“Bullshit.”
“No bullshit. Know what always bugged me?” Nikki asked. “That drone only went after you while Rook was also a perfectly good target. I mean, if that attack was supposed to make me believe it was part of some plot to kill the exposé—literally—as the writer of the article, wasn’t Rook as good a target as you?”
Rook frowned. “You never told me that.”
“We had enough issues already.”
Calls started coming on the scanner asking One Lincoln Forty to check in. Someone in the front seat switched the radio off. “That’s not going to help,” said Heat. “Maloney, you know what kind of radar is going to light up if someone does a cop. Why dig a deeper hole?”
“Not going to be a problem, trust me,” he said with an unsettling degree of certainty.
The last red sliver of the sun disappeared over the New Jersey hills as they started across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. The pit in Heat’s stomach deepened. Rook whispered, “We’re going to Staten Island.”
Nikki blurted, “I listed my apartment so we could live in yours.”
He took in that news calmly and said, “That’ll be nice.”
If it hadn’t been for the cuffs, she would have liked to hold his hand.
“We good?” asked Backhouse through his side window. They couldn’t see Tim Maloney in the dark, but they could hear his shoes crunching gravel on the shoulder of the road as he walked back to the car.
The driver’s door opened, and he got in. “It’s all ours.”
Backhouse was pulling on a pair of blue crime scene nitriles from Heat’s glove compartment. “Took you long enough. Guard give you trouble?”
Maloney gave Backhouse a condescending look and closed his door. The interior went back to total darkness. “Took me a while to find the server box to disable the security cams. But we are done and done.” He turned the ignition and the tires crackled on the siding. Nikki swiveled as far as she was able for a view out the back window, hoping for an approaching car. A police car would have been nice.
All Heat saw was blackness.
Of course, as an associate of Forenetics, LLC, Wilton Backhouse knew the security code to unlock the access door, but since his password was unique to him, rather than enter it on the keypad and leave a time stamp of his presence, he stepped over the unconscious security guard lying on the floor of the guardhouse and overrode the system from there.
They drove across the empty parking lot under the bleak orange light of the overhead lamps. Ground fog had begun to curl in off the surrounding marshes, and the enormous hangar ahead of them loomed like a castle jutting from a misty heath. Maloney parked the Taurus between the hangar wall and one of the eighteen-wheelers used to transport cars to and from the facility so it wouldn’t be visible to the casual passerby on Gulf Avenue.
Backhouse got out first and jogged, cradling his shotgun, to the access door, which he opened with his gloved hand, and disappeared inside. Maloney got Rook out first, then Heat. Since their hands were manacled behind them, the big man showed no concern about controlling them. Heat tried to take advantage of their captors’ separation to work on Maloney’s head. “Backhouse is going to screw you over, you know that.”
“Inside, let’s go.”
Heat complied, but moved slowly so she could grind on Maloney’s weak spot, his clinical paranoia. “How do you deal with Backhouse? He doesn’t respect you. I hear how he talks to you.”
Rook was right there with her. “Yeah, I picked that up, too. Ordering you around. Telling you to wait. Telling you to hurry. Telling you to shut up and drive. Asking what took so long, like you’re his butt boy.”
“I’m not his butt boy.”
“He treats you like a flunky.”