Cassidy climbed the stairs as fast as his bad ankle let him. Rhonda screamed again. The sound was muffled. Shaw must have closed the door to the room. Cassidy stopped on the fourth floor. A thumping, banging came from the floor above. Shaw yelled something Cassidy did not understand, and then Rhonda cried out in pain.
Walls of the fourth floor had been ripped out and was little cover. The fifth floor was worse. Only Shaw’s room had walls. There was no cover up there. He could go up quietly, and kick open the door to the room, but he did not know where Rhonda was. Close to Shaw? He could not risk gunplay without knowing that.
He had to get Shaw out of the room.
Metal garbage cans filled with broken plaster and wood scraps stood near the closed elevator doors. He carried them to the stair landing and threw one down toward the third floor. It crashed and banged down the stairs and clattered out into the hall. Cassidy heard Shaw shout on the floor above. He threw the second can to follow the first, and then limped as fast he could down the hall, his footsteps covered by the crash of the garbage can. He went into a room where a partial wall would give him cover.
Shaw’s footsteps pounded across what was left of the fifth floor and stopped at the head of the stairs. From his angle, Cassidy could see part way up the stairs. Shaw’s feet showed. They came down another step and then stopped. A hand carrying a black automatic appeared, followed by Shaw’s torso as he crouched to look down toward the landing. Cassidy drew back behind the wall. A footstep on the stairs. The brush of Shaw’s jacket back against the wall as he moved down slowly. Cassidy needed Shaw on the landing. If he tried to take him while he was on the stairs, he might miss, might hit the banister or one of the newel posts, and he could not let Shaw get back upstairs to Rhonda.
The quality of the footsteps changed. He was on the landing. Cassidy risked a quick glimpse and jerked back. Shaw was crouched at the top of the stairs looking down toward the third floor.
Cassidy stepped out of the room, gun up. ‘Freeze, Shaw.’
Shaw was snake quick. He twisted and fired two shots toward where he thought Cassidy might be. One of them blew chips of plaster into Cassidy’s face as he fired. Shaw went over backward and clattered down the stair. Did he hit him? Cassidy hobbled to the stair landing. Shaw was crawling for the doorway at the bottom of the flight. Cassidy fired once as he disappeared, but he knew he had missed.
If he went down, he’d be walking into Shaw’s gun. He went up. As he reached the top of the stairs, a shot blasted wood out of the wall, and then he was through and in cover. He went flat on the floor, rolled over, peeked around the doorframe. Shaw fired two quick shots that went high. Cassidy fired once, and missed, and Shaw was gone.
Cassidy rolled over on his back and reloaded his gun. Then he pushed himself up against the wall and limped to the room at the end of the hall. When he opened the door, Rhonda stared at him wide-eyed from the mattress against one wall. Her hands were tied to the radiator behind her. Her skirt was bunched around her waist, and her blouse was torn.
‘Michael?’ Disbelief. ‘Michael. Michael.’
‘It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.’ He holstered his gun and crouched down to work on the knots.
‘How did you get here? How did you know?’ Her voice rasped with shock and fear.
‘I was here when he brought you. I was looking for him.’ He found his pocketknife and sawed through the clothesline Shaw had used to tie her.
‘He’s supposed to be in prison.’
‘I know. Hold on for a second.’
‘Where are you going? Don’t go.’ She pulled at his sleeve.
‘I’ll be right back.’ He got up and went out in the hall and listened. The stairs were covered with grit and dirt, and he did not think Shaw could sneak up quietly. He heard nothing. He went back into the room. Rhonda had straightened her skirt and had done the best she could with her blouse. ‘How do we get out of here?’ she asked.
‘I’m working on it.’ He grabbed the M-1 and went back into the hall. He took a quick peek around the doorway to the stairs. Shaw was out of sight two flights down. Cassidy checked the safety at the front of the trigger guard and then fired three shots spaced along the wall where Shaw might be hiding. The .30 caliber ammunition was powerful enough to blow through the plaster. Maybe he’d get a lucky hit, but at least it would remind Shaw that they had more fire power than just his .38. He went back into the room and propped the rifle near the door.
