“Nikki, are you there?” Cynthia asked.
Desperate, Nikki tried calling to her mother. It came out as a whimper. Her voice was weak. So weak.
“Nikki Heat . . . Nikki Heat . . . Come find me, Nikki Heat.”
There were tears streaming down Nikki’s face now. I’m coming, Mom. I’m coming, she wanted to scream. But the paralysis that had started in her legs was now total. Nothing in her body worked anymore. She was frozen in place. Her mother was just on the other side of the curtain—so very, very close—but Nikki couldn’t get to her.
Then a phone started ringing. Loudly, insistently. And so close to her ear it actually felt . . .
Real. Because it was real. Someone was actually calling her. Heat forced her eyes open, relieved the dream was over, then untangled herself from the meaty left arm of Jameson Rook, which had been draped over her naked body.
She answered just before it went to voice mail with: “Heat.”
“Nikki, it’s George.”
George The Bartender. Why was he—
“I’m sorry to call so late. And I’m sorry if I woke you up.”
“Not at all,” Nikki lied. “I was just getting some paperwork done.”
“Oh, good. Good. I just . . . I got off my shift about an hour ago, and I’ve just been at home, thinking about what we talked about earlier today. Or, I guess I should say, yesterday.”
Heat’s eyes focused on the nightstand clock, which read 2:05 a.m. Rook was nude, too. He was on his right side, not stirring. She began easing herself off the bed.
“Right, right,” she said, keeping her voice low so she wouldn’t disturb him.
“Anyway, it’s been tearing me up and . . . would you mind coming over so we can talk about it a little more? I know it’s late, but I just feel like we should discuss things some more. Would that be okay?”
“Sure,” Heat said quickly. So much for the promise she wouldn’t run off in the middle of the night. She was in the bathroom now, with the door closed so she wouldn’t disturb Rook’s slumber.
“I’ve just been thinking about it, about your mother’s wishes, and I think . . . Well, I’m hoping I can convince you about what she really wanted. I think she had very specific wishes about where she wanted those bills to end up.”
“Absolutely, George. I think you’re absolutely right.”
“Good. We’ll talk about it when you get here. And, again, I’m sorry to call so late. But I just can’t get it out of my mind and I think . . . Well, I think maybe a change of heart might be in order.”
“I agree. I’m already on my way,” Heat said, even though that would have put her in opposition to several New York City indecent exposure statutes—while giving at least a few citizens a cheap thrill. “I know you live close to my mother’s place, but what’s your address, George?”
George rattled off a number on East 18th Street, adding, “Apartment 5F. You want some coffee? I’m just about to put some on. You just never know when you’re going to have unexpected company, if you know what I mean.”
“That’d be great, George. Thanks,” said Heat, already sensing her night’s slumber was done.
She was expecting him to say something else—“good-bye” or “see you soon”—but George seemed to have already hung up. Heat ended the call and exited the bathroom so she could begin scrambling into her clothes. As she dressed, she looked at Rook, still sacked out, his chiseled chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm.
He had been right about George having second and third thoughts— “a change of heart,” George had called it. Of course Rook was right. A journalist spends his career observing people and drawing conclusions about them, and Rook was better at it than most.
A warmth spread to her lower extremities as she thought about the intimacy they had shared that evening. He was better than most at some other things, too.
As she left The Lucerne, Heat ordered up a Lyft to take her down to Chelsea. Traffic at that time of night was flowing easily, and with the lights well timed, the car was able to roll through chunks of ten or twenty blocks at a time before coming to a halt.
As midtown Manhattan passed by her, Heat’s excitement mounted. George would take her to the bills. She would take them to the crime lab personally and demand the technicians scan them and put them through the system immediately. They’d give her a little bit of a hard time, but ultimately a captain got what she wanted.
And then? Well then, after seventeen years, she’d start getting some answers. If the prints weren’t in the city of New York’s database—and she doubted they would be—she’d send them on to the FBI, then to the CIA. Surely no one would deny the perhaps-future director of Homeland Security a favor.
She was feeling wired as the car came to a halt in front of the address George had provided. She might not need his coffee, after all. The possibility of all that lay ahead was a natural stimulant.
George’s apartment was a fifth-floor walk-up in a smaller building that had no doorman and was almost certainly rent-controlled, judging from how little about the building had been updated.
Heat pressed the button for 5F and was buzzed up. She practically flew up the stairs and was soon at George’s door, knocking softly so she didn’t wake the neighbor in 5R.
George came to the door still dressed in the same clothes he had been in earlier. He opened the door without speaking, allowing Heat to enter his small, tidy living room. He looked odd, almost like he had been crying.
Then he closed the door behind her.
“Good work, George,” another man’s voice said. “Now let’s raise those hands nice and high, Captain Heat.”
Heat slowly did as the man said. It had been four years since she’d last heard that voice, but she didn’t need to turn around to know who it belonged to.
Bart Callan had found her.
* * *
George had his hands pressed together in a supplicant pose, like he was already begging for Heat’s forgiveness.
“I’m sorry, Nikki,” George said pathetically. “He made me.”
