The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel

by Dick Wolf

  Although the floor was dirt—or something else completely covered in dirt—his footfalls, even in stealth mode, were thuds. His eyes acclimated just enough to make out the form directly ahead. A cage of some sort. Horizontal bars a foot apart, from the floor to his head level. The whole thing as big as his office. Which gave him an idea of where he was.

  In the nineteenth century, he knew, New Jersey cattle were transported by barge across the Hudson River to the docks on the west side of Manhattan, then walked through the streets to the meatpacking-district slaughterhouses. When the advent of automobiles made that walk problematic, the city dug a network of cow tunnels. Fisk figured he was in dirt-caked remains of the main cow thoroughfare, looking at a cattle pen. He was running his hand along a cold, rust-encrusted bar when a blast shook the tunnel. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a burst of yellow light. Muzzle flash, he knew on some level.

  By the time he’d fully processed it, the bullet whacked the tunnel floor a few feet in front of him, dirt and gravel leaping up at him, sharp edges biting into his face and hands. He dropped to the dirt, flattening himself behind the base of the cattle pen, trying to present the smallest target.

  Another percussive blast and a round sparked the crossbar—the one on which he’d placed his hand a moment ago—before ricocheting away. The spark revealed a small, open-topped boxcar on a pair of railroad tracks about twenty feet away. The car, which was the size of a station wagon, might have been for cattle. Or maybe it was a transport installed by the rumrunners who frequented these tunnels during the Prohibition. Or the Army in World War II.

  Now it was a stroke of luck. The ancient wood-slatted railcar couldn’t protect Fisk against a bullet traveling a couple thousand feet per second, but it could conceal him.

  He took four running steps and dove for it. With three more flashes and booming shots, one after the next, three bullets traced his route, spraying dirt. He landed face first in muck.

  Through the swirls of kicked-up dirt, the waning flashes showed him the shooter. The thickset taxi driver, fifty yards down the rails. The Asian was a few feet farther down the tunnel, with Chay in tow. The two men apparently wore goggles—night vision, almost certainly. Hell of an escape route they’d chosen, Fisk had to give them credit for that.

  He fired his Glock, aiming for the ground near their feet, but not close enough to endanger Chay. His hope was to keep the taxi driver at bay. The shot, which bored into the dirt between railroad crossties, caused both men to drop back, the Asian simultaneously tamping the goggles as though they’d caught fire. The Glock’s muzzle flash, as seen through his infrared lenses, must have been exceedingly bright. So long as they kept their goggles on, Fisk thought, he might be able to blind them using the six-hundred-lumen beam of the Pelican flashlight, giving him the advantage in a shootout, though only a momentary one. Another problem was that the distance between him and them was too great for him to fire with any real degree of accuracy. And if he were to attempt to advance, he would relinquish the cover of the car.

  His best chance was to retreat, to return to the parking garage and connect with backup there. But then Chay would be lost. If these guys got out of here—and they’d certainly thought that part out—they wouldn’t permit her to walk away, not even after they’d gotten what they wanted.

  He felt his way to the steering-wheel-like brake release, which was atop a knee-high spindle at the front of the car, still slick with grease after all the years. Yet the wheel wouldn’t budge, not until he put his full weight into it. With a whine, the swinging hook at the bottom of the spindle pulled free of the axle, and the car began to roll, but in the wrong direction, it seemed.

  It was difficult to say for sure due to the darkness and because the car was moving so slowly. Fisk cursed himself for failing to think of this ahead of time. The rails were level. Gravity wouldn’t move the car one way or the other. Hell, this was why trains had engines.

  With another ringing shot, a bullet pounded through a slat at the head of the car, slicing apart the air to his left before drilling into the rear wall. A barb ripped into his forehead, loosing hot blood. Something to worry about if and when he made it out of this.

  He wondered whether he could move the railcar himself. Circus strongmen traditionally pulled train cars four times the size, right?

  With both hands, he gripped the top of sidewall facing away from the taxi driver, and hurdled it. The guy fired, twice, one bullet and then another buzzing over Fisk’s head and striking the far wall of the tunnel. Landing, with a crunch, in the mound of gravel in and around the tracks, he took a quick inventory of himself.

