Rising Phoenix (32 page)

The lights gave the building a malevolent feel. The chain-link fence covering its facade became teeth, and the reflective windows, lifeless eyes.

Beamon’s car pushed forward. People milled lazily in the streets; knots of conversation formed and dispersed
at random. They looked mildly annoyed as they moved unhurriedly from the path of his car. About fifty feet from the barricades, the crowd of haphazardly dressed spectators became too dense to drive through. Beamon pulled the car over onto the sidewalk and continued on foot. He was carefully examined as he proceeded to the barricades.

“I’m sorry, sir. There’s no admittance to this area,” a haggard-looking cop said. He was moving back and forth in the ten-foot gap in the barricades that allowed emergency vehicles to get in and out. The crowd carefully tested his defenses, anxious to get a closer look.

Beamon reached into his jacket, producing his credentials. When the officers pacing brought him back, he flashed them inconspicuously. The cop waved him through.

The crowd was even worse inside the barricades. Same number of people, but instead of milling around in bathrobes, they were moving at a speed between a jog and a sprint, and carrying all kinds of gear. Children—newly orphaned—were herded like sheep toward the fire trucks.

He walked less than purposefully through the rescue workers, feeling stupider and stupider. There was nothing for him to do here except be seen. Out of the corner of his eye he saw another, more energetic, group of people than the one he had just driven through. Three more cops looked like they were barely holding the line. The Press.

Beamon altered his trajectory slightly, taking a path to the building that would get him within fifteen feet of the rabid reporters. That should make Sherman happy.

He was still almost thirty feet out when one of the reporters recognized him and shouted a question, slapping at his cameraman. The others jumped on the bandwagon and the question became an unintelligible roar.

Close enough.

He aimed his best “no comment” wave in their general direction and resumed slowly walking toward the apartment building. He felt alone and detached.

Ahead of him he saw a reporter who had managed to get through the barricades. He was interviewing a child of no more than twelve, holding her arm tightly. Probably asking her how she felt about her parents being dead. Beamon considered helping the kid out, but thought better of it. This wasn’t his show.

The scene grew considerably more gruesome as he drew closer. Rushing rescue workers were replaced with grotesquely contorted victims. Directly in front of him was a man lying on a white stretcher. He was wearing only a pair of heart-covered boxer shorts. His face looked lined and old at first, but as Beamon drew closer, he realized that it was only the effect of the harsh spotlights. The man’s body was smooth and well muscled.

What was remarkable, and what cemented Beamon’s feet to the ground, was what was happening to the man. He had been lying relatively quietly a moment before. Then, without warning, his back began to arch.

Beamon didn’t pay much attention at first, anxious to make his obligatory turn through the building and then head back home. But the quiet figure started to scream. His back continued to arch, soon coming fully off the ground. His only points of contact now were his head
and heels, which were bunching up the white sheet under him as his stomach continued to rise skyward.

Just when he reached a point where Beamon was sure that he could crawl under him, the man flopped over onto the pavement. His screams died for lack of air, though his mouth still worked silently. The progression continued. Beamon had been awakened from his trance when the man had tipped, but he had no idea what to do. As the man’s head and heels continued to close on one another, Beamon’s body tensed. He waited to hear the inevitable crack of bone as the man’s vertebrae shattered.

It didn’t happen. The progression slowed, then finally reversed itself. The man’s fluttering eyelids closed as he slipped into unconsciousness.

The show over, Beamon reached out and grabbed a paramedic unfortunate enough to be within his reach. “What the fuck’s going on here?” He knew the symptoms of the drug poisonings backwards and forwards. He had never heard of anything like this.

The young paramedic looked at him blankly and pulled away. He was about to rush off, when the unmistakable look of recognition registered on his face. Over the last couple of weeks, Beamon had unwittingly become the most photographed man in America.

“Looks like a different poison,” he said simply.

“What kind?”

He shrugged. “Dunno. Heard somebody say strychnine—but I don’t know that much about poison, you know?”

