by Dick Wolf
Fisk clicked his way to an operator at the EOC—Emergency Operations Center, the same place that fielded 911 calls—and he reported the 10-33 (kidnapping in process). Meanwhile he clicked into the feed from DOM-CAM 37-E9 in time to see the taxi sail along Thirty-Seventh Street between Eighth and Ninth. At the midpoint of the block, the cab’s left-turn signal began to flash, and then the brake lights glowed as it slowed to turn downtown on Ninth.
Fisk relayed these details, along with the cab’s license-plate number, KBY-2092—thank you, Microsoft numeric recognition software. “And, of course, it’s a Crown Victoria,” he added of the taxi—for what that was worth. If you’re going to snatch someone off the streets of New York, Crown Victoria was the model for you. Crown Vics comprised more than half of the New York taxi fleet, with Ford Escape hybrids and Nissan minivans a distant second and third.
The 1 train shrieked to a stop at Penn Station. As soon as the doors opened, Fisk flew out. He jogged in and around the passengers waiting to board, ran up the stairs, and surfaced at the intersection of West Thirty-Third Street and Seventh Avenue, two blocks west of Ninth Avenue, where he hoped to intercept the Crown Vic cab.
He could probably run the two crosstown blocks in a minute. But once at Ninth Avenue, he would have to pick the Crown Vic out of a sea of essentially identical cars—at this time of night, two-thirds of the vehicles on the streets of Manhattan were yellow taxis. Assuming he could pick out the right Crown Vic, then what? Wade into traffic and flag the cab down, waving his Glock for incentive? Shoot at its tires? To brandish his gun carried a willingness to use it, and any shot in that environment risked a fatality. As little as stepping off the curb and waving a Glock might frighten a passing driver into sending his vehicle into another or onto the sidewalk. And all of this was assuming Fisk got to the intersection of Thirty-Third and Ninth in time, hardly a given.
His eye fell on a guy about his own age, in a lemon blazer and the sort of cowboy boots that could only be for show, much like the copper-gold Jaguar XJ sedan he was lowering himself into. The car was overpriced, in Fisk’s opinion, but quick.
He pulled up to the driver’s door as the Don Johnson wannabe turned over the engine. Rapping the driver’s window, Fisk got the guy’s attention. “Police business,” he said, flashing his shield. “I need to commandeer your vehicle.”
The guy didn’t budge. “Why my car?” he asked indignantly.
Fisk might have explained to him that if you’re an adult and a law enforcement officer with proper identification requests your help in catching or arresting a suspect, recapturing an escaped arrestee or prisoner, or preventing a crime, you are required by law to oblige; otherwise you face a fine ranging from fifty to a thousand dollars.
Pressed for time, he ripped the door open and made for the safety-belt release button. The guy hadn’t buckled. Fisk seized him by the shoulders, hauled him onto the street, and jumped into the bucket seat, landing with his foot on the accelerator and his hand on the shifter. An automatic. Figured. He rammed it into D, the engine growled, and Thirty-Third Street began to jet past.
He heard a wail, the electronic version of the old air siren. It switched to a yelp, signifying that the operator of the emergency vehicle was approaching an intersection. Could be an NYPD cruiser closing in on Chay’s cab. Could be another squad car responding to another disturbance. Sirens were part of New York’s sound track.
A station wagon shot out of a parallel spot to the left and onto the single-lane street, two car lengths ahead of him. If the driver had seen the Jaguar at all, she grossly underestimated its speed. The city, in Fisk’s mind, compacted to only the wheel and hood of the Jaguar, the passenger side of the station wagon, and the Jaguar-width gap between the station wagon and the van parked on the opposite side of the block, a gap that was now narrowing.
He sped up, shooting the car into the gap, threading the needle, sending him hurtling into the four lanes’ worth of brisk crosstown traffic at the intersection of Eighth. Wary of hydroplaning on the rain-slicked street, he pumped the brake. The Jaguar slid nevertheless, the tires howling, edging the hood across the stop line, inches from broadsiding a speeding cab, before Fisk brought the car to a halt.
The cab, whose driver honked angrily, was a Crown Victoria. Not the right driver, though. The vast majority of the vehicles on Eighth were yellow, with as many as twenty of them, to Fisk’s glance, Crown Vics.
