The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(50)

Ruth Phillips understood she was about to die.

Thinking of Claire and Sammi. The grandchildren, too. Arnie, of course. The love of her life. Then, now, forever.

She ducked as another joist collapsed and slammed to the floor. It narrowly missed her head.

Choking on the smoke, twisting away from the needle-sharp embers and the fists of heat.

But then, Ruth thought: No.

She wasn’t going to die this way. In pain. Not by fire.

She looked around, as best she could through the fog of boiling smoke. The stairs were gone but in the corner, right under the ledge of the floor that remained, where Arnie lay, was her mother’s old dresser. She crawled to it and climbed on the top. She wasn’t strong enough to do a pull-up and roll onto the floor above her. But she kicked off the slippers, for better grip, stretched her leg high and planted a foot on the mirror on top of the dresser, feeling a thigh muscle drawn to the snapping point.

She ignored the pain.

Flames swelled. A can of turpentine exploded and a swirl of pine-scented fire and smoke ballooned beside her. Ruth turned away, felt the sting of fire on her ankles and arms. But her clothing didn’t ignite.

The fire, she saw, was licking a gallon can of paint thinner.

Now. This is it. Last chance.

Gripping the broken hardwood planks above her, she kicked hard and, in clumsy desperation, clawed her way up, rolling onto the kitchen floor beside Arnie.

“Ruth!” Arnie crawled to her. He was down to his boxer shorts. Half his hair was gone, eyebrows too. And there were burns on his face, neck, chest and right arm but they hadn’t incapacitated him.

“Out! We have to get out! The front!”

Keeping low, for what little air remained in the house, they started down the hall but got only halfway to the front door. Because of the smoke they hadn’t been able to see that the living room and front alcove were a mass of flame too. The bedroom windows weren’t an option either. Those rooms were burning as well.

“Garage,” she cried. It was their last hope.

Gripping each other hard, they pushed forward. Just before the heat and flames drove them back—to a claustrophobic, searing death in the narrow corridor—they reached the garage door. Ruth touched the metal knob and let go immediately.

“It’s hot,” she said.

A pause. They both laughed, a bit hysterical. Because of course it was hot. Everything in the damn house was hot.

She gripped the knob again, twisted it and shoved open the door. They crouched. But there were no flames here, just smoke and fumes roiling into the garage from the vents and up from under the baseboards. They plunged inside. It was hard to see through the eye-stinging clouds but the garage was small and—since it was used for storage only, not parking—they could follow the path to the front between rows of boxes and kitchen appliances and sports equipment from days long ago.

Choking and wiping their streaming eyes, they moved steadily to the front of the structure. She felt light-headed and fell once. Ruth then got a breath of better air, low to the floor, then another and, with Arnie’s help, she rose again.

Arms around each other, husband and wife finally made it to the front of the garage. With another laugh, this one of pure relief, Ruth pressed the button of the door opener.





Chapter 24



Just breathe, Detective.”

She nodded to the city medical tech. And tried to follow his orders. Slowly. Okay…Inhale, exhale. The coughing began in earnest once more.

Not okay.

Hacking, spitting.

Try again. Control it…Concentrating on her lungs, the muscles in her chest. Yes, she controlled it. Breathe in, out. Slowly.

Okay. Controlling it.

No more coughing. Good.

“Sounding great, Detective,” the tech said. He was a cheerful man with curly black hair and skin a mocha shade.

“All good,” she rasped.

Then she puked.

Again, again, again.

Sitting on the back lip of the ambulance, she bent double at the waist and evacuated a mass of the filthy mud soup.

Most had gone into her gut, not her lungs, apparently.

After a moment or two of retching, the feeling subsided.

She took the bottle of water that the EMT offered. Rinsed her mouth and poured it over her face. She couldn’t imagine what she looked like from the neck up. She’d shed her clothes and dressed in a set of Tyvek overalls—she kept a carton in the trunk of her car. It felt like her hair weighed thirty pounds. Her fingernails, always short, ended in goth black crescents.

Beside her sat her Glock, which, before she did anything else, she’d cleaned in a mini field strip, including running a patch soaked with Hoppe’s solvent through the barrel. It had been dangerously clogged.

“What was that shit?” she asked. “That I swallowed?”

She posed this question to Arthur Schoal, the Northeast Geo supervisor, who was beside the ambulance. He was still looking mortified at what had befallen her.

“The mud? Just water, soil, clay, maybe a bit of diesel fuel from the drills. Nothing more toxic than that.”

Yeah, she tasted petroleum. And she thought back to her younger bad-girl days: when you needed gas for your Camaro and you had no money but you did have a length of siphoning hose and the inside knowledge of where some local numbers runner or Mafioso wannabe parked his Caddie.