Night on Fire Read online

  I sigh. “Ya know, a bottle of Dr Pepper is two bucks,” I tell him. “A bottle of Dr Pepper from a vending machine is two bucks in every hotel in the English-speaking world.”

  He shrugs his shoulders again, then eyes my left hand and the two bills I’m squeezing into my fist.

  “All right,” I say, moving toward the machine. I slide in one of the cougar’s dollar bills and allow him to select the Dr Pepper.

  The bottle tumbles downward and lands with a thunk. The kid reaches his hand in and shouts, “Thanks!”

  “Sure, kid,” I say, glancing from the single I have left to the two-dollar price tag below the Dasani. “Let’s go.”

  We head back upstairs. There are eight rooms down our end of the hall, four on each side, each with an adjoining suite. The kid’s room is just next door to the cougar’s, but the kid’s room is adjoined to the last room on the left, not to ours. The last room on the left has a baby blue garter hanging from the door handle. Looks like I’m not the only one getting lucky tonight. Though, of the two of us, I am the only one who gets to sneak out the door come morning.

  I bid the kid good night and tell him to keep our little soda mission a secret. Or at least not to mention the pineapple boxers.

  He nods his head and walks toward his room. I turn and hustle down the hall to pay a visit to the ice machine.

  When I return to the cougar’s room I pull her key card from the pocket in my boxers meant for condoms. I quietly open the door and step inside.

  The cougar’s sitting up in bed, her arms wrapped around her toned, tanned legs. “Well, that sure took you long enough,” she says.

  I nod and douse the lamp she’d turned on above the desk.

  “Where’s my water?” she asks, holding out her hand with indignation.

  “Here, baby,” I say, placing a thick melting cube of ice in her palm. “Suck on this.”

  CHAPTER 3

  I’m dreaming.

  I know I’m dreaming because I’m back in New York, at the jail on Rikers Island, sitting across from a former client named Brandon Glenn.

  Thing is, Brandon’s been dead nearly three years now.

  An alarm suddenly sounds. The jail is on lockdown. I jump off my metal folding chair and race toward the door but it’s locked. Of course it’s locked. It’s always locked during attorney-client meetings with a prisoner.

  When I spin around, Brandon Glenn’s slumping off his chair, falling to the cold cement floor. I hurry around the table to help him, but by the time I get there there’s no saving him. A shank juts out the side of Brandon’s neck, blood gushing like a geyser all over my new Tommy Bahama sandals, my toes turning a deep and gruesome red.

  I drop to my knees, force a soundless scream for help while trying to cover his wound with my suit jacket. My thoughts instantly flash from rescue to culpability. After all, it’s only the two of us in this tiny sealed tomb, the room is locked from the outside—and somehow I know my prints are all over the shank’s bloodied handle.

  As I rise to consciousness I realize the prison alarm is just an alarm clock, maybe the loudest alarm clock on earth. Lying on my stomach I feel around for an extra pillow, place it atop my head, and try to smother my ears.

  When the cougar begins clawing at my back I realize this is no alarm clock. It’s a goddamn fire alarm, the kind of fire alarm even the dead could hear. I reach for another flat, lifeless pillow and tug it down hard over the first.

  The cougar’s growling something at me.

  “… time is it?” I shout.

  I peek out from beneath my pillowed teepee and glance at the window. It’s still night, no light spilling in at all. My eyes flutter toward the digital alarm clock, which reads two-twenty something, the last digit blacked out by one of my socks.

  Quickly I take inventory of myself: pounding head, burning stomach, a mouth that tastes like rum and coconut suntan lotion. So, nothing out of the ordinary.

  The cougar meanwhile is on her feet, slipping back into her sundress, shouting at me to get out of bed.

  “No way,” I say, lowering the heavy lids of my eyes.

