Marty motioned for Gene and Jerri to get to the fire escape, then yanked out a patient-record drawer and ran after Carl.
The window that led to the fire escape was in flames. Gene dove through a wall of heat and slammed against the black-painted railing. The hard metal did its job and stopped him from plummeting five stories to his death. He did his best to slow Jerri and Doug as they flew through in turn. "Marty! Carl! There's no time! Get the heck out of there!" He sprinted down the fire escape stairs as fast as he could go, gritting his teeth against the pain.
"GO! GO! GO!" Marty yelled, shoving Carl in front of him. After a second trip, they'd saved what files they could, but the air in the room was changing from smoke to flame. The west wall leading to the fire escape was a mass of fire. He yelled into the COM, "Gene! The fire escape's cut off!" Marty took the lead, and they crawled to the stairwell door. He pushed it open. Half a flight down, the stairs were an inferno. The air was thick with the smell of lighter fluid.
They covered their mouths and bolted upstairs. Smoke stung their eyes and seared their lungs. Marty threw his shoulder against the roof exit, and the pair stumbled out into the blessedly cold air. The tar at their feet blistered from the heat beneath, and acrid smoke extended the building's shape upward into the cold night sky. For the moment, Marty and Carl stood in the eye of the storm.
Marty spun and looked for any way down. The closest building was thirty feet away. The west side of the building was engulfed in flames. The staccato crackling of bursting tar bubbles rippled across the roof's surface. "Carl. I…This is going to be a fucking shitty way to die."
Gene hit the ground at a dead sprint, adrenaline masking the brutal pain in his foot. The fire escape was a lost cause, which meant that Marty and Carl's only chance was the stairwell. He rounded the front of the building and saw fire trucks in the distance. They crawled and blared their way through traffic. Too late.
"WHERE'S THAT CHOPPER?" he screamed.
"En route," Sam replied, her voice as calm as ever.
He yanked open the front door and ran in, weapons-ready, Doug and Jerri right behind him. The guard sat in her chair with her head lolled to the side. A small dark circle in the middle of her forehead belied the seriousness of the wound. The small splatter of blood and brains on the wall told the rest of the story. In her right hand, her cell phone buzzed for attention.
Gene ran across the room and slammed his shoulder into the stairwell door. A small gas can sat at the base of the stairs. Gene sprinted up three steps at a time, and as soon as he rounded the second-floor landing, he saw the arsonist.
Officer Mullins of the NYPD, who had greeted them with the warrant thirty minutes before, had a submachine-gun in one hand and a bottle of charcoal lighter fluid in the other. He was coaxing the fire lower with squirts from the bottle when he heard Gene pound up behind him.
He spun to bring his gun to bear, but Gene's was up and aimed. Gene double-tapped him center-mass, then shot him in the face as he ran past. He followed the thin trail of burning liquid around the corner.
At the third floor, the stairwell was awash with flames. He could feel the air as it sucked past him from the lower floors and fed the conflagration above. "Sam!" He threw an arm up to shield his face from the heat, but knew no one could get through that much fire. "Get that helicopter to the roof, now!"
"Working on it."
He sprinted down the stairs. Doug and Jerri dragged Mullins' body toward the lobby. "Marty! Carl! Where are you?" A crash from above was his only answer.
* * *
On the roof, all Carl could hear was the roar of flames and the cracking of super-heated wood. The viscous, sticky tar sucked at his shoes. He backpedaled away as the western part of the roof continued to cave in, Marty half holding him up and half dragging him backward by his shirt collar. The clatter as the fire escape collapsed was deafening.
Marty screamed in his ear, barely audible over the roaring flames. "I think I'd rather jump than burn!"
Carl turned his back to the fire and looked over the edge. It was a long way down to the hard street below. A gawking crowd was already forming. There must be dozens of cameras down there, he thought.
"Me, too," he shouted back. "But I'm not jumping. It's one thing for my kids to know their daddy's dead. I'm sure as hell not going to let them watch me die on YouTube."
"I won't let that happen, Carl."
A small object landed in the sticky tar next to Carl's foot. It was a brass baseball nested in a thin, fishnet pouch. The pouch was tied to a long, drawstring-like rope. Carl looked up through the wall of smoke and could see a long, white shape that stretched upward and away. It danced in the wind like a kite's tail.