On the Nickel (28 page)

‘Officer down! Officer needs assistance! Shots fired! Building on fire! Ten-99!' She glanced around. Jack Liffey was right behind her. ‘What the fuck's the address? I can't think!'

‘Fortnum Hotel,' he leaned forward to yell into her phone. He gave the cross streets. ‘We're taking gunfire. We're
on
fire. Send a bus, send a ladder truck, send backup for LAPD Officers Ramirez and Green. Officer Paula Green is
down
!'

Gloria made a face. She wasn't even supposed to be working in this division, but it was done now and there was no avoiding the consequences. She left the phone on and shoved it into his hand.

‘Paula!' she hollered down the staircase. All she could see was a throbbing orange glow on the walls that was definitely not good news. ‘Talk to me, Paula!'

The only answer was a high-pitched male giggle.

She grabbed hard to stop Jack Liffey descending with his stupid pistol – it looked like her old .38 – but at the turning they both surrendered to a flare of intense heat which drove them back up. ‘Up, everyone!' he shouted. ‘Fire!'

She grabbed his arm. ‘Jack, don't be a jerk and get people hurt. This is under control, dammit.'

She could see him take a deep breath to calm himself and cede her the authority with a nod. ‘No it's not,' he said softly. ‘Take control.'

‘Up one floor, now!' Gloria ordered. ‘Everybody! Come out in the hall now! Don't stop to grab a thing! The lobby's on fire.'

She heard one more shot below and prayed the small shape she'd seen wasn't finishing Paula off. ‘If he shot Paula, that fucker is on his way to hell.'

‘I get you,' Jack Liffey agreed.

The motley company began straggling out of Morty's room and then allowed themselves to be herded ahead of Gloria toward the staircase.

‘Hurry along, folks. No sightseeing.'

One doorway on the next floor up still had a lit EXIT sign above it, and they headed that way. Incongruously, it led into a filthy wrecked bathroom with pipe torn from the plaster walls, and the basins and toilets smashed for no rational reason other than to make them unusable.

Maeve found herself shoved out in front of the whole crew, and she hurried to a window under a second EXIT sign and pushed hard. She couldn't budge it and started thinking about breaking the glass when Conor and Morty joined her and managed to tear loose a generation of paint and force the sash up. The window opened to a slatted iron fire-escape platform. They all sucked down a cool draught of city air. Conor stepped over the waist-high sill first and hurried across the iron grid to grasp the metal stairrails.

‘Yaaaaa!'
His torso disappeared abruptly.

Maeve's heart skipped a beat as she saw the boy plummet out of sight. She hurried to the edge and gasped to see him just below her, clinging furiously to the handrails and one stub of metal step. Several rusty steps in a row had crumbled away to nothing under his weight.

‘Rust never sleeps,' he announced a little shakily, looking up at her. She was probably the only other one there who knew that was the title of a Neil Young song and album. She grasped the upper hand rails for extra support as her dad lay down on his chest across the iron platform that seemed to be holding, in order to reach down to grab, first, her ankle, and then Conor's wrist.

‘I've got arm strength, kid.'

He hoisted the boy slowly toward the landing, Conor's feet scrabbling for purchase. The platform itself looked none too secure to Maeve, with big scabs of rust coming away wherever she wriggled.

‘Stay inside, people,' Jack Liffey called. ‘It won't hold.'

‘We need a ladder truck,' Gloria said at the window. Maeve backed very slowly toward the brickwork of the building, feeling the iron straps flexing a little under her weight. She looked down and could see a flickery glow emanating from the windows two floors down. Glancing up on a whim, she counted three more floors to the roof. Iron fire escapes were probably fine if you painted them with Rustoleum once a decade or so, she thought angrily – damning all slumlords.

Gloria was on her cell, explaining their predicament angrily to someone.

Maeve stayed outside with her father, helping boost a shaken Conor in though the window. When they got inside, Gloria shooing them all out ahead of her into the hall. Taking up the rear, Maeve was struck suddenly by the amazing surplus of vulnerability in their little group – a skinny girl from half a country away, a lost woman hunting for her husband, two very old unhappy men, one probably with first-stage Alzheimer's, a boy who seemed permanently a little bemused, then herself – she wouldn't judge herself – and a recent paraplegic who was none too steady on his feet if you watched close. The whole straggling crew emerged from the bathroom just as a burst of flame found its way up some flue in the hallway and belched out behind them, lighting everything in sight with a flare.

‘Oy!'

