NYPD Red 4 (24 page)

At three o'clock,
Kylie left the precinct and walked to the Hertz office on East 64th Street.
One more chance,
she thought as she got behind the wheel of the Chevy Malibu.
Just give him one more chance.

How many times had she said those words? And the answer was always the same.

“I can't, Kylie,” her mother had said. “I love your father, but I'm out of chances.”

She was ten when her parents got divorced. She couldn't understand her mother's logic. If you loved someone, really loved them, how could you not give them one more chance to make the marriage work?

Twenty-five years later, faced with the same life choice as her mother, she was able to make some sense of it.

She loved the man she married ten years ago, but that was not the man whose heart was filled with vitriol when he attacked her from his hospital bed. Spence's drug addiction had taken its toll on them both. How had she become the woman who handed her husband a loaded gun when he threatened to kill himself?

They'd talked since then, and with each phone call he was starting to sound more like the old Spence. He was talking the talk, and she was hoping he could pick up the pieces and get back to walking the walk.

She hadn't told him she was coming. He might say no, and Kylie hated taking no for an answer. It was time for her to clean up her side of the street, and as unaccustomed as she was to apologizing for her actions, there was one thing she knew for sure: you don't phone in your amends.

She would meet him halfway. He could move back home. She'd be there for him when he needed her, but she wouldn't try to micromanage his recovery. He had to want it as much as she did.

It was six p.m. when she got to AtlantiCare Regional. She freshened up in the ladies' room, and then, hair, makeup, and ego in place, she went to his room.

“Can I help you?” the woman in Spence's bed asked.

“I'm sorry. I thought this was my husband's room.”

“This is 202,” the woman said.

“Oh,” Kylie said. “My mistake.”

There was no mistake: 202 was Spence's room. She went to the nurses' station.

“I'm looking for Spence Harrington,” she said. “Can you tell me what room he's in?”

“Harrington?” the nurse said, checking her computer screen. “He was discharged this morning.”

“Are you sure?”

The nurse gave her a look: she was sure. “But don't take my word for it,” she said. “Give him a call.”

Spence had a burner phone. Kylie dialed the number. He answered on the first ring. “Hey, how's it going?”

“Things are crazy at work,” Kylie said. “We have a meeting scheduled with the mayor. She should be here any minute. What are you doing?”

“Nothing much. You know hospitals.”

“How about if I drive down and say hello tomorrow or Wednesday?” Kylie said.

“That's probably not the best idea,” Spence said. “Zach gave me this NA hotline number, and I called it yesterday. There's a real good recovery center right here in Atlantic City. They have an opening, and someone is going to pick me up in the morning and check me in.”

“That's great, Spence. I can visit you there.”

“Not right away. They're pretty strict. Even tougher than the rehab in Oregon. No visitors. No phones.”

“How long will you be out of touch?”

“Not long. Four weeks, tops.”

“And then what?”

“Hey, babe,” he said, laughing. “Not a fair question. I'm supposed to be doing this one-day-at-a-time shit.”

“Spence…”

“What?”

“I'm sorry.”

“About what?”

“About everything. Especially Thursday night when I tried to give you my gun.”

He laughed again. “Don't try that next time you arrest some asshole. He might take it and shoot you. Hey, the guy with the food cart is here with my dinner. I should go.”

“Mayor Sykes just got here. I've got to go too.”

“Kylie…”

“What?”

“I'm sorry too.”

“About what?”

One more laugh—not because it was funny, but because it eased the pain. “I'll make a list and send it to you,” he said. “I better go before my dinner clots.”

“I love you, Spence.”

“I love you too, Kylie. I always have. I always will.” He hung up.

She believed him. Not the blatant lies about being in the hospital, or the food cart arriving, or checking into a recovery center. But she believed with all her heart that he loved her.

And she knew in her heart that she would always love him.

But they were both out of chances.

There had been
an Evite in my email inbox that morning, and I'd printed it and carried it with me all day. The picture was a bottle of Chianti and two glasses on a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. The copy was pure Cheryl.

I arrived at her apartment ten minutes early. She put her arms around me and kissed me sweetly in the open doorway, lingering on my lips. She tasted like heaven.

“I come bearing gifts,” I said, handing her a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of wine several notches up from the Chianti on the Evite.

“It would be gracious of me to say ‘Oh really, you shouldn't have,'” she said, closing the apartment door and clicking the lock. “But who am I kidding? Of course you should have.”

