Frozen Heat nh-4

by Richard Castle

  Nearly every surface in the station wore a coat of graffiti: the wall tiles; the banisters; the support pillars. Soda cans as well as broken wine and beer bottles littered the ground, collected in corners, and rested next to a plastic cooler on the decaying concrete stairs. The doors to both restrooms had been broken off and taken. Nikki didn’t venture inside either one but could see and smell the violations inside the battered, tagged stalls.

  This was the handiwork of the Mole People, she assumed. The Moles were the stuff of urban legends in the New York underground, which told of tribes of misfit subcultures that had organized to rule these tunnels. In reality, they were just tag artists making their marks or homeless who survived in the musty darkness. There had been a TV drama called Beauty and the Beast Nikki watched when she was in grade school that was about a lion man living below like that, but she had never seen dear, urbane Vincent with a spray can and a bottle of fortified wine.

  A noise behind her made her turn and switch off her light. As her eyes adjusted to the muted street glow filtering down through the grates she and Rook had investigated, Nikki figured she must have heard the approach of another train. This one raced downtown on the opposite side of the tunnel from her. She waited until it passed before she lit up her phone again. She didn’t want to chance being seen and reported. She had work to do.

  Nikki began old school, just like the station. She looked for footprints. A thick layer of soot and dust coated everything down there, and if Nicole Bernardin indeed had been there before she was killed, Heat just might find hers. She squatted down and held her light close to the floor. Slowly, patiently, she swept the beam just inches above it, alert for any disturbance or telltale shape that she might follow to the hiding place. The problem was that so many Moles had used the platform that the footprints were myriad. She made one more pass, this time walking the station floor in a stoop, seeing if any smaller, female prints emerged, but none did.

  Next, she searched the ticket booth, which only took seconds. It had long ago been trashed and gutted. As she’d expected, both restrooms presented no hiding places when she examined them, too. The cooler on the stairs was empty, as was the inside of the ticket shredder, whose door had been pried off and left on the ground. She even inspected the bottom of the sidewalk grate itself, in case that was, literally, where Nicole had been styling. It wasn’t.

  Unable to accept defeat, Nikki ignored her frustration and thought. Again she put herself in her mother’s shoes, asking herself, if she had been Cynthia Heat, and had been directed to find the drop, would Nicole expect her to search for footprints in the dust?

  No.

  Then what? How would Nicole let her know exactly where to look?

  By giving her a clue.

  And she had-the bracelet with the numeral charms.

  Nikki looked up at the nine and the one embedded in the wall.

  Could it be?

  It was too high for her to reach, so Nikki surveyed the place for something to stand on. She climbed back up the steps, came down with the plastic cooler, and set it on the ground to use as a stepstool.

  Nikki’s phone vibrated in her hand, startling her. The caller ID said it was Rook. Damn, she forgot to call Rook. She pushed accept and said, “Hey, guess what? I made it down here, and I-” Her ear filled with the dropped-call beep. She tried to redial him but the lone reception bar faded out and she got the “No Signal” display.

  Carefully balancing herself on the cooler, Heat reached up and ran her fingers along the flamboyantly scrolled edges of the “91” faceplate. It felt loose.

  It moved.

  Nikki set her phone on the ground, positioned the light to shine up the wall, and got back on the cooler, stretching out so that the fingertips of each hand were on either side of the faceplate. Her arms ached from the awkwardness of her position, but she kept prying, feeling the panel coming looser from the wall with her effort.

  As she struggled, tugging at one side and then the other, Nikki envisioned her mother working on the same panel ten years before. What did Cynthia Heat find, she wondered, and was it what had sealed her fate? And what about Nicole Bernardin? If Nicole had placed something here in her drop box so many years later, what could that be? And who did she leave it for? And why was it worth killing her over?

  Just then the faceplate popped out of the wall and Nikki fell backward off the cooler, landing hard on the floor, still clutching it.

  “I’ll take it from here,” said the man’s voice behind her.

  Nikki rolled to her knees and reached for her gun, but before she could get to her holster, she got blinded by a strong flashlight beam and heard the action slide on a pistol. “Touch it, and you’ll die right there,” said Tyler Wynn.

  Heat dropped her hand to her side. “Lace your fingers behind your neck, please.” She did as he told her and squinted beyond the light to try to the see the old man as he stepped forward from the top of the ladder onto the platform.

  “You’re every bit as good as your mother, Nikki. Maybe better.” He swung the light out of her eyes and shined it up on the wall where a tan leather pouch sat inside the recess she had exposed. “Thanks for finding this for me. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to retrieve it.”

  “You mean like faking your death?”

  “Miraculous recovery, wouldn’t you say? Do you know I actually paid that doctor extra to zap me with low voltage just to be convincing?” He trained the beam back on her face. “Don’t look so disappointed. One thing you learn in the CIA. Nobody is ever really dead for certain.”

  “I know one woman who is. And you killed her.”

  “Not personally. I had hired help do that. In fact, I think you two know each other.” He called over his shoulder to someone Nikki couldn’t see. “You’d better get up from there, unless you want to get run over. The next train is due any minute.”

