Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

Sonny tossed his long blond ponytail off his shoulder, wiped a sweating forehead with shaking hands and eased through the crowd, closer to Joe Buck. His breathing was labored and his heart slammed in his chest. He sucked smoke-laden air into his lungs and exhaled very slowly, enjoying the taste, the smell. Beneath his hands the yellow tape trembled. Stop that stop that stop that stopthatstopthat!

He glanced up at Pellam.

Not quite a foot taller. Maybe a lot less than that. Ten inches, if Sonny stood up straight. Or nine.

Suddenly a new spectator eased between them and Sonny was jostled aside. The intruder was a young woman in a rich, deep-green double-breasted suit. A businesswoman. She said, “Terrible. Just awful.”

“Did you see it happen?” the cowboy asked.

She nodded. “I was coming home from work. I was on an audit. You a reporter?”

“I’m doing a film about some of the tenants in the building.”

“A film. Cool. A documentary? I’m Alice.”

“Pellam.”

Pellam, Sonny thought. Pellam. Pell-am. He pictured the name and spoke it over and over and over in his mind until, like the top of a column of smoke, it was there but was no longer visible.

“At first,” she continued, looking at the cowboy’s, at Pellam ’s lean face, “it was like there was nothing wrong, then all of a sudden there were flames everywhere. I mean, totally everywhere.” She carried a heavy briefcase stamped Ernst & Young in gold and with her free hand twined her short red hair nervously about her index finger. Sonny glanced at her laminated business card, hanging from the handle.

Pellam asked, “Where exactly did it start?”

She nodded. “Well, I saw the flames break through the window there.” Pointed to the basement.

She didn’t seem at all like an Alice to him. She looked like that somber little thing on The X-Files , whom Sonny, in a private joke, called “Agent Scullery.”

Like Pellam, Scullery was taller than Sonny. He disliked tall men but he venomously hated women taller than he was and when she happened to glance down at him the way she’d glance at a squirrel his hatred turned from anger to something very calm and very hot.

“I was the one that called the fire department. From that box on the corner. Those boxes, you know, you see but you never think about.”

He also hated short hair because it didn’t take very long to burn away. He wiped his hands on his white slacks and listened carefully. Agent Scullery rambled on about fire trucks and ambulances and burn victims and smoke victims and jump victims.

And mud.

“There was mud all over the place. You don’t think about mud at fires.”

Some of us do, Sonny thought. Go on.

Agent Scullery told Joe Buck the faggot cowboy about glowing-red bolts and melting glass and a man she’d seen pulling burnt pieces of chicken from the embers and eating them while people screamed for help. “It was…” she paused, thinking of a concise word, “excruciating.” Sonny had worked for a number of business people and he knew how they lived to summarize.

“Did you see anyone near the building when it started?”

“In the back I did. There were some people there. In the alley.”

“Who?”

“I didn’t pay much attention.”

“You have any idea?” the cowboy persisted.

Sonny listened intently but Agent Scullery couldn’t recall very much. “A man. A couple of men. That’s all I know. I’m sorry.”

“Young. Teenagers?”

“Not so young. I don’t know. Sorry.”

Pellam thanked her. She lingered, maybe waiting to see if he’d ask her out. But he just smiled a noncommittal smile, stepped into the street, flagged down a cab. Sonny hurried after him but the cowboy was already inside and the yellow Chevy was speeding away before Sonny even got to the curbside. He didn’t hear the destination.

He was momentarily enraged that Pellam the tall Midnight Cowboy had gotten away from him so easily. But then he reflected that that was all right – this wasn’t really about eliminating witnesses or punishing intruders. It was about something much, much bigger.

He held up his hands and noticed that they’d stopped shaking. A tatter of smoke, dissolving ghost, wafted before Sonny’s face and, helpless, he could only close his eyes and inhale the sweet perfume.

Remaining this way for a long moment, motionless and blind, he came back to earth slowly and dug into his shoulder bag. He found out that he only had a pint or so of juice left.

But that was plenty, he decided. More than enough. Sometimes you only needed a spoonful. Depending on how much time you had. And how clever you were. At the moment Sonny had all the time in the world. And, as always, he knew he was clever as a fox.

Windy this morning.

An August storm was approaching and the first thing Pellam noticed when he woke, hearing the wind, was that he wasn’t swaying.

It’d been over three months since he’d parked the Winnebego Chieftain at Westchester Auto Storage in White Plains and temporarily forsaken his nomadic lifestyle. Three months – but he still sometimes had trouble sleeping in a bed that wasn’t atop steel springs badly in need of replacement. With this much wind today he ought to be swaying like a passenger in a gale.

He also hadn’t gotten used to paying fifteen hundred a month for a one-bedroom East Village shotgun flat, whose main attraction was a bathtub in the kitchen. (“It’s called a bitchen,” the real estate woman told him, taking his check for the broker’s fee and first month’s rent as if he’d owed her the money for months. “People’re totally dying for them nowadays.”) Fourth-floor walk-up, the linoleum floor a dirty beige and walls green as Ettie Washington’s hospital room. And what, he’d been wondering, was that smell ?

In his years doing location work Pellam had scouted in Manhattan only a few times. The local companies largely had the business locked up and, besides, because of the high cost of shooting here the Manhattan you saw in most movies was usually Toronto, Cleveland or a set. The films actually shot in the city had little appeal to him – weird little Jim Jarmusch student-quality independents and dull mainstreams. EXT. PLAZA HOTEL – DAY, EXT. WALL STREET – NIGHT . The scouting assignments had less to do with being the director’s third eye than filling out the proper forms in the Mayor’s Film Office and making sure cash went where it was supposed to go, both above and below the table.

But scouting was behind him for the immediate future. He was a month away from finishing the rough cut of his first film in years and the first documentary he’d ever made. West of Eighth was the title.

He showered and brushed his unruly black hair into place, thinking about the project. The schedule allowed him only another week of taping then three weeks of editing and post-pro. September 27 was the deadline for mixing and delivery to WGBH in Boston, where he’d work with the producer on the final cut. PBS airing was planned for early next spring. Simultaneously he’d have the tape transferred to film, re-edited and shipped for limited release in art theaters in the U.S. and on Channel 4 in England next summer. Then submissions to festivals in Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Berlin and to the Oscars.

Of course that had been the plan. But now?

The motif of West of Eighth had been the tenement at 458 West Thirty-sixth Street and the residents who lived there. But Ettie Washington was the centerpiece. With her arrest he wondered if he was now the proud owner of two hundred hours of fascinating interviews that would never find their way to TV or silver screen.