“There's more,” I said, taking a plastic CVS bag from my pocket. “A housewarming gift.”

She opened the bag. Inside was a package of men's underwear and a brand-new toothbrush.

“Oh, Zach, thank you. It's just what I always wanted,” she said. “And I have a gift for you.”

She took me by the hand and led me into the bedroom.

The lights were low, and the light scent of her perfume was in the air. “I'm ready for my gift,” I said.
Oh God, am I ready.

She opened a dresser drawer. It was empty.

“Ta-da! It's all yours,” she said, tossing the underwear and the toothbrush inside.

“Thank you,” I said, wrapping my arms around her and pressing her close.

“Hold that thought,” she said, breaking away. “Dinner is served.”

I followed her into the kitchen, opened the wine, and poured two glasses.

“A toast,” she said. “To the team of Jordan and MacDonald, best damn cops in the city.”

I downed most of my drink and refilled my glass. “And to the team of Jordan and Robinson, best damn couple in the city.” I took another big drink.

“Wow,” she said. “You're really pounding that wine. Tough day?”

“No,” I said. “Pretty great day, actually. But I plan to spend a long romantic evening with the woman I love, and if Cates calls, I want to make sure I have enough alcohol in my bloodstream to be able to tell her I'm too liquored up to protect or serve.”

She kissed me again, lit the candles, and set two steaming plates of lasagna on the table.

We sat down. “And what happens if Kylie calls?” she said, her dark eyes playing with me.

“She won't. She drove to Atlantic City to bring Spence home. In fact”—I raised my glass—“here's to MacDonald and Harrington: together again, at last.”

“But what if she does call?” Cheryl said. “I know you. You can't say no to Kylie.”

“You're right,” I said. “If she calls, I can't say no.”

I stood up, took her by the hand, and walked her back to the bedroom. I opened my new dresser drawer, buried my cell phone beneath the underwear, shut the drawer, pulled her out of the room, closed the bedroom door, and the two of us went back and sat down at the table.

I took one more sip of my wine. “Now,” I said, sliding my fork onto the tender pasta and inhaling the intoxicating aroma of perfectly seasoned meat, cheese, and tomatoes, “where were we before we were so rudely interrupted?”

The authors would like to thank NYPD detectives Sal Catapano, Daniel Corcoran, Kevin Gieras, Brian O'Donnell, and Thomas Mays; NYPD transit bureau officer J. C. Myska; Dr. John Froude; Dr. Lawrence Dresdale; Dan Fennessey; Richard Villante; Robert Chaloner; Mike Winfield Danehy; Brian Sobie; Lani Crescenzi; Marina Savina; Gerri Gomperts; Bob Beatty; Mel Berger; and Jason Wood for their help in making this work of fiction ring true.

Rio de Janeiro, Saturday, July 12, 2014
2:00 p.m.

CHRIST THE REDEEMER
appeared and vanished in the last clouds clinging to jungle mountains that rose right up out of the city and the sea. Then the sun broke through for good and shone down on the giant white statue of Jesus that looked over virtually all of Rio from the summit of Corcovado Mountain.

In the prior two months, I'd seen the statue from dozens of vantage points, but never like this, from a police helicopter hovering at the figure's eye level two hundred and fifty feet away, close enough for me to understand the immensity of the statue and its simple, graceful lines.

I am a lapsed Catholic, but I tell you, I got chills up and down my spine.

“That's incredible,” I said as the helicopter arced away, flying over the steep, jungle-choked mountainside.

“One of the seven modern wonders of the world, Jack,” Tavia said.

“You know the other six offhand, Tavia?” I asked her.

Tavia smiled, shook her head, said, “You?”

“Not a clue.”

“You without a clue? I don't believe it.”

“That's because I'm unparalleled in the art of faking it.”

My name is Jack Morgan. I own Private, an international security and consulting firm with bureaus in major cities all over the world. Octavia “Tavia” Reynaldo, a tall, sturdy woman with jet-black hair, a lovely face, and beguiling eyes, ran Private Rio. And we'd always had this teasing chemistry between us.

The two of us stood in the open side door of the helicopter, harnessed and tethered to the ceiling of the hold. I hung on tight to a steel handle anyway. The pilot struck me as more than competent, but I couldn't help feeling a little anxious as we picked up speed and headed southeast.

I used to be a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps, got shot down in Afghanistan, and barely survived. A lot of good men died in that crash, and because of their deaths, I'm not a fan of helicopters despite the fact that they can do all sorts of things that a plane, a car, or a man on foot can't. Let's just say I tolerate them when the need arises, which it had that day.