  She heard footfalls on the metal rungs and a silhouette came up from the tracks behind Tyler Wynn, who said, “Take her gun.”

  And when the other man stepped forward into the light and Heat saw who it was, her heart punched all the air from her chest.

  NINETEEN

  “Petar.”

  It was all Heat could manage to say. She had no breath for more, as if the oxygen had been sucked from the tunnel. But those two hoarse syllables spoke volumes. She whispered her old lover’s name as both a question and an answer. And the weight she gave the word articulated a sour array of feelings suspended from it on sharp, cutting hooks:

  Betrayal. Sadness. Shock. Disbelief. Blindness. Anger. Hatred.

  Petar’s face displayed no shame or regret as he moved toward Nikki. His eyes met hers and she saw in them something like amusement. No, arrogance.

  Heat thought of going for her gun. Even if Tyler Wynn hit her, she might get off a shot at Petar. He was armed, too, but holding his Glock sloppily. She could do it.

  “I wouldn’t,” said the voice behind the flashlight. Tyler Wynn, the living ghost in the Ghost Station, had read her. So much for making the play.

  Petar took her Sig.

  “Good.” Tyler stepped a little closer. “I’ve seen so many people try something stupid when emotions take over.”

  Nikki twisted to look up at Petar. “You killed her? Fuck you.”

  All Petar did was take a step back while he tucked her gun into this waistband. He looked past her in pure dismissal. To him, she was just a chore.

  “I said, ‘Fuck you.’”

  “You two will have time to air things out after I leave. Petar, get the bag, please.”

  Petar stepped behind her, and Nikki could hear him sliding the cooler back under Nicole’s drop box. She tried to wall out her torment and get strategic. Petar would need to pocket his gun to reach up for that pouch. If only she weren’t on her knees, she might have a shot at catching Wynn with a surprise kick. He had read her before, so she covered with conversation. “Was it you that Carter Damon called on the burner cell to get the green light to kill Nico
le?”

  “That was for logistics. Petar did the actual work.”

  “And he called you again. Was that to set up the visiting nurse to spy on us?”

  “I am a creature of habit. Once you run a Nanny Network, it’s hard to stop.”

  She didn’t ask permission, just kept her hands behind her neck and eased up off the ground onto her feet as she spoke. “I really thought Carter Damon killed my mother.”

  “No, he was there after, for cleanup.” Petar fell off the cooler behind her and swore. She noticed Wynn become alert and didn’t make her move. When Petar stepped up on it again, he relaxed and continued, “Detective Damon was quite an asset until the very end when he got a dying man’s conscience and tried to text you.”

  “The interrupted text,” she said, inching closer.

  “Yes, we caught him trying to reach out to you to make amends. Bad for his health, it turned out.”

  “The Brooklyn Bridge?”

  Wynn nodded. “His attempted confession gave me the idea of staging his suicide with another text taking responsibility for the murders. Seemed win-win.”

  Nikki said, “More like win Wynn,” pointing at him. And when she extended her arm to do that, she used it as a feint to lunge for him.

  The old man anticipated her and quickly got her in a choke hold, pressing the muzzle of his gun against her temple. “What? Do you want me to shoot you? Well, do you?” Nikki stayed still. “I will if I have to, but I’d rather not. In fact, I’ve been thinking train mishap. More ambiguous to the police than a bullet, but I’m happy to improvise, if you force my hand.” He pressed the muzzle harder against her flesh. “This gun is a throwdown I can easily plant at Rook’s loft. Do the math on that before you make me shoot you with it. Understood?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He just shoved her away.

  Petar came down from the drop box and handed him the leather pouch. Tyler whispered instructions to him. She picked up “after the next train,” but the rest was lost in the racket as a downtown subway rushed through on the far side of the tunnel.

  Heat battled to keep her head under the crush of emotions coming down on her. Self-anger dominated. She found herself sucked back to Paris, in the Place des Vosges, where she had felt unsettled about something she couldn’t articulate. Now, waiting to be killed in the Ghost Station, the nagging thought defined itself, albeit a bit late. As usual, it was the odd sock.

  “I should have known,” she said to Wynn. She shook her head, unhappy with herself. “I should have smelled it back at the hospital when your ‘dying words’ were urging me to nail the bastards who killed my mom, that’s what you said.”

  “I did.”

  “But I never asked myself, if you were CIA and were so passionate about avenging my mother’s death, why didn’t you do it yourself? You had ten years and all the resources.”

  He smiled. “Don’t feel bad. I’ve fooled more experienced players than you, and for much longer.” A train began to approach them from downtown. Blocks away, but the soft rumble drifted up the tunnel. Nikki’s chest seized with sudden urgency.

  “Why did you have my mother killed?”

  “Because I didn’t fool her. When she found out I had gone independent in the interval between Paris and when I reactivated her in New York, she had to go. She just had to. Up to then, she thought working for me meant she’d still been working for CIA. Then she found out who I was really working for and, unfortunately for her, what the project was.”

