“Yes, it’s really maddening. I still remember my first Internet search. Tom Wolfe wanted to fact-check commercial real estate tycoons in Atlanta. You get so accustomed to answers at the stroke of a keyboard or the click of a mouse. Suddenly I’m forced to go back and do it the old way. Truth be told, I love my technology.”
“But I bet you still have your old skills.”
“Who you calling skilled?” She laughed then took a moment to study Nikki. “I can see this isn’t a social call.”
“I need your help, Mrs. Jay.”
“Absolutely, you know that. What can I do for you?”
“Find me a boat.”
If Carolyn Jay felt daunted by the task, she didn’t show it. Nikki showed her the notes from her spiral notebook that included the eyewitness description of the sky-blue skiff from the plumbing contractor who had followed Rook and his abductors to Pier 36. The only time the librarian faltered was when she saw Rook’s name and his circumstances. She stared at Nikki, understanding the gravity of all this without needing to discuss it, then put herself to work. Mrs. Jay made photocopies of Nikki’s reporter’s notebook and made some side notes to herself on slips of paper, which she had made, as she had always done, from the blank backs of printed sheets of paper that had been cut down to scratch size.
She led Nikki across the marble-lined hallway to room 217 to show her how she was going to proceed, but as soon as they stepped into the catalog repository, Heat’s cell phone buzzed. It was Detective Ochoa. She stepped back in the hall so she wouldn’t disrupt the researchers and answered. “On my way now,” she said. Carolyn stood by the door and asked her if she was all right. She had good reason to ask. Nikki looked anything but.
“I’m sorry, I need to…Police business.” She rushed out, her footsteps echoing on the marble steps. At the lobby, her hurry became a sprint. She had to get to the East River, where someone had reported a man’s body in the water.
Two blocks into her drive east from the NYPL, Heat consciously had to tell herself to breathe. The fifteen-minute trip to the river seemed otherworldly, a soundless voyage to the very gates of Hell, insulated from all outside stimulus. Heat drove with her damp palms on the wheel; her lungs felt seared, and it seemed that because of some untimely breakdown of her cerebral cortex, evolved messages of reason and judgment were being skip-wired, while her amygdala served up high-velocity jolts of primal darkness under the banner of “Coming Attractions”—random clips from a jumpy mental snuff film that filled her with fear and hopelessness.
One of Heat’s front tires smacked the curb on the right side of the driveway that cut into the sidewalk under the Queensborough Bridge. The traffic cop manning the entry to the service lane at 60th Street winced at the impact. Nikki bounced in her seat but didn’t notice the slam or the reaction. She steered up the blacktop incline running under the bridge and then, after reaching the top of the hill, turned down the other side of the steep ramp. She left her car against the fence of a dog run without bothering to close the door. Willing air into her lungs, sucking her lips in hard over the edges of her teeth, Nikki trudged forward, passing two ambulances, a fire truck, and an FDNY Urban Search and Rescue Team van, until she came to the black iron railing, where she pushed between some first responders in time to see a pair of divers in wetsuits working to attach a flotation harness to the corpse about thirty yards out in the swirling water.
The body’s head and shoulders were still submerged, and Nikki bent forward at the waist, hands flat on the cold steel rail, as if leaning six inches closer would give her more information. She caught a glimpse of his clothing, athletic wear of some sort, and dared to believe that it wasn’t Rook’s corpse floating out there. Unless he had changed (or been changed) out of the sport coat and bloody dress shirt he had had on the night before, it must be someone else. Had to be. Please be. The current had created a rip between the concrete footings of the bridge’s piers. The back of the man’s upper body bobbed up through the surface foam, revealing brown skin and a glistening bald or clean-shaven head.
Heat’s relief that it wasn’t Rook nearly laid her flat on the paving stones, and she needed to grip the metal piping when she felt herself go faint and her knees wavering. Composing herself, Nikki said a silent thank-you as she watched the dead man getting reeled toward one of the Zodiacs working the scene. A second boat came alongside to assist with the recovery, and, as he was hauled up, the victim’s running shoes emerged from the muddy water with a bright flash of neon green. Nikki had seen shoes like that recently—New Balance Zantes—and, in the blink it took her to access her memory, she recognized the face of Sampson Stallings as his head lolled forward during the transfer into the police boat.
