Severance Package

I’m no killer, Jamie had told David.

But the truth was, he could be.

If it was for his family.

Jamie bent over and took the gun out from under Nichole’s face. The metal was hung up on her skin, and she was still warm. Then again, everything in the room was superheating.

He lunged for Molly’s body. He needed to be sure.

He needed to put a bullet in her brain.

“Hey hey, come on, man,” said shorter firefighter, catching Jamie in his extended arm and holding him back. The firefighter didn’t see he was holding a gun. “She’s gone.”

“Smoke’s getting real bad in here,” his partner said. Jamie could see his eyes and nose beneath the shattered mask. He looked young.

“I have to,” Jamie said.

“No you don’t.”

“She …”

“Buddy, she’s gone. There’s another team behind us. They’ll get her. Along with everybody else.”

Jamie dropped the gun to the carpet.

They all left the building.

OUT OF THE OFFICE

I just want to spend more time with my family.

—POPULAR SAYING

The walk down the south fire tower felt like forever. Jamie had never felt such heat. He was sure he’d passed out at least once. Maybe twice. But he was supported by the arms of the firefighters, whose names he didn’t even know. He thought about asking them, but his mouth couldn’t form the words. He’d have to find out later. Write them. Thank them. Buy them beers. Introduce them to Andrea, Chase. Cook them meals.

The endless repetition of staircase, turn, staircase, turn also felt like it lasted longer than physically possible.

Eventually, though, they reached the ground floor, and Jamie was being placed on a stretcher, and he reached his hand out to thank his rescuers, high-five them, anything, but they were already headed back into the building.

Someone jabbed a needle in his arm and put a mask over his face and rolled him into the back of an ambulance.

He started to drift off, even though it was only the middle of the day. Hard to tell, with the sky outside so black.

He wanted to drift off. Maybe he would snap awake and find himself in his usual position in bed: left arm tucked under Andrea’s pillow. Her hair, fanned across her pillow. Her scent intoxicating, even in the middle of the night. His hand, resting on her hip. Or if the mood was right, up around the front and higher.

So Jamie drifted a bit, fantasizing that he was home already with Andrea. With Chase in the other room, monitor on, so that the moment he fussed, even a little, they’d hear it, and they could be in there to comfort him in a flash.

He could smell her hair.

Or imagine he could.

Wait.

No.

He couldn’t drift off, not yet.

He had to reach Andrea, tell her he was okay. A phone call, something. News of the fire was probably all over TV. God, she could probably see the smoke from the front steps of their apartment building. She’d wonder. Check the news. Hear about 1919. Panic. He couldn’t do that to her.

Jamie sat up on the stretcher. Pulled the mask from his face. Yanked the needle from his arm.

He reached around to his back pocket to see if he’d put his wallet back there, or left it upstairs. Maybe he could hail a cab, be home in seconds.

Instead he found a card.

And on the front was the cartoon of a duck in little boy pants.

Later, investigators clearing out the floors would discover something odd on the thirty-sixth floor: a badly burned single parachute harness-container containing a Dacron parachute. The brand name was consistent with harnesses and parachutes used for BASE jumping. The pack was found on the floor, but it appeared to have been stuffed over the drop-ceiling tiles on the thirty-sixth floor, just outside the office of Murphy, Knox, CEO David Murphy. As the tiles had burned away, the pack dropped to the ground.

Investigators were at a loss to explain the gear, other than an office thrill-seeker stashing the equipment for a future jump.

But that didn’t explain the typewritten note, found inside an envelope deep within the pack:

CONGRATS, it read.

The body of Paul Lewis was discovered that afternoon, when police officers arrived at the Lewis home to inform him that his wife was missing. They were surprised to find him dead, with half-chewed pieces of potato salad in his mouth.

Blood screens came back negative; the death was ruled accidental.

Somebody tipped off a reporter. By the end of the week, over forty-seven newspapers were running the short wire story of one couple’s freakishly bad luck.

Names withheld to protect the innocent.

Jamie raced up Twentieth Street, hunting for a pay phone. He seemed to remember one at the corner of Arch Street, near a diner that had recently gone upscale—charging nine dollars for hamburgers and adding seven martinis to the menu.

He glanced back. The top of 1919 was a raging inferno now, with so much smoke pouring from the top, it looked as if all of Center City were on fire. That it all had been sold to the Devil.

Everybody had been so busy, no one noticed that he had just stepped out of the ambulance and started walking.

Toward home.

There was a phone on Arch Street, just as he’d remembered it. The steel line connecting the handset to the box looked badly damaged, but there was still a dial tone. Jamie punched in his calling card number, then his home phone. Three rings, then the machine picked up.

Hi, you’ve reached us. If you’re calling, you know who we are. Leave a message, and one of us will get back to you. If we feel like it.

Jamie, being funny.

Beep.

“Honey, it’s me, if you’re there pick up. I don’t know if you saw the news, but I’m fine, I’m out of the building, so you don’t have to worry. Are you there?”

Nothing.

“Sweetie, if you’re there, please pick up.”

No Andrea.