“Okay. Let’s go. I’m gonna wait for a chance, try and knock her off the bike. You guys be waitin’ to grab her.”
“Don’t hurt her,” Tito cautioned. “That’s our job.”
By the time Lupe had whipped into traffic, the lady cop was four car-lengths ahead, not toward Brooklyn, but toward Ground Zero. Didn’t matter. This was New York. You could still knock a bitch off a motorcycle and bundle her into a car without intervention. That was one of the things that made New York great. Freedom!
“Step on it! Step on it!” Chango chanted.
“You’re losing her!” Benito said.
Lupe pulled the automatic transmission down a gear and stood on the gas. The tricked-out Celica shot forward with a chirp of its front tires, cutting off a cab driver, who leaned on his horn. They got hung up at Civic Center by the usual four fire truck progression, sirens blaring, lights flashing.
It was no use. No matter how fast Lupe drove, she was no match for a motorcycle in Manhattan traffic. She could have been driving a Viper, same difference. There simply wasn’t room to maneuver. She refused to admit defeat. The witch cop would not escape.
Lupe finally turned off Vessey toward Ground Zero, chained, roped, and stanchioned off due to massive construction. Hecht Gardens was being built two blocks north. Lupe couldn’t believe her luck as she drove by the massive chain link fence of the Hecht site and spotted the blue-and-white motorcycle inside the gate, parked next to a house trailer that had been trucked in to serve as HQ. The construction site was surrounded by an eight-foot-high hurricane fence topped with concertina wire.
Lupe got on the phone to Tito. “Don’t go near the fence. Meet us round the corner at Maiden Lane. The bitch is here."
They rendezvoused in the lee of another construction site, parking on the curb next to a vast hole in the ground while traffic swirled past on one side. A big white wooden sign said Future Home of Pace-Hong Kong Bank/Mark Zingg Architect/Chalmers Construction Company. The worn curb was fenced off at both ends with plywood construction, but the wall had been torn down for some reason, allowing the cars to snug in. They gathered in the narrow strip between the illegally parked cars and the plywood wall with cutouts to look at the hole. Chango wore black trousers, a black muscle shirt, hair net pinning back his obsidian curls. His shoes were the color of pure Peruvian flake. Tito and Benito wore baggy trousers and muscle shirts, without Chango’s panache. Sammy and Li’l Mack looked like a pair of dwarves who’d been dipped in horse glue and dragged through a rag factory.
Lupe fingered Chango, Tito, Sammy and Benito. “You guys gon’ do the job. You my wolf pack, malditos. You gon’ mess that witch bitch up for me. Who got the bolt cutters?”
Sammy hefted the big clippers.
“You be sure you got them gloves on when you cut the cable, or you gonna turn into a Chicken McNugget.” “Hey!” Li’l Mack squawked. “What do I do?” The fourteen-year-old gangbanger was eager to get in on the action.
“You and me gon’ drive the cars,” Lupe said. “Can’t leave ’em here. Don’t use guns unless you got to. We don’t need the fraggin’ cops.”
Chango led his Tecolotes toward the construction site.
He was six feet and two hundred and thirty pounds, and carried an Uzi submachine gun with a twenty-round magazine. He carried another magazine in the baggy pockets of his baggy jeans, in case he found himself pinned down by a division of Marines. The rest of Los Tecolotes were jealous of the Uzi, which Chango had taken off a drunk Paddy Boy on St. Patrick’s Day.
Benito had his MAC-10. Sammy and Tito had a pair of cheap revolvers.
Lupe watched until they rounded the comer, then turned on Li’l Mack. “Whatchoo waitin’ for—a sign from the Virgin Mary? Get in that piece of crap and drive.”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
A/ hen Sara arrived, the front gate was open just wide enough to admit the bike. Figuring Sharpe had left it that way, she pulled into the lot, got off the bike, and shut the gate behind her without latching it. She wheeled the bike up to the house trailer, a big job, propped up on heavy metal braces and connected like an astronaut to a series of external tanks and outbuildings. Fat cables trundled across the lot in bundles. Stacks of treated lumber formed orderly ranks perpendicular to an enormous, multileveled excavation that was beginning to sprout steel support struts.
