Stewart Sterling - Where There’s Smoke

“What do you think, Doc? Will a hypo bring her around? Long enough for me to ask her a question?”

The student physician shook his head. “She wouldn’t be able to talk, even if she came out of it.”

“She won’t pull through?”

“No telling.” The intern lifted her into the ambulance. “Plasma. Sulfa. Put her in the freezer. I’ve seen these new methods bring ’em right up out of the coffin.”

“Put a listener with her, will you? I’ll be over, soon’s I’m through here.”

“Right.”

Pedley consulted with the deputy chief who was listening to a walkie-talkie cuddled against his shoulder. “How’s it look, Fred?”

“Quick burner, Ben. Top floors are gone. We can save the lower ones.”

“I’m going up.”

“You can’t, man. That side wall’s weakening!”

“All the more reason. I have to get my peek before she goes.”

“No reason to expect any funny business, is there?”

“Yair. Ties in with the Brockhurst thing, this afternoon.” Pedley swapped his overcoat for a stiff rubber one. “Girl your boys brought down will be one of the witnesses, if she lives.”

“All these beams are gone up there on the top floor, Ben. Wall’s buckling some already.”

“If she lets go, there goes my evidence, too.” Pedley hooked one leg onto the spring ladder. “Any more up there?”

“Only other fifth-floor tenant’s a printer. Works nights.” The deputy chief had to shout; Pedley was ten rungs above the truck platform.

Spray froze on him as it fell from the streams arching overhead. The rungs were sheathed in ice. Smoke blew into his eyes; he might as well have been climbing with his eyes bandaged.

The wind buffeted him, swayed the ladder ominously. He had to pause every few rungs.

There couldn’t be much doubt this place had been fire-bugged by the same person who’d touched off the theater. That would seem to eliminate several prospects. Terry Ross, for one.

The publicity man had been under Shaner’s more or less watchful eye all evening. Unless the device for starting this fire had been arranged prior to the Brockhurst blaze, Ross was out.

Amery, too. The lawyer was in no condition to get out of bed. In any event he couldn’t have got out of that private hospital without being seen.

The setup put Hal Kelsey pretty well in the clear, too — or didn’t it? Still, there were a few others who hadn’t been under surveillance—

He made the shift from ladder to sill in the teeth of a shower of spray, clambered over the sill onto a mound of reeking laths, glowing pressed-board, mortar, smoldering furniture. Water gurgled and sloshed along the floor. Glass and plaster crunched beneath his boots.

He moved cautiously. In here the beat of the pumps and the hum of the motors were scarcely audible; in their place was the roar of rushing water as bar-rigid streams forced their way through the windows beside him; the hiss of cold water hitting blazing wood and hot metal.

This had been the bedroom. The explosion hadn’t occurred in here or the inflammable wouldn’t have trickled down the stair well.

He picked his way past a heap of rubbish that had been a boudoir chair, keeping close to the wall where the joists would be less likely to have burned through. The partition into the next room had completely burned away, leaving only a few charred joists.

Pedley could look through into a gutted room filled with enamel that had once been white. The kitchen. By the twisted wreckage of the gas stove, the blast had been there. Maybe there’d been a leak in the feeder pipe; the pilot light would have done the rest.

He crawled over the litter, sniffing. Gas, all right. But not cooking gas. What had gasoline been doing in Kim Wasson’s kitchenette?

A cardboard box, the blackened remnant still there, had been wedged down onto the top of the gas stove. It had been a round box, the size that would hold about five pounds of chocolates.

He pried it loose from the hot metal. The imprint of the metal guard which had covered one of the burners was deep in the crisped bottom of the box. Meant the cardboard had been wet. And filled with something heavy enough to press the soaked fibers down onto the burner-guard sufficiently to leave an imprint.

He looked around for the lid, saw something that sent him leaping back toward the partition.

The brickwork of the rear wall bulged out, slowly, away from him — the way a sleeping animal breathes. After a moment of deliberation, the swelling increased.

The bricks opened up as if a child had poked his foot through a pile of blocks.

The floor beneath his feet slanted and fell away.

He flung himself as flat on the floor as he could, with the linoleum beneath him sliding away at a 50-degree angle. He felt as if he were dropping through to the basement; but he didn’t hit hard, merely slid up against a pile of something soggy that had been an ottoman.

Then a ten-ton truck smacked him in the small of the back, knocked the wind out of him, pinned him face down against the smoking upholstery.

He fought for breath in air clogged with brick dust, fiercely hot from steam. The pipes had been torn loose somewhere close to him. He’d better get elsewhere in a rush unless he wanted to be parboiled.

He stuffed the crown of his hat between his teeth so the wet felt would filter out some of the heat.

He couldn’t move forward. It seemed to him that it took hours to twist and wriggle backward so his shoulders were beneath the beam that held him fast. After that it was a matter of straining every last ounce he could summon into heaving the heavy timber up a fraction of an inch at a time, until he could squirm out from under.

Snow beat in at him as he rolled free. A yard away was the edge of nothing. Beyond and beneath were lights from the next block.

He backed away, crawled through a jumble of smashed furniture, splintered wood, piping, wires. Luminous lines of blue raced in waves across the floor ahead of him, crisscrossing in his path.

There was no way to tell where the doorways or the walls had been; he reached a stair landing before he knew what it was. He went down slowly, a step at a time, listening for the splatter of water in order to duck the force of a stream, if the boys were shooting in here.

At the second-floor landing a white-helmeted figure glittering with ice shoved a flashlight in the marshal’s face, barked hoarsely, seized him in a bear hug. “Godsake, Fred! You don’t have to bust—”

“Thought we were going to have to send lilies, sure, that time. You all right?”

“Sure, except you’re busting this box I’ve been hanging onto.”

The deputy chief turned his flash on the bit of charred cardboard. “What is it?”

“Ancient Navaho firemaking apparatus. Candy box filled with ethyl. Set on top of the gas stove.”

“Delayed-action bomb?”

“Yair. Take a while for the gas to soak through that glazed cardboard enough to make it soft so it would sag open at the seams, let the gas spill out.”

“I’ll be a son!”

“Give somebody time to get quite a ways away from here before enough vapor collected for the pilot light to ignite it. Only thing — the ingenious bastard who thought this up evidently expected there’d be enough of a fire to burn up the box here.”

The deputy chief swore with accomplished fluency. When he had relieved his feelings he added, “Wouldn’t think the girl would have gone to all that trouble to blow up her own place.”

“No. You wouldn’t. I don’t. I think the party who arranged this delayed-action doodad wanted the girl to burn up, too.”

“You know who it is?”