Vertical Burn Part 27

"I haven't done anything. Tell me one thing I've done."

"Leary Way."

"Where do you come off saying that? We almost got fried trying to get out of there."

"Yeah? Tell me about the pipes." When Kub gave him a blank look, Finney said, "You don't know any more about the pipes than Charlie did."

"You been talking to Charlie?"

"Enough to find out you're both liars."

"Okay. I'll bite. What pipes?"

"You guys never went down that corridor." Kub had no answer for that. "Where did you search?"

"Not in that corridor."

"I don't get it. Why lie about it?"

Clenching his jaws, Kub said, "I never lied." Kub glanced at the long-legged woman, but oddly, she didn't seem interested in the proceedings. She sat down in a leather armchair to wait. "I never took no award. I didn't want it."

"That's supposed to make me feel better?"

"G.o.d, I'm sorry." Kub dropped down into a squat, his back propped against the wall, his long fingers cradling his face. "You know how long it had been since I had a mask on?"

"Save the excuses for your mother. Just cut to the chase."

"s.h.i.+t. I hadn't been in a fire in eight years. I almost couldn't even get the mask to work. We were just a couple of guys who hadn't fought fire in a while trying to do our best. We honestly thought we were going to find you both."

"Go on."

"We searched two rooms right near the entrance, but the smoke was so disorienting. Then before we knew what happened, we ran into you, and you were like some sort of . . . Your face s.h.i.+eld was half-melted, and smoke was coming off your shoulders, and you looked like you'd just been dragged out of a steamer trunk somebody'd put in a furnace. Skin was coming off your ears. You could barely move, but you told us to go down the corridor you'd come up, that we'd hear your Pa.s.s device outside a hole in the wall. Twenty-eight steps, you said. Like we were going to go down there and end up looking like you. We were scared, but we were headed that way after you left, and then a gust of heat came down the corridor and forced us onto our knees. Reese was leading, and for the longest time he just knelt there in front of me. Finally I said, 'Aren't we going to do anything?' And he said, 'Calm down. Wait another minute.' We couldn't see s.h.i.+t, man. It was like somebody put sticks in our eyes. To make matters worse, we heard electrical wires popping. Every time we moved I kept thinking we were going to get electrocuted. Tell you the truth, I think we both figured if we waited long enough, Cordifis would come marching out of the smoke just like you did."

"I told told you he was trapped." you he was trapped."

"I know."

"How long did you wait?"

"I'm not sure."

"A minute? Two minutes?"

"Longer."

"Five?"

"Longer."

"Are you kidding? Ten minutes?"

"Maybe."

"But you were practically on top of him."

"I kept tapping Reese on the shoulder. He kept saying not yet. It wasn't like we sat down and said we'd wait ten ten minutes." Tears were running down Kub's face. He wiped them away with his opposite index fingers, moving them side to side like winds.h.i.+eld wipers. minutes." Tears were running down Kub's face. He wiped them away with his opposite index fingers, moving them side to side like winds.h.i.+eld wipers.

"What were you waiting for? As long as there's fuel and oxygen, a fire gets worse. You know that."

"We were calling him. We never stopped calling him."

"I'm sure that gave him some comfort as he burned to death."

"When it started coming down on us, we turned around and made a run for it. By then we could hear flame ripping down the corridor. Man, it sounded like a freight train. I've never been that scared. Next thing I know, I'm trying to cool off under a jiffy hose and Reese is in front of the cameras. I never heard what he said until the next day. I swear. Then what was I supposed to do? Call a news conference and say he was conning everybody? You know how I freeze up in front of a camera. After a while I thought, why not make it all a little more heroic than it was? What was it going to hurt?"

"Oh, yeah. You didn't hurt anybody."

"I didn't think about you until later. All I knew was I couldn't start a scandal, and nothing I said was going to bring Cordifis back. Then, after a few days, Reese told me if I contradicted him, it would blow any opportunity I might have as an insurance investigator for a private company. You know I been counting on that second income after retirement. The way that fire was running, we probably couldn't have got him out anyway. You know that."