Twelve hours later, alone by the light of a single dwindling candle, Heat blasted “Stay” by Rihanna and refilled a shot glass resting on the rim of her tub with Patrón. Her pouring was sloppy, thanks to a combination of a less-than-optimal arm angle and her blood alcohol level. Nikki overfilled the glass, and the slosh trickled down the side until the tequila met her bath, creating the soft sizzle of bursting bubbles.
She had started with a single glass of wine when she got home, but by the third one, which emptied the bottle, Nikki had put away the Rosa Mexicana takeout menu, deciding there was no point to the enchiladas suizas without tequila, but that tequila was just fine without the enchiladas. Nikki was making all the wrong choices that night and just kept making them.
The trauma of fearing that Rook had washed up off Sutton Place had cored out her insides, leaving her emotions strewn in a bloody tangle. Her relief, however profound and welcome, collapsed at the new shock of discovering that Lon King’s loving partner had stopped his daily run mid-span on the recreation lane of the Queensborough Bridge and, according to numerous eyewitnesses, stood on the rail, blessed himself, then let gravity tip him forward with his arms at his sides. The postmortem indicated water in his lungs, so it wasn’t the fall that killed him. Nikki knew it wasn’t the river either, but the heavy pain of unbearable loss. She submerged herself under lavender froth until she could hold her breath no longer, not to contemplate anything rash, just to see what it must have felt like to Sampson Stallings.
Yes, she was definitely making all the wrong choices.
Her cell phone rang, and Nikki made a SeaWorld dolphin vault out of the tub, naked, in her dash to grab it. She had intended to leave the phone within arm’s reach so she could get news about Rook but had been afraid she would drop it in the water. Instead, in her drunken scramble, her wet feet slipped and she fell hard to the bathroom floor, knocking the wind out of herself and sending the iPhone across the tiles like a hockey puck.
She pulled herself toward the john and snatched the phone up before the call got dumped to voice mail. But her screen swipe was clumsy and the phone fell from her hand, clattering onto the floor again. She made a fumble for it and, at last, managed to croak out a hello.
“Nikki, it’s me.” Lauren Parry. For the second time that day, Heat prayed the topic would not be the discovery of Jameson Rook. “What’s going on? You sound like something’s wrong.”
“No, I’m fi-ine.” Heat flinched, hoping she hadn’t cracked a rib. The sharp pain gave fine two syllables.
“You can’t fool me. I called because I’m worried about you. Should I be worried about you?”
Nikki didn’t answer. Didn’t know how to, didn’t have the energy to, didn’t want to open the vein. She decided to stay on the floor and rolled onto her back, hoping for some comfort from the rug, but came to a stop half on, half off. She grunted.
“I’m coming over.”
“No. Don’t. Laur, I’m OK, really. I just…I’m OK. You know me.”
“Which is why I’m calling. You looked liked hell this afternoon at my office.”
Instead of speaking, Heat shook her head no, as if Lauren could see her, though she was very glad this was not a FaceTime call. Finally, she said, “Well, it has been a bit of a strain.”
&nbs
p; “I can’t even imagine. So what are you doing about it? Sitting home, getting hammered?”
Nikki pulled her phone away to examine it to make sure this was indeed not a FaceTime call. She began to tell Lauren not to be concerned, that she had this covered, but as the words formed, they turned into vapor and left her with nothing. Fueled by alcohol and despair, Nikki began to weep.
Her dear friend did the best thing she possibly could have done at that moment. She just listened to the sobs. A minute later, or two minutes, maybe even five, when Nikki whined a high-pitched “I’m sorry…” Lauren still didn’t intervene, except to say she was there, not to worry.