  Fire alarms, they go off all the time. Like car alarms, only louder. I’ve been putting up with this shit since my first semester at URI, some jacked-up resident advisor constantly chasing me naked out of the freshman dorm. Drills they called them. Drills held in the dead of night just to get the girls outside in their underwear, nipples instantly hardening under white cotton tank tops in the brisk New England air. Gossips loitering with their binoculars ready to report the following morning on who is sleeping with whom. Dorms, hotels, condos, apartment buildings, it’s always the same. Always a prankster, some joker or toker higher than an elephant’s eye blowing bong smoke up at the ceiling. Never is it a bona fide emergency.

  Well, almost never.

  The cougar smacks my bare back so hard that it stings. “There’s a fire,” she shouts.

  I groan. “How do you know, baby?”

  “Because there are flames out in the hall and there’s smoke coming in under the door,” she yells. “And stop calling me baby!”

  That gets me up. Still in my boxers, I’m out of the bed and by the front door in a few rapid heartbeats, checking the handle for heat.

  My hand sizzles for several seconds before I yank it away and yelp in pain. Yeah, it’s hot. Hellishly hot. And even from a few feet away I can see the flames licking the peephole I’m too frightened to approach with my face.

  I turn and glance toward the sliding glass door to the lanai, but we’re sixteen floors up and cougars can’t fly. As far as I know, neither can lawyers.

  There is one more exit in the room, a door that leads to a door that leads to the adjoining suite. By the time I raise my singed hand to point to it, the cougar is already there, the first door open, checking the second for heat.

  “It’s cool,” she says, frantically trying the handle. “But it’s locked.”

  I edge closer to the front door, squint my right eye and catch a glimpse out the peephole. The hall is now filled with thick black smoke, and it’s nearly impossible to see anything. But the smoke appears to be billowing from the left, and the suite adjoining ours is to our right. If we can get through that door, we might just have an avenue of escape.

  In the distance I hear sirens, but for us it’s too little too late. If we’re going to survive, we’re going to do so on our own.

  My mind racing, I rush to the heavy wooden chair pushed under the room’s lone desk. With some effort I heave it onto my right shoulder and run full speed toward the locked door, trying to break through. The chair crashes into the door, splintering in my arms, the impact striking me full force in the chest. When I rise to my knees, my torso is bruised and bloodied, and I’m entirely out of breath.

  And fresh out of ideas. The fucking door didn’t budge.

  I push myself to my feet and search for my suit pants. The room is quickly filling with smoke. Ducking low, I spot the pants rolled up in a ball on the tiled floor of the kitchenette. Down on hands and knees, listening to the cougar scream, I crawl toward the pants as fast as I can.

  When I reach the pants I fish around in my pockets for my Bank of Hawaii debit card. I finally find the card in the last pocket left to search. With the blue piece of plastic in hand, I rise to my feet and hurry back toward the locked door adjoining the suite.

  Fortunately I’ve done this before, only this time my hands are shaking and I’m trying like hell to continue holding my breath.

  I slip the debit card in and maneuver it near the lock, but nothing.

  “Hurry,” the cougar shouts as though I’m taking my sweet goddamn time.

  I slide the card in and out, back and forth, up and down, trying to catch the lock. No good. I yank the card back out, draw in a lungful of smoke and choke, my heart pounding hard against my chest.

  As the smoke in the room thickens I stare down at the debit card, my eyes stinging, sweat pouring down my cheeks. “You got me into this fuck
ing mess,” I mutter to the piece of plastic, “now you get me the hell out.”

  I glide the card back into the crack and guide it toward the lock. Finally the familiar feel of the latch giving way. I twist the handle and the door swings open. I grab the cougar’s arm and a moment later we’re scampering through the neighboring suite, darting for the front door.

  Before I open the door I check the handle for heat. Hot, but not nearly as piping as ours.

  I peek through the peephole. Smoke, sure, but it’s now or never.

  “Stay low,” I shout over my shoulder as I open the door.

  We duck out of the room and into the hall, the alarm like a drill in my ears. The thick black smoke invades my nostrils, climbs up my nose and down my throat as I run. Trying to choke the life out of me.

  I bolt toward the stairwell that the kid and I used before.

  When the cougar and I reach the stairwell, I fling the door open. Then I turn back and take one last glance down the hall.

  The kid.

