Heat Storm (Castle)

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Derrick said.

  “I’m assuming this is something that weasel Jedediah Jones has you tied up in?”

  Carl knew all about Jones’s duplicity. Half the reason Derrick talked through his cases with his father was because the old man had such solid instincts. The other half was as a kind of backup plan: If Derrick ever disappeared, Carl would know where to start looking for him when Jones couldn’t be bothered.

  “Yeah, and it’s worse than usual,” Derrick said. Then he told his father about Jones ordering the transfer of Bart Callan and how it tied back to Cynthia Heat and the counterfeit bills.

  “You say ‘worse than usual,’ but that sounds like his typical MO, if you ask me,” Carl said when Derrick was through. “That sonofabitch would double-cross his own grandmother.”

  Carl crushed his beer can in his powerful hands. “Anyhow, you need another? That first one always goes fast when you’re thirsty.”

  “Sure does,” Derrick said, handing over his empty can.

  Derrick sat on the back deck, enjoying the familiar peace of his boyhood neighborhood on a fine fall afternoon. He heard another lawn mower going a few doors away. Overhead in the cloudless blue sky, an airplane on its way to Dulles left a contrail that glowed pinkish in the setting sun. He breathed deeply. The air smelled fresh and clean.

  Carl emerged from the sliding glass doors with two more PBRs.

  Then his face grew hard.

  “Get down!” he yelled.

  Before Derrick could react, Carl grabbed his son by the shirt and easily tossed his two hundred and thirty solid pounds to the floor of the deck.

  As Derrick bounced on the wood, a volley of bullets exploded into the side of the house with a hail of splinters.

  NINE

  HEAT

  They didn’t teach you to think like that at the New York City Police Academy—for a very good reason—yet Nikki Heat couldn’t banish the irrational voice in her head:

  If only The Serpent would try to take a shot at me. That way I could have it out with him rather than have him delivering all these vague threats.

  But as she sat on a bench in Gramercy Park there was no one firing weaponry—just a bunch of pigeons pecking apart a bagel that had been left behind for them.

  Nikki wished she could be one of the pigeons. Right then, The Serpent—and a slew of other factors—had her feeling more like the bagel.

  She was itching for something to do, rather than something to think about—which was all her mother’s mysterious reappearance seemed to leave her with. When her phone rang, she was relieved just to be able to answer it.

  “Heat.”

  “Yo,” Miguel Ochoa said. “We managed to run down that phone number.”

  “That was fast.”

  “You complaining?”

  “Certainly not. What do you got?”

  “No, it seems to be more about what you got,” Ochoa said. “It was a burner phone, bought in cash at a drugstore right around the corner from the precinct this morning by a guy who wore a sling.”

  “A sling?” Heat asked, not sure if she had heard him right.

  “Yeah, like his arm was broken or something. And he was wearing a blue hat. There were two people working up front at the time, and that was all they could remember about the guy between the two of them. Next time I rob a store, remind me to wear a hat and a sling, because people can’t seem to see beyond them.”

  “But Rales got surveillance footage, right?”

  “Negative. The recorder broke a long time ago. There was a street camera and we were able to find a man with a blue hat and a sling entering the store and then leaving a short time later. The problem is, he entered from the south, with his back to the camera. And then he exited heading north, again with his back to the camera. We never saw his face.”

  “Perfect. What else?”

  “We contacted the service provider and leaned on them to give us call data. I thought they were going to make us get a warrant but we convinced them to play nice.”

  “That’s a break.”

  “It is and it’s not. The phone hasn’t made any calls, just texts.”

  Heat already had a sinking feeling before the next words came out of Ochoa’s mouth: “And the only number it has texted is yours. What’s going on, Captain?”

  “Nothing,” Heat said quickly. One of the pigeons ripped off a particularly large chunk of bagel as the word escaped her mouth.

  “This guy bothering you or something?”

