Heat Storm (Castle)

by Richard Castle

  None came. Other than the sobs and panicked shouting of the restaurant-goers—and the soft, insistent professional coaching of the cops who were rescuing them—there were no unusual sounds.

  Eventually, one of the shield-toting cops came for her.

  “Sir,” he said. “Please come with me.”

  “No,” Heat said stubbornly. “I want to draw this bastard out.”

  “Sir, I don’t think that’s advisable. Please come with me.”

  She looked at the cop’s babyish face. He was one of her recent hires, a greenhorn no more than three months out of the academy.

  This kid still doesn’t even need to shave more than twice a week, and he’s acting smarter than I am, Heat thought.

  “Right,” Heat said. “Sorry. Good call, officer. I lost my head for a second.”

  “Actually, sir, I’m here to see that you don’t,” he said. “Now, we’re going to stand, on three. Then we’re going to walk to the door.”

  With the kid holding the shield in a place where it offered both of them protection, they made it to the safety of the precinct.

  The desk sergeant, who had coordinated the response, appeared in front of Heat.

  “What was that about?” he asked.

  “I have no idea,” Heat said, even though she did. “Maybe someone has been hit up for a PBA fund-raiser once too often.”

  Then her phone indicated she had a text message.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  She quickly checked the screen. The message was from The Serpent.

  NEXT TIME, it said. I WON’T MISS.

  * * *

  There would have to be a report filled out. And the aforementioned bal-listics analysis needed to be performed. And the slugs, which were badly deformed from their encounter with the bulletproof glass, would have to be put through the system.

  Heat knew it wouldn’t come to anything. Ultimately, which rooftop Callan used—or what caliber of gun he selected—wasn’t going to help find him. And so she didn’t feel the need to stick around for the confirmation of the inevitable nothing. She was tired. And demoralized. And scared. And lonely.

  She put all the official matters in the hands of the Crime Scene Unit and the night detective shift, then began a three-block walk to The Lucerne. She expected her shoes would feel heavy, what with all she had been through during yet another long day in a series of very long days.

  Instead, a spurt of nervous energy put a spring in her step. She realized she was taking countermeasures against a shooter, ducking behind barriers when they presented themselves, varying the speed of her walk from fast to faster.

  This is ridiculous, she told herself. There’s no way Callan knows I’ve chosen a hotel three blocks south, versus going to Rook’s place, versus a hotel four blocks west.

  Still, she was frightened. Might as well admit it to herself. She thought about Bart Callan. The first time she had met him, he was an agent with the Department of Homeland Security— ironically, the agency Heat just might soon be the head of. She had thought, for a long time, he was one of the good guys. It had taken her a while to unravel his mendacity.

  She thought back to the day, four years earlier, when she had finally put it together. They had scheduled what Callan thought was a friendly sparring session. They met in Heat’s gym, the bare-bones, this-ain’t-your-two-hundred-dollar-a-month-hook-up-haven health club. She knew Callan was a traitor and a criminal by that point. She was just trying to lure him into admitting it.

  When Callan had arrived, he was wearing a ripped T-shirt that showed off his guns. Heat had taken one look at him and read him for an overconfident pretty boy she’d be able to take down easily. Any martial artist can tell you that while biceps may look nice, they are not a terribly useful muscle. Core strength beats bulging biceps any day.

  Except their first several rounds had actually gone to Callan, who caught Heat by surprise, putting her back with ease. She eventually got the better of him, dislocating his shoulder before she arrested him.

  But that was only because she had managed to distract him. One-on-one, when his attention was fully on her, Callan had proven himself to be a worthy adversary. It’s not overconfidence when you really are good.

  And Callan was good. Very good. She didn’t want to repeat the mistake of not giving him the respect he deserved.

  Even now, when he should have been running scared—he was the fugitive, after all—he had her completely off-balance, making it a nervous walk to The Lucerne. She was relieved when she finally arrived without an extra hole or two in her body.

