“Anyway, I rent a box at the UPS Store in Stamford, drive back a week later, and there it is waiting for me. ‘Discreetly packaged,’ as promised. Like I said, it was a pain in the ass, but it’s all part of preproduction.”
He lowered Spence’s head and shoulders to the floor, got a sturdy chair from the dining room table, and centered it ten feet from the front door.
“Now, I know you can’t talk yet, but you can hear me. I need you up in this chair. I’ll do most of the heavy lifting, but you got to help. Otherwise, zap, zap, zap. It’s an amazing little piece of business, this baton. Twenty-four of the twenty-eight reviews on the website gave it five stars. You can see why.”
Gabriel planted his hands under Spence’s armpits, grunted hard, and lifted him into the chair.
“Funny you should be naked,” he said. “It wasn’t in the script, but I like it. Makes you more vulnerable on camera. And the movie’s already rated R, so a little nudity doesn’t change anything.”
It took ten minutes for Spence to come to. By that time, his ankles and calves were duct-taped to the legs of the chair, and there was more tape wrapped around his torso, trapping his arms and hands behind him. A third swath of duct tape covered his mouth. He opened his eyes and saw Gabriel hovering in front of him.
“Well, good morning, Sleeping Beauty. Your prince has been waiting.”
He rested the tip of the stun baton on the chair between Spence’s open legs. “I’m taking the tape off your mouth,” he said. “If you yell, your voice will go up about twelve octaves.”
Spence nodded, then winced as Gabe yanked hard to remove the tape. “Who are you?” he whispered.
“I’m The Chameleon,” Gabriel said.
Spence stared at him in disbelief. “I don’t…I don’t understand. That’s the name of my new show. The Chameleon is my new character.”
“The one you stole from me,” Gabriel said. “I submitted that idea to you two years ago. I’m The Chameleon.”
The man was insane, and Spence shook his head, trying to process the information. “Okay,” he said. “You’re The Chameleon. I’m screening a pilot tonight. The central character is a private detective—a master of disguise. He’s also called The Chameleon. It’s a coincidence. I never stole—”
“I don’t care if you changed him to a detective or a bus driver or an astronaut,” Gabriel said, the anger raising his voice. “It’s still my idea. I sent it to you. I trusted you.”
“I believe you,” Spence said. “The thing is, people send me ideas every day, but I can’t read them. Most TV producers never read unsolicited pitches unless they come from an agent we work with.”
“Most TV producers lie through their teeth,” Gabriel said.
“I swear I’m telling you the truth,” Spence said. “The Chameleon is an idea that I had four years ago. I’ve been developing it ever since, and I finally—what are you doing?”
The Chameleon reached into his backpack. “Look what we have here,” he said. “And you thought the cattle prod was bad? This little movie of mine is just full of surprises, isn’t it?”
Spence screamed. “Help! Somebody! Help!”
Gabriel’s fist connected with Spence’s nose, and the screams were replaced by the sound of cartilage crunching and snapping. He pulled Spence’s head back and violently wrapped the duct tape around his mouth three times.
“You not only took my idea,” Gabriel said, holding up the object of Spence’s terror. “You took my life. And now, guess what, pretty boy? It’s payback time.”
Chapter 69
THERE ARE THREE dozen dogs in NYPD’s Emergency Services K-9 Unit. Half of them work narcotics, the other half are bomb sniffers. A few have been cross-trained to find cadavers. Even in a city the size of New York, on any given day, eighteen bomb-sniffing dogs would be more than enough.
But this was not any given day.
I called Sergeant Kyle Warren, the K-9 coordinator for all of NYPD. He’s only thirty-two years old, but he’s been training dogs since he was ten. I laid out the problem, and all he said was “I’m on it.”
Two hours later, Warren called back. He had recruited dogs from the state police in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and from as far north as the Ulster County Sheriff’s Department. By 5:00 p.m., our K-9 contingent was up to thirty-two.
