boom for getting sweeping overhead shots.
They got there in the middle of a take, and Soleil Gray danced the steps Heat and Rook had seen her rehearse once in Chelsea and again at Later On. In her white sequined leotard, she cartwheeled across the set between an F-14 Tomcat and a Chickasaw helicopter, only this time something was different. There was a show intensity to her performance, a crispness and excitement that she had been saving for the cameras, and she unleashed it with abandon as the Steadicam operator backpedaled to track beside her and she flipped end-over-end the width of the deck, until she landed perfectly in the waiting arms of the sailor-suited male dancers.
Rook whispered to Nikki, 'I predict one helluva prison talent show up in Taconic.'
The director, who had been viewing it all on split screen at a hooded monitor, shouted for a cut, looked to his camera ops, and when he got nods in return, called a reset.
When the fill lights dimmed and the grips started hauling pieces of the set to the next mark, Heat made her move. With Rook following, she strode toward the canvas director chair where, in spite of the brisk fifty-degree air, Soleil Gray dabbed perspiration off her face. Ten feet from reaching her, a jumbo guy with a shaved head and wearing a yellow security windbreaker blocked the path. 'Sorry, folks, this is a closed set. Tours resume tomorrow.' He wasn't unpleasant, just a guy fulfilling the job description on the back of his jacket.
Nikki kept her voice low, showed her badge, and smiled. 'Official police business.'
But the singer, alert to everything happening on her set-or perhaps on the alert for something like this- lowered the towel from her face and stared at Nikki with wide eyes. Her makeup artist stepped in to repair the damage from the towel, but Soleil waved her off, keeping her attention on the visitors as she slid out of her chair.
Heat cleared the security man and, on her way to her, said, 'Soleil Gray, NYPD. I have a warrant for your-'
And then Soleil turned and ran. Slightly behind her, to the port side of the ship, sat a small changing tent for the extras and, beyond it, a passage leading to a flight of metal stairs. Halfway there, Raley and Ochoa came around from behind the changing tent, followed by three uniformed officers. Soleil turned to make a break the opposite way, toward the hatch where Heat and Rook had come on deck, but another pair of officers was posted at that door. Rook ran into her path and she turned sharply again. Distracted by his move, she didn't notice that Nikki was a half step away. Heat made a lunge for her, but Soleil heard her footfall and spun clear. Heat's momentum carried her into a wardrobe rack, and in the instant it took her to regain her balance, her suspect was bolting across the almost football field-wide deck to the starboard side of the aircraft carrier. Soleil's shooting company-grips, electricians, dancers, the director-all looked on in a stunned zone of inertia and disbelief.
Her training kicked in and Heat drew her gun. A gasp rose from the crew, sharp enough and full of sufficient horror to let Soleil guess what had just happened behind her back. She slowed to a stop at the edge of the flight deck and turned to see Heat approaching, gun up, aimed at her. And then, without hesitation, Soleil Gray turned, and leaped over the edge.
Amid a clamor behind her from the frozen onlookers, Nikki rushed toward the side where the woman had gone over, trying to recall what lay six stories directly below her jump. Parking lot? Pier? The Hudson? And in those quick seconds, she also wondered, could someone survive a fall from that height even into water?
But when she got to the edge and peered over the side, Nikki saw something completely unexpected: Soleil Gray tucking and rolling her way out of a safety net suspended from the deck below. 'Soleil, stop!' she called, and took aim again. But it was all for show. Heat certainly wasn't going to open fire on her under these circumstances, and the singer bet on that. Nikki reholstered about the same time she saw two men, stunt coordinators she would learn later, reaching for her suspect and pulling her out of sight onto the deck below, oblivious to what had just taken place above and unwittingly helping her escape.
Heat calculated options, thought of all the places to hide on a ship built to carry over 2,500 sailors, including all the mazes belowdecks. Then she thought of how slow the elevator or the stairs would be. 'Roach,' she said, 'call down and have them seal the exit.'
And then Detective Heat holstered her Sig and jumped over the side. The pair of stunt coordinators helped her out of the net but then tried to subdue her. 'What are you doing? I'm a cop.'
