Burn: (Michael Bennett 7)

by James Patterson

  Arturo and I went back down the ladder and sprinted out of the bank and past a middle-aged Hispanic guard into the five-story construction site. I cursed and immediately started running when I saw that the site went all the way through the block to Forty-Sixth Street.

  “Hey, you see anybody come through here in the last twenty minutes or so?” I yelled at a thinner, younger, and more bored-looking version of the Forty-Seventh Street guard.

  He squinted as he began picking at his teeth with his pinkie.

  “Just those three messenger dudes,” he said as he wiped his pinky on the lap of his cheap rent-a-cop pants.

  “Bike messengers? Where’d they go?” I said.

  “They got on their bikes and, like, jetted, you know. I wasn’t really watching them. I just check people coming in, man. I figured they must have come in from Roberto’s side. Did they have anything to do with those alarms?”

  “Where were the bikes?” Arturo said.

  “They had them, like, chained to the shed pole there.”

  “What did they look like?” I said.

  “They was, like, three white boys, like ESPN host types.”

  Three minutes later, Arturo and I were in the dingy, sweltering back security room of a Dressbarn beside the construction site on Forty-Sixth Street, playing back footage from its sidewalk-facing security camera.

  The first guy came out from under the construction site’s shed with the bike at the 12:13 mark.

  He was a medium-size man in black-and-white sport-racing gear on a modern sky-blue multisport bike that had weird, almost cartoonishly thick black tires. The other two were on beat-up silver bikes and were wearing camo shorts and gray hoodies. It was hard to get their facial features under their sunglasses and helmets, but the sizes and general descriptions were a match for our suspects, three thirty-something white guys, two large and one smaller.

  I was calling in the descriptions when I screamed at Arturo.

  “Wait! Hit the Pause button!”

  In the security footage, the biggest and smallest suspects had immediately crossed to the south side of the street without incident, but the third one, the medium-size guy on the blue bike, had to stop at the rear of a UPS truck to wait for a Poland Spring water truck to pass.

  I bent closer to the desktop security monitor until my nose was almost touching the screen. Then I turned and fled the cramped room.

  “Lopez, come on!” I yelled, scrambling at top speed out the back-room corridor into the bright store, past the bulging racks of clothes.

  “What the hell, Mike?”

  Instead of answering him, I pushed out through the front doors and back out onto the street.

  “Freeze! Police! Don’t move!” I yelled at the UPS guy twenty feet to the east, who was rolling an empty hand truck toward the rear of the brown truck in front of the store.

  “Mike, what the hell?” Lopez repeated behind me.

  “The medium-size guy on the blue bike touched the truck here to balance himself when he was crossing the street,” I said, pointing at the UPS truck’s gate. “He wasn’t wearing gloves. Arturo, we need to get CSI down here yesterday. I think we just got lucky. I think we just got ourselves a print.”

  CHAPTER 97

  I WAS RIGHT. We did get lucky. Half an hour later, all the planets finally aligned.

  The prints that veteran CSU tech officer Gabriela Tremane took were beautiful. From the rear rolling gate of the UPS truck, she had peeled picture-perfect thumb, index, and middle fingerprints and a partial palm of the suspect’s right hand. Then, right there on the spot in front of the Dressbarn, she put them into her portable scanner, and before I even had a chance to cross my fingers, she smiled knowingly.

  “We have a winner,” she said. “He’s in the system. Jeremy Rylan. Two Beekman Street, apartment four H, New York, New York.”

  “If I weren’t in such a hurry, I’d go in there and buy you a dress, Gabriela. Make that two,” I said as I hopped into an undercover Chevy that we borrowed from the responding Midtown South detective squad.

  “And I’d, uh, help you raise a barn to put it in,” Arturo said merrily as he hopped in beside me.

  The address was downtown near City Hall on the northern end of the Financial District, at the intersection of Nassau and Beekman. It was a really nice, architecturally interesting building, a nineteenth-century palace of terra-cotta and brick that made me think of a red velvet wedding cake.

  About an hour and twenty minutes had passed from the time of the robbery when we pulled up to the address. That was our advantage. There was no way Rylan would suspect that we could be onto him so fast. Especially after all the success he’d had.

