Arthur picked up his notebook, turned toward me, and tapped the brass valve keys hanging from my belt. "Higgins," he said, the ghost of a faint, tired smile touching the corners of his weathered mouth. "The south gate has seven turns left before the seat cracks. Grab the cheater bar from the elevator vestibule. We have thirty minutes to save this foundation."
CHAPTER 4: What The River Left Behind
The cheater bar was a four-foot length of black gas pipe, cold as well water and heavy enough to crack bone. I hauled it out from behind the standpipe valve in the forty-fourth-floor stairwell, took the fire stairs down three flights at a dead sprint, and met Arthur at the freight elevator hoistway.
The building’s central automation was screaming now. On every residential landing between forty and thirty-two, the strobe lights pulsed white, cutting across the closed fire shutters. Down in the mechanical shafts, the secondary pumps were chattering dry, starved of grease, their automated bypass relays smoking in the metal wireways.
Arthur didn't run. A man of seventy-two with a fused knee cannot run down concrete steps, but his rhythm was relentless. His work boots hit each riser with flat, deliberate weight, his left hand sliding down the painted pipe handrail while his right gripped the brass wheel key.
"Don't rush your footing, Mark," he said, not breathing hard, his raspy voice dropping below the whine of the ventilation dampers. "You slip on this paint and crack an elbow, there isn't another man in this county who knows which way the south spindle seats."
We hit the sub-basement three minutes before eleven-thirty.
The water had risen four inches while we were in the boardroom. It wasn't clean condensation anymore; it was thick, grey river sludge, carrying the sour rot of old foundry slag and raw petroleum. It lapped against the bottom lip of the main 480-volt distribution cabinet, throwing off a low, stinging vibration that prickled the hairs on my forearms.
Ray Miller was standing on a wooden pallet near the sump trench, holding an emergency spotlight on caisson seven. When he saw Arthur’s wool coat round the concrete bulkhead, the old guard let out a breath that sounded like a tire losing air.
"The packing gland blew two minutes ago, Arthur," Ray shouted over the roar of the weeping seam. "The bypass contractor wedged an iron drift pin into the manual dog to keep the gate from tripping the municipal remote sensor. I couldn't budge it with a sledge."
Arthur stepped straight into the black water without pausing. The sludge hit him mid-calf, soaking his canvas work pants and filling his boots, but he moved directly toward the foundation wall where the bedrock met the 1968 pour.
"Give me the bar, Higgins," Arthur said.
I waded in beside him, the cold cutting through my thick socks like ice needles. The smell down here was choking—sewer gas, wet lime, and burning copper.
The relief gate was an eight-inch cast-steel valve bolted directly into the river bulkhead, installed back when the foundry kept thirty thousand gallons of river wash on standby for the quenching pits. Brenda’s private contractors had drilled two drywall screws through the brass position indicator to hold the valve shut, and an iron drift pin was wedged tight beneath the handwheel stem to fake a closed seal on the mechanical counter.
Arthur laid his calloused palm against the steel valve body. He didn't use a gauge; he just held his bare skin against the casting, feeling the violent, drumming pulse of the river forty feet outside the retaining wall.
"She has about forty-eight pounds behind the disk," Arthur said. "If we knock the pin out while the spindle is cocked, the pressure will strip the brass threads and the entire chamber will fill to the ceiling in four minutes. Slip the pipe over the spokes. Higgins, you take the lower quadrant. Ray, get that pallet out from under the switchboard before the transformer takes a drink."
I slotted the gas pipe over the handwheel spoke. The iron groaned against the leverage. Arthur set his boots wide in the sludge, leaned his chest over the wheel rim, and set his scarred, thick fingers on the hub.
"On three," Arthur said. "Pull toward the river. Don't let it kick back on you, or it'll shatter your wrists."
We pulled together.