The Night Watcher. John Lutz

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СКАЧАТЬ sole or heel made a scuffing sound, ever so softly, on the tile floor. Someone moving beyond the top of his head, beyond his vision. He tried with little success to turn his head, rolling his eyes, as he attempted to see whoever was there. But he couldn’t. They remained just outside his field of vision. And now there was a strong smell, familiar, almost like gasoline.

      Gasoline!

      The doctor screamed against the tape over his mouth and his entire body vibrated so that his heels hammered on the tiles. Cool liquid splashed on the floor near him, then on his shoulders and chest. Into his eyes so that they stung. An instant before he had to clench his eyes tightly shut, he saw a wavering dark form looming above him, holding an object, a container. More of the cool liquid splashed on his stomach, his pelvic area, his thighs, and down his legs. He felt the coolness in his crotch, then beneath his buttocks. For God’s sake!…

      He smelled smoke!

      Smelled fire!

      At first the sensation in his legs and sweeping up his body was incredibly cold. He was reminded of the time years ago when as a child he’d fallen through the ice in the shallow lake behind the house. His mother—

      Then came the heat. The pain! Even through his panic he knew enough to hold his breath as long as he could. Minutes! Hours! Sharon!

      The air trapped in his lungs rushed from him in a hopeless sob.

      He sucked in the pain! It entered him like a demon. The world was pain that would never end! He was choking! Either the floor was moving violently beneath him or he was writhing on it.

      My God! Sharon! Help me! Mother!

      Then he was floating through the pain. Into darkness as something in his chest exploded over and over again. He wondered if it would ever stop exploding.

      Into darkness…

      Dr. Lucette hadn’t been a heavy man, but once the fat in his thighs caught, he burned well. As in more than a few prewar New York buildings, the apartment wasn’t supplied with a universal sprinkler system, and he continued to burn. He wouldn’t need any further attention.

      “I’m really sorry about this,” Sharon Lucette told Bonnie, her pedicurist, down in Shear Ecstasy off the lobby, “but cherry red looks more like vampire red to me. It’s my fault. I thought I wanted it but when I looked at it, Yech! Don’t hate me, okay?”

      “It doesn’t matter,” Bonnie said. She wouldn’t even think of hating anyone who tipped as well as Sharon. “It was only one foot and it’s no trouble to paint over it.” She adroitly dipped her small pointed brush into the new shade of enamel.

      “Apple red,” Sharon said, smiling down at her left big toe. “Much, much better!”

      On the fortieth floor, the flames greedily consuming Dr. Lucette’s foot sent out an exploring tendril, found the rubber kick plate beneath the sink cabinet, then snaked up a dish towel draped over a steel ring inside a wooden door. A few minutes later a slender tongue of flame emerged from the top of the cabinet door and cautiously tasted the glue where counter met cabinet, found it to its liking, and followed the bead of adhesive beneath the countertop to the corner, flicked out, and sampled the wallpaper seam where the paper had separated and protruded because of long exposure to dishwasher heat. It traveled up the thin edge of wallpaper…found the roll of paper towels and devoured it.

      Found the drapes.

      THIRTEEN

      The dark form that was settled in the shadows beneath the trees in Central Park had a clear view of the fifty-first-floor apartment window in the Pierpont Building. Made visible from the park by the contours of the New York skyline, the window was four blocks away, but brought much closer by powerful binoculars. Flimsy blinds or curtains appeared to be closed, and there was no lamp glowing on the other side of the high window, so patience was required.

      It was good that there was a breeze coursing through the park, even if it was a cold one. The stench of the dead doctor still clung to clothes and to porous flesh itself. The breeze would carry the odor of death throughout the city. People would breathe it in and not know, or choose to know—

      Ah! The figure beneath the shadows sat straighter, peering intently through the binoculars.

      There was a light now in Myra Raven’s apartment window.

      In a moment a shadow passed across the curtains; then only light remained. Hers was the only window glowing near that corner of the building.

      The figure in the park lowered the binoculars, then jotted something down with a pen on a folded sheet of white paper.

      Even without the binoculars, the window was now easily visible from the park. Against the black wall of the building it was like a fiery star burning against a night sky.

      Or like a blazing eye high above the city, gazing back at the watcher.

      “You Stack?” The tall guy in the FDNY uniform looked at Stack with a mixture of awe and curiosity, as if he’d recognized a movie star on the street but couldn’t be sure.

      Stack said he was Stack.

      “Lieutenant Ernest Fagin, FDNY Arson.” Fagin stuck out his hand.

      “This is my partner, Sergeant Lopez,” Stack said, causing Fagin to look at Rica for the first time. He shook her hand and smiled at her, trying to make up for bad manners. Give him that. He was young and gangly and looked like Abe Lincoln might have as a teenager without the beard.

      They were standing in the middle of Dr. Ronald Lucette’s living room on the fortieth floor of the Bennick Tower. The place was a blackened, waterlogged mess except for near the door where the flames hadn’t reached. The stench of burned carpet, wood, upholstery, and flesh was acrid and overpowering.

      “Was the fire confined to this apartment?” Stack asked.

      “This apartment and part of the adjacent one on the other side of the east wall,” Fagin said. “This could have been one hell of a fire. Traffic wasn’t bad for a change, and we got to it in a hurry.”

      “I thought you guys didn’t have the equipment to fight fires this high,” Rica said.

      “We don’t have enough to do it from the outside. That’s why response time’s so important. We get to a high-rise early enough to use the elevator or stairs, and we blitz it and get it under control. We don’t manage that, we can still sometimes outsmart the fire and contain the damage.”

      “Outsmart the fire?”

      “Yeah, we hook up to a standpipe. Should be one on each landing, along with a coiled two-and-a-half-inch-diameter hose, sometimes in a cabinet. Then we pay out the hose and at least manage to contain the fire. But it’s a battle of wits, because there’s only so much pressure that way, so much water, and sometimes the standpipe systems fail. A bad fire, we sometimes direct streams of water from nearby windows of other buildings, using their standpipe systems. But if the flames get a chance to take hold and find plenty of fuel, they block fire exits and short out electrical lines so elevators are inoperable. Then the fire has us pretty much at its mercy.”

      It interested Rica that this guy talked about fire as if it had a СКАЧАТЬ