Kylie and I were at the precinct, sticking pushpins into a map of the city that was tacked to a corkboard wall. Since we didn’t have enough dogs to cover every possible target, we had to decide which of them warranted a canine handler to be stationed there full-time, and which could be swept and then have the dog sent on to the next venue.
“I think Spence is right,” Kylie said. “The meatpacking district has to be the prime target. It’s where most of your A-listers are going to be. We should have at least half a dozen bomb-sniffing dogs working this area.”
“Knowing those A-listers,” I said, “I’ll bet we’d hit the jackpot if we sent in a couple of narco dogs as well.”
Kylie’s cell rang. Except it wasn’t her usual ringtone.
“Has my husband lost his mind?” she said. “It’s a Skype call from Spence. Does he really think I have nothing better to do than video-chat?”
“Consider yourself lucky,” I said. “He only calls me in the middle of the night.”
She held up her iPhone and connected to Skype.
“Oh my God. Zach…”
I looked over her shoulder. There on the iPhone screen was Spence, bound, gagged, and sitting totally naked in a chair.
“Spence…” was all Kylie could get out.
And then Gabriel Benoit stepped into the picture.
“Hello, Detective MacDonald. And there’s your sidekick, Detective Jordan, right behind you. I don’t know if you found my apartment yet,” Benoit said, “but I found yours.”
“What do you want?” Kylie said.
“I want you to suffer the same way you made me suffer. Do you know who that woman was that you killed this morning?”
“She was a cold-blooded murderer,” Kylie said. “She opened fire on a bunch of defenseless people.”
“Lexi was as innocent as a child,” Benoit said. “If she killed anyone, it’s because they deserved it.”
“What do you want?” Kylie repeated.
“Do you know how painful it is to lose someone you love?” Benoit asked.
Kylie didn’t answer.
“You’re about to find out,” he taunted.
He held up a fat block of C4 to the camera. There was a digital timer taped to it with one black wire and one white wire, both connected to a detonator buried deep in the plastic.
“You have thirty minutes,” Benoit said. “And then I will have taken from you, the same way you have taken from me.”
He pushed a button. The digital timer flashed 29:59 and began to count down the seconds. When it got to 29:55, he removed it from view, and once again we were looking at Kylie’s living room. Five seconds later, he hung up.
The screen went dark, but the last image I had seen would forever be burned onto my brain. Spence Harrington, naked, totally helpless, taped to a chair in his own apartment, alone and afraid, waiting to die.
Chapter 70
KYLIE BOLTED.
I grabbed a radio and was right behind her, taking the stairs two at a time.
“I need a PPV!” she yelled at Sergeant McGrath as she careened into the front desk and pushed aside a civilian. “Two-one-seven in progress.”
McGrath didn’t hesitate. If there was any bad blood from the earlier meeting, it was forgotten. A Two-one-seven was an assault with intent to kill, and Kylie was clearly a cop on a mission.
“Sixty-four Forty-two,” he said. “Chevy Caprice out front. Fastest PPV we got. Keys are in it.”
Kylie flew out the door and raced for the Chevy. She opened the front door, and I grabbed her by the arm.
“We should call the bomb squad,” I said.
She shoved me off.
“No. By the time they suit up, mobilize, find my apartment, and decide the safest way to defuse the bomb, Spence will be dead. It’s either me,” she said, “or you and me. Are you in or out?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She jumped into the driver’s seat and started the car.
“In!” I yelled, throwing myself into the passenger side as she peeled out and blasted through the red light on Lexington, light bars flashing, siren screaming.
“We should call for backup,” I said.
“Not until we get there and we can assess the situation,” she said, swinging onto Fifth. “We can’t take a chance on having some gung ho rookie showing up and deciding to play hero.”
“You think it’s any better to send a gung ho wife to play hero?”
“Dammit, Zach, I’ve got twenty-eight minutes,” she said. “I know where Spence is and how to get there, and I don’t have time to brief a backup unit and get them up to speed.”
