Richard Castle - Deadly Heat

“Oh, so you think I’m a loser, too.”

His demeanor snap-shifted from defensive to pure manic. “No, no, no, Detective. You made it all… come to, I dunno… life. You brought my game to the next level.”

“Well, game over, Glen,” said Heat.

“Like hell it is.”

Nikki reached out and clattered his chains with her thumb and forefinger. Then she closed the file, slid her chair away, and started for the door. When she got there, Windsor shouted, “You want to talk about Salena Kaye?” Nikki stopped, and he said, “I know stuff. I learned shit about this bioterror plot.”

Heat turned to Rook. “And Detective Windsor cracks his case.”

When she turned away, Windsor called, “I got it all out of that bitch when I worked on her. And trust me, Heat, you’ll want all of it.”

She stayed by the door but said, “I’m listening.”

“No. I want a deal first.”

“Don’t make me laugh, you’re a serial killer.”

“It’s not supposed to end like this.” He yelled and jerked at the wrist chains hard enough for the uniform to come in and make a check. After the uni left, Rainbow said, “You should have killed me, Heat. I deserve to go down in a blaze.” Destiny again, she thought. He became contemplative. Then he said, “You know where the deals are. Come up with something. Like doing life in a shitty prison versus a nice one out of state, maybe in warm weather, for starters. California. Arizona.”

“Clock’s running, Windsor. You want to talk deal, you’d better give up something you learned about this terror plot.”

He thought a short while, then calmly beckoned her over. When she stood beside him, he smiled and said, “When I’m ready. Come back tomorrow, I’ve had a hard day.” Then he closed his eyes and rolled his face away as if going to sleep.

On the way downstairs, Heat turned to Rook. “Don’t say it.”

“You mean, ‘Game not over’? ‘Do not proceed to the exit’?”

“I hate you.”

When Rook postponed their meeting with Puzzle Man, he had instructed him to hang loose. Now, as he and Nikki crossed the Bellevue lobby, he got out his cell to call him. Heat looked at her watch and said, “Now? These are drug dealer hours, he’s not going to-”

Rook held up a palm to her. “Keith. Rook. Hey, puzzle me this. You still good to go?” He grinned and gave her a thumbs-up.

Heat’s eyes burned from fatigue, and she felt so hungry that she was no longer hungry. But sleep would have to wait. “Can he meet us someplace they serve food?” she asked.

Tavern 29, walking distance for them, served all night, and Nikki craved one of their bacon burgers, which she ordered before she even sat down. A beer would have been perfect to go with it, but she didn’t want to lose her edge, and so went for a seltzer. They were both finishing their meals by the time Keith Tahoma strolled in, gray ponytail swaying, yakking from the door to their table about the awesome energy of New York freakin’ City at night. Heat was more interested in what he held in his hands than his speed-talk. He carried a tan cardboard tube from an empty roll of paper towels.

He ordered a coffee, and when it came, he repeated his ritual of six sugars and an OCD paddle stir. Heat asked him if that was going to keep him awake, and he laughed, saying, “So far, so good.”

Rook said, “Keith, I hate to put the squeeze on, but it’s been a long one, and we’re kind of eager to hear whatcha got.”

“Oh, yeah. For sure.” Nikki’s energy level perked up as Puzzle Man brought the cardboard tube up from his lap and set it on the table. “Apologies for the delay, this was one tough nut.”

“But you cracked it,” said Heat, not really asking so much as hoping. Or willing.

His answer was to pat the tube gently and wink. “Now, just so you don’t feel bad about not solving it yourselves, those little lines and squiggles were totally meaningless. I ran every cipher I could without success. And I know ’em all. Even invented a couple over the years. Then this morning, I’m sitting in the park, working my chess games, waiting for the other dopes to realize they’re six moves from losing. I look up and see this bird flapping along. And I saw a jet, probably coming around to land at JFK, five thousand feet higher than the bird. But to me, it looked just like the two were going to collide. You see?”

They both shook their heads.

“You will. It was a visual trick. The optical overlay created a message in my brain.” He stacked his hands flat before his eyes like pancakes.

Heat started to get there. “So you thought maybe all the pages could be overlaid, and this would be revealed.”

“No,” he said, then slapped the table and smiled. “Not all, but a few of the pages could be. After a fair amount of trial and error, I managed to find four pages of your mother’s sheet music that, if I stacked them and held them up to a lightbulb like a shadow box, I got a message. It wasn’t even in a cipher, it was right there in front of my eyes in the King’s English. Hot damn, I felt smart.”

“Do you, um…” Nikki gestured to the cardboard tube.

“ ’Deed I do.” He presented it to her with a flourish.

Nikki took it from him, made a privacy survey of the tavern, and pulled the furled sheets of paper out of the tube. She unrolled them, squared the edges on her place mat, and then, with her heart pounding, held the four stacked sheets to the candle. In her mother’s clean handwriting it read: Unlock the Dragon .

Her eyes went to the code breaker and then back to the message. Heat moved the pages, scanning them in front of the candle, hoping for more. “This is all it says?”

“That’s all she wrote, pardon my French.”

“May I?” asked Rook. She gave the sheets over to him, and he did the same thing, trying to scan for more text. While he held the pages to the light, Nikki thought about the Dragon. The word-obviously a code name-had first come into this case only days ago when the skyjacked helicopter passenger heard Salena Kaye call someone by that name on her cell phone. What had she said? “Dragon, it’s me.” So Dragon was Salena Kaye’s controller. Also Tyler Wynn’s, by his dying declaration. But now, in this code from the past, her mother mentioned him, too. All of which told Heat that the Dragon was as alive today as he had been eleven years ago.

Her mother had no way of knowing it would take so long for her daughter to get this message. But the code still left Nikki confused. And she sure didn’t have another eleven years to figure it out.

She didn’t even have eleven days.

Puzzle Man said, “You two seem a little less excited than I’d hoped you’d be.”

“No, no,” said Heat. “You did great, it’s just…”

Rook finished the thought. “We don’t know what it means.”

“Well, that’s an entirely different task,” said Puzzle Man. “Times like these, I go back to the wisdom shared by my s hi’nali , the Windtalker. My grandfather used to tell me there’s one code you can never break.”

“What’s that?” asked Nikki, holding the words to the light again.

“The one that’s only known by two people. The sender and the receiver.”

Cynthia Heat spoke to her daughter in the nonsensical way apparitions do in sleep. Nikki saw her as she had countless times over the last eleven years, mostly in the middle of the night, although sometimes at unbidden daytime moments as mundane as when she reached for her MetroCard on her way down to the subway or smiled at a New Yorker cartoon. Her mother usually spoke to her from her own pool of blood on the kitchen floor. Over the years she’d said many things to her, mostly as much non sequiturs as the appearances themselves. This time, from the leaden depths only Nikki’s mattress seemed to possess, her mom sat playing her piano-the one in the room right up the hall-and spoke the same two words again and again like a video loop on an online avatar. Cindy Heat kept telling her daughter, “You know. You know. You know…”