been no deaths. Fifty-eight people had been injured—mostly from smoke inhalation. The napalm in the theater had not ignited and the only injuries there were from crowds pushing their way out in panic. The most serious was a broken leg received when bodyguards shoved a woman aside to make sure their dignitary escaped before the commoners (the governor, as it turned out, costing Pellam a fiver, payable to Louis Bailey, the king of gears, both greased and clogged).

The Tower was totaled. Burnt to the ground. It was insured, of course, but the policy covered only the cost of the structure itself, not lost profits. Without the rents from the advertising agency the developer would miss his fourth quarter interest payments on his worldwide loans. McKennah and his companies were already preparing papers for the bankruptcy filing.