Then the hands got him.

Sonny’s snake-like grip ratcheted the cuff around his good wrist. The young man began pulling him back into the job site.

“Come on, come on!” Sonny cried.

Pellam expected to feel the blow of a gunshot but Sonny’d tossed the Colt aside. He had something else in mind and was steering for a pit in the dirt near a contractor’s shed. It was filled with flaming gasoline. He dragged Pellam toward it. He fell against his shattered arm and fainted again momentarily. When he came to he found that Sonny’s manic strength had pulled him to the brink of the pit.

“Isn’t it beautiful, isn’t it lovely?” Sonny called, staring into the swirling fire and smoke at his feet.

He reached down – just as Pellam kicked out with a boot. Sonny slipped on the edge of the trough and fell up to his waist into the burning fuel. He began to scream and in his crazed state, jerking back and forth, thrashing, began to pull Pellam after him.

Blinded by the smoke, seared by the flames, Pellam had no leverage. He felt himself being tugged closer and closer to the inferno. A memory of Ettie’s voice came to him.

“Sometimes my sister Elsbeth and me’d go where they led the lambs along Eleventh Avenue over to the slaughterhouses on Forty-second Street. They had a judas lamb. You know ’bout that? It’d lead the others to the slaughter. We used to yell at the judas and throw rocks to lead him off but it never worked. That’s one lamb knew his business.”

And then he heard:

“Pellam, Pellam, Pellam…” A high voice, panicked.

A vague image through the smoke. It was a person. A thick coat of smoke enveloped him. He dropped to the ground. Sonny’s thrashing body pulled him closer.

Pellam squinted, looking through the smoke.

Ismail, tears running down his cheeks, stood at the fence. “Here! He over here!” He was gesturing madly toward Pellam.

Then another figure. They both eased through the chain-link.

“Get back!” Pellam shouted.

“Jesus,” Hector Ramirez said and grabbed Pellam’s wrist just before he slipped over the edge into the pool of flame.

Ramirez pulled a black gun from his waistband, pressed the muzzle against the links of the cuffs and fired five or six times.

He hardly heard the shots. In fact, he hardly heard the roar of the flames or Ramirez’s voice as he pulled Pellam way from the fire. The only sound in his ears was Ismail’s voice saying, “You be okay, you be okay, you be okay…”

THIRTY-TWO

The roles were reversed.

Now it was Ettie Washington’s turn to visit Pellam in the hospital. Unlike him, she’d had the foresight to bring a present. Not flowers or candy though. Something more appreciated. She now poured the smuggled wine into two plastic cups and offered him one.

“To your health,” she said.

“Yours.”

He swallowed his in one gulp. Ettie, as he remembered her doing when he gazed at her through the viewfinder of the Betacam, sipped hers judiciously. She was the epitome of a frugal homemaker, having learned those skills, Pellam recalled, young from Grandmother Ledbetter.

The private room in which Pellam now lay was below the one where Ettie’d been arrested and above the room where Juan Torres, the poor child, had died. Where would Sonny’s body be? he wondered. The morgue was probably in the basement. Or maybe he was in the city morgue. A routine autopsy then a final trip to Potters’ Field would be his fate.

“People keep asking me what happened, John. Asking me – because I know you. The police, that fire marshal, reporters too. They want to know how you got away from that firebug fella. They think you know but you’re aren’t talking.”

“Miracle,” Pellam offered wryly.

But Pellam wasn’t going to complicate the lives of his improbable friends by telling anyone how Ismail hadn’t gone back to the YOC at all but had hung around waiting to spend more time with Pellam, had seen Sonny’s attack, and had run up the street to summon Hector Ramirez.

“Well, that’s between you and the doorpost,” Ettie said, echoing a favorite expression of her grandfather’s. “And that fire marshal said something else. Which I didn’t exactly understand. He was saying that you might want to think about leaving the city before your name becomes Mr. Unlucky… So. That what you going to be doing, John? Leaving?”

“Not hardly. We’ve got a film to finish.”

“That boy came by to see you. When you were asleep.”

“Ismail?”

Ettie nodded. “Gone now. Has quite a mouth on him for a youngster. I put him in his place, though. T lking to grown-ups that way… He said he’ll be back.”

Pellam didn’t doubt it.

I be your friend.

Well, I be yours, Ismail.

That’s the marvelous thing about debts. Even after you repay them, they never go away.

Ettie had also brought him a Post, the huge headline (“Towering Inferno”) next to an equally huge photo of the flames consuming McKennah Tower.

There’d been no deaths. Fifty-eight people had been injured – mostly from smoke inhalation. The napalm in the theater had not ignited and the only injuries there were from crowds pushing their way out in panic. The most serious was a broken leg received when bodyguards shoved a woman aside to make sure their dignitary escaped before the commoners (the governor, as it turned out, costing Pellam a fiver, payable to Louis Bailey, the king of gears, both greased and clogged).

The Tower was totaled. Burnt to the ground. It was insured, of course, but the policy covered only the cost of the structure itself, not lost profits. Without the rents from the advertising agency the developer would miss his fourth quarter interest payments on his worldwide loans. McKennah and his companies were already preparing papers for the bankruptcy filing.

The sidebar in the paper read, “Welcome to the club, Rog.”

Curiously, none of the pictures of the developer showed anything but a matter-of-fact businessman who seemed completely blasé about the prospect of losing several billion dollars. One shot showed him striding cheerfully into his lawyers’ office accompanied by an attractive young woman identified only as his personal assistant. His eyes were on her; hers, on the camera.

The hospital room bristled around Pellam and grew dark for a moment. Pellam slipped a merciful Demerol into his mouth. He washed it down with wine.

When he looked at Ettie he noticed her face was stern. But her expression had nothing to do with mixing alcohol with medicine. She said, “John, you did so much for me. You almost got yourself killed. You should’ve just took off. You didn’t owe me anything.”

Should he say it or not? For the past several months Pellam had been debating. A dozen times he’d been on the verge. Finally, he said, “Oh, but I do, Ettie.”

“You’re looking pretty funny, John. What’re you talking about?”

“I owe you a lot.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Well, it’s not exactly my debt. It’s my father’s.”

“Your father? I don’t even know your father.”

“You did. You married him.”

After a moment she whispered, “Billy Doyle?”

“He was my natural father,” Pellam said.

Ettie sat completely motionless. It was the only time in all the months that he’d known her that he couldn’t find a trace of any emotion in her face.

“But… how?” she finally asked.

Pellam told her what he’d told to Ramirez – about his mother’s confession – her husband being away all the time, her lover, Pellam’s suspect pedigree.

Ettie nodded. “Billy told me he’d had a girlfriend upstate. That’d be your mother… Oh, my. Oh, my.” She thought back, her sumptuous memory unreeling. “He told me that he loved her but she wouldn’t leave her husband. So he left her and came down here, to the Kitchen.”