Джеймс Паттерсон - NYPD Red 6

We weren’t doing that well ourselves as the car went slip-sliding across the slick turf. And then another spinout as the Impala did a complete one-eighty.

“Faster on foot,” Kylie said. She bailed out of the back door and ran toward the chopper. I jumped out after her.

The chopper was small, a single-engine, no markings except for a tail number. NYPD Aviation would be able to outrun it—if they were here. But they were still minutes away, and that’s all the time Banta needed to lift off and fly in any direction on the compass, land in a secluded spot, and drive off to parts unknown. That was Gary—always planning ahead.

The pilot must have been one of his EMS cohorts, because less than thirty minutes after Banta got the call that we were on to him, this guy showed up with the getaway plane, no questions asked.

I was a hundred feet away when the black EMS tech climbed into the chopper. Kylie was closer, but not by much.

Gary was going to outrun her. He knew it. I knew it. And Kylie knew it. Which was probably why she reached down to her right hip.

“ Don’t shoot ,” I screamed, my voice drowned out by the whump-whump of the rotors.

Kylie breaks a lot of rules and bends even more. She’s got a reputation as a maverick, and she’s proud of it. But there’s one rule that will cost her her job if she violated it. A cop cannot—repeat, cannot —shoot at a moving vehicle unless he or she is returning gunfire.

That means if a car is coming at me at seventy miles an hour, I have two choices: get hit or get the hell out of the way. Firing my gun is not an option.

There are no loopholes, no excuses. And in this case, there was no justification for shooting. Kylie’s life wasn’t in danger, just her pride. She was determined not to lose Banta.

He clambered into the helicopter and pulled the door shut. The engine whined, the blades spun faster, but Kylie didn’t stop. Just as the pilot pulled on the lever to create more lift, she jumped onto the landing-gear skid, brought her right hand up from her hip, shook it hard, and jammed it through the narrow vent window.

It wasn’t a gun. You don’t shake your gun. You shake your department-issued can of mace. It’s not much bigger than a tube of lipstick, but it packs more than enough wallop to incapacitate a cockpit full of bad guys.

The chopper smacked down hard as Kylie yanked her arm out of the window and pirouetted off the skid like one of the Flying Wallendas coming down from the high wire, ready to take a bow.

The chopper doors burst open, and the occupants spilled out, choking, wheezing, and dropping to the ground.

Kylie went directly to the fallen hero, cuffed him, and yanked him to his feet.

The boy band, guns in hand, joined the action and helped me take care of the other two in short order.

The rotors on the chopper eased to a stop, the last echo of the siren died out, and the civilians who had been watching—and recording—the action burst into applause.

Except for one man—one very, very angry man. He came running toward us yelling something about crazy bastards having to pay.

Hard to blame him. He was the groundskeeper.

CHAPTER 72

WE SEPARATED GARY BANTA from the others and poured him into the back of a squad car. He didn’t say a word for the entire forty-five-minute ride back to Manhattan. He didn’t have to. Guilt, shame, and remorse were etched on his face.

We got to the precinct just at the change of tour, so the place was humming with the energy of a big-city police station. Kylie and I walked through the door, our pants and shoes caked with mud, and all the cops in the room stopped what they were doing. But they weren’t looking at us.

They were staring at one of their own, still in uniform, wrists shackled, head hung low, eyes unable to meet theirs. I gave the desk sergeant a quick nod. Paperwork later. We rushed Banta upstairs and out of the line of fire before some wiseass cop said something that would send him into a tailspin.

“That was rough,” I said as soon as we got him into a chair in the interrogation room. “You okay?”

He gave me a stoic nod. But I knew the stony façade couldn’t last long. Everyone has a breaking point, and for Gary Banta, all it took for the dam to burst were seven words.

You have the right to remain silent .

Translation: Life as you know it is over .

His body heaved; he slumped in his chair and wept uncontrollably.

I put a hand on his shoulder and said, “We’ll help you get through this, brother.”

Brother . It wasn’t a sign of respect. It was a tactic. When you want someone to talk, treat him like gold.

We gave him water, tissues, and time to cry it out. He declined a lawyer. He had too much he needed to get off his chest.

“Gary,” I said in my best father-confessor voice, “you have a record anyone would be proud of. This isn’t you.”

He looked up, grateful that I had a hint of the man he used to be.

“Tell them that,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “The family. Tell them how sorry I am. It was supposed to be a victimless crime. Insurance was going to reimburse them. We never meant for anyone to die.”

“We?” I said.

“Me, Diggs, and Ramos. It was just the three of us.”

“What about the crew at Yankee Stadium?”

He cracked half a smile. “They’re clean. The only thing they’re guilty of is giving me a heads-up that a cop was lying about knowing me. Hunter made you when he said I don’t drink coffee and you bought it. I drink it by the gallon.”

I returned the smile and shrugged. “FDNY, one; NYPD, zero.” I put my hand on his shoulder a second time. “I saw a picture of the fire commissioner pinning a medal on you,” I said. “It was only two years ago. How’d you get from there to here?”

He closed his eyes for about ten seconds as he reconstructed a life gone wrong. “I’m a single dad,” he said when he opened them. “Two years ago I was on top of the world. My daughter finished college, she got a great job, and I had some money in my pocket. Same with the other two guys. So we bought a house in Peekskill, worked on it on our days off, and flipped it six months later. We cleared fifty-seven grand, and we were hooked.

“We bought another house. Bigger, much more money, but we were like addicts. We were going to get rich flipping houses. And then Murphy’s Law kicked us in the balls. First it turned out the electric wasn’t up to code, then we had to spend ten grand on a truss to support the second floor, and finally, the crusher—mold.

“The place was a money pit. We were in over our heads, and we couldn’t scrape together enough to get out. And then one day Diggsy and I catch a call, a guy hit by a car on Bainbridge Avenue. We pick him up in the bus, and we’re cutting his shirt off, and we see them. Bags of coke taped to his chest. Turned out to be five kilos—street value was like eighty, ninety grand.

“The guy says to us, ‘Don’t rat me out to the cops. Just hang on to the blow for me for a few days, and there’s fifteen grand in it for you.’ Diggs and me, we’re straight shooters, but we’re hemorrhaging money on this house, and we can’t say no to fifteen large. Two days later, the guy—we named him Mr. Bainbridge—calls and tells us to drop the coke off at a Sunoco station on East Tremont. We do, and the guy gives us a bag with fifteen Gs in it.”

He looked up at us. “You know where this is going, don’t you?”

“Bainbridge called again,” I said. “Any drug dealer would be happy to have two upstanding citizens with EMS badges on his payroll.”

“The next run was to Jersey. A week later, it’s Norfolk, Virginia. That’s a long haul. So we call Ramos. He was in the toilet with us on the house-flipping, plus he’s a pilot. Why drive across five state lines when you can fly?