  “You killed her for that?”

  “Your mother’s sense of mission is what killed her. She was just like you.”

  They stood as statues when an uptown train raced through, rattling the station and making the hair on their heads lift and swirl. The moment it passed, Petar took out his gun. Tyler Wynn holstered his under his sport coat and climbed down the ladder to the tracks. “Should have four to six minutes before the next train.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time,” said Petar, switching on his Mini Maglite. “Catch you after.”

  Nikki watched just Wynn’s disembodied head move along the platform as he walked the tracks. “Tyler.” He stopped. “What’s in the pouch?”

  “You’ll never know.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  Wynn said, “Shoot her, if you have to.” Then started his walk back to the 96th Street station.

  Heat made up her mind she would kill Petar.

  That’s how she would survive. The only question was, would she enjoy it? And what would that make her if she did?

  Alive. That was all she cared about. The morality of how she felt, she would gladly sort out in her old age.

  She had already figured out their plan. It wasn’t hard to. The next train would rocket past in four to six minutes, and the idea was for her to be in front of it when it did. So she had five minutes, give or take, to get it done.

  “So there’s no way to call this off?”

  Petar didn’t engage. He stood silently, close enough to be accurate with his Glock but distant enough to be out of reach if she made a run at him. At the moment, their plan was better than hers.

  “A head start for old times’ sake?” Still no reply. He watched her but without looking at her.

  It was hard for Nikki to even see Petar as the same man she had fallen for. She had not gone to Venice in the summer of ‘99 seeking romance but passion of another kind: her love of theater. Other students interning at the Gran Teatro La Fenice had asked her out, and she had a series of first dates, but nothing serious. Until the night at the Ai Speci wine bar when she met an earnest-looking Croatian film student visiting the city to shoot a documentary on Tommaseo, the renowned Italian essayist. Within a week, Petar Matic had moved out of his hostel into her apartment. After Venice, they spent a month touring Paris before she returned to Boston to start her fall semester at Northeastern. He surprised her by sliding into her booth one morning in the student union, saying that he missed her so much, he’d enrolled there himself.

  “Just tell me one thing, you owe me that,” she said, still trying to engage him. “Did Tyler actually go to all the trouble to find out who I was dating and then recruit you to kill my mother?”

  That got a reaction from him. He snorted and shifted his weight back onto one of the support pillars. “You like to flatter yourself? Go ahead.”

  “I’m not flattering myself, I’m just trying to figure out Tyler’s approach. ‘Hello, young man, would you be interested in earning a few extra dollars murdering your girlfriend’s mom?’”

  “See, that’s where your head’s up your own ass. Nikki, do you honestly believe our relationship was ever about romance?” Heat felt herself absorbing yet another emotional shock but kept the conversation going, kept pushing.

  “Sure felt like it to me.”

  He laughed. “It was supposed to. Come on, do you think we met in Venice by accident? Like it was Kismet? It was a job, man. The whole thing was a setup.”

  “You mean like ‘accidentally’ running into me and Rook in Boston? Was that to find out what I knew?”

  “No, I was just tailing you. Or was, until fucking Rook spotted me. My assignment in Venice was to get in your pants and work that to get close to your mom.”

  “To kill her?”

  “Not at first. To find out some things.”

  “And then kill her.” Nikki gritted her teeth, fending off her own fury to stay focused on getting him distracted.

  “Yeah, kill her. Like I said, it was a job. I’m good at it.”

  “Except for the suitcase.”

  “Right. I fucked that up. I used that old piece of shit to carry papers from your mom’s desk and forgot all about it. Hey, it was ten years, I’m allowed one.”

  “That’s not all you screwed up.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The High Line. You were the sniper, weren’t you?”

  “And?”

  “And you blew the shot.”

  “I didn’t blow the sho
t. There was an earthquake.”

  “Then you blew the second shot.”

  “No way.”

  “And the one you could have taken at the end of the line. I saw the laser dot. But instead, you jumped.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You bet I am.” Nikki took a step toward him.

  “Stay where you are.”

  She took another step. “I want you to shoot me.”

  “What?” He shined the light in her eyes and raised his gun, but she took another step. “I’m warning you, stop.”

  She moved closer. “You seem to be real good at slipping knives in women’s backs. Can you put one of those bullets in me? No you can’t. Come on, Pet. Face-to-face. Right here. Bring it on. I’ll even make a better target for you.” She moved closer yet.

  But he took a step back and bumped into the support pillar he’d been leaning on. A sound like the low roar of the sea floated up the tunnel. The train was coming. Right on time. He wagged the gun, gesturing her to step to the edge.

  Heat stood firm.

  “Go on. Let’s not make this harder than it has to be.”

  “For whom, Petar?” She took one more stride closer. They were only three feet apart, and for the first time, she could look into his eyes. And he, into hers.

  “Now,” he shouted.

  “Do you really think I’m going to make this easy for you? Stand with my back to you so you can give me a shove?”

  His eyes darted away, then returned.

  The roar grew into a rumble. The concrete platform vibrated.