High Heat

by Richard Castle

  “But Callan had to have help from someone who works for the government.”

  “Maybe. But maybe not.”

  “That’s helpful.”

  “I’m just saying, yes, it could be some version of an inside job, where someone with the appropriate amount of juice within the federal government worked some levers. Callan was FBI before he was Homeland Security. When you start looking at the number of people he had contact with during his career who would still be around and could have helped him get that transfer…I mean, you’re probably looking at hundreds of possible suspects.

  “But,” Rook continued, “we also can’t rule out a bribe coming from the outside. I think history has shown that if you’ve got enough money, you can make the US government do just about anything for you. It makes our suspect list—”

  “Enormous,” Heat finished for him. “So it could be someone who needs Bart Callan’s formidable mix of skills. Or someone who fears what he knows will get out, and was therefore pressured into helping him. Or…”

  She let her voice trail off, then grunted in frustration. “There are too many possibilities. I wish my mother would just make contact somehow—for real, not as an apparition. We can sit here and spin theories for hours, but she could probably clear up everything in thirty seconds. Why won’t she just let me help her?”

  “We’ve been over this,” Rook said. “It’s because she knows it’s too dangerous. We have to trust her. She knows more than we do right now, so she knows what’s best.”

  Rook paused. Heat became aware he was studying her carefully. “You didn’t sleep very well last night, did you?” he asked.

  Heat shook her head. Rook stood, walked over to where Heat was leaning against her desk, and wrapped his strong arms around her. She allowed herself to be embraced.

  “I’ve seen that look in your eyes before, Nikki,” he said as she nestled her head in his shoulder. “That obsessed look. And I have to tell you, it scares me. It scares me to death. I know asking you to just stand down is impossible. But you can’t let this consume you. Because it will. It will eat you up until there’s nothing left of you.”

  She separated herself. “I’ll be fine. Really,” she said. “Anyway, I’m not the one being threatened by terrorists right now. I’m really not sure about you flitting all around town like this, having lunch, riding the subway.”

  “What are you worried about? Your typical New York subway car has at least three riders tougher than anything ISIS could throw at us. I’ll be fine. Besides, I’ll have an NYPD escort with me the whole time. We’ll have lunch, then we’ll come right back.”

  “I know, I just…I have a bad feeling about this. Every time you go out it’s like we roll the dice again, and one of these times it’s going to come up snake eyes. I want you where I can see you, where I can keep you safe.”

  “Once I get back from lunch, I promise I’ll hunker down here,” Rook said. “My Legs Kline feature is due by the end of the day tomorrow. I’ve got some written, but I really need to get going on it, if only because I need to get that minister of magic thing in print before he forgets.

  “Now,” Rook said, looking down at his watch, “speaking of deadlines…”

  “Yeah, I know,” Heat said. “Go. Just be careful.”

  They kissed one last time, then Rook walked out the door.

  Heat knew she should have plowed herself back into her paperwork immediately—and stayed at it until Rook and Aguinaldo returned with the lead that would give their investigation new legs.

  But she couldn’t help herself. She went to the window of her office, just to get one more glimpse of the man she loved before he disappeared from view.

  She swiveled the blinds open as Rook and Aguinaldo descended the front steps of the Twentieth Precinct. Rook had a little-boyish bounce to his stride, as he tended to get whenever he was aiding an investigation. Aguinaldo moved with her usual compact efficiency.

  Heat saw them turn right and walk up 82nd Street in the direction of the American Museum of Natural History subway stop.

  Which was why she had such a clear view of what came next.

  The first thing that caught her attention was the roaring of an engine followed by the accompanying squeal of tires coming from somewhere down the block.

  She swiveled her head left to see a large black SUV with an extra-long antenna charging up the street at high speed, its pinstripe a white blur on its side.

  Just as it whipped past the precinct, there was more sudden movement coming from the top of the block. Another large black SUV, identical to the first, screeched around the corner from Columbus Avenue and was roaring down the block—traveling west, against the direction of the one-way street.

