by Earl Emerson
When he stepped through the door onto sixty-four, he could see the rooms were absorbing heat and poisons from the fire below through the ductwork and pipe chases. This would be the next floor to explode into flame. Even so, he could see here more clearly than on the stairs.
Marion Balitnikoff stood facing him, an open Buck knife with a four-inch blade in his left hand. No gun in sight. He weighed in at two-fifty, was quicker than a cat in a dog fight, and had a keen little smile on his face that he reserved for situations such as this. It occurred to Finney that he’d never been in a fight as an adult. By all reports, including his own, Balitnikoff had been in dozens of brawls over the years.
Finney stepped forward with the Halligan bar raised over his head. Balitnikoff feinted, then forced Finney back, then feinted again. Even with all that equipment on, the knife blade moved with surprising swiftness.
Careful not to place himself in a position where Balitnikoff would step inside his swings and gut him, Finney swung the heavy bar. He missed. He swung and missed again, the bar whirring in the air. Balitnikoff flicked the blade at him and cut a banana-shaped wedge out of the Nomex shell on his shoulder.
As they fought, Finney began to think about all those sleepless nights he’d endured. He thought about Annie Sortland and her burns and rictus teeth, about Gary Sadler saving his life and then dying in the smoke. He thought about the dead waiters and waitresses in the freight elevator. He thought about Spritzer, the firefighter who’d fallen into the street outside, and the woman who’d fallen beside him. About the corpses they’d found in the stairwell. He thought about Bill Cordifis, and as he thought about these things a rage welled up in him.
Stepping forward, he swung right-to-left and then left-to-right, using his arms as if the heavy bar were a kayak paddle. He swung again and again.
Stunned by the rapidity of the assault and the fact that Finney was swinging from both directions, Balitnikoff began edging backward. In the middle of his assault, Finney recognized Balitnikoff’s strategy for what it was, an old Muhammad Ali ploy—the rope-a-dope: let the other guy punch himself out. It would work only as long as he could evade Finney’s blows or absorb the punishment, and only if Finney actually wore himself out.
Working like a farmer with a scythe, he forced Balitnikoff back a step at a time until the bottle on his back butted up against the wall with a melodic clank. Then, before he could get his bearings, Finney stepped in and hit him in the left shoulder, the right hip, left shoulder, right shoulder. Finney fought as if possessed. With all the equipment Balitnikoff was wearing, no single blow was going to bring him down.
He hit Balitnikoff across the side of the helmet, knocking it half-off and cracking the lens on the MSA facepiece. When he connected with Balitnikoff’s forearm, the knife flew off and skidded across the floor.
Weaponless, Balitnikoff bulled forward and grabbed Finney around the shoulders. Face-to-face now, they danced a cumbersome dance. Clean air blew out the sides of Balitnikoff’s dislodged facepiece. Arm-weary, Finney struggled in Balitnikoff’s powerful grasp, managing only to twist around so that they were facing the same direction, his back to Balitnikoff’s chest, the larger man’s arms encircling him from behind. It was a mistake, because in a matter of seconds Balitnikoff maneuvered the crook of one arm around Finney’s throat and began choking him.
Like a pair of mating monsters, they staggered backward out of the room and crashed through a hollow-core door into one of the tenant areas. Finney, seeing stars and streaks of light in front of his eyes, knew he was beginning to black out.
He pushed the larger man off balance, forcing him backward. When he heard Balitnikoff’s composite air tank clank against a window, the sound of the cylinder on the pane solid and heavy, for a split second he thought the glass would break and they would catapult into the street, but these windows didn’t break that easily. The ones without the white dots didn’t break at all.
Finney had only seconds. He pushed with every ounce of strength, but all he accomplished was to run Balitnikoff along the surface of the glass from one side to the other. He still had the Halligan in his hands. He swung hard between his own legs, thinking to hit a leg. Instead, the sound of shattering glass startled him, small plates falling onto the floor, others disappearing silently outside.
Balitnikoff whispered, “Oh, shit!” His grip loosened.