  As we were just about to get out of the car, we saw a guy on the sidewalk turn off the corner of Nassau from the north.

  It was a guy on a bike.

  A fancy sky-blue bike with funky black tires!

  Too bad Rylan saw us at the same second. He immediately spun a lightning 180 and whipped to the right down Nassau.

  I gunned the engine and roared forward into the intersection in pursuit.

  For eight feet.

  Nassau, the one-way street he’d turned down, at the moment was a no-way street. The middle of the road had been ripped up and a World War I–style trench was carved into the center of it, where earthmoving equipment stood behind barricades. Our car wouldn’t fit, and Rylan was on the left-hand sidewalk racing away.

  I ripped the transmission into park and jumped out into the street, hitting the sidewalk at a dead run.

  “He’s heading south!” I yelled to Arturo as I ran, clutching my radio like a sprinter’s baton. “There’s not much Manhattan left where he can hide. Coordinate with everyone. We need to box him in!”

  On the sidewalk, I immediately almost plowed into a trio of Jamaican construction workers pushing a Sheetrock-filled Dumpster out of a building. As I ran stumbling into the street, alongside the construction barrier I could see that Rylan was already at the next corner, Ann Street, slaloming around pedestrians.

  As I watched, Rylan blasted through an old Chinese food delivery guy, sending him flying back into the intersection. Then there was a sickening, bone-crunching crash as the Chinese guy got creamed by another bike messenger, a teenage Asian guy coming west on Ann.

  As I ran up, I could see that the poor old food delivery guy’s nose and mouth were bleeding as he crawled around in the gutter on his hands and knees. On the ground beside him, the teen biker was making a hissing sound as he rocked back and forth, gently cradling what looked like a badly broken wrist.

  “I need to borrow this!” I yelled as I jumped on the messenger’s fallen bike. “You’ll get it back. I think.”

  CHAPTER 98

  I LOOKED UP TO see Rylan make an abrupt left onto Fulton Street, but when I got there, no blue bike was to be seen down the narrow street or on either sidewalk. Then my eyes fell on the descending stairs to the subway in the left-hand sidewalk, and I jumped off the bike and lifted it as I ran down the stairs.

  There was a yell as I hopped the turnstile with the bike and came out onto a train platform. I could see a businesswoman sprawled on her back and just beyond her, Rylan on his sky-blue bike pedaling like mad.

  “Move, move!” I yelled to the waiting passengers as I followed Rylan down the platform. At the other end of it was a set of three steps that I had to hop off the bike to mount. At the top, I spotted Rylan pedaling furiously down a long, brand-new pedestrian tunnel with shining white graffiti-free tiled walls.

  I watched Rylan go around a bend in the tunnel, and when I finally got around the bend myself, I was just in time to see him leap nimbly off his bike and carry it gracefully through an exit turnstile before taking the stairs two at a time.

  Damn, this guy is in good shape, I thought, gasping as my elbow painfully clipped the metal frame of a billboard on the wall.

  Finally coming up the exit stairs into daylight, I could see Rylan in the distance, south along traffic-fill
ed lower Broadway. He skidded around a dog walker in the crosswalk, then did an actual wheelie between an old tow truck and a Smart car blocking the box.

  “Arturo! Come to Broadway! We’re on Broadway heading south!” I yelled into the radio as I split the gap between a flatbed and a Range Rover.

  Through my sweat, I was just able to see Rylan shoot around a pedicab and hook a right off Broadway onto Dey Street. Following him a moment later, I slammed the side of a delivery truck with a palm as it almost ran me over. Then I wobbled to my right and scraped the left side of my face against the side of a stopped city bus. A jutting burr or bolt or something on the bus cut my ear, and I added blood to the sweat I was already dripping onto the blurring asphalt.

  When I made a lane-shifting, skidding right onto Dey myself, I was just able to see Rylan’s sky-blue guided missile make a left onto Church. I knew Church turned into Trinity Place, where the first Manhattan robbery had occurred.

  Is that where he’s heading? I wondered between my ragged breaths.

  It wasn’t, I found out a few seconds later. Rylan made a right on Rector, and then as I hit Rector, I saw him make a left onto West Street.