"You've had a lot of time to work on your excuses, haven't you?"

Somewhere in the room a pager went off. As Kub went to get it, Finney became aware they'd been hearing sirens for some minutes. "I gotta go," Kub said wearily when he returned. "They got two multiples going on. Plus, there's something at the Columbia Tower."

PART FOUR.

59. THURSDAYS WITH SHEILA.

Patterson Cole watched Norris remove the contracts from the safe and pack them into the briefcases, musing that there was something about Norris that made him look like a poof, something about the way he used his hands. He'd had this thought before, and deep down he supposed it didn't really matter whether Norris was a poof or not, but still, it bothered him. The bow ties bothered him. The manicured fingernails bothered him. Did he actually apply polish? Norris was using a cane today, had stubbed his toe walking to the p.i.s.soir in the middle of the night. Norris was always nursing some sort of ache. Just thinking about it made Patterson old. Maybe after this was all over, he'd send Norris to Sun Valley to oversee his Idaho holdings with Dithers. Maybe it was time Norris had a little change of scenery. Time he did, too, for that matter.

Norris Radford and Patterson Cole had taken a series of elevators to forty-two where they'd removed forty-seven thousand dollars in cash from the safe in the main office. Now they were on floor seventy-three in Patterson's private hideaway. n.o.body ever came up here but Norris and, every other Thursday, a woman named Sheila from the service. It was a luxury apartment with a desk, computer, fax, and in the back room, a double shower, a Jacuzzi, and a bed about half the size of a tennis court. When he wasn't using the bed for his play time with Sheila, Patterson would sneak up after lunch to take a siesta, maybe twenty, thirty minutes of shut-eye. It was his guilty secret-well-one of them.

They'd planned this meticulously, and now all they had to do was empty the other safe and skedaddle. Everything else was taken care of. After tonight all of Patterson's troubles would be over. He would pay off the d.a.m.n b.i.t.c.h, sign the divorce papers, and in time, they would rebuild this tower with more safeguards than the original.

Why couldn't they all be like Sheila? No fuss. No muss. He'd found her ad in the back of The Stranger: The Stranger: ALL THE COMFORT YOU WANT FROM A WOMAN, $ ALL THE COMFORT YOU WANT FROM A WOMAN, $175. NO EXTRA FEES. NO DISAPPOINTMENTS. She wore a little too much makeup, but her body was as advertised. And it didn't hurt that she was fifty years younger than he was. The one thing he was going to miss about this building was Thursdays with Sheila. He'd have to find another cozy spot.

Looking around the office, Patterson saw several personal effects he wanted to take with him. Sure, the firemen had told him to leave everything, but there was a montage of photos on the desk he needed, photos of his first wife, Ruth, their two children when they were toddlers, and shots of himself as a young lumberjack. They'd worked his a.s.s off at Weyerhauser, but he found more and more he was looking back on those days as the happiest of his life. He picked up the montage and stuffed it under his coat.

"What do you want out of this safe?" Norris asked, looking up at him from across the room.

"The bonds. There's some jewelry in that black box. Any cash."

Patterson sat in the leather office chair and rolled it over to the window. Four floors lower than the famous women's rest room stalls with their panoramic view, it looked out over the same vista: the east portion of the city and, beyond that, Lake Was.h.i.+ngton, the growing city of Bellevue, and the bedroom community that was Mercer Island. The lake was fuzzy with fog, and most of the east side was already sketchy. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Six-fifteen. Plenty of time.

His eighty-fourth birthday would be coming around in March, and he knew he was slowing down. He'd thought about retirement, but then who would run things? He had two sons, in their sixties now, but they were both numbskulls. One, Hardy, hadn't spoken to him in four years, not since he married the bimbo.

The whoop-de-whoop mechanical screeching in the corridor outside the office started without any warning. The fire alarm.

"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 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 h.e.l.l's wrong? Where's this elevator?"

"They don't work when the building's in alarm."

"I know that, G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 b.u.t.ton 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."

