Hells Kitchen

blood, Pellam realized. He’s following the trail of my blood to my hiding place. But why hasn’t he found me yet? It was too dark, he supposed.
    Metal grated on metal.
    A resonating sound like a steel drum, a bell.
    Then, a gushing sound as liquid began flowing on the ground. He clutched his arm more tightly. What was Sonny doing?
    A second gush joined the first. Then another.
    A pause. Then a gunshot sounded very nearby. Pellam jumped in shock. There was a huge flash of light and Pellam realized that Sonny had opened drums ofgas or diesel fuel in the construction site and set the liquid ablaze with the gun.
    What had been dark now became dazzlingly bright.
    “Ah, Pellam . . .”
    There, clearly visible in the shocking, yellow light, was the trail of Pellam’s blood, leading to his cave. Still, he remained where he was. No way, he thought, can I outrun him. In the fiery illumination he could now see Sonny prowling madly in the far end of the construction site, not far from the still-wrapped statue, looking for Pellam.
    Pellam felt heat from all around him. The burning fuel was flowing into the scaffolding and piles of wood, setting everything aflame. And two, no, three of the wooden sheds. Then another. A truck caught fire. Tires burst and melted amid vibrant orange flames and turbulent black smoke. Wood snapped like bullets and there were explosions as fuel tanks—gas and propane—cracked apart, firing hissing buckshot through the night.
    The whole site, a half block long, was suddenly awash with fire. More trucks ignited. The sheds, stacks of wood and rich, dark paneling—destined perhaps for Roger McKennah’s penthouse—crackled and blazed. He saw timbers spontaneously sprout flames and the roiling hot wind passed the fire to pallets resting against the shed where he hid. Pellam scrabbled into a corner, away from the tempestuous inferno.
    The noise of the fire was like a subway train.
    At this moment—when the entire lot was enveloped in flames, when there was virtually nothing left untouched by the fire—a small half moon of red, white and blue bunting ignited. Unlike the massive tide offlame in the yard this scrap burned placidly. The hot, rising air carried it aloft.
    And it was this shred of patriotic cloth, not the gallons of fiery gasoline or stacks of blazing wood, that finally ignited McKennah Tower itself.
    The burning scrap wafted onto a stack of cardboard boxes in the open atrium. The cartons began to glow then burn brightly. In a few minutes the flames were in the lobby, rolling over artists’ conceptions of offices, over the tall palm trees that had so astonished Ettie Washington when she watched them being delivered, over piles of linoleum and wallpaper, buckets of paint. More propane tanks, on parked forklifts and high-climbers, exploded, shooting shrapnel throughout the lobby and shattering the huge plate glass windows.
    Fire everywhere.
    The paper wrapping of the statue burned away but Pellam, stumbling toward the gate, still couldn’t make out what it was.
    Finally he could wait no longer. The flames were too close, the heat too much. He eased from his hiding space as the window of the shed popped out in a quiet burst and scattered scalding glass around him.
    Only one exit remained—the way he entered, though the chain link. Sonny knew about that. But there was nowhere else to go; the plaza and atrium were completely engulfed.
    As he staggered out from his hiding place and made his way to the fence he saw a rich glow in windows on the second floor of the Tower, then the third, then the sixth or eighth, then higher. The fire had been sucked quickly into the gullet of the building.
    Huge sheets of Thermopane windows burst, glass shards and black pellets of plastic rained down.
    He stumbled to the chain-link and still could not see Sonny.
    A stone of the heart . . .
    He managed to squeeze through the opening in the gate but one side sprung out of his grip and struck his broken arm. For a moment he passe out completely and then found himself on his hands and knees. He inhaled deeply and crawled away from the site into the middle of Thirty-fifth Street. Behind him was a tide of yellow flame and tornadoes of orange flame and spouts of hissing blue flame. Windows exploded and walls collapsed. Heavy bulldozers and sheds and dump trucks settled down to die.
    Then the hands got him.
    Sonny’s snake-like grip ratcheted the cuff around his good wrist. The young man began pulling him