Their combined weight had been pushing hard against the glass when the Halligan cracked it. Balitnikoff had his heels firmly up against the window base and was now holding onto Finney in order to maintain his balance. He might have stepped forward, but the heels of Finney’s boots were against the toes of Balitnikoff’s, locking his feet in place.
Now Finney swung the Halligan hard over his head and down, digging the pick into the surface of a nearby desk as they teetered for a moment, and then Balitnikoff began sliding backward, his feet inside the broken window, his body and rump out. As much as he tried to right himself by pulling on Finney, he continued to drop. His grip had slipped, so that now he was grasping the tail of Finney’s coat and his backpack. Finney couldn’t tell if he was trying to climb back in or take Finney with him.
Finney held tightly onto the Halligan, which he’d buried in the desk.
Balitnikoff, Finney, and the desk all began to slide toward the open window. Only Balitnikoff’s ankles and wrists were inside now.
“Help me,” Balitnikoff said, his words brushed smooth by the hissing from his displaced facepiece. “Help!” There wasn’t anything Finney could do but hold onto the steel bar with all his might.
When the tugging stopped, he turned his head in time to glimpse the soles of Balitnikoff’s boots as they rolled backward out of the building, the only sound the whispering of his facepiece as his body merged with the mist.
Finney peered over the lip of the open window in time to hear the body land in the street below. The composite air cylinder exploded.
Diana’s MSA cylinder had only six hundred pounds of air left, barely enough to get her back to sixty. She was finding that the lower she went in the building, the longer it had been since the fire had touched a floor, the more tenable that floor was. Sixty was dicey. Fifty-nine iffy. But fifty-eight was definitely inhabitable despite sparking wires in the ceiling.
She’d failed to contact Finney by radio and believed he was probably with the rescue team and in the process of getting a full air bottle. She certainly couldn’t squander any more of her air waiting for him.
Fifty-seven had so many missing windows she was able to conserve air by turning off her waist regulator. Midway through her exploration of the floor, she spotted a man dragging a large canvas package out of one of the elevators.
He wore a bunking coat and helmet with civilian trousers, along with a mask in stand-by position. It was G. A. Montgomery. When he looked up, she saw nothing but his smile.
“The elevators are working?” she asked.
“Just this one. I have to get this out, though.”
Helping him slide the heavy canvas-clad lump out of the elevator, she said, “Looks like a department tarp.”
“Am I ever glad to see you. We’ve been looking all over for you guys. Have you seen what the fire’s done to these floors? This is incredible.”
“I didn’t think the elevators were working,” Diana said. “If they are, we have a lot of people upstairs who need help.”
“I don’t know how dependable it is. I only just found it.”
“And you came up without full bunkers? Bring anybody with you?”
G. A. looked around. “They were here a minute ago.”
Waving her flashlight along the burned carpets so they could both step safely through the debris, Diana surveyed the floor. She noticed the doors on a second elevator were propped open, a gaping black hole showing—the elevator car was not on this floor. Before she could turn around to address G. A., a loop, possibly a section of curtain cord, dropped around her neck from behind. “Hey,” she said, as the cord tightened.
“Hey. Cut it out.” She grabbed the cord and managed to get a glove under it before it tightened fully.
G. A. pulled the cord taut and then placed one of his feet between hers, jerking on her neck and tripping her like a cowboy roping a calf. Without realizing how it happened, she was on the floor on her hip. Oh, God, she thought. He’s one of them. He began dragging her across the floor by the cord. It took her a few moments to realize he was dragging her toward the elevator shaft.
“What the hell are you doing?” she gasped. “Are you crazy?”
Her free hand grasped frantically at the floor, but there were no handholds. She grabbed at the wall and caught a feeble purchase on the corner molding next to the elevator doors. They were at the shaft opening now, and she could hear the sounds of their movements echoing in the elevator well. She was on her back, digging in with her boots, anything to slow her momentum.
Pinpricks of white light had been rotating behind her eyes, but now they began to turn to large black circles. She could feel the deep, open space under her head and neck. Of necessity, he had loosened the cord and was pushing instead of pulling. One of her shoulders was now beyond the lip of the opening. Another few seconds and she would be falling.
