Colleen entered the plant quietly, and just as quietly, pulled the gate shut behind her. The debris-strewn lot resembled a lunar landscape in the moonlight.
She stopped, cocked an ear.
Voices. Echoing from inside the warehouse.
She stepped through bricks and rubble carefully in her new platform shoes, over to one of the big industrial windows, where she rubbed the heel of a fist in the grime coating a pane. Peered through.
There, in the dimness, the moving beam of a flashlight.
Run upstairs, call the police? How long would that take? Maybe it was just some punks, screwing around.
The beam of light shifted, followed by a scrape of wood. A pallet. A man speaking: Put it over there. He sounded older, not like a teenager.
She’d check things out discreetly, call the cops if need be. She took a deep breath and headed to the other side of the plant, the old employee’s entrance, opposite the side to the stairs to the office. She stopped at a pile of waste, found a piece of rebar about a foot and a half long. More banging echoed from inside the building, people dragging stuff, the sound booming off the high corrugated-metal roof.
At the side entrance, rebar in hand, she stood, her limbs vibrating. Calm down. The door, normally locked, was open, the window broken. She turned back to the street, eyed the fence. The corner was obscured by a dumpster on the street. They had gotten in somehow.
She tiptoed into the plant amidst the clanging. Her eyes adjusted: two shadows moving behind a bouncing flashlight, not twenty feet from the 55-gallon drums full of acetone.
Her nerves shot into overdrive.
Two men. Throwing a wooden pallet onto a disordered stack. One guy was young, judging by his build and lithe movements, wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt. The other, holding the flashlight, was bulkier, a bandanna tied around his face bandit style. She didn’t recognize either of them. The young man held up an oblong container and squirted liquid onto the makeshift pyre.
Barbecue starter.
“You can cut that out right now,” Colleen said. “The cops are on their way.”
Both men spun toward her.
“See those drums behind you?” she said. “Acetone. How bad do you want to be blown sky high?”
“She’s bluffing,” the big guy said.
“It’s a paint plant, Einstein,” Colleen said.
“Fuck you, bitch,” the kid in the hoodie said, draining the bottle, tossing it on the pile as well. It clanked, bounced off somewhere.
“You need to mind your own business,” the big guy said to her. He pulled something out of his jacket. Even in the shadows there was no mistaking the outline of the pistol. Guns had that kind of energy. He pointed it at Colleen. Her heart pounded as she ducked behind a vertical steel support beam. The flashlight beam swept over the big empty space, over wreckage of machinery, without catching her.
The big guy said to the kid: “Just do it.”
She craned her neck around the post and saw the kid pull something from the front pocket of his sweatshirt. A book of matches. He yanked a match and, after a couple of dry scratches, got it lit, setting fire to the whole book. The flame danced in his hand.
“Hurry up,” the big guy said to the kid. “We got to get out of here.”
The book of burning matches floated onto the stack of soaked pallets. A daunting woof preceded blinding blue and orange flames that lit up the center of the warehouse, filling Colleen with adrenaline.
“Let’s go!” the big guy yelled. The two men turned, ran in her direction, heading for the door. Colleen waited, grimacing as flames leapt hungrily in the darkness. The two men drew closer, the kid in front.
She came out swinging the rebar.
The kid in the hoodie dodged out of the way. Swearing up a storm, he dashed for the exit. Colleen swiveled round just in time to see the pear-shaped man coming toward her, gun up. She reminded herself how hard it was to hit anything with a pistol, even in broad daylight, let alone the dark, especially while running, under the threat of a counterattack. Heart thudding, she waited until he got closer.
He fired.
The shot ricocheted, echoing through the plant, stretching her nerve endings tight. She came at him, catching him by surprise, exactly what she wanted. Overweight and off balance, he skidded, crab-like. She caught his teeth with the rebar. An ugly crack traveled from his jaw down the steel rod into her arm.
“Motherfuck!” he grunted, a hand shooting up to his face. The gun went off again, wild and deafening up close, the report bouncing off the rafters. She ducked back, lunged in again, swiped him one more time, not a direct hit like before, but enough to knock the gun out of his hand. He snorted as the gun smacked the floor and disappeared into shadows.
Flames roared, licking up the pallets.
The young guy was long gone. The big guy staggered toward the doorway, one hand gripping his face.
She’d have to let them go. The fire had to be put out. Before the plant went up.
Flames panted, illuminating the darkness with wild shifting light. She tossed the rebar. It clanged off across the floor.
On the metal column she wrestled a dust-caked fire extinguisher free and lugged it over to the blaze. The pile of pallets was engulfed by fire, flames edging closer to the drums of acetone. No more than ten feet away.
Her pulse racing, she approached the fire. A wall of heat warmed her face. All her body wanted to do was flee. She sucked in a smoky breath and pulled the pin, squeezed the handle.
A blast of chemicals hissed, white fog subduing the monster briefly. But within no time the canister was empty and the flames crept back up to their former height, crackling with intensity. Tossing the empty extinguisher aside with a crash, Colleen hurried back to the former break room, trying to clear her thoughts. There was another extinguisher by the door. She checked them on her rounds. She found it, wrenched it off.
“What’s going on here?” a voice yelled in Spanish.
At the doorway. Ramon. Thank God.
When he saw the flames, he came running into the warehouse. “I saw two guys running away.”
“There’s another extinguisher,” she shouted in Spanish. “By the men’s lockers. Hurry.”
“Got it!”
She ran back to the roaring fire, pulled the pin, and used steady side-to-side strokes, working the base of the fire this time. Behind her, she heard Ramon. A pin popped and then he stood alongside her, bathing the blaze with retardant as well. She stopped shooting for a moment, ducked behind him, moved over, blocking the path to the drums. She resumed her attack. The burning pallets began to crackle and die.
“I’m almost out,” Ramon said. “We’ll need another one.”
“Two, just to be sure,” she said. But they had this thing on the run. She searched her mind for the location of the remaining extinguishers.