American Lightning by Howard Blum Read Free Book Online Page A

hurrying to put the paper “to bed.” Down below in the pressroom, the printers prepared the machinery; the first edition would have rolled off the presses at four A.M. Now they were all trapped. And escape would be a battle.

    The first person to rush to the scene was a man wearing a woman’s floral dress and a blond wig. Los Angeles police detective Eddie King had been working an undercover detail that night trying to catch the Boyle Heights rapist. Throughout the summer the rapist had been targeting women in the Boyle Heights neighborhood, and the police, with no clues and conflicting descriptions of the assailant, had decided to bait a trap with a decoy. But King, a hulking six-footer crammed into a tentlike dress and wearing a garish straw blond wig that barely covered his thick neck, had attracted only incredulous stares. Frustrated, his mood worked raw by the snide teasing that the backup officers had aimed at him throughout the night, King had been returning at one A.M. to the First Street police station. As he crossed Spring Street, the ground seemed to give way beneath his feet. He steadied himself, and all at once a catastrophic boom broke through the nighttime quiet. In the distance the sky lit up with a diffused glow. An earthquake, King decided. He ran full speed toward the eerie, unnatural light.
    The
Times
Building was an inferno. King was overwhelmed. Instinctively he rushed toward the structure with the vague plan of saving someone. But the flames and the heat quickly stopped his advance; it was as if he were held back by an impenetrable wall. He had no choice but to remain on the street. He could stare at the galloping, uncontrolled fire, feel the scalding intensity of its heat, and listen to the miserable screams, the keening wails, of the people trapped inside. But there was nothing he could do. They were beyond his help.
    Alerted by shouts, he looked upward. A crowd of confused, desperate faces appeared at the third-floor windows. The flames were moving toward them, getting closer. The heat was unbearable. So people started to jump.
    It was a long way down. King watched men land on the hard concrete sidewalk. How must it feel, he thought, to have your entire existence come down to a single impossible choice: either you burn or you jump to your death. Tears in his eyes, he picked up one inert body after another and carried it across the street. He thought the corpses should be removed as far as possible from the fire’s path. He didn’t want them to be burned beyond recognition. He wanted relatives to be able to recognize their loved ones. He wanted families to be reunited one last time. He stacked the corpses in a pile like firewood. It was all he could do.

    Inside, the exit doors had jammed. Perhaps the heat had melted the locks. Perhaps the doors had not functioned for years. Whatever the cause, there seemed to be no way out. Still, a group of engravers on the sixth floor refused to give up. There was nowhere else to go, so they headed for the roof. It was rough going, a journey through smoke and flames, but they kept at it and in time succeeded in reaching the rooftop. Only now they were trapped.
    Opposite the roof, across an alley, was a rooming house. They could see the adjacent building’s roof, but it was too far to jump. The engravers yelled for help. They hoped someone would hear them and rescue them before the fire climbed higher.
    They yelled, their voices shrill pleas above the noise and tumult and confusion of the blaze. And finally they were heard. Residents at the rooming house hurried to the roof. But they didn’t know what to do. They stared across at the men trapped on the other side. They could feel the heat of the fire, and their eyes burned from the smoke. They saw what it was like to be in the
Times
Building. But they had no way of helping the engravers. All they could do was look at the trapped men across the alleyway.
    At last, a ladder was found. It was carried to the