Raging Heat

by Richard Castle

  Shortly before two, Heat came to Rook’s desk. “Mayshon Franklin is out of surgery and in recovery. You mind getting a little wet?”

  The first thing the prisoner saw when he opened his eyes was Heat’s badge. He couldn’t help but see it because Nikki held it so close that it was almost touching his nose. It had taken him longer to come out from under his anesthetic than she and Rook had expected, and they spent a quiet hour waiting in bedside chairs listening to the hiss of rain against the window. Far from lost time, it ensured she would be there on wake-up when the haze of pain meds might dull Mayshon Franklin’s instinct to clam up, lie, or ask for an attorney.

  With Earl Sliney, the state police’s fugitive now off the board, BCI Senior Investigator Dellroy Arthur had broken camp, happy to leave his accomplice to NYPD. Heat obliged. “Mayshon Franklin, you are under arrest,” she said, removing her shield once she knew it registered.

  His eyes were glazed, searching but not making optical sense of his world yet. He tugged lightly at the manacles connecting him to his jail-ward bed. Then he licked his dry mouth and said, “Earl?”

  “Earl Sliney is dead, Mayshon.”

  He closed his eyes, nodding an of course to himself, and then opened them again. “How?”

  As Heat tried to decide how to put it, Rook stepped up behind her and said, “Human Pez dispenser.” That only confused Franklin, and Heat didn’t want him to lock up. Plus, she only had so much time before he would fatigue-out and go under again, so she got to it.

  “Look up here, Mayshon.” Nikki held up the ATM security cam freeze of him and his crew and tapped Beauvais. “You recognize him, right? Mayshon, eyes here. Good. You know him?”

  Franklin nodded weakly. “We have video of your friend Earl shooting at him a few weeks ago. You were there.” He nodded again, which was encouraging because she wanted him unguarded. “Did he hit him?”

  “No, shot at him.”

  “Right. We know he shot at him. Did any of Earl’s bullets hit him?” Mayshon shrugged and winced at the effort. “Can you answer yes or no?”

  “I don’t know. Mighta hit him, mighta not. I dunno.” He took a breath that stuttered on the intake and his eyes drooped.

  “Stay with me, Mayshon, you’re doing great. Almost done.” His lids fluttered to half-mast and Nikki pressed, aware of the short time she had before he zoned. “You and Earl were chasing him, and he had a package. What was it?”

  “He stole.”

  “What did he steal?”

  “From the boss.” He smiled dreamily. “Y’all don’t steal from the boss.”

  “What’s the boss’s name, can you tell me that?” He made a face, mimicking a child in trouble and wagged his head on the pillow. She’d come back to that. “What was in the package?”

  “Bad stuff, I dunno. Stuff meant for the shred net.”

  Since he claimed he didn’t know what was in it, she didn’t want to waste time flogging that. “Tell me about the shred net.” One eye closed. His other lifted like a stoner’s in a music video. “Mayshon. Where’s the shred net?”

  “You don’t know? You’re the police.”

  “Tell me, help me understand you better, Mayshon.”

  “Flatbush. C’mahn, you know.” His speech became increasingly slurry.

  “Where in Flatbush?”

  “Flatbush, there ya go.” He closed his eyes and muttered in a singsong, “Mar-co.” And then he chuckled, answering in the same cadence, “Po-lo.…”

  “Mayshon, don’t play games with me, just tell me where.”

  Again he sang, “Po-lo,” then didn’t say anything, and she thought she’d lost him. Then he chuckled again and said, “Whirl ride.”

  And then he slept.

  Working his iPad in the hall after the floor nurse ordered them to step out, Rook made a spin move on the polished linoleum. “Ha-ha, knew it. Thug-One wasn’t jerking your chain. Look.” He held the tablet out for Nikki to read his search hit. “Marco Polo Worldwide—as opposed to ‘whirl ride’—Spice Distributor and Wholesaler in Flatbush, New Yowk.” He watched hope cross her face and her wheels starting to turn. “I wouldn’t call ahead.”

  “No,” she said on her way to the elevator. “Let’s surprise them.”

  When they pulled out of the garage of Brooklyn’s Woodhull Medical Center, the rain surprised both Heat and Rook by still seeming relatively light. Shouldn’t it be more torrential? The wind, however, remained prolific, seemingly limitless. On the drive down Marcus Garvey Boulevard toward Flatbush, plastic bags, tree branches, chunks of billboard, even price numbers ripped from service station signs flew across their path, prompting Rook to say something Nikki only half heard about falling gas prices.

