Heat put her phone away. She couldn’t bear to carry this conversation any further.
“Here’s how it’s going to go, Mitch,” said Heat as she pulled up a chair to put herself knee-to-knee with the bull in charge. “I’m going to give you a chance to tell me now who runs this little…enterprise.” She gave Rook a glance and saw that he caught the FiFi reference. Her casual air was a total mask. Nikki knew it was just a matter of time before word got to the leader of this sweatshop, and she wanted that name immediately before he could flee. But she couldn’t show her neediness, so she toyed, holding her notebook like a secretary from the Mad Men steno pool. “First name, last name, please.”
“I can’t.”
“You mean you won’t.”
“Damn straight I won’t. Know what they’ll do to me if I talk?”
“What did Fabian Beauvais take from you guys.”
“I said I’m not talking.”
“That’s too bad. Because I was going to offer you a plea deal. Hurricane special. Because, you see, Mitch, we are really good at finding things out. What do you think we’ll learn when we check your cell phone for calls?”
He looked up at Rook, who said, “Oh, yes. Any call to you, or from you.”
“Mitch, don’t you think we’ll figure out who you work for?” Heat let him stew on that for a while and snapped her fingers. “Wait, I have a terrific idea. Do you shred your papers, Mitch? Because I am going to have our Crime Scene Unit go through your trash. Here at your little office and at your home. What will we find, Mitch? Check stub? An e-mail you printed carelessly?”
Rook tagged in. “Lucky you like to work out, Mitch. New York prisons have the best weight facilities. A piece of advice? I’d be careful who spots you. Some of those lifers act clumsy, but I think they just like to see what happens when heavy iron lands on a throat.”
Mitch started to squirm. He gave Heat a nervous look, and she said, “Don’t listen to him. Nobody’s going to bother you in the exercise room. A build like yours, someone will most likely test you out in the recreation yard or in the chow line. Put a shiv in a big fella like you, that’s going to buy some gangster a lot of cred.” She patted his knee. “Too bad. You had a chance to take the deal.”
As soon as she stood, Mitch said, “OK.”
On their rush to the car Rook called to Heat in the lobby near the display cases. “Wait.” She stopped and turned.
“Wait? Really?”
“Gotta do one thing. I’ll hate myself if I don’t.” He held up a pause finger and ran back into the warehouse. Nikki stepped in the doorway and watched him jog past Mitch and the officers who were about to lead him off. He arced around a mound of old PCs and stopped at the confetti pile. He paused over it a beat, then turned and opened the back door. The howling winds moaned and lifted the piles into the air, grabbing at them with greedy force and sucked the shreds out of the warehouse, scattering them into the maelstrom.
When they were gone, now just ticker tape in the storm, Rook pulled the door closed. He passed Heat on his way out again and said, “Whoopsie.”
The high tide wasn’t supposed to crest for almost two hours, but when they passed Wall Street just past 7 P.M., the wheels of Heat’s car were rim-deep in East River overflow. The TAC frequencies were lively, to say the least. They heard reports that the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel had begun to take on seawater, that numerous residents were stranded in elevators in the downtown-most high-rises because Con Ed had cut power as a precaution, and that the entire façade had shorn off an apartment building in Chelsea, exposing all four stories of front rooms to the street. “Would not want to be the guy sitting on the can with the Ledger in that building,” commented Rook, who then gave a jaunty wave. “Hello, New York City.”
Heat appraised him and said, “How old are you?”
“Go ahead, hate me for my highly visual imagination.”
On Beaver Street the power was still on when Nikki parked, but the streetlights didn’t keep her from bumping the curb with her front tire because it was submerged. She checked her mirrors and gave the block a full rotation. All the retail shops were closed, as was the Delmonico’s restaurant on the corner. Nobody was out driving, and the only vehicles on the street were parked cars and a UPS truck, all of which were empty. “I’m not seeing our boys.”
“Bet they got slowed by the storm.”
Detective Ochoa confirmed over his cell that the Roach Coach had indeed fallen victim to a road closure. “The FDR and Henry Hudson are both NG,” he said. “High water was supposed to be ten-to-twelve, but now they say it’s rising over a foot above that. Rhymer and Feller are tailing us, but, with the streets like they are, I can’t see us there for maybe an hour.” All Heat could imagine was her suspect up there in his apartment making his escape out some back way.
“You up for this?” she asked Rook.
“What? You’re not ordering me to stay behind in the car for once?”
“No,” she said with a sly grin. “You’re going to give me a pony ride to the door so I don’t wreck my shoes.”
He actually offered to do that, even came around to the driver’s-side door and crouched for her to hop on. She gave his ass a swat and he gave up that notion. They slogged ankle-deep to the front of the apartment building, a prewar terra-cotta, twelve stories tall. Heat shielded her eyes from the whipping wind and rain and tilted her head back. The penthouse lights were lit.
“NYPD, open up.” Detective Heat banged once more and listened. She heard movement inside and stepped back, then launched herself forward to deliver a kick to the sweet spot of the door. In the blink before it landed, the dead bolt slid and it started to open. Her momentum carried her sole into the wood and the door flew about six inches before it slammed into someone behind it who cried out.
She came in with her gun drawn and took position over the man cringing on the floor. She handed Rook the Beretta from her ankle holster and told him to hold it on him while she checked the other rooms. “It’s wet,” he said.
“Don’t worry, it’ll still fire.” When she came back a moment later, she holstered and came around to cuff the attorney.
Reese Cristóbal wept. Sitting cross-legged in his foyer, blood streaming from his split lip onto his champagne carpet, the Gateway Lawyer blubbered like a toddler. Heat tried to raise her detectives, but cellular service had gone funky, either through excess call volume or equipment damage. Nikki decided to give them ten more minutes. She turned to her prisoner. “So how low are you? Putting yourself out there like some community asset, saying you’re placing immigrants in jobs and smoothing the transition for them, and all the time it’s a cover for your ID theft ring. No, forget that. It’s more than a cover; your position guaranteed you a ready supply of slave labor to pick through the trash and gather your stolen documents.” At first it looked like he was nodding agreement, but the man rocked back and forth, keening and moaning.
“Welcome to your reality, counselor. You are cooked; you know that, right? You are not only going down for human trafficking and every related civil rights and abuse charge we can throw at you, plus ID theft and bank fraud.…” His sobs grew louder so she spoke up to drown them. “…I am going to see you tried as an accessory in the attempted murder of Fabian Beauvais by one of your bulls. And who knows? Maybe you had something to do with his killing, too.”