‘Now!' Gloria shouted, pushing one of the old men toward the stairway. ‘Folks, let's go! Up is the way! We're gonna be fine! I promise.'

They hurried up the steps, feeling the heat rising ominously up the stairwell. Jack Liffey stayed back to guard the rear. Maeve took the crook of Sam Greengelb's arm, helping him climb. Ahead of her, Conor and Millie had their hands through Morty's elbows like bookends, boosting his stiff legs up the steps in a rather drunken gait, like a three-legged race at a picnic.

Taking up the rear with Jack, Gloria was on her cell again, shouting repeatedly at someone. ‘You get
everything
here fast, Miss Oh! Absolutely everything. You heard me, officer down! Officer needs assistance! Code three! Fuck the codes. I don't care about any basketball riots you got at Dorsey High or any drive-bys in the Shoestring Strip. Get your choppers. Get your SWAT. Get medevac for Sergeant Paula Green, LAPD, and get the fire boys to bring one of their firesuits. They may have to send somebody straight into a real fire inside the Fortnum to get our Paula out. I'm badge 21-437, Harbor Division, honey. If I don't see that ladder truck the minute we get to the roof, I'll come over there tomorrow and kick your ass all the way across town.'

Maeve realized with a chill that Gloria's friend, Paula Green, whom she had met and liked a whole lot, must be caught down there somewhere in the inferno. But hopefully below it or protected from it.

Rice Thibodeaux slipped out of the Fortnum, after pouring the cans of gasoline everywhere, with flames brewing up nicely one floor up and licking down into the lobby. He crossed toward McCall's big truck and glanced back at a crashing sound to see a ball of fire punch out a second-floor window and flames begin to caress up the brick walls above the window. The other windows on the second floor were already aglow with fire. Bless the fury of gasoline, he thought. It couldn't have been burning more than a few minutes since he'd run along the linoleum hallway emptying the cans. He heard sirens in the distance and climbed the Dodge's footstep to pull confidently at the door.
Shock!
The shitty thing didn't give! That asshole McCall had locked up by habit and taken the keys, instead of leaving them in the ashtray as they'd always arranged. Fuck him. Where was McCall? Oh, yeah. He was in the basement, a crispy critter before long. And then his heart sank after he realized the front tire was dead flat.

A number of old black men along the sidewalk were watching him curiously. He was really pissed off suddenly to be watched, but held it in. What business was this of theirs? Spades always thought the world owed them something. Why
was
that? What was it about niggers? They had some peculiar idea of justice wedged up their ass, and none of them – none – knew a thing about Nietzsche and making your own future.

‘You got a fucking problem!' he yelled at all of them.

He jumped down from the Dodge and walked to the curb to confront the old men. Thibodeaux had left the useless empty pistol back in the cleansing fire, but he yanked his big new killer knife out of his waist. He'd yanked it out of McCall and now he felt the incredible momentum as its big blade waved around in his hand. He'd found the outlandish eighteen-inch copy of the Marine knife in a Tijuana tourist shop. It was his sop on a trip down there so McCall could see a stupid donkey show he'd heard about, which never even happened. The tourist shop had been full of onyx birds, onyx Mexicans in
sombreros
sleeping against cacti and strings of firecrackers and cherry-bombs. The knife was probably only meant to be window décor, he realized. The shopkeeper had snickered, setting an inflated price, but he'd ignored the old fool's game and paid what he wanted, $50.

‘Calm down, mister,' one of the spades against the fence called out to him. ‘We all cool here.'

‘All you coons stay back on the sidewalk!'

‘There's no need for that kind of talk, mister.' That had come from the biggest colored man of them all, a brawny man twice his height and width, and Thibodeaux had half a mind to knife him down immediately, set an example to the others.

But he heard a noise and whirled to guard his back, brandishing the big knife from a crouch. No one was there. He could see the Fortnum clearly in the dusk, and it was extremely satisfying, cooking up just like the two-story farmhouse his Blackwood team had barbecued near Falluja with the kids screaming upstairs.
If you don't want to die, fuckers,
somebody on his fire team had shouted,
don't let the
hajis
shoot at us from your house!

‘Some bad shit's going down,' a man still sitting on the sidewalk said.

Thibodeaux whirled again. ‘I'm not gonna negotiate with you sambos! I mean it. Just shut the fuck up. I got to think.'

‘This is a free country, man. We shall overcome.'

Sirens were howling nearby, a block or two away. And a chopper was scooting overhead, sweeping its bright sunbeam across the buildings of The Nickel, tapping at them like the probing cane of a blind man.

