A prolific rooster-tail wake churned behind them on Pearl Street. Heat figured their speed at near seventy. At one of the numerous alleys around there, this one named Coenties Slip, the driver hit the brakes hard and steered them into a sharp left that felt like it would roll the truck. This time it was Rook’s turn to slip over the side. Only one leg went over, though, and he made a quick recovery just before the BearCat plowed through the park benches and cement chess tables in the neighborhood plaza at Water Street, nearly sending both of them off the top.
The truck stopped there. Idling again.
An angry bear at rest.
Heat shivered. The temperature was mild, in the sixties, but she was soaked through. Her fingers were growing numb. She forgot all that to listen in the maelstrom for what might come next. Rook caught her eye when they both detected some kind of movement below.
It all happened quickly. Another latch popped. Both went on high alert. Then a lightning bolt must have made a direct hit near them. The brightest light and loudest concussion split the air, blinding and disorienting them. By reflex, their hands went to defensive mode, covering eyes and ears after Zarek Braun tossed out the stun grenade.
His angle of opportunity had been poor, tossing from a side portal. The flash bang didn’t get high enough to detonate on the roof, but exploded yards away in the little square. Still near enough, though, to get the effect he needed. A three-count after the fireworks, the driver hit the gas and then the brakes. Heat and Rook, disoriented and no longer holding on, flew off the back, landing in the water.
Ifs count a lot. If Braun had made a better throw, they’d both be paralyzed in pain. If Heat had been looking to the right at the time of the flash, she might have been totally blinded. If that square hadn’t been waist-deep in water, she might have broken something. The ifs were with Heat, and she would take every one of them.
Trying to blink the halos away, she hoisted Rook to his feet and drew him to the side of the van that shielded him from Zarek Braun. She knew he would be out there ready to finish the job. Listening, buying time to clear her eyes and ears, she tried to go to the Zen place, to calm herself.
Screw that.
Heat’s rage dealt the play. With her Sig Sauer in one hand and her Beretta Jetfire in the other, Nikki burst around the rear of the truck with both guns blazing. The passenger door gaped open and she made out the silhouette of Zarek Braun splashing for cover behind a planter wall. She spun in a crouch at the open door and called freeze just as the driver swung his Glock at her. Heat fired one shot at him and his head jerked backward into the mist of blood decorating the window behind him.
Rounds from the G36 slapped the water beside her legs. Nikki hoisted herself up into the BearCat and pulled the armored door closed and heard pops like hailstones dance on it. She got on her knees and leaned across the driver’s body to open the other door. She called for Rook to get in, but he was already hauling out the corpse and doing just that.
“Can you see?”
“Well enough,” he said. Then he hit the gas, gunning it straight for Zarek Braun. But the front end smashed into the planter wall he was taking cover behind and the BearCat lurched to a stop. “Maybe not so well, after all.”
Heat pointed. “He’s running that way. Go, go, go.”
Rook found reverse, backed clear of the planter, and chunked the transmission into drive to follow the fleeing killer. But, in his blurriness, he rammed the planter again. By the time the vehicle got back on track, they thought they had lost Braun. Then, up Water Street, they saw muzzle flashes. Rook accelerated toward them, drawing close just as Braun kicked an NYPD harbor unit patrolman out of the Boston Whaler he’d been patrolling the streets in, and took off with the outboard at top speed.
“Rook. Stop.”
“I can catch him.”
“Just wait.” She hopped out and ran to the officer, who was down. In a draw between saving the life of a brother-in-arms or capturing a killer, she would take her chances on finding the killer later.
“Officer, I’m on the force. You’re safe. Where are you hit?” She bent and rolled the man over faceup in the water. He had a clean shot to the temple. Even though she knew he was dead, she felt for a pulse. Rook helped her carry him to the truck and they resumed their pursuit.
Heat said, “He can’t have more than a block on us. Two maybe.”
“Detective?”
“Yeah?”
