Driving Heat (41 page)

“Your theory fits,” Heat said, giving a smile and a wave to the cop, “but it fits only up to a point. That only covers King and Lobbrecht. Who killed Nathan then? And why? And
why is someone still trying to kill Wilton Backhouse?”

“I’ll admit my theories are at the nascent stage, but getting there, wouldn’t you say?”

“Further ahead than I am,” she said. And wasn’t so happy to admit that.

The address was off Northern Boulevard, about a mile from the bridge in a mixed neighborhood of row houses, auto-body repair shops, an ice cream factory, and the new nightclubs, steakhouses, and
Starbucks franchises that were the area’s hint of gentrification to come. Out of habit, Heat parked halfway down the block—close enough to get to the car in a hurry, far enough not to
be made at the curb.

The street was quiet at that time of day. Soon the cafés and pizza joints would be pulling in lunch trade, but aside from an old man hunched over his walker, Heat and Rook had the
sidewalk to themselves. The building was a beige one-story warehouse in the same basic size and configuration as the body shops and one-story warehouses they had passed on the way there. The front
had a rolling steel garage door with the requisite amount of tagging. The main door turned out to be double dead-bolted and locked when Heat tried it. The chain-link fence on either side had no
gate, and sharp razor wire was coiled along the top to further discourage would-be thieves. Heat pressed her face against the windows, but they had been painted over from the inside.

Rook took a step back from the building and shielded his eyes against the sun. “No sign. No phone number. No nothing.”

“They’ve got security cams, though,” she said, indicating the three lipsticks covering the building.

“Show-offs,” said Rook. “How come they get security cams and the NYPD doesn’t?”

Heat tried the bell and tried knocking again. They waited. Both pressed their ears to the door, but heard nothing. “Want me to bust a window?” he asked.

“Let’s do something crazier. Let’s get a search warrant.”

They got back in the car and Heat phoned the District Attorney’s office to request her paper. The assistant DA who took her call was a friendly, which was to say that Nikki wasn’t
going to get any obstruction from him, as she had with the administrative subpoena she wanted for Lon King’s receptionist. After she hung up, she said, “All good. But it’s going
to take an hour by the time the judge signs and they can get it over here to us.” They sat in silence for a moment.

“Wanna get some lunch?” she asked.

“Wanna make out?”

Nikki said, “Oh, yes, nothing would be better than getting all hot on a public street during a stakeout in broad daylight.”

“Just asking.”

“Just saying.”

A few seconds passed, then he muttered, “So you wanna?”

Heat was laughing when the bullet ripped through her side window. The close-range report temporarily deafened her left ear. Fragments of glass pelted her cheek and shoulder. Rook cried out,
“Oof!”

Heat could no longer see through the cascade of red pouring down over her eyes.

“D
rone!” yelled Heat. “Down, down!”

“I see it. You OK?”

“I’m hit.”

“Me too.” Nikki swiped a wet smear of blood from her eyes and turned. Through the haze she saw the right shoulder of Rook’s shirt blossoming crimson.

“Pressure,” she said. “Do it.”

He pushed a palm to his wound. “Your forehead…”

“Drone’s on the move.” Heat cranked the ignition. “Buckle up. Stay down.” Then she mashed the gas pedal, sending her Taurus Police Interceptor tearing out into the
street.

“How bad are you hurt?” Rook asked.

Nikki ignored him and squinted through the damp stickiness of her own blood, watching the cars, watching the peds, watching the drone—which was four car lengths ahead, humming away from
her up the block. Rook scoped out the drone, then came back to her. “Are you seriously going to try to catch it?”

“How much do you know about these things? How fast can they go?”

“Let’s see,” he said. “Amateur UAVs? A horizontal airspeed of thirty feet per second, or…let’s call it twenty miles per hour.”

“Then I am seriously going to try to catch it.” She braked to quickly check the intersection side to side. The movement made her head ache and the skin above her brow line started to
sting. She gunned the V8 and snatched up her two-way. “One Lincoln Forty, ten-thirteen. Request assistance on a ten-ten, shot fired. One-L-forty and passenger wounded. In pursuit of drone,
repeat: drone. Caution, UAV is armed and dangerous.”

