Raging Heat

The sunlight cut sharp to her eyes when they stepped out of his building onto the sidewalk and he took a long inhale of Tribeca, declaring, “God, I’ve missed this city.”

“Subway, not taxi,” was all Nikki could think to say, choosing a crowded express train over the intimacy of a cab’s rear seat and the conversation opportunity a venue like that threatened to open up.

As they approached Reade Street, Heat lurched into another emotional mode when she made the guy. The long lens puzzle man from the Hayden stood outside the little park in Bogardus Plaza. Only this time he wasn’t holding a camera. He’d gone back to panhandling. “Keep walking,” she told Rook. And when he gave her a curious frown, she repeated it, evenly but firmly. He did as he was told for once, and when he reached the corner and looked back, Nikki had vanished.

TWO

ying there on her back in the gutter under the serving window of the Tribeca Taco Truck, all Heat could see across Reade Street were the man’s boots as he came closer to find out where the hell she went. To her eye, those Lugz looked a little fresh from the box for a derelict. A hand prodded her shoulder. Nikki turned her head to look up at a sidewalk diner in a Rangers cap with the authenticity stickers still on the beak. Around his mouthful of nopalas burrito, he said, “Yo, lady, you sick?” Then he snatched the Ray-Bans off her face and ran. And they say New Yorkers don’t care. Instead of giving chase, though, she logrolled under the chassis of the truck to the street side.

Heat waited until she saw her stalker disappear around the back of the vehicle, then pushed herself to her feet from a tripod stance, keeping her right hand on her holster. She moved swiftly, using the growl of a passing school bus to drown out her footfalls. The guy couldn’t figure out how he could have lost her — Nikki didn’t need to see his face to know that. As she snuck up behind him, he peered around the corner of the taco van, swiveled his head to the right to scan the opposite end of the sidewalk, then craned to survey the café tables in the plaza across Bogardus Garden.

“Don’t worry, I’m right here,” she said, close enough for him to feel her breath on his neck. And then, more sharply, “Ah-ah. Don’t turn around. Drop the cup.” Coins danced on the pavement. “Hands behind your head.” Nikki slid her palm off the butt of her Sig Sauer and pressed his chest against the quilted stainless steel door of the food truck while she cuffed him.

“A little harsh for public solicitation, wouldn’t you say, Detective?” said Rook on arrival. But then he saw the Smith & Wesson .40 caliber she pulled from the panhandler’s waistband. “Hmm. Sir, unless that squirts water, you have some explaining to do.”

The man ignored Rook. And Heat, for that matter. Just stared up at the sky, shaking his head like he was mad at himself. He bristled even more when she plucked his wallet and opened it. Now it was Heat’s turn to shake her head. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“Nikki Heat. This is a nice surprise.” Zach Hamner’s voice annoyed her even more this time. As usual, he oozed the casual jauntiness of a no-worries, above-the-fray networker enjoying his high rung on the political ladder at One Police Plaza. But this time an extra helping of duplicity seeped through the phone along with something new from the senior administrative aide to the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters — a whiff of apprehension.

“Let’s keep it real, Zach. This is neither nice nor a surprise.” From his end came rustling, and then a door close. Heat waited him out, surveying her bull pen, empty so far, except for Rook, across the room filling his espresso maker with fresh water.

After some throat clearing, Hamner said, “That’s a hell of a ‘good morning,’ Detective.”

“Want to know what my wake-up call was? Busting the Internal Affairs Bureau doofus you sent to shadow me.”

His denial reflex started to kick in, and she cut him off. “And don’t insult me further by playing innocent. When I threatened to parade him through the Twentieth and lock him up in front of my squad, he talked like a starlet on The View.”

Even though she called him a doofus, Heat blamed herself for not acting the day before when the IAB detective caught her attention outside the planetarium. Sure, he had changed out of his panhandler’s disguise, put on a hat, and acted like he belonged with the news snappers, but when the sonar ping had sounded for Nikki, she dismissed it, breaking one of the cardinal rules of investigation that she preached to her squad: Always notice what you are noticing.

“All right,” said Hamner with a sigh of resignation. “Let’s stipulate I was doing some background on you—”

“You had me tailed.”

“—But I had a reason.”

Count on that, thought Nikki. Zach “The Hammer” Hamner always had a reason. Or, more likely, a strategy.

“I’m waiting,” she said.