One of them said, 'She told us you were a crazed fan trying to kill her.'
'Which way did she go?'
They sized up Nikki and pointed to a hatch. Nikki ran for it, taking the door cautiously in case Soleil was waiting on the other side, but she wasn't. Ahead of Nikki stood a long passageway and she went down it at a run. It terminated at a T, and Nikki paused briefly there, imagining, if she were Soleil, the direction she would choose in her scramble to escape. Her instincts made her turn left, rushing toward a stream of daylight and what felt like the direction of the wharf side of the ship.
Heat arrived at an open hatch, the source of all the sunlight. She paused long enough to bob her head through the opening and return it, once again cautious of an ambush. When she got through the hatch, she saw a metal staircase, probably the lower level of the same one Soleil had tried for topside before Roach appeared. She hoisted herself over the rail and descended the steps another level, to where they ended at a small deck near the stern, a semicircular balcony that hung out over the wharf and one of the carrier's power supply or warehouse sheds.
Then she spun, hearing shoes on the steps above her. 'Rook?'
'God, you're fast. How do you do it? I'm still dizzy from the jump.'
But Nikki wasn't paying attention to him anymore. She'd caught a flash of white and sequins in the sunlight on the pier below. Heat calculated the four-foot leap the singer had made across from the railing to the roof of the support shed and jumped it easily herself. While she ran across the shed's flat top to a metal spiral staircase leading down to the parking lot, she could hear Rook keeping pace behind.
The sole uniform they had left below had sealed off only the gangway, not anticipating a bold rooftop escape like the one Soleil had made, so there was no one to stop her when she came around the far side of the crew parking area, sprinting for the exit on Twelfth Avenue. Fifty yards behind her and gaining, Detective Heat called out to the security guard to stop her, but he was geared to protecting the singer and, instead, looked around for some unseen female assailant to stop, not Soleil herself.
She got out through the gate.
The pop star's curse quickly turned into a blessing when she saw the paparazzi loitering outside the fence, three of them with motorcycles. By now they were snapping her as she ran toward them. Soleil called to one of them by name. 'Chuck! I need a ride, fast.'
Chuck was already peeling out onto Twelfth with Soleil clinging to his back when Nikki got there. The other two paps with bikes were starting to saddle up to follow, but Heat showed her badge and pointed to the rider on the fastest bike. 'You. Off. I need your bike for official police business.' The paparazzo hesitated, weighing the legal penalty versus the loss of photo op, but he soon felt Heat's hand clutching his jacket. 'Now.'
Heat took off in pursuit and the other pap started to follow, but Rook arrived waving his arms, blocking him. He hit the brakes. 'Rook?' said the photographer.
'Leonard?' said Rook.
Heat had to work to maintain her tail on Soleil and her paparazzo driver. He was reckless and ballsy, threading the needle between cars and zigzagging across lanes without a care about his series of near misses. As a cop in Manhattan, Nikki had seen how the celebrity shooters had increasingly begun to hunt in packs, often on motorcycles, and the image that always came to her was the pursuit of Diana in that tunnel in Paris. Now she was pursuing one of them and decided to exercise skill over daring so she didn't kill herself or a bystander.
But she was still able to keep up, if not overtake. It was evident that Soleil didn't have a destination; this was purely about evasive maneuvers, losing the tail. The path they took was a pattern of up one street, down another, through Midtown West. At one point, heading east on 50th, Soleil must have tired of the game, because Nikki saw her cast a look back, register Heat was still on their tail, and then shout something in the paparazzo's ear.
At the next corner her paparazzo, with the exclusive he could only have dreamed of, faked a right turn but instead cut a U, not only traveling the wrong direction on the one-way street but bearing down head-on at Nikki. Heat evaded, cutting to her right, and side skidded, nearly setting the bike down in the middle of traffic. But gearing down and steering into the skid, she made a U-turn herself, although almost clipping a parked FedEx truck as she swung her one-eighty.
Going the wrong way herself now, Heat flashed her headlight and used her horn. Fortunately the only close