‘He was in prison,’ Rhonda said. ‘I didn’t have to think about him anymore. I ran across the street to get some cigarettes, and he grabbed me when I came out of the store. He had a gun.’ She took a deep breath and let it out. ‘He was going to rape me. He acted like he was going to do me a favor.’
‘Stay here. I’m going to talk to him.’
‘I’m not staying here. I’m going with you.’
‘Rhonda—’
‘I’m going with you. I’m not going to stay here alone.’
She followed him back out into the ruined hall. Cassidy stood where he could be heard but not seen and called down the stairway. ‘Shaw. Hey, Shaw.’
‘Yeah?’ From his voice, he was somewhere near the third-floor door.
‘The best thing you can do is get in your car and take off. With a little lead time, you might get away.’
‘Don’t worry about me getting away. I’ll be out of the country by this evening. I can’t leave yet. I built a whole plan to get you here, and here you are.’
‘It’s a stalemate. You can’t come up, and we can’t come down. I told my partner what I was doing. He knows you’re out of prison. When I don’t show up for my shift, he’ll come looking.’ Rhonda looked at him with hope.
Silence while Shaw thought it over.
‘I don’t think so. If you’d told him, he would have come with you. No, no. You came looking for me alone. That’s how you want it to end – you and me. Nobody to interfere.’
The hope went out of Rhonda’s eyes.
‘Hey, Cassidy, how’d you do the thing with my wallet?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I figure it was that couple with the dogs. The blond with great ass.’
‘What couple?’
‘Sure. Sure. I didn’t kill the Brandts. Did you? This is the time for truth telling, Cassidy. You’re not getting out of here.’
‘I didn’t kill them.’
‘Maybe, but you know I didn’t. You set me up. You framed me.’ There was a shuffling, scraping below, and Cassidy fired two more shots through the wall hoping to get lucky.
Shaw laughed. ‘Hey, Cassidy, I’ll tell you what. If you come down, I’ll let the woman go.’
Rhonda shook her head violently. She knew the lie.
‘She says, no,’ Cassidy yelled.
‘All right. She’s on your head. I gave you the chance. I have a solution. It’s not perfect. I wanted to watch you die. But this’ll work for me. At least I’ll hear you scream.’
Rhonda touched him, her face tight with alarm. ‘What does he mean?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing. He’s making a noise.’ He wished he believed it. He led her back into the room and inventoried what was there – the mattress, the propane tank with the heater attached. Was there something he could do with that? If there was, it escaped him. The jugs of water, useful for a long siege. Could they wait Shaw out? Maybe. He could not think of another choice.
‘Michael,’ Rhonda was standing in the open door. ‘He’s doing something.’
They could hear scraping sounds and occasional thumps and clatter rising from the stairwell. Cassidy, carrying the rifle, edged around the stair door and looked down. A pile of demolition debris was growing on the third-floor landing. As Cassidy watched, pieces of broken wood flew through the doorway and landed on the pile. A moment later, a large wad of torn wallpaper followed. Cassidy leveled the rifle at the wall near the doorway and fired two shots. For a moment it was quiet below, and then Shaw threw more wood on the pile from a different angle.
‘What’s he doing?’ Rhonda asked. ‘Is he trying to block us from getting down there?’
She had her answer a moment later. A line of fire crept along a ribbon of wallpaper and disappeared into the pile. For a few seconds Cassidy thought the pile had smothered the flame, but then fire began to flicker deep in the pile. Something dry and volatile caught, and a tongue of flame rose and licked the wall of the landing. The material that covered the plaster began to burn.
‘What do we do?’ She was scared, but her voice was steady.
‘There has to be another way out.’
‘The roof?’
‘There’s an alley between us and the next building. It’s too far to jump.’
‘Maybe we’ll find something on the roof, a plank or something. Maybe we can make a bridge.’
It did not take them long to search the fifth floor. There was no trapdoor to the roof.
By the time they got back to the stairs, the fire was raging. The stairwell acted like a chimney, and the blast of heat coming up the stairs drove them back from the door.
‘Well, at least we don’t have to worry about him sneaking up,’ Cassidy said.
It got no smile from Rhonda. ‘Someone on the block has to have noticed. Someone will call the Fire Department.’
‘They don’t know we’re in here. The firemen’ll try to keep the fire from spreading to the next building. That won’t do us any good.’