  The lobby was small—as tends to be the case at any Manhattan hotel where you’re not spending $350 a night—and she tried not to feel an extra stab of remorse when she had to answer “one” to the desk clerk’s question: “How many key cards would you like?”

  She took the elevator up to the deluxe room, which still had the typically tiny dimensions of a Manhattan hotel room. It was just a bed, a desk, a television, and a minibar, with narrow channels left open around the furniture for navigation.

  It should have been a sanctuary. Except as soon as she closed the door behind her, all the things she had been semi-successfully keeping in their own compartments suddenly ran together. Her ransacked apartment. The taunting of Bart Callan/The Serpent. Being shot at. Her mother, alive but still not with her. Her husband, estranged from her because that was what was best for him.

  It was, wasn’t it?

  Heat’s resolve began to crumble, almost like someone knocking into a brick wall with a five-ton wrecking ball, sending shattered pieces of masonry and mortar to the ground below. She imagined herself crawling back to Rook and snuggling up next to that gorgeous hunk of a husband.

  There were a lot of reasons they had survived so much as a couple. Some were, relatively speaking, superficial: he could make her insides feel gooey with one winsome smile; he could make her laugh, even when she didn’t want to; he was the first person she wanted to share news with, whether it was good or bad.

  But more important than all that was the way he accepted her, no matter what condition she happened to be in when she crawled, limped, or ran toward him. In sickness or in health. Sane or crazy.

  When she needed him to listen, he did that. When she needed to be embraced, he did that, too—and sometimes so, so much more, if that happened to be where things led.

  She knew this was another time when Rook would take her exactly as she was.

  A memory from their early dating life came to her. It was their one-month anniversary. She was still a sergeant who was subject to the whims of whatever case came up next in the rotation. Rook had secured a seven o’clock reservation at Joie de Vivre, a place so exclusive even celebrity two-time Pulitzer Prize–winners had a hard time getting a table. She had happily accepted, even though they were so new in their relationship—and she still had so many walls built up around her feelings—she had to pretend she wasn’t abundantly impressed by his pull.

  Before heading to work that day, she had packed a smoking-hot dress, one that plunged and clung and flowed in all the right ways. She matched it with a pair of knockout heels. She planned to change and then run out the door, hoping none of her fellow detectives would see her in it—because, after that, they’d never be able to think of Sergeant Heat as one of the guys again.

  Mostly, she was excited for the date. Who wouldn’t be?

  But then it rained. And she wound up trooping through the projects, looking for a perp suspected of B&E. But even when she found him, hiding amidst rat droppings in the cellar of his cousin’s apartment, it wasn’t clear whether they had enough evidence to hold him, because a confidential informant was playing hard-to-get with the prosecutor’s office.

  When the snitch finally gave it up, it was raining even harder, hopelessly delaying the last bus from Rikers, which should have been there hours earlier. And the only other detective working was a lieutenant, and the squad leader at that, so she couldn’t just lay it off on
him while she ran out the door in a scorching dress and six-inch heels. On top of that, her hair looked like it belonged on a troll pencil topper.

  Even worse, she had lost track of time. It was 8:12 p.m. by the time she called Rook, saying she was dreadfully sorry, but she couldn’t make it.

  “It’s fine,” he said calmly. “We’ll just reschedule.”

  But she could only imagine what he was feeling inside. For one hour and twelve minutes, Jameson Rook had sat in that swank restaurant by himself, across from a table setting that made it abundantly clear he expected company, getting surreptitiously eyeballed by a high-society crowd that was whispering behind its hands about how the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner was being stood up.

  He had every reason to be furious with her. She was furious with herself.

  And yet, as she walked out of the precinct forty-five minutes later, thinking she’d go home to ramen noodles and an answering machine message from her new boyfriend saying he was thinking about seeing other people, there was Rook. He was wearing his best suit, though he was so soaked from the waist down—a twenty-five-block walk through a driving rainstorm will do that, no matter how good your umbrella is—that the pants appeared to be twelve shades darker than the jacket.

