The Night Watcher

by Lutz, John

  Terror struck him like an ax and made his eyes bulge. His chest heaved, his heels hammered, and despite the headache he kept banging the back of his head against the floor. A voice said something he couldn’t understand. It might have been his own. Very cold liquid—Yes, my God, gasoline!—splashed over the length of his body. Some of it got in his eyes, though he’d clenched them shut.

  When he opened them he could barely see through the stinging blurriness that someone was standing near him, over him. He saw something dark mushroom above him, like an enormous bird spreading its wings, and it took him a few seconds to realize what it was. An umbrella!

  Kreiger stiffened his body and began to scream. The sound came out of his taped mouth as only a moan, but it ranted like an air horn inside his head, tried to escape through his ears, his nose. Not enough noise to be heard by anyone out there, though, he knew. He knew!

  The black umbrella was directly over him now. He tried to fix his eyes on it and lose himself in its blackness, be safe and unseen there as in shadow. The scream echoing inside his skull continued. Even through the pain he continued to scream. The pain and the scream became one, and was the last thing he experienced. It carried him like a dark bird into death.

  The Torcher backpedaled from the kitchen, then lowered the umbrella and tossed it half folded into a corner. As always there would be no fingerprints. Gloves would prevent them. Since it wasn’t raining outside, the umbrella, taken from Kreiger’s closet, might attract attention.

  The flames along the tablecloth edge were still high, though the sprinkler system, compartmentalized and confined to the kitchen, where the fire was, continued to spray water. Kreiger lay blackened and glistening like a huge rotted whale on the floor. He was still burning slightly, sizzling, actually, where the water hit.

  Look away! Time to leave, not too quickly.

  The dry coat slid over wet clothing. The boots were wet but wouldn’t be memorable; there was still plenty of snow and slush outside.

  Everything was as planned. The alarm system wired to the sprinklers had been easily neutralized. But soon the smoke, which the showers of water helped to create, would escape the apartment and cause an alarm to sound, or the smoke would be smelled or noticed by someone in the building.

  Already it was detectable out in the hall.

  Not in the elevator.

  There was no one even to notice the Torcher until the lobby. Half a dozen people were there, laughing and leaving together. On their way to dinner and a Broadway show, maybe. Living life, having fun.

  The Torcher joined them as they went out the glass doors into the maelstrom of the city, past the doorman who was looking the other direction anyway for a cab to hail for them. They would need two taxis, the Torcher thought. Busy doorman.

  Away. Walk slowly.

  The tone of the conversation and laughter, fading now, didn’t change.

  Into the dark. Alone.

  As water pressure dropped, the sprinklers in the Kreiger kitchen sputtered, then were reduced to emitting only a drizzle. Pockets of fat, what Gert sometimes called Kreiger’s love handles, were sizzling now like bacon. A spark jumped. Another. One landed on the bath towel lying on the floor near the inert Kreiger. Having been shielded by the umbrella, the thick terry cloth towel wasn’t so damp that it couldn’t hold the spark, nurture it to flame…slight at first, then larger.

  The single flame was joined by others, and they writhed and danced along the unfurled towel to the cooking island whose counter had acted like a roof and kept the cabinetry below it dry. The laminated-wood cabinet doors began to smoke, then glowed and flamed. Behind the cabinet doors, the flames found cleaning fluid, rags, a box of folded plastic wastebasket liners.

  It wasn’t long before the cooking island blazed, super-heating the gas in the stove’s lines to the burners until fumes found an opening and became flame that wove and twisted its way to the ceiling.

  The kitchen was sucking in air now from the rest of the rooms; the fire was in control and the fire had to breathe! It flattened itself and spread over the kitchen ceiling, blossoming out and down to attack more prey along the walls, the walls themselves. It was strong enough now to have a voice, a constant sibilant sigh that was becoming throatier and throatier. It would soon become a roar. The fire was strong enough now to leave the kitchen, to steal up on, then burst upon and devour whatever was in its path. It was feasting and craving and growing by the minute, by the second.