  She was busy trying to sway the acting precinct commander of the Sixty-seventh to provide backup at Marco Polo Worldwide. He was understandably reluctant to release assets during a citywide emergency, yet was no match for Heat, who invoked the name of Zach Hamner as her next call, if that’s what it took. The acting PC offered two patrol teams to meet her at the west end of Preston Court in fifteen minutes.

  Heat’s Taurus had been blocked in back at the Twentieth, so she and Rook arrived in the drug impound undercover car she had commandeered in her haste. A pair of blue and whites was waiting for them outside the U-Haul parking lot on the corner of Preston at Kings Highway. “Don’t want to jinx it,” she said to Rook, “but we’re only about three blocks from Fabian Beauvais’s SRO. If this turns out to be that shred net, and he ripped them off, it’s an easy walk.”

  “Or run,” he said.

  More than simply functioning as backup, the patrol officers had good local knowledge. Preston Court was a down and dirty industrial zone, a partially unpaved, two-lane alley lined on either side by low-rise weathered brick and concrete warehouses, mounded quarry materials, and metal-scrap lots bordered by chain link and razor wire. The spice distributor sat a hundred yards east between a tire recycler and a boiler-system repair company. The ranking uni, a sergeant, said all the business on that stretch of Preston loaded their materials in and out the front doors, so there was only a narrow service track running behind the buildings, an easy route to plug with a patrol car on each end. Heat told the sergeant she liked his plan and dispatched him and the other team to the back, keeping one of the uniforms to go in the front door with her and Rook.

  On the drive up the block, they passed a flatbed stacked with hollow automobile bodies in front of a crusher yard. Next door, outside a vacant hulk with a red and white sign advertising thirty thousand square feet for lease, a handful of young Latinos crouched with cupped hands around their smokes as if the hurricane were a minor inconvenience. When they made the undercover cop car, they ran in all directions. Pulling up to Marco Polo Worldwide Spice Distributors, Rook scoffed at the sign. “If this isn’t a front for something, I’ll eat a tablespoon of cayenne.” Indeed, the sad building looked anything but international, a double-height box of exposed concrete blocks topped by rusty corrugated steel panels.

  The front door was unlocked, either through sloppiness or thanks to the smokers, and the three entered. They found the reception area unattended. Clearly it got no walk-in customers. Dingy framed photos of herbs drying on foreign hillsides graced Masonite paneling straight out of a Khrushchev-era basement bomb shelter. Inside the dust-caked display cases, bowls of dead and decayed spices were laced with cobwebs. From their pallid color and texture, they might have been delivered by Marco Polo himself.

  The door to the side of the counter opened, and an imposing guy ripped with muscles stepped in, hastening to pull it closed behind him. “Help you?” he said in a voice an octave higher than anyone expected from his roided body.

  “Interested in some spices,” said Rook. “I’m just mad about saffron.”

  Both the officer and the muscleman gave him strange looks. Heat’s focus stayed on the hard body, w
hom she saw stuff something in his back pocket and cover it with his untucked shirt tail. “I’d like to speak to the manager. Is that you?”

  “We’re closed.”

  “The door was open.” She parted her coat to show some tin and Sig Sauer. “Are you the manager?”

  “No.”

  “Who is?”

  “You have a warrant?” As soon as he asked it, the inner door behind him opened wide. A slender Asian man holding an unlit cigarette and a disposable lighter stood in it. Behind him they could see a portion of a large, open warehouse with about a dozen foreign men, women, and children off-loading garbage bags from a box truck. Muscle Man gave the guy with the cig a shove back inside and pulled the door shut.

  “Won’t be needing a warrant. I just happened to observe illegal activity. That girl I just saw is working in violation of child labor laws,” said Heat, approaching him. “And you are under arrest for carrying an illegal weapon.” She reached in his back pocket and pulled out a telescoping billy club. While the uniform frisked and cuffed him, she said, “I think I’d like my tour now.”

  An hour later, still handcuffed, but seated in a stained executive chair in the middle of the warehouse, the muscleman, Mitch Dougherty watched glumly as his workforce of forty-six illegals called him names in foreign tongues as they filed past to be processed by Social Services. SSD personnel had braved the weather and arrived with two buses to transport the dozens of abused and malnourished aliens to emergency shelters and to get a health assessment.