  The two vehicles were on a collision course until they came to a halt within twenty feet of each other, bracketing where Rook and Aguinaldo were standing.

  “Run!” Heat shouted. Except, of course, they couldn’t hear her from inside the building. And the window had been painted shut eons ago.

  Rook and Aguinaldo had stopped in their tracks, more surprised about the sudden appearance of these two vehicles than threatened by it. That’s when Heat realized neither one of them had been with her for Hassan El-Bashir’s description of the strange late-night visitors to Masjid al-Jannah. And Heat hadn’t yet put it on the murder board. Neither Rook nor Aguinaldo knew these SUVs were identical to the ones that had likely delivered Tam Svejda to her death; neither had any idea what danger they were in. Aguinaldo wasn’t even reaching for her gun.

  Heat was. There was no time for a phone call. She was already drawing her 9mm Smith & Wesson out of its holster.

  But before she could take out the window—if she shot it then cleared away the remaining glass with her foot, she’d be able to lean out of it and perhaps take aim at the people who were about to pounce on Rook and Aguinaldo—she stopped herself. The bullet would take out the window, yes. The problem was what came after that. Heat had no idea where the projectile would go next. No angle of fire was safe. It would either go into the street, where there would be drivers or pedestrians, or into the building across the way, where there were apartments. It wasn’t a clean shot.

  In the time it took her to calculate this, the doors to the black SUVs had opened. Four men—large men with dark clothing and ski masks on their faces—had poured out. Their weapons were raised. They were shouting commands Heat couldn’t make out.

  Aguinaldo was, by now, reaching for her service weapon, which she kept in a shoulder holster under her jacket. But it was too late. Three of the dark-clothed men were on her, with one seizing her from behind and two closing in from the front. They had rightly determined that Aguinaldo—the armed police officer—was the greater danger, and therefore needed to be neutralized first. And they were doing so with ruthless efficiency. Aguinaldo was quickly overpowered. She never really had a chance.

  Rook was trying to make a run for it, scrambling back in the direction of the precinct. But the assailants seemed to have anticipated this move. Coming from the back SUV, the fourth man, who had both the size and agility of an NFL linebacker, tackled Rook, driving him down to the sidewalk. Rook, no delicate flower, was nevertheless at a fifty-pound disadvantage, all of it muscle. Rook struggled gamely, but he hadn’t learned a lot of wrestling moves in journalism school. The larger man had no trouble keeping Rook pinned down.

  Heat was desperate now. She didn’t bother yelling anymore. No one in the detective bull pen was going to be able to get there fast enough; no one downstairs would be able to hear her. She simply ripped the blinds off the window with her left hand. With her right, she gripped the Smith & Wesson by the barrel.

  Then, using the handle of the gun like a hammer, she swung it at the center of the window.

  It was thick decades-old safety glass, and it would not go easily. It merely spiderwebbed in response to the first blow. After the second, a small hole appeared in the middle. Finally, with the third strike, Heat shattered the middle portion, en
ough that she could use the gun as a claw to enlarge the hole. She ignored the dozens of small cuts she gained as pebbles of glass rained down on her exposed hand.

  The scene outside was rapidly deteriorating. Aguinaldo had been disarmed, then carried to the farther of the two SUVs—thrashing frantically but also impotently. One of the men opened the back doors, while the other two tossed her inside. Whether there was another man inside the SUV, waiting to subdue her further, Heat couldn’t tell.

  The three men then turned their attention to Rook, who was still held down by their linebacker-sized colleague. Heat was now kicking away at the glass that stubbornly clung to the lower half of the windowpane, not slowing or crying out when one particularly stubborn shard sliced her pants leg and ripped into her flesh.

  Rook was facedown on the concrete. One of the men had a firm hold of his top half. Another, a huge guy who looked like he hadn’t seen two hundred pounds on the scale since grade school, was sitting on Rook’s legs. The other two turned their attention to each of Rook’s arms, which they bound together at the wrists using a zip tie.

