Where There’s Smoke

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The red sedan rocketed up Broadway at a screaming seventy with the siren wide open; for one not hardened to that banshee howl it would have been difficult to catch, beneath it, the hoarse intonation of the panel speaker:

“Second alarm — Second! Brockhurst Theater — Forty-fifth — Eighth and Broadway! Engine Twelve. Engine Twenty-nine. Hose Thirty-one. Hose Thirty-four. Ladder Twenty. Rescue Five. At four fourteen pee-em, authority Bureau Fire Alarm Telegraph. Double-you Enn Wye Eff.”

Ben Pedley caught it and cursed with feeling. A blaze in the crowded theater district was bad medicine any time. But with the mercury down in the thermometer’s socks and a half-gale sweeping in from the Hudson, it was enough to give a man the smoke-eater’s chills.

An expression of grim calculation hardened his harness-leather features; a line of concentration sharpened between the gray eyes as he shot the sedan between a stalled truck and a braking bus. The possibilities at the Brockhurst were numerous and unpleasant.

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