A little girl in pink pajamas covered in purple unicorns stepped into the light of the hall. Ben froze at the sight of her, alone and rubbing her eyes, her straw-like blond hair flattened on one side from sleep. The girl watched Ben take the last two steps down onto the fifth floor before breaking into a grin. She pointed to Ben’s face, waiting for her father to join her from inside the apartment.
“Daddy! Look! Look! Fireman!”
Ben watched the father back out of the apartment with a stroller. There was an infant squawking in a blanket in the seat, unstrapped, booted feet kicking.
“I know, baby. I know.” The man looked Ben up and down, pulling a robe around himself. “Where do we go? Across the street?”
“Get as far away from the building as possible,” Ben said, his stomach roiling. “Go down the street and turn the corner.”
“But my neighbor said it’s just a—”
“Do as I say, sir,” Ben said.
“When will we be allowed back in? I’ve got work in the mor—”
“Get out of the building!” Ben barked. He felt his eyes grow wild. “No more questions! Do as I say! Evacuate now!”
The little girl jumped at Ben’s words and burst into sudden tears. The man scooped her up against his hip. “It’s okay, honey. It’s okay. He’s just a jerk. Let’s get moving.”
Ben thumped on doors. “Fire department! Fire department! Evacuate now!”
He pushed into an apartment facing east, left the elderly woman who answered the door standing bewildered in the entryway. He walked to a window at the back of the apartment, smacked the curtains out of the way to get a view to the alley behind. Ben could see Engo’s Subaru hugging the wall on the opposite side of the alley, and something about that burned him right to the core, that Engo would try to park his piece-of-shit Subaru as far back from the blast zone as he could so it wouldn’t get scratched or the windows wouldn’t get busted while he tried to rip off a dying billionaire of eight million dollars. Ben could just see the edge of a pipe snaking toward the back door of Cristobel’s.
Ben went back out, past the bewildered and protesting old lady. He barked at the woman to evacuate and waited while she went back into the apartment, emerging with a potted fern clutched under her arm and a sour look on her face. The alarm overhead turned from an eerie bleeping to a more urgent whoop.
“Are they all out?” Matt asked over the radio.
“Yeah,” Ben said, though he couldn’t possibly know that. Because there was a chance someone was hiding under a bed, or wearing earplugs as they slept, or passed out drunk, or clinically deaf, and they’d be there inside their home when Ben and the crew blasted the restaurant. But fuck it, right? He was a killer anyway.
“Engo, you got the mains switched off?”
“I need a hand.”
“You fucking kidding me?” Matt snapped. His acting was getting better. “Engo, cut the power and gas, now. This ain’t your first day.”
“I’ll be back there in a second, Engo,” Ben said.
He walked down the stairs of the apartment building, got to the foyer, and spotted Matt through the glass entry doors by the mailboxes. The boss was rousting the man in boxers who had since thrown on clothes and was standing barefoot in the street, taking a picture of the fire engine with his phone. Ben went to the fire door at the back of the foyer and pushed his way out.
His heart leaped right up into his esophagus when he smelled the alleyway, like the scent that filled his nostrils had tugged the organ up there on a wire. He smelled garlic. He’d expected to smell the mercaptan additive in the natural gas Engo was pumping into the tubes running beneath his feet, wedged beneath the door of Cristobel’s. An eggy, familiar aroma he’d encountered a thousand times. But the scent of the garlic was there, impossibly intense, more intense than a person would encounter at a goddamn garlic farm.
For a second or two, Ben couldn’t speak.