Finney walked down to the next landing and felt around on the floor for the pistol Balitnikoff had dropped. He hadn’t encountered either of the Lazenbys since he threw them down the stairs and had no idea where they were now. As he swept his gloved hands around on the floor for the gun, he touched a pair of boots and realized there was a man standing in front of him. He rose to find the dim outline of his brother, Tony, a battle lantern in one hand, the missing pistol in the other. He was still wearing a facepiece and breathing bottled air. “What are you doing with these guys, Tony?”
“Get out of here, John. Leave the building. Go away and don’t come back.”
“I can’t leave. There are people in trouble.”
“Get out or—”
“Or what? You going to shoot your own brother?”
“John . . .”
“Give me the gun, Tony.”
“I can’t.”
“Shoot me or give me the gun. I’m not giving you any other choices.”
“Damn you, John.”
“I’ve been damned for a while. You want to see what it’s like, pull that trigger.”
Tony raised the pistol to his brother’s face and held it. After a moment, his arm began shaking. Then his shoulders slumped and the gun skittered down the stairs. “Ah, shit! The whole thing just ran away with us.”
“Where are the others?”
“Mike has a dislocated shoulder. You broke Paul’s leg. I don’t know where Marion went. There’s no one else up here.”
Diana was almost to the juncture where her own body weight would carry her into the shaft. She’d kicked him two times in the face and blood was gushing out his nose, but it didn’t seem to faze him. He continued to push and shove like a man putting garbage down a chute.
Then she heard a familiar voice say, “You sonofabitch!” Immediately the pressure against her hips ceased. She heard scuffling as she balanced on the brink of the shaft, uncertain whether she was going in or not. After some moments of flailing, she managed to touch the wall inside the shaft where she found a metal flange that gave her enough purchase to slowly stop her teetering and lever herself out. She propped her back against the wall, stripped the cord off her neck, and tried to move air into her lungs. Her throat was swollen, her face itchy with what felt like needle pricks.
G. A. was making almost no headway against the intruder, even though, legs pumping, he was shoving with all his strength and weight.
Finney wasn’t wearing a bottle, his sooty face and shoulder dappled with blood from G. A.’s nose.
Finney walked G. A. backward, the two performing a strange, lethal dance, until they were standing next to the exposed elevator shaft. As Diana watched, G. A. pulled a small automatic pistol out of his pocket. She tried to shout a warning, but couldn’t get any sound out of her swollen throat before G. A. fired a single round into the center of Finney’s coat.
It didn’t seem to affect him. At the sound of the shot, Finney gripped G. A. by the lapels and whirled him out from the wall, spinning him around the room in a circle, like a man playing with a child, until the centrifugal force brought G. A. back around and slammed him into the raised edge of the floor of the elevator. Striking his rib cage and arm with a dull cracking sound, G. A.’s legs collapsed and he slipped, his legs disappearing into the shaft.
As gravity slowly inhaled G. A., Finney stood over him, his soot-streaked face dispassionate. Without meeting Finney’s eyes, G. A. slipped to the lip of the hole. Diana wanted to tell him to let go of the pistol—if he let go he might be able to hold on—but she still couldn’t get any words out.
“Why?” Finney asked. “Why did you guys do this?”
“You’d never understand,” G. A. gasped.
“Try me.”
“Why bother? You’re a loser.”
Locking eyes with Finney, G. A. slowly raised the gun for one last shot, a shot he was certain he could manage, just as he’d always been certain about everything else in his life. Finney didn’t bother to move out of the line of the pistol. He’d taken a bullet to his gut and didn’t feel like moving. Besides, he had it two to one against G. A. getting off the shot. He was right. Instead of pulling the trigger, G. A. slipped into the hole. On the way down they could hear him screaming, “Aw, shit!”
When he hit bottom, the ugly thump came back simultaneously with a hollow-sounding gunshot, as if his finger had reflexively jerked the trigger.
“Am I ever glad to see you,” whispered Diana, hoarsely.
“You okay?”
“I think so.”
“He was trying to throw you down the shaft.”