“That was the right thing to do.”
She kept her face to the window searching for signs. “Someday, that could be me.” And then she added. “But not today.”
“Got him!”
“Where?”
“See how the counter-wake is slapping the walls of that drugstore?”
Rook stopped and backed up. Heat shined the side spotlight down the alley. In the distance, she made out an indistinguishable form.
“Not sure.” Nikki’s mind raced, running maps and odds through her head. “Pier Eleven’s down the block. He might be making a run for the river. Let’s go, let’s go.”
Rook tore off after the outboard, whose churn they could by then make out like a pale apparition in their headlights. The tide had reached its peak, and the water grew deeper as they got closer to the East River. The truck, which had performed like a champ, began to labor. “Come on, baby, come on,” said Rook. “How close?”
“Almost to South Street, almost there.” But then the machine lost its match with Nature. The engine died. Heat opened her door and stood on the running board, shielding her eyes from the storm, trying to follow the beam into the swirling night.
The outboard had reached Pier Eleven, and was slowing to a stop. That bastard was less than a hundred yards away. She indicated the dead officer to Rook and said, “Use his radio to call another ten-thirteen.” And then Heat grabbed something from the floor of the truck and left.
Spindrift pelted Nikki’s face, filling her mouth with a brackish taste. The howl of Sandy’s fury isolated her from any sound other than the wind and spray lashing violently at her ears. Though she ran as hard as she could, the tide measured thigh-deep in that neighborhood. Still lower than it had been farther downtown, but fighting the ferocious wave chop coming right off the East River made Heat feel like the trailing contestant on Wipeout. Underneath the FDR, she caught five seconds of shelter, adjusted the sling of the backpack, and sloshed on.
A tiny, shallow-draft Boston Whaler was not engineered for super-storms. Ahead of her on Pier Eleven, Heat saw its bow lift in a gust, turning its flat bottom into a wing that caught air and pointed the craft skyward before it flipped back upside down and then pinwheeled directly at her. She ducked behind the metal generator unit at the head of the pier and watched it sail overhead and crash into a concrete support of the highway overpass behind her.
When she came out from behind the machinery, Nikki spotted Zarek Braun recovering from his capsize. He saw her, too, as he hauled himself up from the churning water that covered the pier. Just when Heat thought she had him bottlenecked on that wharf, he turned and kicked a massive wake of his own, running to her left. Was he foolish enough to try to swim for it?
No. He was heading for the gangplank to Slip A, one of the docks where the water taxis come and go. No taxi tonight. But she did see a boat tied to the heaving berth—a twenty-four-foot Zodiac military pro Responder. A man on board caught a glimpse of Zarek Braun waving a circle in the air and fired up the twin Mercury 150s on its transom.
The floating dock took a swell, and Braun toppled facedown on his first step off the gangplank onto the lurching platform. Nikki reached the top of the gangplank, braced on the metal railing and called a freeze that got carried away unheard in the whirlwind. Zarek Braun rebounded from his fall and pivoted toward her with his assault rifle. She fired one round that went astray when the dock pitched, moving him sideways and down. He got on one knee and replie
d with a flaming burst from the G36 that sent Heat diving behind a soda vending machine.
His aim was off, too. All his rounds went high.
Heat made a rapid peek around the corner just as another surge knocked Braun off-balance. This time, he lost hold of his assault rifle. It slid away from him in the radical pitch and came to a stop against the safety fencing at the far end of the dock. Seizing the moment, Nikki sprung to her feet and started down the heaving gangplank toward him. But she lost her footing in a sea roll, too. Heat landed on her knees, gripping the banister with her left hand and clinging to her Sig Sauer with her right.
When she hauled herself up, she looked in disbelief as her Cool Customer lived up to his nickname. Instead of backtracking for his carbine, he turned his back on Nikki and strolled toward the waiting escape boat with out so much as a glance at her. He knew what they both knew. It was impossible to get off an accurate shot with the river tossing them about in a hurricane. But at the bottom of the gangplank, Heat braced and fired.
