Richard Castle: Raging Heat

Lying there on her back in the gutter under the serving window of the Tribeca Taco Truck, all Heat could see across Reade Street were the man’s boots as he came closer to find out where the hell she went. To her eye, those Lugz looked a little fresh from the box for a derelict. A hand prodded her shoulder. Nikki turned her head to look up at a sidewalk diner in a Rangers cap with the authenticity stickers still on the beak. Around his mouthful of nopalas burrito, he said, “Yo, lady, you sick?” Then he snatched the Ray-Bans off her face and ran. And they say New Yorkers don’t care. Instead of giving chase, though, she logrolled under the chassis of the truck to the street side.

Heat waited until she saw her stalker disappear around the back of the vehicle, then pushed herself to her feet from a tripod stance, keeping her right hand on her holster. She moved swiftly, using the growl of a passing school bus to drown out her footfalls. The guy couldn’t figure out how he could have lost her — Nikki didn’t need to see his face to know that. As she snuck up behind him, he peered around the corner of the taco van, swiveled his head to the right to scan the opposite end of the sidewalk, then craned to survey the café tables in the plaza across Bogardus Garden.

“Don’t worry, I’m right here,” she said, close enough for him to feel her breath on his neck. And then, more sharply, “Ah-ah. Don’t turn around. Drop the cup.” Coins danced on the pavement. “Hands behind your head.” Nikki slid her palm off the butt of her Sig Sauer and pressed his chest against the quilted stainless steel door of the food truck while she cuffed him.

“A little harsh for public solicitation, wouldn’t you say, Detective?” said Rook on arrival. But then he saw the Smith & Wesson .40 caliber she pulled from the panhandler’s waistband. “Hmm. Sir, unless that squirts water, you have some explaining to do.”

The man ignored Rook. And Heat, for that matter. Just stared up at the sky, shaking his head like he was mad at himself. He bristled even more when she plucked his wallet and opened it. Now it was Heat’s turn to shake her head. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“Nikki Heat. This is a nice surprise.” Zach Hamner’s voice annoyed her even more this time. As usual, he oozed the casual jauntiness of a no-worries, above-the-fray networker enjoying his high rung on the political ladder at One Police Plaza. But this time an extra helping of duplicity seeped through the phone along with something new from the senior administrative aide to the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters — a whiff of apprehension.

“Let’s keep it real, Zach. This is neither nice nor a surprise.” From his end came rustling, and then a door close. Heat waited him out, surveying her bull pen, empty so far, except for Rook, across the room filling his espresso maker with fresh water.

After some throat clearing, Hamner said, “That’s a hell of a ‘good morning,’ Detective.”

“Want to know what my wake-up call was? Busting the Internal Affairs Bureau doofus you sent to shadow me.”

His denial reflex started to kick in, and she cut him off. “And don’t insult me further by playing innocent. When I threatened to parade him through the Twentieth and lock him up in front of my squad, he talked like a starlet on The View .”

Even though she called him a doofus, Heat blamed herself for not acting the day before when the IAB detective caught her attention outside the planetarium. Sure, he had changed out of his panhandler’s disguise, put on a hat, and acted like he belonged with the news snappers, but when the sonar ping had sounded for Nikki, she dismissed it, breaking one of the cardinal rules of investigation that she preached to her squad: Always notice what you are noticing.

“All right,” said Hamner with a sigh of resignation. “Let’s stipulate I was doing some background on you—”

“You had me tailed.”

“—But I had a reason.”

Count on that, thought Nikki. Zach “The Hammer” Hamner always had a reason. Or, more likely, a strategy.

“I’m waiting,” she said.

“You’re sorta blindsiding me here. I’m still herding my ducks.” He chuckled, trying to regain footing. “Can you meet at our usual deli for breakfast, say, tomorrow or early next week?”

The seasoned interrogator kept his feet to the fire. “Background on me for what? Tell me now, or I’ll start asking around.”

Nasal breeze crossed his phone’s mouthpiece. Then came the creak of executive leather as he sat. “A job, since you insist on squeezing me. A promotion. Again.”

His “again” carried some stank. Three years before, Zach identified Heat as a rising star and campaigned for her to take command of her precinct after the death of the beloved Captain Montrose. The ugly politics of the process gave her second thoughts, however, and she left him at the altar, declining both her promotion to captain and the command, to remain a street detective. A gamesman has a long memory, she decided. And yet, he still played the game. Why this time?

It had to be Wally Irons. The man who took the precinct command Heat had declined proved himself to be an inept self-promoter with no copsense nor any clue how to manage people. Captain Irons’s sole talent rested in his astonishing ability to survive in the face of his gaffes, usually buffoonish or egregious. The whole squad bet that the exposure of his secret affair with one of his homicide detectives, Sharon Hinesburg, would trigger the end of his command. Especially since his lover turned out to be a mole for a terror organization. Yet, after two weeks of intensive meetings downtown and a monthlong leave of absence, the Iron Man returned to flip on the lights in his precinct commander’s office without so much as a wink about his transgression — or a hint of how he kept his post.

The tongue-in-cheek speculation ran to holding blackmail photos of the mayor. Rook theorized Wally was like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, “a human cockroach, only freakishly mutated. Like that deviant species they discovered that survives chemical spills, nuclear meltdowns, and Real Housewives marathons.”

These were Nikki’s thoughts as she eyed the empty desk in the bull pen. The desk that had been assigned to Sharon Hinesburg’s replacement, a grade-three who transferred from the Organized Crime Unit, a gifted, instinctive investigator whose single drawback turned out to be her bust size. And when years of innuendo from Captain Irons turned to harassment, and finally, an “accidental” grope, Detective Camille Washington just didn’t show up one day last week. Now, Nikki assumed Irons was out and she was Zach Hamner’s candidate — again.

She was mistaken.

“The commish directed the head of Counterterrorism to create a new task force, and he wants you on it. You do remember Commander McMains?”

Of course she did. Nikki especially recalled how he stepped in to help her shut down that bioterror plot. “Good cop. Good person.”

“He thinks the same. Which is why your name tops his short list. This is big, Heat. We’re definitely thinking outside the boroughs with this job. We need someone who can liaise with our foreign law enforcement partners to meet the challenges of all cross-border criminal activity that impacts New York City.”

Nikki wondered, was he reading this? Probably not. Most likely, Zach wrote it and accessed his talking points from memory.

“Under McMains, you would be the NYPD point person working directly with Interpol, New Scotland Yard, the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, and a slew of others. And I hope you know where your passport is, because you’re going to be spending a lot of time in London, Hamburg, Tel Aviv, Lyons, Mexico City, Rio…” The implications resonated immediately and Hamner’s words fuzzed while she watched Rook fiddling with the espresso maker across the squad room. Something cold and melancholy poked her gut.