  It would soon be powerful enough to explore, to go where it chose, to claim what it needed.

  THIRTY

  In the living room alcove office of his co-op on the fifty-eighth floor of the Belmire Tower, Alan Warner was hunched over his computer keyboard. The alcove could be transformed into an office simply by opening the antique Victorian hutch Warner had paid someone to fashion into a workstation that contained his computer, printer, and fax machine, with space for a file cabinet and a few reference books.

  He was diligently working on chapter fifteen of his next book in his series of Guntrader western novels. Warner was prolific and had a strong story sense, and while he wasn’t a household name, his westerns sold well and had countless times been adapted for TV and the movies, making him a wealthy man. But he had to work hard to meet deadlines, and sometimes he felt as if he were running—or typing—in place. It was his habit to catnap during the days and work evenings, which was why he was seated now hard at his task while his wife Niki had gone to bed early to read.

  Warner, a middle-aged, stocky former Brooklynite who wore his dark hair long in back like his fictional western gunslingers, sat back from the computer and cursed. He was trapped in a box canyon. His main character, Max Dill, was under siege in a desolate ranch house surrounded by dozens of hired guns who’d been rustling horses and selling them to the U.S. Cavalry. Nobody other than the rustlers knew Max was there, and he was fast running out of ammunition.

  How the hell am I going to get him out of this? Warner asked himself. He didn’t want to have the cavalry ride in to the rescue; that didn’t quite compute, since they were the ones buying the horses.

  He sat back, waiting for an idea to hit him as they always did, and nodded off, maybe for only a few seconds.

  He came awake smelling something burning, and thought at first the rustlers had set fire to the ranch house in an effort to flush out Max Dill.

  Then he realized he was staring at his computer monitor and had dozed off. But he hadn’t slept very long, because there were no wild mustangs galloping across the monitor; the screen saver hadn’t come on. So he’d been dreaming.

  Wait a minute. He could still smell something burning. From the apartment below, he’d bet. Gertrude Kreiger attempting to cook again. Warner had an eye for female beauty and appreciated Gert Kreiger, but cooking wasn’t part of the repertoire he imagined her to possess. Cooking ability wasn’t something a woman like her needed, especially married to that rich sidewinder husband of hers, Otto. Warner’s dislike for Otto Kreiger fell short of hate because of the time he’d found a statement from Otto’s brokerage firm stuck to the inside of the incinerator shaft. Obviously it had escaped from Otto’s trash during its plunge to the basement and fiery destruction. It listed all of Otto’s stocks. Warner had taken the statement to his apartment, researched some of the stocks, and bought them. He’d more than doubled his money in three months, then sold the stocks and bought a two-year-old Mercedes 500SL. Thanks, Otto.

  “What’s going on?” Niki asked behind him.

  Warner turned to see his attractive blond wife—attractive enough, he thought, to maybe someday play the rancher’s daughter in a Max Dill movie—standing outside the open bedroom door. Sexy, he thought. Maybe the cavalry would work after all and he could finish this chapter, then…

  “Alan?”

  “Oh! Wrong? I dunno. Gertrude trying to cook again downstairs, I think.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Maybe Otto’s boiling something alive.”

>   “That’s possible.”

  “Want me to knock on his door and draw down on the consarned varmint?”

  “Only in one of your novels, hon. I couldn’t sleep. It’s too hot in the bedroom. I’m gonna turn down the thermostat a notch.”

  “Okay. I’ll open the hall door to get a little cool air.”

  Warner crossed the room to open the door.

  When his fingers touched the brass doorknob, he drew back his hand. The knob was hot. No, only warm. He touched it again, leaving his hand on it this time. What the hell?…

  “Alan,” his wife said behind him.

  “The doorknob’s warm.”

  He pressed the flat of his hand to the door’s wood surface. It, too, was warm.

  “Alan, maybe you better not—”

  But Warner, curious, had turned the knob and opened the door.

  The fire was waiting for him.

  Had him!

  He turned and tried to run. But the fire was beyond him, behind him, had rushed into the apartment like a hot and roaring hurricane.