He led her out around the heat that blew up the stairwell to the elevator doors. Like all the other doors to the shaft except at the first floor, they were closed. He tried to fit his fingers into the seam where they came together, but there was no room. He stepped back and shouldered the rifle. ‘Better stand back. We might get a ricochet.’ She crossed to the other side of the hall. Cassidy aimed the rifle at the join between the two elevator doors. He fired. A hole appeared at the door seam. He shifted his aim and fired again. The second shot caught the right edge of the hole. The third caught the left. The clip popped out with a ping. The rifle was empty.
He went to look at his work. He could get two fingers into the hole, but it was not enough to move the doors. He jammed the tip of the rifle barrel in and levered. The doors creaked open a few inches and stopped.
‘Wait,’ Rhonda said, ‘I’ll find something bigger.’ She went to one of the demolition piles and came back with a five-foot piece of two by four and pushed it into the gap between the two doors. They both put hands on it. ‘Ready?’
‘Yes,’ Cassidy said, and they leaned into it. The doors scraped open a few more feet.
Cassidy stepped into the gap between the two doors. The interior walls were burning on the third and fourth floors, and the brick walls of the shaft were beginning to heat up. The air from the shaft was warm, but not yet hot. The shaft was dark. Only the doors on the first floor were open, but the windows on that floor were blocked. Cassidy put his back against one door and shoved hard on the other, and that one gave another foot and then stopped and would not move again.
‘How do we get down?’ Rhonda asked.
Cassidy lit a match and leaned into the shaft. There was enough light to show him the steel rungs of a maintenance ladder fixed to the wall to the left of the doors.
He pulled back out of the gap. ‘There’s a ladder. The ledge leading to it isn’t very wide, but we can get to it if we’re careful.’
‘What happens if he looks up?’
‘I shoot him, or he shoots us.’
‘This is why my mother didn’t want me going out with a cop.’
There was a roar from the stairwell, and a tongue of flame reached out into the fifth floor and then withdrew again.
‘We’ve got to get off this floor,’ Cassidy said. ‘Stay here. I’ll be right back.’
‘Michael,’ she protested.
‘Right back.’ He hobbled fast to the room, grabbed the blanket off the bed and the two full jugs of water and hobbled back to where Rhonda waited. The fire roared in the stairwell, and somewhere below them a ceiling collapsed with a crash. Cassidy gave Rhonda the blanket.
‘Put it over your head and shoulders.’ When she did, he poured a jug of water on the blanket. She gasped with shock from the cold as it soaked the blanket and her clothes. He handed her the other bottle, and she soaked his head and coat with what was left.
A piece of the wall at the top of the stairs blew out, and flames surged into the fifth-floor hall.
‘We have to go.’ Cassidy turned his back on the shaft, held the edges of the doors and felt for the ledge with his foot. It was narrow and his heel hung over the drop. He released the door edge with one hand and groped to his left until he found a metal brace on the door he could grab. He shuffled left, holding onto the brace with his chest pressed against the door. ‘Rhonda, come on.’ He watched while she backed through the door the way he had. Her high heel caught on the door track, and for a moment he thought she was going to topple backward down the shaft. She caught herself and he could hear her breath blow out in relief. ‘Rhonda, get rid of the shoes.’
‘Goddamn it, they cost me fifty bucks.’ She stepped back into the hall and out of sight, and then reappeared crouched down in the door gap. She wedged the heel of one shoe in the slot where the door ran, and levered until the heel broke off. She did the same thing with the second one, stood to put the heelless shoes on, and stepped back into the gap. ‘Someone is going to pay for those.’ She felt gingerly for the ledge, found it, and brought the other foot out to join it.
‘Reach out. There’s a metal brace about three feet to your left at shoulder height.’ She reached for it and missed. ‘A little higher. There. There. Come on. No problem now.’
She edged slowly away from the door. Cassidy shuffled out of her way toward the end of the ledge. He stretched out for the ladder, got a grip on a vertical, reached out with his left foot and found a rung, and pulled himself over. ‘Okay,’ he said to Rhonda, ‘come on.’ The wall in front of him was warm. The longer they waited the hotter the shaft would become. She shuffled toward him on the narrow ledge.