Sara went up the two planks on cinderblock steps to the trailer door and rang the buzzer. No response. “Sharpe!” she barked, trying the knob. It was open.
She stepped inside—it was an orderly office with banks of monitors: twelve screens covering various aspects of the site. Blueprints were taped to a drafting table, others rolled into tight cylinders and shoved in cubbyholes. A large bulletin board covered one wall; on it had been fixed work rosters, security rosters, and an architect’s rendering of the finished Gardens. The drawing reminded Sara of an optimist-hued spread from Popular Mechanics, circa 1980, describing a city of the future.
And then the lights went out, the screens went blank.
Sara reached for the phone on the desk, but that, too, was dead. She looked out through one begrimed window at Manhattan, its lights still aglows. Only power to the construction site had been cut.
Sara moved instinctively away from the door and unclipped her stainless steel short nose .357 mag, Smith Et Wessen K-frame round butt. The boys had been trying to talk her into a Glock .9 for years, but it didn’t have a round butt.
Moving fast and low, Sara pushed the door open with a T-square. The area immediately in front of the trailer appeared empty. She wasted no time, slipping low out the door and over the side of the steps before anyone had a chance to draw a bead. It looked nice and dark under the trailer, so she rolled beneath its mass, retreated to the darkest corner, and turned her attention to the yard. At first there was no sign. She blinked rapidly, willing her eyesight to adjust to the dark. Within a second, it was so. Her night vision had increased uncannily since acquiring the Witchblade.
She wished she knew where the transfer box was, so she could gauge where they were coming from. A pair of legs ending in blindingly white cross-trainers padded lightly into the yard from the direction of the front gate. That’s it-just the shoes, like some kind of mime act. She saw the rest of them trailing tentatively behind, like a rat pack in the jungle.
Some kind of gang. Were these the ones responsible for the vandalism? Where was Sharpe? One of them passed through a beam of light, and she saw the gun. As far as Sara knew, eco-terrorists didn’t cany weapons. Guns were not healthy for children and other living things. These guys didn't look like greenies, either. They looked like a street gang, far from their turf.
She counted three. She couldn’t see if they were all armed, but she had to assume they were. Where was Sharpe? She had no intention of drawing down on three armed gangbangers. She slithered out the back of the trailer and stood in a narrow corridor formed by the trailer and a seven-foot stack of steel girders. If she could get atop the girders, she’d be in a good position to see without being seen. She could hear them spreading out now, despite their clumsy attempts at concealment. She had to get some altitude now, before they separated too far from each other.
Spying an empty five-gallon laminex container, she jammed her gun in its holster, turned the pail upside-down, and used it as a stool to get a leg up. As she reached for the top girder, the Witchblade overwhelmed her right hand with a faint, crystalline ping.
“Whazzat?” said an adenoidal voice behind her.
Sara instinctively lashed out with her left foot, cocking it high and jamming it back into the neck of a fourth gangbanger who had somehow managed to get the drop on her. Her adrenaline-fueled kick slammed the punk so hard up against the trailer, his head bounced like a speed bag. A piece of heavy metal fell and clattered under the trailer. The punk fell to his knees, choking.
Tough crap, Sara thought, pulling out a pair of handcuffs. Before she had a chance to handcuff the punk to the trailer, gangban
gers appeared at both ends of the narrow corridor.
“There she is!”
“Rush her!”
Sara dropped and rolled, leaving the one she’d struck retching on his knees. She rolled under the trailer, scrambled out, and took off toward the vast pit that dominated the construction site. Adjacent to the pit, a Manitex Crane rose hundreds of feet into the sky like some huge steel gallows. A series of steel barriers surrounded the crane’s broad stance, hydraulic pistons resting on cracked concrete. The top of the crane hovered over the huge pit, from which the construction scaffolding had already begun to sprout.
A series of flashes opened up to her right, from atop the very pile of girders she’d set out to climb. A bullet whizzed by her ear. Several struck the ground. New York surged and pumped around them, drowning the sound of individual gunfire. Sara had no choice but to run for the protection of the triangulated steel protecting the tower’s spine and ladder. She began to climb, the Witchblade gripping each rung with a clang, fingers folding into an iron grip.