The innately unfazed dispatcher came back, “Copy, One Lincoln Forty. State location.”

“Astoria. Northbound Thirty-Seventh Street, crossing Thirty-sixth Avenue.”

“Watch it, watch it,” called Rook.

Heat swerved barely in time but missed the first in a caravan of halal food carts being pushed from a driveway into the street. “Thanks, got it.” She lit up her flashing LEDs but
decided against the siren in case the drone was wired for sound. There was a chance the operator hadn’t realize she was crazy enough to pursue.

They caught a green light at 35th Ave., but Nikki brought her speed way down because a bus was unloading a group of middle schoolers on a field trip at the Museum of the Moving Image. “I
got the kids, you stay with the drone,” she said. Once clear, she squeezed by a double-parked oil truck, then accelerated up the block past a body-waxing studio, an awning manufacturer, and
indoor batting cages.

“Uh-oh, getting some altitude,” he reported. “Cutting a left at this corner, I’ll bet.” He winced when Nikki gassed it to beat the red for her left turn.

“Sorry.” She caught the rusty flavor of blood that had started to congeal on her lips and fought nausea. “You stop bleeding?”

“Some.” He lifted his palm and amended that. “No.”

The quadcopter had gained enough height to clear the two-story townhouse and descended again as it moved west after its turn. But then it goosed its speed and arced a sweeping left at 36th
Street. “Don’t turn left,” he warned her.

“But that’s where it went.”

“You’ll get dead-ended. Kaufman Studios just put up a permanent gate.” Rook was right. The street was barricaded by a dark-blue fence. “I saw it when I did my guest spot
on
Alpha House
.” Heat watched the drone move south, having flown right over the barrier. “We tried,” he said.

But Nikki wasn’t giving up. She drove to the next corner and started to make a left. “You do know you’re about to go the wrong way down a one-way street,” said Rook.

“No, I’m not.” Then she pulled the car into the driveway of the studio loading dock. “I’m going to drive down the sidewalk beside the one-way street.” The
entire block was taken up by the massive wall of a movie soundstage, which meant no doors, no shops, no foot traffic in and out. The concrete ahead was clear. Still, Heat drove slowly, just in case
someone suddenly emerged from among the fleet of white production trucks lined up along the curb. When she reached the corner at the other end, they both craned their necks to the left.

“There!” He pointed, and she just caught a glimpse of the drone as it zipped down 36th Street, disappearing behind the far side of the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts.

She double-chirped her siren and drove off the curb with a hard thump that pained them both. She chirped it once again as she cut across lanes of traffic, then made a right down 36th, chasing
the tiny dot at the end of the block. Heat’s vision had fuzzed. She swiped at the blood, but it didn’t help. “Lost it. What’s it doing?”

“You all right?”

“What’s it doing?”

“It’s slowing down. And descending.”

Nikki blinked rapidly to clear the blood coating her lashes. “Got it. Two o’clock, beside the parking structure.” The thing had been easier to spot in the open sky. Now that it
had decreased altitude, the speck became more challenging to track against the confusing background of buildings, windows, and signage.

“Still descending,” he said. “Looks like it’s going to land.”

An ambulette shuttle full of seniors lurched out from the curb, and Nikki had to brake hard not to hit it. Rook moaned lowly and pursed his lips in pain at the sudden stop. Gray heads all in a
row like a roll of postage stamps scowled out the van windows at them. Heat made a mirror check and shot around the front of the ambulette just in time to see the drone, now descended to street
level, slowly drift inside the yawning back hatch of a small SUV, soundlessly, elegantly, as if in a scene from the future. The hatch automatically closed and the SUV drove on, turning the corner,
heading west.

Heat palmed her mic. “Read me the plate, I can’t see it.”

“That’s not your vision. It’s got one of those tinted plastic covers.”

