Feller asked, “What about PAPD?”
“Smart. And since Port Authority is becoming your thing, why don’t you make a friend at PAPD who’ll run Beauvais and Capois through their data bank to see if there are any hits. Arrests, tickets, citizen complaints filed against a cop, basically anything. Roach, have you gotten any traction on those MetroCard swipes in Chelsea?”
“Indeed,” said Raley. “When we went through Jeanne Capois’s purse a second time, we found something on the back of a grocery receipt in her wallet. She had used it to jot down an address in Chelsea on West Sixteenth Street.”
Ochoa added, “It’s an apartment not far from the subway stop.”
“And, ironically, the Port Authority Inland Terminal Building. Before you get excited, it’s no longer owned by Port Authority, but by Google. I Googled that, increasing a seemingly infinite loop of irony.”
“Before you get pulled into a time warp, Rales, why don’t you give me that address? I’ll pay a visit tonight on my way home. I’d like you and Ochoa to go interview Beauvais’s friend Hattie Pate at the address Rook left.”
Before she released them for the night she voiced what swirled within all of them. “I don’t need to tell you this case is far from cleared. I won’t say it’s in jeopardy, but we can’t sit on what’s up here.” She indicated the Murder Board over her shoulder. “Let’s pretend this is square one and get more.”
“Higher, farther, faster,” said Rhymer.
Ochoa shook his head. “Don’t. Just don’t.”
She gave the taxi driver the address in Chelsea and settled into the seat burdened by a downer day and her own bleak thoughts. The surprise turn the case had taken and its collateral fallout was bad enough. The underpinning that kept her brain swirling had a name, and it was Jameson Rook. After the years of intimacy and happiness they had enjoyed together, not to mention the deep respect she had for his character, she had cause to believe him when he said he hadn’t shared any inside information with Gilbert’s man. Then how did this happen?
She took out her phone and opened up the text message Rook had sent her shortly after he left the Twentieth. BTW SINCE YOU BROUGHT UP VOODOO, I ALSO DID SOME RESEARCH ON THAT EARLIER TODAY. NOT AS FRINGY-SATANIC AS PEOPLE THINK. ONE OF THEIR BELIEFS IS THAT THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS OR COINCIDENCES. EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A PURPOSE — R.
Nikki wondered what purpose she could she find in this. Not in sending the text, that was obviously a makeup ping. But what reason was there to find in Rook’s dissent and intrusion? Even if he hadn’t been the direct cause of Gilbert’s release without bail, he’d been more than a loose cannon. She couldn’t escape that recurring feeling he was working against her.
Ever since news of the task force job came out.
Heat didn’t want even to think he would be trying to undermine her chance for the task force for his personal reason of keeping her in New York.
But she couldn’t stop.
So she touched the TV screen to resume the seat-back news video she had switched off before, just to get some distraction. “Hurricane Sandy Slams Jamaica.” So much for escape. The Eyewitness News report said the storm had become a Category One, moving northward, pounding Jamaica with eighty-mile-per-hour winds. Footage rolled of people walking bent into the sideways force of rain. A reporter in a yellow slicker made his obligatory stand-up report, shouting against the howl of nature from the seething breakwater about dead and missing by the dozens, buildings caving, others being swept out to sea in the surge. The raging hurricane continued its track over the Caribbean, with computer models still predicting landfall in the U.S. Northeast sometime Monday or Tuesday. Like most New Yorkers, Heat looked at the gentle mist reflecting the night-scape on the sidewalks and found it all hard to believe. But a lot could happen in five days.
When the cab let her out at Eighth Avenue at Sixteenth a new unsettling wave rolled through her. After she scoped out this address, Nikki worried: should she go to her place or to Rook’s? Their issues would all need to be confronted eventually. For the moment, that meant later. Heat double-checked the address and walked on, asking herself why the hell she ever went into the trash for that Parisian jewelry bag.
If she had been paying attention to the street instead, she might have seen them coming. By the time the man in the black SWAT uniform tackled her from behind, his partner had already yanked her gun.
EIGHT
urprise delayed Heat’s reaction. A split second of “what the — ?” was all it took, and she toppled face-first, toward the sidewalk. But in the blink after that split second, training kicked in. With a vengeance.
A primary rule of close combat: Don’t get pinned. Nikki spun during the fall to present her back to the ground. On her twist around she jammed a sharp elbow to the ear of the man behind her, which not only stunned him but also pushed him off-line so he would not land on top of her.
When he hit the pavement with an “Oof,” she had already continued her roll, flinging a leg behind the knees of the man beside her, the one who’d taken her weapon. He had her Sig Sauer in his hand but pointed where she had been, not where she was. The leg sweep took this guy down hard. The back of his head made a coconut smack on the concrete. Heat sprung into a crouch, ready to lunge for her pistol, but by then the other assailant had gathered himself up and he threw himself on her.
Like his partner, he was big and built like granite. But his bulk also made him slower than Nikki. Once again, she swiveled to land on her back, and when he reached out to put a hand on each shoulder to pin her, she rained a rapid-fire barrage of punches up to his undefended face, a face she then recognized from Beauvais’s SRO. He pulled back a fist to strike her, but during his wind-up, she lunged the crown of her forehead into his nose and he cried out. The punch never came.
Movement. The other man, also from the SRO hallway, was hauling himself up onto his knees, dazed, and with blood streaming from the split skin on the back of his shaved head. In the ghosty light, she saw him start to bring up the Sig Sauer. Nikki struggled to free herself from under the moaning hulk. Finally getting to a squat, she gauged there was too much distance and not enough time to jump for the pistol. She made a no-look reach and tore at the Velcro on her ankle holster. The ripping sound gave the man an instant of hesitation. Heat filled it with .25 caliber slugs from her Beretta Jetfire. The air cracked twice and his face lit up with muzzle flashes as the bullets entered just above his eyebrows.
Beside her, a whoosh of cloth. A black tactical boot kicked Nikki’s wrist and her back-up piece flew from her hand, clattering into the parking lot of the public housing complex. Without waiting, she dove for her Sig in the dead man’s hand. Inches from reaching it, two pairs of hands grabbed her from behind, snatching her up onto her feet. Another big man had joined the attack, and both of them dragged her across the sidewalk toward an idling van. She struggled mightily to free herself. Heat knew if they got her in that thing, she was as good as dead.
Another axiom from Nikki’s combat training: To unleash surprise, think in opposites. She made a point of wrestling harder the closer they brought her to the side cargo doors. No match for their brute strength, she was conditioning them to work against her resistance. Then, a yard from the open doors came their surprise. Heat reversed her struggle, unexpectedly charging in the direction they were pushing her. The flip in momentum hurled all three of them at the vehicle. But Nikki was the only one prepared for the shift.
When the two men smacked into the side of the van on either side of her, Heat broke free and ran.
At ten on a drizzly weeknight, this block was hopelessly quiet. Apartment vestibules were empty and locked; the big office building on the left slept; no cabs or cars to flag for help. Ahead, at Ninth Avenue, a pool of bright light reminded her: The hotels. The Dream and the Maritime both had a vibrant night scene. And security. But then she came to an abrupt stop.