Page 45 of Eruption

In fact, nothing happened.

The Kama Kai tower still stood in the slashing rain.

Rebecca began counting forward. “One… two… three…”

Still nothing.

Rebecca Cruz was thirty and she had been working in the family business—the formal name was Cruz Demolition and Trucking—ever since she’d graduated from Vassar. It was best to keep this kind of work in the family, her brothers had toldher when she talked about various other careers. It demanded too much patience, too much attention to detail, too much trust for them to invite outsiders into the tent.

This job is like a marriage,her older brother, Peter, used to say,just a lot more stressful.

By now she had worked on some fifty buildings around the world and been the lead on at least half of them.Should have been the lead on all of them,she told herself,even when I was fresh out of college.

But in the past few years, she had seen the business change. Contracts were shorter. The pace was much faster. The days when they could take three weeks to study a building were over. Now clients expected a building to be taken down and carted away in a matter of days, not weeks, and this was true even when they were working hazardous sites.

But the faster pace suited Rebecca’s personality. Her brothers were more cautious—too cautious, to her mind, and too timid sometimes for a dangerous business like theirs. Rebecca Cruz wanted to keep pushing forward and get the job done, wherever in the world the job was. She was able to push forward, and push back, in several languages; she spoke Japanese, German, some Italian, a little Korean, a little Mandarin.

But pushing so hard was one of the things about her that pissed her brothers off, and royally.

She didn’t believe she was reckless; she just didn’t hesitate. By now even her brothers knew enough to get out of her way.

David couldn’t lead on a job. If she left things to him, nothing would get taken down. David worried things to death.

Rebecca wasn’t a worrier. She was always too busy getting things done, basically.

But she was worrying now.

She had counted to twenty and still nothing had happened.

Of course the computer would take a certain amount of extratime to recalculate the blast timings because one side of the building was wet, and that changed the calibration impacts. But not twenty damn seconds. That could only mean one thing:

They had a short.

So Leo’s fears were justified this time.

Damn it,she thought.

They would have to go back in. But she didn’t want to be in that building again, with its scored I-beams, chopped floors, the possibility of live…

Forget about Legos. It was like a house of cards.

She heard a softwhump!

Sawdust burst outward from the lower floors’ windows.

“All right!”she yelled, pumping her fist.

The walls of the upper stories gently folded inward. A perfect implosion; the building slid to the ground almost in slow motion. There was a final, much louderwhump! as the roof crashed down.

And it was over.

Rebecca clicked her radio back on and waited for the congratulations from the others. Apparently, they hadn’t turned their radios on yet.

No matter. They would celebrate with beers very soon; she didn’t care how early it was.

As she turned to go find them, a dark brown van squealed to a stop in front of her, so close that it nearly clipped her.

Two men in dark raincoats jumped out. One of them said, “Rebecca Maria Cruz?” He held up some sort of badge.

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