“I’m here,” The Chameleon said.
“We lost you for a minute there. Everything okay?”
The Chameleon adjusted his E! channel cap and got comfortable behind the camera. “Everything’s perfect,” he said.
As writ.
Chapter 24
LEXI SAT CROSS-LEGGED on the sofa, elbows on knees, chin resting on her open palms, eyes riveted to the TV screen, not wanting to miss a single tidbit Ryan Seacrest might unearth.
She was a full-fledged, card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool Celebrity Junkie, and she didn’t care who knew it. They were glamorous, they were hideous, they were superstars, they were flaming assholes—it didn’t matter, she couldn’t get enough of them. Even the ones she hated. Even the ones she wanted to kill.
The cheese platter was sitting on the coffee table, the Saran Wrap still on. She had brought out the two champagne glasses and filled hers with Bud Light. The bubbly was definitely staying on ice till Gabe got home.
The cell phone between her legs vibrated, and she grabbed it.
The text made her giddy: Greetings from Camera 3. DTB. Luv, G
DTB. Don’t text back. God knows she wanted to, but this was Gabe’s biggest scene yet. Not fair to distract him.
She sipped her beer and watched Ryan joke around with all the celebs as their limos pulled up to the red carpet. It had to be the most awesome job in the world. Plus he got paid zillions.
“I’d do it for free, Ryan,” she said to the screen. “Hell, I’d even pay you to let me do it.”
She was born and raised in Indiana. Her family was still there. But she was a New Yorker now, so she really loved it when all the big stars said how fantastic it was to shoot movies and TV shows in New York City. That’s what this whole Hollywood on the Hudson thing was about. So, yeah, maybe they got paid to say stuff like that, but as far as she was concerned, it wasn’t hype. New York was the best.
“Look out, world,” Seacrest said to his audience. “Here comes the most-talked-about, most-written-about, most-tweeted-about bad boy in all of Hollywood. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you? It’s Braaaaaaaaaaaad Schuck.”
The picture cut away from Seacrest to a remote camera at street level. A stretch Hummer, blowing its horn, made its way slowly up Sixth Avenue. The moonroof was wide open, and standing on the backseat, half in, half out of the car, was Brad Schuck.
To toast the crowd, he raised a bottle of the vodka he was famous for hawking, tipped it to the sky, and guzzled down four long swallows. The fans howled.
The camera stayed on Schuck while Seacrest gave a running commentary. “I’ll ask him when he gets here, but knowing Brad Schuck, I’m going to bet five bucks that wasn’t water,” he said. “Wait a minute, he’s handing the bottle to someone in the limo.”
Schuck lowered the vodka, ducked down, and came up a second later with a two-foot-long tube.
“Oh, man!” Seacrest yelled off camera. “It’s a bleacher reacher. Bad Brad has a T-shirt cannon, and since he’s wearing one of his signature GET SCHUCKED T-shirts, I think we all know what he’s going to be shooting into the crowd.”
Whoomp. The first T-shirt launched into the air, and the people behind the barrier went berserk scrambling for the souvenir.
Then the Hummer made an S-turn from one side of the street to the other and Schuck fired again.
“The mayor invited everyone to shoot in New York,” Seacrest said, laughing, “and crazy Brad is doing just that. Let’s watch.”
Lexi knew what was coming next. She was off the sofa now, jumping up and down, clapping her hands, her head spinning with excitement.
“Oh, God!” she screamed. “I heart New York.”
Chapter 25
“I GUESS EVERYTHING they say about this Schuck character being a raving lunatic is true,” Jerry Brainard said.
He had thrown the feed from the E! channel onto the large center monitor and, along with a few million other viewers, we watched Brad Schuck fire T-shirts at the adoring multitude.
“You going to arrest him?” Jerry asked.