Zarek half turned but kept his stride. Another yaw of the dock as it strained against its pilings sent the HK skimming back her way. She grabbed it, aimed, and pulled the trigger.
It was empty.
The mercenary gave her a smug nod and laughed as he hopped into the black Zodiac. Nikki started weaving toward him with her Sig up. Braun pointed to something down inside the boat, and his accomplice, whom she recognized as the man she had shot with the nail gun in Chelsea, reached over with his unbandaged hand and brought up a fresh G36.
Proving she could be a cool one herself, Nikki stopped and holstered her weapon. That confused Zarek Braun as he took the HK from his partner. In the moment he hesitated to wonder what the hell that was about, Heat underhanded the flash-bang grenade she had brought along in the backpack and lobbed it into the Zodiac.
Back at the Twentieth Precinct, just before dawn, Heat stood in the faint light of Observation-One staring through the glass at her prisoner. The shiver she felt wasn’t from the still-damp hair tickling the back of her neck. It came from watching a paid assassin sit under the lunar wash of fluorescents with such inverted tranquility he resembled a wax replica of himself at Madame Tussauds.
She could have easily killed him hours before on that dock. Even with all the heaving and pitching, Nikki had the drop on him, and at that range, she had three nines left she could have parked in his head, with one left for his boat wrangler, if he’d gotten any ideas. Who knows? She might have worn a medal for it, cashing the chit of a double cop killer.
But Heat wanted this prick alive.
And she got him, flash, bang, boom.
Now came the harder part, and she knew it: trying to get a mercenary with psyops training to give up the man who hired him. Heat assessed him again and quietly composed herself, becoming mindful of her breathing. The room still had a tang from the old days when they allowed smoking in there, and her own clothes—the same ones that she had changed out of and balled into her file drawer the other day—weren’t the freshest, either. But they were dry.
Sandy had moved on in the overnight after making landfall near Atlantic City. The former hurricane was now somewhere over Pennsylvania, but the city was still reeling, and through the door behind her, Nikki heard the early-morning bustle of the precinct’s forces in response mode.
She had a different job to do. And it was time to jump in.
Zarek Braun’s concentration never left the spot he had chosen under the mirror. Not even when he heard the sucking sound as Heat came through the air lock that buffered the observation room from Interrogation-One. “Something different about you this morning, Mr. Braun.” She ducked her forehead toward his and squinted into a playful face. “What is it, now? Is it the orange jumpsuit? Not as flattering as your black phony SWAT outfit, is it? No, something else…Oh, I know. The manacles. You are incarcerated.” She tossed her files onto the tabletop and took her place. “Just as you will be for the rest of your life. Which may end up being shorter than you had planned.”
That brought his eyes off the wall. She winked. “That’s a topic yet to explore. First, I want to ask you some questions. Number-one is sort of a public safety issue. Are there any more members of your urban black ops cadre out there? Because I would sure like to get them off the street.” His gaze drifted front again. “That’s OK, because we’re finding out lots about that from your boat skipper in the other room. I just thought I’d give you a chance to get ahead of the rush for leniency from cooperative goodwill.”
She could have put Braun and his Zodiac captain, Seth Victor, in the same interrogation box together to play them off each other. Her decision, though, was that the Cool Customer would have intimidated his underling into silence. So she went with divide and conquer. Maybe Victor didn’t know as much as Braun, but his paranoia about getting sold out might loosen him up. This one would be a challenge, though; she knew that before she came in.
“Look, let’s keep it real. We both know you’re going to try to stonewall here. And, unlike you, we don’t go for torturing our prisoners. Although, I have thought of it, Zarek.” Addressing him by his first name brought a tiny flex to his mouth. “Not so much a thought, as a fantasy.” Heat brought up a hand to count off fingers. “Let’s see, you killed my captain. You killed a patrol officer. You killed Reese Cristóbal. You killed Fabian Beauvais, too, didn’t you?” She waited. The Cool Customer remained passive. “And you also killed Jeanne Capois. And the old man she kept house for. Look: out of fingers. Am I leaving anybody off?”
