Driving Heat (20 page)

“Obviously this event has left us communications challenged. You already know what is not working; here is how I would like us to adjust. I think you’ll see it’s pretty much
common sense.” She referred to talking points she had listed on a single sheet of her reporter’s notebook. “We all need to switch immediately to personal e-mail. As soon as this
meeting is over, please email each other so that everyone has only to hit Reply to stay in touch. Same applies to cell phones. I am ordering everyone immediately to begin using your personal smart
phones and likewise to send email and texts so communication is seamless. In your squads and units, please create text groups right now so everyone can be text-alerted at once and at all
times.”

A patrol sergeant raised his hand. “What happens if this thing grows and knocks out our personal electronics?”

“There’s always a party pooper,” said Heat, winning some relieved chuckles from the group. “We don’t know what course this is going to take. And we live in an
era—and a city—not equipped for this. Can anyone here remember the last working pay phone he or she saw?” Nikki held up the walkie-talkie she had placed on the table beside her.
“In the meantime, Sergeant, to answer your question, two-way car radios and walkies are still good to go. But that’s going to mean more air traffic, so be mindful of who you are
stepping on, and keep it short. As for here in this building, we have located additional landline telephones in the basement and they are being brought up. Hopefully, we’ll have enough
jacks.” A glance at her crib sheet. “Oh, for those of us who were here in 2009 and used to make fun of the department for forcing us to still use typewriters to fill out our Complaint
Informational Follow-up forms…” She paused while an amused murmur about the old DD5 Pinks circulated among the cops. “You’ll be happy to know that there are about a dozen
typewriters with some of your fingerprints on the keys headed up from storage for use in completing reports. What can I say? Even a cyber blackout can’t defeat a bureaucracy.” After the
chorus of moans had faded, she added, “For now, we are going back to the way cops did it in the old days.”

“Graft?” said Detective Feller.

“We’re going to have to resort to some retro work-arounds,” Heat told
Raley and Ochoa when she called them in to
her office after her roll call. “Fewer instant searches and more shoe leather, for starters. Sorry, Your Highness,” she said to Rales. “No surveillance cams makes you a peasant
like the rest of us.”

“We’ll find other ways, like you said.”

“And what about you two?” Estranged as they might have felt, the longtime partners continued to share nonverbals. For instance, at that moment, each shifted his crossed legs at the
same time. “Well?”

“You don’t need to worry about us,” said Ochoa.

Raley nodded. “We’re all about the job.”

Nikki knew the difference between game faces and masks, but before she could go deeper, they dove in and laid out their plan to deploy their squad, adjusting for the blackout. Detective
Aguinaldo would drive down to RTCC and retrieve the raw license-plate video from the Roosevelt Island Bridge cam, hand-search all tags recorded that morning, and run them through the DMV. State
cyber structure, so far, remained unaffected by the hacking. With all police databases kaput, Rhymer would go analog and hit the mug books, armed with Sampson Stallings’s artistic rendering
to search for the intruder at Lon King’s apartment. Since Joseph Barsotti had gone MIA, Randall Feller would pack a thermos of coffee and an empty milk jug for an all-night stakeout of
Fortuna’s Wheel in case the mob soldier showed up to talk with his boss, Fat Tommy. Roach’s own task would be to continue reaching out to the other members of Wilton Backhouse’s
cadre of whistle-blowers. When Raley and Ochoa had finished, rather than poke at the wound, Heat just said, “Team Roach,” and let them go to it.

“What’s your take on Tangier Swift?” asked Rook after he had checked in
at the hostess station for their ten
o’clock reservation at ABC Cocina.

“And…he’s off!” Nikki said with a grin.

“What?”

“What what?”

As the hostess ushered them through the lively late dinner-and-bar crowd, Nikki said, “This is so you. You want me just to race out and arrest him without evidence.” When they
reached their table, she took the banquette side against the distressed brick wall, not for the cushion but following her cop’s habit of always maintaining a full view of her surroundings.
They accepted their menus, then Nikki waited for the hostess to leave before she continued. “I can’t go around busting people for murder just because Wilton Backhouse pointed a finger
and Swift reminds you of Largo from
Thunderball
.”