“Arrest him? It’s more likely the mayor will invite him to lunch at Gracie Mansion,” I said. “The first thing you learn at NYPD Red is that there’s a time and a place to crack down on celebrity bad-boy antics. Radio City in front of thousands of doting fans is not the place, and the week that the mayor is trying to encourage assholes like Schuck to shoot more movies in New York is definitely not the time. Besides, those T-shirt missiles are harmless enough. They’re only made of cott—”
The back door of the Command Center flew open and a uniformed cop struggled up the steps, trying to hold up a dazed, incoherent civilian. Brainard helped them both in, and the cop lowered the civilian gently to the floor.
“I found this guy under the TV camera scaffold,” he said. “I smelled his breath. He’s not drunk. Judging by the bruise on the side of his head, I think somebody coldcocked him. I called for an ambulance.”
The man on the ground had the E! channel logo on his blue shirt. The badge on his breast pocket had turned around, and I flipped it over.
“Oh shit,” I said. “Jerry, get back to the board.”
“You know him?” Brainard said, scrambling back to his chair.
“No. Never saw him before in my life. But he’s with E! TV, and his badge says ‘Cameraman.’”
“So?”
I’ve been playing chess since I was seven years old. Somewhere along the way I learned how to think three, four, five moves ahead. But I didn’t have time to explain to Jerry where I was going.
“Just give me the mast camera, and zoom in on those E! channel camera scaffolds,” I said.
Jerry panned over to the 50th Street scaffold and zoomed in on the camera at the top.
“Looks normal,” I said. “Next one.”
I turned to the cop in uniform. “Where did you find him? Under what scaffold?”
“Sixth Avenue.”
Jerry was already panning over to the scaffold on 51st Street.
“Forget that one!” I yelled. “Give me the guy in the center. Sixth Avenue.”
Jerry leaned on the toggle switch and the camera slowly started to creep back in the opposite direction. It was agonizing, like watching someone park a battleship.
“Zoom in on the cameraman,” I said.
Jerry brought the man sharply into focus. For a few seconds it all looked perfectly normal, and I was starting to doubt my instincts. And then the cameraman stepped away from the camera.
“Pull back!” I yelled. “Track him, track him!”
The cameraman moved to the edge of the scaffold. He had something in his right hand. He pulled his arm back, like he was about to throw a Hail Mary pass.
“It’s glass,” Brainard said, zooming in on the man’s hand. “A bottle, I think.”
And then he let it fly. The camera tracked the bottle perfectly as it arced through the air over Sixth Avenue.
I didn’t have to be a chess player to know what was going to happen next.
The Molotov cocktail hit the roof of Brad Schuck’s Hummer and exploded on impact. The screen lit up bright orange, and Brainard pulled back to get a wider picture.
“This is Command,” I said into the mic. “I need every available unit to the camera scaffold on Sixth Avenue between Five Zero and Five One. There’s a white male, fifty to sixty years old, wearing a blue E! channel uniform. He’s our bomb thrower. Stop him. He’s probably coming down the north side of the tower. I can’t see him from here.”
I stood up and watched what I could see. Brad Schuck, in flames, frantically crawling onto the roof of his scorched limo.
He rolled off the car onto the road, got up, and stumbled, screaming, toward the theater, globs of flaming napalm flying off his body.
Just before he could rush headlong into Ryan Seacrest and the horrified crowd under the marquee, Schuck blessedly lost consciousness and collapsed in a smoldering heap on the red carpet.
Chapter 26
/> ONE SECOND I was staring at the guy who torched Brad Schuck, and the next he was gone.
“We lost him,” I said. “He knows where our camera is, and he’s climbing down the back side of the scaffold.”
I’d never worked with Jerry Brainard before, but the man was a total pro. Unflappable. Grace under fire.
“Of course he knows where that camera is. It’s twenty-seven feet high and pointing right at him,” Brainard said. “But I wonder if he knows about this one.”
His fingers worked the console, the picture changed, and suddenly there was our bomber, climbing down the opposite side of the camera tower.
“Traffic cam,” Brainard said. “I preset every one in a six-block radius before we started. Just in case.”
Jerry was good, but the guy we were after wasn’t stupid. He had to know we’d pick him up with another camera soon enough. As soon as his feet touched the ground, I understood why he needed to be off camera, even if for just a few seconds.