“No.” Ben went over, gripped Engo’s shoulder. The man was bent over a pair of tanks Ben was telling himself weren’t maroon colored—sweet Jesus, couldn’t be maroon colored, had to be yellow. “Engo. No. No. No. You’re not— That’s not—”
“It’s acetylene.” Engo didn’t even look up. “You fuckers wouldn’t listen to me, but I know what I’m doing. I know we need a bigger bang to break the wall. In a minute you’ll see that w—”
A noise hit him, like a train whooshing through an empty station. Then all Ben’s own breath thumped out of his chest as his body hit the Subaru. He fell to the ground, waited for the rushing, thundering, ringing sound in his ears to stop, glass and wood and flaming chunks of ash raining all around him. His helmet was off, one glove was off, and the concrete beneath his bare cheek was so hot he felt the sizzling of his own stubble hairs and skin as he tried to get up. Coughing, wheezing, dragging himself up, smoke shooting from his very lips, the taste of char on his tongue. He saw Engo, a black shape moving in the smoke cloud. Ben knew instinctively that Matt was on the radio, but all he could do was stand there and watch flames roar up out of the great hole in the back of the restaurant where the door and the bricks housing it used to be.
Engo had him by the arm. His face was flash burned, red and raw and shiny.
“We gotta go! We gotta go!”
Ben found his helmet and glove somehow, dragged them on, ran behind Engo back through the open fire door at the rear of the apartment building. He tripped on a rug that ran the length of the room, almost losing it. Engo sprinted through the shattered glass door of the foyer, heading toward the engine. Matt was already laying out hose, something Ben hadn’t seen his boss do in over a decade, something it hadn’t been his job to do in all that time.
“What the fuck happened?”
“What do you think?” Ben yelled before Engo could answer. He turned and gaped for a second at the damage the blast had done to the front of the restaurant. Burning wood and steel fragments were sprayed in a wide arc across the street. There was a flaming dining chair embedded by the legs in the passenger-side front window of the fire engine. The people had cleared out completely; were running, ducking behind cars, crowding into the front doorways of apartment buildings. The glass—a mixture of broken apartment and shopfront windows—was an inch deep and sloshing around their boots like winter snow.
Engo bled the hose and Ben felt Matt come onto the line behind him, and then there was a last sharp tug and they both looked and saw Andy taking up the hose with one hand and trying to right a helmet on her head with the other. Ben recognized the gear as the spare bunker uniform they kept in the back of the engine.
And then Ben glanced down the street and saw two squad cars screeching to a halt in a V shape on Eighth Avenue, and some uptown engine he didn’t recognize nosing into the crowd down at the other end of the street. He knew in a second or two what had happened. He knew it all. That wherever Andy had been, she’d looked at her magic little fucking trackers and saw Matt’s and Engo’s cars, at least, parked back at the station while they weren’t on shift. Maybe his own, too. She’d figured the job was on, and she’d called it; it was time to bag them. Him, Engo, Matt, Jakey. She’d called in the cavalry. And in doing that, she’d blown her cover. Now Matt and Engo knew who she was, too, because while Matt had called the dispatcher for backup when the blast hit, the cops and engines they were seeing now got there only seconds later, and the only way that could have happened was if someone called them in before he ever could.
Ben didn’t have time to see the bitter recognition in Matt’s eyes. Engo had kicked on the hose. He hung on as the older man advanced on the fire, the hose—rock hard and heavy as a human body—swaying in his hands. They beat at the flames, Ben’s gaze roving over the fire itself, and the guys from other crews laying hose and tanking up on either side of them. He looked up through the billowing smoke rising fast and rancid brown against the skyline of buildings and saw exactly what he didn’t want to see, yet of course did want to see: a pale towel being waved from a window on the sixth floor.
“We still got civilians up there!” Ben roared above the sound of the fire and the water and the sirens. Matt didn’t even look to confirm. He got off the hose just as a guy from another crew took it up. Ben watched Matt walk over to a chief from uptown who was standing there trying to get his bearings.
“Civilians up top!” Matt shouted. “I’ll send two of mine in.”
“My guys are already tanked up. Keep yours on the ho—”
“Fuck you!” Matt’s face was blank, rigid, devoid of the emotion that was supposed to be behind his words. “We got here first. It’s our save. Put two of your guys on my line.”
Matt walked back to Ben before he could get a response. Ben held the hose, eyes locked on the fire, until he felt Matt’s tap on his shoulder and a guy slid in to fill his spot on the hose. He was tanked up and sprinting for the broken glass door of the apartment-block foyer before he could catch his breath. Ben locked eyes with Andy for a second before the smoke and heat haze smothered out her image, and he turned and ran into the building.