  Through the smoke I can barely see him, standing as still as a statue, tears raining down his face, a half-full bottle of Dr Pepper still attached to one of his paws.

  “Go,” I shout at the cougar, shoving her into the stairwell.

  “What are you—”

  Before she completes the question I’m hunched low, scrambling back down the hall toward the kid. He’s coughing now, hacking as though he’s been smoking Winstons the past half century.

  I lift the kid, toss him onto my right shoulder, surprised that he’s as light as air.

  Breathlessly, I work my way back toward the stairwell, but the heat’s too much, the smoke’s filling my lungs. I begin choking and nearly collapse to the floor.

  Instead, adrenaline pumping, I pick myself up and lunge forward.

  “Stop, drop, and roll!” the kid’s yelling in my ear. “Stop, drop, and roll!”

  “I think that only applies if you’re on fire, kid,” I rasp.

  Then we’re in the stairwell, my bare feet again slapping against the stairs. Only this time there is an alarm screaming in my ears, and we’re not on a mission for an ice cold Dr Pepper and a two-dollar bottle of Dasani. This time the clock’s ticking and there’s a damn good chance both the kid and I might die.

  All right, Kev. We’re down the first flight. My knees suddenly ache, the weight of the kid now taking its toll. Down another flight. Only fourteen floors to go. The smoke in the stairwell is getting thick. My lungs are about to give. Holding the handrail, I stumble down another flight. Thirteen more to go.

  If I stop, I think, I drop, and the kid dies. Down another flight. Keep moving.

  Another flight. Eleven to go.

  Ten. I can’t breathe. Nine.

  Won’t someone shut off this fucking alarm? Eight.

  Almost there, Kev. Just seven more flights to go to get the hell out of this night alive.

  CHAPTER 4

  Outside, watching the flames dance, thick black smoke drifting over the Pacific, I listen to the kid screaming and crying for his grandmother, and I dread the worst. My eyes flick over to the ambulances every few seconds, though I know it’s in vain. Anyone who is getting out has gotten out already, and there is no one alive and outside who meets Grandma’s description. A sick feeling rises in my throat and I taste the remnants of rum, blended with smoke and bile. I nearly vomit at my bare feet but instead choke it back, keep my chin up, eyes focused, my hand resting gently atop the kid’s head, trying futilely to douse the fire in his tortured imagination.

  The kid told me amongst a rush of tears that he never made it back into his room after we bought him the Dr Pepper downstairs. The door was locked and he didn’t have a room key. Silly of me now that I flash back to his outstretched pockets to think that one would have magically appeared. He knocked on the door but knew Grandma had long been sleeping. I think that maybe the soda she ordered tasted “oogie” because it was sprinkled with Bacardi light rum. And Grandma had taken her pills, the kid said. Her “Am-beans,” he told me, the white oval tablets that never fail to put her down for the night.

  Unable to reenter his room, the kid searched the hallway for me. Then he tried the stairwell, went down one floor and came back. He sat on the stairs for a while, sipping his soda. Figured someone would eventually come by and find him.

  When the alarm sounded, the kid said, he immediately had an accident in his pants, peed all down his legs and into his shoes. I told the kid not to worry about that, told the kid that I did that, too.

  There are thick gray blankets wrapped around us, courtesy of the Honolulu Fire Department. I’ve taken a few hits of oxygen and all things considered, I’m feeling sublime. The cougar’s fine, too, just a tad shaken up. Standing next to me, the three of us almost look like a family. Which means, I believe, it would be a crime for me to sneak away and head home.

  As police and news helicopters circle overhead, I turn and gaze at the swelling crowd of gawkers. Some are in their nightclothes, pajamas, nightgowns, nighties, even teddies. Some guys, like me, are still in their boxers or briefs. One’s standing completely in the buff, a UPenn baseball cap covering his goods. Others are dressed in their day clothes—sundresses and aloha shirts, khakis and shorts. It seems some flocked over from the resort next door, others from the villas, town houses and condominiums that round out the rest of the Ko Olina community.

