Heat made a rapid peek around the corner just as another surge knocked Braun off-balance. This time, he lost hold of his assault rifle. It slid away from him in the radical pitch and came to a stop against the safety fencing at the far end of the dock. Seizing the moment, Nikki sprung to her feet and started down the heaving gangplank toward him. But she lost her footing in a sea roll, too. Heat landed on her knees, gripping the banister with her left hand and clinging to her Sig Sauer with her right.
When she hauled herself up, she looked in disbelief as her Cool Customer lived up to his nickname. Instead of backtracking for his carbine, he turned his back on Nikki and strolled toward the waiting escape boat with out so much as a glance at her. He knew what they both knew. It was impossible to get off an accurate shot with the river tossing them about in a hurricane. But at the bottom of the gangplank, Heat braced and fired.
Zarek half turned but kept his stride. Another yaw of the dock as it strained against its pilings sent the HK skimming back her way. She grabbed it, aimed, and pulled the trigger.
It was empty.
The mercenary gave her a smug nod and laughed as he hopped into the black Zodiac. Nikki started weaving toward him with her Sig up. Braun pointed to something down inside the boat, and his accomplice, whom she recognized as the man she had shot with the nail gun in Chelsea, reached over with his unbandaged hand and brought up a fresh G36.
Proving she could be a cool one herself, Nikki stopped and holstered her weapon. That confused Zarek Braun as he took the HK from his partner. In the moment he hesitated to wonder what the hell that was about, Heat underhanded the flash-bang grenade she had brought along in the backpack and lobbed it into the Zodiac.
Back at the Twentieth Precinct, just before dawn, Heat stood in the faint light of Observation-One staring through the glass at her prisoner. The shiver she felt wasn’t from the still-damp hair tickling the back of her neck. It came from watching a paid assassin sit under the lunar wash of fluorescents with such inverted tranquility he resembled a wax replica of himself at Madame Tussauds.
She could have easily killed him hours before on that dock. Even with all the heaving and pitching, Nikki had the drop on him, and at that range, she had three nines left she could have parked in his head, with one left for his boat wrangler, if he’d gotten any ideas. Who knows? She might have worn a medal for it, cashing the chit of a double cop killer.
But Heat wanted this prick alive.
And she got him, flash, bang, boom.
Now came the harder part, and she knew it: trying to get a mercenary with psyops training to give up the man who hired him. Heat assessed him again and quietly composed herself, becoming mindful of her breathing. The room still had a tang from the old days when they allowed smoking in there, and her own clothes—the same ones that she had changed out of and balled into her file drawer the other day—weren’t the freshest, either. But they were dry.
Sandy had moved on in the overnight after making landfall near Atlantic City. The former hurricane was now somewhere over Pennsylvania, but the city was still reeling, and through the door behind her, Nikki heard the early-morning bustle of the precinct’s forces in response mode.
She had a different job to do. And it was time to jump in.