  To use the term Heat had heard from FiFi Figueroa, Mitch was only one of the bulls, an enforcer. But he was inside, and that meant he must know who ran the business. And what a business it turned out to be.

  Ana, a young woman from Honduras who spoke excellent English, approached Nikki on behalf of the other workers, desperate to share the story of their plight. “I am like most of these women. We have been abducted from our hometowns and brought here against our will.”

  In the case of Ana, she was taken one night in La Ceiba by gangs who first raped her, then smuggled her to America to be a prostitute. “Sadly,” she said, “it is true for some of the boys as well, although many of the men and women were not kidnapped, but were tricked to come here. Who does not want to come to America for education, si? That is what they told some, and then they arrive, and there are no identity papers or no colleges, and they are then forced to work for pennies in this living hell and live in the squalor of the rooms they keep us in.”

  Heat scanned the lineup of vacant-eyed souls. Of course she knew about human trafficking—the underground industry of human servitude that kept the moral outrage of slavery alive and well in modern times. But here she saw it in the flesh, en masse. Men, women, and—as she learned from Social Services—children, as young as nine, caught in the historic form of abduction, abuse, and enslavement for the enrichment of their captors; and all who supported the system. Here before her were forty-six lives. What made her shudder was the certainty that they were the proverbial grain of sand on the beach.

  Exhilarated by her rescue from bondage, Ana led Heat and Rook around the warehouse, describing the setup and the jobs done by each team. “That’s how they divided us, by specialty. And by literacy. You’ll see what I mean.”

  The wide-open, twenty-thousand-plus-square-foot building was subdivided by task. In one end, plastic garbage bags were mounded high, filling one end of the immense, hangarlike space. The rest of the concrete floor was sectioned off by planks of wood that defined square borders where sorting was done. All work was done by hand. One team sorted each bag into raw materials that were carried to its designated section. An area each for: credit cards and credit card receipts; ATM cards and receipts; personal mail, which was then organized by type—bank statements, preapproved credit lines, mail order and Internet invoices that used credit cards, newsletters from professional organizations and clubs, and birthday cards to harvest dates of birth; cardboard shipping cartons with name and address labels; and hard goods, which included everything from discarded clothing with names and phone numbers, to luggage tags, and old technology—especially computer hard drives and old phones.

  “This was all sorted on hands and knees all day and into the night. And then the trucks would come and bring more and more.”

  Rook asked, “What happened to the good stuff you found?”

  “Yes, the useful material with names and information that could be used to make IDs or to do fraud were boxed in those plastic bins and transported elsewhere to the people who would make false accounts or fake credit cards and such.”

  “It must be worth millions,” he said to Heat. But she was looking elsewhere, across the huge room.

  “Ana, what is that back there?”

  “The confetti pile. Come, I will show you.” She led them to the back corner where they saw the shredded material FiFi had described. Shredded documents, which had been emptied out of plastic bags, laid out on the floor, and painstakingly—almost impossibly—assembled like jigsaw puzzles into completed car loan and mortgage apps, résumés, anything that got shredded for security from identity theft. “This is where they made me work,” she said. “Because they said I was patient and smart.”

  Ana coughed back a tear and then kicked apart one of the nearly complete docs, a credit report for an apartment. It swirled to pieces in a mini gyre and drifted to the floor like snow in a globe. She liked it so much she kicked another and another until she collapsed. Nikki held her to comfort her and beckoned a social worker over.

  But as quickly as she had crumbled, Ana sat up, wiping the tears, declaring she was fine. Heat said, “Ana, we can do this when you feel stronger, but I would like to ask you to look at some pictures.”

  “I will do it now,” she said. “Truly, I am fine. I am free.” She smiled. Nikki took out her cell phone and scrolled to a photo of Fabian Beauvais. “Oh it is Fabby!” Ana was so excited she tried to take the phone. “He worked here, too, you know.” And then her face clouded. “Fabian was tricked to come her from Haiti after the earthquake. They told him he would have a better life. This was his life.” She turned to the room as the last of the forced laborers left for the shelter. “But Fabian, he got out. He got away. And helped his fiancée break free, too.”

  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 wo
rk 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.”