“I know.” Officer Lawrence nodded. “The roadblock’s so people don’t drive down. The power, it’s going out all along the West Side. Maybe further south, too.”

  “We still got it here,” Katzen said.

  “Like that means anything,” Crew Cut snapped. “Who knows how long the whole fucking grid will hold.”

  “You guys got any coffee or anything?” Officer Pembry asked. “We’re cold as shit.”

  “Sure,” Hardaway said, gesturing toward the coffee machine on the far table. “I’ll make you some.”

  “Thanks,” Officer Pembry said, glancing at Bill. “Your perp. What’s his story?”

  “Excessive rock ‘n rolling,” Bill said.

  “Ignore him,” Hardaway said. “It’s a fraud case.”

  A low purr as the coffee machine ground up pods and spewed hot coffee into paper cups. Hardaway carried the cups to the officers, who drifted to the long table without so much as a second glance at Bill.

  Tattoo exchanged a look with Crew Cut, who shook his head. Katzen shoved Bill’s notes on North Brother Island into the leather folder.

  “Good coffee,” Officer Pembry said, taking a sip.

  “Don’t need to butter me up,” Hardaway said. “It’s called Rain Forest Melody, or something, but it tastes like shit. It’s okay, you can admit it.”

  “I’ve had better,” Officer Lawrence offered, his gaze drifting over the walls and floor before settling on Bill’s shattered smartwatch. A quick blink, and his eyes moved along. No change in his expression.

  “Where you out of?” Soul Patch asked.

  “Ninth,” Officer Pembry said.

  “You’re a long way from home,” Katzen offered.

  “Everybody’s out there,” Officer Lawrence said. “Just trying to hold this shit together.”

  The lights blinked out.

  Someone gasped. A chair rasped on the concrete.

  The dull rumble of thunder like artillery.

  Bill stood. Should he run? Try to sneak away? It was too quiet in here—they’d hear him. If he moved to the table, they might mistake him for one of them. You could grab a gun, he told himself. Then you have a chance. No, no chance. You’ll die.

  So what? You’re dying anyway!

  True. He stepped toward the table, holding his breath so he could hear better. A metallic click, either a chair settling or a thumb on a holster. A low curse.

  “Get a flashlight,” Crew Cut called out.

  The lights flickered on.

  Bill was already back in his seat, cursing himself. Maybe if you’d been a little faster, you could have done something. Saved your own ass, instead of waiting for your wife to save you. Again.

  “It’ll happen again,” Hardaway said. “This place has a backup generator?”

  Crew Cut snorted. “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Listen, I have a suggestion,” Officer Pembry said. “You have that armored carrier over there. We could pack everyone in it, head to the nearest station.”

  Officer Lawrence’s shoulder radio crackled: “…ort in…”

  Slugging down the rest of his coffee, Officer Lawrence stepped away from the table, muttering into the handset. He stopped between his cruiser and the rattling roll-up doors.

  Crew Cut stretched and bent to touch his toes—one, two, three, four. Stunningly supple for an older dude. Beyond him, Soul Patch and Tattoo circled toward the coffee machine. They were creating space, Bill realized. Ready for something bad to happen.

  Katzen was paler than before. Hardaway coughed and rubbed her face. They were nervous and trying to hide it. Bill strained to catch anything from the conversation between Officer Lawrence and whoever was on the other side of that radio, but the rumble of the storm made it impossible to pick out anything but a few words: “…warehouse…personnel…”

  If someone starts shooting, Bill thought, you better tip your chair over. Crawl for a door. If you’re lucky, you won’t catch a stray. If you’re extra-lucky, everyone will be too busy killing each other to focus on you.

  On the table, another radio crackled: “King, you there?”

  Crew Cut froze.

  “King,” the radio crackled again. “Report in.”

  “Give me the radio,” Crew Cut told Hardaway, who was closer.

  Hardaway tossed him the radio, which Crew Cut caught one-handed.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” Crew Cut told the radio.

  Hardaway pretended to scratch her back, drawing up the back of her jacket, revealing the grip of her pistol.

  “You better give me a sit-rep,” the radio crackled. “They’re saying you left your post, you dumb asshole.”

  “Yeah, I responded to an all-hands arrest,” Crew Cut said, his eyes locked on the two young officers. “We arrested the suspect, but we’ve taken refuge in one of the vehicle depots. We’ll get back when we can.”

  “What…” the radio dissolved into static.

  “Bad copy,” Crew Cut said. “Please repeat.”

  “Wh—pect?” Crackle, crackle. “What arrest? Nobody—”

  Officer Pembry backed away from the table. He didn’t have his hand on his gun—not yet—but he could sense something wasn’t right. Beside the garage door, Officer Lawrence heard something in his radio that made him jolt upright.

  Another radio on the table crackled. “Hardaway, come in,” a voice snapped.

  Officer Pembry’s hand drifted toward his waist.

  The radio again: “Hardaway, where the hell are you?”

  Bill tensed his legs, ready to dive.

  “What’s going on?” Officer Pembry asked, low and casual.

