Hells Kitchen

shakier and sweatier, glanced at the big camera in the cowboy’s hand. A cable ran to a battery pack in a canvas bag. It wasn’t one of those cheap videocams. This was the real thing.
    Who exactly are you, Joe Buck? What exactly are you doing here?
    Sonny began to sweat harder (which didn’t bother him though he’d been sweating an awful lot lately) and his hands began to shake (which did bother him because that was a very bad thing in someone who assembled incendiary devices for a living).
    Watching tall, thin Joe Buck take some more footage of the burnt-out tenement. Sonny decided he hated the cowboy more for his height than because he was shooting so fucking much tape of a building he’d just burned down.
    Still, in some part of his heart, he hoped the tapes were good; he was proud of this little fire.
    After he’d started the blaze and slipped back out through the basement door, he’d hidden in the construction site across the street and turned on his Radio Shack scanner. He heard the dispatcher put out a second-alarm assignment. It had been a 10-45, code 2 call. He was pleased about the alarm—which meant a serious fire—but disappointed about the code, which meant that there’d been only injuries, not fatalities. Code 1 meant death.
    The cowboy continued to shoot for a few minutes. Then he shut the big camera off and slipped it back into his bag.
    Sonny glanced again at the fire marshal and his cronies—my gosh, that’s one huge faggot assistant. Lomax told the big boy to order a backhoe and start the vertical excavation as soon as possible. Silently Sonny told them that this was the correct procedure for investigating a fire like this.
    But Sonny was getting more and more worried. Pretty soon he was all worry, the way a corridor fills with smoke; one minute it’s clear, the next it’s dense as cotton.
    The reason, however, wasn’t Lomax or his huge assistant. It was the cowboy.
    I hate that man. Hate him, hate him, hate him hatehimhatehim.
    Sonny tossed his long blond ponytail off his shoulder, wiped a sweating forehead with shaking hands and eased through the crowd, closer to Joe Buck. His breathing was labored and his heart slammed in his chest. He sucked smoke-laden air into his lungs and exhaled very slowly, enjoying the taste, the smell. Beneath his hands the yellow tape trembled. Stop that stop that stop that stopthatstopthat!
    He glanced up at Pellam.
    Not quite a foot taller. Maybe a lot less than that. Ten inches, if Sonny stood up straight. Or nine.
    Suddenly a new spectator eased between them and Sonny was jostled aside. The intruder was a young woman in a rich, deep-green double-breasted suit. A businesswoman. She said, “Terrible. Just awful.”
    “Did you see it happen?” the cowboy asked.
    She nodded. “I was coming home from work. I was on an audit. You a reporter?”
    “I’m doing a film about some of the tenants in the building.”
    “A film. Cool. A documentary? I’m Alice.”
    “Pellam.”
    Pellam, Sonny thought. Pellam. Pell-am. He pictured the name and spoke it over and over and over in his mind until, like the top of a column of smoke, it was there but was no longer visible.
    “At first,” she continued, looking at the cowboy’s, at Pellam ’s lean face, “it was like there was nothing wrong, then all of a sudden there were flames everywhere. I mean, totally everywhere.” She carried a heavy briefcase stamped Ernst & Young in gold and with her free hand twined her short red hair nervously about her index finger. Sonny glanced at her laminated business card, hanging from the handle.
    Pellam asked, “Where exactly did it start?”
    She nodded. “Well, I saw the flames break through the window there.” Pointed to the basement.
    She didn’t seem at all like an Alice to him. She looked like that somber little thing on The X-Files, whom Sonny, in a private joke, called “Agent Scullery.”
    Like Pellam, Scullery was taller than Sonny. He disliked tall men but he venomously hated women taller than he was and when she happened to glance down at him the way she’d glance at a squirrel his hatred turned from anger to something very calm and very hot.
    “I was the one that called the fire department. From that box on the corner. Those boxes, you know, you see but you never think about.”
    He also hated short hair because it didn’t take verylong to burn away. He wiped his hands on his white slacks and listened carefully. Agent Scullery rambled on about fire