“It was the damndest thing.”
The door from stairwell B opened, and four men wearing MSAs and full bunkers entered in a whirl of smoke, their helmet shields identifying them as crew members from Ladder 7. They carried spare bottles and rope bags. The door opened again, and four more firefighters appeared.
“You the ones set up the rope system?” the officer asked.
“We are,” Diana whispered.
“Is it working?”
“So far.”
“Can you show us what you’ve done?” asked the officer.
“Maybe she can,” said Finney, backing against the wall where he slowly lowered himself to the floor. “I have to take myself out of service here.”
When they opened his coat, his T-shirt was soaked with blood from his navel down. The bullet had gone in at an angle, had zipped around the outside of his rib cage so that, using their fingertips, they located it just under the skin near his spine.
“What the hell happened?” asked the officer.
“It’s a long story.”
“Where did you guys come from?” Diana asked.
“Reese got this great idea of using ropes in the elevator shafts. The stairs cleared a little bit, so we came up to try it.”
77. A PAIR OF FEET UNDER A BLANKET
As they reclined in lounge chairs on the deck atop Finney’s houseboat, the late autumn sun glinted off Lake Union; boat traffic paraded across the surface of the lake like colored geegaws in a shooting gallery.
Diana doing the lion’s share of the work, they’d kayaked all morning in the double sea kayak, up the Montlake Cut to Lake Washington, past the razzle-dazzle homes and condos on Lake Washington Boulevard, and then along the lee side of the new floating bridge. They’d tied up at the sailing club at Leschi and lunched, then paddled back to Lake Union.
Their leisurely day was to have been capped off with a medal ceremony at the Seattle Center, a commemoration of heroes at the Columbia Tower that Finney had, at the last minute, decided to boycott for reasons he could not explain.
Diana and Finney were sitting in deck chairs so they could absorb the sunshine and watch the sailboats w
hile they listened to the football game at nearby Husky Stadium on a portable radio, the announcers occasionally drowned out by the drone of a seaplane dropping down onto the water. In order to keep them warm, Diana had tucked her stocking feet into a provocative nook under the blanket in Finney’s lap.
They were both still on disability leave, and she had spent the last week at his place, returning home only to pick up fresh clothes, check messages, and water her mother’s houseplants. “What’s the score?” he asked.
“You just asked. Twenty-seven ten. Sure you don’t want to go to that ceremony?”
“When I think about medals, all I can see is that plaque over Reese’s desk.”
“If you’re not going, I’m not going.”
“That’s silly. Go ahead.”
“Not this time.”
After a minute or two, Diana said, “Rumor has it, when you get back from disability, Smith is going to make you a lieutenant.” Smith had been appointed interim chief of the department following Charles Reese’s abrupt resignation.
“That would be nice.”
“Is that all? Nice.”
“Yeah.”
Once Reese had staffed the upper floors of the Columbia Tower with truckmen, it had been a relatively simple, though time-consuming, process to evacuate the last of the wedding party out of the tower. Since Oscar Stillman was no longer available to manipulate the air pressurization system, the stairs had become passable first for firefighters and later for civilians.
The morning after the fire nineteen firefighters were sent to the hospital suffering burns or smoke inhalation. Finney was treated for burns, cuts, a gunshot wound, smoke inhalation, and a chipped tooth he’d incurred during his scuffle with Balitnikoff.
For twenty hours the fire raged, and after it was tapped, the Columbia Tower had a distinct tilt to it. One local newspaper columnist proposed that it be left that way and transformed into a tourist attraction.
During the fire Jerry Monahan gave a rambling confession to the medics who were treating his broken leg. He wanted to come clean in time for somebody to stop Balitnikoff, Tony, and the Lazenbys from killing Finney and his friends. Monahan didn’t seem to mind murdering two hundred strangers, but losing three people he knew bothered him no end, especially after having suffered guiltily through Gary Sadler’s emotional funeral a few days earlier. He’d admitted the Lazenby brothers had been inside the Bowman Pork fire giving bad directions to Sadler and Finney, that they’d taken an unconscious Sadler back into the building after Finney had carried him out.