Nikki caught a glimpse of Rook appealing to her in the mirror, and when she ignored him and went back to looking for the address, he added, “I don’t know if I can live in a world where shotgun doesn’t mean shotgun.”
They drove right past the building the first time because the street numbers had been pried off the doorframe, leaving only half of a brass 4 dangling sideways from a nail. Heat killed the engine and surveyed the flophouse, a six-story walk-up of graffitied brick, sections of which had been slathered over by brown paint in a sorry attempt to hide the tags. Some teenage girls, huddled clannishly on the stoop, registered the cop car, and split for the bodega next door. A plastic bag of trash flew out an upstairs window. It broke apart on the dead lawn and Feller said, “Home, sweet home.”
“You might think about waiting here.”
Rook groaned in protest. “This again? Really?”
When he had first started riding along, before they were in a relationship, Heat made him wait in the car for fear of liability. And later, because he meddled. Then she gave it up because he had—more or less—proven he knew how to behave himself. Sometimes. Why did she revert today? She glimpsed him again in her rearview and knew why. That jewelry receipt. It impacted her more than she knew. Nikki was worried something could happen to him.
“Maybe I should go back where I’ll be safer, like hanging off a broken footbridge in the Congo.”
“Stay close, writer boy,” was all she said.
They passed some chalky dog turds on the landing of the third floor, and, as they trudged up one more story toward Fabian Beauvais’s room, Rook asked what they guessed the monthly rent ran in an apartment building like this. Feller said, “You don’t go monthly here, dude. This is weekly, at best. No lease, no ID, no job, no prob.”
“It’s an SRO,” said Heat.
“Right. Single-room occupancy.”
Detective Feller scoffed. “More like squalid, wretched, odious.”
“Uh, actually,” said Rook, “that would be SWO.”
Feller stopped on the top step of the fourth floor and turned to look down at him. “You’re still pissed I got shotgun, aren’t you.”
“No, I write for a living, and, with all due respect to the erroneously dubbed three Rs, wretched isn’t spelled with an R, but with a—”
“Hey!” called Heat just as two men the size of NFL tight ends rushed from the hallway at Feller’s back, shoving him from behind. He flew forward, his body plowing into Heat and Rook. All three tumbled as the pair leaped over them and bolted down the stairwell, skipping half the steps. Detective Feller grabbed the banister and pulled himself off Heat, who rolled herself to her feet and sprang off in pursuit.
Flying around the turn on the second floor landing, Nikki heard the entry door slam below her and so wasn’t surprised when she reached the front stoop and saw the men had already gained fifty yards on her. She ID’d herself and called a freeze as she sprinted after them, now with Feller and Rook a dozen paces behind.
At Kings Highway the men separated and, just as Heat hand signaled for Feller to take the one who split left, something unusual happened. Each hopped into a waiting car—one of two nondescript, plateless sedans that sat waiting for them—and then sped off, roaring with far more muscle under their hoods than those little cars should have packed. One of them, a Japanese import, cut a wild, bounding diagonal across the concrete median and fishtailed with the other into the distance until the sound of their souped up engines faded like dying flies.