In one swift, almost invisible move his distinctive blue E! channel shirt was transformed into a red, orange, and gold tie-dyed T.
“Velcro,” Brainard said. “Pretty slick.”
I grabbed the mic. “Command to all units. Suspect is on the ground and on the run. He’s removed the E! channel uniform and is now wearing jeans and a red, orange, and gold tie-dyed sixties-type T-shirt. He’s in front of the Time-Life Building and headed for West Five One Street.”
You might think that with more than a hundred cops blanketing the area we’d have no problem grabbing one man. But it wasn’t that easy. Most of our guys had been stationed in front of the barricades, and they had to work their way back through the crowd.
Under normal circumstances, a bunch of New Yorkers might begrudgingly get out of the way if a cop yelled “Coming through, coming through!” But tonight, the circumstances were far from normal. As soon as the Molotov cocktail hit, people stampeded for safety. To make matters worse, they didn’t all agree on which direction was safe. It was every man for himself, and they pushed, shoved, and elbowed frantically, not caring if the person they bowled over was a pregnant woman or a cop chasing a lunatic.
Several of our uniforms broke through the crowd and made their way toward 51st Street.
“He doesn’t have a prayer,” Brainard said.
Then our screen went purple.
“Shit—he tossed a smoke bomb,” Brainard said.
The smoke screen wouldn’t win any special effects awards, but it worked.
Brainard pulled back to a wide shot.
“There he is,” I said.
Tie-Dye was heading for the maze of food carts that had taken over the south side of 51st Street.
“Sir, we’ve got a bird’s-eye view, but our guys at street level can’t see two feet in front of them.”
“But they can look up,” I said, keying the mic.
“Suspect is in the row of food carts on Five One,” I said. “He’s between a yellow-and-blue Sabrett hot dog umbrella and a red-and-white that says ‘Falafel.’”
The smoke was settling quickly, and I could see several of our uniforms aggressively pushing their way through the mob toward the target umbrellas.
The cop in the lead was ten feet away when it happened.
A motorcycle came roaring out from between the two carts and headed east on 51st Street.
“Damn,” Brainard said. “This guy is good.”
“Not as good as we are. We got him now. Command to all units,” I said into the mic. “I need a total lockdown on all vehicular traffic, Forty-second to Fifty-seventh Streets. Ninth Avenue to Third. Suspect is on a bright green Kawasaki Ninja rice rocket.”
The man on the motorcycle made a rubber-burning right turn and headed the wrong way on Sixth Avenue. The Ninja was at full throttle and was making a beeline for the flaming limo.
“Look at that crazy bastard,” Brainard said. “Where the hell is he going?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “The entire grid is locked up tight. It’s impossible for him to get away.”
And then, right before my very eyes, the son of a bitch did the impossible.
Chapter 27
STANDING THERE ON the scaffold with the Molotov in his hand, Gabriel the director gave a last-minute pep talk to Gabriel the star.
“This is the money shot. You only get one take, but you can do it. You’ve done it a thousand times.”
Gabriel the actor rolled his eyes. A thousand? He’d gotten it right only six times. Six out of thirty-two. Tossing a flaming bottle onto a moving car isn’t as easy as people think. Lexi had rehearsed him, but without the fire. And instead of a car, they had used a shopping cart they took from the parking lot at Pathmark.
He thought he could use some more practice, but she said, “No, you never want to over-rehearse.”
They had made the napalm at home. It was ridiculously easy. Just mix gasoline with Styrofoam and put it in a glass bottle.
Lexi, of course, had to complicate it.
“Add some vodka,” she said.
“What’ll that do?”
“Probably nothing. It’s just a little cinematic symbolism. Brad Schuck—vodka—get it?”
What the hell. He added a shot of Stoli.
And now it was showtime. The Hummer came rolling up Sixth Avenue.
“And action,” the director called out.
As soon as the bottle left his hand, he knew that the thirty-third time was the charm. Perfect throw, perfect arc, perfect landing.
The explosion was louder, brighter, and more spectacular than he expected. He only wished he had time to stay and enjoy Brad Schuck’s final performance, but he’d see it all on video tonight.
