“Good policy,” Vic said. “Look, I’m sorry, Erin. Guess I’m wound a little tight.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Me, too.” She didn’t add that Ian was the guy Vic should’ve been apologizing to, mainly because she figured Vic would rather break his own knuckles with a hammer than apologize to a suspect.
“What else we got to do here?” Vic asked.
“I’ll process Thompson,” she said. “You can take off.”
“You sure? Webb may not want me running out right now.”
“I’m in charge of the unit when Webb’s not around,” she said. “We’ve been on duty almost a full day. Get out of here. That’s an order.”
Vic smiled wearily. “Yes, ma’am.”
Piekarski handed Rolf’s leash to Erin. “See you later, Detective.” Then she walked off with Vic.
Erin watched them go and rubbed Rolf’s head. “Well, looks like someone’s getting some tonight,” she said. "You and I don’t get to go home just yet. You good for a while, kiddo?”
Rolf wagged his tail. He could go as far as she asked him to.
Erin left the K-9 in the observation room for a moment and went back into the interrogation room. Ian was sitting exactly the way he’d been when she’d left. She pulled out her cuff key and unlocked his wrists.
“Sorry about that,” she said quietly.
“No need, ma’am,” he said. “We’re all just doing our jobs.”
“And thanks,” Erin said. “Looks like you had my back. Somehow.”
He looked at her without answering. Erin remembered something she’d heard once about veterans. If you looked in a man’s eyes, they said, you could tell how much war he’d seen. In Ian’s face, she saw a faint echo of all the combat he’d been in, all the bullets and blood and death. She wondered how he could possibly be so calm. Then she saw that he wasn’t calm at all. That was just the surface he showed to the world. Underneath, he was always on duty, always ready to fight. Trauma psychologists called it hyperawareness. He couldn’t help himself. That was how he’d managed, disoriented from a car crash, to maintain his situational awareness enough to see a gunman sneaking up from a direction no one expected. No wonder Carlyle called him the most dangerous man in New York City.
And she was turning him loose. Even stranger, it felt like the right decision.
“You’re free to go,” she said. “I apologize for the in¬con-ven¬i¬ence.”
He stood up. “Thank you, ma’am. Good night.”
Chapter 17
Erin finally left Precinct 8 after taking care of as much of the case paperwork as she could stand. She drove home as the eastern horizon turned pink. She’d been working pretty much around the clock. There was time to grab a shower and maybe sleep a couple of hours before she’d need to be back at the precinct. Doctors and cops, she thought ruefully. Two occupations that couldn’t afford to screw up, and they were the ones expected to run for days without sleep.
She made a mental note to ask her brother how much caffeine a person could take before it became dangerous. Then she realized how crazy that question was, and chalked it up to too much adrenaline and too little sleep. She parked her Charger and got out.
As she stepped out of her car in her apartment’s garage, she saw a black Chevy Suburban SUV she didn’t recognize. It was idling near the exit. Even as she looked at it, she saw a couple of men coming toward her out of the corner of her eye, out of the shadows from the opposite direction.
Erin was tired, but not too tired to recognize an ambush. She’d been bushwhacked in her garage once before, and had promised herself it would never happen again. Before she’d fully identified the situation, she’d unholstered her Glock and stepped back behind her car door, putting it between her and the two guys.
Then she recognized one of them and didn’t feel any better. The lead guy was one of the largest men she’d ever seen. Mickey Connor, former heavyweight boxer, chief enforcer for Evan O’Malley, nearly three hundred pounds of sadistic muscle. The guy beside him looked like one of his heavies, a goon with no neck and enormous arms. Neither one had a weapon in hand, but that was no comfort. Carlyle had warned her that Mickey didn’t need a weapon, didn’t even bother to carry a gun most of the time.
“Come on, O’Reilly,” Mickey said in his rough, gravelly Brooklyn street accent. “We’re going for a ride.”
He continued toward her. Erin gauged the distance. Ten yards. Seven was the magic number, the infamous “twenty-one foot rule.” At that range, they taught cops, a man with a knife was an immediate deadly threat. She wondered how many bullets it’d take to put Mickey down. He was a bulky guy, and he might be wearing a vest. A head shot was chancy, but might be her best option.
“That’s close enough, Mickey,” she said, trying to put an edge of steel in her voice.
He halted. His lips curled into a hint of a mocking smile.
“Relax, O’Reilly. The boss wants to talk to you, that’s all. Just talk.”
“I’ll bet,” she said. Like hell she was getting in a car with Mickey Connor. She could think of safer, less painful ways to commit suicide.
“We already got your boyfriend,” he said, pointing toward the Suburban. When she glanced involuntarily that direction, he took the opportunity to take another step toward her, moving with surprising grace for a man his size. His buddy had spread out a little, drifting to Erin’s left.
“You ever been shot, Mick?” she asked.
“Couple times,” he said. “Didn’t take.”
“You come one step closer, you’re going to get shot again.”
“I make you nervous?”
“Nah. I just don’t like the way you smell.”
She heard the click of a car door opening behind her and cursed inwardly. The O’Malleys had planned things well. She couldn’t keep an eye on
