Size 12 Is Not Fat (Heather Wells 1)

“Oh,” I say, releasing the now crumpled and greasy cotton. “Sorry.”

Cooper’s arms drop away from me at once.

“No problem,” he says.

His voice, like my own, is steady enough. But there’s something in his blue eyes I’ve never seen before…

But before I have a chance to put my finger on just what, exactly, it is, a familiar voice from inside the cab we’re sitting on demands, “So is she okay or what?”

I look down through the open panel in the cab’s ceiling and see relief wash over Pete’s face.

“You had us shittin’ our pants back there, Heather,” he says. And indeed, his burly Brooklynese has a tremor in it. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I say, and prove it by climbing shakily down from the roof of the cab virtually unaided. My shoulder twinges a painful warning at one point, but Pete’s steadying hand on one elbow, and Cooper’s careful grip on my belt, keep me from losing my balance. I find, once I’m safely inside the elevator car, that it’s difficult to stand without leaning against something since my knees are shaking pretty badly.

But I manage all right, by sagging against the wall.

“What about Julio?” I ask.

Cooper and Pete exchange looks.

“He’s alive,” Cooper says, but his jaw is strangely clenched.

“Leastways, he was a minute ago.” Pete yanks around the key he’d inserted in the override switch. “But as to whether he’ll still be alive by the time they get him out—”

I feel dizzy. “Get him out?”

“They’re gonna hafta to use cutters.”

I look to Cooper for a more detailed explanation, but he isn’t forthcoming with one.

Suddenly, I’m not so sure I want to know.

For the second time in two days, I end up in St. Vincent’s emergency room.

Only this time, I’m the patient.

I’m lying on a gurney, waiting to get my shoulder X-rayed. Cooper has gone in search of a tuna salad sandwich for me, since fear has made me famished.

While I wait, I gaze mournfully at my ragged fingers and palms, wrapped in gauze and smarting from numerous stitches. It will be weeks, an irritatingly young attending physician has informed me, before I have normal use of them again. Forget guitar playing. I can barely hold a pencil.

I’m glumly considering how I’m going to do my job properly when I have little or no use of my hands—undoubtedly Justine would have found a way—when Detective Canavan shows up, the unlit cigar still clenched between his teeth. I’m not sure it’s the same cigar. But it sure looks like it.

“Hey there, Ms. Wells,” he says, as casually as if we’d just bumped into one another at Macy’s or something. “Heard you had quite an eventful morning.”

“Oh,” I say. “You mean the part where somebody tried to kill me? Again?”

“That’d be the one,” Detective Canavan says, removing the cigar. “So. You sore at me?”

I am, a little. But then again, it hadn’t been his fault, really. I mean, that planter could have fallen over accidentally. And Elizabeth and Roberta really could have died while elevator surfing.

Except that it hadn’t. And they hadn’t, either.

“Can’t say as I blame you,” Detective Canavan says, before I have a chance to reply. “Now we got a Backstreet Boy with a busted head and a janitor in intensive care.”

“And two dead girls,” I remind him. “Don’t forget the two dead girls.”

Detective Canavan sits down on an orange plastic chair that’s bolted to the wall outside the X-ray lab.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “And two dead girls. Not to mention a certain administrative assistant who should, by rights, be dead as well.” He puts the cigar back in his mouth. “We think it was a pipe bomb.”

“What?” I yell.

“A pipe bomb. Not particularly sophisticated, but effective. In an enclosed space, like the brick elevator shaft, it did a lot more harm than it would have if it had been in a suitcase or a car or something.” Detective Canavan chews on the cigar. “Somebody seems to want you dead in a big way, honey.”

I stare at him, feeling cold again. Cooper had thrown his leather jacket over my shoulders as soon as we’d gotten down into the lobby, because I’d started shivering for some reason. And then when the paramedics had arrived, they’d added a blanket.

But I’d been freezing ever since seeing the wreckage that had once been the service elevator, crumpled at the bottom of that shaft. Firefighters had tried to pry the doors open with massive pliers—the jaws of life, they called them—but the twisted metal just shrieked in protest. Lying in that wreckage was Julio, who I later learned had suffered multiple broken bones, but was expected to survive. I had started shivering just looking at the mangled cab, and my hands have felt like ice ever since.

“A pipe bomb?” I echo. “How would somebody—”

“Slipped it on top of the elevator car. Easy to make, if you have the know-how. All you need is a steel pipe, threaded on both ends so you can cap it. Drill a couple holes in the side for twin fuses, slip a couple firecrackers through the holes, epoxy them in place, tack on some cigarettes, then fill the thing with gunpowder. Easy as pie.”

Easy as pie? That sounds worse than the SATs!

Noting my raised eyebrows, Canavan removes the cigar and says, “Excuse me. Easy as pie if you know how to do it. Anyway, somebody lit that thing a few minutes before you and—what’s his name?” He refers to his notebook. “Oh yeah, Mr. Guzman—went for the ride. Now, if you don’t mind my asking, what the hell were you doing on top of that thing?”

Confused, I think back. A pipe bomb, with twin cigarette fuses? I have no idea what such a thing would look like, but I certainly hadn’t noticed anything like it when I’d been up on the elevator car’s roof.

Then again, with all the gears and machinery up there, a small bomb would be easy to hide.

But a pipe bomb? A pipe bomb, in Fischer Hall?

Behind the double doors to the waiting room, a nurse is calling, “Sir, you can’t go in there! Sir, wait—”

Cooper bursts through the swinging doors, his arms full of paper bags. A pretty nurse trails after him, looking mad.

“Sir, you can’t be barging back here,” she insists. “I don’t want to have to call security—”