Beamon watched him hurry away, then turned and
continued toward the building. Looking up, he saw that the windows had been either opened or broken out. The malevolent eyes had turned into empty sockets.

At the bottom of the steps someone caught his arm. A fireman. He looked like he was in charge.

“Mr. Beamon? I’m Shannon Calloway.” He extended his hand. “Sorry to hear about your nephew.”

“Call me Mark, and thanks.” Beamon reached out to take the fireman’s hand.

“You can’t go in there without one of these.” Calloway thumbed at the tank on his back. A hose attached it to a full face mask pushed up onto the top of his head.

“Is there a fire?” Beamon looked for signs of smoke.

“Oh, no—no fire. It looks like the poison was in crack cocaine. There were quite a few smoking pipes lying around. Don’t want to take any chances.”

Beamon backed away from the building as a burly-looking fireman ran down the stairs with another victim. There was no way in hell he was putting on a respirator and running around this brick graveyard just to please the press.

“I can get you a …” Calloway started. A man standing on the steps shouted at him, interrupting his train of thought.

“We’re clear in here, Shannon—fully ventilated.” The man jogged down the steps, pulling the heavy tank off his back with practiced ease.

“I stand corrected,” Calloway said, holding his hand out toward the dark opening where the front doors had once been. “Be my guest.”

It took a few moments for Beamon’s eyes to adjust to the gloom of the hallway. The shouts of rescue workers
and the crash of ax on door echoed through the building. He paused at the base of the steps and forced himself to take a deep breath. He had been holding it since he passed through the shattered doorjamb that was the front entrance to the building. The image of the dying contortionist seemed to superimpose itself on everything he saw.

Feeling a little more collected, he started up the stairs, idly trying to decipher the stylized graffiti adorning the walls. He was on the first landing when the shout “coming through” bounced off the walls, followed by heavy footsteps. Between two firemen was a stretcher with a heavy-looking man strapped firmly to it. The fireman on the low side had to hold the stretcher almost above his head to keep it level. Under normal circumstances, he looked more than up to the task. These weren’t normal circumstances. The man on the stretcher was convulsing violently, straining against the heavy straps holding him in place. The motion was throwing the two back and forth, slamming them into the sides of the narrow staircase. Beamon flattened himself against a wall, but it was too late. The hard edge of the stretcher, backed by the full weight of the three men, slammed into his chest. They didn’t seem to notice, or at least didn’t acknowledge the collision. Beamon stood on the steps, slightly stooped for a moment, catching his breath. When the pain in his chest subsided to a dull throb, he continued up.

He reached the first-floor landing and began walking slowly down an interior hallway. It reminded him of a house of horrors at a cheap traveling carnival. As
he walked past open doors, it seemed that the scenes behind them were being acted out for his benefit. Corpses, people in the throes of violent convulsions, crying children. Above them all hovered busy men and women in various uniforms identifying them as fire fighter, paramedic, ambulance driver, police.

Beamon felt the weight of the situation come crashing down on him. The feeling came on suddenly, adding to the pain in his chest. He came upon a closed door—the first he had seen. A large red X had been spray painted on it. Somehow the mark didn’t blend with the graffiti blanketing the dank walls, and Beamon reached out and touched it. Still wet.

Two more firemen appeared from a door at the end of the hall and began rushing toward him. Beamon could see something squirming under the clean white sheet covering the stretcher between them. He pushed mightily on the door in front of him. It opened with the sound of cracking wood. He made it through just as they passed and slammed the door behind him.

Shouts could still be heard through the thin walls, and through the open window to his right, but he was grateful for the calm motionlessness of the room.

The only light was provided by the spotlights on the asphalt below, creating a rectangular beam that cut through the room. He could see dust floating lazily in the light, but the more tangible occupants of the room were obscured in shadow. They came slowly into focus.

