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  Firing Line

  ( The Destroyer - 41 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Ruby is too hot to handle, and Remo is being ordered to play fireman. But friendship comes first, even to a Master of Sinanju, and Remo is steaming mad. Mad enough, in fact, to walk out. It's out of the frying pan and into the fire because Chiun, deferring to tradition, refuses to quit CURE. And they both know that soon he could be hot on Remo's tail. But the heat's really on when Remo meets up with Sparky, a walking Molotov cocktail. New York firefighters are walking off the job, and an arson gang, with Sparky in tow, has decided to strike while the iron's hot. Unless they receive the ransom they demand, they'll turn the city into the biggest backyard barbecue in history.

  FIRING LINE

  Warren Murphy

  CHAPTER ONE

  Solly Martin had a theory that great ideas are diamonds, not pearls. By which he meant that great ideas spring up full-blown in flashes of inspiration; they are not created, as a pearl is created, by layer after layer of idea and change and improvement, until one day a piece of sand has been converted into something brilliant and pure.

  So it surprised Solly that when he had his great idea—to burn down America—it had not come on him all at once, but had been carefully built in his mind from the first irritating sand-speck of a thought.

  Solly Martin was a businessman, although when he told this to his Uncle Nathan who was visiting his sister, Solly's mother, in Coney Island, Uncle Nathan had said to his sister, as if Solly were not in the room, "If this is a businessman, I am the Pope of Rome."

  Solly did not like his Uncle Nathan; the old man had yellow teeth, chewed with his mouth open and had a craving for kreplach that bordered on the unnatural, and the abolition of kreplach from the house had been Solly's first manly demand upon reaching the age of puberty and being bar mitzvahed.

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  "You'll see, Uncle Nathan," Solly had said.

  Uncle Nathan buried his face in the dish of Jewish dumplings. "Just so he doesn't go asking me to invest any money," he said to Solly's mother. "Some businessman. Already starting to go bald, and still to earn his first smart dollar. It is to laugh."

  Solly shrugged off the comment. Uncle Nathan was wealthy but he had never had an idea in his head. His idea of success had been to buy fabric cheap and have it cut and sewn into garments which he still sold cheap, but not so cheap that he didn't make a profit. His success was predicated upon longevity: he had made small amounts of money for enough years to turn them into large amounts of money. Solly was going to make large amounts of money, but not by outlasting the American dollar. He was going to make it with the brilliant sparkle of his ideas that no one else had.

  So far, the big idea had just eluded him. The Mark Spitz gold medal memorial key chains hadn't made it. Battlestar Galáctica boardgames had bombed. No one had wanted his pirated eight-track tape of the background music from King Kong II.

  He had printed up 20,000 Elvis Presley T-shirts, couldn't sell them, and had unloaded them for a dime on the dollar. Two weeks later, Elvis Presley had died, the T-shirts were worth their weight in gold, but they then belonged to someone else.

  In desperation, he had developed a racetrack betting system based on the biorhythms of horses, but when he found out that it only lost money, he stopped playing it and tried to sell it by direct mail to gamblers. No one bought it.

  When the balance in his bank account was down

  to $20,000, from the half-million he had been left by his father, Solly Martin decided it was time to rethink his career as a businessman.

  He decided he had lost the common touch. He was so brilliant, so far ahead of bis time, so advanced beyond the rabble, that he had forgotten to stay in touch with what they thought and believed. He would move immediately to reestablish his contact with the buying public.

  He told his mother, "I'm going to open a store."

  His Uncle Nathan looked up from his plate. "He's going to sell sand to Arabs," he told Solly's mother. "Open a branch in Iran. Sell Stars of David. A businessman yet."

  He attacked the last helpless kreplach which skidded around the plate away from his fork.

  "Yeah," Solly said. "Well, maybe that's not such a bad idea. Think of all the Stars of David you could sell to people who want to burn them in demonstrations and things. Want to deface them. You ever think of that?"

