Chapter 4
The elevator jerked to a stop at the very summit of the iron skeleton of the Jeffers Building. For a single numbing second Glen was certain that the cage in which he felt claustrophobically confined was about to plunge downward, killing all of them as it smashed into the concrete bed forty-five stories below. For just that moment, the strange tingling in his left arm was gone and the queasiness in his belly and tightness in his groin forgotten. In the next second, though, as Jim Dover slid the elevator’s gate open and stepped out onto the wooden platform that seemed to Glen to hover precariously in midair, all the terrors of his acrophobia came flooding back.
He steeled himself against the unreasoning fear that gripped him now, and tried once more to convince himself that his panic was irrational: this building was going to be the best engineered and best constructed in the city, and barring some unforeseen calamity, there was no chance at all that either the platform surrounding the elevator shaft, the shaft itself, or the girders that formed the skeleton of the building would collapse. He and George Simmons had gone over it countless times, the engineer arguing that the building was overdesigned while Glen insisted on erring on the side of safety. Yet now, as he reviewed the specifications in his mind one more time, all the equations, all the coefficients of stress, all the statistics on tensile strength and rigidity suddenly became meaningless in the face of the terror that clasped him more tightly every second. A wave of dizziness swept over him, and he instinctively reached out to grip the mesh of the elevator cage with his right hand.
“You okay, Glen?”
Alan Cline’s voice seemed to be coming from far away and had the hollow sound of someone speaking from the depths of a cave. But Glen could see Alan standing right there, only a few feet from him. His fingers tightened on the metal mesh and he forced the burgeoning panic back down. Determined, he looked up at the sky, and for a moment everything seemed normal again. The last traces of this morning’s fog and drizzle were burning off, and nothing was left to mar the clear cerulean expanse overhead except for a few fluffy white wisps that seemed to evaporate even as he watched. He took a deep breath, and once more felt in control of himself. Finally easing his grip on the elevator cage, he shifted his gaze to his partner and managed a weak grin. “Great view from up here, huh?”
“For those of us who can look at it, yes,” Alan Cline observed. By now only Glen was still in the elevator, and Jim Dover was already uncorking one of the bottles of champagne that had been waiting in the ice chest he’d brought up first thing this morning. “Are you going to join us, or shall we pass your glass into the elevator?”
Gingerly, Glen stepped out onto the platform, which was constructed of several lengths of four-by-twelve planking, secured to the I beams with heavy bolts, resulting in an open ten-by-twelve-foot deck.
Plenty of room, Glen silently assured himself, for four men to stand on perfectly safely.
But even as he tried to reassure himself, the dizziness crept over him and he reached back to grip the elevator door. He concentrated on breathing deeply and evenly until the dizziness subsided. As Jim Dover passed him a glass of champagne, he finally risked taking a good look around. It was, indeed, a great view. High enough now to see over the crests of First Hill and Capitol Hill to the east, he could see a narrow slice of Lake Washington and the skyline of Bellevue rising in the distance. To the south, the Kingdome squatted like a huge orange squeezer at the near end of the industrial expanse that stretched all the way down to Boeing Field, and the entire Olympic range was now clearly visible. In the far distance he could see Mount Baker to the north, and Mount Rainier to the south. Nearly overwhelmed by the beauty of the panorama, Glen unconsciously released his grip on the elevator and stepped forward, raising his glass. “To the most fabulous place for a park in the history of Seattle,” he said. Raising his glass to his lips, he drained it, then tossed the plastic glass over the edge of the platform.
And moved closer to the edge to watch it drop through the skeleton of the building.
First he felt the instant tingling in his groin as his scrotum contracted to draw his testicles protectively upward. At the same time a black roiling pit seemed to open in his belly. Worst, though, was the terrible feeling of being drawn forward, pulled as if by some physical force over the edge to plunge into the abyss.
He struggled against the urge; took a step backward.
Then the bands tightened around his chest, his left arm began to tingle once again, and he felt that clammy sheen of sweat coat his body.
