“What are you doing?” Carl asked.
“I like my Hormel hot chili shaken, not stirred.”
Derrick doubled-up the paper plates, the better to prevent leaking, then dumped the contents of both cans on top. He gave that delightful culinary creation a few minutes of nuking in the microwave, then pulled it out, using a bath towel as a hot pad.
“Bon appétit,” he said, placing it in the middle of the round table.
“So this is a hot meal and a good night’s sleep?” Carl said.
“It could be worse,” Derrick said.
“How?”
“If the chili didn’t have pop-tops. At this point, I don’t think we could afford a can opener.”
Derrick was already digging in with his plastic fork. Carl soon followed. In truth, it tasted pretty good. Everything does when you’re starving—and when you’re reasonably certain it might be your last meal for some time.
With no conversation, they attacked the pile of chili until it had diminished to about a quarter of its original size. Then their gustation was interrupted by a knock at the door.
“Pizza delivery for you, Mr. Dricker,” a man said. It was the man from the front desk. Except his voice was suddenly an octave higher than it had been.
The Storms exchanged a glance. They hadn’t ordered pizza.
They didn’t need to say this to each other. Nor did they need to look outside to know the front desk man was nervously holding an empty pizza box while someone else held a gun to his head.
Derrick was already on his feet, already studying the room, what possibilities it offered, and how they might escape from this trap.
Except there was no escape. The room didn’t have any side doors, nor did it have a back window. The front door was the only way out.
Having made that determination, he began cataloguing the contents of the room, looking for anything he might be able to use to his advantage.
The knock came again. “Mr. Dricker,” the man said. “Pizza for you.”
“I think you have the wrong room,” Derrick said, to stall for time.
“It comes free with a one-night stay, sir. Compliments of the Oorah.”
Carl Storm was standing now, too. He formed his fingers into the shape of a gun, then pointed the imaginary barrel at the door and pantomimed a shooting motion, complete with kickback.
Derrick shook his head. There was no point in wasting an innocent hotel clerk. Especially when all it would do was alert the thugs on the other side that they did not have the element of surprise on their hands, and so they might as well enter with guns blazing.
Besides, he already had a plan.
“Okay, terrific,” Derrick said to the man. “I’m just getting out of the shower. Give me a second to get some clothes on.”
Derrick shooed his father out the way. “Pull the mattresses up on the far side of the room and get behind one of them,” Derrick whispered.
Then he began putting his plan into place. He grabbed the microwave and quickly transferred it over to the round table in front of the window, which was to the left of the door as he faced out. He pointed the back of the microwave toward the interior of the room. Then he tilted over the refrigerator, ripped out the Freon tube, and stuffed it inside the microwave.
Freon, by itself, is an inert gas. That’s one of the reasons it’s used as a refrigerant. However, even an inert gas, when put under enough pressure—and then heated to the point where it bursts—can turn into a weapon.
But Derrick wasn’t done. He added the two empty cans of chili, two of the four hangers, which he bent to make fit, and all of the cleaning supplies he could stuff inside.
He set the microwave for ten minutes then ran to the back of the room, where his father was already crouched behind one mattress. The other mattress was for Derrick. He hid behind it, stuffed his fingers in his ears, and closed his eyes.
In truth, he had no idea what he had just created. Perhaps it was a powerful improvised explosive device. Perhaps it was just a mess that would spark and fizzle until it shorted the microwave.
It wouldn’t take long to find out.
* * *
The metal inside caught fire within a few seconds. A few seconds after that, the plastic of the cleaning supply bottles began melting. From there, it was hard to say what exactly occurred. Was it the cleaning supplies igniting, causing the Freon tube to burst? Or was it the detonation of the Freon tube that addled the chemicals?
Whatever the case, the resulting explosion was more terrific than anything Derrick could have hoped for. And the outer covering of the microwave gave the blast a shape, propelling most of that energy outward.
The window shattered, sending a hail of glass and shrapnel toward the parking lot. Derrick’s hope was that anyone in its vicinity would have been knocked flat—or at least stunned.
Which was what gave the Storm boys their only chance.
“Go, go,” Derrick whispered fiercely, pulling out Dirty Harry as he went for the door. Carl was right behind him, moving at a speed that was distinctly preretirement.
Derrick didn’t bother looking to his left, trusting on the explosion to clear out that side. As soon as he crossed the threshold, Derrick turned to his right, ready to put Dirty Harry to deadly use.
The first thing he saw was the hotel clerk. The poor man was lying on the concrete walkway, moaning. He had brought his arms up to his face, one side of which was a mess of raw meat.
Beyond him was the man who, Derrick guessed, had been holding the clerk at gunpoint. He had taken the explosion face-on and had been thrown on his back. He wasn’t moving.
There were two other men who appeared to have been loitering a little farther back. They were also shielding their faces with their arms, like they were expecting another blast.
One was crouched into a small ball. Derrick deemed that man to be effectively ineffective for at least as long as it would take the Storms to reach the safety of the Buick.
But the other man, while still flinching, seemed to be coming out of his shell-shocked stupor a little faster. He was already raising the rifle that had been at his side and was perhaps a second or two away from being able to start firing.
