Hells Kitchen

batting at flecks of cinders burning holes in his work shirt and jeans. The wall exploded outward. A finger of flame shot out. The tip caught Pellam on the arm and set fire to the gray shirt.
    He didn’t think so much about dying as he did the pain from fire. About it blinding him, burning his skin to black scar tissue, destroying his lungs.
    He rolled on his arm and put the flame out, climbed to his feet. “Ettie!”
    He looked up to see her turn away from the flames and fling open a window.
    “Ettie,” he shouted. “Try to get up to the roof. They’ll get a hook and ladder . . .” He backed to the window, hesitated, then, with a crash, flung his canvas bag through the glass, the forty thousand dollars’ worth of video camera rolling onto the metal stairs. A half dozen other tenants, in panic, ignored it and continued stumbling downward toward the alley.
    Pellam climbed onto the fire escape and looked back.
    “Get to the roof!” he cried to Ettie.
    But maybe that path too was blocked; the flames were everywhere now.
    Or maybe in her panic she just didn’t think.
    Through the boiling fire, his eyes met hers and she gave a faint smile. Then without a scream or shout that he could hear, Etta Wilkes Washington broke out a window long ago painted shut, and paused for a moment, looking down. Then she leapt into the air fifty feetabove the cobblestoned alley beside the building, the alley that, Pellam recalled, contained the cobblestone on which Isaac B. Cleveland had scratched his declaration of love for teenage Ettie Wilkes fifty-five years ago. The old woman’s slight frame vanished into the smoke.
    A wheezing groan of timber and steel, then a crash, like a sledgehammer on metal, as something structural gave way. Pellam jumped back to the edge of the fire escape, nearly tumbling over the railing and, as the cascade of orange sparks flowed over him, staggered downstairs.
    He was in as much of a hurry as the escaping tenants—though the mission on his mind now wasn’t to flee the ravaging fire but, thinking of Ettie’s daughter, to find the woman’s body and carry it away from the building before the walls collapsed, entombing it in a fiery, disfiguring grave.

TWO
    He opened his eyes and found the guard looking down at him.
    “Sir, you a patient here?”
    He sat up too fast and found that while the efforts of escaping the fire had left him sore and bruised, sleeping these past five hours in the orange fiberglass chairs of the ER’s waiting room was what had really done him in. The crook in his neck was pure pain.
    “I fell asleep.”
    “You can’t sleep here.”
    “I was a patient. They treated me last night. I fell asleep.”
    “Yessir. You been treated, you can’t stay.”
    His jeans were pocked with burn holes and he supposed he was filthy. The guard must’ve mistaken him for a bum.
    “Okay,” he said. “Just give me a minute.”
    Pellam moved his head in slow circles. Something deep in his neck popped. An ache like brain freeze from a frozen drink spread through his head. He winced, then looked around. He could understand why the hospital guard had rousted him. The room was completelyfilled with people awaiting treatment. Words rose and fell like surf, Spanish, English, Arabic. Everyone was frightened or resigned or irritated and to Pellam’s mind the resigned ones were the most unsettling. The man next to him sat forward, forearms resting on his knees. In his right hand dangled a single child’s shoe.
    The guard had delivered his message and then lost interest in enforcing his edict. He wandered off toward two teenagers who were smoking a joint in the corner.
    Pellam rose, stretched. He dug through his pockets and found the slip of paper he’d been given last night. He squinted and read what was written on it.
    Pellam picked up the heavy video camera and started down a long corridor, following the signs toward the B wing.
    *   *   *
    The thin green line hardly moved at all.
    A portly Indian doctor stood beside the bed, staring up, as if trying to decide if the Hewlett-Packard monitor was broken. He glanced down at the figure in the bed, covered with sheets and blankets, and hung the metal chart on a hook.
    John Pellam stood in the doorway. His bleary eyes slid from the grim dawn landscape outside Manhattan Hospital back to the unmoving form of Ettie Washington.
    “She’s in a coma?” he asked.
    “No,” the doctor responded. “She’s asleep. Sedated.”
    “Will she be