Kylie made a hard right onto Central Park South, the ritzy stretch of 59th Street that runs from Grand Army Plaza at Fifth Avenue to Columbus Circle at Eighth. The street was lined with dozens of horse-drawn hansom cabs waiting to take willing tourists on a twenty-minute trot through the park for fifty bucks plus tip. Kylie leaned on the siren, then hopped the double yellow line into the eastbound lane, where there was a lot less traffic.
“We went through a list of every possible target,” she said. “How did we not think of Spence?”
“We were looking for the big cinematic finale,” I said. “But Benoit just turned this around into a vendetta. You killed his girlfriend.”
“Right,” she said. She turned left onto Seventh Avenue, skidded into the fire lane, and floored the Caprice. “So if Spence dies, it’s my fault.”
My cell phone rang. I looked at the caller ID. “It’s Cates,” I said. “McGrath must have told her we took off on a Two-one-seven.”
“Don’t pick it up,” Kylie said.
“Are you out of your mind?” I said. “She’s our boss.”
“Yes, right now I am totally out of my mind, and if we tell our boss what we’re doing, she might pull the plug. Zach, I know that Spence doesn’t mean much to you, but if you care about me, please, please, please don’t answer the phone.”
If I cared about her? Had I ever stopped caring? And now all that emotional baggage was threatening to drag down the only other thing I cared about. My career.
The phone rang a second time.
Cates’s caller ID flashed on the screen. Below that were two buttons. One green, one red: accept, decline.
They may just as well have said: lose, lose.
I will probably regret this for the rest of my life, I thought.
I pressed one of the buttons.
Chapter 71
EXT. 17TH STREET PIER, NEW YORK CITY—DAY
The Chameleon makes his final costume change and drives his rented Zipcar to the South Street Pier. His crew is waiting for him. Six men, three women, each dressed in the same uniform he is wearing—black pants, white shirt, white dinner jacket, and electric blue bow tie. He’s been working with them for three months now, and they are happy to see him.
“ARMANDO,” ONE OF the women called out to him as he jogged across the parking lot. “I was worried about you. You almost missed the boat.”
It was Adrienne Gomez-Bower, the pretty one with the curly jet-black hair, and the blatantly obvious crush on him. He doubted if she’d even look twice at Gabriel Benoit, but she totally had the hots for Armando Savoy, the brown-skinned, intense young actor, born in Buenos Aires, raised in Marseilles, and trying to make it big in New York.
“Adrienne, ma chérie,” he said as he leaned toward her and gave her the traditional French faire la bise, a kiss on each cheek. “Sorry I’m late. I had a callback for the new Mamet play. It’s down to me and two other guys.”
“Oh my God, Armando—a David Mamet play?” she said. “How awesome would that be? I swear, if you get the part, I will be front row center on opening night, even if I have to sell my body to pay for the tickets.”
Another time and he would have enjoyed kicking up the sexual tension a few more notches. Lexi wouldn’t mind. She knew it was all part of his act. But now with her gone, coming on to Adrienne felt too much like cheating.
“Anyway, boss,” he said. “Sorry I’m late.”
Adrienne was the crew chief, and she smiled. “I’ll let it slide,” she said. “But next time I may have to come down hard on you.”
Gabriel pretended not to notice the innuendo and stepped to the back of one of the catering trucks. “Who’s hosting this little soiree?” he asked.
“Shelley Trager,” Adrienne said. “He’s a multizillionaire TV producer. You see the yacht we’re working on? It’s not a rental. He owns it. He’s got a hundred and twenty-seven guests, most of them connected to the biz. Maybe one of us will get discovered.”
“I hope it’s you,” Gabriel said, wheeling a dolly under eight racks of wine glasses. He took off his white dinner jacket and laid it across the top rack. The jacket weighed eighty pounds. Lexi had sewn sixteen waterproof canvas pockets on the inside, and he’d stuffed each one of them with five pounds of C4. He’d used only twenty pounds at Harrington’s apartment, so this was way more than enough.
“I’m flattered that you hope that it’s me,” Adrienne said. “But what about you? Don’t you want to get discovered?”
