She ignored the pain.
Flames swelled. A can of turpentine exploded and a swirl of pine-scented fire and smoke ballooned beside her. Ruth turned away, felt the sting of fire on her ankles and arms. But her clothing didn’t ignite.
The fire, she saw, was licking a gallon can of paint thinner.
Now. This is it. Last chance.
Gripping the broken hardwood planks above her, she kicked hard and, in clumsy desperation, clawed her way up, rolling onto the kitchen floor beside Arnie.
“Ruth!” Arnie crawled to her. He was down to his boxer shorts. Half his hair was gone, eyebrows too. And there were burns on his face, neck, chest and right arm but they hadn’t incapacitated him.
“Out! We have to get out! The front!”
Keeping low, for what little air remained in the house, they started down the hall but got only halfway to the front door. Because of the smoke they hadn’t been able to see that the living room and front alcove were a mass of flame too. The bedroom windows weren’t an option either. Those rooms were burning as well.
“Garage,” she cried. It was their last hope.
Gripping each other hard, they pushed forward. Just before the heat and flames drove them back — to a claustrophobic, searing death in the narrow corridor — they reached the garage door. Ruth touched the metal knob and let go immediately.
“It’s hot,” she said.
A pause. They both laughed, a bit hysterical. Because of course it was hot. Everything in the damn house was hot.
She gripped the knob again, twisted it and shoved open the door. They crouched. But there were no flames here, just smoke and fumes roiling into the garage from the vents and up from under the baseboards. They plunged inside. It was hard to see through the eye-stinging clouds but the garage was small and — since it was used for storage only, not parking — they could follow the path to the front between rows of boxes and kitchen appliances and sports equipment from days long ago.
Choking and wiping their streaming eyes, they moved steadily to the front of the structure. She felt light-headed and fell once. Ruth then got a breath of better air, low to the floor, then another and, with Arnie’s help, she rose again.
Arms around each other, husband and wife finally made it to the front of the garage. With another laugh, this one of pure relief, Ruth pressed the button of the door opener.
Chapter 24
Just breathe, Detective.”
She nodded to the city medical tech. And tried to follow his orders. Slowly. Okay... Inhale, exhale. The coughing began in earnest once more.
Not okay.
Hacking, spitting.
Try again. Control it... Concentrating on her lungs, the muscles in her chest. Yes, she controlled it. Breathe in, out. Slowly.
Okay. Controlling it.
No more coughing. Good.
“Sounding great, Detective,” the tech said. He was a cheerful man with curly black hair and skin a mocha shade.
“All good,” she rasped.
Then she puked.
Again, again, again.
Sitting on the back lip of the ambulance, she bent double at the waist and evacuated a mass of the filthy mud soup.
Most had gone into her gut, not her lungs, apparently.
After a moment or two of retching, the feeling subsided.
She took the bottle of water that the EMT offered. Rinsed her mouth and poured it over her face. She couldn’t imagine what she looked like from the neck up. She’d shed her clothes and dressed in a set of Tyvek overalls — she kept a carton in the trunk of her car. It felt like her hair weighed thirty pounds. Her fingernails, always short, ended in goth black crescents.
Beside her sat her Glock, which, before she did anything else, she’d cleaned in a mini field strip, including running a patch soaked with Hoppe’s solvent through the barrel. It had been dangerously clogged.
“What was that shit?” she asked. “That I swallowed?”
She posed this question to Arthur Schoal, the Northeast Geo supervisor, who was beside the ambulance. He was still looking mortified at what had befallen her.
“The mud? Just water, soil, clay, maybe a bit of diesel fuel from the drills. Nothing more toxic than that.”
Yeah, she tasted petroleum. And she thought back to her younger bad-girl days: when you needed gas for your Camaro and you had no money but you did have a length of siphoning hose and the inside knowledge of where some local numbers runner or Mafioso wannabe parked his Caddie.
Another bout of coughing, another slug of water. The regurgitation — one of her absolute least favorite activities — seemed at bay.
The important thing, she told herself, was that her knee was fine, after the slam onto the wobbly plank. She was still mobile and free — largely free — from the arthritic pain that had dogged her for so many years.
She squinted away tears from the puking, and noticed ribbons of mud on Schoal’s clothes.
“You pulled me out?”
“Me and Gibbs. The guy we were talking to.”
“He here?”
“No, he went to call his wife. See if she was okay.”
Okay? she wondered.
“I’ll have to pay you,” she said to Schoal.
The man blinked and nodded, though he’d had no idea what she was talking about.
“For the mud treatment. In a spa they can cost a hundred bucks.”
He laughed.
Sachs did too. And summoned up every ounce of willpower to keep from sobbing.
She’d told the joke not for him but to shove aside the utter horror of being held immobile in the muck, unable to breathe.
It had affected her. Badly. Being held helpless, being sucked down, down, down. She’d almost been buried alive — wet earth or dry, that made no difference. Confinement was her personal hell.
She shivered once more. Recalling a banished memory from years ago. As a girl she’d read a book that she believed was called Stranger than Fiction, about real-life occurrences that were, well, strange. One was about exhuming a coffin, for some reason, only to find fingernail scratches on the inside of the lid. She hadn’t slept for two days after that and when she did she refused to cover up with sheets or blankets.
“Hey, Detective. You okay?”
She controlled the creeping panic attack, like she’d controlled the coughing. But just.
“Yeah, sure.”
Deep breaths, she told herself.
Okay, okay.
She wanted to call Rhyme. No, she didn’t want to. She wanted to drive two hundred miles an hour even if it meant burning out the Torino’s engine. No, she wanted to go home and curl up in bed.
Frozen — hands, feet, arms, belly and neck, all held motionless in the wet, slimy grave.
She shivered. Put. It. Away.
The medical technician said, “Detective, your heart rate...”
Her finger was clipped to one of the heavy-duty machines the EMTs came armed with.
Breathe, breathe, breathe...
“Better.”
“Thanks.” She pulled the clip off, handed it to the tech. “I’m good now.”
He was examining her carefully. And he nodded.
It was then that she noticed that the Northeast Geo workers were talking among themselves, standing in clusters. Their expressions were troubled. And it wasn’t Sachs’s near-death experience that took their attention.
She recalled wondering about the supervisor’s comment that Gibbs, the worker she’d been speaking to, had called his wife to see if she was all right.
Something was going on.
She realized too that there were a dozen sirens in the distance. Ambulance sirens and police sirens.
She remembered the shaking of the ground. And she thought immediately of a terrorist attack. The Twin Towers once again.