“See, this is why I’m crazy about you. Excellent recall of Bond villainy.”

“I can’t help it. It’s catching.” She rested a hand on the center of the table, palm up, and as he gently lowered one of his to complete the sandwich, Nikki felt his
warmth flow into her. “Are you trying to distract me from my point?” He shrugged impishly. “Well, I can hold hands and still advocate.”

“And a man’s dream comes true.”

“Unfounded allegations and dick measurement by motor yacht are not sufficient cause to break out my cuffs. That’s a luxury you have as a writer that I don’t. I need
evidence.” Heat studied him. “Unless you know something and are still holding back.”

“I think we’re past that, aren’t we?”

“Are we?”

“Look, Nik, I’m sorry I kept a secret from you. But not so sorry. It sure wasn’t to hurt you, and certainly not to impede your investigation. But, c’mon, everybody has
secrets, right? In fact, what do the two of us do for a living? We dig out the truth behind people’s secrets. We uncover the stuff they’re hiding for one reason or another.”

“Well, let me make something clear. I don’t want to have to dig out yours.”

“Oh, you made that very clear. I believe you invoked a threat of jail with a denial of my constitutional right to due process.”

Nikki held up her menu to study it and smiled. “I have my moments.”

They both ordered margaritas, which Rook, as he always did, declared to be the best south of ’Cesca and east of the Zuni Café. The Jean-Georges kitchen turned out chic Latin
American and, even though they had both said they would mix things up, they went for their standbys. He ordered the glazed short-rib tacos with habanero relish, and she went for the charred octopus
with guajillo vinaigrette.

“Do they even have mug books anymore?” Rook asked as they traded bites.

“They’d better, because Detective Rhymer is going to be spending all night flipping through something.” She explained to Rook that, as high-tech as the NYPD was, they had had
enough foresight—or, maybe, stubbornness—to have paper backups of everything. “That’s the good news. The bad is retrieval. We’ve all gotten used to our instant info at
the swipe of a finger. Some foreign hacker with a grudge decides to teach New York City a lesson, and suddenly we’re back to paper-based everything.”

“Which only makes me yearn all the more for my Montblanc.”

“Rook, nothing’s keeping you from your computer to write.”

“True, but when all technology fails us, and someday it will, I shall have my pens. My mother bought that Hemingway for me when I was in school to encourage my writing.”

“And how’d that work out, you of two Pulitzers?”

“Do you know, back then Mother paid six hundred dollars? On eBay now bids on the Limited Edition Hemingway top out at thirty-five hundred. Although I’d never sell.”

Nikki leaned in close to his face. “I’ll go thirty-six and a sexual favor of your choosing.”

“Sold.”

They laughed and she picked up her margarita glass. “One more of these first.”

He cackled. “Joke’s on you. That pen’s going to be community property soon enough.” But the smile had fallen from her face and, in the pool of light from the votive
candle between them, her complexion had blanched to the color of a white-marble tombstone. “Maloney,” was all Heat said before she dashed for the front door.

A table full of hedge-fund boys rose and stood in her path to check their smart phones, oblivious to the server with the tray waiting to get by and the police captain hemmed in by them all. She
found another path, side-squeezing between the chair backs of other diners, then hurried past the bar overflow and dashed through the reception area to the street.

Heat rotated east, then west, scanning 19th Street for a sign of him. To the east, the sidewalk was clear, except for an old recycling picker pulling empties out of a stack of curbside garbage
bags. A taxi turned onto the block from Park Avenue South, but its vacancy light was lit, and Nikki could make out no passenger inside as it approached. From the opposite direction, four laughing
women formed a chorus line as they marched toward her. Heat’s view behind them was blocked. She scanned both ways again, then asked a couple braving the night chill at one of the
cocina’s outdoor tables if they had seen a guy staring in the window a minute before. They both gave her New York signature you-fuckin’-kidding-me? looks and went back to their
conversation about somebody getting beaten by his own selfie stick.