She called in a description of the crossover and her twenty. They had just passed under the elevated tracks of the N and Q trains when Rook said, “Blinker.”

“Good. Then he doesn’t know he’s being followed.”

The SUV signaled a right, then eased down the sloping driveway of a brick duplex and pulled inside the open garage under the house.

There were no street spaces, so Heat double-parked. “Stay in the car,” she said, and started up the sidewalk. Her legs felt weak from trauma and blood loss. She blinked to clear her
vision and, when that didn’t work, she wiped her eyes with her sleeve. The cloth came away wet with fresh blood, and her brow felt as if it were on fire. Without turning, she said,
“Does ‘Stay in the car’ mean anything to you?”

“Pretty much no,” said Rook, who was hurrying up behind her. “You should really catch on.”

“Go back. You’ve been shot.”

“So have you.”

“Grazed.”

“Let me look.”

“Yeah, let’s stop out here and do that.” She increased her pace, drew her Sig, and stepped into the garage behind the driver’s side of the vehicle. “NYPD, show me
both hands—now!” After only a few seconds the door opened a fraction. “Hands!” Heat cupped her palm into a brace under the grip. Her weapon felt unusually heavy, and she had
to press her elbows against her ribs to steady her shaking. “Now.”

Both of the driver’s hands emerged, empty, through the narrow opening at the top of the car door. “Good,” she said. “Now keep them high like that and step out. Slowly.
Nice and easy.” A chill fluttered through Nikki and her shoulder bumped clumsily against the garage wall as she struggled with her equilibrium. She remained upright, though, and succeeded in
stabilizing herself, but wished some backup would get there. Heat knew the undeniable symptoms of shock.

He did as he was told and squeezed slowly out the small space between the car and wall of the garage. And when he stood to his full six-two to face her with his hands raised, Timothy Maloney was
actually smiling. It was the same grin she had seen during his interrogation and when he had peered through the restaurant window to taunt her.

Given Heat’s condition and the vulnerable position she would put herself in if she tried to cuff him in that confined gap, she took a step back and indicated the wider space behind the
rear bumper. “Come out here and go prone.”

The ex-cop kept his hands up. He kept smiling, too. But he didn’t move. “No,” he said as pleasantly as if he’d been asked if he cared for any dessert. Nikki blinked and
saw in Maloney’s eyes a six-second Vine video of paranoid personality disorder symptoms: masking; dissociation; passive aggressiveness; and the one she preferred not to see acted out, chaos
manufacture. Lon King’s diagnosis had damned Maloney succinctly: high-functioning and dangerous.

Heat didn’t back down, but demonstrated her control without directly challenging him, which might inflame the confrontation. “Come on, help me out here, Tim. You know how this
goes.”

He hesitated, but finally eased nearer, toward the back of the SUV, hands up. Then he stopped, and the snide grin returned. “This ain’t going to happen, chief.”

Behind Heat came the menacing
snick-snick
of a shotgun being pumped. Heat kept her pistol on Maloney but turned her head. Wilton Backhouse stood under the garage door with a Mossberg 20
leveled at her and Rook.

The sight of him wasn’t such a huge surprise to Heat. Maybe Backhouse
hadn’t topped her list of possibles, but he’d
been tugging at her sleeve to get on it. So watching the sole survivor of the whistle-blowers, armed and caught in the act, gave Nikki an odd sense of satisfaction, like filling the last matrix gap
in Tetris. The only thing that would have made the situation better would be if she were holding the gun on him instead.

“Wilton,” she said in the most calming voice she could muster. “This can end here.”

Backhouse fired a blast into the ceiling. The sudden boom was deafening and made Heat and Rook jump. Maloney sprang forward through a shower of plaster and splinters and tried to snatch the gun
out of Nikki’s hand. She kept a grip and fought him for it, but the professor jacked another shotgun shell from the Speedfeed and aimed at Rook’s chest. Heat froze. Maloney took her Sig
from her. And the Beretta .25 from her ankle holster.