"Mitchell Smith - Daydreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Mitchell)

well, and Ellie, in plain-clothes so as not to overawe the children in
her work-a blue print dress today-went over to the near car, showed her
badge to a freckled sergeant, and asked if she could help. He,
comfortable in the passenger seat, gave her a look at once surprised and
bored, talked with her for politeness' sake awhile, then went back to
his notebook, jotting this and that.

Ellie wandered then across the street to join the casual crowd, and
after watching the firemen at their duty for a few minutes, looked up
the building's side, along high rows of windows, some whole and neat,
others charred and broken in or out. Then, in one of the neat ones
closed to the level of a rust-stained air conditioner-she saw, or
thought she saw, a very small brown face, eyes wide, peering down. Two
windows away from this, to the left, through an empty window frame,
smoke rolled out solid and black as a small tornado, but silent.

The firemen were busy in the street (one, a firewoman and fairly small,
wrestling hose with the rest); the massive pumper-parked half-turned
from the uptown corner stood unmanned, its nozzles dripping. Ellie ran
back across to the fire captain, a short, wiry man with a neat mustache.
She interrupted him as he was talking on his hand radio, and when he
turned from her still talking-he had a man, one of his men, down with
chest pains on the seventh floor-she reached out and tugged at his
rubber jacket "Goddamn you, lady," he said. --Get your hands off me!"
And was not impressed when she showed her badge pinned now to the bosom
of her dress. Indeed, he looked around for a cop to get this cop off
his back. Like many firemen, whose jobs are--statistically--so much
more dangerous, the captain had a certain contempt for policemen, and
policewomen. Ellie persisted, pestering him about the small brown face.
She'd become child-sensitized in her work, and, perhaps because of her
childlessness, was quick to assume a guardian stance.

The firemen, as it happened, had already cleared the building quite
thoroughly-it was a smoky fire, not an inferno, though not much less
dangerous for that-and two men were now bringing Richie Rollins down
seven floors of smoldering stairs in the near pitch dark, carrying him
on their shoulders while trying to keep his breather mask straight on
his face. Rollins had peed on them, and was dying, his heart shaking
uselessly in his chest.

The captain spoke to his building boss, who was on the third floor and
climbing to help with Rollins, directing him to lower the man from the
north-side corner window to save the time on the last two flights of
stairs. The captain also had a problem with water. The pressure due to
hydrant-opening by the foolish and broiling poor might not permit him to
cope if the building burst into flame. He was calling in another alarm,
therefore, simply for more hose length, and was embarrassed by the
necessity, since this was only a shitty little fire, nothing special,
isolated in this one building-no spread at all. He'd had no serious
injuries, only one man, an inhaler, taken gasping away to Metropolitan