  As soon as they had Rook’s hands secure, the man who had immobilized Rook’s upper half produced a burlap bag. Even as she put all her effort into her work, Heat gasped. She could see the black stripe running down one side of the burlap. It was the same kind of bag—perhaps even the very same article—that Tam Svejda had worn at the time of her execution.

  The man slid it over Rook’s head. Then the four of them picked him up, one on each limb, and carried him toward the rear SUV.

  Finally, Heat had enough of the glass cleared away that she could get the upper half of her torso out the window. Gripping the gun in her left hand, the only one that gave her any kind of angle at which to shoot, she leaned her body out.

  If Heat had caught one break, it was that the street had cleared of pedestrians. They had all scattered when the guys in ski masks had drawn their guns. Still, Heat couldn’t take aim at the men who had Rook. Maybe if she’d had a rifle. Maybe if she’d had a magnifying scope. Maybe if she’d had a firm shooting stance.

  But not with her current setup. From that angle and that distance, with that inaccurate a weapon and that tenuous a position, there was too great a danger an errant shot would hit Rook.

  Instead, she aimed for the tires of the SUV they were taking him toward, the one closest to her. She squeezed off one round, then two, then three. If she could disable the vehicle, strand it in the middle of 82nd Street, this could have a far happier ending than the one it seemed headed for.

  “If” being the operative word. Heat had, on occasion, practiced shooting left-handed at the range. But it still felt foreign. She didn’t have the control over the weapon she did when it was in her dominant hand. The well-practiced muscle memory, developed over the hours and years, simply wasn’t there.

  All three shots buried themselves harmlessly in the asphalt, short of the tire she was aiming for. In her effort not to miss high—the most common miss, especially with how untrained her left hand was—she had overcompensated and fired low instead.

  The men had now wrangled Rook close enough to the SUV that she could no longer safely aim at it. She turned her attention to the SUV that contained Aguinaldo. It was the vehicle that was farther up the street, an even tougher shot. But at least—one more slight advantage for Heat—it was blocking the street. Shooting out this SUV’s tires would slow the escape of the other.

  Now, however, there was an additional danger: the man who had been carrying Rook’s left leg had let go and drawn his weapon. He was soon returning fire.

  Heat wasn’t much of a target, with only her left arm, left shoulder, and head leaning out the window. But, if nothing else, facing live fire made it even harder to aim at her target, especially when one of the incoming bullets struck the side of the building only a few feet away from her. Small pieces of brick stung Heat’s face.

  She squeezed the trigger three more times. The bullets slammed into the SUV’s bumper, creating three jagged holes in the chrome. She cursed herself for missing high.

  In between trigger squeezes, Heat became aware the gunfire was attracting attention inside the building. She could hear the commotion of officers shouting orders. A response was coming, and soon. If Heat could at least slow the attackers down, the Twentieth Precinct would soon mobilize with overwhelming force. Four goons in tight T-shirts would be no match for the kind of manpower and firepower the NYPD could put on the street.

  But the goons knew that, of course. They knew speed wasn’t just desired. It was an absolute necessity. And their chain of action—so rapid, so coordinated from the start—was now reaching its end.

  Rook had been tossed inside the back of the SUV. The three men were now scrambling toward the fronts of the vehicles. The fourth was laying a kind of cover fire for them, peppering Heat with shots that were coming increasingly close to hitting her, making it difficult for her to take aim at any of the men who were briefly exposed.

  Another bullet pinged off the building, just above her, sending another shower of particles into her face. For Heat to keep her head outside the window was incredibly foolhardy. It was only a matter of time until the man’s aim became true. For a moment, she kept her left hand and arm outside—if they got hit, so be it—and fired off two more rounds.