  Everything where it was supposed to be, except the blood that slid down his forehead and seeped into his eyes. Blinking against it only spread the stinging.

  The railcar now stood between him and the taxi driver. Another shot hit the far wall, popped free a wooden slat, then pierced a slat on the near wall, inches to Fisk’s left, at eye level. The muzzle flash, which he viewed through the newly created apertures, appeared bigger than before. Under cover of darkness, the shooter was coming to get him.

  Fisk crawled through the gravel, gingerly, so as not to telegraph his movements, reaching the back of the car. He rose until he could get his full weight against the platform, then he drove with his legs, trying to heave the car ahead as though it were a football sled. Except it was unyielding. His knees were at the point of snapping, it seemed, when the car finally fell away and rolled forward.

  A shot cracked through a slat by his left shoulder. A chunk of wood flew up, knifing his shoulder before clinking against the rail. Another bullet sparked the metal lip of the car inches to his right and ricocheted to God-knew-where. The taxi driver had managed to find his range, that was for sure. The good news was that Fisk now had a pretty good idea where the guy was: twenty-five yards up the tracks, to the right, in the open. He resumed firing, the reports thunderous at close range, the rounds pounding and splintering the slats, through which Fisk’s thermal signature clearly revealed too much. The air swirled with dirt and pungent gunpowder.

  He kept pushing the railcar ahead, its increasing momentum easing his task. Quickly he was jogging to keep up with it. Then he let go and sprinted along the left side of the car, opposite the taxi driver, stopping ten yards down the rails and readying both his Pelican flashlight and his Glock. As soon as the car passed, he clicked the single button on the base of the Pelican, igniting its harsh high beam, finding the wide face of the taxi driver, and bringing his goggle lenses to a glow, which sent him reeling. Fisk followed with gunshots to the chest, dropping the taxi driver to the tracks—and he would not, it appeared, be getting up.

  Fisk then had to contend with Chay’s other captor, the Asian. Having flanked Fisk, he was firing at his back. All Fisk saw was the flash, and by the time he’d registered that much, the bullet had knocked him onto his side and, it felt to him, set a fire inside his hip, the pain maddening and so intense that it caused his consciousness to flicker. He rolled to tamp the pain with the dirt, meanwhile swinging his flashlight beam to delineate the guy from the darkness. He stood fifteen feet away, his pistol pointing down at Fisk’s face.

  And he started to press the trigger, just as Chay slung a brick at him. He turned toward her motion, causing the brick to merely graze the back of his skull rather than smack it full-on.

  The shot sailed high.

  Loosened dirt from the ceiling fell on Fisk. He swung the flashlight toward the Asian, catching him in the eyes, causing him to whirl away without looking. His wrist caught one of the cattle-pen crossbars, hard—Fisk heard bone snap. The guy lost his hold on his pistol. He ran in retreat, toward the far end of the tunnel. Keeping the beam on him, Fisk fired twice, the first round raising a cloud of dirt in the guy’s wake. The second round and he grabbed at his thigh and collapsed.

  “This way,” Fisk shouted, beckoning Chay toward the railcar.

  She ran to him, no words, arms and legs pumping hard. She let out a
gasp once she was safely behind the car.

  He took in the shaft of light at the far end of the tunnel, a doorway opening. Through the doorway ran three men, their pistols unmistakable even in silhouette a block away. Could they be backup?

  The Asian struggled to his feet and limped to them, screaming something Fisk couldn’t understand, except for the unmistakable urgency. The guy flung a hand toward the railcar and the three men started that way, toward Fisk.

  They were backup, all right.

  For the wrong side.

  CHAPTER 28

  By Fisk’s count, his Glock had just five left of the eighteen rounds he’d started with, one for each of the men now hurrying down the cow tunnel after him and Chay—one for each of them, that is, if he were to shoot with freakishly good luck.

  “This way,” he said to Chay, flicking the light toward the door through which he’d entered the tunnel.

