“No,” she said. “I told you I would never do that.”
“Then, fine. Let Wally be the bull in the china shop while you watch it on TV.” The light turned and he walked on. She caught up with him.
“I hate you.”
“Inside words,” he said.
The next morning, Heat arrived ten minutes early for her seven o’clock coffee meeting with Zach Hamner, hoping to use the time before he showed to quell the upset she felt at stooping to see the weasel. But when she walked into the cafe near One Police Plaza, he was already finishing off a combo breakfast consisting of a Denver omelet, home fries, bagel and cream cheese, juice, and an espresso. Hamner didn’t rise when she came in, just gave her a nod and pointed to the chair across from him. “You’re early,” he said, checking the time on his BlackBerry.
“I can wait outside and you can finish your meal.” She had told herself on the subway ride downtown that she wouldn’t be snarky with him, but Zach Hamner made it hard to resist. The NYPD senior administrative aide to the deputy commissioner of legal affairs liked to swing his dick, and Nikki figured it got all its length from his title. Every transaction, large and small, was a power play to him, and forcing her to come all the way down to the Cort Cafe, for a conversation they could have easily completed the night before on the phone when she’d called him, constituted a command appearance to prove who swung the longest rope.
Zach pretended to be oblivious to her annoyance. “No, I can eat while we talk. Coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
He finished his bagel, making her wait out his chew while he surfed new e-mails on his phone. Heat conceded that Zach “The Hammer” Hamner had cause to be unhappy with her. And, clearly, this ceremony of disrespect was payback for the political capital she’d cost him two months before. That was when she’d stunned the Police Commission by declining the promotion he had engineered for her to take command of the Twentieth Precinct.
When he took his sweet time to flick a sesame seed off the sleeve of his charcoal pin-striped suit, she almost walked out. In these few short minutes of proximity, the viscousness of his world—a power broker’s bazaar of trades and leverage—brought back the agony that had sent her fleeing from the bump in rank. This was why Heat had refused to call him when Rook mentioned it the week before. But now, with Irons in danger of blowing up her mother’s case, Nikki knew she had no choice but to suck it up and acquiesce.
And so did Zach Hamner.
He set his BlackBerry to the side and said, “So. Trouble on Eighty-second Street?”
“As I said last night on the phone, I’m on mandated leave at the worst possible time. Captain Irons engineered that, and now that I’m sidelined, he’s bigfooting both of my investigations and putting them at risk.”
“And one of them’s your mother’s homicide, right?”
He knew that already, but she played along and swallowed it. “That’s why I’m asking for your help.”
“I tried to help you once before and that didn’t go so well.”
“Let’s be honest, Zach, you would have been helping yourself with my promotion, too.”
“Enlightened self-interest. You can’t hitch your wagon to a star without creating one.” He flashed a mirthless grin and let it drop. “I misjudged you, Heat. You pissed on me in public.”
Fulfilling her role in the transaction, she said, “I’m truly sorry if I caused you trouble,” and watched him process those words: the entire reason for the trip.
“OK, then,” he said, satisfied to get the deference he wanted. “Wally Irons. Tough one. They love him at One PP. His CompStats are stellar.”
“Come on, Zach. His CompStats versus The Hammer?”
He liked the sound of that. “Your cell phone charged? Good. Stay aboveground this morning so I can reach you.”