One outpaced the rest, shifting lanes and weaving recklessly around cars and trucks. The driver was crazy, Fisk thought, even by the high standard of crazy set by New York cabbies.
He couldn’t see the driver. But the woman in the backseat was white, and corpulent, with short blond hair. Essentially Chay’s opposite. Which didn’t preclude Chay from being in the taxi, along with the young Asian, the two of them perhaps keeping their heads below the window line, the blonde serving as a decoy.
Yelps emanated from a Ford Taurus NYPD cruiser five cars behind the taxi in question, the cruiser’s light bar alternating between red and blue. The new Taurus cruiser didn’t intimidate anyone on appearance or muscle, but it was “smart,” equipped with an infrared monitor capable of scanning license-plate numbers, and 360-degree surveillance cameras that transmitted live video to NYPD headquarters, where it was analyzed by powerful computers.
Fisk followed the Taurus driver’s line of sight to another taxi, three cabs ahead, also a Crown Vic. Chay was in plain view in the backseat, across from the Asian. Along with traffic, the cab was heading downtown at about thirty miles per hour.
Fisk jumped the red light at Thirty-Seventh, turning left onto Ninth. His Jaguar fell in two lanes to the left of the Ford Taurus cruiser. The two taxis ahead of the Taurus peeled off in deference to the lights and the yelp, looks of profound relief from both drivers upon realizing that the police car was after someone else.
Paying no heed to the police car, the Crown Vic taxi shot ahead, slaloming around a sanitation truck. Traffic began to part in deference to the police, allowing the cruiser to get within a few car lengths of the taxi.
Fisk had no such luck, blocked by the cars slowing and stopping to let the police car past. Still the policemen’s options weren’t much better than his own, a function of departmental pursuit policies designed to protect bystanders. In this instance, the police were prohibited from discharging their weapons. Shooting at the driver of a moving vehicle is a low-percentage play at best. Shooting out his tires carried too many risks to bystanders. The Department’s recommended Pursuit Intervention Technique, using the car to strike the fleeing vehicle behind one of its rear wheels and put it into a spin, was even riskier. So the cops’ objective now was probably just to keep tabs on the Crown Vic and report its progress to headquarters so that other units could lay spike strips and roadblocks and bring the pursuit to a safe conclusion.
Finding a gap between two other taxis, Fisk accelerated the Jaguar, rounding a sanitation truck and yet another taxi, trying to get closer, but not too close. No reason to reveal himself, or even bring the Jaguar close and provoke Chay’s captors, who might have few compunctions about taking a risky shot. He figured they had an escape route planned. All of the cameras notwithstanding, a city of eight million was a great place to get lost. But would they have planned on a helicopter? Surely they heard it now, and felt the chops, as Fisk did, all over. The Jaguar’s sideview mirror showed him its skids. A Bell 412, about two hundred feet up.
Motion ahead snapped Fisk’s attention back to the street; he needed to brake to avoid rear-ending the taxi in front of him, a—what else?—Crown Vic.
Traffic congealed where Ninth Avenue met Twenty-Fifth Street. To continue, Chay’s Crown Vic taxi would have to drive over the four vehicles ahead of it. All traffic was now stopped for the light. Cars to either side penned the taxi in place. It was as though the chase had been put on pause. Red lights in Manhattan lasted from forty-five to a hundred and twenty seconds, based on traffic patterns at the time.
In waiting it o
ut, Chay’s captors risked falling into the crosshairs of a shot that would qualify as relatively low risk. A cop or tactical-team member could advance on them and threaten to fire point-blank if they didn’t release Chay and then get out of the car, hands in the air. That was what the police had in mind, Fisk suspected, on spotting two more police vehicles, a GMC Yukon cruiser and a tiny Smart car used by traffic enforcement. They both parked on Twenty-Fifth Street, one vehicle on either side of Ninth Avenue. An officer hustled out of each, toward the Crown Vic.
The taxi’s rear passenger-side door snapped open, and out slid the Asian, having put on a navy-blue armor-plated vest and a high-ballistic face shield—a black mask made of Kevlar. He cradled a TAR-21, a black, fully automatic assault rifle that looked more like a weapon from the Terminator movies than anything from present day. It included a 40mm grenade launcher and an optical scope that provided target images in 3-D via a holographic weapons sight.