The room was only about twenty feet square. At the far end was an open kitchen. Dishes were piled high in the sink and on the counters. In the center of a chrome and Formica table sat a box of breakfast cereal and a
bowl. The living room consisted of a sofa and a couple of old chairs arranged around a high-tech-looking TV.

On the floor behind the sofa lay a woman in a floral patterned dress. She was on her side, her back arched unnaturally. Beamon walked quietly across the room and stood over the body. Her eyes stared up at him.

Next to the woman was a clear plastic crack pipe. It was lying in a puddle of water that was undoubtedly the work of the firemen who had been trying to clear the poisonous fumes from the building. Beamon looked back at the woman. Something in her expression had become accusing. He walked to the kitchen and began rifling through the drawers. It was hard to make out their contents in the semidarkness, but he didn’t want to turn on the lights. The woman on the floor belonged in the dark.

Finally finding what he was looking for—a pair of scissors, he went to the table and sat, pushing the half-full bowl of Lucky Charms off to the side. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket and cut the filter off, lighting it with a cheap plastic lighter. The smoke attacked his lungs, giving him another much-needed rush of nicotine.

He had been working well with the casualty numbers that Laura put on his desk every morning. Numbers agreed with him. They could be added, subtracted, and multiplied, but they couldn’t bleed or cry out in pain. Even the television reports, while certainly more graphic than Laura’s charts and graphs, were only pictures. Little pixels scanned across an electronic screen at the speed of thought.

He took another drag on his modified cigarette, feeling the eyes of the woman on his back.

The ambiguities of the CDFS’s actions, and their long-term effects, had disappeared from his mind. They were killing people. Real people. The obvious conclusions about lives saved in the future by lower levels of drug use, and the other coldly logical arguments for the CDFS’s actions, seemed ludicrous as he looked down on the woman’s frozen form.

The front door to the apartment began to open, and Beamon waved in its general direction. “FBI. It’s all clear in here.”

“Mark?”

“Laura?”

She moved through the door and closed it quietly behind her. Through the shadows he could just make out her slim figure and perpetually tied-back hair, as she walked across the room and sat down next to him. “Tom told me you were here.” She reached out for his hand. “Are you okay?”

He remained silent and took another deep drag on his cigarette.

“I thought you didn’t take cases personally.” She looked around the room. “This is just noise to you. Isn’t that what you told me?”

Beamon pointed to the woman lying on the floor. “They don’t sound like noise this close up.”

Laura walked over to the woman, took a quilt off the sofa, and covered the body with it. She looked down at the lump under the blanket for a moment and then took a seat in the chair directly in front of Beamon.

“You know, Laura, I took this case just to feed my ego. Calahan burned me, so I came back to show him
and the world just how smart I am. Thousands of people are dead, and I was just playing a game.”

“Come on, Mark. You had no idea that this case was going to blow up like it has. No one did.” She plucked the cigarette from his mouth and tossed it in the sink. “You know, they put the filters on these things for a reason.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You sure you want to do this, Tony? It makes me nervous having you this close to a buy.”

Anthony DiPrizzio, head of the DiPrizzio crime family, nodded and calmly straightened his tie. He didn’t like to be this close, either, but times were changing, and he needed to be there. This was no time for the hands-off management style professed by his favorite instructor at Wharton. It was time to get personally involved.

It was eleven-thirty
P.M.
, and DiPrizzio was sitting in the small office on the second floor of one of his many New York waterfront warehouses. Across from him was Chris Panetti, an old and trusted enforcer who had worked for his father before Tony had taken over the helm. At the other end of the room sat three more men, each with a shoulder holster wrapped around his thick torso. He knew all of them too. All were men who had been with the Family for years. They were transfixed by a football game playing on a tiny black-and-white television. DiPrizzio watched the game from his side of the office with mild interest. He had never understood the appeal.

The unmistakable rolling sound of the warehouses cargo doors going up floated up to the office. The men watching the game stood and turned off the television. Panetti stood too, touching the holster under his arm. “I don’t suppose I can convince you to watch from up here, eh, Tony?”