‘You want to fuck with
me
? I know a place all you Zulus can go to die! Learn about Fred Nietzsche, Niggers.' Thibodeaux started edging away from them, into the middle of the street, but the biggest Negro stepped off the curb with his eyes narrowing.

‘Hold on, man. Why you got to go racist on us?'

‘Back off, nig.'

‘Why you got to be
doin'
this? Did some black man hurt you? We don't mean you no harm at all, son.'

Thibodeaux ended his retreat. He planted his feet and poked his knife toward the big menacing Negro. ‘Stay back, heavy-duty! You think I'm deaf and dumb?'

‘Not at all, not at all. I think you're a sad man who's worried about something that's coming down on him. Look, we all know how mean the world can be. Just look at us. We got nothing. Why would I want to hurt you?'

‘Well, here's some nothing!'

Just as the first fire engine came around the corner, Thibodeaux ran toward the big black man with the long knife thrust out in front, like a knight with a lance.

Moses Vartabedian hadn't felt like going to an empty home, with a stack of pizza boxes on his fancy granite counter, so he'd returned to his local downtown office from the unpleasant party at Wolverton's where even the gold-diggers were too young for him. Coming in the door, he knew he needed a new ream of paper for the buzzing fax, and he was fussing through the racks of office supplies he kept in a small back room, with spiffy orange metal racks from some pricey Italian company. There was a wired window at the back of the supply room, an original sash from the sweatshop it had once been. No point in fixing it up because it looked out over Skid Row, then the L.A. River, and then the heart of Mexican L.A.

It was only chance that led him to glance out. He saw the column of black smoke first, then a flicker of flame.

‘Grandmother of God!' He backed away and saw his own reflection in the glass. Who was this – the bland pasty look of a prey animal? No more than a mile away a helicopter was weaving its bright light in figure-eights over what was unmistakably his Fortnum building, and unmistakably on fire.

I was happy once,
Vartabedian thought.
I was on top of things, confident, rebuilding wrecks, honored for it. Is it all gone?

T
he up staircase ended abruptly in a dark vestibule with a pitched roof and a locked door that led to the roof, and Jack Liffey's whole retinue started piling up behind him. The heat and now the growling animal noises of fire were gathering below them. Almost by instinct he yanked out the clumsy .38 Police Special and put his last three slugs straight into the doorframe where the latch-tongue would be, alarming everyone behind him to a frazzle and causing one of them to scream, but then he kicked the door open on fresh cool air. The doorframe was so rotten the shots had probably been unnecessary. But he was on the edge of panic himself, feeling responsible for so many lives.

The approach of fire pressed a sadistic thumb on one of his rawer nerves – not three years ago he'd been chased in a long scramble down through brush and gully by the wind-driven Malibu wildfire that they had taken to calling the Cold Canyon Fire. Cold Canyon, set by an arsonist at the height of the Santa Ana Winds, plus the arsonist himself had killed a Jamaican he'd come to like a lot, right beside him, along with several other hapless people, and it had burned out seventy-three ‘structures,' as the fire department put it, many of them multi-million dollar homes.

The last of the Fortnum residents pushed out on to a tarpaper roof so dry that it crunched a bit underfoot, but it seemed to hold their weight well. Gloria hung back at the vestibule a moment, yelling into her cell phone. Jack Liffey walked cautiously to the knee-high parapet above Fifth Street, hearing a fire siren dying away below, and sure enough, six or seven stories down, a big ladder truck was deploying, with its men in yellow slickers hurrying this way and that. But they weren't raising the ladder yet, and that was absolutely all he had a mind to see.

‘Dad!' Maeve was pointing.

A police helicopter approached like a killer Apache run from Nam, coming in just above the roofs and blinding him for a moment with its big Nite-Sun beam that swept over him.

‘Yeah, I see it.'

Gloria was done with her rant on the cell phone and started toward them.

‘Close the door!' Jack Liffey shouted. All they needed was a heat flue to suck the fire upward.

Gloria went back and shouldered it shut. Several of their group began waving frantically to the approaching helicopter, as if it might miss them and fly straight past. He glanced down again and the firemen still hadn't begun to raise their ladder.

Conor squatted against the parapet, writing fast in his notebook, amazed that he'd found so much focus and intensity. He knew it was a way of trying to control his gathering dread, but it was better than letting fear take hold.

‘Conor! Wake up! They need us to get off this side of the roof!'