The Jaguar was no longer of use. Fisk pulled it in front of a fire hydrant on the right side of Ninth. Before he could get out, while he jerked the shifter into park and readied up his Glock, the Asian leveled the TAR-21 at the cop approaching on Twenty-Fifth Street from the east, a big guy, who, at the sight of the rifle, ducked behind a parked van.
The Asian pressed the trigger, issuing three booming shots in rapid succession. The rounds tore into the steel siding of the van, exiting on the far side with enough force to lift the cop and hurl him backward, onto the street, where he didn’t move, and, from the looks of it, wouldn’t again.
Pivoting 180 degrees, the gunman sprayed a series of rounds, so close together that the staccato blasts blended into a continuous blare, felling the traffic cop, a young woman coming down Twenty-Fifth from the west. As the reverberations from the reports faded, the air filled with panicked screams of people running for cover or diving to the pavement. Vehicles near the intersection tore off, or tried to—several crashed.
Fisk dropped out of the driver’s door of the Jaguar and into a crouch below the roofline of the SUV parked between him and the gunman. He plotted a route in and around parked cars and a bus shelter that would permit him to advance the twenty or thirty yards, as quickly as possible, in order to get a shot at the Asian.
As if reading his mind, the Asian pivoted, aiming the gun up Ninth Avenue, on a line toward Fisk, and pulled the trigger.
Diving for the pavement, Fisk heard a sproing like that of a spud gun firing. The assault rifle’s grenade launcher, he realized, in the same instant that the grenade clanked into the hood of the Ford Taurus cruiser. Both policemen knelt in firing position on the street, shielded by their engine block. The explosion transformed the hood into a burst of fire, shrapnel, and glass that laid out both men and spat the rest of the car backward, into the grille of a Daily News delivery truck.
Most glass in the vicinity—cars and store windows—shattered. Shards that had been the Jaguar’s driver’s window cascaded down the driver’s door and onto Fisk.
He crossed his forearms over the back of his head to protect himself, meanwhile turning his head away, allowing him to see the gunman raise the rifle and launch a second projectile.
It buzzed upward until exploding and ripping through the tail boom of the helicopter, sending the craft into a downward spiral from which it couldn’t recover. It crashed into a wooden water tower on the roof of the corner apartment building.
Fisk braced for the explosion and fireball. Neither happened, but water gushed over the cornice, falling like a chute down the red brick façade, turning the roofs of cars parked below into a set of steel drums and knocking pedestrians to the sidewalk.
Fisk jumped up, found the Asian in his gun sight, standing on the street, on the passenger side of the taxi. Chay sat on the driver’s side. Far enough away for Fisk to take a shot.
He squeezed off two rounds. Meanwhile the Asian ducked back into the Crown Vic cab. One of Fisk’s bullets dinged the rear passenger-side doorframe, the other hammered the roof, and the cab took off, knocking aside the lone vehicle left in its path, a Civic, and banging a right onto a tree-lined, almost entirely residential block of Twenty-Fifth Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.
Fisk hurried back to the Jaguar and into the driver’s seat, turning over the engine. Too many stopped vehicles stood on the street between the Jaguar and Twenty-Fifth Street. He sent the car up the curb, raking the undercarriage. Dodging a parking meter and circumventing the bus shelter on the sidewalk meant clanking against one of the city’s new eighty-five-pound steel trash cans.
It might be telling, he thought, that the cab turned onto single-lane Twenty-Fifth Street rather than continue down four-lane Ninth Avenue, a relative speedway. If her captors intended to take Chay downtown, there was just one route left before they ran out of island, Eleventh Avenue, two blocks over. After Eleventh, Twenty-Fifth Street terminated at Chelsea Piers.
The Jaguar thumped onto Twenty-Fifth Street, affording Fisk an unimpeded view all the way to Chelsea Piers, overlooking the Hudson River. The Crown Vic, the only other moving vehicle on the block directly ahead, came to a red light at the intersection of Tenth.
