Richard Castle - Deadly Heat

“Good night, Rook.”

“Good night? But you got my Spidey sense all tingly.”

“Hold that thought.”

Home alone with no obligations after a harrowing few weeks, and a deep fatigue she thought she would never sleep off, Nikki contemplated an evening of scented candles, bubble bath, and soulful divas on the boom box. But that felt like distraction; more superficial than the inner healing she craved.

Besides, she knew she could never relax with missing pieces or loose ends.

She brought out the cardboard tube and set it on the coffee table. Puzzle Man, however unnerving a partner, had proved his worth and managed to crack the code. The message felt incomplete, but with the arrest of Carey Maggs as the leader of the conspiracy, Heat told herself to let it go.

But she couldn’t.

Back to her mom. Back to lack of closure.

Why, she wondered, would someone work so hard to construct a coded message that, essentially, didn’t reveal information? Her mother was more practical than that. No wasted effort, everything for a purpose. The apple didn’t fall far.

Nikki slid the papers out of the tube and laid them out before her. Then she stacked them and held them to the light, getting the same message as before: Unlock the Dragon .

As she had done, ad nauseam, she considered the significance of each word. Nikki focused on “Unlock” because that felt like a call to action-one she hadn’t taken. That’s what kept her persevering. Nikki had not unlocked anything.

She had spent eleven years going around that apartment searching for locks or secret boxes. Her father had let her go through some of their things that he had brought to his condo in Scarsdale, and she had found nothing there. So no more house searches.

Heat stared at the message until her eyes glazed. Then she spread the four pages apart, kicking herself for going back to square one like that. But she did.

Why was this so difficult? What had Puzzle Man said? That the hardest code to crack was the one that’s only known by two people? The sender and the receiver.

If Nikki were the intended receiver, she wondered, why choose her? When her mother was murdered, Heat was a theater student at Northeastern, not a cop, and with no hint of becoming one. Or maybe her mom knew more about her nature than she did. Or simply trusted her completely.

“So, Mom,” she said aloud, “what’s just between us here?”

She tried not to picture the mother of her nightmares sprawled on the kitchen floor. Her gaze fell across the room, and the ghost of her recent dream came to her: Cynthia playing the piano in the corner, saying, “You know…”

It began to seep through as she laid her eyes on the four pages again. Nikki removed her focus from the coded marks themselves and contemplated the sheet music they had been written on. A recollection drifted to her on a trail of time’s smoke.

Those four pieces comprised one of Nikki’s piano recitals when she was sixteen. She rushed to the piano bench and dug out the old program. There they were on the list. Those four songs, and no others.

Why choose them for the code?

That recital lived clearly in her memory. She recalled her stage fright, and making only one mistake in her fingering, which (for the first time) she had not let shake her confidence. And what else? Oh, yes! Her mother was so proud of her that night she celebrated by taking Nikki out for dinner-and letting her have her very first drink. They’d gone to the Players, where her mom was a member. The club sat only a few doors from their place but carried a grand history and specialness to Nikki. Her mother asked the bartender to go in back and unlock her private wine locker for a special bottle. When he uncorked it and left, Cynthia drank down the water from Nikki’s glass then poured her daughter some of the celebration wine. Her mom only allowed the sixteen-year-old a half glass. To Nikki, it was brimming.

Heat checked her watch and stood. The new warmth that flowed through her came from something more than revelation, more than closure. She felt a connection.

Nikki put on her coat and stepped out.

The bartender’s hair had gone white over the years but he still remembered Miss Heat, same as he recalled everyone who ever had been a member or honored guest at the Players. If George had been working the Grill Room when Samuel Clemens knocked cue balls around the billiard table that still lived there, he would have memorized every shot, quip, and bawdy curse from Mr. Twain.

He got his keys off the hook above the bar sink, and as he led Nikki to the back, he said, “I still see your dad come in from time to time. Although not so much since…” George’s brow fell. He left it there.

In the back of the room, past cases of hard liquor and house wines, built-in cabinets filled a wall. “Here we go,” said George, “the private stock.” Each cupboard, the size of a small gym locker, was marked by an oval brass plaque etched with the member’s name. Nikki recognized a lot of them; most belonged to famous actors, but a few to composers, journalists, and novelists. They weren’t arranged alphabetically, but the barkeeper knew where each stash resided, by heart. He fit the key into the door of the locker labeled “Cynthia Heat” and stepped back. Discreet to a fault, George smiled and said, “I’ll leave you to do the honors,” then melted away to the Grill Room.

Heat opened the door and found no wine. All the locker housed was a solitary bottle of beer: Durdles’ Finest Pale Ale. A banner on the label read, “Now crafted in America at Brewery Boz, South Street Seaport.” Nikki lifted the bottle and saw her name on the envelope it had been resting on.

She ran the pad of her forefinger over her mother’s handwriting and opened the envelope flap, which Cynthia Heat had left folded but not sealed.

The note to Nikki was short. She absorbed it with surprise, at what it said and at the unexpected sense of closure she’d always believed could never come. The words under the signature at the end of the note made her eyes cloud with tears: “Always remember Mom loves you.”

She left the beer, took the note, and departed with one fewer loose end, and then some.

Nikki’s quad protested as she stretched on the mat at her gym early the next morning. The soreness from the physical ordeal of the past weeks, coupled with skipping workouts and sleep, made her feel like an out-of-shape slug. Heat smiled through her grimace, thankful she belonged to the only gym in Manhattan without mirrors.

When Bart Callan came in, he was grinning, too. “You weren’t kidding, Heat. This facility is bare-bones. I expect to see Rocky Balboa working a side of beef.”

“I like it this way. No frou-frou, no posers. It’s come to work, or stay out.”

“Is that why we have it all to ourselves?” He dropped his gym bag in a corner then stripped off his sweats down to his basketball shorts and a Homeland T-shirt with the sleeves hacked off, revealing seriously ripped upper arms. She wondered if he had altered his tee just for her.

Heat and Callan double fist-bumped in the center of the mat to signal readiness. Nikki shifted her weight back and forth on the balls of her feet to get a read of him, and in an instant, she got her assessment. He made a feint left and a lunge right, grabbing her waist and sending her to the mat. “Finally,” he said. “Contact.”

“Man.” She got up and said, “Rusty.”

This time she went for him. As she came forward, he dropped to a knee and flipped her over his back, and she came down with a thud on the mat. “Remember, you called me,” he said. “You sure you’re up for this?”

“We’ll see. I didn’t sleep much last night.”

“The arraignment?” He waved the air dismissively. “Don’t sweat that.”