‘I’m not scared. I’m not scared. I’m not scared.’ She said it over and over again as she came. Then she stopped. ‘I can’t reach. Cassidy?’
‘I’ll get you. It’s all right. I’ll get you.’ He reached toward her. ‘Don’t take my hand. Go up a little and lock on my wrist. It’s a stronger grip.’ Her hand was too small to go all the way around his wrist, but his went easily around hers. ‘When I say, go, push off and I’ll pull you over. Grab for the ladder with your other hand.’
‘I’m not scared. I’m not scared. I’m not scared.’
‘Come on.’
‘Oh, Christ …’
When she pushed off, the leather sole of her shoe slipped on the metal of the ledge. She flailed for the ladder with her free hand, but missed and swung like a pendulum over the drop held only by their locked wrists. She let out a cry of fear.
‘Grab for the ladder.’ He could feel their hands slipping. ‘Grab it.’ The swing had turned her free hand away, and when she twisted for the ladder, he felt her grip on his wrist slip more. He squeezed hard and swung her toward him and heard her gasp as she banged into the ladder below him, and then the weight on his arm slackened as she got a foot on a rung.
‘Okay. Okay. Let me go. I’ve got it.’ For a moment her head rested against his leg, and he could hear her breath rush in and out. She moved lower on the ladder. He leaned his head against the steel rung and tried to banish the vision of her falling.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. I think so. Jesus Christ, I don’t want to do that again.’ On the other side of the wall, something went off like a bomb. The propane tank for the heater.
‘We can’t stay here. We have to go down. Can you do that?’
‘Yes.’
When Cassidy felt her move down, he followed.
‘The wall is much hotter down here. Ow.’
‘What?’
‘It burned me.’
‘Don’t touch it.’
‘Good advice, Michael. Thanks.’ She kept going.
The fire roared outside the fourth-floor elevator doors. Smoke wisped in around the edges, and there was a line of red where the doors did not quite join. The brick wall they passed grumbled and crackled in the heat. The air smelled of burned metal and brick, of wood smoke, and the stench of burning plaster.
‘Michael,’ said Rhonda, halfway down to the third floor. ‘I don’t know if I can go any further. The rungs are really hot here. Ow, shit.’ She climbed back up until her head was at Cassidy’s knees. ‘I burned my hand.’
‘It’ll be cooler once we’re past the third floor.’
‘It was burning through my shoes, too.’
‘Hold on.’ Cassidy found his pocketknife. He looped one arm around an iron vertical for support, and opened the knife. ‘I’m going to cut strips off the blanket. We’ll wrap our hands.’ The wet cloth resisted the knife. He had to work the tip of the blade through and saw it until he cut a long strip free. He cut it in shorter lengths. They wrapped their hands and went down.
The elevator doors at the third floor bulged inward. The fire on the other side had burned a cherry-red patch of metal in the middle of one door. The rungs under their shoes were hot enough to burn their feet through their soles, and the wet blanket strips on their hands steamed. A brick exploded from the wall above the third-floor elevator doors, then another one, and another. Flames snaked out through the hole into the shaft and then retreated.
‘Michael, the whole place is coming down.’ Her voice was harsh with strain.
The rungs of the ladder were cooler, and the air seemed less dense as they went below the third floor. Rhonda stopped below him opposite the second-floor elevator doors. ‘It’s better here,’ she said. They could see the top of the elevator twenty feet below. ‘Why don’t we go down to the bottom?’ she asked.
‘We don’t know where Shaw is. If he thinks we could use the shaft to get down, he may be set up to see into the gap at the top of the elevator. He’d have us before we had a chance at him.’
‘He’ll be gone by now. He must think we’re dead. He wouldn’t risk staying.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘No.’
‘We’re okay here for a while. The firemen are going to show up any minute. People were working up the street. Someone will have called in the alarm. When we hear them, we go. Shaw’s not going to do anything in front of a bunch of firemen.’
Just under the fourth floor a section of shaft wall blew out. Shards of brick, plaster, and burning wood rained down on them. Cassidy leaned out to shelter Rhonda below him. A piece of flaming wood landed on his shoulder. He brushed it off as another part of the shaft wall exploded above them. Cinders and flaming bits of wood rained down on them. They burned through Cassidy’s wet hair and coat before he could slap them off.