  As the pain bent him over and his vision went, he saw the flames leap for the hem of his wife’s nightgown.

  “Alan!”

  He tried to take a step toward her but the fire was everywhere and everything.

  Stack and Rica could smell the smoke even on the other side of Manhattan. As they were halfway to the scene of the fire, the lighted windows in the upper floors of tall buildings faded, then became invisible. There was a dark pall over the city, blotting out the night sky and hanging low enough to sting the eyes and leave an unpleasant taste of ash on the tongue. When the unmarked reached the Upper East Side, its headlight beams were visible in the lowering haze.

  The street was blocked off, and Stack and Rica had to show ID, then proceed on foot. They made their way through a maze of emergency vehicles. Hoses and feeder cords lay in a network on soaked and ice-glazed pavement. An FDNY vehicle was nearby, its aerial ladder disappearing in the haze only about three stories up. A pumper was parked next to the ladder truck. Was there actually a firefighter up on that ladder, directing water into the flames? Sirens howled like wolves as ambulances carried victims away. Strangely, there wasn’t much shouting. By now, everyone was exhausted.

  Beyond police barricades, people in heavy coats, some of them wearing house slippers, stood and stared vacant-eyed at the building they’d called home. A few of them were seated on the curb, sobbing or simply staring, being attended to by family or neighbors. A blond woman wearing nothing but a thin nightgown sat in a parked squad car, looking straight ahead, tears streaming down her cheeks and reflecting in the eerie red and blue roof-bar lights playing over the scene.

  “Those people on the sidewalk,” Rica said, “they remind me of those old films from World War Two when the German army rousted people from their homes in the Warsaw ghetto.”

  “Different kind of war,” Stack said, “but war nonetheless.” He could hardly believe what he was seeing. On their right were rows of formless shapes beneath blankets on the wet sidewalk. He knew they were corpses. There weren’t enough body bags.

  “Christ!” Rica said. She’d seen the blanketed forms, too. She crossed herself. It was the first time Stack had seen that, though he’d heard she was Catholic.

  A tall form in boots and a rubber slicker strode toward them. He had on a firefighter’s helmet and what looked like an inhalator slung around his neck. He got closer, removed the helmet, and used both sides of his wrist to wipe some of the soot off his face. Ernest Fagin. His eyes were haunted. He was breathing hard.

  “What the fuck happened?” Stack asked.

  “C’mon over here,” Fagin said. “Gotta sit down.”

  They walked to the curb, between a parked squad car and a sedan with a roof light and an FDNY plaque on its lowered sun visor. Fagin slumped down on the curb, not minding that it was wet and that water flowed over his booted toes toward a storm sewer.

  “Fire on the fifty-seventh floor. It burned for a while before we were notified; then traffic held us up. Goddamn people don’t move over for sirens anymore!”

  “It looks like a modern building,” Rica said, glancing in the direction of the still blazing fire that was a dim glow overhead in the haze.

  “It is. That became a problem, especially with our slow response time. The building’s vented for air-conditioning, and we didn’t get the call soon enough to use our blitz tactics. The place is equipped with a sprinkler system, but it hadn’t been checked for a while and didn’t maintain pressure. The more water it sprayed, the weaker the pressure became, until finally it was a trickle. What it did was slow the fire, dampen everything, and increase the smoke.”

  “Are the elevators working?” Rica asked.

  “Hell, no. In about a third of major high-rise fires, they fail to operate. Fire, heat or water damage cause electrical failures. This is one of that third. We got here, and the elevators shafts were like chimneys; we had to ascend by foot up the fire stairs, lugging most of our equipment on our backs.”

  “I thought the floors in these buildings were more or less sealed off from each other,” Stack said. “Built with flame-retardant material.”

  “The building is classified as fire-resistive,” Fagin said. “But that’s not the same as nonflammable. Still, it might have been enough.”

  Rica squatted down next to Fagin. “Except for…?”