  "No, thank God," his uncle said. "If I thought of things like that, I would be sleeping in the street, making soup in an empty tomato can, Mister Businessman. Hah!" He looked at Solly and showed his yellowed teeth.

  Solly Martin left the house. He felt uncomfortable. His uncle was too old-country to know anything about today and the movements that were going on in the world of marketing. And besides he had gotten uncomfortably close.

  Solly had just bought a building off Main Street in White Plains, New York, in the heart of fashionable Westchester County. He was going to sell Middle Eastern imports, which could now be bought

  for a song with so much of the Middle East going under economically.

  Buy cheap and sell dear. Was anything simpler?

  Unfortunately, Middle Eastern countries obviously did not regard shipping schedules as the life-and-death matter that American companies did, so on the day Solly's store was to open, all that had arrived were two boxes of Islamic crescent pins, one box in cheap gold metal and the other in mother of pearl, and seventeen cartons of banners bearing the Palestine Liberation Organization symbol, which Solly did not remember ordering.

  He complained on the telephone to his supplier who, when he had taken Solly's order, had wanted to be called Phil, but now explained that his name was really Faud Banidegh, and said that he had ordered all Solly's supplies, he had, but it was America's fault, trying to make Iranian businessmen in America look bad to help restore an imperialist regime in Iran, but what could one expect of imperialists who slept with Zionists, and it was too late~ for Solly to stop payment on his check because it had already been cashed.

  Solly's first customer came in, looked around the store and.left without saying a word.

  His second customer was a woman with a gray pants suit, and graying reddish-dyed hair. She looked around, then stood at the counter, fingering an Islamic crescent.

  Solly appeared before her. "Can I help you?" he said.

  "Yes," she said. "Hold still." Then she spat in his face, dropped the crescent on the floor and ground it under her heel before leaving.

  They were the last two people to enter the Little

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  Flower of the East Shoppe in White Plains, except for bill collectors, meter readers, and delivery men sent by the lunatic Iranian, Faud Banidegh, who seemed intent on burying Solly Martin under mountains of Islamic crescents, half in cheap golden metal and the other half in mother of pearl.

  Solly decided to advertise, but when the local newspaper said it wanted cash in advance, Solly put signs up on his windows. Big Sale drew no one. Closeout did no better. Neither did absolutely last closeout. Final days brought him no customers, but three people did stop in front of his store and applaud and at night, one wrote under the sign "About time."

  We're givtng rr away brought in one teenager under the assumption that the Little Flower of the East Shoppe was a porn parlor, but when he saw no peep movies, he snarled in disgust and walked out.

  On the day his money ran out, and still the boxes arrived bearing Islamic crescents and PLO banners, Solly decided to do what he guessed most American businessmen did when faced with a disaster. He went to a saloon, and there he found out what many American businessmen did when really faced with a disaster, and it wasn't drink.

  Solly told his tale of
woe to two men sitting next to him at the bar.

  They cracked their knuckles a lot and looked at each other and nodded as they listened.

  "Now I'm not only broke, but I owe that Arab my lungs," Solly said.

  "You miscalculated the American psyche," said the shorter man, whose name was Moe Moscalevitch.

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  The taller of the two had the face of a beagle that had been cast in wax and hung on a sunny wall to melt. He nodded. "Definitely correct," he said. "A miscalculation of the American psycho."

  "Psyche," corrected Moe Moscalevitch. Ernie Flammio looked chastened. He said to Solly, "There's only one way out." Solly looked up quickly.

  "I'm too young to die," Solly said.

  "Who said die?" asked Flammio.

  "Correctitude," said Moscalevitch, who said things like that a lot. "Nobody mentioned your impending demise."

  'That's right," said Ernie Flammio. "No one mentioned your attending derise."

  "Impending demise," said Moe Moscalevitch.

  "Right. Impending demise," said Flammio.

  "What then?" asked Solly Martin.

