Linda Fairstein: Killer Heat

I kept my eye on the gun while I obeyed his command.

"Now the other one."

He seemed satisfied that I wasn't wearing an ankle holster.

"Where's Mercer?" My beloved friend had been through one shooting on the job not too long ago. I couldn't bear to think he had been hurt again. "That's his gun."

"Fine piece."

"Sig-Sauer. Nine millimeter." I figured I might as well use the little bit of knowledge I'd picked up at the range the previous week. Maybe he'd think he'd be better off if he kept the gun away from me. Maybe he'd think I'd know how to use it if I got my hands on it. "Same as mine."

"I guess I'd better find out where that's at then. They'd make a pretty pair," he said. As he moved toward me, I took a step back.

"In my locker," I said. I lifted my windbreaker up and showed him the waistband of my jeans. "No Sig."

I started to reach into the pockets to turn them inside out.

"Hold it, bitch. I'll be doing that myself."

I knew the door was just inches behind me. I didn't want Troy Rasheed's hands anywhere on me.

"You're not leaving yet," he said, thrusting an arm over my shoulder to hold the door in place.

My back was flush against it. He was practically leaning his body on mine, and the handle of the knife he'd abandoned-the one I'd found with the canteens-was pressing into my spine. I didn't mind the discomfort. I just didn't want him to find it.

Rasheed put his left hand into my deep jacket pocket and pressed it in place, rubbing up and down slowly, then from side to side. He may have been looking for a gun or a waist holster, but he was also delighting in repulsing me with his touch.

He leaned back so he could reach his arm between our bodies to check my other pockets-jacket and jeans on my left side-raising the gun above my head with his right hand.

"You're sweating, girl," he said.

"It's August."

He laughed.

The warm moisture from my pores was mixing with the cool dampness of the rainwater that had saturated me.

He found something in my jeans pocket and slowly pulled it out. "A Yankee fan. I like that in my women."

It was the ticket stub from a game I had been to earlier in the month. While he read the small print, I looked out at the river, but not a single boat was plying the choppy water yet.

"Who'd they play?"

"Boston. We crushed them."

Troy Rasheed was so close to me I could smell his stale breath and foul body odor. I couldn't take the chance of closing my eyes for a second, so I focused on a door to the side of the desk that opened into a second room. Maybe Mercer and Russell Leamer had been forced in there.

"Now I think it's time for the seventh-inning stretch. You and me, we're going to-"

"I need water," I said, putting my hand to my throat. "Is there any water inside?"

His head whipped around in the direction I'd been looking and back at me. He placed the Sig in the front of his waistband.

"I'll be deciding what you need for the time being," Troy said, holding his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger. "Shit, I don't even know your name. You didn't answer my question."

I didn't speak.

"Now why don't you just tell me your name?"

"You don't need to know my name."

His right hand smacked the side of my face faster than I could blink, and he laughed again. "I told you, I'll be deciding what you need, and I'm certainly deciding what I need. I always do."

Then he placed a finger on my jacket, directly above my left breast, and pressed into my chest as he drew an imaginary line across it, a couple of inches long.

"Now, if you weren't working undercover, Miss Detective, you'd have a shiny gold plate right here and I could just read your name."

I swatted his hand away. "Alex Cooper."

"Alex Cooper," he repeated, nodding his head up and down. Maybe he was visualizing how the initials would look on his forearm.

Troy Rasheed slipped out of the Park Service uniform raincoat that he must have taken from Leamer and let it drop beside him on the floor.

He was wearing a plain white T-shirt, and now I could see the flourishes of the monograms up and down both arms, each one marking the heartbreaking experience of a woman who had crossed his path.

I needed to keep him talking. It would be only minutes before Mike figured a way to come check on me. There wasn't any room for an "AC" to be added to his skin museum.

"The first thing you're going to do for me, Alex, is take off-"

The desk phone rang and Troy Rasheed was as startled as I.

"Well, you can't be quite so tough as you're acting, Detective Cooper, can you? Get all out of breath just 'cause the telephone rings?"

He took a step toward the desk but didn't answer, waiting out the sixth, seventh, and eighth rings, before the insistent caller gave up.

"You're gonna take off your shoes first, Alex. Those sneakers is not sexy," he said, pulling on his lip again, extending it away from his teeth, as though it hurt him.

There was another noise-behind Rasheed-from within the second room. He didn't act as though he'd heard it. Thank God someone was alive in there.

"Get them off, sugar."

I bent down to untie the laces of my sneakers. He was too far away from me, for the moment, for me to try to surprise him with the knife.

The ringing started again. Rasheed picked up the receiver and slammed it back down, then took it off again and rested it on the desk. In seconds, a shrill busy signal was bleeping at us, rendering the phone useless.

Another noise behind Rasheed. Not a voice but some kind of movement. He jerked his head in that direction.

"Let me see my friend Mercer. Let me see what you've done to him."

He picked up an object from the desk and turned to face me. Troy Rasheed was holding a grenade.

"I'm gonna save the show-and-tell for later, Detective Cooper, when he's feeling a little better. But we'll take another one of these with us."

"Take it where?" I raised my voice. I wanted Mercer and Leamer to know I was just a room away. "That's how you got Mercer's gun. You used a stinger on them. Let me see him, please."

"Now you've been well-trained, girl, if you've been playing with one of these. I hope you've never thrown this son of a bitch at any of your perps, Detective Cooper. That would make me very angry at you."

Stingers, or Hornet's Nests, are less-than-lethal grenades made up of small rubber balls inside two spheres of hard rubber, instead of shrapnel in metal casing. Law enforcement agents use them to break up prison riots, and I had seen a SWAT team clear a small room with several of them, incapacitating their targets, dropping men to the ground, by the blunt force of the projectiles.

"Can I sit down for a minute?" I said. "I-uh-I feel dizzy. I think I'm going to be sick."

I knew women who had put off their assailants by becoming physically ill.

Troy tugged at his lower lip. "I think the best thing for that is a little fresh air, Alex."

I imagined Mercer and Leamer, bound and gagged like Pam Lear, on the floor of the adjacent room. I didn't want to leave them to go off with this maniac.

He grabbed my elbow and pulled me toward the door. There was a chain around his neck, hanging down under his T-shirt. Something dangling from it made an impression against the cotton in the shape of a dog tag.

He stopped in front of me and started to give orders.

"We're going for a walk, Detective, like I told you. And I'm gonna go nice and slow out there 'cause I know you're barefoot. I know that's why you can't exactly run fast, either. So you remember that, too. Oh, and did I tell you that you might want to be very careful where you walk?" he said, stroking my cheek with the back of his hand. "You must be good at following orders, aren't you?"