A table full of hedge-fund boys rose and stood in her path to check their smart phones, oblivious to the server with the tray waiting to get by and the police captain hemmed in by them all. She found another path, side-squeezing between the chair backs of other diners, then hurried past the bar overflow and dashed through the reception area to the street.
Heat rotated east, then west, scanning 19th Street for a sign of him. To the east, the sidewalk was clear, except for an old recycling picker pulling empties out of a stack of curbside garbage bags. A taxi turned onto the block from Park Avenue South, but its vacancy light was lit, and Nikki could make out no passenger inside as it approached. From the opposite direction, four laughing women formed a chorus line as they marched toward her. Heat’s view behind them was blocked. She scanned both ways again, then asked a couple braving the night chill at one of the cocina’s outdoor tables if they had seen a guy staring in the window a minute before. They both gave her New York signature you-fuckin’-kidding-me? looks and went back to their conversation about somebody getting beaten by his own selfie stick.
Nikki heard Rook call her name as she jogged west, giving a wide berth to the Sex and the City reenactors, but she kept going, choosing that direction because it had the blocked view. Heat scanned a stoop behind a big carpet store and an alcove across the street. Other than that, there were no nooks or crannies to hide in. When she reached the corner at Broadway, moviegoers had just begun spilling by the dozens out of the AMC Loews. If Maloney was around, he could easily blend in. And would. She had gotten a firsthand lesson in his evasion skills the previous night in the park.
Heat threaded her way through the crowd anyway, searching, sweeping—what else could she do? When she caught a favorable red light, Heat took a step out onto Broadway to do an uptown-downtown check, but came up empty there, too. On the green, a lead-footed cab driver nearly brushed her with his car. He gave her a honk with one hand and a finger with the other as he went by.
Rook was waiting for her on the corner holding her walkie-talkie when she stepped out of the street. “You sure it was him?”
The image of Timothy Maloney standing outside the restaurant on the sidewalk, arms defiantly crossed, just waiting for her to make eye contact with him, was as vivid as it was unnerving. “None other.”
He held up the two-way. “Think you should call it in?”
The effects of the cyber shutdown made her worry about stressing the system with her sighting when there might be more urgent police concerns. Nikki scanned the area again, knowing she did so just for drill’s sake, and said, “He’s long gone.”
A light drizzle started to fall during their walk to her apartment, only two blocks away off Gramercy Park. In the mist, people started waving wildly for cabs and running with hunched shoulders or holding copies of the Post over their heads. “Answer me this,” Rook said as they moved along at a relaxed pace. “When did weather become something that happened to us instead of just something that happened?”
“Sandy wasn’t just something that happened,” she said.
“Agreed. Once in a generation.”
“What about Irene, the year before?”
“OK, if you’re going to resort to facts, I see no future in this conversation.” Rook put his arm around her at the corner and they folded into each other, a perfect fit. While they waited for the signal, he caught her doing a recon up and down Park Avenue South. “Maybe you should just call it in. At least let Roach issue a BOLO.”