  As she started toward it, he fired a shot to keep their pursuers at bay. She was uncommonly quick and nimble, outrunning him to the door, making it through unscathed. Fisk fired one more round for cover. It had the effect of a clothesline on one of the attackers. Fisk had expended, he knew, his good luck.

  He hastened through the door and locked it behind him, then dead-bolted it too, possibly buying them a few seconds. He found Chay waiting at the far end of the alcove.

  “Elevator,” he said, starting that way.

  Chay hesitated by the stairwell door. “How about this?”

  “The exit door upstairs is blocked by a car.” Which, the more he thought about it, might work to their advantage.

  He ran as far as the dead attendant, his position atop the elevator threshold unchanged. Stepping onto the elevator, Chay gave the corpse a wide berth. Fisk knelt and snatched up the Bentley key fob dangling the guy’s pants pocket, then hauled his body along the floor, out of the way. Hurrying aboard the elevator, he hammered the button, releasing the lift with a hydraulic hiss.

  Chay gaped at his hip. “Oh God.”

  Blood swamped his light blue dress shirt, turning the tail that protruded to purple. More blood dripped onto the floor. “Looks worse than it is,” he said. He had no idea if that was true.

  A gunshot rose from below, the report playing over and over again off the damp concrete walls and ceiling. Over it, Chay asked, “Are they trying to shoot the lock out—” She was preempted by an earsplitting metallic clank.

  “Succeeding, sounds like,” Fisk said.

  As the main level dropped into view, they heard the door to the tunnel swing inward, whacking the wall. Kicked in, Fisk guessed. He gestured Chay toward the sidewall, reaching the Glock into the garage.

  He squinted against the glare of the streetlights outside. He got the sense that they were alone in the garage. Across the street, though, walked three men in dark suits, typical Wall Streeters in appearance. Which was odd in Chelsea.

  “See them?” Chay said under her breath.

  “Give me to three-Mississippi and then come get in the car, but look like you’re in no hurry,” he said, starting toward the Bentley.

  Each time his left foot touched down, his hip had the sensation of being shot again. He aimed the keyless remote, unlocked the Bentley, and lowered himself into the driver’s seat, drawing no looks from the suits across Twenty-Fifth Street.

  The cabin was clammy, the leather sticky with heat, and it would stay that way; Fisk could locate and turn on the air-conditioning later. For now, he slotted the key into the ignition, twisting it and bringing the throaty engine to life. The passenger door opened and Chay dropped in.

  Her good looks were to her detriment in this instance: all three heads snapped toward her, gazes lingering. The trio flew at the parking garage, drawing guns from within suit coats and pant waists.

  “Get down,” Fisk said, shifting into drive and mashing the gas pedal.

  Chay heaved herself into the passenger footwell as the car lurched forward, the squeals of the tires boosted to howls by all the concrete. The men leaped from the street, landing on the near curb, stopping at nine, twelve, and three o’clock of the garage entrance, and assumed standing firing positions, with a precision and fluidity suggesting they’d done this hundreds of times. The Bentley, a heavy car, was made with twice as much metal as an ordinary sedan, Fisk thought. Probably weighed north of five thousand pounds. Still it would be no more effective than butter against bullets.

  A bullet smashed through the windshield to his left, exiting through the rear window. Another spanked his window frame before raising a haze of foam particles from the backseat. A third gonged the hood and ricocheted into the garage’s ceiling, where it ruptured the fluorescent tube, killing the light and sending glass flakes clattering onto the windshield.

  As the car continued ahead, Fisk stuck the barrel of his Glock out the newly created aperture in the windshield, firing at the suit at nine o’clock, missing, the bullet disappearing into a van parked across the street. He fired again, the bullet finding the man’s stomach, knocking him to the street.

  Fisk aimed the Bentley’s hood at the guy at twelve o’clock. The gunman turned away, too late. The grille rammed him, taking his feet out from under him and sending him thumping onto the hood. He remained in possession of his gun, though, and his faculties.

  Fisk swung the Bentley left across the sidewalk and onto Twenty-Fifth Street. Fighting centrifugal force, the guy clung to the hood and pressed his muzzle against the glass, giving Fisk a view up the barrel. Fisk expended his last bullet. It appeared to paint a third eye between the guy’s original two before he rolled off the hood and onto the street.