Tavia and I were aboard the helicopter courtesy of Mateus da Silva, the only other person in the hold. A colonel with the Brazilian military police, da Silva was also head of all security for the FIFA World Cup and the man responsible for bringing Private in as a consultant.

The final game of the tournament—Germany versus Argentina for the soccer championship of the world—was less than a day away. So far there'd been little or no trouble at the World Cup, and we wanted to keep it that way. Which was why da Silva had asked for an aerial tour of the Magnificent City.

After two months in Rio, I agreed with the nickname. I've been lucky enough to travel all over the world, but there's no place like Rio de Janeiro, and certainly no more dramatic an urban setting anywhere. The ocean, the beaches, the jungle, and the peaks appear new at every turn. That day a million hard-partying Argentine fans were said to be pouring over Brazil's southern border, heading north to Rio.

“This will give us a sense of what Rio might look like during the Olympic Games,” da Silva said as we peered down at dozens of favelas, shantytown slums that spilled down the steep sides of almost every mountain in sight.

Below the favelas, on the flats, the buildings changed. Here, on the city's south side where the wealthy and superrich of Rio lived, modern high-rise apartment complexes lined the sprawling lagoon and the miles and miles of gorgeous white-sand beaches along the coast.

We flew over the tenuous seam where slums met some of the world's most expensive real estate toward two arch-shaped mountains side by side. The Dois Irmãos—the Two Brothers—are flanked by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the ultrachic district of Leblon to the north, and a sprawling favela known as Rocinha to the west.

Once one of the most violent places in any city on earth, Rocinha was among the slums Brazilian military police tried to “pacify” in the years leading up to the World Cup. The government trained a hard-core group of elite fighters known as BOPE (from the Portuguese for Special Police Operations Battalion) and declared war on the drug lords who had de facto control over the favelas. Da Silva was a commander in BOPE.

The special unit killed or drove out the narco-traffickers in dozens of slums across the city. But they'd succeeded only partially in Rocinha.

The favela's location—spilling down both flanks of a mountain saddle—made access difficult, and the police had never gained full control. Da Silva remained nervous enough about that particular slum to demand a flyover.

We went right over David Beckham's new place in a canyon above Leblon. The British soccer star had caused a stir when he'd bought land in a favela; some of Rio's wealthy were indignant that he would stoop to living in a slum, and advocates for the poor worried it would start a trend and displace people who desperately needed shelter.

The helicopter climbed the north flank of the mountain, allowing us to peer into the warren of pastel shacks built right on top of each other like some bizarre Lego structure.

“You might want to stand back from the door, Jack,” Tavia said. “They've been known to shoot at police helicopters like this.”

Tavia was very smart, a former Rio homicide detective, and she was usually right about things that happened in her city. But da Silva didn't move from the open doorway, so I stayed right where I was too as we flew over the top of the slum, dropped off the other side, and curved around the south end of the Two Brothers.

We stayed low to avoid the ten or fifteen hang gliders soaring on updrafts near the two mountains. To the east, the coastal highway was clogged with traffic as far as we could see. The Argentines had come in cars and buses. They hung out the windows waving blue and white flags and bottles of liquor. Bikini-clad girls danced on the hoods and roofs of the vehicles and crowded the beach on the other side of the highway.

“They'll be coming all night,” Colonel da Silva said.

“Can the city handle it?”

“Rio gets two million visitors on New Year's Eve,” Tavia said. “And five million during Carnival. It might not be managed flawlessly, but Rio can handle any crowd.”

Da Silva allowed himself a moment of uncertainty, then said, “I suppose, besides traffic jams, as long as the final goes off tomorrow without incident, we're good to—”

“Colonel,” the pilot called back. “We've got an emergency on Pão de Açúcar. We've been ordered to get a visual and report.”

“What kind of emergency?” the colonel demanded.

As we picked up speed, the pilot told us, and we cringed.

I hung out the door, looking north toward Pão de Açúcar, Sugarloaf Mountain, a thirteen-hundred-foot monolithic spire of dark granite that erupts out of the ocean beyond the north end of Copacabana Beach.

“Can people survive something like that?” Tavia shouted at me.

Even from eight miles away, I could clearly make out the sheer, unforgiving cliffs where they fell away from the peak. I thought about what we'd been told and how bad the injuries might be.

“Miracles happen every day,” I said.