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With a scream Sachs leapt aside, but tripped and landed hard on her back, staring at the huge falling bar of wood streaking directly at her face and chest. Instinctively she held her hands up.
A huge bang as the beam landed on a child's Sunday-school chair. It stopped inches from Sachs's head. She crawled out from underneath and rolled to her feet.
Looking around the room, peering through the darkening smoke.
Hell no, she thought suddenly. I'm not losing another one. Choking, Sachs turned back to the fire and staggered toward the one corner she hadn't checked.
As she jogged forward a leg shot out from behind a file cabinet and tripped her.
Hands flying outward, Sachs landed face down inches from a pool of burning oil. She rolled to her side, drawing her weapon and swinging it into the panicked face of a blond woman struggling to sit up.
Sachs pulled the gag off her mouth and the woman spit black mucus. She gagged for a moment, a deep, dying sound.
"Carole Ganz?"
She nodded.
"Your daughter?" Sachs cried.
"Not . . . here. My hands! The cuffs."
"No time. Come on." Sachs cut Carole's ankles free with her switchblade.
It was then that she saw, against the wall by the window, a melting plastic bag.
The planted clues! The ones that told where the little girl would be. She stepped toward it. But with a deafening bang the door to the boiler room cracked in half, spewing a six-inch tidal wave of burning oil over the floor, surrounding the bag, which disintegrated instantly.
Sachs stared for a moment and then heard the woman's scream. All the stairs were blazing now. Sachs knocked the fire extinguisher out from under the smoldering table. The handle and nozzle had melted away and the metal canister was too hot to grasp. With her knife she cut a patch off her uniform blouse and lifted the crackling extinguisher by its neck, flung it to the top of the burning stairs. It staggered for a moment, like an uncertain bowling pin, and then started down.
Sachs drew her Glock and when the red cylinder was halfway down, fired one round.
The extinguisher erupted in a huge booming explosion; pieces of red shrapnel from the casing hissed over their heads. The mushroom cloud of carbon dioxide and powder settled over the stairs and momentarily dampened most of the flames.
"Now, move!" Sachs shouted.
Together they took the steps two at a time, Sachs carrying her own weight and half the woman's, and pushed through the doorway into the inferno on the first floor. They hugged the wall as they stumbled toward the exit, while above them stained-glass windows burst and rained hot shards--the colorful bodies of Jesus and Matthew and Mary and God Himself--down upon the bent backs of the escaping women.
TWENTY-NINE
Forty minutes later, Sachs had been salved and bandaged and stitched and had sucked so much pure oxygen she felt like she was tripping. She sat beside Carole Ganz. They stared at what was left of the church. Which was virtually nothing. Only two walls remained and, curiously, a portion of the third floor, jutting into space above a lunar landscape of ash and debris piled in the basement.
"Pammy, Pammy . . ." Carole moaned, then retched and spit. She took her own oxygen mask to her face, leaned back, weary and in pain.
Sachs examined another alcohol-soaked rag with which she was wiping the blood from her face. The rags had started out brown and were now merely pink. The wounds weren't serious--a cut on her forehead, swatches of second-degree burns on her arm and hand. Her lips were no longer flawless, however; the lower one had been cut deeply in the crash, the tear requiring three stitches.
Carole was suffering from smoke inhalation and a broken wrist. An impromptu cast covered her left wrist and she cradled it, head down, speaking through clenched teeth. Every breath was an alarming wheeze. "That son of a bitch." Coughing. "Why . . . Pammy? Why on earth? A three-year-old child!" She wiped angry tears with the back of her uninjured arm.
"Maybe he doesn't want to hurt her. So he just brought you to the church."
"No," she spat out angrily. "He doesn't care about her. He's sick! I saw the way he looked at her. I'm going to kill him. I'm going to fucking kill him." The harsh words dissolved into a harsher bout of coughing.
Sachs winced in pain. She'd unconsciously dug a nail into a burned fingertip. She pulled out her watchbook. "Can you tell me what happened?"
Between bouts of sobbing and throaty coughs, Carole told her the story of the kidnapping.
"You want me to call anybody?" Sachs asked. "Your husband?"
Carole didn't answer. She drew her knees up to her chin, hugged herself, wheezing roughly.