Gabriel tipped the dolly and began to push it up the ramp of the waiting yacht. “Not tonight, boss,” he said. “Not tonight.”
Chapter 72
TRAFFIC SCRAMBLED TO get out of our way as we tore down Seventh Avenue at autobahn speed. “Thank you,” Kylie said, eyes glued to the road.
I didn’t respond.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?” I mumbled.
“What do you think? Come on, Zach—Cates asked you to ride herd over me, and three days later, you’ve gone off the reservation. That’s my fault.”
“It was my choice not to answer the phone,” I said.
“Okay. But thank you. I mean it. I owe you big-time. Spence and I both owe you.”
“Great,” I said. “Maybe he can help me find a job in security at Silvercup.”
She turned and smiled at me, nearly plowing into a cab that couldn’t get out of her way fast enough.
Under ordinary circumstances, it would have taken twenty minutes to get to Kylie’s apartment in Tribeca. But with lights, sirens, and an absolute madwoman behind the wheel, we made it in eight and a half.
The Caprice screeched to a hard stop at the corner of Washington and Laight streets in front of an elegant eight-story redbrick building that had long ago been the Pearline Soap Factory. Tens of millions of dollars later, it had been transformed into a symbol of the ultimate chic that now defines lower Manhattan. No one on a cop’s salary could possibly afford to live there. Spence was obviously a good provider.
“Seventh floor,” Kylie said as we raced into the lobby. The elevator was right there, doors wide open, but she ran past it and into the stairwell.
I followed.
“Elevator’s too slow. This is the fastest way,” she said, giving the obvious answer to a question I hadn’t even bothered asking.
“Do we have a plan?” I said as we got to the fifth-floor landing.
“No. Yes. I don’t know. Damn it, Zach, we don’t need an NYPD Red master plan for every little thing. I just want to get in, get Spence out, warn the neighbors, and get our asses out of the building. If it blows, it blows.”
It made sense. In, out, run. Simple. There was no time to try to disarm a bomb.
We crashed through the stairwell door on seven, and turned right. There were only two apartments on the floor. Kylie’s was in the front.
She pulled a key out of her pocket and jammed it into the lock on Apartment 7A.
In, out, run, I kept saying to myself. Simple. But something wasn’t sitting right.
Kylie turn
ed the key, and in that split second I knew. Nothing that came from the twisted mind of Gabriel Benoit was ever simple.
I lunged at her and threw her to the floor.
“What the fuck?” she screamed.
“It’s booby-trapped,” I said.
She stared at me, half believing, half in denial, because undoing a booby trap takes time, and we were running out fast.
“How do you know?” she said.
“I don’t. But I know Benoit. He gave us more than enough time to get here. He wants us to barge through that door.”
“We have to get in,” she said. “Spence is in there.”
“Quiet.” I stood right up against the door and yelled. “Spence!”
He responded with a series of high-pitched shrieks. I knew from the Skype call that his mouth was duct-taped. He couldn’t utter a word, but it was clear from the urgency and the inflection in every cry that he wasn’t just asking for help. He was giving us a warning.
“Spence,” I said, “is it safe to open the door? Grunt once for yes. Twice for no.”
The answer came back loud and clear. Two muffled, yet distinctly separate, penetrating sounds. No.
“Is the door wired with explosives?”
A single grunt. Yes.
Every ounce of confidence and bravado drained from Kylie’s face. She had made all the calls—no bomb squad, no backup, just storm the castle and save the day on her own—and now it looked like every single call she had made was wrong.
“Zach…,” she said, looking as vulnerable and helpless as I’d ever seen her.
Suddenly saving Spence’s life was all on me. I shut my eyes and tried to picture every square on the chessboard.
“We have seventeen minutes,” she said.
No time to overthink.
“Spence!” I yelled through the door. “Can I come through the window?”
One grunt. And then…nothing.
Yes.
It was the answer I’d been hoping for.
“That’s it,” I said to Kylie. “I can get in through the window.”
NYPD Red Page 17