  He was carrying two Styrofoam containers, marking the first time that Joie de Vivre had ever agreed to do takeout. He had stopped off at a drugstore to buy the only two candles they had left. One claimed to be kiwi scented. The other supposedly smelled of maple syrup.

  “I was thinking we could reschedule for right now,” he said. “Do you think the bull pen has a table for two?”

  “But Rook, I ruined our romantic evening,” Heat said.

  “Nonsense,” Rook said as the water continued dripping from his pants into his shoes. “Every time I’m with you, it’s the most romantic thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  That was Rook then. And she knew—even though they had never discussed that evening again in all the years since—it was still Rook now. If he held grudges at all, he got over them in the blink of an eye. He loved her. Unconditionally.

  And she loved him. Unconditionally. So why was she pushing him away? Why couldn’t she do both: be a wife and a daughter?

  She threw her bag down on the bed, then emptied her pockets. She grimaced when she pulled out the gift card for Captain Tyler’s Airborne Escapades. The Island-Hopping Special. It was such a classic Rook move. He was always finding ways to keep things fresh.

  And she was always finding ways to screw things up. With that thought, she went for the minibar, which was well stocked with small bottles. Each one contained a full shot. But they felt so small and inconsequential she had tossed back three of them before the alcohol from the first one even had time to seep into her bloodstream.

  She drank because of her mother. She drank because of Rook. She drank because of all she had lost and all she seemed to be losing.

  SIXTEEN

  STORM

  Back in the ancient boxy Buick, the Storm boys pointed south, away from the lights of Crystal City and Washington, DC, toward the promise of anonymity.

  Derrick drove. If there did happen to be anyone to outrun or evade, it made sense they might want to be able to exceed fifty-seven miles an hour. The Buick was, as Derrick soon proved, capable of more.

  But there didn’t seem to be any tail, or anyone who cared that sometimes a Buick was going ninety in the far left lane, and then sometimes it was lagging back at fifty in the far right.

  They were clean. For now.

  “So what’s our plan?” Carl asked.

  “To run. To hide. Then to regroup,” Derrick answered.

  “I have to tell you, in my line of work, I was always the hunter, not the hunted.”

  “Unfortunately, I’ve had experience with both. Welcome to the lower reaches of the food chain. Sometimes it helps just to accept it as fact.”

  “I don’t accept—”

  “Dad, seriously. We’ve got a major criminal syndicate after us, and they’re being tipped off by a top secret division of the CIA. We’re a little bit outgunned at the moment.”

  They were passing near the Potomac Mills mall. In the glow cast by the massive overhead lights, Derrick could see his father’s jaw working.

  “Okay, so if I accept your premise that we’re in duck-and-cover mode, what are the rules of engagement?” Carl asked.

  “For tonight? We don’t engage at all. We find a place where we can hunker down. But we have to do it in a way that keeps us completely off the grid. Jones will be looking for us, and he has eyes everywhere. You’ve already destroyed my phone, so that’s a good start. But we also have to avoid using credit cards, ATM machines, anything that would leave electronic bread crumbs for Jones to follow. How much cash do you have on you?”

  Carl took his wallet out of his back pocket and eyed its contents. “Eighty-four dollars,” he said. “How about you?”

  “You don’t want to ask.”

  “Oh, fer Chrissakes . . .”

  “Sorry, Dad. I stopped using cash a while ago. I’m in and out of so many countries it doesn’t even make sense to try to keep up. Even small villages in Mongolia take plastic now.”

  Carl grumbled about that development, recasting an argument first made by recalcitrant ancient Mesopotamians who were resisting the move to the shekel as a unit of currency, replacing the use of livestock.

  “Look, Dad, I know things are a little bleak right now, but . . .”

  There was a pause. Then it became pregnant. Then it had babies.