Strange. Without meaning to, he had apparently drifted to the opposite side of the roof from everyone else, and Maeve was tugging him to his feet. A noisy helicopter was hovering directly over his head as if it wanted to come down. Lord! He was so intent on blocking things out that he hadn't even noticed.

She took his hand and they sprinted across the roof, driven into a crouch by the noise and beating of the aircraft descending, flailing their hair and clothing.

Omigod,
he thought. Watching his feet on the black tarpaper as they ran past the vestibule in the exact center of the roof, he could see big bubbles swelling in the tar.

He did his best as he ran to call Maeve's attention to the boiling tar in the center of the roof, but she was too busy rescuing him and watching her father at work on the far side of the roof organizing others and pushing them across toward the chopper.

‘They can only take three this time!' Jack Liffey said. ‘No arguments! Women first!'

Jack Liffey coralled Felice and Millie and then grabbed Maeve and pushed them all into the blast of wind where the police helicopter hovered, only a foot above the roof, its overworked engine straining and groaning. A policeman in a black helmet leaned out the wide open doors to haul the women in. The skids tilted and touched down lightly from time to time as the big machine bobbed in its fierce struggle against gravity.

‘They'll be back, and the ladder truck's sending up its ladder, too!'

‘Dad, I won't leave you!' Maeve objected from beside the beast.

‘I said no arguments! Go!'

Maeve wailed some complaint into the overwhelming noise as she was tugged aboard last by the officer at the same time she was pushed by her father.

‘Don't you dare get hurt!' she shouted through cupped hands at her father as the machine rose straight up.

Jack Liffey flapped both arms upward in a needless shooing gesture as the chopper doors slid shut and the machine tilted forward and shot away, carrying Felice, Millie and Maeve. Next would be the old men and the boy, he thought. He and Gloria would go last.

Conor grabbed his shoulder and stabbed a finger wordlessly at the roof near the vestibule.
The tar, the tar,
he kept saying wordlessly. And the roof was clearly forming and popping big tarpit bubbles.

Oh, Christ,
Jack Liffey thought,
leave me to worry about one thing at a time.

Why was that damn ladder truck shilly-shallying?

He stared down off the edge of the roof to see a plume of fire shoot straight out of the hotel where the firetruck had once been parked. The truck had already backed away for some reason and was repositioning around the corner on San Julian where firemen were pouring streams of water over the building.
Take your time, guys,
he thought.
We've got all night up here.

‘Jack, Jack!' He knew Gloria needed his attention, but he'd heard the roof door flap open and on instinct he raced across to the vestibule and slammed the door shut with his back, feeling the escaping air like a blast-furnace. With his foot he scraped hot tar and torn crescents of tarpaper against the outside of the door. Then he took out his Swiss Army knife and shoved the blade into the door crack, pounding it home with the heel of his hand. None of this would hold for long.

‘Jack!'

He looked at last and saw Gloria leaning hard on the parapet, pointed off to his right. In just that instant, he could tell that she had been injured and could barely stand up, and he wondered how it had happened. What turnabout! He wanted to go to her, but where she stared with such intensity drew his own gaze to the top of the fire-escape, arcing over the parapet, where the two old men were fighting over who would get on the fire-escape first.

‘Stop! Stop!' Jack Liffey shouted. ‘Don't even think about it! It's rusted out!' Why was this like herding squirrels? He hurried toward them.

‘Listen, Mr Liffey, you got exactly what miracle to offer?' Greengelb insisted. ‘You got to go
down
in fire! I shit on fire!'

‘Fire is my
shtendik
enemy!' Morty began to titter and chatter in almost simian fashion, trying to force his way past Greengelb.

‘Stop it! Look here!' They were so light; Jack Liffey tugged them both toward the corner of the roof above San Julian. ‘The fire department is raising their ladder right now. We'll all be climbing down to have a beer in two minutes.'

‘Nu,
I'm already completely incinerated!' Morty Lipman announced, wavering where he stood.

Jack Liffey shoved them both to the ground. He'd pictured some kind of panic dragging all three of them over. The world was asking too much of him.

‘You were both fighters!' Jack Liffey shouted. ‘Wait for the pros!'

He turned back and saw that Gloria had crumpled on to the roof herself. ‘Aw,
shit!'
Jack Liffey forgot the men, forgot everyone else and ran to her.

‘I'm OK, Jack. I just twisted my ankle rounding up those women. It was stupid.'

‘Can you stand up?'

‘I think so.'

