Guilt, second thoughts, self-reproach, more guilt. Like drop-in company, all the unwelcome demons paid Nikki a visit after she ordered a tail on Rook. It bothered her so much that, twice during the night, she even picked up her phone to email Roach and call it off. They would understand. Or they wouldn’t, and they would just have to live with it. Precinct commanders made iffy decisions and reversed themselves all the time. However, Heat didn’t know the stats on such things on her first day in command.
Every time she weakened, though, something would reset her resolve. Like watching Rook furtively respond to a text at dinner without regard to her, and, after hitting send effortlessly resuming his theory on A-Rod’s shelf life in pinstripes. Or when he excused himself to the gents, only to veer instead into the restaurant vestibule for a quick but intense call that was unacknowledged when he returned to the table. Mostly, however, what kept her from rescinding her order was the ineradicable image of Rook on that security video, striding with impunity into Lon King’s office—the safe place where she had gradually learned to let her guard down and bare her soul to a stranger with a trust that did not come naturally to Nikki Heat. So she held firm.
But resolve is not closure. To her, it felt more like a frayed bungee cord straining against the lid on Pandora’s Box.
At the end of the evening, as she tucked into her precinct paperwork instead of their bed, she told herself that she wasn’t doing that to avoid Rook. Being Captain Heat meant keeping up with new responsibilities—memos, emails, and reports. A quick kiss, and it was back to grand-larceny spreadsheets for her; a trip up that hall with the new le Carré for him. But the distant whir of his electric toothbrush triggered a pang of melancholy that led to a confrontation with the truth—which was that she wasn’t retreating from Rook, but from herself. And that she harbored qualms about her own duplicity. Their lovemaking included looking each other in the eye. Nikki was afraid of what he might see in hers that night.
Heat needed to move the needle, or at least to try. She quit her laptop, rose from the dining table, and discovered yesterday’s celebration bottle of the Sancerre in the fridge. After pouring a generous glass, she folded herself onto the couch in the library, a cozy alcove Rook had defined with freestanding bookcases, and stared out over the Tribeca rooftops. Between her and Battery Park, almost close enough to touch, the new One World Trade Center’s upper floors illuminated an engulfing cloud, making it look like an angel’s halo.
Nikki set her wineglass down untouched and admired the spire of steel and light, a gleaming, necessary statement about resiliency, bravery, and pride. Heat’s impromptu pause to consider its significance didn’t solve her problems, but it sure put them in perspective. At the very least, she decided, she would not end her first day as commander of the Twentieth Precinct in a self-manufactured funk. With a new understanding of the burdens that weighed upon the shoulders of the PCs she had served under, Wally Irons and her mentor, Captain Charles Montrose, Nikki raised her glass. Her silent toast took her back to a time when Montrose had broken out a bottle of Cutty from his desk drawer and they clinked coffee mugs at the end of a shift. She recalled his words then as if he were there to remind her of them now: “No mystery to this job, Heat. Embrace every problem. Because they are the job.”
Easier said…The pressures of command relentlessly carved out chunks of her beloved skipper’s soul, and it also didn’t escape Heat that she was filling the shoes of two men who had both died on said job. So there was one thing to avoid.
Maybe Nikki couldn’t exactly embrace the Rook problem, but she would have to live with it. Raley had nailed it: Their careers were bound to make them smack heads sometimes. And that gave Heat a choice. Live in constant inner hell or accept the fact of an occasionally conflicted life.