Manseur walked over, picked up the. 22 from the bricks and tossed it into the trunk of his car.
“Massey's car has a tracker on it,” Tinnerino said desperately.
Manseur considered that. Massey's pals Adams and Green weren't at the hotel like the bad guys believed, they were on the ferry too. Manseur was sure the three of them could handle Estrada and Ruiz. He reached for his cell phone to call Massey just to let him know when a voice came over the tactical channel: “Transit Officer Davis. Shots fired on the Canal Street Ferry, in transit from Algiers Point. Officer needs immediate assistance. One perpetrator, armed with an automatic weapon.”
Manseur turned toward the water. Halfway across the river, the ferry was making a sharp right turn.
“Okay, maybe it's too late for them,” Tinnerino was saying. “What can you get me for flipping on Suggs?”
91
As soon as Arturo ran up the stairs, Nicky put Faith Ann back inside the Stratus. He told the wide-eyed girl to stay there and she'd be fine. As Winter was cuffing the woman, he ran after Adams, cane in hand.
“Stay behind me,” the federal agent ordered.
Limping, Nicky trailed behind Adams, arriving up on the upper deck to find half a dozen passengers lying facedown on the floor near the bow windows.
“FBI!” Adams yelled.
“Freeze! Police officer!” a voice yelled out. Nicky saw the gun first, a Smith amp; Wesson Sigma aimed at Adams and him. The man who gripped it was dark-skinned. He wore a watch cap, baggy jeans, and a coat. A badge dangled from his neck on a chain, and his eyes were wild with excitement. Since he had a piece of toilet paper stuck to his shoe, Nicky knew where the dark-skinned man had been when the shooting started. The policeman came slowly toward him.
“Where's the shooter?” Adams snapped.
The young cop kept his gun on Adams, more or less. The copilot was cowering against the wall near the door. “Show me some I.D.”
“Where's the damn shooter?” Adams repeated. But he dipped his gun so the barrel was pointed away from the cop, while reaching his left hand carefully into his pocket to bring out his credentials.
The ferry began swinging around, heading downriver.
The cop said, “I'm Davis, Transit Authority. I already called this in. The bastard has the wheelhouse.”
“Obviously,” Adams said. “We can probably flank him-”
“I gotta stop him,” Davis interrupted. “God knows what he'll do, and there are civilians on board that I'm responsible for. I'm in charge here. No offense, but this ain't no white-collar FBI crime. People could get killed.”
Adams said urgently, “What's the wheelhouse layout? How many doors? Access to them?”
“No time to waste making a plan. This is too fluid for that-too immediate. Look, I know this vessel, I'm trained to handle this-you two just make sure my flanks are covered. One of you keep guard on either side. He gets away from me, he'll come down one of the staircases on either side and nail you,” Officer Davis said.
Nicky figured the cop was barely out of the academy. The rookie was determined to be a hero, and arguing with him was a waste of energy.
“We have the flanks,” Adams told him.
Davis opened the door to the stairwell, looked up the steps. He started slowly up, holding his gun before him precisely as he had been instructed at the academy.
“He's a dead duck,” Nicky quipped, taking a toothpick from his shirt pocket and putting one end of it into his mouth.
“We'll flank Estrada,” Adams said. “You best be ready to take over the wheel, son,” he told the copilot, who was crouching against the wall a few feet away.
The copilot nodded, smiled weakly.
“What's the layout?” Adams asked him.
“The stairs on either side go up to the roof, then after the smokestack there's another set up to the pilothouse. We-”
“How are they locked?”
“They don't lock, because the pilot might have to get out fast, or someone get in. We've never had anything like this…”
“How many people in the wheelhouse?”
“Two of us when we're docking. One at the controls for the crossing. I was headed down for coffee. The pilot is up there alone.”
“You best be ready to take over in case-”
A loud burst of nine-millimeter rounds fired into the stairwell sounded like hammer blows. Nicky peered in through the small window set in the door and saw the transit officer lying on the floor. His unfired weapon lay on the floor beside him, spattered with blood and brain matter. Nicky inched the door open, leaned inside the space, and looked up to see a dozen holes punched through the closed door.
“Dead?” Adams asked.
“Lying there dead with T.P. stuck to his danged foot-how embarrassing. Got it through the door.”
“He wasn't trained all that well,” Adams said. “If the shooter didn't see who was at the door, he's bound to be sure he got one of us. He'll think nobody in their right mind is coming up these same stairs.”
“I'll go up these stairs on a double-stealth setting. He'll be watching the outside staircases, so when he sees you he'll open an outside door to shoot at you. When he does that, you dodge the bullets and I'll bust on in and smoke his ass,” Nicky said.
“You're sharper than you look, Green,” Adams said, raising a brow. “But let's do this my way. I'll go up the inside stairs and you circle around. Soon as he sees you, I'll kill the little freak, hopefully without hitting the pilot.” He looked at the copilot, still cowering on the floor. “If we do, at least we have a spare.”
Nicky spat out his toothpick, leaned his cane against the wall beside the door. He limped to the starboard wire door and, slipping the mechanism, slid it open. Reaching the top of the staircase, he saw Estrada looking out at him through a Plexiglas window. Nicky dived toward the smokestack located directly behind the wheelhouse. Arturo slammed open the door, pointed the Uzi out, and wasted most of what was in the magazine-precisely as Nicky had expected.
Nicky heard reports, saw muzzle flashes illuminate the wheelhouse like an electrical storm. A split second after the exchange ended, he put a toothpick into his mouth and climbed up the short rise of stairs to the pilot house.
The little room was filled with a fog of cordite. All three men inside were lying on the floor. Nicky aimed the. 45 down at the prostrate killer as he moved to check Adams. “Adams, you still alive?”
Adams didn't move.
“Johnny boy,” Nicky said, “you okay?”
Adams, who was beneath a narrow steel shelf under the window, sat up slowly and, according to his facial expression, painfully. “Lucky shots,” he said hoarsely. “Couple in the vest. Think he got my right shoulder, though.” Reaching his left hand across his lap to get the Glock from the floor beside him, he lifted it and set it down beside his left leg and covered his right shoulder with his hand to staunch the blood leak.
“That's a nasty cut on the side of your head,” Nicky said.
“I hit that shelf on the way down. After I got him.”
“Oh, I'm not so sure who got who.” Nicky kept the Colt aimed at Arturo Estrada, facedown on the floor between him and the pilot's chair. “You can get up now,” he told the pilot.
The pilot stumbled uncertainly to his feet. He stared down at the killer, whose blood was pooling around his head.
“Shouldn't you be driving this thing?” Nicky asked the captain. The pilot tore his eyes from the dead killer, then turned his attention back to the river.
