Driving Heat

by Richard Castle

“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.

  Backhouse pressed the button to close the garage door. As it lowered, Maloney scowled at him. “On my iPad screen you had a fucking gimme. How’d you miss the bitch?”

  “I had her in the crosshairs until she started laughing and moved her head.”

  Rook turned to Nikki. “Remember that next time you tell me to stop clowning around.”

  She lowered her head gravely. “Next time…”

  Their captors were still at it. “And don’t give me shit,” said Backhouse. “Some fucking cop. You got made.”

  “Who chases a drone?”

  “And catches it,” said Rook.

  “Which means very soon there’s going to be a police presence.” Maloney turned to face Heat. “You called it in, didn’t you? Of course you did. Procedure.” He gestured to the floor. “All right, kiss cement, both of you.”

  “If it matters, I’ve already been shot once today,” said Rook. Maloney’s response came immediately and unexpectedly. He punched the wound in Rook’s shoulder, bringing him down to one knee. Heat lunged at Maloney, who backhanded her injured brow with his gun hand, then straight-armed the 9mm in her face. She peered up from the ground at him through a curtain of fresh blood.

  “Don’t,” said Backhouse. “Not here.”

  “Then we gotta go.”

  Backhouse snapped, “Will you wait? Jeez, give me a second.” During a short pause to think, his eyes darted around, then he nodded to himself as if he had solved an equation. “Maybe this is a good thing. Get them up. We’re going.”

  The ex-detective used Heat’s bracelets and a pair of his own to handcuff her and Rook. Then he shoved them both in the backseat of her car. As Backhouse hopped in up front, Maloney elbowed out the remaining glass from the side window, punched the gas, and spun a hard U-turn, retracing the route they had taken to get there. Seconds after crossing under the elevated tracks, they passed a pair of blue-and-whites speeding the opposite way. Cocky, grandiose, or just a chaos creator, Maloney gave a cop-to-cop four-finger wave to the patrolmen going by. Nikki craned backward to put a desperate face in her rear window. The only response was from one of the unis, who returned Maloney’s gesture, and why not? To anyone who didn’t know otherwise, Heat’s car looked like an undercover Police Interceptor with a detective at the wheel, transporting offenders in the rear. Prisoners in backseats always looked desperate. Some felt it more than others, thought Nikki.

  “If you’ll give me a chance to help you, I can make sure this goes a lot easier on you, especially if you stop now.” Heat knew their situation was beyond grim, but the only hope she could see was to engage them on some human level, taking a page from the hostage handbook. Unfortunately, one of the men in the front seat had also read it.

  “‘When engaging the hostage taker, speak calmly and do your best to establish rapport in a way that does not agitate the HT.’ Pretty good, huh? Know what? I should be a cop.” He cackled, loving his own joke.

  “Can we just…you know, drive?” said Backhouse.

  As they rode from Long Island City south into the back streets of Greenpoint, Nikki switched her focus, trying to get a grasp on the pair’s relationship, which seemed more pragmatic than truly friendly—as if Maloney was the professor’s hired gun and accomplice, but it ended there. Part of her evolving strategy concerned finding some way to come between them in order to undermine their unity. Finding that wedge might save her life and Rook’s. She also wanted to prove a hunch that had been simmering ever since she had interrogated Joseph Barsotti.

  Rook seemed to be pondering the same question. “Question, Professor?” Backhouse didn’t reply, so naturally Rook continued as if he had. “I’m playing my Six Degrees game back here, wondering how a police detective meets a forensic engineering consultant. And the Kevin Bacon I come up with is Fred Lobbrecht, am I right?” He got silence in return but kept on. “I mean, you knew Fred Lobbrecht professionally. But how would Detective Maloney meet him? You don’t travel in the same social circles, I’m guessing. Unless…” Rook’s experience had brought him to the same conclusion Heat was sniffing: that Wilton Backhouse had been the unidentified visitor in the psychologist’s waiting room when Barsotti walked in on Maloney’s tirade. And that was where the college professor had found his lethal TA.

  Anger flared within Nikki. If she had gotten that damned administrative subpoena, she wouldn’t be sitting there handcuffed and shot, a captive in the back of her own car right now. She pushed that thought aside and continued trying to engage her kidnappers. “Wilton, I’ll bet Fred Lobbrecht had you come in to talk with his shrink, same as he did with Rook, am I right? You and Tim crossed paths in the waiting room. You saw o
pportunity to use him and struck up your little friendship.”