  “No, it’s . . .” Heat wasn’t sure how to complete the thought. Ochoa didn’t need to know that she was being anonymously warned away from investigating her non-dead mother’s disappearance.

  She came up with “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You know we’re always saying we’re like a family at the Two-Oh. If you were my sister—”

  “But I’m not,” she snapped. “I’m your boss.”

  Ochoa was silent.

  “Sorry, I’m just . . . I think I’m coming down with something. Are you guys doing okay up there? I think I might just call it a day.”

  “Yeah, yeah, of course, Cap. You need anything, you know we’re just a call away.”

  “Thanks, Miguel.”

  She hung up, then stood from where she’d been seated at her park bench. The pigeons were mostly done with their dinner. Heat decided it was time to get home so she could make her own. She retrieved her gun from the trunk of her unmarked car and set herself on a slow meander toward her mother’s apartment, a short distance away.

  Her apartment. It was still strange to think of it that way again.

  Then she reached her block and stopped to gawk at the building. Two strands of yellow police tape stretched across the front door. Standing in front of that was a uniformed officer.

  And parked in front of him, just down the steps and beyond the sidewalk, was a truck from the coroner’s office.

  * * *

  For the first time all day, Heat was glad she had been forced to wear her captain’s uniform to the press conference. It spared her having to identify herself to the young officer who had been stationed in front of the building.

  He saluted nervously as she approached and said, “Evening, Captain.”

  “At ease,” Heat said. “I live here. What’s going on?”

  “There was a crime committed inside, sir,” the officer said.

  Thank you, Officer Obvious. “Gee, someone should put some crime tape up,” she said.

  Heat began to walk past him into the building, but the officer slid to the side to block her path.

  “I’ve been told to keep residents out for the time being, sir,” he said. “It’s pretty gross in there. You might not want to go in.”

  Heat fixed him with a look. The man—boy, really—never would have said that if a male captain had shown up.

  “Officer, do you see these bars on my collar?”

  He nodded. She put down her bags so she could close the distance between them.

  “They signify many things,” she said. “But one of the things they indicate is that I can handle ‘gross.’ I can also handle yucky, icky, and pukey. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, moving out of the way.

  Then Heat walked inside.

  It was not just gross. It was like a set designer for a chain saw movie had gone overboard. There was blood on the walls, blood on the ceiling, blood on the floor, blood on the vase that held the silk flowers, blood on the silk flowers, blood on the table that held the vase, and blood on the mirror behind the vase.

  And that was just what registered with Heat in her first glance. She was aware the typical adult male contained approximately one and a half gallons of blood. She had just never seen such a high percentage of it splattered on the walls of her lobby.

  A team of CSU techs were hovering over a body that was lying behind the front desk. Heat walked over.

  She immediately recognized the bowling-pin-like shape of Bo
b Aaronson, but little else about him.

  He had been brutally butchered. His scalp was partially separated from his skull and peeled back, revealing the whiteness of bone. His eyeballs were missing, as if they had been pecked out by hungry vultures. His jaw hung, obviously dislocated, at a grotesque angle. His fingers ended in meaty stumps where the nails had once been. His throat and wrists had been slashed.

  For good measure, he had also been disemboweled.

  Death, whenever it had come, had been a blessing. The amount of pain he had suffered before then had to be unreal.

  Heat paused, as she always did, to honor the victim of a crime. It was the ritual she always performed so she never forgot what police work was ultimately about.

  In truth, Bob Aaronson had been a terrible doorman. It wasn’t just Derrick Storm who slipped past him. So did delivery people, neighborhood bums, heroin addicts, religious zealots, charitable solicitors, political pollsters, and pretty much every other undesirable visitor imaginable. The only people he managed to reliably stop were Girl Scouts selling cookies. He was that bad.

  Aaronson probably should have been fired for incompetence at least ten times, except that no one on the building’s co-op board could be bothered to do it. Plus, he always sucked up to them.

