you wish to die?’ ” They both looked at each other. Then Nikki took off her blouse. He had similar sentiments and took off his sweater.
“I told you I may not want to answer some of these.”
“And therein lies the game, Detective Heat. Moving on to “ ‘What musician has impacted your life the most?’ ”
“Most impactful musician…,” she said, pondering. “Chumbawamba.”
“You’re kidding. Not Bono? Or Sting, or Alanis Morissette, or-really? Chumbawamba? Tubthumping Chumbawamba?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. When my high school drama coach told me a freshman couldn’t play Christine in Phantom, a song about getting knocked down and getting up again resonated very strongly with me.” Still does, she thought. “What about you?”
“Steely Dan for ‘Deacon Blues.’ And James Taylor for everything, especially ‘Secret O’ Life.’ ” Then Rook palmed his forehead, “Oh, oh, no, wait! I forgot AC/DC.”
Heat made a buzzer sound. “Ambivalent reply, Rook. Points off, pants off.” After he complied, he looked at the questionnaire, made a little head shake, and turned to the next page.
“Whoa, whoa, penalty flag,” Nikki said. “You can’t skip questions, let’s hear it.”
He shuffled back and read, “ ‘What qualities do you look for in a woman?’ ” Rook paused. “Minefield, I’m not answering that.” After she made him take off his shirt, he said, “This is not how I saw this game going,” and he turned to the top of the next page. “Payback time. ‘What qualities do you look for in a man?’ ”
“I can answer that. Honesty. And a sense of humor.”
“Uncanny how I have the quality of being both honest and funny. Like if you asked me about your clothes and said, ‘Hey. Does this blood make my ass look fat?’ I’d tell ya.”
“Are you stalling because you’re losing?”
“Fine.” Next he read, “ ‘Who would you have liked to be?’ All right, I’m going to answer this one first. A backup singer for Aretha Franklin. The sequined dress could be an issue, but that would be my other life. You? Who would you be?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Meryl Streep.” He gave her a sympathetic look because they both knew she gave up her theater major when her mother was killed.
“Moving on. ‘What is your present state of mind?’ ”
All Heat could do was think about the turmoil she was experiencing. She didn’t answer and took her slacks off.
“My state of mind…?” said Rook. “The Strip Proust tide is turning. Yay! Next question: ‘What is your idea of misery?’ ”
“Pass. I don’t like how these questions are going.” As she unhooked her bra and set it on the coffee table, she said, “You have to answer, too, Chuck Woolery.”
“Simple. Misery for me is what I felt after I hurt you by not calling after my trip.”
“To coin a phrase, good answer,” said Nikki. “Next?”
“Let’s see… ‘What is your motto?’ ” He dropped his head. “I don’t have a motto. Who has a motto?”
“You’ve got a choice, underpants or socks.”
“There. That’s my new motto.”
“Nice try,” she said.
He slid out of his underwear, leaving his socks on. “Take that, Spitzer.”
“I actually do have a motto,” said Heat. “It’s ‘Never forget who you work for.’ ” And as she voiced the words, Nikki felt a creeping unease. It wasn’t exactly shame, but it was close. For the first time it sounded hollow. Fake. Why? She examined herself, trying to see what was different. The stress, that was new. And when she looked at that, she recognized that the hardest part of her day lately was working to avoid confrontation with Captain Montrose. That’s when it came to her. In that moment, sitting nearly naked in Rook’s living room, playing some silly nineteenth-century parlor game, she came to an unexpected insight. In that moment Nikki woke up and saw with great clarity who she had become-and who she had stopped being. Without noticing it, Heat had begun seeing herself as working for her captain and had lost sight of her guiding principle, that she worked for the victim.
Right then Nikki resolved to call her own meeting with Montrose first thing the next day. And let the damned chips fall.
“Hello?” said Rook, bringing her back. “Ready for the next one?” She looked on him with clear eyes and nodded. “Here we go then. ‘What is your ideal dream of earthly happiness?’ ”
Heat paused only a moment to think. Then she said nothing, but stood and slid out of her panties. Rook looked up to her from the couch with a face that she couldn’t resist, so she didn’t. She bent down, taking his mouth in hers. He met her hungrily and pulled Nikki into his arms. Soon, the rhythm of their bodies answered that last question. She didn’t think about it but found her lips to his ear, whispering, “This… This… This…”
SIX
At eight the next morning Nikki sat at a window table at EJ’s Luncheonette, blowing on her large coffee and waiting for Lauren Parry to pick up her phone. Instead of corporate jazz or Soft Hits of the Eighties and Nineties, the programming for anyone stuck on hold at OCME was a loop of short messages about New York City’s municipal opportunities and services. Rather than Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” or Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” the mayor invited you to call 3-1-1 for all your information needs and some monotone DOT administrator extolled the virtues of Alternate Day, Alternate Side Parking. Where were Annie Lennox’s “Sweet Dreams” when you needed them?
“I have a question for you,” said Heat when Lauren finally came on the line. In the background she could hear the snap of gloves and the lid of a metal pail clanging open against a wall. “It’s about that bruise on Father Graf’s lower back. You recall it?”
“Of course. What about it?”
It had come to her in bed with Rook-appropriately enough-at dawn. Heat had been sleepless, mulling the confrontation she planned to bring to her captain in the coming hours. Next to her, Rook turned onto his side and Nikki rolled to face his back, using her fingertips to comb down the sprung hairs on his cowlick. He looked thinner to her than when he had left. His shoulder muscles revealed more cording, and even in the waxy light his ribs were defined by deeper shadows between them. Her eyes traced his vertebrae to the small of his back, where she saw the fading bruise. While they were drying each other from their shower, she asked him where he got it.
Rook told her that two weeks before, he had ridden by cargo ship from Rijeka, on the Adriatic, to Monrovia on the West African coast, where he witnessed what he considered a brazen daylight offload of black market arms. The dealer, who was on the wharf to supervise the transfer of thirty tons of AK-47 rounds, plus crates of grenade launchers, onto waiting trucks, kept glancing up from his Range Rover to the ship’s navigation tower, where Rook was lurking, trying to be inconspicuous. But after the convoy lumbered off the pier, Rook went below to his crew quarters, only to be grabbed by three of the dealer’s goons. They put a hood over his head and drove him for over an hour, to a plantation in the hills. There, they removed the sack but handcuffed him while he waited, locked in an empty horse stall in the barn.
At nightfall, he was taken to the great lawn beside the yellow plantation house, where the arms dealer, a former MI6 operative named-or at least using the name-Gordon McKinnon, was at a picnic table tossing back Caipirinhas under strings of fiesta lights shaped like red chili peppers. Rook decided not to let on how much he knew about McKinnon from his research… that the former British SIS man had amassed a fortune brokering black market weapons to embargoed nations in Africa… that the blood flow from Angola, Rwanda, the Congo, and recently Sudan could be traced to the drunken, sunburned, ginger-haired man right before him.
“Have a seat, Jameson Rook,” he said, and gestured to a wooden stool across the table. “Oh, come on. I knew it was you when you boarded in Croatia.” Rook sat but didn’t speak. “Call me Gordy.” Then he laughed, and added, “But I guess you damn well know that already, don’t you? Huh, am I right?” He slid a tall glass across the rough timber to him. “Drink up, it’s the best fucking Caipirinha on this whole fucking continent. Both my bartender and my cachaca are flown in from Brazil.” Maybe he was too drunk to remember his guest’s hands were cuffed
