Kylie took off, and I set the bolt cutters at my feet and put the phone to my ear. Nathan Hirsch had been wrong to tell me to butt out. I may not have been an experienced negotiator, but I wasn’t some random cop jumping on to the phone call. I knew a hell of a lot about Geraldo Segura. I hadn’t been agitating him. I’d been empathizing with him. Saying what I had to say to get him to trust me.
As far as I could tell, Nathan wasn’t doing such a great job of winning Segura over. I thought about unmuting my phone and jumping back into the fray. I’d start off by hitting him with that quote from Abraham Lincoln: “He who represents himself has a fool for a client.”
“And the fifty thousand dollars a year we paid your grandmother,” I heard Hirsch say. “That was my idea. Wells was against it. I remember one year I wrote the check, and he started arguing with me about—”
My phone went dead. I looked up at the crowd, almost every one of whom had a cell phone in their hands. Their phones were dead, too.
Then a bullhorn cut through the air. “Zach. Zach.” It was Kylie. “Do it, Zach. Do it. Do it. Do it.”
I wanted to scream at her. I wanted to lash out and tell her she was the most infuriating, irresponsible, uncontrollable partner a cop could possibly have. And then when I was finally finished ranting, and railing, and venting my spleen, I wanted to have incredible make-up sex with her.
But, of course, I didn’t do any of that.
Instead I grabbed the bolt cutters and raced toward the man chained to a bomb on the courthouse steps.
CHAPTER 52
I sprinted across the empty square. By the time I hit Centre Street the crowd erupted, picking up Kylie’s chant. Do it, Zach. Do it, Zach. Do it, Zach.
Do what? Get myself killed because my partner, who spent a few minutes talking to some guy in a Thai prison, suddenly decided she was an expert on when bombs can go off and when they can’t?
The clamor grew more raucous as the mob egged me on.
And then out of nowhere came the music. Some crazy son of a bitch in the horde of well-wishers had a saxophone, and I heard those stirring opening notes to “Theme from Rocky.”
Dum, dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum.
Hero music. But I didn’t feel heroic. I felt like an idiot. Kylie’s words raced through my brain. “Segura can’t blow up anything without a cell signal, and guess what they have on the ESU truck? A cell jammer.”
My gut reaction when she said it was to try to stop her from using the jammer illegally. What I should have said was, “How do you know Segura can’t blow anything up without a cell signal? What if he has a computer rigged with a backup detonator? What if he has a high-powered rifle, and he shoots me for trying to save the man who cost him twenty years of his life?”
But I hadn’t questioned her logic, and now I was putting my ass on the line to save one of the biggest dirtbags on the planet.
Nathan Hirsch sat staring at his dead cell phone, probably wondering if Segura was going to call him back or blow him up. He was a dozen steps up from street level, dead center between two massive Corinthian columns. The towering temple of justice loomed behind him.
I wanted to bound up the stairs two at a time, but as soon as my foot hit the first step, everything seemed to slow down. It was like that recurring dream where you’re running, running, running, but you feel like you’re barely moving.
Maybe it was the jet lag. Maybe it was the abject fear fucking with my head, but it seemed to take a lifetime for my foot to touch the second step.
Someone had found a way to amp up the sound of the sax, and with the music blaring and the crowd chanting, I made it to the third step. And the fourth.
Days later, I would watch some of the many videos of my climb up those courthouse steps. On film it only took seconds, but in real life my entire world was in slow motion.
“Nathan—don’t move,” I called out as I got closer.
He looked up when he heard me. Cates had guessed right. Hirsch had pissed himself. And he was crying.
Please, God, I thought, don’t let this fat bastard be the last thing I ever see during my time here on earth.
“Hold still,” I said, lowering his cuffed wrist so I could rest the briefcase on the steps. I took a look at the bolt cutters I’d been dragging along like an appendage. They were a flimsy government-issue piece of crap, and I remembered John Glenn’s famous words: “As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind: every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder.”
Somewhere in my pocket was a key ring with half a dozen keys on it, one of which might open the cuffs. Or it might not. I hoped I didn’t have to find out. I opened the bolt cutters wide, positioned the blades over two steel links, and, with every ounce of strength I had left in my travel-weary body, I slammed the two handles together.
The chain snapped.
“Run, Nathan, run!” I commanded.
He didn’t. Or maybe he couldn’t. He froze.
And he was too fat to carry.
I grabbed him by both arms, pulled him toward me, and put my mouth to his ear. “Listen to me, asshole. I’ve got a girlfriend I’m going home to. You either move or you can stay here and die.”
He moved.
He navigated the steps like a pregnant sow, and I braced myself for the explosion that would hurl the two of us into the federal court building on the other side of Lafayette.
It never came. No boom. Just the whoops of the onlookers as I helped the gasping lawyer waddle across Centre Street toward the bedlam and finally passed him into the arms of a team of uniformed cops.
“Have the paramedics check him out,” I said, “but don’t let him wander off until he has a heart-to-heart with Selma Kaplan at the DA’s office.”
One of the cops put her hand on my shoulder. “What about you?” she said. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Just get me away from these fucking cameras.”
I followed her to a mobile command center that was parked on Worth Street, stumbled in the door, shut it behind me, dropped to my knees, and, half sobbing, half laughing, I thanked a God I hadn’t been in touch with for longer than I care to admit.
CHAPTER 53
There were four white-shirted cops in the command center. Brass. Two of them were barking into satellite phones. I’d picked the wrong place to duck into for quiet reflection. I took a few slow deep breaths, centered myself, and looked up.
One of the white shirts was looming over me. I recognized her immediately: Barbara O’Brien, a public information officer. I stood up.
“You’ve got balls, Detective Jordan,” she said.
Coming from anyone else, that would have felt like a compliment. But not from her. I nodded, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“You got a warrant to go with those balls?” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“You disabled the cell phone service for tens of thousands of civilians. The press is going to ask me if you came up with that little rescue mission on your own, or did you have a signed warrant?”
“I believe my partner was working on a warrant.”
“Working on? For your sake, let’s hope she got it.”
“Lieutenant, I have to go. Captain Cates is expecting to hear from me.”
“Tell her she’ll be hearing from me, too.”
I’d walked into the command center to the sound of a cheering crowd. I walked out a minute later at the top of somebody’s shit list.
Within seconds after I stepped back outside, the crowd let out another joyful roar. But this one wasn’t for me. Their cell phones had come back on.
“I see that you restored their cell service,” I said to Kylie as she made her way toward me.
“It’s more like I restored their lives,” she said. “Another few minutes without a dial tone and these people would have gotten ugly.”
“So now the bomb is hot again.”
“No problem. The guys in the bomb squad live for that shit. They’ll be fighting to see who gets to disarm it. Besides, Segura’s not going to set it off without anyone to blow up. Now that he’s got a cell signal again, he’ll probably call back and congratulate you. As will I.” She threw her arms around me. “You’re a hero, partner.”