  “He’s coming south on West Street,” I called happily to Arturo as I pedaled like a man possessed. We were near Battery Park now, Manhattan’s southernmost tip, and Rylan, for all his phenomenal riding skills, was running out of city.

  “Pin it down Broadway, Arturo,” I called into the radio over the driving tempo of my bike chain, “and you can cut him off by the Battery! There’s nowhere to run!”

  But I spoke too soon.

  Far ahead, I watched Rylan, racing down West Street, suddenly veer to the left and do a bunny hop over a low railing. Then he was rocketing down a short embankment onto an entrance ramp under an overpass. As I got closer, I read the sign on the overpass he’d just disappeared into and groaned.

  HUGH L. CAREY TUNNEL, it said.

  CHAPTER 99

  WHEN I GOT TO the spot where Rylan had jumped the rail, I stopped and lifted the bike over it and jogged down the embankment with it like a civilized madman. A multitude of drivers lay on their horns as I hopped back onto the bike on the entrance ramp’s shoulder.

  “It’s OK,” I said to them. “It’s all right. I was actually dumb enough to want to be a cop.”

  After I skittered over an empty Coors Light bottle on the shoulder, almost wiping out, I pawed for the radio in the pocket of my raid jacket to tell Arturo my location. That was when I noticed something. My radio was AWOL. It had fallen out of my pocket during all my running and jumping around.

  I screamed in frustration as I stood up on the pedals and started pumping into the dark mouth of the tunnel for the first leg of my Tour de Brooklyn.

  The inside of the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel, more commonly called the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, was about as charming as you would think. It was humid and dark, the air so thick with exhaust my lungs felt like they were chewing on it. To add some excitement to my recreational afternoon spin, I almost came off the seat as I hit a dip, only a moment later to have an eye-opening seat-to-crotch collision as I hit an unseen metal street plate.

  A gust from a massive speeding Verizon reel truck had almost plastered me to the tunnel’s dirty tiled wall when a blue light started bubbling behind me. There was the deafening double bloop of a siren, and I turned to see a sight for sore eyes.

  “Mike!” Arturo said from our Chevy’s driver-side window as I hopped off the still-rolling bike and ran for the car.

  I shoved Arturo over to the passenger side and pinned it. Now, this is more like it, I thought as we roared at top speed.

  “What’s up, man? You’re bleeding like a stuck pig,” Arturo said.

  “Thanks for noticing, Lopez,” I said as I gunned it on the shoulder, siren blasting.

  I weaved around the Verizon truck, and after another thirty seconds, I could see light at the far end of the slightly curving tunnel. What I couldn’t see was any sign of Rylan as we came out into daylight by the tollbooths.

  Then I did see him out of the corner of my left eye, a speck of light blue as Rylan, running with the bike on his shoulder, hopped over the railing on the opposite side of the Gowanus Expressway.

  I hit the switch for the car’s megaphone as I turned all the sirens up to eleven. “Go through the tolls! Now! Move, move!” I called to the three cars I was waiting behind.

  We jetted through the tolls and hit the first exit ramp we could find, a quarter mile farther south down the Gowanus. I floored through the light at the end of it, and kept it floored until I saw an underpass in the direction where Rylan had bolted.

  We roared through, into a quiet residential Brooklyn neighborhood of brownstones and low buildings, screeching to a stop at intersections to look up and down the blocks. We were stopped at the third one, beside a dry cleaner, when we saw Rylan bullet across the road three blocks ahead. We got to the corner just in time to see him disappear under yet another underpass.

  “Now he’s just starting to piss me off,” I said as I raced down the hill.

  On the other side of the underpass, the residential neighborhood morphed into an industrial area. There were clusters of windowless industrial hangars behind rusting chain-link on the right, a sole orange Hyundai shipping container in a weed- and rubble-strewn field on the left, and Rylan in the middle of the forlorn street between them, still pedaling madly.

  But we were gaining on him now.

  Rylan rolled up on the sidewalk to the right and looked back at us once under his left arm the way a jockey would. Then again.

  Then he simply disappeared.