It stopped, its new relaxed pace perhaps signifying the captors’ belief that they’d gone black. Fisk fought the impulse to accelerate and catch up to them. Instead he called in the update to the EOC, meanwhile rolling ahead at fifteen miles an hour. He slowed here and there, as though he were searching for a parking spot.
When the light at the end of the block turned green, the taxi drove across Tenth Avenue and onto a onetime industrial stretch of Twenty-Fifth Street that was now an odd mix of auto-body shops, trendy art galleries, and a combination of the two, the Tesla Motors showroom. Midway down the block, the cab stopped suddenly.
Driving onto the block, Fisk sensed that the driver was executing a timing stop. If he were to hit the brakes too, he might reveal himself as a tail. So he continued to within five car lengths, at which point the taxi turned left into a parking garage.
Fisk continued past, catching the cab halt just inside the dimly lit garage, the brake lights turning the parking attendants’ stand red.
Fisk pulled the Jaguar into a loading-zone space in front of a giant green Perrier delivery truck—which figured in an art-gallery district. He got out, trying to appear unhurried, and wandered back toward the parking garage. He passed an art gallery fronted by a wall of tinted glass, through which he saw a dressy and well-heeled crowd sipping champagne. One couple, venturing out and onto the sidewalk, looked with consternation at the rain. Clearly no one had a clue about the melee two blocks away or the kidnappers next door.
Fisk called into EOC with the address of the parking garage before ambling past the entrance, a concrete chute about the height and width of a van. He saw Chay and the two men at its base, boarding a car lift and then descending.
He kept walking for fear that a sudden stop on his part might alert the captors. He monitored their descent in the angled glass mirror on the upper corner of the entrance. When their heads dipped below ground level, he hurried back into the garage.
On the main level, which included about fifty cars improbably packed into space for half that many, he found the Crown Vic cab parked by the unmanned attendants’ stand. The entire level seemed deserted, save for Norman, who lay in the backseat of the taxi, his face drawn in, skin a bluish-gray, eyes bulging, open and unblinking. He’d died a horrible death.
Fisk peered down the open elevator shaft. The car—which consisted only of a platform, with no walls or roof—sat one level below, empty but for a pair of legs, in navy uniform pants cuffed over work boots. It was the body of the garage attendant, lain across the elevator threshold, Fisk guessed, for the dual purposes of preventing the elevator from returning to the main level as well as preventing him from revealing where Chay and her captors went. If they’d intended to flee the garage in a different car—a sensible tactic—why hadn’t they done so already?
Fisk looked around before finding th
e door to the stairs leading down a level. A glossy black late-model Bentley sat directly in front of it, in the New York parking-garage tradition of showing off the fanciest car without letting an inch of space go to waste. It was easier for the captors to take the elevator down, Fisk thought, than wait while the attendant went to the lockbox, got the key for the Bentley, got it running, and then moved it out of the way.
He checked his phone. No cell reception. Should he take the time to go back outside to call in an update? Backup would be here soon enough regardless, he decided.
He sat down on the edge of the shaft, dropped his legs in first, lowered the rest of himself as far as he could reach, then jumped the remaining five feet. Concerned not so much for his knees or ankles as landing face-to-face with one of the captors, he hit the oily metal floor in a roll and sprang up, leading with his gun, to find . . . only the garage attendant. He lay splayed on his back, his head at a preposterous angle, neck broken. A metallic winged letter B dangled from his pocket. The Bentley key fob.
Fisk stepped out of the elevator. Sputtering fluorescent tubes on the ceiling revealed a subterranean level packed with a hundred more cars, and no people. At least no sign of people. On the far side was a dark alcove. Leading with his gun, Fisk wormed his way through the parked cars and proceeded into the alcove. At the end was a rusty fire door, closed but unlocked—it had to be bolted from within.
He pulled it open half an inch. The cool air that seeped out reeked of mold and rats. On the other side of the threshold was a dark space. Here and there light trickled in, not enough that he could see anything, but the vibrations from the traffic and the power grid overhead and to either side gave him an immediate sense that it was spacious. Creeping in, he heard no one, no whispers, no breaths, no telltale weight shifts—and this was the sort of place that magnified sounds. The door groaned shut behind him, plunging him into blackness. He was reluctant to use his Pelican flashlight, even on low, for fear of giving away his position.