Where was Sharpe?
They were closing in now from three directions, squeezing off shots at her. It had been a mistake to gain altitude-now they could shoot at her without risk of hitting each other. She thought of going back down, but that would only bring her within their range. They were closing in too fast.
The Witchblade yanked her hand around in a tight little arc into a stunning collision with a bullet. No. She would not get hit. The Witchblade would not permit it. But could even the Witchblade protect her from three different shooters coming from three different directions? She looked up. The supports seemed to stretch into infinity. Someone let loose with a short burst of automatic weapons fire, and the Witchblade absorbed the blast with a bone-jarring clatter that traveled up her arm and left her shoulder momentarily numb. The gauntleted hand reached of its own accord for the next rung. She had no choice but to climb.
She saw the one with the auto now, it was Twinkle Toes, in his pure white sneakers. If he got directly beneath her, all he had to do was stick the gun into the shaft and fire straight up. Of course all she had to do was fire straight down. Bracing herself on the ladder with one foot and an elbow, she drew her Magnum, and fired a round straight down. Give ’em something to think about. She thought about pulling her cell, but now they stood in a tight little cluster around the base of the crane, discussing what to do.
“ ’Ey, chiquita,” one of them said. “You want to par-rrrty? We gon’ have a little picnic witchoo.”
“Up there or down here,” another cooed softly. “Don’t matter to us.”
The three began to climb, outside the triangulated central support. Smart. Made them tough to spot, hard to shoot, if they didn’t lose their nerve. Sara climbed, barely staying ahead of them. No one spoke. She could hear them breathing heavily as they worked, the occasional clang of metal against metal. At one point they stopped. Looking down, Sara saw the flare of a turbo lighter, heard the faint tinkle of burning crack. The pause that refreshes. They were at least a hundred and fifty feet up now, twenty feet beneath the gondola, which hung to one side and just beneath the horizontal crossmember, stretching far out over the pit.
Where was Sharpe? Had this group somehow managed to kill him? Inconceivable. They were just a bunch of low-life gangbangers! But they had the drop on her. They must have been following her. But why? She flashed on Jorge, but her instincts told her he was okay. What about Lupe, then? Had Sara been negligent in not taking the girl more seriously?
Could be, she decided. She climbed the twenty feet to the base of the gondola, up onto the tiny steel platform. The door was locked. Locked! Who would lock such a place, two hundred feet in the air? Sara had no choice but to scramble up into the tiny crow’s nest clinging to the back of the control gondola. From here, she could see down one side of the pillar, but she couldn’t see her pursuers. She heard voices directly beneath her feet—they were clinging to the underside of the gondola.
Crouching, she drew her pistol. “Boys,” she said clearly. “I'm a New York City police officer, and I’m armed. You have two choices. You can turn around and head down, or you can stick your snouts up over the rim and have me blow them off.”
“Tough talk from the lady witch,” a basso profundo rumbled from directly beneath. “We get done witchoo, won’t be nothin’ left but your badge.”
Activity from the other side of the gondola. While Deep Voice distracted her, he’d sent one of his wolves up to take her by surprise. She was in a pickle. They were just waiting for her to commit to one of her attackers before another swarmed her from behind. Evidently they were so high on crack they no longer cared whether they soared, got shot, or did the dirty deed.
The kid was coming over the top. He'd scrambled up past the gondola and stepped out onto the steel roof, slithering on his belly, thrusting his gun in front of him. Must have picked up his ninja technique from a Michael Dudikoff movie, Sara thought, listening to his inept scraping. She waited until he thrust the gun over the roof, grabbed it in both hands, her left thumb on the cool blue metal of the gauntlet, braced a leg against the wall, and heaved.
The kid sailed out over the pit like a Frisbee. He screamed all the way down, struck with the sound of an ax hitting a melon. She’d only meant to throw him to the floor of the platform, but the Witchblade had had other ideas.
“Jesus!” a voice exclaimed from below. “She killed Tito!”
“Damn you!” she hissed at the gauntlet.
A hand reached for her pistol. Twisting, she punched the gangbanger flush in the face with her gauntleted right hand. His nose dissolved in a mist of red, but reeling back, he’d managed to snag the Magnum and flip it over his head so that it sailed out over the pit.
