“Truly, this is going to blow you away. Shall I come to you? Are you still following your money?” There was a rustling sound and she groaned. “Hey, what are you — ?” Nikki started to scream.
And then her phone went dead.
Eighteen
Rook bolted to his feet and finger stabbed the face of his phone, desperate to launch a callback. Heat’s cell rang and rang as he took a step toward the stairs. Guzman blocked him. “Don’t,” said Rook, “I have to go.” By then he was getting voice mail, “Nikki, it’s me, call back, OK? Let me know what’s happening. Soon as you can.”
“Nikki...” Pascual Guzman sampled the name aloud and turned to Martinez. “I thought I knew her voice. That was the police detective who called me in.”
“Me, too,” Martinez said as he shouldered up to Guzman. Rook tried to slide around the pair, but Martinez pressed the palm of his wide, manicured hand flat on his chest and stopped him.
“Guys, I need to go help her, come on.”
“And what’s this about Ossining?” asked Martinez, who had done time there.
From moments before, when he discovered that his money trail surprisingly led to the exiled human rights novelist, Rook had been watching his narcotics bribe laundering theory come unstitched before his eyes. Combining that with the fact that nobody in that basement had drawn a weapon on him — not even Martinez — he took a chance out of urgency. “OK, here it is,” he said, directing himself mainly to Faustino Velez Arango, who watched quietly from his chair. “My girlfriend is a cop who’s working a murder case that I don’t believe has anything to do with any of you.”
“This is still the murder of Father Graf?” asked Guzman.
Rook thought it over and nodded. Guzman pulled at his thick beard and spoke to Velez Arango in Spanish. Rook couldn’t understand all the words, but the tone was emotional. The exiled author nodded solemnly a few times. When they were done, Rook pleaded. “A life may be in danger. I can’t believe you, of all people, Señor Velez Arango, would hold a writer captive against his will.”
The man stood and crossed over to Rook. “I know that Father Graf did more than give me this holy medal. Pascual tells me that whoever killed the padre took away a saint on earth, devoted to our cause.” Then a trace of a smile eased some of his gravity. “And, of course, I have read your profile of this Nikki Heat.” He gestured to the steps. “Go. Do what you can to save her.”
Rook started off, but Martinez blocked him again. “Faustino, he will give you up.”
The novelist took his measure of the journalist and said, “No, he won’t.”
Rook dashed to the stairs and then, as an afterthought, said to Velez Arango, “One more favor?”
“Qué?”
“I’ll need all the help I can get. Any chance I could carry that St. Christopher?”
Velez Arango folded his hand around the medal. “It is valuable to me.”
Rook said, “Tell you what. Keep my ten grand, we’ll call it even.”
Nikki Heat ran up Vanderbilt Avenue, threading herself upstream be tween the tight flow of pedestrians making their way to Grand Central. She glanced over her shoulder and could see him coming, his black ski mask astonishing the late afternoon business commuters who stopped and turned to look at the man who rushed through them. Those who weren’t stunned looked around, either for cops or to see if somebody was making a movie.
It had happened so quickly. Eager for a cab, Nikki had deployed her secret weapon in that neighborhood, which was to skip the organized taxi cue on Forty-second Street, a great place to make friends because the line is slow. Instead, she waited on Vanderbilt near the Yale Club, a favored drop-off spot and, therefore, an equally favored spot to snag a ride on the fly.
As she was on the phone to Rook, waiting out a suburbanite counting coins for the driver’s tip, the guy came up behind her. Heat didn’t notice where he came from. She only saw motion behind her reflected through the haze of road salt on the cab window. Before she could turn, one hand was stripping her of her cell phone while the other pulled her shoulder. The surprise of it took her off her game a beat, but Heat’s combat sense kicked in, and she spun, going with the momentum of the grab and then using her shoulder to ram her assailant backward into the green light pole near the entrance of the club. Down on his ass on the sidewalk, her attacker started his hand toward the inside of his coat, and Nikki ran.
Half a block north now, he was closing in. Heat bolted across Vanderbilt, risking exposure in the open road, so she wove and dodged to present a poor target. Her goal was to turn the corner at 45th and get inside the lobby of the Met Life, where security guards could help. Beyond that, Grand Central was replete with cops and Homeland Security.
But then, the best of all worlds — an NYPD cruiser pulled up to the stop sign at 45th. “Hey!” she called. “Ten-thirteen!” Assist police officer.
The uniform at the wheel had his window open, and when she was ten yards from the car and closing, he turned to face Nikki. “Heat, get in.” It was The Discourager. At first she wondered if Harvey still had her back — unlikely. Or if this was just luck — less likely; this wasn’t his precinct. She started putting her brakes on as she reached the car and saw the gun on his lap, pointed out the window at her. “Get in,” he said once more.
Heat was calculating the odds of outmaneuvering his aim by bolting to the rear of his blue-and-white when a gloved hand came from behind her and clamped a rag over her mouth and nose.
Nikki tasted sweetness and then blacked out.
Raley came back on the line and told Rook that he checked, and sure enough, there had already been several 911s about a female being chased by a man in a ski mask outside Grand Central Terminal. Ochoa was getting it out on the air that the female was Nikki Heat. Raley expected the surrounding streets would be swarmed by units by the time Rook got there.
Translation: There wasn’t much for Rook to accomplish there, but since it was the last place he had heard from her, he continued down Broadway. Waiting for the light at Columbus Circle, his heart raced as Rook drew the parallel to her pursuer in the ski mask and the crew that had tuned up Horst Meuller in his apartment. He relived Nikki’s interrupted phone calclass="underline" her excitement at what she had discovered upstate, then the suddenness of the assault, her cell probably taken or smashed.
Rook opened the Recents screen on his phone. Out of habit or spite, Nikki had used her old phone to call him. Which meant that, possibly, she still had the spy store phone he gave her to call for help. Rook wondered if she had it and, if so, whether she had it turned on. He got out his own new phone and began to figure out how the hell to enable the GPS.
Her temples were throbbing when she came out of it. Nikki was en gulfed by a fog thick enough to make her feel underwater. Her head seemed too heavy for her neck, and she couldn’t move her arms or legs. “Coming to,” said the voice that seemed to drift in from another dimension. Heat tried to open her eyes, and the light, coming from unforgiving white-blue fluorescents in overhead tubes, pierced her so harshly that she closed them right away.
What had she seen in that little glimpse? She was somewhere industrial. A definite workshop or warehouse. Unfinished walls with exposed studs and metal storage racks full of boxes, and... tools and parts of some kind. Another look, that would tell her more, but not if she had to stare into those lamps again. She tried to turn over but couldn’t and so lolled her head and peeked once more. Harvey, still in his uniform, leaned with his arms folded against a workbench, watching her. He was wearing blue plastic gloves. That disconcerting view pumped enough adrenaline to lift some of the haze. She rested her lids, chastising herself for not seeing the possibility before that The Discourager hadn’t been tailing her for protection but to keep tabs on her. Harvey had been hiding in plain sight. Nikki remembered bringing him the pizzelles and felt an ache in her gut.