He seemed amused by some private joke. Then he spoke. “You have lovely eyes. Bedroom eyes.” His words came softly in a Polish accent, which, under other circumstances, Heat might have found sexy.
“And you know what they see ahead for you? Let me lay it out. New York does not have a death penalty, I’m sure you’ve thought that through. But guess what we’ve been busy doing. Letting our pals at Homeland Security do some checking on you. We like to cooperate. Not just with each other but with our allies in foreign lands. A little birdie told me about Operation Dream Catcher. You were a bad boy in the desert. A very bad boy. Let me ask you something. If our friends in Afghanistan want an extradition so they can repay you in all the ingenious ways they can imagine, what do you think I should tell them?”
A minuscule flare of his nostrils. A scalp flex that moved his ears. Small tells gave away his unease and let her know she’d had some impact. So Nikki tested it for the money. “I want you to tell me about Keith Gilbert. I want to know everything. I want you to tell me why Keith Gilbert wanted Fabian Beauvais dead. I want you to tell me how you killed Fabian Beauvais for Keith Gilbert.”
She gave him an opening to respond, but he didn’t take it. “Did you notice there’s a theme here? Keith Gilbert. Wealthy men have no problem hiring men like you to do their scut work. Keith Gilbert even told you to kill me, didn’t he? And you tried. Twice. Oh, and how did that work out for you, Zarek?”
Heat sat facing him, waiting. And waiting some more. She stood. “Fine. You keep it zipped like that, being all cool. Styling your orange duds and your bracelets and chains. Know what I’m going to do? Go Google the weather forecast for Kabul.”
When she left Interrogation, two and a half hours later, she found Rook waiting for her in the ob room. “These guys are hard core,” he said. They watched Seth Victor picking at his wrist bandage through the magic mirror. His face was still swollen from the broken nose Heat had given him in Chelsea. The effect made him appear even more stoic than his unit leader in the next box. “You know, in my prior, somewhat nutty ramblings about roving bands of rogue black ops mercs out on the streets, dishing out justice, I always figured it would be a little more satisfying to meet them. Like they’d have some swagger and élan.”
“You mean like an action figure?”
“Exactly.” And then he realized what she’d said and turned to her. “Was that a shot?”
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“If the beard fits.”
Anyway, these guys are just punks with army-surplus gear. Lethal enough, I grant you, but swagger? Élan? I think not.” Inside the box, Victor turned toward Rook. Even though they both knew better, it seemed like a reaction. “I think we should find another room.”
Out in the hallway Rook said, “I made it to Gramercy Park. Your apartment’s fine.”
“What’s it like out there?”
“Not good. Storm’s past, but now we’re getting the nasty back ass of it. Power is still out below Thirty-ninth, subways, tunnels, and some bridges are closed; they’re still putting out house fires in Breezy Point…Oh, and somebody put a roller coaster in the ocean off the Jersey shore.” He led her into the break room and indicated the clothes on the coat rack. “Got you these from your apartment.”
“Oh, great. Thanks.”
“It’s the least I could do after you saved my life.”
She pulled the outfit off the hook. “Oh yeah, this suit definitely makes us even.”
“I beg to differ, Detective Heat, but I think we are finally even for that bullet I took for you.”
“You know, I don’t see it as even. I see it as your turn to take another one.” And she stepped into the ladies’ room to change.
The voice of Keith Gilbert echoed up the hall from the bull pen as Nikki returned in her refreshed wardrobe. She looked up at him in front of the forest of microphones on TV when she stepped into the room and thought she saw something on his face that went beyond weariness from running the PA’s emergency sitch room overnight. Did she see stress? A twinge of fear?