Hell's Kitchen

One woman in a frenzy of panic flung open the door of her room and with the in-rush of oxygen an explosion engulfed her. The last scream she uttered wasn’t a human sound at all but a burst of flame popping from her mouth.

One man fled from searing wall of flames and hurtled through a fifth-floor window. He cartwheeled elegantly in silence to the roof of a yellow taxi below. The glass in the cab’s six windows turned instantly opaque as if coated with winter frost.

Another man stepped onto a fire escape so heated by flames that the metal rods of the stairs melted through his ru

In rooms on the higher floors some of the guests believed they were safe from the fire itself; they noticed only a faint haze of smoke around them. They calmly read the in-case-of-emergency cards and, as those reassuring words instructed, soaked washclothes and held them over their faces. Then they sat down calmly on the floor to wait for help and died peacefully in the sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning.

In the lobby, there was another flash-over. A sofa exploded in orange fire. So did the body of a tourist, lying on the carpet. He contracted into the pugilistic attitude – knees drawn up, fists clenched and arms bent at the elbows. In front of him a Pepsi machine melted and exploding soda cans shot through the lobby, the contents turning to steam before the aluminum hit the floor.

So

The NYFD trucks began to roll up. So

Fatalities already.

But he knew that.

The apparatus kept arriving. Dozens of Seagrave and Mack fire trucks and engines and ladders. Some red, some Day-Glo yellow-green. Intersection horns blaring harshly. Ambulances. Police cars, marked and unmarked. Men and women in heat-proof gear, with air tanks and masks, hurried into the conflagration. More ambulances. More police. Lights and noise, cascades of water. Steam everywhere, like ghosts of the dead. Cars parked illegally were hacked open to make paths for the hoses.

Crowds filled the streets, looters sized up the risk.

The hotel became a storm of orange flame, towering up to the eighth-floor penthouse.

When the flames were largely under control the EMS medics started bringing out the bodies. Some were cyanotic – bluish-tinted due to lack of oxygen. Some were red as lobsters from the flames and heat. Some were charcoal colored and bore no resemblance whatsoever to the human beings they had once been.

More windows burst outward. Slivers of black glass rained to the street as rooster tails of water rose from the huge nozzles and converged on the weakening flames, turning to scalding steam.

So

He watched it all until, finally, finally, he saw what he’d been waiting for.

His mother had told So

So

Now, in the smokey chaos of the dying Eagleton hotel, So

Gasping for breath, staring at the building, the young man leaned against a lamppost. Probably thinking what people always thought at times like that: I could’ve been trapped in there. I could’ve died in there. I -

“True, you little faggot,” So

Alex spun around. “You… I…”

“What does that mean?” So

Ski

“Like, listen!”

So

Pellam, breathless from ru

Oh, no. No…

The hotel was gone. You could see sky through some of the windows of the upper stories and gray brown smoke flowed from the dead heart of the building. He said to a passing EMS technician, round man with a sweaty, soot-stained face, “I’m looking for a teenager. A blond kid. Ski

The weary technician said, “Sorry, mister. I didn’t treat anyone like that. But we got eight BBRs.”

Pellam shook his head.

The tech explained. “ ‘Burned beyond recognition.’ ”

Walking through the numb crowds, Pellam asked about the boy. Somebody thought he might have seen the young man climb down the fire escape but he couldn’t be sure. Somebody else, a tourist, asked him to take his picture in front of the building and held out his Nikon. Pellam stared in silent disbelief and walked on.

Closer to the building he stepped away from the crowd and nearly ran into Fire Marshal Lomax. The marshal glanced at Pellam and didn’t say a word. His eyes returned to four bodies lying on the ground, arms and legs drawn up in the pugilistic pose. They were loosely covered with sheets. His radio crackled and he spoke into his Handi-Talkie. “Battalion commander has advised fire is knocked down as of eighteen hundred hours.”

“Say again, Marshal Two-five-eight.”

Lomax repeated the message then added, “Appears to be suspicious origin. Get the crime scene buses down here.”

“That’s a roger, Marshal Two-five-eight.”

He put the radio back in his belt. A rumpled man in general, he was now a mess. Shirt soot-stained, drenched in sweat, slacks torn. There was a gash on his forehead. He pulled on latex gloves, bent down and tossed the sheet off one of the victims, searched the horrible corpse; Pellam had to look away. Without glancing up, Lomax said in a calm voice, “Let me tell you a story, Mr. Lucky.”

“I-”

“Few years ago I was working in the Bronx. There was this club on Southern Boulevard, social club. You know what a social club is, right? Just a place for people to hang out. Drink, dance. The name of the place was Happy Land. One night there was maybe a hundred people inside, having a good time. It was a Honduran neighborhood. They were good people. Working people. No drugs, no guns. Just people… having a good time.”

Pellam said nothing. His eyes dipped to the macabre spectacle of the corpse. He tried to look away but couldn’t.

“There was this guy,” Lomax said in his eerie, dead voice, “who’d been going out with the coat-check girl and she’d dumped him. He got drunk and went out and bought a buck’s worth of gas, came back and just poured it in the lobby, lit it and went home. Just like that: set a fire and went home. I don’t know, maybe to watch TV. Maybe have some di