  Backhouse held his tongue. Maloney was another story. He flared. “Hey, I’m not being used.” Then he calmed down a bit and chuckled. “I make friends very easily. I’m handsome enough, I’m strong enough, and darn it, people like me.”

  “Hey, Tim,” said the professor. He shook his head to say, Cool it.

  “So you guys met up that day and what, Wilton, you saw a prime candidate to help you deal with some problems?” asked Heat. “Like Lon King?”

  “Lon King was a fucked-up individual,” snapped the ex-cop.

  Nikki kept her focus on Backhouse. “Because Lon King knew too much about something? Wilton, I can’t hear you.”

  Maloney sighed. “I should have shot them back at the house.”

  “Drive,” said Backhouse.

  “But what did he know about? What did Fred Lobbrecht tell Lon King that meant they both had to die? And then the others. Abigail Plunkitt. Nathan Levy.” She watched the pair up front exchange glances but hold their silence. “I have a theory,” she said, “but I’d love to hear it from you.”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  “That’s a switch for you, Backhouse.” Rook leaned forward as best he could to peer around the headrest. “I thought you were the marquee headliner. The mouthpiece of the whistle-blowers. The next Assange or Snowden. That’s how you told me you saw yourself.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Want me to get my notes? The address is in Tribeca. I’ll direct you.”

  “He’s right,” said Heat. “You’re quite the showman. Starting with that phony drone attack in Washington Square.”

  Rook agreed. “All staged to make us see you as a victim like all the others and deflect suspicion. Like the last faked attack in your office. The envelope, please.”

  “Hey, you swallowed it,” said Backhouse.

  Nikki shrugged. “At first.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No bullshit. Know what always bugged me?” Nikki asked. “That drone only went after you while Rook was also a perfectly good target. I mean, if that attack was supposed to make me believe it was part of some plot to kill the exposé—literally—as the writer of the article, wasn’t Rook as good a target as you?”

  Rook frowned. “You never told me that.”

  “We had enough issues already.”

  Calls started coming on the scanner asking One Lincoln Forty to check in. Someone in the front seat switched the radio off. “That’s not going to help,” said Heat. “Maloney, you know what kind of radar is going to light up if someone does a cop. Why dig a deeper hole?”

  “Not going to be a problem, trust me,” he said with an unsettling degree of certainty.

  The last red sliver of the sun disappeared over the New Jersey hills as they started across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. The pit in Heat’s stomach deepened. Rook whispered, “We’re going to Staten Island.”

  Nikki blurted, “I listed my apartment so we could live in yours.”

  He took in that news calmly and said, “That’ll be nice.”

  If it hadn’t been for the cuffs, she would have liked to hold his hand.

  “We good?” asked Backhouse through his side window. They couldn’t see Tim Maloney in the dark, but they could hear his shoes crunching gravel on the shoulder of the road as he walked back to the car.

  The driver’s door opened, and he got in. “It’s all ours.”

  Backhouse was pulling on a pair of blue crime scene nitriles from Heat’s glove compartment. “Took you long enough. Guard give you trouble?”

  Maloney gave Backhouse a condescending look and closed his door. The interior went back to total darkness. “Took me a while to find the server box to disable the security cams. But we are done and done.” He turned the ignition and the tires crackled on the siding. Nikki swiveled as far as she was able for a view out the back window, hoping for an approaching car. A police car would have been nice.

  All Heat saw was blackness.

  Of course, as an associate of Forenetics, LLC, Wilton Backhouse knew the security code to unlock the access door, but since his password was unique to him, rather than enter it on the keypad and leave a time stamp of his presence, he stepped over the unconscious security guard lying on the floor of the guardhouse and overrode the system from there.

  They drove across the empty parking lot under the bleak orange light of the overhead lamps. Ground fog had begun to curl in off the surrounding marshes, and the enormous hangar ahead of them loomed like a castle jutting from a misty heath. Maloney parked the Taurus between the hangar wall and one of the eighteen-wheelers used to transport cars to and from the facility so it wouldn’t be visible to the casual passerby on Gulf Avenue.

  Backhouse got out first and jogged, cradling his shotgun, to the access door, which he opened with his gloved hand, and disappeared inside. Maloney got Rook out first, then Heat. Since their hands were manacled behind them, the big man showed no concern about controlling them. Heat tried to take advantage of their captors’ separation to work on Maloney’s head. “Backhouse is going to screw you over, you know that.”

  “Inside, let’s go.”

