Unable to get the gun free, Nikki pressed the air nailer against his wrist and fired. Pulled back. Fired again. Nails are painful. Nails between joints are excruciating. The pistol dropped. Disarmed, he ran out moaning.
Sirens coming. Lots of them.
Armed with her attacker’s Smith & Wesson, Detective Heat switched mode, just like that, to offense. She wanted these guys. For what they did. For what they knew.
Cautiously, rapidly, she picked her way past the debris container that had shielded her and hopped over the body splayed on the concrete with the hammer lodged in its head. She flattened her back against the wall of the loading dock and braced the gun in both hands. The cargo door of the van slammed just outside, and she heard it roaring off. She swung around the corner onto the sidewalk to try for the tires but it was too long gone. Across the street, a quarter block west, a dark gray Impala idled. A man stood at the open driver’s side door. This was the cool customer who’d blocked her escape earlier. Their eyes met. In the orange tint of the streetlights, his features were passive. A living death mask.
“NYPD, freeze.” Nikki brought her weapon up to aim. With a chilling casualness, he raised an assault rifle and laid down a hail of bullets that sent her diving for cover behind the engine block of a parked car. When the firing stopped and the echoes from the G36 trailed off into the night, Heat shook the windshield glass from her hair and rose up, ready to return fire.
But the Impala was already turning the corner down on Ninth Avenue. Before disappearing around it, Heat could swear she saw an arm raise up from the driver’s side and give her the finger.
Forty minutes later, Lauren Parry knelt beside the body on the floor of the loading dock. “Nikki Heat, you did this?”
“Would it help if I said he had it coming?”
The ME glanced again at the claw hammer, still embedded in the man’s head, and then back to her. “Remind me never to mess with you, girl.” Lauren, who constantly nagged her friend not to get herself killed, chuckled. Her laugh was as false as Nikki’s vacant smile.
Heat still inhabited the adrenaline wasteland. After the hormonal tsunami receded, it left her body shaky, her emotions hollow, and her focus dulled. All reserves had been tapped and she subsisted now on pure will. She was relieved to be able to account for her weapons. Her Beretta 950 found its way home to her ankle holster courtesy of a teen from the housing projects who violated his mom’s curfew to smoke some weed in the parking lot, found the Jetfire, and turned it in to the crime scene unit working the body of the attacker she’d killed with it. CSU had located her Sig Sauer near his corpse, and she’d have that back soon enough. Detective Feller knew a few things about adrenaline dumps and handed her a Snickers. Randall had arrived on the scene shortly after the first responders, having heard the ten-thirteen call go out. The street veteran said if he’d known that she was the officer needing help, he would have beat them all there, and Nikki believed that. He told her that the plate numbers she got from both vehicles had been boosted from airport rental cars, so good luck there.
“I figured when I saw the Montana tags on the Impala,” she said. “Makes sense that the Cool Customer wouldn’t be driving that thing around with Port Authority tags on it.”
“Cool Customer, indeed. That G36 he was firing must have packed a hundred-round drum. CSU had to send out for more numbered cones to mark the shell casings. They ran out.”
While he went around the block to check on getting her Sig released, Heat took another bite of the candy bar in service to her blood sugar. Then came another boost. Rook arrived.
He had been her first call when things all settled and the wounded construction worker got patched and ported in the ambulance. Nikki phoned just to let him know where she was — at least that’s what she told herself. But she really needed to hear his voice. She craved a connection to life after coming so close to losing it. And even though she’d told him not to come by, there he stood, beaming on the sidewalk as if he wanted a candid look at her before he broke and ran to her arms.
They buried themselves into their hug, whispering each other’s names, and then kissing. PDA be damned, she thought, I’ve earned this moment. The tensions they’d been dealing with didn’t exist right then; all she wanted was to hold him and be held. He touched his thumb tenderly to the red mark on her check and she assured him the paramedics checked and she was fine, nothing broken.
“You know,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever kissed a woman standing over a corpse before.” Nikki laughed, but it started to turn into tears and she put her head against his chest just to get calm and not break down. He seemed to know she needed that and they stood together quietly a few moments until she stepped back, nodding that she was OK now.
They relocated to the sidewalk to let Lauren Parry continue her work. He said, “Apologies to Peter, Paul, and Mary, but now we know what you’d do if you had a hammer.” Which made her laugh, but then she noticed his eyes were moist now.
“Hey?” She took his hand. “I’m all right.”
The precinct’s remaining Crown Victoria pulled up beside them and the man who needed all that room hauled himself out of the driver’s side. “Heat, you’re going to give me a fucking heart attack,” said Wally Irons.
“No, I think the pork chops and fried dough are pretty much going to take care of that,” muttered Rook to Nikki while the captain waddled around to them.
Before Irons even checked on her, he gave Rook a disdainful head-to-toe and said, “I’d ask what you’re doing at my crime scene, but I guess I can let it go, considering.”
Rook said, “You’re a big man, Wally,” and took an elbow from her.
Heat filled in her captain on the events. The exercise forced her to relive the unpleasantness, but it also helped her organize the main points for the report she would have to write. It also spared her a second recap to Rook. She finished by telling him Detective Feller would ride herd on Forensics to run prints on the two deceased and on the Smith & Wesson dropped by the man she air nailed.
He bobbled his head. “Sounds like you’ve got it all buttoned down.”
“It’s the job, sir.”
He looked off up the empty midnight street, watching life beyond the cordon and said, “You think this is related to the Gilbert case?”
“I do.” Beside her, Rook cleared his throat but wisely chose not to speak.
“Heat, I want some hides on the wall for this.” He came back to look at her. “Meantime, I’ve tried this before, but I’m not taking no. I’m putting a radio car at your doorstep all night. Period.”
She thought about the assault force. Saw the passive menace on the face of the Cool Customer. And said yes.
Irons felt good about that. Until Rook said the car should be at his place overnight.
Heat was up and dressed, pacing the kitchen on her cell phone when Rook shuffled out of the bedroom the next morning. After indulging in a long, hot, therapeutic bath to soothe the morning-after soreness of her street battle, she had already brewed a thermos of coffee and taken it down to the officers in the blue-and-white outside his loft. Nikki poured him a cup of French roast from her second pot and smooched a silent air-kiss while she listened to Zach “The Hammer” Hamner’s dour phone call to start the workday.
“This is not going to be one of our usual friendly chats,” he’d begun when her phone rang exactly a minute after seven. Zach was so damned earnest, she couldn’t tell if he was kidding, or if he truly felt they had a cordial relationship. “This is an on-the-record, official caution, Detective. Are you hearing me?”