  Still, this was a terrible way to go, even for someone as worthless at his job as Aaronson.

  Heat turned so she didn’t have to look at the carnage any longer.

  On the other side of the lobby, talking to one of Heat’s sheet-white-faced neighbors, was a pair of plainclothes detectives who Heat recognized as being from the Thirteenth Precinct.

  One of them walked over when he saw her.

  “Captain Heat,” he said, not bothering to hide his surprise. “Did . . . did someone call you about this already?”

  “This is my building. You guys got any leads on what happened here?”

  “You mean other than someone going to town on the doorman with a fillet knife?” the detective asked.

  “I figured that out already. You got a time of death?”

  “We talked to one resident who entered the building at around 4:35 and found Mr. Aaronson alive and well. The resident who found him called 911 at 4:52. So we’ve got a pretty tight window, yeah.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “We were hoping you might be able to tell us that,” he said.

  Heat tilted her head to the side. Then the detective pointed to the wall behind the desk, where there was something written in blood. Heat hadn’t noticed it at first, what with all the other blood sprayed everywhere. Even now it was hard to make out, because of the smearing, running, and clotting of the blood that the writer had used as his ink.

  Except once she focused on it, there was no doubt what had been spelled out:

  NIKKI HEAT.

  Heat drew in her breath sharply, despite herself. She had been threatened and intimidated before, though not, perhaps, in such sanguinolent fashion.

  She rocked back on her heels and had to fight the urge to steady herself on the desk. She didn’t want to smudge any of the blood spatters or leave her prints in a way that might contaminate the scene.

  “You got a friend you want to tell us about?” the detective asked. “Maybe someone handy with a knife?”

  All she could think about was The Serpent. Was this his idea of taking a shot at her?

  What was it he had said in his last text? Something about proving how powerful he was and manifesting his wrath? There was certainly a lot of wrath involved in what had happened to Bob Aaronson.

  Yet she already knew she wasn’t going to tell this detective about The Serpent. Maybe she would have to tell Roach about him, but . . .

  In the meantime, the detective was staring at her hard, waiting for her answer.

  “I don’t know,” Heat said. “I don’t recognize this as being anyone’s work in particular.”

  “You think maybe this could be related to Legs Kline somehow? Maybe one of his people trying to avenge his ex-boss’s death, trying to rattle your cage?”

  “I don’t know if any of his people were that loyal, but . . . I guess I wouldn’t rule anything out.”

  The detective had his pad out, but he hadn’t written anything on it. Truly, Heat hadn’t given him anything useful.

  “We certainly haven’t,” he said. “If you don’t mind, we’re going to go through your old cases, see if anyone special just made parole or something like that.”

  “Good plan,” Heat said. “I’m happy to assist, of course.”

  “Thank you, sir,” he said, handing her a business card. “And, certainly, if you have any ideas about who might have done this—”

  “You’ll be my first phone call.”

  That seemed to satisfy him, so Heat made noises about wanting to head upstairs. More than anything, she wanted the Crime Scene Unit to complete its job so someone could begin cleaning up. She didn’t want her neighbors walking past and seeing her name painted in blood. They were already leery enough about her, given past history.

  She punched the button for the elevator and rode up by herself. As she entered her apartment, the first thing she saw was that the small end table in the vestibule had been tipped over, and the vase that normally sat on the table was lying on the ground in two large pieces and several more small ones.

  Someone had been in her apartment, someone who still might have been inside.

  Heat froze for a moment. The prudent thing—the thing she would have done, had it been any other apartment but her own—would have been to go back downstairs and request backup before she entered.

  She drew her 9mm instead. That would have to serve as her prudence and her backup.

  TEN

  STORM

  Derrick Storm had sprawled flat on the surface of the deck, making himself as small a target as possible.

  Carl Storm had fallen on top of him. For as much as Derrick wished he wouldn’t, Carl Storm was using his body as a shield to protect his son.