Scrambling down the scaffold, The Chameleon morphed from bland blue to brightly colored tie-dye, and bolted for the Kawasaki.
The smoke bomb was Lexi’s idea. They had argued about the color. He thought red smoke would stick it to the NYPD Red cops. But she reminded him that there’s also NYPD blue.
“Red plus blue equals purple,” she said. “Perfect way to stick it to them both.”
Never argue Lexi logic. It didn’t matter. He was just glad she came up with the idea, because as it turned out the smoke saved his ass.
The Chameleon knew all the great movie motorcycle scenes—Schwarzenegger on the Harley Fat Boy in Terminator 2, McQueen on the Triumph TR6 in The Great Escape, and now yours truly on the Kawasaki Ninja.
He jumped on the cow, pinned the throttle, and peeled out. Most of the cops had moved to the inside of the barricade to try to control the freaked-out civilians, so it was clear sailing as he tore down Sixth Avenue.
He didn’t have much time. It was only a matter of seconds before they locked up Midtown, river to river.
At 48th Street he stood up, took his weight off the front wheel, and headed for the one place they wouldn’t think to seal off.
Underground.
He pointed the bike at the entrance to the D train and barreled down the stairs.
Most subway stations would be a dead end, but the Rockefeller family had been thoughtful enough to build a twenty-acre concourse underneath their vast complex of skyscrapers. Lined with shops, restaurants, and art galleries, it connected all the office buildings from Fifth Avenue to Sixth, from 48th Street to 51st.
It was a magnet for tourists, a year-round temperature-controlled transportation hub for commuters, and of course an ingenious escape route for a man on a motorcycle trying to outwit the police.
There were no cops down here. Just wide-eyed sightseers who smiled when they saw the Kawasaki cruising slowly along the marble corridors, and jaded New Yorkers who clearly didn’t give a shit.
INT. UNDERGROUND CONCOURSE AT ROCKEFELLER CENTER—NIGHT
The Chameleon pulls the bike into a blind corner behind Value Drugs and covers it with a tarp. They’ll find it eventually, but there’s no way to trace it back to him. The plates are stolen, and the ID numbers have been acid-washed off.
&n
bsp; Next stop: the men’s room at Starbucks. He emerges two minutes later, a shaggy-haired college kid wearing Harry Potter glasses and a T-shirt that says SAVE THE PLANET. IT’S THE ONLY ONE WITH BEER.
He walks to the subway entrance, swipes his MetroCard, and steps out onto the platform just as a downtown D train pulls in. It’s crowded and he squeezes in with the rest of the straphangers—just another New Yorker headed home after a busy day.
It all went smoothly except for the train. It wasn’t pulling in when he got to the station. It never is. He walked casually toward the far end of the platform checking out his fellow travelers.
And then he saw her.
Hilary Swank.
Not the real Hilary. It was a poster for her latest film.
He walked up to it.
“Hey, Hilary,” he said. “Remember me? The jerk at the bar? Not anymore, baby.”
Not. Any. More.
Chapter 28
THE COMMAND CENTER was crammed to capacity, including Kylie, Cates, the commissioner, the mayor, and Irwin Diamond, the deputy mayor in charge of damage control.
“I invite half of Hollywood to visit the fine film production facilities of New York City,” His Honor said, “and on Day One we’ve got two dead and another one circling the drain? How is that possible?”
Like Reitzfeld had said earlier at Silvercup, shit floats up. The commissioner fielded the question. “This guy is good, sir. He’s a master of disguise, he knows how to blend in, he’s planned every killing, including his exit strategy, and he’s got balls the size of Brooklyn. We had a hundred cops looking for him, and he sweet-talked his way right into the middle of them, and rode out on a Kawasaki.”
“And in case you missed it on the West Coast, it’ll be on the news at eleven, and on YouTube forever.” The mayor pounded his fist on the console. “What’s his goddamn motive? Why is he doing this to us? To me?”
Kylie, never afraid to speak, spoke. “He works in the business, sir. He’s obviously got some kind of a grudge.”