  Heat complied, but moved slowly so she could grind on Maloney’s weak spot, his clinical paranoia. “How do you deal with Backhouse? He doesn’t respect you. I hear how he talks to you.”

  Rook was right there with her. “Yeah, I picked that up, too. Ordering you around. Telling you to wait. Telling you to hurry. Telling you to shut up and drive. Asking what took so long, like you’re his butt boy.”

  “I’m not his butt boy.”

  “He treats you like a flunky.”

  “For sure. And you think he’s going to take this fall?” said Rook. “Believe me, there will be a fall.”

  They were getting closer to the door, so Nikki piled on. “You’ll be lucky to be alive to take a fall. You’re a detective just like me, Tim. Use your training. Look at this guy’s pattern. He kills his partners.”

  “She’s right. You gotta know he’s already thinking about how and when to do you.”

  “Turn it around while you have time. Preempt him.” Nikki stopped walking and faced Maloney. “You have my word, I’ll get you the best deal I can.”

  “And you’ll live,” said Rook.

  “Problem out here?” They turned. Wilton Backhouse stood there, holding the door open. “This more than you can handle, bro?”

  Nikki listened for a hitch. Maybe there was a moment of hesitation. But Maloney replied, “No, I got it,” and jerked them forward.

  Rook stepped into the enormous crash hall ahead of her and halted. Maloney gave him a shove but was savvy enough to respect Heat’s combat training, and kept a firm grip on her arm. But when Rook moved and cleared her view, whatever strength Nikki had managed to hold on to following her day’s violent ordeal instantly leached out of her. At the far end of the hangar a pool of light illuminated an American subcompact loaded on the launch catapult.

  Its two front doors gaped open, waiting.

  In unspoken unison, Heat and Rook slowly pivoted their heads, tracing the route along the test runway to the other end of the crash hall a football field’s length away, where the impact barrier—a monstrous concrete block reinforced with steel—sat waiting, immovable as Gibraltar. That wall of the former airplane hangar had been freshly painted over since their last visit nearly a week before. For anyone who had been there, no amount of white latex could erase the ghastly image of Fred Lobbrecht’s blood-and-tissue splatter, least of all the pair slated to take the next ride.

  Then, as only he could, Rook tried whatever it took to lighten Heat’s burden. “Shotgun,” he said.

  Nikki choked back emotion, willing herself to command this moment. Weakness meant death; focus gave them a fighting chance. “Seriously?” she said, forcing herself to sound anything but fearful. She went for indignant. “You have to be kidding. How is this a good idea?”

  “Not really
sure how good it is,” said Backhouse. “You caught me off balance when you showed up. I’m just making the most of this situation on the fly. I mean, this isn’t some movie where the guy says, ‘I’ve been expecting you, Mr. Bond…’”

  “There’s an understatement,” said Rook.

  Backhouse flared. “Hey, you can fuck yourself.” Maloney threw an elbow into Rook’s wound again. Heat fought her instinct to fight. Since she was handcuffed and unarmed, a head butt would only instigate something she couldn’t finish. Rook gave her a sign that he was cool, even though his lips had gone white from biting back the pain.

  Backhouse wasn’t the only one grappling for a solution during freefall. Her bravado was only pissing everyone off at a time when she needed to keep them talking. As a cop who had experience in hostage negotiations, Heat knew that the longer this played out, the better the odds they had to survive it. So, Nikki shifted her approach, not merely stalling to prolong the agony, calmed the conversation, and tried to forge a sympathetic connection.

  “Let’s all take a step back and look at what’s happening here, OK?” she began. “Wilton, I think we all feel like this is a knot we’ve got to untie, right? You said yourself that you’re trying to ad-lib your way out. We all know you’re a smart guy, but if you admitted it, I’m guessing every step you’re taking feels like you’re only pulling the knot tighter. Look around at this moment. Is this working for you?” She took it as a hopeful sign that he actually did survey the tableau. He scanned the two people before him, bound and bleeding, then his volatile accomplice, a problem to be dealt with later; then he looked down at the Mossberg shotgun in his gloved hands. He came back to stare at her, and she urged, “Come on, let’s figure a way out of this. Let me help.” Nikki saw in his eyes a hint of the weary dog-chasing-its-tail regret she had witnessed in so many perps caught in a situation gone south. They were a long way from done, but that small opening could be the first step to a resolution.

  But then he shook the moment off. “There may not exactly be a proven metric for this but, no, I think this has a shot.”