Derrick would have moved on from his field of fire by that point. But his dad would be square in the crosshairs.
Still moving, not daring to stop and aim, Derrick pulled Dirty Harry’s trigger twice in rapid succession. The first bullet hit just south of the man’s collarbone and spun him. The next buried in his side.
It was unclear whether either shot was fatal. It would depend on which way the bullets tumbled inside the body and how skilled the trauma surgeons were. But the wounds were, at the very least, incapacitating for the time being.
Derrick was in the Buick’s driver’s seat by the time the man fell. That the vehicle was pointed outward—with Carl having backed the car into its spot—was looking like genius forethought. As Derrick twisted the ignition key, Carl piled into the seat next to him.
“Hit the gas,” Carl said. “And duck.”
Derrick followed both instructions, steering half blind into the parking lot, aiming for what he judged to be the open space at the exit. Gunshots sounded out. The man who had been crouching and shielding himself had obviously found his gumption and was now up and firing.
And not inaccurately. One bullet slammed into the vicinity of the trunk. Another buried itself in one of the taillights, putting it out of commission. Then the back window of the Buick shattered when a third bullet found it.
But by then, Storm was already back out on the main drag, putting distance between them and the gunman with every pump of the roaring engine’s pistons. There were two more shots, both misses, and then the guy stopped bothering.
Derrick merged onto Interstate 95, pointed northbound, if only because that was the first entrance ramp that presented itself. He accelerated but didn’t bother going any more than the speed of the other traffic.
They were out of danger.
>
For the moment.
But how long until it caught up to them again?
Derrick tried to sort out what he had seen. There were three attackers, not counting the poor front desk guy. Those had been the three survivors from the assault on Carl’s place in Fairfax before. They hadn’t had time to recruit reinforcements.
Yet. But that was clearly coming.
And if they didn’t find a better hiding spot, there were only going to be so many daring escapes they could muster before the odds caught up to them.
“Okay, so how the hell did they find us?” Carl asked. “We used cash. We don’t have phones on us. We were in the very definition of a no-tell motel with a clerk we had bought off. What happened?”
“My guess? Satellites,” Derrick said.
“What about them?”
“Let’s start with the assumption Jones knew we were at Bryan’s place.”
“But you went in through the roof, and my Lame Depot hat was a foolproof disguise. How would he know?”
“Because Jones knows everything. One way or another, he just does. He didn’t want to tip off the Shanghai Seven when we were at Bryan’s place, because he didn’t want to endanger one of his agents. But as soon as we were on the move, he had eyes in the sky. That’s why we didn’t have a tail coming out of Bryan’s place. Jones knew it was a lot easier to have one of the nerds track us in real time from high up in the geosynchronous orbit. He waited until we had bunked in for the night, then told his Shanghai Seven friends where to find us.”
“Well, if that’s the case, then aren’t we screwed? There’s nowhere we can hide.”
“Oh, Jones can’t see everything. He doesn’t have regular access to geothermal satellites. Only the military has that, and I’m willing to bet Jones doesn’t want to burn through a favor with the Pentagon just to help out the Shanghai Seven.”
“So where do we hide?”
“In the trees,” Derrick said, already slowing for the next exit.
It was labeled with signs for Prince William Forest Park. “First things first, though. We have to let Nikki Heat know what’s going on down here. She’s as much a threat to the Shanghai Seven as we are. She has to know Jones might be using his resources against her.”
“Great. But how are we going to tell her? We can’t even use a phone.”
“We can’t use my phone,” Derrick said. “That doesn’t mean we can’t use a phone.”
Having turned off the highway, Derrick was soon pulling into an Exxon with an accompanying convenience store, one of the large modern ones that had a little bit of everything. Before long, he had convinced a fellow customer that a lightly used Arc’teryx AR-395a climbing harness would go for at least a hundred bucks on eBay, and that made it worth at least forty bucks in the parking lot of an Exxon.
And forty bucks was enough to buy a refurbished burner phone and a card with enough minutes to suit his purpose. Before long, he had banged out a text to Heat’s cell phone number.
Then Derrick Storm and his father disappeared into the deep recesses of the Prince William Forest Park.
SEVENTEEN
HEAT
At the speed of light, the text had traveled to a cell tower, then to a server, which then located Nikki Heat’s phone as being near another cell tower, which then sent out the message. The whole transaction, from transmission to receipt, took less than a second.
The processing of it, by a woman who was already four bottles into the minibar—and contemplating a fifth—was quite a bit slower. The words blurred on the screen in front of Nikki Heat’s eyes before coming into focus.
NIKKI: IT’S DERRICK ON A BURNER PHONE, IT READ. I AM COMPLETELY COMPROMISED. WE ARE ON THE RUN. MY PEOPLE ARE INFORMING THE S7 OF MY EVERY MOVE. THEY MIGHT BE DOING THE SAME TO YOU. WATCH YOUR BACK.
At that moment, Heat’s back was firmly planted in the only chair in that tiny Manhattan hotel room. The shades were drawn. No one knew where she was. No one was going to be bothering her.