  Through the chaos I eventually spot Koa. The bartender is standing by himself, entranced by the flames, his arms folded tightly across his chest. I wave my arm in an attempt to snag his attention but he doesn’t see me. I call out, but with all the noise—the copters, the crowds, the still-sounding sirens—it’s impossible for him to hear. Finally he tears his gaze away from the fire and searches the throng. I throw up my arm again and he sees me.

  When he reaches us, he’s leering at the towel-covered cougar standing next to me. Then he glances down at the kid, one eyebrow arched toward the sky. “Damn, you work fast, Corvelli. The two of you got one toddler already?”

  Like most native Hawaiians, there’s a slight hint of pidgin English in Koa’s speech, such that his th’s sound like d’s, many of his r’s disappear completely, and “already” sounds a lot like awready.

  “What are you still doing here?” I ask him, glancing at my bare left wrist out of habit. No watch, but I figure by now it has to be well past three o’clock. “I thought Kanaloa’s closes at midnight on Tuesdays.”

  Koa half-smiles. “Nah, we just tell you that, Kevin, or else you’d never go home.”

  A few yards away flashes are going off. Not the occasional twinkle from a curious tourist, but a full-on barrage of shooting from every which direction, as though the four of us were standing on the red carpet in tuxes and gowns, instead of barefoot on the grass in towels and T-shirts. I shield my eyes against the glints of light, which until now had been aimed at the top two or three floors of the tower, hoping it’s just investigators doing their jobs, looking for fire buffs, seeing who’s lingering a little too long at the scene, who is a little less awed by the rescues than by the flames still creeping and crawling up the night sky. But I know that I’m wrong. I know that it’s the goddamn media.

  No sooner do I realize it than a tape recorder is aimed point-blank at my nose. The mikes can’t be too far behind.

  “Can you tell us what you saw?”

  “How did the fire start?”

  “Are you a guest at the resort?”

  “Was anybody else up there?”

  “How did you and your family escape?”

  As I parrot “No comment,” I slowly back up, dragging Koa, the kid, and the cougar away from the predators. My progress is immediately impeded by a large firm hand pressed against the middle of my back. The fingers move gradually up my stiff neck until they rest rigidly on my right shoulder. I turn and see the familiar though not-so-friendly face of John Tatupu.

  “May I have a word with you, Mr. Corvelli?” Tatupu says.

  Although I ho
ld a good deal of respect for this particular native Hawaiian homicide detective with the Honolulu PD, he thinks I’m a sleaze, and I can’t say it doesn’t sting a bit.

  I turn toward the media vultures and smile; saved by the dick.

  “What can I do for you, John?” I say, moving with him away from the mob.

  He flinches at my use of his first name. John and I are clearly not on a first-name basis. “Heard you were on the floor where the fire started,” he says.

  I arch my brows. “Really? Who told you that?”

  “We’re not in a courtroom, Corvelli. I get to ask the questions tonight.”

  “Fine,” I say, stopping mid-moonlight stroll, turning my head up and squinting at a lit tiki torch at the edge of the beach. “If it’s going to be like that, I refuse to respond.”

  “Rather do this downtown?”

  “Are you asking me on a date, Detective? Because you sure as hell don’t have probable cause for an arrest.”

  Tatupu rests his hands on his hips and tries again. “Look, I know you were with that woman over there.” He points with his chin at the cougar ten yards away. “All I need to know to clear both her and you is exactly what you were doing when the fire started?”

  “If memory serves,” I say, “I was calling down to the front desk to request an extra Bible. See, there were two of us in the room and only one copy of the Good Book.”

  Tatupu sighs heavily, a long and deep, defeated exhalation. I almost feel sorry for him. Almost.

  “Look, John,” I say, pulling my blanket tighter against the late night trade winds finally blowing in from the ocean. “There are sixteen rooms on that floor, eight down our wing. It’s mid-July and the hotel’s filled to capacity. That means there were probably at least fourteen people besides myself and my date down our end of the hall. Why not hassle them first, see what you can get?”

  Tatupu looks me squarely in the eyes, his broad lips sunken on either side. “I would but from what I hear from HFD’s search and rescue team, most of them are already dead.”