Patterson Array - NYPD Red

I had no time to be delicate. “This is going to hurt,” I said and yanked the tape off hard, taking hair and skin with it.

Spence hungrily sucked in a mouthful of air. “Bomb to the right of the front door,” he gasped.

“I see it,” I said, walking over to it. “Not very sophisticated.”

“Zach, Spence, what’s going on in there?” It was Kylie on the other side of the door.

“He’s okay,” I said, which was seriously stretching the truth. “Hang on. I’m trying to disarm the booby trap. In fact, I want you to stand in the stairwell…just in case.”

“I thought you said you knew what you were doing?” she said.

“I do,” I lied. “It’s just a precaution. Now, back off, dammit.”

“I’m going. Hurry up. We have less than eight minutes.”

Spence’s face was contorted with pain. I had no idea how he might help, but I was out of my element, and since I was about to do something that could kill us both, I figured two heads were better than one.

“Spence, can you focus?” I said. “I need you to track my thinking.”

“I’ll try.”

“Okay, the front door is the trigger. Opening it pulls the trip wire. Trip wire activates the blasting cap.”

“And then we’re dead. Makes sense.”

“Now logic would dictate that if I pinch the wire and cut the piece closest to the door…”

“You take the door out of the equation,” Spence said. “No trigger.”

I pinched the trip wire between my thumb and index finger.

“Do it,” he said.

I cut the wire. One half fell to the floor. I opened my fingers and let go of the other half.

“We’re still here,” he said.

I opened the door and yelled out for Kylie.

She ran down the hall, then stepped into the apartment cautiously, eyes glued to her husband.

“Don’t go in any farther,” I said. “When Benoit Skyped us, the block of C4 he held up had a timer. The one I disabled doesn’t. There’s got to be another bomb somewhere.”

“We don’t have time to look for it,” Kylie said. “Let’s just get Spence out of here.”

“You can’t,” Spence said.

“Yes, we can,” Kylie said. “We’ve got six minutes and twelve seconds, and we’re getting you out of this building if we have to carry you out stark naked, chair and all.”

Spence’s body started to tremble. “You can’t get me out,” he repeated.

“Why?”

His eyes stared straight down at his feet. “That’s why.”

I followed his gaze. I hadn’t seen it before. Probably because there was almost no blood-just small dark stains where Spence’s feet had been nailed to the floor.

“Oh my God,” Kylie said, kneeling down at Spence’s feet.

“He had a nail gun,” Spence said.

“We have to pry you loose,” she said, putting a hand on his left foot.

Spence’s head and shoulders jerked back hard, and he let out a gut-wrenching scream. “Don’t-don’t touch. Please.”

“Spence, we have to get the nails out.”

“No time,” he said, breathing rapidly through the fog of fear and pain. “Just get yourself out.”

The reality of what was happening was incomprehensible, yet Spence seemed ready to accept it.

Kylie and I weren’t.

“Spence,” I said. “Where did Benoit go after he started the timer?”

“Kitch-en,” he said, forcing the word out in two syllables separated by a gasp for air.

Kylie and I both ran to the kitchen.

It felt like deja vu. Only a few minutes ago I had been flinging the cabinet doors open in Dino’s apartment. Now Kylie and I were doing the same thing in hers.

“I’ll do the top. You get the ones on the bottom,” she said.

I dropped to a squat and started opening the lower cabinets.

“Clear, clear, clear, clear,” Kylie said every time she opened another door and found nothing.

And then I saw it. The top of my head was just at countertop level, and I caught a flicker of red. It was the same glowing red light I had seen when Benoit started the countdown timer. It was coming through the glass door of a sleek, stainless-steel Breville toaster oven.

“Kylie, I got it,” I said, standing up.

“We only have two minutes. Can you disarm it?”

“Maybe if I had two days. I might have exaggerated my bomb experience,” I said. “I can’t even take a chance on opening the oven door. It could be rigged to blow. We have to ditch it-the whole thing.”

“Well, we can’t throw it out the window,” Kylie said. “God knows how many people we’d kill.”

“Do you have a safe?” I said. “That would contain some of the explosion.”

She shook her head. “What about the basement?” she said. “It’s like a bunker down there.”

“Not enough time. Even if your elevator managed to get us down there, we’d never get out.”

“We don’t need the elevator,” she said. “Grab it and follow me.”

The toaster oven was freestanding, about the size of a small microwave, and unplugged. I picked it up and followed Kylie.

“Garbage chute,” she said, bolting out the front door.

The incinerator room was just past the elevator. We went in, and Kylie pulled the chute door open.

As soon as she did, we both realized her mistake. The door was hinged at the bottom, and the hopper was designed to drop down only about sixty degrees. Plastic garbage bags could be squished and squeezed to cram down the chute. Stainless-steel toaster ovens couldn’t.

“Pull hard on the door,” I said. “Rip it right out of the wall.”

Kylie sat on the floor, grabbed the handle, and put all her weight on it.

“It won’t budge,” she said. “The bomb is too damn big to shove through the door.”

I stared at the red glow. We had ninety seconds.

“Get me a sledgehammer,” I said.

“I don’t have a sledge-no, I have something. Give me a second,” she said, running back to her apartment.

“I can give you seventy-two seconds,” I yelled back after her. “And then we’re toast.”

I watched the timer count down to 1:00, 0:59, 0:58, and I wondered how much C4 Benoit could stuff into the guts of a toaster oven. From what I knew about his style, he wouldn’t skimp on the ingredients.

Kylie came back carrying a twenty-pound dumbbell. “Best I can do,” she said. “Hold the door open.”

I’m pretty sure I’m stronger than Kylie, but I wasn’t about to debate which one of us should be wielding the dumbbell. We had only thirty-seven seconds, and I figured whatever she lacked in brute strength, she would make up for with pure adrenaline.

I set the toaster oven on the floor, pulled down the chute door as far as the hinge would go, then grabbed the handle to hold the door in place.

“I’m hoping you’re as accurate with a dumbbell as you are with a Glock,” I said. “Try not to hit me. We’ve got thirty seconds. When we get down to ten, we should run like hell for your apartment.”

So we can die in there with Spence, because as sure as shit, when this blows, the blast radius is going to go a lot farther than your living room.

Kylie brought the dumbbell down hard. The force reverberated up my arm, but the door didn’t budge.

“Twenty-five seconds,” I said.

She swung it again.

The door hung on tight.

“Hit it again,” I said. “Third time’s the charm.”

I was right. The door gave. Not a lot, but it gave.

“It’s loose,” I yelled. “Again.”

She lowered the boom, and this time chunks of cinder block fell to the floor.

“One more time. Eighteen seconds.”

Kylie raised the dumbbell high and brought it down with a loud grunt worthy of Serena Williams.