  But she withdrew those, too, when she realized she was basically shooting blind. Not only were her odds of hitting the right thing now depressingly low, her odds of hitting the wrong thing—like Rook, Aguinaldo, or some civilian who was trying to crouch out of the way—had gone up astronomically.

  The fourth man kept firing at her anyway, putting rounds into the side of the building, deterring her from even thinking about sticking her head back out. One bullet plowed into the windowsill, splintering the wood. Heat knew if she had stayed where she was, that bullet likely would have found her midsection.

  Heat could hear the SUVs pulling out—away, she assumed, from the precinct. She had dashed over to her desk and was picking up the phone. She rang the desk sergeant.

  As soon as he picked up, Heat began, “Shots fired on—”

  “We know, Captain. We know. We’re getting a response out the door right now. Give us thirty more seconds and we’re there.”

  The sergeant hung up.

  But they didn’t have thirty more seconds. The gunfire from outside had stopped. As Heat scrambled back to the window, all she saw was the great black back end of the second SUV, making its escape.

  There was blood oozing down her ankle from a gash in her calf. There was blood smeared on her right hand from countless glass abrasions. There was blood trickling down her forehead from where small bits of brick shrapnel had embedded themselves.

  Nikki Heat didn’t pay attention to any of it, didn’t let it slow her for even a second. She just charged out of her office, past her detectives, who were scrambling to gather their weapons and their wits, and down the stairwell. She wasn’t waiting for any elevator.

  When she reached the lobby of the Twentieth Precinct, there were six officers assembled, very nearly ready to mobilize. The last of them was getting outfitted as the other five already had been: riot helmet, tactical vest, bulletproof shield.

  Heat had nothing more than a bra and a blouse to protect her. She didn’t care. Without hesitation, she led the charge out of the precinct, her 9mm pointing the way.

  On the street, pedestrians were just starting to warily come out of their hiding places, having tentatively determined that since the vehicles were gone the threat had past. They immediately fled back to safety when they saw a bloodied Heat, followed by her pack of heavily armored officers.

  When Heat reached the corner of Columbus Avenue, there was no sign of anything awry. Traffic, both foot and vehicular, were flowing normally. There were no more sounds of shrieking tires, roaring engines, or gunfire.

  She turned to a hot dog vendor on the corner.

  “There were two black SUVs,” Heat said, panting. “Which
way did they—”

  The man stretched out his arm toward the light on the south corner of the intersection of 81st Street. “Almost took out a woman pushing a kid in a stroller. It was like this close.”

  The man brought up his hand to bring his thumb and forefinger together, but Heat didn’t linger long enough to see just how closely a tragedy had been averted. Nor was she waiting for the officers behind her. They would either keep up or not. She was already dashing down Columbus Avenue, arms pumping, legs churning.

  It was probably pointless, yes: a human powered only by the strength of her legs, trying to run down a pair of SUVs with eight cylinders of piston-pumping power under their hoods. But it was all Heat could do.

  Maybe one of the SUVs would run into something—a light stanchion, a fire hydrant, a building. Maybe the desk sergeant, anticipating the SUVs would go down Columbus, would be able to get patrol units to form a blockade, meaning Heat would be providing critical support from behind.

  Maybe doing something felt like a better option than doing nothing.

  The light at 81st Street was red. Heat didn’t bother going all the way down to the crosswalk. She took the straight line across the avenue, weaving through the cars waiting for the light.

  On the other side was the natural history museum, its front steps covered with tourists, just as it had been the day before when she had been chasing Muharib Qawi. Heat didn’t break stride as she rounded the corner. If anything, she accelerated.

  And she didn’t stop. Even as it became apparent she was running into a perfect mess.

  The intersection of Central Park West and 81st Street was a tangle of cars, cabs, and trucks, some of which were pointed in the wrong direction, some of which had bashed-in bumpers, some of which had crushed hoods. Steam hissed from busted radiators. Chunks of plastic—which had until very recently been attached to vehicles—littered the street. Groups of tourists were gesturing with excitement.