When she was cried out, at least for that round, Heat forced herself to sit, sliding her backside on the tile until she could rest her shoulders on the toilet.
“You want some company, Nikki?”
“Want to know what I’m doing right now? I’m wet and shivering from the tub, sitting on my bathroom floor naked, using the john as a backrest. I’m kinda drunk and all alone and I kinda need that. You insulted?”
“No, I get it.”
“Because if you wanted to come over like Melissa McCarthy from Bridesmaids and slap some sense into me, you might not like the result.”
Dr. Parry chuckled. “Don’t want that.”
“No, you don’t.”
“All right, then, I’ll respect your wishes.”
“Thank you.”
“Wait, wait, don’t you hang up yet. Now if I were to come over there—which I am not. But if I did, and went all Megan Price on your ass, I would tell you one thing: Be Nikki Heat. Stay strong. Whatever it is, you’ve got to stay positive.”
“That’s three things.”
“And you can start by corking the wine bottle.”
“Oh, that was gone an hour ago. I’ve moved on to the hard stuff.”
“Just promise me, Nikki. You do what I said? And call anytime. Please?”
“Hey, Laur?”
“Yeah?”
“Never call this number again.”
The two ended the call laughing—but only Nikki’s laughter turned into tears.
She struggled to all fours, found the cork for the tequila bottle on the floor, then hauled herself up using the side of the tub as a handrail. The shot glass must have fallen into the bath water, so she drank straight from the bottle.
It was definitely a night of wrong choices.
The beauty of a hangover, Nikki thought the next morning, was that it did wonders for confusing the source of pain. Was it from the knot on your head some bruiser gave you with his shoe, or from the tender ribs you got hitting your bathroom floor in one of your life’s more un-shining moments? Or was it from the hangover itself? As she took a sip of her second vanilla latte of the day, Heat knew where the real pain lived, and that was why she was standing on a sidewalk on Warren Street at seven-thirty waiting for someone to unlock the front door of the Fountain Pen Hospital.
“I left him a voice mail, personally, to let him know it was fixed,” said Terry Wiederlight, one of the owners, as he returned from the back room holding a small cardboard box the size and dimensions of a pen. “Always glad to see you, Nikki, but Rook was so eager to get this Hemingway back, I’m surprised he didn’t come himself.”
Maybe to convince herself as much as Terry, she smiled and said, “He’s tied up on an assignment. But he’s going to want this when he’s free, I do know that.”
“That’s great, I hope it’s real soon. I expedited this. You know how Rook gets when he’s obsessed.”
“Sometimes all we need is one little thing to keep us going, Terry.”
“You are so right. Although this is no little thing, is it?” He uncapped the Montblanc collector’s edition pen and let her examine the replacement nib, which looked exactly like the original: gleaming Rhodium-plated 18-karat gold with deco scrollwork engraved around the number 4810, the metric altitude of the eponymous highest peak in the Alps.
“He is going to be so happy.” Once again, for herself, she added, “When he sees this.”
On her way out, Terry said, “Hey, if you two are getting each other wedding gifts, they also have other limited editions in the Writers Edition series. Maybe the Agatha Christie or the Edgar Allen Poe. Although he’s not much of a mystery writer, is he?”
Even with the Montblanc protected to excess in Bubble Wrap, Nikki carried the package in her hand like a fragile keepsake, beginning to worry that this entire errand was acting out some delusional fantasy, as if she were like Miss Havisham, clinging to a pen instead of a decaying wedding dress. Whether it was a positive gesture of hope or an exercise of pure denial, picking up Rook’s pen constituted for her an affirmation of his life in the absence of facts. It not only had to do, it needed to do. For now.
As bolstering as Lauren Parry’s well-intended words had been, they were really just a nudge. The actual wake-up call that prompted Nikki to turn the emotional corner came in bed that morning, and from herself. And it came in the same apartment, the same room, and the same bed where, over a decade before, she had begun another climb, a struggle from the depths of a bottomless hole following her mother’s murder. Back then, Heat had come to realize that it was not enough to stay positive: She had to do positive.