He offered an arm and felt the burden of too much of her weight as she hauled herself erect against him.

‘Just set me on the ledge. You're damn good at taking charge, bless your heart.'

‘Fire's coming up the stairwell, very soon,' he explained softly, because she deserved to know. And like invoking the name of the devil, the door of the vestibule blew open, and a fireball billowed out into the night air like a frightened being escaping something far worse below, followed in half a second by the deep
crump
of an explosion below. He reached out to hold her shoulder, some kind of superstition. ‘We've got time,' he said, though he had no particular reason to think so. ‘The firetruck is here.'

There was a roar and they all looked back – against their instincts – to see the entire vestibule blown upward thirty feet in a firestorm like the insistent flame of a blowtorch. The whole inferno below was apparently venting through this one chimney.

Jack Liffey had read somewhere of thirty-minute walls and sixty-minute walls, built into condos as a matter of county fire code to slow a fire and allow escape, but he bet nobody had heard of that when the Fortnum was built. They probably had two-minute walls at best.

‘How you doing?'

‘The ankle smarts – but hurting is just life. Don't let go of me yet.'

‘Not
ever,
Gloria Ramirez. I swear to God, not ever.'

He could tell she wouldn't welcome any further emotion just then.

‘Gentlemen! Gather over here,' Jack Liffey called and beckoned. ‘You, too, Conor. Stop daydreaming. This is all real life.'

Greengelb gave Lipman a boost up and the two of them argued for a moment before starting toward Jack Liffey. Where was that fucking helicopter? He scanned the sky but saw nothing at all, which was strange. Usually the TV news choppers were on to any event like flies on shit. But, of course, this was only Skid Row, he thought. Only the homeless dying. Just the sparrows falling.

He steadied Gloria at the edge and then allowed himself to look over. With a sinking heart he saw they hadn't even budged the ladder yet. He had a burning urge to hurl an explosive down on the firetruck, see it burst into an orange fireball, and if he'd had a grenade handy he probably would have done it. OK, he told himself, there was a rational reason for the delay – they weren't idiots.

‘They've got some kind of hitch,' he whispered to Gloria. ‘But they'll come. Don't look down. Not where you're sitting.'

He heard a rending crash and glanced behind him to see a chunk of roof sailing away from a widened urgent flame that was howling straight upward like the flame out of a rocket engine. That would pretty much discourage the choppers, he thought.

‘Let's think about this,' he said softly to Gloria. ‘You've got the experience. We need to keep everybody calm.'

‘Judging by your face, don't let them look over the edge.'

He sighed. ‘I'm sure the ladder's coming, but there's some hangup.'

‘Liffey!'

It was too late. Greengelb was stabbing his finger urgently over the parapet. Jack Liffey looked down to see the ladder truck pulling away from the building.

‘What the fuck! Let me have the cell,' he said to Gloria.

She didn't even want to look, as if a light had gone out within her. He could see by her ashen skin and clenched teeth that she was in intense pain. He punched in 911.

‘Please state your emergency—'

‘Shut up and listen! I'm on the roof of the building that's burning down on The Nickel, the Fortnum Hotel, and your ladder truck is driving away. I have five people up here who need help. What the
hell
is going on? I want to know
now
!'

‘Sir, I'm sure that—'

‘Don't you fucking reassure me! Put me in touch with someone who knows what's happening.'

‘Sir, I'm sure they're—'

‘Stop now! One of the people up here is a cop who's hurt – and I swear to God, the way she's looking right now she's going to come down there and shoot you dead if I tell her you're saying one more meaningless word to me.'

All he heard at the other end was a kind of electronic wind. He looked over to see Gloria suppressing a grin. ‘Great, Jack. Maybe they'll all just drive away now.'

The noise of the venting flame had become almost intolerable – a jet airliner fifty feet overhead – and the flame had eaten a big rude shape in the roof.

The others had gathered around him, but he heard a squawk coming back from Gloria's cell in his hand. He could see she was almost unconscious with the hurt and he supported her back, on the parapet.

‘Hello, are you on the roof?'

‘Yes, I am. Who is this?'

‘This is Fire Captain David McConnell. We're doing our very best with mechanical problematics here, sir. We'll get you down, we will.'

‘Define the crap you just said.'

‘Please don't be angry. This never happens, but it did. The ladder mechanism on one of our trucks locked up. They test it every week. But you don't care about that. Another truck will be here in minutes. In the meantime we're going to be spraying you with water to keep you cool. We can do that. Is that all right?'