And then he slept.
Working his iPad in the hall after the floor nurse ordered them to step out, Rook made a spin move on the polished linoleum. “Ha-ha, knew it. Thug-One wasn’t jerking your chain. Look.” He held the tablet out for Nikki to read his search hit. “Marco Polo Worldwide—as opposed to ‘whirl ride’—Spice Distributor and Wholesaler in Flatbush, New Yowk.” He watched hope cross her face and her wheels starting to turn. “I wouldn’t call ahead.”
“No,” she said on her way to the elevator. “Let’s surprise them.”
When they pulled out of the garage of Brooklyn’s Woodhull Medical Center, the rain surprised both Heat and Rook by still seeming relatively light. Shouldn’t it be more torrential? The wind, however, remained prolific, seemingly limitless. On the drive down Marcus Garvey Boulevard toward Flatbush, plastic bags, tree branches, chunks of billboard, even price numbers ripped from service station signs flew across their path, prompting Rook to say something Nikki only half heard about falling gas prices.
She was busy trying to sway the acting precinct commander of the Sixty-seventh to provide backup at Marco Polo Worldwide. He was understandably reluctant to release assets during a citywide emergency, yet was no match for Heat, who invoked the name of Zach Hamner as her next call, if that’s what it took. The acting PC offered two patrol teams to meet her at the west end of Preston Court in fifteen minutes.
Heat’s Taurus had been blocked in back at the Twentieth, so she and Rook arrived in the drug impound undercover car she had commandeered in her haste. A pair of blue and whites was waiting for them outside the U-Haul parking lot on the corner of Preston at Kings Highway. “Don’t want to jinx it,” she said to Rook, “but we’re only about three blocks from Fabian Beauvais’s SRO. If this turns out to be that shred net, and he ripped them off, it’s an easy walk.”
“Or run,” he said.
More than simply functioning as backup, the patrol officers had good local knowledge. Preston Court was a down and dirty industrial zone, a partially unpaved, two-lane alley lined on either side by low-rise weathered brick and concrete warehouses, mounded quarry materials, and metal-scrap lots bordered by chain link and razor wire. The spice distributor sat a hundred yards east between a tire recycler and a boiler-system repair company. The ranking uni, a sergeant, said all the business on that stretch of Preston loaded their materials in and out the front doors, so there was only a narrow service track running behind the buildings, an easy route to plug with a patrol car on each end. Heat told the sergeant she liked his plan and dispatched him and the other team to the back, keeping one of the uniforms to go in the front door with her and Rook.
On the drive up the block, they passed a flatbed stacked with hollow automobile bodies in front of a crusher yard. Next door, outside a vacant hulk with a red and white sign advertising thirty thousand square feet for lease, a handful of young Latinos crouched with cupped hands around their smokes as if the hurricane were a minor inconvenience. When they made the undercover cop car, they ran in all directions. Pulling up to Marco Polo Worldwide Spice Distributors, Rook scoffed at the sign. “If this isn’t a front for something, I’ll eat a tablespoon of cayenne.” Indeed, the sad building looked anything but international, a double-height box of exposed concrete blocks topped by rusty corrugated steel panels.