"s.h.i.+t, 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 pa.s.sed the old man and opened the door for him.

"G.o.d! What the h.e.l.l 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., A.M.," Norris said, his eyes watering. Cole wondered whether it was from the smoke or because Norris was such a d.a.m.ned pansy.

"The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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.

n.o.body'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 the door to sixteen, which should have unlocked automatically when the building went into alarm.

They investigated sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, and twelve minutes later reported a small room fire on what they believed was the north side of the building on eighteen. They radioed that they were going to hook up the two hundred feet of hose line a second team had lugged up to the standpipe in the stairwell and make an attack on the fire. The officer in charge was a county lieutenant, and he seemed to know his stuff. He said they thought the fire was being fed fresh air from an unknown source, possibly a broken window.

Diana hoped it was only a room fire on eighteen and that the smoke on the other floors had drifted up or been pumped down through ductwork. A room fire on eighteen was doable. More likely it was the malfunctioning ventilation system in the building, Diana thought. There was smoke on too many floors. The elevators were not running. Doors that should have been open were locked. Finney had predicted this.

Three minutes later, the upstairs team reported they were not receiving water from the stairwell standpipe. Outside, Diana had seen Engine 10 pumping into the building's connections, so there should have been water. The county chief dispatched a pair of firefighters to trace down the problem, then told the firefighters on eighteen they'd have to wait.

At the incident command post on four, the county chief, two of Seattle's newly arrived lieutenants, and a pair of firefighters from Station 10 who were familiar with the building began poring over the heavy, yellow, looseleaf binders that held the prefire plan for the building.

The lobby was filling rapidly with weepy civilians who'd straggled down one or another of the smoky stairwells and were stumbling around the open s.p.a.ces on four, trying to figure out where to go next. Many had come down without car keys or purses or coats. All were coughing; one woman vomited. Several more mutual aid companies from outside the city showed up, most from jurisdictions where the tallest buildings were four or five stories. An alarm in a seventy-six-story building had to be daunting for them. Diana knew it was certainly daunting for her.

Diana remembered a fire they'd had at the Morrison Hotel. The Morrison was only five stories, but one of the elevators hadn't worked, so they'd been jamming men and equipment into the remaining tiny, slow-moving elevator. Most of their lines, pump cans, ladders, and fans had been hauled up four flights of stairs, and she still remembered how so many of the firefighters, after a couple of trips up and down those stairs wearing fifty pounds of protective equipment and carrying another twenty or thirty of firefighting gear, had knelt by open windows in the hallway, gasping for breath.

An Engine 10 lieutenant, Wilder from A-s.h.i.+ft, quickly took the overtimers and the personnel from outside fire departments and began forming them into teams, pa.s.sing out a.s.signments as they came up. They established a medical area downstairs in the food court. A team of three firefighters was sent outside to set up a base area well away from the building, where the incoming apparatus would park. They announced the command post would be on floor four, which was actually at street level from the Fifth Avenue side of the building.

"What about all these other floors in alarm?" asked the county chief, who turned out to be from Both.e.l.l, a small city at the north end of Lake Was.h.i.+ngton. "When do we send somebody to investigate?"

Lieutenant Wilder said, "Use sixteen for staging. Send a backup team for the first crew, an RIT to back up both of them in case they get into trouble, and then have extra crews investigate the higher floors one by one. Bottom to top. We're going to have to send runners up with spare bottles so they can change right there in the stairs. It's all we can do."

"What good's a backup team without water?" asked the chief.

"We'll get water. We also have to pressurize those stairwells. The building engineer is on his way."

During the next few minutes they received reports over in-house phones-just before they inexplicably conked out-that there was smoke on floors eighteen through twenty, on twenty-six, sixty and sixty-one, seventy-six, as well as unconfirmed reports that smoke had been sighted drifting off the roof. "Probably coming out the vents," said one of the nearby county firemen, but even as Diana wondered how anyone could see smoke coming off the roof in this fog, she began to doubt the veracity of some of the information they were receiving.