“It’s storm watch, Heat, there is no weekend here.” As if he took a day off, anyway. Heat imagined that Zach Hamner probably went to the beach in his suit and tie. He nearly — but not quite — sounded compassionate as he checked on her after the ordeal.
“I’m fine. But I’m not the one OCME is working on in there.”
He asked her how Irons managed to get in that position, and when she told him, he muttered, “Fuck.…” And then he sniffed and added, “A boob to the end.”
“Excuse me, you asshole.” The trauma of the ordeal started to boil over, and The Hammer was the lucky caller. “Wally Irons was a lot of things, but you know what he is now? A cop who died in the line of duty.”
Zach started to retract, but she plowed him down. “So listen to me, you fucking little fuck. If you say anything to malign a brother cop who gave up the ultimate sacrifice, I will come down there personally and feed you your goddamned BlackBerry. Right after I stuff your balls down your throat.” Then she saw Lawrence Hays hanging around her car and hung up.
“I’m saving you some trouble, Detective.”
“How did you get into my crime scene?”
Hays ignored that, like accessing a restricted area was nothing to a man like him. He just stood there with his arms folded, his butt resting on the trunk of the Taurus, waiting for her. “When I heard the news, I figured, if I were Nikki Heat, I’d come looking for the guy who gave me this address. Here I am.” He took off his aviators so she could see his eyes.
What assuaged her wasn’t what she saw there. This guy was so schooled in psyops, he could adopt any attitude and appear credible. The fact was, though, it made no sense for him to set her up. Unless Hays was working with Zarek Braun. Her gaze drifted down to the scar tissue peeking through the V in the neck of his polo shirt. “I think we’re good,” she said. “For now.”
“Smart.” He slipped the sunglasses back on and said, “Now. You want an assist?”
“As in?”
“Come on, you know what I do.”
“Mr. Hays, if you’re offering your professional services, I decline. This is a police matter, and NYPD is capable of handling it. Besides, I think one mercenary operating in this city is enough.”
He took a moment to survey the thin scrim of smoke still curling off the house and said, “You’d better hope so.”
Her squad reassembled two hours later following the neighborhood canvass. “You called it,” said Feller. “Real Time Crime DB had a ping. Two weeks ago, a guy living in one of the row houses up the block called in a beef about a foreigner making lewd sounds and gestures to his teenage daughter. The Four-eight sent a uni, but the citizen said there must have been some mistake.”
Ochoa said, “We did a door knock at the home of the complainant. The family was jumpy, seeing how they just got let back in after the all clear. But they ID’d Braun from the photo.”
“Even better,” continued Raley in full-Roach overlap, “the foreign dude freaked them out so much — which is why they lied to the uniform — that they kept tabs on him.”
“May I?” asked Rook. “I so seldom get mistaken for a detective.” He opened a page of his notes. “Last time they saw your Cool Customer was Thursday. He came by with a big duffel bag and some power tools. Ran a circular saw for about an hour, did some hammering, and left with the tools but not the duffel.” He closed his notebook. “Sounds to me like a booby trap installation.”
“Thursday. You do know that’s before we saw Hays,” observed Feller. Heat told them about the CIA contractor’s visit and her feeling Lawrence Hays was an unlikely, and to move on. Nobody disagreed.
Detective Rhymer’s cell rang, and while he stepped away to take the call, Raley asked if Heat knew what would be happening next at the precinct. “I hate to get practical, but has anybody told you who’s coming in to replace…you know?”
“I don’t think anyone’s thinking that far ahead, Sean. My best guess is One PP’s focused on storm watch and little else. I’d be surprised to hear anything before Sandy’s done.”
“Hey?” said Opie, sounding a lot like the TV Opie. “Guess who that was.”
“No,” said Heat, reading the triumph on his face. “Really?”
Rhymer slipped his cell phone back in his pocket. “Alicia Delamater will be happy to meet me to pitch concepts for the secret Sean Combs reboot party.”
At two that afternoon not a single drop of rain was falling on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Sandy still churned off the Georgia and Carolina coasts, tracking northeast with enough menace to cause the mayor to order evacuations of the most flood-prone zones in the city. A mix of urgency and fatalism filled the streets with some New Yorkers hurrying to stock up, get sheltered, or leave before the subways and trains shut down at seven; the rest took it in stride and carried on as normal, either ignoring reality or just content to ride out nature’s spectacle when it arrived the next day.