“Glen?” he heard someone ask, but now the voice sounded too far away even to be readily identifiable. “Jesus, Glen, what is it?”
Glen staggered backward, groping for something to steady himself with.
Found nothing.
His right hand moved wildly now, reached for the elevator.
Missed.
He staggered, his balance failing him, his knees buckling.
It was his heart.
Something had gone very wrong with his heart.
He could hear it pounding in his ears, feel it beating crazily in his chest.
Now the bands constricting his lungs tightened. He struggled for breath.
“He’s having a heart attack,” he heard someone say as he felt strong hands grip his shoulders, steadying him as he crumbled onto the thick planks of the platform. “You got your phone, Jim?”
Jim Dover was already punching 911 into the pad of his cellular phone, and as George Simmons and Alan Cline knelt next to Glen Jeffers’s supine figure, Dover ordered an ambulance, then began barking orders into the walkie-talkie that allowed him to communicate with the crew below. A moment later, all his instructions issued, he slapped the phone shut, dropped it into his pocket, and took charge of the situation on the tiny platform. Suddenly, even to Jim Dover, the sturdy planking seemed to be no more than an insignificant speck suspended in the middle of nothing. “We have to get him into the elevator. George, you and I should lift him up. Alan, hold his head. Not real high—just enough to slide him into the cage.”
As the three men raised Glen Jeffers a few inches off the planking and eased him through the open gate of the elevator, the semiconscious man’s lips worked, and an incomprehensible sound came faintly from his lips.
“What did he say?” Alan Cline demanded. When no one replied, Alan bent over his partner. “It’s okay, Glen,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady and reassuring. “Soon as we get you down, you’re going to be just fine.”
The metal gate clanged shut and Jim Dover jabbed impatiently at the elevator’s controls. After a second’s hesitation, the cage jerked once, eliciting a barely audible grunt of pain from Glen Jeffers, then began inching its way downward at what seemed to be an impossibly slow pace.
“For Christ’s sake,” Alan Cline demanded of no one in particular, “can’t you make this damned thing go any faster?” No one answered him, and he bent over his partner once more. “Take it easy, Glen. Just take it easy, okay?”
Above his head, Jim Dover and George Simmons glanced uneasily at each other. Glen’s breathing was coming only in the shallowest of gasps, and his complexion had lost all its color, taking on a ghastly faint bluish pallor. “Either of you know CPR?” Dover asked. “I don’t think he’s going to make it.”
Alan Cline glared up from his crouched position next to Glen. “Shut up, Jim, okay? Nobody’s going to die.” But as if to belie his partner’s words, a terrible rattling sound issued from Glen Jeffers’s lips, and now the blood drained from Alan Cline’s face. Racking his brain to remember what he’d been taught in the cardiopulmonary resuscitation course he’d taken almost a year ago, he pulled Glen’s mouth open, checked to make sure his tongue wasn’t blocking his throat, then began pressing rhythmically on his chest. As the elevator continued its agonizingly slow descent, he bent over, closed Glen’s nostrils with the fingers of his right hand, and began breathing directly into the unconscious man’s lungs.
After three deep breaths he went back to work on Glen’s chest.
They were only twenty feet above the building’s floor when finally another small groan escaped Glen Jeffers’s lips and his lungs began to work once again, though the most they appeared able to produce were spasmodic, gasping breaths that seemed incapable of sustaining life.
“Come on, damn it,” Alan Cline whispered. “Breathe! For God’s sake, breathe!”
As if in response to his partner’s voice, Glen seemed to gain a little strength, and his chest heaved.
The elevator banged to a stop and Jim Dover threw the door open. “Where’s the ambulance?” he demanded of the assistant foreman, who was waiting at the elevator’s base.
The man’s eyes fixed on Dover for a moment, then shifted to Glen Jeffers, whose ragged breathing had abruptly stopped again. “Not here yet,” he said as Alan Cline went back to work on Glen. Then his gaze came back to the contractor and he shrugged helplessly. By the time the ambulance arrived, would it already be too late?