Richard Castle - Frozen Heat

“How soon?”

“Hasty girl.”

“How soon?”

“Within the hour, for sure.”

“Hey, Lauren?”

“Yeah?”

“This is good news,” said Nikki. “Thanks for being a pest.”

After she hung up, Rook came over to join her and said, “You do know that if we weren’t in your workplace, I’d give you a shoulder rub or a hug or both.”

“Thank you for not.”

“You’re my hero, seriously. I don’t even know how you are coping.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Please, not here, not now.”

“‘Nuff said.” He raised both hands in a surrender gesture. Rook knew her well enough to know that, in spite of all the passion that boiled inside, Nikki came factory-equipped with a firewall that kept it locked up. Her feelings ran deep and hot, which made it a life’s work for her to compartmentalize. Jameson Rook unexpectedly held some keys to those locks and wisely let the subject drop. He switched gears with a survey of the room, which buzzed with a level of activity he’d never seen before. “Looks like you’ve got the taskmaster thing down, Detective Heat. Or is it taskmistress? So hard to know these days.”

“It’s a start” was all she allowed.

“And what are you planning to do?”

“Me? Keep riding herd. Beg, borrow, and steal a bunch of uniforms to get out and canvass with the Jane Doe photo, as soon as I have a clue where to show it. Maybe I’ll take a drive down to Thirtieth Street to surf the autopsy when she thaws.”

“I think you and I have more important work to do.”

Nikki gave him the wary squint he’d seen so often. “Why am I not liking this already?”

“Cute,” he said. “Always your first reaction. Until what? Sweet vindication.” He left for the Murder Boards, and, after hesitating, she surrendered and followed. When Nikki got there, he faced the two boards, balancing his hands like scales. “Is it I, or does there seem to be a bit of an imbalance?”

“First off, plus ten for grammar.”

“All part of the writer’s toolbox,” said Rook.

“And, secondly, yes, I focused my briefing on the new murder. The details of my mother’s case are too vast to post on one board.” She tapped her temple. “But trust me, it’s all in here.”

“Which is why,” he said, matching her move by tapping the nearly blank board, “we need to concentrate our efforts here.”

“Rook, I have been there. I have lived it for over a decade.”

“Not with me, you haven’t.”

“But I cannot lose traction on the new case.”

“Come on, you yourself said solve one, solve the other.” He swept his arm to the bustling squad room. “You’ve already got one plate spinning beautifully. What’s to lose by sorting through the cold case with your experience and my fresh eyes?”

“But that means going backward. More than ten years.”

He smiled and nodded. “With apologies to Prince, we’re going to partner like it’s 1999.”

“Prince may forgive you but rule me out.” Rook held his ground, affirming the logic of his idea by letting brash silence and flickering eyebrows do the work. At last, she said, “We don’t have time to go through the whole case.”

“Well, how about we start by talking to the lead detective on it?”

“He retired,” she said, the quickness of her reply designed to tell him she not only kept up on the details but that this would be no small undertaking. “Who knows where he is now?”

“I don’t know about right this minute, but at noon today Carter Damon, NYPD, retired, will be at P.J. Clarke’s on West Sixty-third having lunch with us.”

“Rook, you are incorrigible.”

“I know. I tried being corrigible once. Lasted a summer right before puberty. Corrigible was kinda dull. Incorrigible was not only more fun, it got me laid a lot. Which is also fun.” He checked his watch. “Ooh, quarter to twelve. Subway, or are you driving us to our appointment?”

Rook didn’t say much on the short walk to the 79th Street station. He kept the walk brisk to thwart Nikki from changing her mind and staying at the precinct to probe the new lead rather than traveling back in time with him. Standing in the aisle of the subway car for the two-stop ride south, she did say, “You actually knew the name of the lead investigator and where to find him?”

“Let’s just say I needed a hobby during my recuperation. A guy can only watch so many telenovelas.” The doors parted and she followed him out onto the platform.

The subway station at West 66th Street was always busy around lunchtime; however, damage from the earthquake made the pack of humanity extra dense that day. The rails and underground structure had been OK’d by MTA engineers, but superficial damage still needed a cleanup and the platforms there were halved by caution tape to keep riders away from all the tile that had broken off the walls. Many subway stops in the city had public art installations themed for their neighborhood, and their stop; the one for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts had an impressive wall mosaic stretching the length of the station. Whole chunks of the masterpiece had fractured in the morning shake, sending glass bits of costumed warriors, opera singers, and back-flipping gymnasts to the floor. The elevator up to the sidewalk had also been tagged out of service, and Heat and Rook found themselves blockaded by an elderly woman struggling her walker up the steps. They introduced themselves to her by first names and each offered Sylvia an arm to grip for the remaining five steps. A stranger behind them, a hard-looking gangsta from Uptown with a neck and arms full of scary ink poked Heat’s shoulder. Then he volunteered to carry the old woman’s walker. Welcome to New York City in an emergency.

Up top, Sylvia left them for the Barnes amp; Noble, singsonging her thank-yous to Heat, Rook, and the gangsta, who had quietly gone his way in the opposite direction, toward Juilliard. Nikki noticed he had a clarinet case over his shoulder.

Walking through Dante Park where Broadway crosses Columbus, they saw a small band of demonstrators rallying under the Philip Johnson Timesculpture shouting warnings of doom to them about the omen of the quake. One shook a homemade sign at Nikki as she passed. It read, “The End Is Near!” Crossing the street to the restaurant, she paused to look back at the words on the sign and hoped so. Then Jameson Rook took her elbow and escorted her back to the beginning.

The P.J. Clarke’s at Lincoln Square had only opened for business two years before but already vibed old New York saloon, the sort of joint where you could get a great burger and a brew or order something icy fresh from the raw bar without a health care card. The original P.J.’s, which opened on the East Side more than a century before, was where Don Draper and his fellow mad men hung out, as did real-life throwbacks like Sinatra, Jackie-O, and Buddy Holly, who proposed to his wife there on their first date. When Nikki Heat followed Rook across the distressed wood plank floor to their table, she only spotted one familiar face. He wasn’t a celebrity but he made her knees go weak.

Carter Damon might have retired from the NYPD, but a cop’s habits run deep, and he sat with his back to the wall so he could monitor the room over his Bloody Mary. He stood to shake both their hands but kept his gaze on Nikki, even as he gripped Rook’s. Something broken lurked in that look; something that, for her, read sadness or awkwardness or, maybe, vodka. Perhaps all of the above.

“You grew up,” Damon said as they all sat. “I just got older.” Sure, he had more salt in with the pepper of his brush cut and cop-stache, and some pouches had begun to swell his eyes, but Damon, at fifty, still had the lean body of a guy who kept himself in shape. He fit perfectly into the image frozen in her head from the first time she saw him on the worst night of her life.