Next to losing your badge, losing your gun is the worst that can happen. Thus spake Vincent. No, Pop, she thought. There’s worse. There were three of them now swarming the tiny platform, holding her down.
“Get her!” said Twinkle Toes, reaching for her throat, a coyote grin on his face. One grabbed her left leg. Another grabbed her right. The Witchblade went to work, snapping into the short one’s crotch. His mouth made a per-feet oval beneath a hairline mustache as he reeled back to the limits of the platform, gasping for air. She shot out her left leg, catching another in the thigh, sending him skidding back. Now she was wrestling with Twinkle Toes, who’d moved to straddle her. Saliva dripped from his pronounced canines. Sara bucked with all her might and threw him off. She scrambled free, sinking the Witchblade into Hairline Mustache’s thigh like a tiger claw. Metal flanges hooked deeply into his flesh as she literally clawed her way over him to the gondola’s roof.
From here, she could either retreat to the counterweight, a distance of some thirty feet, or head out over the pit, where the crane did its lifting. The massive horizontal girder was triangulated with the flat plane on top. The Witchblade wanted to stay and fight. It pulled against her, trying to drag her back toward the cupola, where the three survivors were checking their actions and plotting. She could hear them discussing her clearly.
“She’s a freakin’ witch, Chango. Choo see what she did to Tito?”
“She got lucky.”
“I’m bleedin’, you guys. What was that?”
“Put a rag on it. Me and Benito’ll drag her back here.”
“You go on and run, chiquita! You runnin’ out of room!”
The strange thing was, they didn’t scare her. Not in the slightest. Height scared her. Looking down, the bottom of the pit was lost in shadow, far beneath ground level. It was probably a three-hundred-foot drop. She crouched inside the triangulated girder thirty feet out, another fifty to the end.
Could Sharpe have set her up? Could he have somehow learned that she’d burgled him, that she was on to him, and lured her down here To get snuffed? If so, why not do it himself? Sharpe was a hands-on guy. Could this wolf pack have taken him down? That didn’t make sense, either. If they’d taken care of Sharpe, they would have already been a
t the site when she got there. But they weren’t. They’d followed her in.
The telltale glow of a lighter flared on the far side of the gondola. That’s right, boys. Crank yourselves up. A moment later, a silhouette entered the triangulated section of the beam, followed shortly by another.
“Benito, get up on top. We’ll catch her between us.” “What we gon’ do with our guns?” one of them asked softly.
“Leave ’em. She ain’t got one, either.”
At least they were down to two. They had no fear. They would have made great high iron workers. The lesser of the two boosted himself up to crouch precariously atop the giant horizontal girder while the leader, Twinkle Toes, slowly advanced, wolf grin dripping.
“I thought crack made you paranoid,” Sara said conversationally.
“Nah, we used to it. Getchoo high, if you like.”
“No thanks. I’m high enough.” She took out her cell phone, the size of hotel soap, and flipped it open. It was dead. She faked it.
“Dispatch, this is Detective Pezzini, on the crane at Hecht Gardens. I need backup, and lots of it. Seem to be a bunch of gangbangers .. .just a minute.” Holding the dead phone to one side she called out to her pursuers, watching with an uneasy mix of humor and apprehension. “Boys, what gang are you with?”
“We the Brooklyn Tecolotes, guapa," the kid on top sang with pride. Show-and-tell time.
Sara spoke into the phone. “You hear that? Yeah. Thank you.” She folded the plastic clam and slipped it in her pocket. “They’re on the way. You got maybe five minutes to get out of here.”
The two looked at each other, grinning like mongrels at roadkill. Twinkle Toes began crab-walking her way. “Cops don’t use cell phones, guapa.”
“Everybody uses cell phones, Pancho. Bet you got one.” “Why you call me Pancho? My name is Chango.”
Now the one on top had begun to creep forward. Sara glanced back. She was about forty feet from the tip of the crane, directly above the rolling lift unit or skyhook. She couldn’t fly. She didn’t know what the Witchblade could do if she took a dive. She’d never tested it that way. She had a feeling it wasn’t designed for high-altitude bailouts.
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