Nikki heard Rook call her name as she jogged west, giving a wide berth to the
Sex and the City
reenactors, but she kept going, choosing that direction because it had the blocked view.
Heat scanned a stoop behind a big carpet store and an alcove across the street. Other than that, there were no nooks or crannies to hide in. When she reached the corner at Broadway, moviegoers had
just begun spilling by the dozens out of the AMC Loews. If Maloney was around, he could easily blend in. And would. She had gotten a firsthand lesson in his evasion skills the previous night in the
park.

Heat threaded her way through the crowd anyway, searching, sweeping—what else could she do? When she caught a favorable red light, Heat took a step out onto Broadway to do an
uptown-downtown check, but came up empty there, too. On the green, a lead-footed cab driver nearly brushed her with his car. He gave her a honk with one hand and a finger with the other as he went
by.

Rook was waiting for her on the corner holding her walkie-talkie when she stepped out of the street. “You sure it was him?”

The image of Timothy Maloney standing outside the restaurant on the sidewalk, arms defiantly crossed, just waiting for her to make eye contact with him, was as vivid as it was unnerving.
“None other.”

He held up the two-way. “Think you should call it in?”

The effects of the cyber shutdown made her worry about stressing the system with her sighting when there might be more urgent police concerns. Nikki scanned the area again, knowing she did so
just for drill’s sake, and said, “He’s long gone.”

A light drizzle started to fall during their walk to her apartment, only two
blocks away off Gramercy Park. In the mist, people
started waving wildly for cabs and running with hunched shoulders or holding copies of the
Post
over their heads. “Answer me this,” Rook said as they moved along at a relaxed
pace. “When did weather become something that happened to us instead of just something that happened?”

“Sandy wasn’t just something that happened,” she said.

“Agreed. Once in a generation.”

“What about Irene, the year before?”

“OK, if you’re going to resort to facts, I see no future in this conversation.” Rook put his arm around her at the corner and they folded into each other, a perfect fit. While
they waited for the signal, he caught her doing a recon up and down Park Avenue South. “Maybe you should just call it in. At least let Roach issue a BOLO.”

“Much as I love it when you speak acronym, a Be On The Lookout is going to be a drain on resources when Maloney either had a car waiting or hopped a subway down at Union Square.”

“With this guy’s history of paranoia and stalking, I think you should be a little more mindful of your own words at roll call today. Safety and communication.” Rook’s
point was one Heat was already mulling over herself. True, Maloney had slid down her roster of potential killers, but he was still short-listed. And now Nikki had what she believed was her second
sighting of him in as many nights—stalking via a restaurant window, no less—the same MO Maloney had used when he crashed Lon King’s dinner with Sampson Stallings at that
Vietnamese place.

“Maybe I will,” she said. “Soon as we get to my place where it’s dry.”

In the elevator to her floor, Rook said, “You know what? This weekend we should just bite the bullet and haul all of your stuff to my loft. Some things here and some things there is kind
of scattered.”

“Or I should just buy a spare charger to keep there.” This trip to her place was initiated by the hacking attack, which had transformed her department-issue BlackBerry into a
designer paperweight. With her iPhone now her primary handheld, she needed to pick up her power cord. As Nikki unlocked her front door, she needled him. “If you’re feeling too
scattered, maybe we should just spend the night here tonight. I’ve got cold wine, you’ve got clean clothes, I’ve got dirty thoughts.”

“Captain Heat, you’re trying to seduce me. Aren’t you?”

“Is that what you want, Jameson?” She let him in and they kissed in the foyer. Heat pushed her door closed with her back as he pressed against her. When they parted she whispered in
his ear, “I guess you do want that.”

“I didn’t answer.”

She tugged at the front of his jeans. “You didn’t have to.”

Nikki flipped on the lights in her kitchen and started to uncork a bottle of Gavi she wanted to try. From the living room, Rook said, “Now I know the real reason you wanted to bring me
here tonight.”

“Not sure what you mean.”

“What did you get me? Let me guess.” He appeared at the counter carrying a Godiva gift box with a stick-on bow. “Chocolates?”

“I didn’t get you anything.” A flood of adrenaline released in her. “Rook, don’t open that!” Heat dropped the wine bottle, which shattered on the floor, and
raced around to him where he stood frozen in place. Speaking more calmly, even though her hands were quaking, she said, “Slowly, carefully, set the box down.”