I could probably Mace him and get to it, but that’s not really the point. The point is that he’s willing to hurt me—maybe to kill me—to protect his little art monopoly. Which means he probably knows a lot more than he’s saying about the origin of the Sleeping Women.
“Well?” he says, almost playfully.
I back toward the iron staircase, finding the spray nozzle with my finger as I go.
“Where are you going, Jordan?” He takes three quick steps toward me, the hammer held waist high. As he does, a new scenario hits me with chilling force. What if the painter isn’t the killer at all? What if Wingate masterminded the whole thing to earn millions in commissions? What if he kills the women and merely commissions the paintings from some starving artist? His dark eyes flash as he moves forward, and the violence in them unnerves me.
In one movement I whip out the Mace can and blast his face from six feet, the powerful stream filling his eyes, nose, and mouth with enough chemical irritant to set his mucous membranes on fire. He screams like a child, drops the hammer, and starts clawing his eyes. I almost want to steer him to the sink, so pitiful are his cries, but I’m not that crazy. As I whirl toward the stairs, my heart beating wildly, a giant hand swats me back into the room and a fusillade of distant cannon hammers my eardrums.
When I open my eyes, I see gray smoke and a screaming man. Wingate is shrieking so loudly that I can’t think. You don’t hear men scream like that except in war zones, when they’re lying on the ground holding their guts or genitals in a bowl some medic gave them. Now Wingate is running around the room like a blind rat in a sinking ship; he might just go out a window. I scrabble to my knees and crawl toward the staircase, but the smoke only gets thicker. The lower floors of the gallery are on fire.
“Is there a fire escape?” I shout, but he doesn’t hear me. He’s still trying to claw his eyes out.
To my left I see a faint blue glow, a streetlight. That means a window. I crawl quickly to it and raise my head above the sill, hoping for a fire escape. I find a thirty-foot drop instead. Crabbing back toward the stairs, I stop halfway and wait for Wingate to rush by. A couple of seconds later he does, and I tackle him.
“SHUT UP!” I shout. “IF YOU DON’T SHUT UP, YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!”
“My eyes!” he wails. “I’m blind!”
“YOU’RE NOT BLIND! I MACED YOU! STAY HERE!”
Standing erect in the thickening smoke, I rush to the sink and fill a coffee decanter with water. Then I stagger back to him and flush out his eyes. He screams some more, but the water seems to do him some good.
“More,” he coughs.
“No time. We have to get out. Where’s the fire escape?”
“Bed … bedroom.”
“Where is it?”
“Ba—Back wall … door.”
“Get up!”
He doesn’t move until I yank his arm hard enough to tear a ligament. Then he rolls over and starts crawling beside me. As we move, a roar like the voice of some satanic creature bellows from the staircase. The fire’s voice. I’ve heard it in lots of places, and the sound turns my insides to jelly. There’s a reason human beings will jump ten floors onto concrete to escape being burned alive. That roar is part of it.
I go through the bedroom door first. The smoke here is not as bad. There’s only one window. As I crawl toward it, Wingate grabs my ankle.
“Wait!” he rasps. “The painting!”
“Screw the painting!”
“I can’t leave it! My sprinklers aren’t working!”
The pressure of his hand on my ankle is gone. When I turn back, I see no sign of him. The fool is willing to die for money. I’ve seen people die for worse reasons, but not many. I stand in the door and try to see through the smoke, but it’s useless.
“Forget the goddamn painting!” I shout into the gray wall.
“Help me!” he calls back. “I can’t move the crate alone!”
“Leave it!”
No reply. After a few seconds, I hear something whacking the crate. Probably the hammer. Then a creaking sound like tearing wood.
“It’s stuck!” he yells. Then a series of racking coughs cuts through the roar of the advancing fire. “I need a knife! I can cut the canvas loose!”
I don’t much care if Wingate wants to commit suicide, but it suddenly strikes me that the painting in that frame is worth more than money. Women’s lives may depend on it. Dropping to my knees, I take a deep breath and crawl toward the coughing.
My head soon bumps something soft. It’s Wingate, gagging as he tries to draw oxygen from the smoke. The flames have reached the top of the stairs, and in their orange glow I see the painting, half out of the crate but stuck against the side panel Wingate only partially removed. Unzipping my fanny pack, I take out my Canon, pop off three shots, then zip it back up and grab Wingate’s shoulder.
“YOU’RE GOING TO DIE IF YOU DON’T MOVE!”
His face is gray, his eyes nearly swollen shut. I grab his legs and try to drag him to the bedroom, but the exertion makes me dizzy, and for an instant my eyes go black. I’m near to fainting, and fainting here would mean death. Dropping his feet, I rush to the window, flip the catch, and shove it upward.
The outside air hits my face like a bucketful 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.