  There was a guardrail at the foot of the dead-end industrial block, and Rylan hit it head-on at almost thirty miles an hour and went flying up, up, and away over the handlebars and into a stand of high strawberry-blond weeds.

  If it weren’t for the ABS on the Chevy, we would surely have hit the guardrail as well. Instead, we skidded to a hard, seat-belt-whipping stop against the raised curb, and I was out of the car and over the rail, scrambling and sliding over takeout containers and Preston cans down a weedy, rocky slope toward where Rylan was doing the doggy paddle in a body of brownish water.

  I stared around me in wide-eyed wonder at the seagulls wheeling over the recycling center on the opposite shoreline and the 1950s-era Airstream trailer with plastic covering its rear windows jutting from the middle of the water behind Rylan like a half-sunken art deco sub.

  Rylan had been flung into the Gowanus Canal, one of the most polluted bodies of water in New York City and probably on the planet. Despite the afternoon’s heart-attack-inducing chase, I actually felt sorry for the poor guy. Especially after I was treated to the canal’s aroma, which was heavy on the raw sewage, accompanied by strong sulfur notes and a not-so-invigorating waft of burnt plastic.

  Rylan, doggy-paddling about thirty feet from where I stood, made a few valiant strokes away, as if he were actually going to try to swim the nearly two-mile-long canal.

  “Really, Rylan?” I said, trying to control my gag reflex. “I mean really?”

  He looked at me again and then lowered his eyes and quickly began swimming back toward me.

  CHAPTER 100

  AN HOUR LATER, ARTURO and I were huddled together in a dim closet in the Major Crimes Division squad room watching closed-circuit video of Rylan in interview #2.

  The puffy-marshmallow white Tyvek jumpsuit we’d let him change into from his stinking clothes made an annoying crinkling sound as Rylan, arms crossed, rocked back and forth with his head down. With his lean, boyish good looks, he reminded me of an athlete, a closing pitcher angry at himself for having just given up a disastrous home run on the game’s last pitch.

  “For a guy who claims he doesn’t know what the heck is going on, he sure seems pretty darn upset,” Arturo said.

  Arturo was right.

  Rylan had been playing dumb so far, acting relieved when we said we were cops and quickly apologizing for running, claimi
ng he owed some scary guys a gambling debt. He also claimed he didn’t know why in the world we were chasing him and since there seemed to be some kind of huge mistake, it would probably be best to have his lawyer sort it out.

  In the meantime, we’d had a chance to go over his priors. We learned that instead of being a burglar in his previous life, Rylan had run a small Wall Street investment firm that had been exposed as a Bernie Madoff–like Ponzi scheme. He’d done two years at a white-collar prison and had gotten out almost two years before.

  Rylan didn’t have a Facebook profile, but I managed to google a New York Magazine article about young Wall Street hotshots that described his rising from a tough section of Staten Island to become the captain and quarterback of the Columbia University football team.

  I shook my head at Rylan on the screen as he rolled his office chair into the corner and began cursing at himself.

  “I don’t know how good he was in the pocket uptown at Columbia, Arturo,” I said, “but I don’t think even Eli Manning could scramble his way out of this bloody mess.”

  On the other side of the squad room was the office of my boss, Miriam Schwartz, now abuzz with several VIP visitors. The Manhattan DA had shown up along with the chief of detectives. The FBI had even sent over a couple of bank robbery guys. The press didn’t know that we had made an arrest, and we wanted it to stay that way. There were still Rylan’s accomplices to round up, along with the over four million in gems still missing from all the heists.

  Speaking of things that were still missing, the contents of the bank safe-deposit box were still a mystery. The bank had told us that the box was registered to one Aaron Buswell. What was curious was that there was no Aaron Buswell in the New York State driver’s license system, and the contact number given was disconnected.

  On a brighter note, Brooklyn and Robertson had re-interviewed the young guard at the construction site next to the bank, who broke down and revealed that he had been given five grand to be an accomplice in the heist. Not only had he given Rylan and his partners access to the construction site, he had hidden the clothes they had used in the heist in the guard shack. Fortunately, Brooklyn was able to recover the items. The CSU lab was already in the process of getting DNA off the coveralls to link to Rylan.