Patterson Array - NYPD Red

“Look out, world,” Seacrest said to his audience. “Here comes the most-talked-about, most-written-about, most-tweeted-about bad boy in all of Hollywood. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you? It’s Braaaaaaaaaaaad Schuck.”

The picture cut away from Seacrest to a remote camera at street level. A stretch Hummer, blowing its horn, made its way slowly up Sixth Avenue. The moonroof was wide open, and standing on the backseat, half in, half out of the car, was Brad Schuck.

To toast the crowd, he raised a bottle of the vodka he was famous for hawking, tipped it to the sky, and guzzled down four long swallows. The fans howled.

The camera stayed on Schuck while Seacrest gave a running commentary. “I’ll ask him when he gets here, but knowing Brad Schuck, I’m going to bet five bucks that wasn’t water,” he said. “Wait a minute, he’s handing the bottle to someone in the limo.”

Schuck lowered the vodka, ducked down, and came up a second later with a two-foot-long tube.

“Oh, man!” Seacrest yelled off camera. “It’s a bleacher reacher. Bad Brad has a T-shirt cannon, and since he’s wearing one of his signature GET SCHUCKED T-shirts, I think we all know what he’s going to be shooting into the crowd.”

Whoomp. The first T-shirt launched into the air, and the people behind the barrier went berserk scrambling for the souvenir.

Then the Hummer made an S-turn from one side of the street to the other and Schuck fired again.

“The mayor invited everyone to shoot in New York,” Seacrest said, laughing, “and crazy Brad is doing just that. Let’s watch.”

Lexi knew what was coming next. She was off the sofa now, jumping up and down, clapping her hands, her head spinning with excitement.

“Oh, God!” she screamed. “I heart New York.”

“I guess everything they say about this Schuck character being a raving lunatic is true,” Jerry Brainard said.

He had thrown the feed from the E! channel onto the large center monitor and, along with a few million other viewers, we watched Brad Schuck fire T-shirts at the adoring multitude.

“You going to arrest him?” Jerry asked.

“Arrest him? It’s more likely the mayor will invite him to lunch at Gracie Mansion,” I said. “The first thing you learn at NYPD Red is that there’s a time and a place to crack down on celebrity bad-boy antics. Radio City in front of thousands of doting fans is not the place, and the week that the mayor is trying to encourage assholes like Schuck to shoot more movies in New York is definitely not the time. Besides, those T-shirt missiles are harmless enough. They’re only made of cott-”

The back door of the Command Center flew open and a uniformed cop struggled up the steps, trying to hold up a dazed, incoherent civilian. Brainard helped them both in, and the cop lowered the civilian gently to the floor.

“I found this guy under the TV camera scaffold,” he said. “I smelled his breath. He’s not drunk. Judging by the bruise on the side of his head, I think somebody coldcocked him. I called for an ambulance.”

The man on the ground had the E! channel logo on his blue shirt. The badge on his breast pocket had turned around, and I flipped it over.

“Oh shit,” I said. “Jerry, get back to the board.”

“You know him?” Brainard said, scrambling back to his chair.

“No. Never saw him before in my life. But he’s with E! TV, and his badge says ‘Cameraman.’”

“So?”

I’ve been playing chess since I was seven years old. Somewhere along the way I learned how to think three, four, five moves ahead. But I didn’t have time to explain to Jerry where I was going.

“Just give me the mast camera, and zoom in on those E! channel camera scaffolds,” I said.

Jerry panned over to the 50th Street scaffold and zoomed in on the camera at the top.

“Looks normal,” I said. “Next one.”

I turned to the cop in uniform. “Where did you find him? Under what scaffold?”

“Sixth Avenue.”

Jerry was already panning over to the scaffold on 51st Street.

“Forget that one!” I yelled. “Give me the guy in the center. Sixth Avenue.”

Jerry leaned on the toggle switch and the camera slowly started to creep back in the opposite direction. It was agonizing, like watching someone park a battleship.

“Zoom in on the cameraman,” I said.

Jerry brought the man sharply into focus. For a few seconds it all looked perfectly normal, and I was starting to doubt my instincts. And then the cameraman stepped away from the camera.

“Pull back!” I yelled. “Track him, track him!”

The cameraman moved to the edge of the scaffold. He had something in his right hand. He pulled his arm back, like he was about to throw a Hail Mary pass.

“It’s glass,” Brainard said, zooming in on the man’s hand. “A bottle, I think.”

And then he let it fly. The camera tracked the bottle perfectly as it arced through the air over Sixth Avenue.

I didn’t have to be a chess player to know what was going to happen next.

The Molotov cocktail hit the roof of Brad Schuck’s Hummer and exploded on impact. The screen lit up bright orange, and Brainard pulled back to get a wider picture.

“This is Command,” I said into the mic. “I need every available unit to the camera scaffold on Sixth Avenue between Five Zero and Five One. There’s a white male, fifty to sixty years old, wearing a blue E! channel uniform. He’s our bomb thrower. Stop him. He’s probably coming down the north side of the tower. I can’t see him from here.”

I stood up and watched what I could see. Brad Schuck, in flames, frantically crawling onto the roof of his scorched limo.

He rolled off the car onto the road, got up, and stumbled, screaming, toward the theater, globs of flaming napalm flying off his body.

Just before he could rush headlong into Ryan Seacrest and the horrified crowd under the marquee, Schuck blessedly lost consciousness and collapsed in a smoldering heap on the red carpet.

One second I was staring at the guy who torched Brad Schuck, and the next he was gone.

“We lost him,” I said. “He knows where our camera is, and he’s climbing down the back side of the scaffold.”

I’d never worked with Jerry Brainard before, but the man was a total pro. Unflappable. Grace under fire.

“Of course he knows where that camera is. It’s twenty-seven feet high and pointing right at him,” Brainard said. “But I wonder if he knows about this one.”

His fingers worked the console, the picture changed, and suddenly there was our bomber, climbing down the opposite side of the camera tower.

“Traffic cam,” Brainard said. “I preset every one in a six-block radius before we started. Just in case.”

Jerry was good, but the guy we were after wasn’t stupid. He had to know we’d pick him up with another camera soon enough. As soon as his feet touched the ground, I understood why he needed to be off camera, even if for just a few seconds.

In one swift, almost invisible move his distinctive blue E! channel shirt was transformed into a red, orange, and gold tie-dyed T.

“Velcro,” Brainard said. “Pretty slick.”

I grabbed the mic. “Command to all units. Suspect is on the ground and on the run. He’s removed the E! channel uniform and is now wearing jeans and a red, orange, and gold tie-dyed sixties-type T-shirt. He’s in front of the Time-Life Building and headed for West Five One Street.”

You might think that with more than a hundred cops blanketing the area we’d have no problem grabbing one man. But it wasn’t that easy. Most of our guys had been stationed in front of the barricades, and they had to work their way back through the crowd.