Richard Castle - Frozen Heat

Nikki never had to find out. She righted herself. Gasping, she lurched for the edge of the platform. But it was too tall for her to jump up on. The train was seconds away. Its blazing headlight turned the tunnel into day. That’s when Nikki saw the metal service ladder recessed into the concrete. She pitched herself at it and grabbed the railing.

Heat rolled onto the deck of the platform just as the Uptown One roared by, kicking up a swirl of wind and a clatter more deafening than she’d experienced in all her years in New York. She was lucky to be alive to hear it.

The train moved on, and the air and noise stilled fast in its wake. Two blocks away, its brakes screeched as it pulled into the station she had just left. Nikki rolled over and sat to regain her breath from the excruciating whack she had given her kneecap on her scramble up the ladder. When she tested it with her fingertips, it didn’t feel broken, although the sting told her some skin would be missing. She used her phone flashlight to look for blood on her pants but didn’t see any. Just a smudge of railroad grime on the knee, identical to Nicole Bernardin’s.

Heat rose to her feet. She swept her light around the Ghost Station and saw a study in contrasts. One the one hand, design and equipment from the early part of the last century, left as it was the day the station had been sealed: a deco ticket booth; a vintage disposal machine for chopping tickets after entry; overhead fixtures for individual bulbs instead of fluorescent tubes; rows of scalloped ceiling accents; an ornately wrought banister descending the stairs from the capped sidewalk entrance; a scrolled iron gate that the station agent lifted for passengers exiting the trains; and a terra-cotta panel with “91” in relief on it, set into the wall to designate the station. But the romance of frozen time had been offset by its defilement.

Nearly every surface in the station wore a coat of graffiti: the wall tiles; the banisters; the support pillars. Soda cans as well as broken wine and beer bottles littered the ground, collected in corners, and rested next to a plastic cooler on the decaying concrete stairs. The doors to both restrooms had been broken off and taken. Nikki didn’t venture inside either one but could see and smell the violations inside the battered, tagged stalls.

This was the handiwork of the Mole People, she assumed. The Moles were the stuff of urban legends in the New York underground, which told of tribes of misfit subcultures that had organized to rule these tunnels. In reality, they were just tag artists making their marks or homeless who survived in the musty darkness. There had been a TV drama called Beauty and the Beast Nikki watched when she was in grade school that was about a lion man living below like that, but she had never seen dear, urbane Vincent with a spray can and a bottle of fortified wine.

A noise behind her made her turn and switch off her light. As her eyes adjusted to the muted street glow filtering down through the grates she and Rook had investigated, Nikki figured she must have heard the approach of another train. This one raced downtown on the opposite side of the tunnel from her. She waited until it passed before she lit up her phone again. She didn’t want to chance being seen and reported. She had work to do.

Nikki began old school, just like the station. She looked for footprints. A thick layer of soot and dust coated everything down there, and if Nicole Bernardin indeed had been there before she was killed, Heat just might find hers. She squatted down and held her light close to the floor. Slowly, patiently, she swept the beam just inches above it, alert for any disturbance or telltale shape that she might follow to the hiding place. The problem was that so many Moles had used the platform that the footprints were myriad. She made one more pass, this time walking the station floor in a stoop, seeing if any smaller, female prints emerged, but none did.

Next, she searched the ticket booth, which only took seconds. It had long ago been trashed and gutted. As she’d expected, both restrooms presented no hiding places when she examined them, too. The cooler on the stairs was empty, as was the inside of the ticket shredder, whose door had been pried off and left on the ground. She even inspected the bottom of the sidewalk grate itself, in case that was, literally, where Nicole had been styling. It wasn’t.

Unable to accept defeat, Nikki ignored her frustration and thought. Again she put herself in her mother’s shoes, asking herself, if she had been Cynthia Heat, and had been directed to find the drop, would Nicole expect her to search for footprints in the dust?

No.

Then what? How would Nicole let her know exactly where to look?

By giving her a clue.

And she had-the bracelet with the numeral charms.

Nikki looked up at the nine and the one embedded in the wall.

Could it be?

It was too high for her to reach, so Nikki surveyed the place for something to stand on. She climbed back up the steps, came down with the plastic cooler, and set it on the ground to use as a stepstool.

Nikki’s phone vibrated in her hand, startling her. The caller ID said it was Rook. Damn, she forgot to call Rook. She pushed accept and said, “Hey, guess what? I made it down here, and I-” Her ear filled with the dropped-call beep. She tried to redial him but the lone reception bar faded out and she got the “No Signal” display.

Carefully balancing herself on the cooler, Heat reached up and ran her fingers along the flamboyantly scrolled edges of the “91” faceplate. It felt loose.

It moved.

Nikki set her phone on the ground, positioned the light to shine up the wall, and got back on the cooler, stretching out so that the fingertips of each hand were on either side of the faceplate. Her arms ached from the awkwardness of her position, but she kept prying, feeling the panel coming looser from the wall with her effort.

As she struggled, tugging at one side and then the other, Nikki envisioned her mother working on the same panel ten years before. What did Cynthia Heat find, she wondered, and was it what had sealed her fate? And what about Nicole Bernardin? If Nicole had placed something here in her drop box so many years later, what could that be? And who did she leave it for? And why was it worth killing her over?

Just then the faceplate popped out of the wall and Nikki fell backward off the cooler, landing hard on the floor, still clutching it.

“I’ll take it from here,” said the man’s voice behind her.

Nikki rolled to her knees and reached for her gun, but before she could get to her holster, she got blinded by a strong flashlight beam and heard the action slide on a pistol. “Touch it, and you’ll die right there,” said Tyler Wynn.

Heat dropped her hand to her side. “Lace your fingers behind your neck, please.” She did as he told her and squinted beyond the light to try to the see the old man as he stepped forward from the top of the ladder onto the platform.

“You’re every bit as good as your mother, Nikki. Maybe better.” He swung the light out of her eyes and shined it up on the wall where a tan leather pouch sat inside the recess she had exposed. “Thanks for finding this for me. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to retrieve it.”

“You mean like faking your death?”

“Miraculous recovery, wouldn’t you say? Do you know I actually paid that doctor extra to zap me with low voltage just to be convincing?” He trained the beam back on her face. “Don’t look so disappointed. One thing you learn in the CIA. Nobody is ever really dead for certain.”

“I know one woman who is. And you killed her.”

“Not personally. I had hired help do that. In fact, I think you two know each other.” He called over his shoulder to someone Nikki couldn’t see. “You’d better get up from there, unless you want to get run over. The next train is due any minute.”