  The two men did not answer him immediately. They called over the bartender, who filled their glasses. They paid for the drink, the first they had bought since bumping into the self-pitying Martin, then took him to a corner of the room, where they sat at a table and talked in whispers.

  "We're talking about a fire," said Moscalevitch.

  "A fi—" Martin started to speak, but Flammio clapped a big bony hand over his mouth.

  "That's right," Moscalevitch whispered. "A fire. Just a match. Snap, crackle, flash, your problems are solved. You collect from the insurance company. You get your money back. You can start over again somewhere else with some other wonderful idea."

  Solly was calculating. A fire wasn't bad. He remembered his family always joked about Uncle

  Nathan's annual fire, which usually seemed to break out when business turned seasonally bad. A fire had something else going for it, too. It beat suicide, which was the only thing Solly Martin had been able to think of on his own.

  "Well," Solly said and took a big drink from his vodka screwdriver. He looked around suspiciously to made sure no one was eavesdropping. The two men nodded approval. "A fire," Solly said. "But how ..."

  "The how is up to us," said Ernie Flammio. "We ain't called the Fire Twins for nothing."

  Solly could have kissed him. How nice of these two men to help him out this way. It was three drinks later that he realized the help was not just altruistic. It was a $2,000 act of assistance, payable in advance.

  He could get that much from his mother without a problem. And then he would find a new business. One that the public would be smart enough to patronize. He was tired of having the public's stupidity make him into a failure. The next time, he would give them what they wanted. They wanted stupid, he'd give them stupid. Boy, would he give them stupid. They wanted hamburgers made out of sawdust, they'd get them. They want chicken with coating made of 712 toxic chemicals, they got it. Fish that no one who had ever smelled an ocean could eat? No problem. He was finished with trying to improve America's life. He was going to give them all what they deserved.

  When he woke the next morning, Solly Martin had a terrible headache. It got worse when he remembered what had happened the night before. He wondered if Moe Mosoalevitch and Ernie

  8

  Flammio would be waiting for him at the Little Flower of the East Shoppe, but they weren't. Instead, they called him shortly after 11 a.m.

  "It won't do for us to be seen there," Moscale-vitch said.

  "No. Right," said Solly. He wondered how he could call this whole thing off.

  "It'll be tomorrow night, kid," Moscalevitch said. "Just remember, leave the back door unlocked when you go. We'll bust it up so it looked like burglars. And you make sure you're out of town somewhere, so no one can pin anything on you."

  "All right," said Solly. He held onto the telephone a moment, building up his courage to tell them to call it off. Then his eyes lighted on the stack of bills sent him by the Iranian, Faud Bani-degh, and he gulped and said, "Yeah. Tomorrow night. All right."

  Served them right. Served them all right. Maybe those two could set a fire that would spread all the way to Iran. Maybe he could take his insurance winnings and get Moe and Ernie to burn down Banidegh's office in New York. Maybe . . . maybe . . . and a glimmer of an idea entered Solly Martin's mind.

  He knew he shouldn't be there. He knew it was risky. But Solly Martin couldn't stay away from his store the next night. The idea that had been throbbing gently in his brain was beginning to take shape, and he wanted to watch, to learn, to see if something could really be made to work.

  To protect himself, he had gone to his mother's for dinner. When she wasn't looking, he had set the kitchen clock three hours ahead, then slipped a

  9

  sleeping pill into her glass of Manischewitz grape wine. As he started to nod off at the table, he called her attention to the clock, which read midnight, and told her, "It's midnight, Momma, I think I'll go to bed here, too."

  He had put the old woman to sleep, then hustled downstairs into his car and driven up to White Plains. Now he sat, parked in a darkened side street, diagonally across from the front entrance to his store. The Little Flower of the East Shoppe looked even more dismal and forlorn at night that it did in the daytime. No emptier, but sadder somehow.

  He waited, hunched down in the car, for almost an hour before he saw someone walking toward the store on the deserted shopping center street.

