“Rook, you say that about everyone we meet on this case. May I remind you of Kimberly Starr?”
“But I hadn’t seen this guy before. Or maybe it’s his muscle. That is what you guys call them, muscle?”
“Sometimes,” said Raley. “There’s also goon.”
“Or thug,” said Ochoa.
“Thug’s good,” continued Raley. “So’s badass.”
“Meat,” from Ochoa, and the two detectives alternated euphemisms in rapid-?fire succession.
“Gangsta.”
“G.”
“Punk.”
“Bitch.”
“Gristle.”
“Knucks.”
“Ballbuster.”
“Bang-?ah.”
“But muscle works,” said Ochoa.
“Gets it said,” agreed Raley.
Rook had out his Moleskine notebook and a pen. “I gotta get some of these down before I forget.”
“You do that,” said Heat. “I’ll be in with the…miscreant.”
“Vitya Pochenko, you’ve been a busy boy since you came to this country.” Nikki turned pages in his file, silent-?reading as if she didn’t already know what was on them, and then closed it. His jacket was full of arrests for threats and violent acts, but no convictions. People either shied away from testifying against Iron Man or they left town. “You’ve gotten away clean. A lot. People either really like you, or they’re really afraid of you.”
Pochenko sat looking straight ahead with his eyes fixed on the two-?way mirror. Not nervously checking himself, not like Barry Gable. No, he was fixed and focused on a point of his choosing. Not looking at her, not like he was even there with her. He seemed deep in his own mind and nowhere else. Detective Heat would have to change that.
“Your pal Miric mustn’t be afraid of you.” The Russian didn’t blink. “Not from what he just told me.” Still nothing. “He had some interesting things to say about what you did to Matthew Starr at the Guilford day before yesterday.”
Slowly, he unhooked his eyes from the ozone and rotated his head to face her. As he did, his neck twisted, revealing veins and tendons strung deep into bulky shoulders. He stared at her from underneath a thick ginger brow. At this angle in the downcast lighting he had a prizefighter’s face with a telltale nose that curved in an unnatural flatness where it had been broken. She decided he had been handsome once before the hardness. With the brush cut, she could picture the boy of him on a soccer field or lofting a stick in a hockey rink. But the hardness was what Pochenko was all about now, and whether it came from doing time in Russia or learning how not to do time, the boy was gone and all she saw in that room was what happens when you get very, very good at surviving very, very bad things.
Something like a smile formed in the deep creases at the corners of his mouth, but it never came. Then he spoke at last. “In the subway station when you were on top of me, I could smell you. Do you know what I’m talking about? Smelling you?”
Nikki Heat had been in all sorts of interrogations and interviews with every stripe of lowlife in God’s creation and those too damaged to make the list. The wiseguys and the crazies thought because she was a woman they could rattle her with some leering porn-?movie trash talk. A serial killer once asked her to ride in the van so he could pleasure himself on the way to the penitentiary. Her armor was strong. Nikki had the investigator’s greatest gift, distance. Or maybe it was disconnection. But Pochenko’s casually spoken words, along with the entitled look he was giving her, the intrusion of his casualness and the threat carried in those amber resin eyes, made her shudder. She held his gaze and tried not to engage.