Maria didn’t come to work.” She huddled inside her uniform.
“Leave me alone, Jesus, just leave me alone. I got to do my job.”
He leaned over and swept a desk clean of its files and letter trays and telephone, sending them clattering to the floor. “Why should I care about your goddamned job?
What’s it mean to me?” He suddenly struck a match and held it over the canvas bag in the waste cart, filled with the scrap paper from a dozen offices. “Your goddamned job … I’ll burn down your goddamned job! You want to see me do it? I will, Mama, you know I will!” She was now thoroughly frightened and reached for a phone on another desk to call security. Jesus batted it out of her hands, his eyes wild. “Mama, I want money, you understand me? I want it now!”
. He could feel the weakness start again and he began to gag. “I know you’ve got money, Mama,” he said faintly.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see her clutch almost automatically at her pocket. “I knew it, goddamnit!” he shouted. He came slowly around the desk, holding out his hand. “Gimme the wallet or I’ll break your fucking arm!”
She tried to run, to reach another phone, and he pounced on her, knocking her against the desk and pulling the phone out of the floor connection. Then she was running for the office door. He tripped her, grabbing at her smock. She held her hands over , the pocket containing her wallet but his fingers were already there, pulling, tearing.
“Please, Jesus, por Dios!”
“Speak English, Mama,” he sneered. The next instant he had torn the wallet from her pocket and was leafing through the contents. Oh, Christ, sixteen bucks … Maybe Spinner would consider it on account, maybe half a bag would get’him through. He pushed past her and had just opened the door to the hall when the first of the cramps hit him and he abruptly doubled up, gasping for breath and gagging at the same time. He sagged against the door frame, fighting for strength.
Albina was running toward him now, her face wet with tears but an angry look.in her eyes. Jesus turned his back to her to fend her off and then she had seized the wallet and money from his hand and he was too feeble to resist.
“Mama, don’t …”
She was running for the elevator bank and he started after her, a little of his strength returning. She pressed the call button, then glanced at him coming toward her and changed her mind and ran for the stairwell door. He caught her when she was half through, grabbing her wrist to twist the cash out of her hand. They were making too much noise, he thought, and if that fat faggot Douglas had called security, the guards would be on them any minute.
His mother had started to cry for help and he clamped a hand on her mouth and at the same time tried to pull the money out of her hand.
She fell backward, pulling him with her, and they tumbled through the open door onto the landing. The door started to swing inexorably shut and Jesus leaped for it, shouting, “Catch it!” His fingers scrabbled at the edge of the metal and then he heard the lock click into place.
“Goddamnit, see what you’ve done!” Jesus snarled, whirling en his mother. “We’re trapped!” She huddled, sobbing, on the landing, her back to the wall, clutching the wallet to her breast and trying to stuff the crumpled bills back into it. For a moment they stood glaring at each other and then Jesus felt something else suddenly grip his stomach. It wasn’t nausea … it was the smell of smoke. He turned to look down the stairwell.
The air in the well below was already hazy with it.
In the machinery room at the top of the Glass House and in the subbasement, the whine of the smoke sensors has stopped and the glow of the heat indicators has faded.
The electrical connections -to the instruments have been burned through, the sensors themselves twisted or melted lumps of metal.
Griff Edwards waddles back to his desk, spreads out his paper, and tries to think of a two-letter word that is a composing room term; he is uncertain whether the last letter is an “n” or an “m.” Since the panel trouble light isn’t working, he does not realize the futility of his vigil.
A number of floors above, the beast is feeding hungrily and raging around the confines of the room. It is now brilliantly lit-a storage room filled with rows of shelves and lockers holding drums and bottles of solvents and waxes, half-open cartons of toweling and toilet paper.
The majority of these have started to char, ready to add more fuel to the flames surrounding them.
Most of the bottles on the shelves above the burning mats have burst in the intense heat, dribbling their contents over the mats below.
Close by, a locker suddenly bursts open as a five-gallon drum inside explodes A few feet away, the flames are clawing at several fifty-gallon drums resting on their sides in a metal rack. The drums contain a stripping solvent, trichloroethylene, for removing old, wax from tile floors. The stenciled letters on the lower drum have begun to fade into the surrounding char as the paint on the drum blisters.
The solvent inside begins to vaporize, building up pressure to the point where the ends of the drum are bulging with a terrible pregnancy.
The walls of the room, except for the one that doubles as the wall of the utility core, are of dry-wall plaster. The paper surfacing of the wall panels has already charred and the plaster in the paper-plaster’sandwich is steaming, breaking down under the heat and buckling from the internal pressures of carbon dioxide being driven from the plaster itself. Overhead, the perforated acoustical tile has buckled and torn loose from the ceiling. Under ordinary circumstances, the tile is relatively fire resistant but the tile itself is now charring and disintegrating as its binder decomposes under the intense heat. On the floor below, the asphalt tile, protected somewhat by its heat absorbing contact with the concrete floor, is nevertheless, melting on the surface and in many places, bulging. Where the tile bulges and curls away from the floor, it melts, slumps, and begins to burn with a smoky flame. Near the ceiling, a stringer holding a fifteen-foot fluorescent light fixture gives way and the fixture, still suspended from the other stringer, falls, smashing into the surface of melted tile.
The pressure in the nearby drum of trichloroethylene has finally become too great and the spigot shoots across the room, propelled by the internal pressure. A moment later, the drum erupts. At normal temperatures “trichlor” is not flammable, but in this heat the liquid spatters over the room, vaporizes, and ignites,. The other drums have sprung leaks rather than exploding, and the superheated liquids flood across the floor to join the fiery deluge.
The beast is now raging in its prison, plucking at the concrete ceiling overhead, pushing the walls, clawing at the metal door, twisting and warping it but momentarily unable to burst it from its hinges. The liquids on the floor push toward the crack at the bottom of The door and a blazing finger thrusts underneath and finds fresh tile and paint just beyond. Another finger follows and instantly the blazing flood is seeping underneath the metal panel.
The beast has learned cunning.
CHAPTER 21
Credits, debentures, unpaid bills, canceled orders …
the whole sordid history of a business failure-it was like walking onto a battlefield after the war was over but the corpses had yet to be buried. Still, somebody had to do it, Douglas thought, and Larry had no head for figures.
He could add a column six different times and come up with six different answers. Not that he wasn’t bright, but his knack for business lay more in public relations and sales.
Douglas leaned back in his chair and rubbed his knuckles into his eyes. For a moment his mind wandered back ten. years to when he had met Larry at a football game in Oakland. Douglas had been working for another decorating firm then and the local client had invited him to the game. Larry had some sort of butt job in the front office of the Forty-Niners and the client-what had been his name, anyway?-had introduced them during half time, probably intentionally matchmaking.
He and Larry had liked each other instantly. It had been an odd sort of courtship, with no apologies offered and none expected. When it came to love, whatever they had been looking for, they found in each other. Larry’s career depended very much on his being circumspect and yet, with Ian, he had seemed to grow almost overnight
