Her eyes popped open and she arched up in her task chair. Roach stood over her. “Sorry to startle you,” said Ochoa. “My BCI man just called. They’ve cornered Earl Sliney and Mayshon Franklin.”
The cobwebs dissolved and she got to her feet. As she grabbed her coat, Raley asked, “What about him?” Across the bull pen, Rook had his head down on a desk.
She called out, “Rook,” and his head gophered up. “We’re rolling.” Through his walrus yawn he called shotgun.
FIFTEEN
hey convoyed with gum balls lit but no sirens across the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn; Heat, Rook, and Feller leading Raley, Ochoa, and Rhymer in the Roach Coach. Behind them the Manhattan skyline set the low ceiling ablaze like a CGI special effect and the car got buffeted by forceful gusts advertising the imminent arrival of a hurricane.
Rook scrolled his iPad and called out occasional tidbits about the storm. “Whoa, with the freak convergence of meteorological factors and the full moon tomorrow night, they say there could be storm surges of eleven to twelve feet. Know what that means, don’t you? Ocean-view dining in Times Square.”
“If I have to sit back here,” said Detective Feller, “can I at least have some quiet?”
The silence that followed lasted a full ten seconds before Rook finger-swiped another Web page and horse chuckled. “Are there any fans of irony here? The Metropolitan Opera announced it’s canceling performances of The Tempest, due to — wait for it — the hurricane. Gotta love it.” Another burst of wind pounded the Taurus and he hollered at the window, “‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!’”
“Uh, Rook?” said Heat.
“Yeah?”
“First of all, that’s King Lear, not The Tempest. And second? Put a sock in it?”
“You didn’t tell me to put a sock in it when I hit Alicia Delamater with the old Zoo Lockup.”
“No, that was…That was timely,” Heat exited the bridge onto Broadway and looped back toward the East River passing Peter Luger’s.
“I was thinking you’d say ‘inspired.’ See what history gives us?” He twisted to Feller in the backseat and explained the bluff he had pulled out of the Nikki Heat playbook.
Detective Feller gave him a thumbs up. “I do the same thing to spook the amateurs, except I call it Cellmate Lice Buddy.”
“Ew,” blurted Rook. “I’ll confess now to anything.” Which made all three laugh, at least until they saw the roadblock of flashing lights up Kent Street.
At the staging area beside the defunct Domino Sugar plant on South Third, Detective Ochoa shook hands with Senior Investigator Dellroy Arthur. “Pleasure to meet you in person,” said the BCI lead. Heat immediately noticed the plainclothes detective’s badge, the state police’s distinctive “golden stop sign,” which had a mourning band across it just like hers. He told them all he was sorry for their loss, never mere words among the law enforcement brotherhood. Heat thanked him for the wishes and the solidarity, and then they did what cops do — got to work.
“Here’s how it came down,” began the SI. “NYPD got a call that someone had cut through the fence around the bicycle course they’re creating over there.” They all turned toward Havemeyer Park, a vacant lot that was in the process of being developed into a BMX pump track complete with moguls and dirt berms. “Patrol showed up and observed two men drinking beer and riding the course. The pair evaded the officers on their bikes, but the unis pursued and saw them enter that construction site.” Heat and her group pivoted up Kent, where the concrete skeleton of a ten-story building jutted up into the blustery night.
Heat asked, “What put them on your radar?”
“Simply put, shots fired. That brought out the incident squad from the Ninetieth, which interviewed the responding officers, who ID’d Earl Sliney as one of the perps based on our APB. His companion fits the general description of his known associate, Mayshon Franklin.” The state detective fired up his iPad and they gathered around while he stylus-walked them through the street map to indicate street closures and exit chokes. “We’ve got them boxed on the ground. Unfortunately in this wind we can’t bring air support.”
“How do you know they’re still in there?”
“More shots fired. They’re somewhere on an upper level from the round I heard.” Arthur laid out his plan, which was to employ a dual SWAT team pincer incursion, starting at ground level and clearing each floor to the roof. The construction company had e-mailed him PDFs of the architectural plans and he indicated each phase, and the timing, of each team’s movement so they didn’t cross fire each other. When he’d finished, the BCI man asked, “Any questions?”
“Just one,” asked Heat. “Can you take them alive?”
“Guess that’s up to them.”
If it hadn’t been for his customized vest, which proclaimed JOURNALIST instead of NYPD, Rook might have made the cut. But the New York State Police senior investigator was “not playing games,” as he put it, and the writer got ordered to wait at the staging area. “It’s my own fault. The bling did me in,” he said to Heat, indicating the two Pulitzer medals embroidered onto his body armor.
“Plus no badge, no gun, no training.”
“That’s right, rub my nose in your so-called superior qualifications.”
Heat and Feller joined the first SWAT team; Raley and Ochoa fell in with Team-Two. Dellroy Arthur had done his homework, radio communication was ongoing, and the incursion teams were first order. None of that minimized the danger of entering a dark construction high-rise at night with a howling wind obscuring sound and blowing objects at you out of nowhere while armed suspects — one, a killer who shoots old ladies — waited God knows where.
Methodically, over the space of thirty minutes, stairwells, elevators, air shafts, and port-a-potties were cleared on ten of the ten floors. That left only the roof. Air support would have made the job so much easier. Or a taller building in the vicinity that could put observers on its top floor. The teams waited at their entrance points on opposite corner stairwells for the go, when they would storm the rooftop simultaneously. After confirming readiness, the green light came.
They burst onto the surface and quickly found cover behind the bulky AC units on one side of the roof, and stacked metal crossbeams on the other. What they hadn’t planned was for Sliney and Franklin to be astride their bikes, pedaling like mad for the edge of the building instead of laying down fire. While Heat and each team ran at them shouting to freeze, she tried to picture the iPad map to recall how close the nearest building was. And how far down.
Whether they had some Thelma and Louise death pact, or had seen Matt Damon leap from too many heights into windows and make it, Sliney and Franklin sped forward without hesitation. The men made no sound. No whoop, no rebel yell, no scream. They simply pedaled their fiercest until they ran out of roof.
Neither one hit the ground.
Coming off the ledge, it was clear they would not make the other side. Sliney must have realized that quickly because he made an X Games midair dismount and desperately wrapped both hands around the cable of the construction crane next to the building. In a wild junction of flashlight beams, they saw him grip it, but he wore no gloves. His momentum, gravity, and friction combined to skin the meat off his palms as he cried out in his horrific slide down the braided steel. The giant lift hook at the bottom of the cable stopped him. The point snagged under his jaw and tore his neck open wide, leaving him to swing lifeless, head thrust back, in the fifty-plus gusts.