“I see you do know.” And then, most chilling of all, he winked. “I’m going to have that.” Then he made wet air kisses at her and laughed.
Then Nikki heard something she had never heard in the Interrogation Room before. Muffled shouting from the observation booth. It was Rook, his voice smothered by soundproofing and double-?pane glass, hollering at Pochenko. It sounded like he was shouting through a pillow, but she heard “…animal…scumbag…filthy mouth…,” followed by pounding on the glass. She turned over her shoulder to look. Hard to be nonchalant when the mirror is flexing and rattling. Then came the dampened shouts of Roach and it stopped.
Pochenko glanced from the mirror to her with an unsettled look. Whatever had gotten into Rook’s pea brain and made him slip his leash in there, he had succeeded in undercutting the Russian’s moment of intimidation. Detective Heat latched onto the opportunity and flipped the subject without comment.
“Let me see your hands,” she said.
“What? You want my hands, come closer.”
She stood, trying to gain height and distance and, most of all, dominance. “Put your hands flat on the table, Pochenko. Now.”
He decided he would choose when it was time, but he didn’t wait long. The shackles on one wrist clacked against the table edge, and then the shackles on the other, as he spread his palms on the cold metal. His hands were scuffed and swollen. A few knuckles were plumming into bruises, others were missing skin and wept where they had not yet scabbed over. On the middle finger of his right hand, there was a thick stripe of blanched skin and a cut. The kind a ring would leave.
“What happened here?” she said, relieved to feel in charge again.
“What, this? Is nothing.”
“Looks like a cut.”
“Yeah, I forgot to take my ring off before.”
“Before what?”
“Before my workout.”
“What workout at what gym? Tell me.”
“Who said anything about a gym?” And then his upper lip curled, and she instinctively took a step back, until she realized he was smiling.
Captain Montrose’s office was empty, so Nikki Heat ushered Rook inside and pulled the glass door shut. “Just what the hell was that all about?”
“I know, I know, I lost it.”
“In the middle of my interrogation, Rook.”
“Did you hear what he was saying to you?”
“No. I couldn’t hear him over the pounding on the observation mirror.”
He looked away. “Pretty lame, huh?”
“I’d call it a first. If this were Chechnya, right now you’d be riding down the mountain feet-?first on a goat.”
“Will you knock it off about Chechnya? I get one movie option and you pick, pick, pick at it.”
“Tell me you don’t have it coming.”
“This time, maybe. Can I say something?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I don’t know how you can stand doing this.”
“You kidding? It’s my job.”
“But it’s so…ugly.”
“War zones aren’t so much fun, either. Or so I’ve read.”
“War, not so good. But that’s just one part. In my job I get to move from place to place. It may be a war zone one time or riding in a Jeep with a black hood over my head to visit a drug cartel, but then I get a month in Portofino and Nice with rock stars and their toys, or I shadow a celebrity chef for a week in Sedona or Palm Beach. But you. This is…this is a sewer.”
“Is this the equivalent of ‘what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’ Because if it is, I’ll kick you in the balls to show you how not nice I can be. I like my job. I do what I do, and deal with the people I deal with, and here’s a headline for your article, writer boy: Criminals are scum.”
“Especially that G.”
She laughed. “Excellent research notes, Rook. You sound so street.”
“Oh, and by the way? No goats. Popular misconception. Up in the Caucasus with General Yamadayev, it was all horses. That’s how we rolled.”