  Derrick always knew his dad would take a bullet for him. And vice versa. He just hoped to never have the occasion to confirm it.

  They had their faces down—Derrick on the deck, Carl on Derrick’s back—to protect themselves from the shards of wood raining down on them.

  The gunfire was automatic, making it impossible for them to keep track of the rounds expended. It just kept coming in a sustained burst. There is nothing quite like being pinned down by a heavy blanket of machine-gun fire to make a person feel overmatched.

  The only thing keeping them alive was the deck’s elevation and the gentle downward sloping of the backyard beyond it. Had it been the opposite, subjecting them to fire from above, they would have been shredded. Ask any military commander, anywhere, throughout history, from the Huns to Hannibal: There’s a reason why the high ground is considered an advantage.

  Finally, the gunfire ceased.

  “Reload,” the Storm boys said at almost precisely the same moment.

  They didn’t need to communicate what that meant they needed to do. Carl sprung off Derrick’s back and scrambled toward the sliding door. Derrick low-crawled after him into the family room.

  But not before he risked a brief glance at where the gunfire had been coming from. That was what allowed him to see the shooter plainly.

  He was Caucasian, with a buzz cut flat enough on top to land a remote control airplane on and ears that stuck up from the sides of his shaved head. He had a slightly psychotic look about him, like he had spent his childhood wearing too much camouflage, pretending to play soldier, and his summers torturing frogs with leftover Fourth of July fireworks.

  Whether or not he actually spent time in the armed forces, he was now clearly some kind of mercenary.

  But who sent him? And how had he tracked Storm to his father’s house?

  There was no time to even think about it. Once inside the family room, still in a crouch, Derrick looked at the Barcalounger and the paisley couch. They were the familiar furni
shings of his boyhood, and he couldn’t believe he was now wondering how he might use them to keep himself alive as the gunfire resumed.

  But no matter how ugly a couch was, it couldn’t stop a bullet. The attacker was now pumping rounds into the side of the house, aiming for the room the Storm boys had disappeared into. Chunks of plaster flew as the bullets pierced the wall.

  “Come on! In here!” Carl yelled, staying low as he entered the kitchen, where at least there were cabinets to provide extra cover.

  They sat together on the linoleum floor as bullets shattered the windows in the next room.

  “We can’t stay in here,” Carl said. “He’ll move into the kitchen next and we’ll get shredded. You want to make a break for the front door?”

  “No,” Derrick said. “That’s exactly what they want us to do. I’ll bet you anything the guy in the back’s job is simply to flush us out toward the front, where the rest of the team is waiting to finish us off.”

  “Good point. So what’s your plan?”

  Ordinarily, Derrick Storm’s plan when someone was shooting at him would have been to shoot back. Storm’s favorite gun was a Smith & Wesson Model 629 that he called Dirty Harry. Like the revolver Clint Eastwood had once used when asking someone to go ahead and make his day, it used .44 Magnum cartridges.

  Unfortunately, Dirty Harry was currently stored in the trunk of his Ford Taurus, which was currently parked in the driveway, which was currently among the least safe places in America.

  But just as Storm was about to draw a breath to answer his father’s question, he was interrupted by the cacophonous sound of the front door being broken down.

  “Go, go, go,” someone was saying.

  “Cellar,” Carl whispered fiercely.

  It was a terrible direction to head in. And also the only one with a chance of keeping them alive.

  As silently as possible, they slid toward the door to the basement, which was off the kitchen. Carl went in first. Derrick was just behind, locking the door as he went, for what little good that would do.

  The Storm basement was unfinished, with a bare concrete floor and a series of naked lightbulbs hanging from the two-by-ten rafters. Small head-height windows, each of them no more than twelve inches from top to bottom—too small to crawl out of—let in some ambient light. There was a storm door with steps leading up to it. But, of course, that only emptied into the backyard, where that machine gunner would have been all too happy to rip them in half.