“I need an answer!” Molly screamed at the corner of the room.
“Relax, miss,” said the taller one. “We’re here to help.”
Molly turned around, hands clenched at her sides. She looked strangely lost, even for a woman who was nearly naked and drenched in blood.
“No,” Molly said. “You are here for me to punish.”
She looked back at the corner of the room, told her invisible friend: “I will show you I am worthy.”
Then she cleared three paces and jumped at the taller one, her foot in the air.
Her heel shattered his plastic face mask, sending him staggering backwards.
The other one, his partner, who was shorter, charged forward with the handle of the pickaxe and pinned Molly against the wall.
That didn’t last long. She worked a leg up, pressed her foot against the firefighter’s chest, then flung him across the room. His back struck the edge of the conference room table. The champagne bottles jolted and tittered. Cookies slid off their plates. The firefighter landed on his face, hands splayed on the floor.
By this time his partner, with a broken face mask, had regained his senses and charged forward.
Molly kicked him in the face again, shattering the rest of his mask. He screamed.
Jamie climbed to his feet and gripped one of the conference room chairs. The chair rolled beneath him, and was heavier than it looked.
He picked it up and swung it at Molly anyway.
Aiming for her back.
She needed to be stopped.
But Molly sensed him. Kicked sideways. Hit the chair. Jamie went tumbling backwards, over the dead bodies of Nichole and David. Jamie kicked out, trying to clear himself of the corpses.
The firefighters, by this point, had enough screwing around.
They remembered their pickaxes had blades.
The shorter one swung at Molly, aiming for her chest. She lifted her forearm to block it, and the blade cut through her metal bracelet. It slipped from her wrist and fell to the floor. The blow had connected with her flesh, though. Molly cried out. Grabbed her wrist. Bent forward.
The taller one took advantage, hurling his pickaxe into Molly’s back, high and to the left. She took a few wobbly steps forward, then dropped.
No one spoke for a few moments. Smoke continued to roil around the building. The air in the conference room itself was beginning to look wavy.
Molly lay with her check pressed against the carpet, staring at Jamie.
He thought about that night a few months ago, that drunken night when he walked her to her car. She had stared at him the same way.
But now something was different.
Now she was pursing her lips.
Blowing him a kiss.
Before her eyes closed.
The shorter firefighter knelt down beside her. Took off his glove. Pressed two stubby fingers to her neck. Shook his head.
“Okay, c’mon,” his partner said. Then he turned to Jamie. “Buddy, you okay?”
“Yeah,” Jamie said, automatically.
But he wasn’t, of course.
“We’ve gotta get out of here. Now.”
“Buddy. You with us?”
Jamie stood up. It all had happened so quickly. Then he remembered what he had been reaching for.
The gun.
Even though the man was dead—his body was right there on the floor, his head covered in a messy halo of blood—his boss’s words echoed.
You think you can just walk away from something like this? You think there aren’t people out there who want to make sure you’re dead? Along with your family?
I’m no killer, Jamie had told David.
But the truth was, he could be.
If it was for his family.
Jamie bent over and took the gun out from under Nichole’s face. The metal was hung up on her skin, and she was still warm. Then again, everything in the room was superheating.
He lunged for Molly’s body. He needed to be sure.
He needed to put a bullet in her brain.
“Hey hey, come on, man,” said shorter firefighter, catching Jamie in his extended arm and holding him back. The firefighter didn’t see he was holding a gun. “She’s gone.”
“Smoke’s getting real bad in here,” his partner said. Jamie could see his eyes and nose beneath the shattered mask. He looked young.
“I have to,” Jamie said.
“No you don’t.”
“She …”
“Buddy, she’s gone. There’s another team behind us. They’ll get her. Along with everybody else.”
Jamie dropped the gun to the carpet.
They all left the building.
OUT OF THE OFFICE
I just want to spend more time with my family.
—POPULAR SAYING
The walk down the south fire tower felt like forever. Jamie had never felt such heat. He was sure he’d passed out at least once. Maybe twice. But he was supported by the arms of the firefighters, whose names he didn’t even know. He thought about asking them, but his mouth couldn’t form the words. He’d have to find out later. Write them. Thank them. Buy them beers. Introduce them to Andrea, Chase. Cook them meals.
The endless repetition of staircase, turn, staircase, turn also felt like it lasted longer than physically possible.
Eventually, though, they reached the ground floor, and Jamie was being placed on a stretcher, and he reached his hand out to thank his rescuers, high-five them, anything, but they were already headed back into the building.
Someone jabbed a needle in his arm and put a mask over his face and rolled him into the back of an ambulance.
He started to drift off, even though it was only the middle of the day. Hard to tell, with the sky outside so black.
He wanted to drift off. Maybe he would snap awake and find himself in his usual position in bed: left arm tucked under Andrea’s pillow. Her hair, fanned across her pillow. Her scent intoxicating, even in the middle of the night. His hand, resting on her hip. Or if the mood was right, up around the front and higher.
So Jamie drifted a bit, fantasizing that he was home already with Andrea. With Chase in the other room, monitor on, so that the moment he fussed, even a little, they’d hear it, and they could be in there to comfort him in a flash.
He could smell her hair.
Or imagine he could.
Wait.
No.
He couldn’t drift off, not yet.
He had to reach Andrea, tell her he was okay. A phone call, something. News of the fire was probably all over TV. God, she could probably see the smoke from the front steps of their apartment building. She’d wonder. Check the news. Hear about 1919. Panic. He couldn’t do that to her.
Jamie sat up on the stretcher. Pulled the mask from his face. Yanked the needle from his arm.
He reached around to his back pocket to see if he’d put his wallet back there, or left it upstairs. Maybe he could hail a cab, be home in seconds.
Instead he found a card.
And on the front was the cartoon of a duck in little boy pants.
Later, investigators clearing out the floors would discover something odd on the thirty-sixth floor: a badly burned single parachute harness-container containing a Dacron parachute. The brand name was consistent with harnesses and parachutes used for BASE jumping. The pack was found on the floor, but it appeared to have been stuffed over the drop-ceiling tiles on the thirty-sixth floor, just outside the office of Murphy, Knox, CEO David Murphy. As the tiles had burned away, the pack dropped to the ground.
Investigators were at a loss to explain the gear, other than an office thrill-seeker stashing the equipment for a future jump.