Dead Sleep by Greg Iles Page B

of cold water, filling my lungs with rich oxygen and clearing my head. I have a momentary fantasy of going back for Wingate, but survival instinct overrides that impulse. Below me is the iron framework of a fire escape. It’s the classic New York model; one floor down, a latched ladder awaits only my weight to send it to the pavement below. But when I crawl down to the platform and pull the latch, the ladder stays where it is. A wave of smoke billows from the window behind me. I pull down on a rung with all my strength, but nothing moves.
    I lived in New York long enough to know how to work one of these things, and this one isn’t functioning. It’s fifteen feet to the cracked cement of the alley below, my best target a space between some garbage cans and a steam grate. A distant siren echoes up the chasm, but I don’t think the fire department will start their rescue work in this alley. I’ve got to get down, and there’s only one way to do it.
    Crawling over the railing, I lower myself until I’m hanging by my hands from the edge of the platform. I’m five-feet-eight, which shortens the drop to about ten feet. No great shakes for a paratrooper, but I don’t happen to be one. I did drop from a helicopter once in North Carolina, photographing an Army training mission. It felt like fifty feet, though it was supposedly twelve.
    What the hell. A broken ankle is nothing compared with Wingate’s fate. I open my hands and drop through the dark. My heels strike a glancing blow on the pavement and fly out from under me, leaving my right buttock and wrist to absorb the main force of the impact. I yell in pain, but the exhilaration of escape is a powerful anesthetic. Rolling to my left, I get to my feet and look back up at the platform. The window I crawled through moments ago is spouting fire.
    Jesus.
    My next instinct is to look down the alley, and what I see there sends a cold ripple along my flesh. There’s a man standing at the far end, watching me. I see him only in silhouette, because all the light is behind him. He looks big, though. Big enough to really mess me up. As I stare, he moves toward me, first uncertainly, then with a determined gait. He does not look like a fireman. My hand goes to my pocket, but the Mace is not there. I lost it upstairs. All I have is a camera, which is less than useless in this situation. I whirl and run toward the other end of the alley, toward the banshee wail of sirens.

4
    CAREENING OUT OF the mouth of the alley, I come face-to-face with a spectacle I covered dozens of times early in my career. The classic fire scene: engines with red lights flashing and hoses spraying; squad cars and EMS vehicles arriving; cops yelling; a crowd of spectators, the eternal crowd, spilling out of the bar and the video store, gaping, drinking, and shouting into cell phones. Most of them poured out of the bar after hearing “an explosion,” and the smell of liquor spices the air. The police are trying to herd them back behind a taped perimeter, to protect them from falling brick and flying glass, but they’re slow to move. I walk right past the biggest cop and point my camera at the fire.
    â€œHey!” he yells. “Get back behind this tape!”
    â€œThe Post, ” I tell him, holding up my camera.
    â€œLet me see your card.”
    â€œI don’t have it. I was having a drink in the bar with some friends. That’s why all I have is this crappy point-and-shoot. Give me a break, man, I’m the first one here. I can scoop everybody.”
    As the cop deliberates, I turn back to the mouth of the alley, forty meters away, but no one comes running out of it. The corner wall blurs for a moment, though, the vertical line of brick seeming to wrinkle in the dark. Was that him? Is he trying to figure a way to get to me even now? A deep crack rumbles from the bowels of Wingate’s building, and masonry cascades into the street. The crowd gives