They sized up Nikki and pointed to a hatch. Nikki ran for it, taking the door cautiously in case Soleil was waiting on the other side, but she wasn’t. Ahead of Nikki stood a long passageway and she went down it at a run. It terminated at a T, and Nikki paused briefly there, imagining, if she were Soleil, the direction she would choose in her scramble to escape. Her instincts made her turn left, rushing toward a stream of daylight and what felt like the direction of the wharf side of the ship.
Heat arrived at an open hatch, the source of all the sunlight. She paused long enough to bob her head through the opening and return it, once again cautious of an ambush. When she got through the hatch, she saw a metal staircase, probably the lower level of the same one Soleil had tried for topside before Roach appeared. She hoisted herself over the rail and descended the steps another level, to where they ended at a small deck near the stern, a semicircular balcony that hung out over the wharf and one of the carrier’s power supply or warehouse sheds.
Then she spun, hearing shoes on the steps above her. “Rook?”
“God, you’re fast. How do you do it? I’m still dizzy from the jump.”
But Nikki wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. She’d caught a flash of white and sequins in the sunlight on the pier below. Heat calculated the four-foot leap the singer had made across from the railing to the roof of the support shed and jumped it easily herself. While she ran across the shed’s flat top to a metal spiral staircase leading down to the parking lot, she could hear Rook keeping pace behind.
The sole uniform they had left below had sealed off only the gangway, not anticipating a bold rooftop escape like the one Soleil had made, so there was no one to stop her when she came around the far side of the crew parking area, sprinting for the exit on Twelfth Avenue. Fifty yards behind her and gaining, Detective Heat called out to the security guard to stop her, but he was geared to protecting the singer and, instead, looked around for some unseen female assailant to stop, not Soleil herself.
She got out through the gate.
The pop star’s curse quickly turned into a blessing when she saw the paparazzi loitering outside the fence, three of them with motorcycles. By now they were snapping her as she ran toward them. Soleil called to one of them by name. “Chuck! I need a ride, fast.”
Chuck was already peeling out onto Twelfth with Soleil clinging to his back when Nikki got there. The other two paps with bikes were starting to saddle up to follow, but Heat showed her badge and pointed to the rider on the fastest bike. “You. Off. I need your bike for official police business.” The paparazzo hesitated, weighing the legal penalty versus the loss of photo op, but he soon felt Heat’s hand clutching his jacket. “Now.”
Heat took off in pursuit and the other pap started to follow, but Rook arrived waving his arms, blocking him. He hit the brakes. “Rook?” said the photographer.
“Leonard?” said Rook.
Heat had to work to maintain her tail on Soleil and her paparazzo driver. He was reckless and ballsy, threading the needle between cars and zigzagging across lanes without a care about his series of near misses. As a cop in Manhattan, Nikki had seen how the celebrity shooters had increasingly begun to hunt in packs, often on motorcycles, and the image that always came to her was the pursuit of Diana in that tunnel in Paris. Now she was pursuing one of them and decided to exercise skill over daring so she didn’t kill herself or a bystander.
But she was still able to keep up, if not overtake. It was evident that Soleil didn’t have a destination; this was purely about evasive maneuvers, losing the tail. The path they took was a pattern of up one street, down another, through Midtown West. At one point, heading east on 50th, Soleil must have tired of the game, because Nikki saw her cast a look back, register Heat was still on their tail, and then shout something in the paparazzo’s ear.