  “Tragedy number two,” Fagin said, “after the sprinkler system failed. The butterfly valves in the air-conditioning shafts and ducts were supposed to close automatically if smoke was detected, or above a certain temperature. They didn’t work. Maybe the wiring had burned through and shorted out, maybe this, maybe that…. Thing is, they didn’t close, and the fire traveled up through the ductwork. The smoke traveled up and down. Most of our fatalities are from smoke inhalation.”

  Stack stared at him. “I didn’t think smoke traveled down.”

  “These modern high-rises have tightly sealed windows and doors. You need keys to open the doors, and most of the windows don’t open at all.”

  “So once the fire stairs and elevator shafts are full of smoke, people are trapped,” Rica said.

  “It’s not only that,” Fagin said glumly. “Like Stack said, smoke does rise. But once it reaches the top floor, it’s got no way to go in these sealed buildings except to start spreading down.” He glanced up at Stack. “You won’t like what it’s called: the Stack Effect. Because the variance in outside and inside temperatures of a sealed building cause differences in pressure, the smoke and heat are moved fast—up or down. The building becomes in effect a giant smoke stack. Imagine what happens when you cap a smokestack.”

  “Didn’t people break out some of the windows?” Rica asked. “Give the smoke a place to go?”

  “Sure,” Fagin said. “We broke out some of the windows to get streams of water to the fire from high floors of adjacent buildings, trying to contain it. But you break windows and you create drafts and feed the fire oxygen. That’s what fire lives on, oxygen.” He glared upward fiercely as if at an enemy who’d defeated him. “As long as we can’t get to it with water and foam, it burns until it runs out of oxygen and flammable material. Until most of the building is a shell.”

  “Is it too early to know how it started?” Stack asked.

  “Yeah. But we have an idea what unit it started in. From the early calls. Up on the fifty-seventh floor. Belongs to someone named Kreiger.”

  Stack shook his head.

  “Doesn’t register,” Rica said.

  Fagin shifted his lanky body forward to get his feet centered beneath his weight. “Could be the work of your guy,” Fagin told her, hauling himself to a standing position.

  “I hope not,” Rica said. “I hope some human being didn’t cause this.”

  Fagin shook water from his helmet and placed it back on his head. “I better get back. I’ll let you know more when I find out more.”

  Stack and Rica nodded to him, then st
ood and watched him negotiate the slippery, littered street. Back toward the fire.

  Like a moth, Stack thought inanely. Or maybe not so inanely. Maybe there really was an analogy.

  “Whaddya think?” Rica asked.

  “I think we oughta get outta the way,” Stack said.

  As they walked around the police barricades on their way back to the unmarked, a frenetic redheaded woman was arguing with one of the uniforms, trying to get through. She would have been attractive if her face hadn’t been screwed up with rage and fear, her hair wild from wind and her wrestling with the cop who was restraining her.

  “I goddamn live there!” she screamed, trying to get at the cop’s eyes with long red fingernails. “My husband might be in there!”

  “I got somebody checking the tenants list, ma’am.” The cop was nifty with his hands, fending her off without hurting her. Must be like fighting with an eagle, Rica thought.

  “Fuck the tenant’s list! I’m a tenant! Kreiger! Find Kreiger on your damned list!”

  Stack and Rica glanced at each other.

  “There’ll be a better time to talk with her,” Stack said. “Fagin’s information might not be correct.” He hoped it wasn’t. He felt like clutching the woman to him, hugging her tight, telling her how sorry he was for her.

  That was probably how the cop felt, too, only he had to protect his eyes.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Fagin came by the precinct to listen to the 911 tape with Stack and Rica in O’Reilly’s office:

  “Near Second Avenue and East Fifty-first, the Belmire Tower, there’s a fire on the fifty-seventh floor.”

  “Could you give me your—hello! Hello!”

  But the caller had abruptly hung up.

  O’Reilly ignored Stack and Rica and looked at Fagin. “Sounds like some asshole fartin’ through a fan blade.”

  “Not much help, I guess,” Fagin admitted.

  “Lab might be able to bring something up,” Stack said.