Flash! Fiction by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

84

Pity he hadn't thought to bring me one of those papers. Some of these guys can tell some tall tales and they like to spook each other. It goes with the job. I don't mind as long as they keep it off my site and in the tavern where it belongs. They're damn good at bring-ing down high-rises, but they don't have my responsibilities —

responsibilities for life and death. I warned him — he being the leader — that if he was shitting me, he'd regret it way past his natural life.

Still, I couldn't ignore the possibility that there might be something to what he said, so I called my police liaison and asked for a sweep of 229 South — the entire building. We had officers on the scene, but it wasn't protocol to go outside the chain of command. Going through my liaison officer was. The hierarchy of a large organization, like a big city police force, is just as complex as the structure of a high-rise. If you don't respect it, you might find it falling on top of your head one day.

Just to be doubly safe I contacted the gas company to confirm that we were good to go. They sent out two trucks to check over everything. All lines in were safely disconnected, just like the dozens of times I'd done this before. The police sweep was completed in under an hour and nothing turned up — no little old lady, no apartment filled with newspapers, no burning smell, and no ashes.

We had our go ahead. Buildings clear, gas shut off. I'd like to have had my guys sweep 229 South one last time, but that would have risked offending the police, and I'd sworn never to do that again.

The gas— I knew the guys. I'd worked with them many times before. Besides, the developer and the mayor's office — three calls from each in the past hour-and-a-half. Was I going to wait another half-an-hour? No! I might fire this son-of-a-bitch but not until we'd demolished these buildings. Crazy as he was, he was still one of my best demolition guys.