“How’s your thick head, Chapman?” Scully asked as they shook hands.
“Aerated, Commissioner,” Mike said. “That can only help the gray matter to breathe some fresh air.”
“Crime Scene’s going over your car,” he said. “It appears to have been a Molotov cocktail. Really primitive. The lab will analyze it but it’s probably just some gas in a soda bottle.”
“It did the job,” Mike said. “It was a scorcher.”
“Mercer told me what you saw,” the commissioner said to me. “Would you mind repeating it?”
One of the detectives stepped forward to take notes.
“The first kid practically nailed me when I went to get back in the car,” I said.
“First kid?” Scully asked. “Mercer didn’t tell me that there was more than one.”
“Two,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t get a chance to tell Mercer. Anyway, I think the first one was delivering food. At least I saw a bag dangling from the handlebars.”
“Chinese? Italian? American?”
“The food?” I asked. “I couldn’t see the writing on the bag.”
“Not the food,” he said. “The kid.”
“I didn’t get a good look. He was coming at me too fast,” I said. “It was all I could do to flatten myself against the side of the car.”
“You didn’t flatten yourself,” Mike said. “I’m the one who pushed you when I saw the second biker coming our way.”
Keith Scully looked at me as though I’d just committed perjury. “Which is it, Alex?”
“Why bother asking me?” I said.
“Did you hit your head on the pavement or something?”
“Not hard enough to put me out of my misery, apparently,” I said. “Did you think that I was likely to be the target of a killer this time, Keith?”
“You thought Battaglia’s assassin was done?” the commissioner said.
I clapped both hands to my ears. “We’re all answering one another’s questions with questions.”
“Can you describe the first biker?”
“He had no headlights on the bike and no reflectors on his clothes. He was all in black with a hoodie pulled down on his forehead. Dark-skinned, I know, because I saw his forearms. He had gloves on his hands, but his sweatshirt sleeves were pushed up.”
“Age?” the commissioner asked.
“A kid. I thought he was a kid. A teenager, maybe.”
“And the second one?”
“Same,” I said. “Young, dark skin. I couldn’t make out any facial characteristics, and he was also wearing a hoodie.”
Scully seemed to think I was useless, so he turned to Mike. “What’s your guess? Were they together? One to throw you off, make you unsteady, while the other tossed the cocktail?”
“Probably so,” Mike said. “They were only seconds apart from each other when they rode by. Seconds, not even a minute.”
“Amateurs, hired by a pro,” the commissioner said.
“You have ideas?” Mike asked.
“Yes, Chapman. Three other incendiary cocktails went off like this around town within the last hour. There’s already a bunch of Facebook posts claiming that radicals were randomly blowing up cars to protest the jailing of one of the sheiks who was convicted in federal court by Prescott last week.”
“Then these radicals should have lit a fire under Skeeter’s ass,” I said. “Not mine.”
“All the episodes had two bike riders?” Mike asked.
“Yes,” Scully said. “Tailing each other by seconds.”
“Injuries?”
“None, except for you. All the other cars were unoccupied, and no one was around them.”
“Like you say, Commissioner, amateurs hired by a pro,” Mike said. “Poor man’s grenades, to make the whole thing look like a bunch of disenfranchised street kids in action, rather than a targeted attack.”
“No sign of any of the pairs of bicyclists in the aftermath of each explosion,” Scully said. “I’m sure my guys will find abandoned bikes before morning. Gloved hands, so no prints. The bastards will slip out of the hoodies and split up, and be on their way back to Throgs Neck or Gravesend.”
“So if someone’s out to kill me, why didn’t he—or they—just send sharpshooters, like they did for Battaglia?” I asked.
“Not that tonight’s attacks are subtle, Alex,” the commissioner said, putting his arm around my shoulders, “but they create the illusion that this coincidence—”
“Coincidence?” I said.
“That’s how it will appear to the public, as happenstance. When they read the news of tonight’s four blasts—since we have no intention of releasing the information that you and Mike were close enough to the car to have been blown to bits—it will appear to be in no way connected to Battaglia’s death.”
“But it’s a police car,” I said. “You won’t fool anyone.”
“The car was unmarked,” Scully said, “and there isn’t enough of it left for people to know what it used to be.”
“The plates? The license plates can be traced.”
“Mercer had those removed while the vehicle was still smoking.”
Battaglia’s dangerous world was closing in around me. I took a few deep breaths and tried to think clearly.
“So these kids just get lucky? They happen to come along when Mike and Mercer and I leave the restaurant and part ways, heading for our cars?” I said. “Mike always swears there are no coincidences in policing.”
“There aren’t,” he said.
“If I hadn’t stepped out of the car to see what you were looking at,” I said, letting all of this sink in, “I’d have lit up the night sky, along with all the empty cardboard coffee cups that you litter your car with.”
“Fact,” Mike said. “That’s a fact.”
“So I’m just supposed to believe these thugs had the good fortune to come along at the moment they did, capitalizing on the fact of your flat tire?”
“The truth of it is, Coop, that those bikers were waiting for us since I parked the car and we went into Primola,” Mike said. “They had you in their sights. Me too, I guess.”
“And the flat tire is the coincidence they needed. The one that defies your theory,” I said.
“Not on your life, Coop,” Mike said. “It’s the bad guys who made the tire flat while you were chowing down on your pasta primavera.”
“They what?” I looked from Mike’s face to Keith Scully.
“That tire was slashed by a knife, babe. Intentionally maimed. My car couldn’t have rolled to the next corner, there were so many cuts in the rubber,” Mike said. “And I’m the fool who insisted you stay by my side.”
THIRTY
“Things have changed, Alex,” the commissioner said. “So my setup has to change too.”
“I get that.”
“It’s all moved so much faster than we expected, and it was never my plan to put you in harm’s way.”
Keith Scully had walked me away from Mike, into a corner of the hallway.
“You didn’t do that,” I said, although now I kept rethinking why I had been left so exposed in the days since Battaglia’s murder.
“I have to move you out of the city,” Scully said. “There’s no way to ensure your safety here.”
“I’ll go to Martha’s Vineyard,” I said, anxiously looking over his shoulder at the nurse who was waiting for Mike to roll up his shirtsleeve for his injection. “We’re good there.”
“I can’t let you go to your own home. That wouldn’t be smart.”