“Shut up, old man,” Callan said. “Go back over in the corner and don’t move.”
George retreated meekly into the far corner as Callan advanced toward Heat from behind.
“Now, Nikki, you are going to stand absolutely still. You are going to keep your hands nice and high, and you are not going to move a single muscle. Do you understand me?”
“Screw you, Callan.”
“I would like that very much, believe me. When we sparred that time, feeling that body of yours underneath me . . . I would like nothing more. I thought about that a lot in prison, you know—thought about what I’d like to do to you.
“But I’m afraid that’s not why I’m here. Now, not a move.”
She felt the cold muzzle of a gun against the base of her skull, pointed upward such that any bullet would obliterate her medulla oblongata— the part of the brain responsible for respiration, circulation, and a host of other functions a body couldn’t do without for very long.
Then she felt Callan’s hand working its way up her torso. It started at her stomach, then went to her rib cage, then paused for a grope of her breast. Her skin crawled. She would have rather been felt up by a reptile.
“Nice,” he said, giving her a squeeze. Then he moved to her shoulder holster, which he expertly unsnapped before removing her 9mm.
With any other assailant, Heat would have picked a moment to whirl and deliver an elbow to the Adam’s apple, followed quickly by a back kick to the groin.
But not with Callan. He was too good. And too careful. And his gun was dug too far into the back of her head.
Callan stepped back quickly, getting himself out of range of Heat’s fists and feet. Then he walked over to one of the living room’s two windows, which was already open. He tossed the gun out, letting it fall five stories to the sidewalk, unconcerned about who might find it or whether it would strike someone on the head.
Heat heard it clang off the concrete
, feeling a special sense of helplessness as she thought about some kid—or some criminal—scooping it up.
Quickly, though, that gun became less of a concern than the one Callan now had trained on her face.
“Surprised to see me? Thought you had gotten rid of Bart Callan for good, didn’t you? Well, let me tell you something you obviously didn’t learn four years ago: I win in the end. I always win in the end.”
“You’re going to fry this time, Callan. You’re an escaped inmate who committed murder while on the lam. That’s a capital offense. The federal government will be happy to give you the needle for that.”
“If I were you, I’d be a little more worried about your own death than mine,” Callan said. “Now, you’re going to tell me where your mother hid those bills.”
Heat was fairly certain her confusion showed on her face. “I’m going to tell you? What are you talking about? I have no—”
“I know you were a theater major, Nikki, so I’ll give you a B-plus for that performance. But it’s not fooling me. I heard your mother on that recording you had in your apartment. I heard all the stuff about how she hid the bills in the same place as her best liquor. I know that didn’t mean her apartment, because I turned that inside out pretty good—yes, that was me. Then I went and had a talk with your buddy George here.”
Callan jerked his head toward George. “And your bartender told me everything. He told me that Cynthia knew her phone was tapped and that it was just a misdirection to fool the people listening and how you had the bills all along. In case you’re wondering, it took about twelve seconds before he gave you up. I didn’t even have to touch one of those silver hairs of his.”
Heat’s eyes flashed toward George, who mouthed “I’m sorry” one more time. She could plainly see his desperation for her to do something, anything.
She could now guess how it had gone. Callan had gotten the jump on the old man, who then started lying just to stall for time. Maybe he also thought Heat, as a cop, would come with backup, or that she would be smart enough to sniff out the trap. When she thought back to his last words, she realized he had even tried to warn her:
You just never know when you’re going to have unexpected company, if you know what I mean.
But, of course, Heat had been so excited about the possibility of finally getting the bills in her possession, she had ignored that sign.
And now it seemed to have been a deadly mistake.
“So now,” Callan continued, “you’re going to tell me where those bills are. And you’re going to tell me right now, because if you don’t, I’ll gut your friend George like a fish.”
“If you touch him, you’ll never get those bills,” Heat said. “That’s a promise. Leave him out of it. This is between you and me, Callan.”
“So you admit you know where the bills are?”
Heat acted like she couldn’t decide whether to confess, like she was struggling with the weight of the thing. In reality, she was trying to think of some way out.
If she could keep Callan talking, she could then lead him to some other place, some place where she could find some advantage against him. But where would that place be? It wasn’t like she’d be able to convince Callan she had left the bills at the precinct and have him march in there with her. Could she tell him what he was looking for was at The Players Club? George had keys. She could take Callan there. Perhaps his focus would drop for a moment along the way, giving her the opportunity to pounce.
Finally, because he was expecting an answer, she said: “Yes, I do.”
“Good. Where?”
“No. Not yet. First, George here is going to walk out of the apartment.”
“And run straight to the cops? Not a chance.”
“He’s an innocent. He has nothing to do with this.”
“You are not in a position to bargain here, Captain Heat,” Callan said, brandishing the gun at her, as if she needed the reminder.
“Oh, but I am. I’m the only person alive who knows where those bills are,” Heat bluffed. “And if you kill me, you’ll never recover them. But the executor of my estate has very specific instructions about what to do with them in the event of my untimely passing.”
Callan clenched his jaw.