She let out a long exhale, telling herself she was as safe as could be.
And then, just as the last oxygen molecules exited her lungs, there was a knock at the door that made her anxiety spike.
“Room service,” said a voice.
She hadn’t ordered room service.
It was like Storm’s text had not been a warning, but rather a prophecy. Had Storm’s “people” found her that quickly? Was the Shanghai Seven on the other side of the door?
Or was this Callan again? Since he seemed to be acting as Shanghai Seven muscle, was he now doing this errand for them as well?
Heat pulled out her 9mm and tried to begin a correspondence with a more sober part of her brain. She cursed herself for diving into the minibar with such ferocity. Just when she needed her wits about her, just when she needed everything to be totally sharp, she felt like she was moving through peanut butter.
On her way to the door, she stumbled against the bed, which seemed to have grown by several feet since she had last walked around it. She fell into the wall, barely able to maintain enough agility to brace herself with her free hand.
The knock came again.
“Room service.”
Yeah, right. Couldn’t you people at least come up with something more creative? Say it was free pizza or something?
She was breathing more heavily than a short walk across the room ought to have required. She reached the door and paused, trying to gather herself. Was there any way she could wrest some advantage from this situation?
Peering through the peephole, she saw what appeared to be a hotel waiter, dressed in a black vest and matching bow tie, with a long-sleeve white shirt underneath. With one hand, he was holding aloft a large platter with three covered plates on it. The other hand was tucked behind his back, in the manner that a courteous waiter might.
Or a guy hiding a Glock.
Heat thought about shooting first and asking questions later, either by cracking the door open or just firing straight through it. That Glock, or whatever he was packing, wouldn’t matter if she could put him down before he could get a shot off.
Except, even in her inebriated state, she still remembered her training, which was buried in a place deep enough the booze couldn’t touch it. Lethal force was only justified when an assailant posed a threat of serious physical harm. She had not yet seen a weapon and did not have definitive proof he was there to kill her.
She thought of Michael Brown. She thought of Eric Garner. She thought of all the cops who, when faced with that split-second judgment, had chosen poorly, ruining so many lives in the process. Nikki Heat didn’t want to find herself trending on Twitter for all the wrong reasons.
At the same time, she couldn’t let this goon get the drop on her. She took in a deep breath, let it go, then counted in her head.
When she reached three, she threw open the door, planted her left leg firmly, then aimed her right foot at the underside of the guy’s chin. Heat was trained in Brazilian jujitsu. She had delivered this kind of kick at imagined or simulated targets several times a week for years. Drunk or not, muscle memory took over.
Her shoe connected with a solid, meaty sound. Had the blow been slightly to one side or another, it probably would have dislocated the man’s jaw. Being that it was straight on, all that force transferred into a jarring, concussive blow to his brain. Both the waiter and the tray he had been holding jerked backward, separated from each other as sure as the man was now separated from consciousness.
Nikki already had her gun up and had it steadied on the man’s midsection all the same. If there was a next move, she didn’t want it to catch her off guard. She was ready for the gun to come out, for this encounter to turn deadly. Then she would have the justification to bury this punk.
But wait. Why were there potatoes au gratin flying in the air? And why was she watching a rib eye bouncing against the far wall? And were those snow peas, lightly sautéed in a balsamic soy sauce and garnished with almond slivers?
“Well, so much for you being a meat and potatoes girl,” she heard a very familiar voice say.
She turned and faced her next opponent.
It was Jameson Rook, dressed in a tuxedo accented with a rose boutonniere.
“Next time,” he continued, “you can just tell me you prefer the fish.”
* * *
It took a while for the waiter to return to consciousness and then be mol-lified by a sincere apology, an ice pack, and the largest tip in room service history.
But after that was taken care of—and the au gratin slime was washed off the walls and carpet—Heat and Rook had retreated back into her room.
“It appears I have interrupted a looming tragedy,” Rook said, surveying the quartet of small bottles on the desk. “Surely you realize there are quicker and less painful ways to go than death by minibar?”
Heat, who was feeling sufficiently more sober—thanks to the adrenaline chaser she got when the waiter knocked on the door—swept the bottles off the top of the desk and into the trash.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you without revealing closely guarded, top secret, proprietary information, and neither subpoena nor threat of imprisonment will force me to do so. I daresay, not even the future director of the Department of Homeland Security could get me to confess.”
Heat fixed him with one of her classic “I’m done playing now” looks. It had distinct “I’m going to kick your ass now” overtones.
“You have the Find My iPhone app installed,” Rook said hastily. “Remember? When we lost it in the couch cushions after that time we . . . well, you know.”
She nodded. She remembered, of course. It just seemed like another century, when she had been a different person.
He closed in, grabbed her hands, and looked deep into her eyes: “My plan was that we would talk over dinner. But now that you seemed to have dispatched with that, we could skip right to dessert, if you like.”
Heat was still in such a confused mental state, she offered no response. Rook, whose focus was suddenly quite singular, thought for sure that meant he had sealed the deal.
Heat Storm (Castle) Page 16
