Hells Kitchen

back into the job site.
    “Come on, come on!” Sonny cried.
    Pellam expected to feel the blow of a gunshot but Sonny’d tossed the Colt aside. He had something else in mind and was steering for a pit in the dirt near a contractor’s shed. It was filled with flaming gasoline. He dragged Pellam toward it. He fell against his shattered arm and fainted again momentarily. When he came to he found that Sonny’s manic strength had pulled him to the brink of the pit.
    “Isn’t it beautiful, isn’t it lovely?” Sonny called, staring into the swirling fire and smoke at his feet.
    He reached down—just as Pellam kicked out with a boot. Sonny slipped on the edge of the trough and fell up to his waist into the burning fuel. He began toscream and in his crazed state, jerking back and forth, thrashing, began to pull Pellam after him.
    Blinded by the smoke, seared by the flames, Pellam had no leverage. He felt himself being tugged closer and closer to the inferno. A memory of Ettie’s voice came to him.
    “Sometimes my sister Elsbeth and me’d go where they led the lambs along Eleventh Avenue over to the slaughterhouses on Forty-second Street. They had a judas lamb. You know ’bout that? It’d lead the others to the slaughter. We used to yell at the judas and throw rocks to lead him off but it never worked. That’s one lamb knew his business.”
    And then he heard:
    “Pellam, Pellam, Pellam . . .” A high voice, panicked.
    A vague image through the smoke. It was a person. A thick coat of smoke enveloped him. He dropped to the ground. Sonny’s thrashing body pulled him closer.
    Pellam squinted, looking through the smoke.
    Ismail, tears running down his cheeks, stood at the fence. “Here! He over here!” He was gesturing madly toward Pellam.
    Then another figure. They both eased through the chain-link.
    “Get back!” Pellam shouted.
    “Jesus,” Hector Ramirez said and grabbed Pellam’s wrist just before he slipped over the edge into the pool of flame.
    Ramirez pulled a black gun from his waistband,pressed the muzzle against the links of the cuffs and fired five or six times.
    He hardly heard the shots. In fact, he hardly heard the roar of the flames or Ramirez’s voice as he pulled Pellam away from the fire. The only sound in his ears was Ismail’s voice saying, “You be okay, you be okay, you be okay . . .”

THIRTY-TWO
    The roles were reversed.
    Now it was Ettie Washington’s turn to visit Pellam in the hospital. Unlike him, she’d had the foresight to bring a present. Not flowers or candy though. Something more appreciated. She now poured the smuggled wine into two plastic cups and offered him one.
    “To your health,” she said.
    “Yours.”
    He swallowed his in one gulp. Ettie, as he remembered her doing when he gazed at her through the viewfinder of the Betacam, sipped hers judiciously. She was the epitome of a frugal homemaker, having learned those skills, Pellam recalled, young from Grandmother Ledbetter.
    The private room in which Pellam now lay was below the one where Ettie’d been arrested and above the room where Juan Torres, the poor child, had died. Where would Sonny’s body be? he wondered. The morgue was probably in the basement. Or maybe he was in the city morgue. A routine autopsy then a final trip to Potters’ Field would be his fate.
    “People keep asking me what happened, John. Asking me—because I know you. The police, that fire marshal, reporters too. They want to know how you got away from that firebug fella. They think you know but you’re aren’t talking.”
    “Miracle,” Pellam offered wryly.
    But Pellam wasn’t going to complicate the lives of his improbable friends by telling anyone how Ismail hadn’t gone back to the YOC at all but had hung around waiting to spend more time with Pellam, had seen Sonny’s attack, and had run up the street to summon Hector Ramirez.
    “Well, that’s between you and the doorpost,” Ettie said, echoing a favorite expression of her grandfather’s. “And that fire marshal said something else. Which I didn’t exactly understand. He was saying that you might want to think about leaving the city before your name becomes Mr. Un lucky. . . . So. That what you going to be doing, John? Leaving?”
    “Not hardly. We’ve got a film to finish.”
    “That boy came by to see you. When you were asleep.”
    “Ismail?”
    Ettie nodded. “Gone now. Has quite a mouth on him for a youngster. I put him in his place, though. Talking