Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

As his meaty leg was yanked upward, the top half of his body toppled. Like a great oak falling in the forest, he went straight to the floor, narrowly missing the child, but hitting the arms of the stroller, pitching the boy upward, like he was on a teeter totter and someone had dropped a boulder at the other end.

Everyone screamed. The teenage girls’ screams came out more like shrieks.

No sooner had the big man hit the floor than he started to lift up as his one leg headed toward the top of the door.

But then the shoe was ripped from his foot. He came crashing down again. The shoe sailed up to the center of the door until the lace snapped, and it dropped back down.

“Benjy!” the mother screamed, reaching over the man to see that her child was okay.

“Fuckin’ hell!” Elliot shouted.

Somehow, impossibly, everyone had pushed back to allow room for the fallen man. The girls were literally perched on Leonard’s feet. The child’s father’s arms were spread wide against the wall of the car.

The toddler was crying. The stroller was a write-off.

And then the doors opened.

They had reached the lobby.

Half a dozen people waiting to board recoiled in horror at the sight of the collapsed man. The girls managed to step around him, quickly followed by their mother. Once out, they stopped and turned to offer help.

The big man slowly got up off the floor. Elliot actually extended a hand to help him.

“You okay?” he asked.

The man nodded, then spotted his shoe, minus half a lace, on the floor of the car. Leonard grabbed it and handed it over.

“Please!” said the older woman, still at the back of the car. “Let us out! We have to catch a plane!”

She and her husband navigated their way around the others, but as soon as they exited the elevator they were faced with a throng of people who’d been waiting for it.

“Look what you did!” said the small child’s mother, who now had the toddler in her arms and was pointing to the mangled stroller.

“Uh, sorry,” he said.

“You should never have gotten on,” the father said. “And Christ, maybe this’ll teach you to tie up your shoes.”

“I said I was sorry. Anyway, it’s the hotel’s fault. The door grabbed my lace.”

The parents shook their heads as they hauled the busted stroller off the elevator.

“You sure you’re okay?” Leonard asked.

The big man nodded slowly. “I might have twisted my ankle,” he said, looking down at his socked foot. “But I guess I’m all right.”

“Okay,” he said, then looked at Elliot and gave him a shrug that said, I guess we’re done here .

As the two headed through the lobby, Elliot said, “I thought that guy was going to lose his leg or something.”

“I want my granola parfait from Le Pain Quotidien,” Leonard said, “and then we’re going to see if we can move to another hotel.”

Elliot smiled. “So now you’re the one who’s fed up.”

As they came out of the hotel, Leonard said, “That guy could have crushed us to death.”

“So, what, you’re looking for a hotel that bans fatties? That sounds very un-PC.”

They took a moment to get their bearings as they stood on the sidewalk. A yellow Prius cab was working its way down the street.

Leonard pointed east. “It’s that way.”

“No,” Elliot said, grabbing his arm. “I’m pretty sure Le Pain’s that way.”

The cab was sixty feet away.

“Wait,” Leonard said, looking one way and then the other. “I hate to admit this, but I think you’re right.”

The cab passed by the hotel doors.

“Okay, then let’s—”

And that was when the bomb in the Prius exploded.

Three minutes after the taxi explosion on East Forty-Ninth Street, eight people were huddled out in front of the three elevators in the lobby of the twenty-story Gormley Building on Seventh Avenue between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets. A man and a woman who were closest to the closed doors were both gazing at their phones. The woman was reading the New York Times and the man was scanning information from an app that tracked the stock market. He shook his head slowly, not liking what he was seeing.

Of the six people behind them, most were on phones, others sipped expensive lattes from Starbucks cups. Every few seconds, someone would glance upward to see what floor the car was currently on.

It had been up on the eighteenth floor, but was heading their way.

About ten seconds later, the doors parted.

The man and woman who’d been standing closest each took a step forward without looking up from their phones.

And went down.

There was no car.

Odds were, they might have survived. It was not as though they stepped into the shaft twenty floors up.

They plunged, but only as far as the basement. There was only one floor below the lobby level. There was no parking garage beneath the Gormley Building, so the elevator did not go any great distance below the street.

The shaft, however, did extend slightly farther than the basement level, into a pit that accommodated elevator servicing.

It was into this pit that the two people fell.

As they pitched forward through the open doorway, screams erupted from those directly behind them. No one else blindly followed them into the shaft.

Once the cries of “Oh my God!” and “Holy shit!” and “Fuck!” subsided, a casually dressed man with buds in his ears leaned into the opening and looked down. The two people were rag dolls, their arms and legs a twisted mess. The floor of the shaft was dirty, and the grimy cement walls were lined with cables and tracks.

The fallen man was struggling to move one of his arms. The woman could be heard moaning.

“They’re alive!” said the earbuds guy, glancing back at the others as he yanked on the wires that led up to his head. “Call 911!”

Someone with a phone in hand was already punching in the three numbers.

The man with the earbuds leaned back into the shaft and shouted down to the two injured people. “Help’s coming! Hang in there!”

A breathless uniformed security guard arrived, pushing his way through the onlookers until he got to the opening. “What’s going on? What’s happened?”

The earbud guy said, “Door opened, no car, they went straight in.”

The security guard’s eyes went wide. “Basement,” he said. “We can get closer to them if we open the elevator doors in the—”

And that was when they heard a mechanical noise. They both looked up.

What they saw was the bottom of the elevator car, which had been, all this time, sitting at the second floor.

It was now slowly moving in a downward direction.

“Fuck me,” said the security guard, backing out of the shaft and pulling the other man with him.

The car’s descent was bafflingly and maddeningly slow.

The base of the car had now moved below the top of the opening to the shaft. The inner doors of the elevator car were closed. While there was still a chance to see to the bottom, the earbud guy noticed that the fallen man had actually managed to get to his knees. He was leaning over the woman, checking on her.

As the car descended halfway past the opening, the security guard said, “Shit.” He reached over and hit the Up button, hoping that would halt the elevator’s progress, or at least make it come to a stop at the lobby level.

That way, rescue crews would still be able to reach the injured by way of the basement elevator door. All the security guard had to do was grab the special elevator key. All elevators had a small, peepholesized opening in the door into which the key could be inserted. Once turned, it would open the doors.