“I should have gotten those bills off your mother when she first told me she had them,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
Callan actually smiled, then said: “Oh, I guess you wouldn’t know about that. That was why I first had the pleasure of interacting with your mother—because of those counterfeit bills. I was part of a task force with the Secret Service that was looking into foreign counterfeiting, and she came to me. After she told me about where she had gotten them from, it was clear she had to die. That’s when I ordered Petar Matic to kill her.”
“I thought it was because she had gotten onto your smallpox plot with Carey Maggs.”
“Well, yes. That, too. I had a couple irons in the fire back then, and your mother was trying to tug at all of them. She was circling around a bunch of stuff she could never quite grab. The smallpox plot was actually pretty far from being hatched at that point—Maggs needed a lot of time to get his operation up and running. The bills were actually the much more immediate issue on my mind when I dispatched Petar.”
Except Matic had never made it there—and obviously hadn’t admitted his failure to Callan. Tyler Wynn, who knew about Cynthia’s death sentence, had helped her fake her own death first. Not that Callan knew it.
“So you were working for the Shanghai Seven even back then?”
Callan got a funny look on his face. “Who I’m working for is none of your business. Now, I’m getting very tired of this conversation. You’ve got five seconds to tell me where the bills are before I shoot the old man, and then another five seconds before I shoot you.”
TWENTY
STORM
This is never going to work,” Derrick Storm said.
He was wearing two pairs of long johns and a pair of boots and standing next to his father on a winding country road just down from Jedediah Jones’s house. They were in Potomac Falls, amidst some of the most expensive real estate in the DC area, an enclave of the superrich and ultra-connected. It was still dark.
“Of course it’s going to work,” Carl said. “Haven’t I taught you anything about technology? If human beings are clever enough to design it, they’re usually clever enough to defeat it.”
“This is never going to work,” Derrick repeated.
His eyes were fixed on his father’s creation, which was the end result of an hour or so of odd errand running. It began with a predawn raid of a sod farm, which went off mostly smoothly—sod farms not being known for their excessive concern with theft. The only hitch was that the sod didn’t have any price tags on it. The Storms could only hope the one hundred dollars they left behind covered what they took.
It continued at a twenty-four-hour Walmart, where a tired checkout woman didn’t blink at the strange combination of purchases: two king-size blankets, four bags of tent pegs, two pairs of insulated boots, four pairs of long johns that were going to be far too snug on the men purchasing them, sweatpants and sweatshirts that were going to be too large, a package of razor blades, and Saran Wrap.
Lots and lots of Saran Wrap.
Finally, they stopped at a 7-Eleven not far from Jones’s house, where the Storms had emptied the freezer of ice bags.
“Thermal cameras rely on the fact that human beings emit body heat in the infrared spectrum,” Carl lectured. “But if there’s no body heat, there’s nothing for the camera to see. Now hurry up. We haven’t got all night here. Dawn will be here before you know it.”
Derrick was still shaking his head as he looked at what Carl had insisted they make. They had attached thick layers of sod to the king-sized blankets with the metal tent pegs, which had been bent to keep them in place after they were inserted. The result, a blanket of grass, looked ridiculous and weighed about two hundred pounds, s
o they weren’t exactly going to be flying across Jones’s front yard.
Then there was what Carl insisted they do to themselves.
“This is never going to work,” Derrick said.
“You keep emphasizing a different word in that sentence like it’s somehow going to change my mind. Your pessimism is disturbing. I thought I raised an optimist.”
“You did. You just didn’t raise a crazy person.”
“They said Van Gogh was crazy.”
“Because he was,” Derrick said. “The man chopped off his own ear and then later killed himself.”
“But he left behind art that is still being studied and marveled at.”
Derrick pointed to the grass blankets: “Yeah, Dad, these? No one is confusing these with Sunflowers or Irises.”
“Shut up and start wrapping,” Carl said.
This was the other part of Carl’s plan. After putting on their long johns to give them insulation, they were going to pack as much of their bodies in ice as they could stand. Then they were going to put clothes around the ice. Between that and the boots, very little of their body heat would be able to escape. Any that did would be absorbed by the blanket, and then ultimately by the grass, which would naturally maintain the same temperature as the surrounding atmosphere.
And that, in turn, would make them invisible to the infrared cameras.
Or at least that was the hope.
“This is nuts,” Derrick said as he flattened the first ice bag against his father’s chest.
“This is genius.”
“Yeah. Of the Van Gogh variety.”
Once Derrick had Carl wrapped, Carl returned the favor—if, in fact, having bags of ice strapped to one’s body could be characterized as such. They finished by putting the final layer of supersized clothing on over top, providing even more insulation.
Then they grabbed their grass blankets and began the walk toward Jones’s property.
“So run through this for me one more time,” Derrick said. “We’re going to sneak across the grass in this ridiculous getup until we reach the base of the house.”
“Right. The cameras are on the house, and they’re fixed, not moving. Once we’re snuggled up next to the foundation, they’ll no longer be able to see us. We slice off the ice bags—you did remember to grab your razor blade, right?”
Heat Storm (Castle) Page 19
