door slam come up from street level beneath her.
Heat paused briefly with her hand on the door before she jerked it open and made her defensive exit, gun ready, out onto the sidewalk. The Texan was not there, but he had left something behind. A spatter of blood on the sidewalk, visible in the pool of light shining down from the sodium lamp above the service door.
The sidewalks in Tribeca were busy with the cocktail and pre-dinner crowd. Heat made a quick survey and couldn't see her cowboy, and there were no nearby blood droplets to track. And then the detective heard a woman talking to the man she was walking with. She was saying, 'I swear, honey, that looked like blood on his shoulder.'
Nikki said, 'Police. Which way did he go?'
The pair looked at Nikki. The woman said, 'Do you have some kind of ID or a badge?'
Time was wasting. Nikki looked down, but her badge wasn't on her hip. 'He's a killer,' she said and then she showed them her gun, pointed upward, unthreatening. They both immediately pointed across the street. Nikki told them to call 911 and ran.
'Up Varick toward the subway,' called the woman.
Heat ran full-bore north on Varick, dodging pedestrians, looking at both sides of the street and in every vestibule and open storefront she passed. At the triangle intersection where Franklin and Varick met up with Finn Park, she stopped at the corner and scanned the windows of a coffeehouse to see if her man had mixed in with the customers. A diesel pickup truck clattered by, and when it had passed, Nikki jogged across the crosswalk to the concrete island surrounding the Franklin Street stop for the southbound 1 train. Beside a bank of newsstands and plastic boxes full of free handouts for singles clubs and the Learning Annex she saw more blood. Nikki turned across the square, toward the steps leading to the subway. She saw the Texan illuminated by the light coming from underground. He made her just as his head disappeared down the stairs.
A train must have been due, because the station was full of people waiting to go downtown. Nikki vaulted the turnstile and followed the commotion. People were getting shoved aside along the platform to her left, and that's where she went. She wove her way through the commuters, many of whom were swearing or asking one another, 'What's with that guy?'
But when Nikki reached the end of the platform, he wasn't there. Then she heard someone behind her say, 'He's going to get killed,' and she looked on the track. The Texan was down there in the darkness, climbing across to the northbound side. His right shoulder was tilted lower on the side where she had broken his clavicle, and a line of rusty red traced down the arm of his tan sport coat from the same shoulder, where it looked like he was also carrying her 9mm slug. His free hand clutched her manila envelope, which was now finger-painted with his blood. She braced against the wall, hoping for a shot, but bright light filled the platform, a horn blasted, and a 1 train screeched into the station, blocking her.
Heat raced back to the exit, to beat the passengers getting off the train, and ran up the stairs and across Varick to the northbound station, almost getting creamed by a taxi. The blood drops at the head of the stairs told her she was too late. She went down into the station just to make sure he hadn't doubled back on her as a feint, but the Texan was long gone.
Detective Heat had one consolation prize for her efforts. As she turned to come back up the stairs, something caught her eye on the dirty tiles at the foot of the bottom step. A single typewriter ribbon cartridge. The couple she had encountered must have made that 911 call, because the street was filled with blue-and-whites and plain wraps when Nikki got back to Rook's block. Detective Heat pressed her way through the onlookers, found a sergeant, and identified herself.
'You were in pursuit?' he asked.
'Yes. But I lost him.' Heat gave a description of the Texan and his last-seen to put out on the air, and while one of the sergeant's men did that, she started for the front door, telling him that Rook might be up there. The notion released a strong primal wave of worry coursing through her gut and her vision fluttered.
'You OK? Do you want a medic?' asked the sergeant. 'You look like you're going to faint.'
'No,' she said, pulling herself back together.
Moving through the front door of Rook's loft with a half dozen cops behind her, Nikki pointed out the spray of the cowboy's blood on the jamb as she passed. She led them through the kitchen and past the toppled chair where she had fought her captor and strode to the back of the apartment, retracing the steps the Texan had made before he left the first time. She clung to the hope that his reason for that trip to the back of the apartment was to check on Rook, which could mean he was all right.
When she reached the hall leading to his office, Heat immediately saw the shambles through the open door at the end of it. The cops behind her had their weapons drawn, just in case. Not Nikki. She forgot all about hers and just rushed ahead, calling out, 'Rook?' When she got to the door of his office, her breath caught.
Rook was facedown under the chair he was duct-taped to. He had a black pillowcase over his head, just like the one she had been wearing. There was a small puddle of blood collected on the floor under his face.
She got on one knee beside him. 'Rook, it's Heat. Can you hear me?'
And then he moaned. It was muffled, as if he had been gagged, too.
'Let's get him up,' said one of the cops.
A pair of EMTs came into the room. 'Easy,' said one of them, 'in case his neck's broken.' And Nikki felt another twinge in her gut.
They brought Jameson Rook upright slow and easy, by the numbers, and cut him loose. Fortunately, the pooled blood was only from hitting his nose on the floor when he toppled over trying to escape. The EMTs did a check to make sure it wasn't broken, and Nikki came in from the bathroom with a warm facecloth. Rook used it to swab himself clean while he told Detective Nguyen from the First Precinct what had happened.
After he'd left the OCME, Rook had come straight there to his loft so he could type up the day's notes for his article. He grabbed a beer, walked up the hall, and as soon as he arrived at his office, he saw that the whole place had been ransacked. He turned to Nikki. 'It was like Cassidy Towne's crime scene, except with electronics from this century. I was just getting my cell phone to call you when it rang, and it was actually you on the caller ID. But as I went to answer, he came up behind me and put that pillowcase over my head.'
'Did you struggle?' asked the detective.
'You kidding? Like crazy,' said Rook. 'But he had the pillowcase around my head real tight and had me in a choke hold.'
'Did he have a weapon?' asked the detective.
'A knife. Yes. He said he had a knife.'
'Did you see it?'
'I had a pillowcase blindfolding me. Plus, last year I got taken hostage in Chechnya by some rebels. I found that you live longer if you don't ask to see the knife.'
'Good call,' said Nguyen. 'What next?'
'Well, he sat me in this side chair, told me not to move, and started to tape me down.'
'Did you ever see him? Even through the pillowcase?'
'No.'
'What did his voice sound like?'
Rook thought a moment. 'Southern. Like Wilford Brimley.' And then he added, 'Oh! But not the look-at-that- Wilford-Brimley's-doing-TV-commercials-now Wilford Brimley. Younger. Like from Absence of Malice or The Natural.'
'So… Southern.' Nguyen made the note.
'I guess that would be easier to fit on the APB than Wilford Brimley's IMDb credits, yes,' said Rook. 'Southern, it is.'
Nikki turned to Nguyen and said with simple authority, 'The accent was North Texas.'
Nguyen turned an amused side glance to Heat, who smiled and shrugged. He turned his attention back to Rook. 'Did he say anything else to you, say what he wanted?'
'Never got that far,' answered the writer. 'His cell phone rang, and next thing I know he leaves me sitting there and goes out.'
Heat interjected, 'He must have had somebody outside watching the street who tipped him that I was coming up.'
'So we have an accomplice,' said Nguyen, making that note.