Actions carry great, sometimes mystical power, and back at the start of the new millennium, after Nikki had passed a lost, miserable week cocooned under those covers, the decision to do something rather than wallow had led her to become a police officer. Today, her saving act was to secure Rook’s fountain pen—perhaps not as emphatic a life choice as altering her entire path to be a detective instead of an actress, but in one way not so different. Both worked as concrete steps. The one thing Dr. Parry had gotten right was when she had told her to be Nikki Heat.
Nikki Heat was all about action, not wallowing.
On the second level of the parking garage near City Hall, as she remote-clicked the locks on her car and opened the door, she heard a man speak her name softly from somewhere up the ramp. She dropped the Fountain Pen Hospital sack on the driver’s seat and turned, ducking into a crouch between her car and the one beside hers, resting her hand on the grip of her Sig Sauer.
She waited, listening.
The only sound came from the morning rush out on Broadway and the annoying buzz of a flickering lamp in the entry to the stairwell. Then he spoke again. Calm, measured, matter-of-fact. “You won’t be needing that gun, Captain, I promise you.” The echo against concrete in the cavernous space made it hard to pinpoint his location. Heat duckwalked back against the wall in case he was directly above her. No sense creating too much opportunity. “I wouldn’t advise you to pull it, anyway. It would not go well.”
She chanced engaging him, hoping to draw him into view or give her a ping on his location. “Is that a threat?”
A full minute passed before he spoke again, and by that time he had relocated. He was now nearer, it seemed, but his calm voice was still diffused in the reverberations of the space, defying any attempt at triangulation from her defensive spot, where she crouched between two engine blocks. “I’m not here to threaten or harm you. I’m here to talk to you about Jameson Rook.”
Heat’s stomach hit the spin cycle. Oh, shit, she thought, is Rook dead? Is he here to tell me Rook’s dead? Nikki fought the urge to bolt out into the open ramp and try for a look at this guy. Or to take him. If he knew something about Rook, she wanted it—now. “What about Rook? Tell me!” In contrast to his measured tone, her blurt sounded eager and needy. Because she was.
“I thought you’d be interested, and I can hear that I have your attention. Which is good, because what I am about to say to you is very important.” He paused again. Taking his time, running the table his way, and only making it harder on Nikki, who was coping with a turbo pulse and wondering what the fuck was going on. “I need to issue you a caution to stop overreaching in your homicide case. Not only are you trying to go places you shouldn’t go but doing so would be harmf
ul to Mr. Rook.”
His words smacked Heat with alarm and hope. “Oh, my God…” she muttered. “He’s alive…” She couldn’t help herself and shot to her feet, calling, “He’s alive?” She got no reply and this time shouted it loud enough to hear her own voice ring back at her in the concrete cavern. “Don’t screw with me, is Rook alive?”
Another pause, and the voice came from farther away, as the unflappable baritone with a hint of accent—maybe Oklahoma?—resumed. “I urge you to listen. I know this is very difficult because it runs against all your training and, to be certain, your emotional investment.”
“Damnit, tell me. Is. He. Alive?”
In that same soft-spoken tone, he said, “Yes…so far.”
Her cop wheels started turning. If this guy was telling the truth—if Rook wasn’t dead in a gutter somewhere with a bullet in his head—this guy might be able to lead her to him. She stepped from between the cars and shouted again. “Who are you?” Nikki got her iPhone out and texted her location and a 10-13.
He chuckled. “What do you like? How about ‘Mr. Jones,’ does that work for you?”
The moment she had completed her message and hit Send, Mr. Jones said, “I see we only have a few more moments to spare here, so let me make this as clear as I can. If you continue to press the issue and follow the path you are on, you will be putting Mr. Rook’s life in jeopardy.”
“If he’s alive, prove it. Let me talk to him. Let me see him! Take me to him!”
“You’re not listening. And you’re assuming I have control of the situation. I am trying to share a clear warning. Unless you want to bring him harm, or worse: Stand down.”
Driving Heat Page 23