  He had expected Moe Moscalevitch and Ernie Flammio. He had not expected a scrawny young boy with pipecleaner arms sticking out of his raggy T-shirt and pants that were two years and three inches too short.

  The boy paused under a street lamp. In Jhe amber-bright light, Martin could see he was about thirteen years old. He had a mop of flaming red hair and a face that looked as if it belonged on a poster urging people to send the underprivileged to summer camp.

  The boy looked around, then darted into the alley between Martin's store and the next building. Solly leaned back in his car seat. His brow wrinkled. Who was the kid? The two arsonists had said nothing about a kid helping them.

  Only a few minutes later, Moscalevitch and Flammio walked rapidly down the street. Flammic carried a bag. Without hesitating or looking around.

  10

  they turned sharply into the alley next to the store and headed for die back. Solly Martin nodded his head. He was satisfied now that the kid had been a lookout.

  The back door to Solly Martin's shop wasn't just unlocked; it was wide open, and Moe Moscalevitch grunted his annoyance. The kid Martin was a putz. No one noticed an unlocked door, but an open door was an invitation for neighbors to call the police.

  He was about to say something to Ernie Flam-mio, when he heard a sound inside the store and stopped in mid-stride. He wheeled toward his taller companion and raised a finger to his mouth, cautioning silence. Flammio nodded. The two men listened.

  Lester McGurl hummed under his breath as he tossed papers from behind Solly Martin's counter onto the floor. He loved it. He just loved it.

  He pulled PLO banners off the shelves, opened them and tossed them into one of the corners. When he had first started in the store, he had glanced every few seconds at the front windows to make sure that he wasn't seen, but that caution was forgotten now. He loved what he was doing, and sometimes he wished that people would stop by to watch. He threw more papers onto the floor.

  Outside, Ernie Flammio hissed to Moe Moscalevitch, "He's humming 'I don't want to set the world on fire.' "

  "No, he's not," said Moscalevitch. "The name of that ditty is 'My Old Flame.' "

  "Oh. Something like that," Flammio said. "What's he doing now?"

  11

  "I don't know." Moscalevitch was crouched down behind the open door. He peeked into the store. "He's just a kid."

  "Maybe that Martin hired him, too."r />
  "No," said Moscalevitch. "Just a free-lancer, I think."

  He stood up and walked through the door. Ernie Flammio, carrying the bag containing gasoline and lengths of twine that had been soaked in potassium nitrate and allowed to dry to be used as fuses, followed him.

  "What are you doing in here?" Moscalevitch said to the back of young Lester McGurl.

  The skinny boy wheeled and looked at the two men. Instinctively, he backed away. In the faint glimmer from the street lights, filling the store with a dull orange glow, he could see their faces. They were adults, and he did not like adults. Not these, not any. He had never seen the men before, but he had seen that kind of face before. He had seen them at orphanages and foster homes, and the faces came connected to heavy, strong hands that had spent years beating on Lester McGurl. Until recently. Until he had found a way to stop the beatings.

  Even from across the room, he could smell the gasoline they were carrying and he knew, without thinking, what they were here for.

  "This is my fire," he said petulantly, still backing away. "Why don't you just go and leave me alone?"

  Solly Martin knew it was wrong, but he had gotten tired of waiting. And besides, he wanted to know more about this whole arson thing.

  He got out of his car and walked through the al-

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  ley separating his store from the next building. The rear door to his store was open, and he paused, shaking his head. He didn't know anything about arson-for-hire, but it seemed dumb to leave the door open so anyone might notice and call the police. He walked toward the door, then heard voices inside. They were talking too loudly for his liking. He didn't think that was cool. He considered getting the hell out of there, before those two incompetent loonies got him arrested as well as themselves. Screw it, he decided. It was his money. He would just walk in and tell them to knock off the

  noise.

  He paused in the doorway and saw Moscalevitch and Flammio standing only a few feet from him, their backs to him. At the other corner of the store was the young kid.

  Before Solly could say anything, Moscalevitch