  “But what?” Carl finally asked.

  “Actually, I’m not sure,” Derrick said. “I was going for the big pep talk and I realized I didn’t actually have any material for it.”

  “Oh, great. That’s really confidence-inspiring. I’m moved. Churchill. Patton. None of them could have said it better.”

  “Well, okay, okay, no need to get snarky, here. We just have to think about this rationally. Jones is the ultimate pragmatist. There’s no way he and the Shanghai Seven are cooperating based on some alignment of long-term goals. They’re temporary bedmates, based on a mutual exchange of needed goods or services. But maybe we can change that arrangement somehow. We know what Jones is giving the Shanghai Seven: information about our whereabouts. The question is, what is the Shanghai Seven giving him in return?”

  “Money?” Carl asked.

  “Unlikely. Jones already has all the money he needs. Besides, money isn’t Jones’s god. Power is. They must be giving him some kind of advantage over someone, some kind of perceived influence, I don’t know.”

  “All right. How are we going to figure out what it is?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Wonderful. Again, if this spy thing doesn’t work out for you, you have a great future as a motivational speaker.”

  “If you want someone to sing ‘Tomorrow’ from Annie, you’re in the wrong car,” Derrick spat. Then he adopted a more conciliatory tone. “Look, let’s just try to get a hot meal and a good night’s sleep.”

  They were at the exit that led to Quantico, the Marine base. Derrick put on his turn signal and was soon cruising down a row of fast-food restaurants and low-end chain motels. When he got to one that wasn’t a chain, he pulled in.

  The man at the front desk informed them he had one room left for fifty-four dollars a night, plus tax. The man absolutely insisted he needed a photo ID and to swipe a credit card for incidentals, until Derrick kicked in an extra twenty. Then that insistence faded.

  One falsified registration form later, Mort S. Dricker Jr. and his father, Mort Sr., were officially registered at the Oorah Hotel.

  With lodging taken care of, they went across the street to a convenience store. Their remaining $7.30 covered two cans of Hormel hot chili, which had an added nostalgia bonus, having been a staple of Derrick’s childhood—it was one of the few things his father knew how to cook. The store clerk kicked in two plastic forks and two paper plates, free of charge.
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  Then they made their way to room 216, which was on the ground floor, around the corner from the front desk. Carl parked the Buick just outside, backing it into the space as if they had a trunk full of bags to unpack.

  In reality, they didn’t even have a toothbrush between them, much less the toothpaste to put on it. Much less the money to afford such luxuries.

  Derrick tried not to think about that as he inserted the key card in the flimsy door. It led to a dimly lit interior, with heavy curtains that appeared to date to a time when the Marines who checked in were worried about what they were going to face when they shipped off to Korea.

  The air smelled stale. There were stains of dubious origin on the walls, cigarette burns on the threadbare carpet—even though the room was labeled nonsmoking—and a certain overly lived-in feeling about the beds. Neither of the Storms wanted to think about the frantic sexual energy that had been expended during too-short twenty-four-hour leaves in this space.

  Immediately facing them as they entered the room was an ancient dorm-sized refrigerator with a big boxy microwave— possibly the newest item in the room, sheets included—set on top. Up against the wall, the dresser held an item that was sure to be a curiosity to any of the young recruits who used the room: a non-flat-screen television.

  In the corner by the window, there was a small round table with a noticeable slant to it, and two wooden chairs. In the other corner, there was a shelf at head height, underneath which was a rod with four bare metal hangers on it. On the floor, beneath the hangers, the maid had left a small plastic caddy with generic cleaning supplies.

  That was probably the best news of all. It suggested someone had actually once cleaned the place.

  “Home sweet home,” Derrick said, closing the door behind them.

  “You spies really lead a glamorous life.”

  “James Bond never had it so good.”

  “They must have skipped those scenes in the movies,” Carl said.

  Derrick pulled the cans of chili out of the plastic bag and began waving them vigorously back and forth.