  The third suit, who’d originally positioned himself at three o’clock, now stood directly behind the Bentley, firing.

  Bullets blasted cavities into the rear window before boring into the dashboard, instrument panel, and center console stereo, raising sparks and smoke.

  Keep going, Fisk told himself. He floored the accelerator.

  “Shit,” Chay said, looking over his left shoulder.

  He turned to see the Perrier truck backing up, toward him, its green back fender filling his side window. Then the vehicles crunched together, the driver’s side of the Bentley swelling and bulging at Fisk, the windows exploding.

  He propelled himself out of its way, in Chay’s direction. Meanwhile the truck driver clomped his brakes, halting the Perrier truck, but not before its back fender lifted the Bentley onto its passenger side wheels.

  When it came to rest, at a forty-five-degree angle from the ground, Fisk and Chay’s egress was blocked by the truck’s fender to his side and by concrete to hers.

  He squatted on the passenger seat, his gun hand pressed against the windshield, the other against the headrest to keep from falling against her. She looked okay. She said nothing, maybe at a loss for words. He followed her wide eyes to the suit who was still standing. He circled the hood, cautiously, apparently trying to line up his best shot at Fisk. Twenty-Fifth Street was oddly still.

  Although the Glock was empty, Fisk stuck the barrel through one of the apertures in the windshield. “Drop your weapon,” he shouted.

  The guy bent over and placed his gun on the pavement. But as he rose, a smile twisted his lips. The rearview showed Fisk why: the reinforcements from the tunnel were now exiting the stairwell through the doorway the Bentley had blocked.

  Regarding the rearview mirror, Chay sighed. “Fuck.” Echoing Fisk’s sentiment.

  He reached back to the driver’s side, into the footwell, pressing the accelerator by hand. He hoped that the weight shift in combination with the friction from the two tires still on the ground might be enough to right the car. The tires shrieked. The rest of the car vibrated, but didn’t move forward, not an inch.

  Oddly, the reinforcements from the tunnel didn’t advance either. And the reason for that came to Fisk in blue and red flashes on the garage’s façade, from the light bars atop the police cars at either end of the block, and more joining them.


  “We timed that well,” Fisk said.

  CHAPTER 29

  You did a really good job of getting shot,” Fisk was told by Larry Driessen, a thirty-something Emergency Service Unit paramedic with the look and mannerisms of a Borscht Belt comic. “The bullet drilled through your hip, yes, but it came and went without messing with the hipbone or any blood vessels, and without leaving anything behind that shouldn’t be there.”

  “So you’re trying to tell me I’m lucky?” Fisk lay on his side on a gurney inside one of the two ESU ambulance trucks—essentially mobile hospital rooms—that sat outside the parking garage entrance on the now sealed-off West Twenty-Fifth Street block. Inside the garage, much of which was now a crime scene, Chay was being interviewed by homicide detectives. “I don’t feel lucky.”

  Driessen packed the hole in Fisk’s hip with Celox, a fine yellow powdered hemostat, intended to stem the bleeding. It offered none of the burning or stinging threatened by its danger-nuclear-radiation-yellow tint, but the pressure felt like being kicked by a horse.

  Stretching a field dressing over the wound, the paramedic said, “This is cliché, I know, but—you should see the other guy.” He patted the dressing into place. “Now we just need to give the Celox five minutes to clot the blood, then get it back out, put a couple skin staples in you, and you’ll be battle-ready again.”

  “Back up a sec,” Fisk said. “Which other guy?” Police had quickly rounded up the survivors, then gone into the cow tunnel in pursuit of the Asian who’d abducted Chay.

  “The Chinese kid.”

  “Any idea who he is?” One of the advantages of the ESU responding to these scenes was a battery of facial recognition, fingerprint, and DNA analysis to aid in identifying perps and victims on the spot.

  “A Columbia graduate student named Ji-Hsuan Lin.” Driessen chuckled. “At least as far as we know.”

  “Shot in the leg?”

  “His right leg, yeah, but in the femoral artery, which is the Mississippi River of the circulatory system.”