“Further ahead than I am,” she said. And wasn’t so happy to admit that.
The address was off Northern Boulevard, about a mile from the bridge in a mixed neighborhood of row houses, auto-body repair shops, an ice cream factory, and the new nightclubs, steakhouses, and Starbucks franchises that were the area’s hint of gentrification to come. Out of habit, Heat parked halfway down the block—close enough to get to the car in a hurry, far enough not to be made at the curb.
The street was quiet at that time of day. Soon the cafés and pizza joints would be pulling in lunch trade, but aside from an old man hunched over his walker, Heat and Rook had the sidewalk to themselves. The building was a beige one-story warehouse in the same basic size and configuration as the body shops and one-story warehouses they had passed on the way there. The front had a rolling steel garage door with the requisite amount of tagging. The main door turned out to be double dead-bolted and locked when Heat tried it. The chain-link fence on either side had no gate, and sharp razor wire was coiled along the top to further discourage would-be thieves. Heat pressed her face against the windows, but they had been painted over from the inside.
Rook took a step back from the building and shielded his eyes against the sun. “No sign. No phone number. No nothing.”
“They’ve got security cams, though,” she said, indicating the three lipsticks covering the building.
“Show-offs,” said Rook. “How come they get security cams and the NYPD doesn’t?”
Heat tried the bell and tried knocking again. They waited. Both pressed their ears to the door, but heard nothing. “Want me to bust a window?” he asked.
“Let’s do something crazier. Let’s get a search warrant.”
They got back in the car and Heat phoned the District Attorney’s office to request her paper. The assistant DA who took her call was a friendly, which was to say that Nikki wasn’t going to get any obstruction from him, as she had with the administrative subpoena she wanted for Lon King’s receptionist. After she hung up, she said, “All good. But it’s going to take an hour by the time the judge signs and they can get it over here to us.” They sat in silence for a moment.
“Wanna get some lunch?” she asked.
“Wanna make out?”
Nikki said, “Oh, yes, nothing would be better than getting all hot on a public street during a stakeout in broad daylight.”
“Just asking.”
“Just saying.”
A few seconds passed, then he muttered, “So you wanna?”
Heat was laughing when the bullet ripped through her side window. The close-range report temporarily deafened her left ear. Fragments of glass pelted her cheek and shoulder. Rook cried out, “Oof!”
Heat could no longer see through the cascade of red pouring down over her eyes.
“Drone!” yelled Heat. “Down, down!”
“I see it. You OK?”
“I’m hit.”
“Me too.” Nikki swiped a wet smear of blood from her eyes and turned. Through the haze she saw the right shoulder of Rook’s shirt blossoming crimson.
“Pressure,” she said. “Do it.”
He pushed a palm to his wound. “Your forehead…”
“Drone’s on the move.” Heat cranked the ignition. “Buckle up. Stay down.” Then she mashed the gas pedal, sending her Taurus Police Interceptor tearing out into the street.
“How bad are you hurt?” Rook asked.
Nikki ignored him and squinted through the damp stickiness of her own blood, watching the cars, watching the peds, watching the drone—which was four car lengths ahead, humming away from her up the block. Rook scoped out the drone, then came back to her. “Are you seriously going to try to catch it?”
“How much do you know about these things? How fast can they go?”