  Hardaway’s hands behind her back, yanking her weapon from her waistband, but Officer Pembry must have been the fastest gun at the Policy Academy because he had already dropped his coffee and drawn his weapon in a two-handed grip, no way could he miss from this distance.

  Hardaway, Crew Cut, Tattoo and Soul Patch also drew their guns.

  Shouting from the direction of the garage doors. Officer Lawrence crouched behind the rear bumper of his cruiser, only his gun and part of his face visible. Ordering everyone to drop their weapons.

  Nobody listened to him.

  Bill tried to judge potential angles of fire. No guns were pointed in his direction, but bullets had a way of ricocheting off concrete and metal. If he stayed in this chair, he was a fat target. If he threw himself to the floor, he might startle someone into firing at him.

  “Everybody, let’s calm the fuck down,” Crew Cut snapped.

  Officer Pembry lowered his pistol so it pointed at Hardaway’s chest instead of her head. As he did so, Tattoo and Soul Patch dipped their barrels to the floor.

  But Katzen kept his firearm locked on Officer Pembry’s head. Maybe he was triggered by someone pointing a gun at his partner. “Drop that gun,” he told the younger cop. “You drop it right now.”

  “You tell me what’s going on,” Officer Pembry said.

  “It’s some corrupt shit,” Officer Lawrence offered from his cover behind the pillar. “Radio told me. They’re hunting for them.”

  Crew Cut spun on Katzen. “I thought you had everything covered.”

  Katzen snorted. “That dumb fuck in IA. He was onto me from the beginning. I knew it.”

  “You asshole,” Tattoo said. “I knew we couldn’t trust this fucker.”

  “It’s all fixable,” Hardaway said. She stared at Officer Pembry like a cobra hypnotizing its prey, unblinking. “Nobody needs to get hurt here.”

  “We were blown anyway,” Katzen said, taking three steps to his left so he could focus on Crew Cut and Officer Pembry at the same time. “We all got debts. Alimony. Gambling, in my case. Mortgages. And you think the city’s giving us what we need? What we deserve? We’re owed this. These two fine officers here, I’m sorry, but they’re just going to have to go.”

  “The fuck,” Officer Lawrence shouted. “You fire, you die first, you understand? You die first.”

  Crew Cut tapped his gun against his leg. “Nobody has to die tonight. But officers, I’m going to have to ask you to toss those weapons. We’re going to handcuff you, place you in your cruiser. That will provide us more than enough time to get out of here.”

  Officer Lawrence glanced at Bill.

  “Don’t look at me,” Bill said. “I’m just the hostage here.”

  “Cover me, partner,” Officer Pembry said. “I’m coming back.”

  “Move,” Officer Lawrence said.

  Pembry backed up, trusting his partner to cover him. If these young dudes have a shotgun in their cruiser, Bill thought, it could change the odds yet again.

  Katzen shook his head.

  Pembry was almost to the cruiser. Almost near cover.

  “No,” Katzen said, his finger tensing on the trigger. “We got to do it.”

  Crew Cut raised his pistol and fired.

  Blood spat from Katzen’s skull. He toppled to the floor, his weapon skittering away.

  Hardaway dropped her pistol and raised her hands, her fingers trembling. “I can live with it,” she told Crew Cut.

  An engine roared. The door of the cruiser open, Officer Pembry scrambling onto the front passenger seat. Officer Lawrence running low across the concrete floor, barely slowing as he dove over Pembry and into the driver’s seat. Under other circumstances, the flailing acrobatics would have been funny.

  The cruiser reversed, smashing into the roll-up door hard enough to tear the lower half away. Its undercarriage sparked as it bounced down the driveway and into the street, its rear bumper plowing an enormous wave of dirty water. A fast slide, the squeal of brakes, and it powered south, engine screaming over the storm’s howl.

  “I’m glad we didn’t kill them,” Tattoo said.

  “I am, too,” Crew Cut said. “You remember what it was like, being that young? Damn, you thought you were actually doing some good. Let’s get everyone in the APC. We’re going to that fucking island right now.”

  NINETEEN

  Every time the RV swayed in the punishing wind, Fiona’s stomach flipped. Every time the huge tires plowed through another pothole, she braced herself against the nearest wall. The driver was a big-rig cowboy, pushing the gas far too hard for conditions. She could only hope he avoided running over anything living.

  The bodyguards sat on the couch, their hands on their knees, vibrating with ill intent.

  In his command chair, Boz clicked a laptop key every few seconds, pretending to ignore them.

  Fiona scanned the space for weapons. Boz probably had a shotgun wired to the underside of his table, hidden by the short tablecloth. The bodyguards had enough muscles to twist off her head like a bottlecap, and she bet they also had pistols tucked down the backs of their pants.

  “Relax,” Boz finally said. “You paid me enough for this little trip.”

  “And after?” Fiona asked.

  Boz shrugged. “We’re still good, provided we don’t cross paths ever again, dig?”

  “I dig.”

  Boz shifted to the assassin. “You giving me the shit-eye, friend?”

  The assassin shrugged. “Nope.”

  “Good.” Boz nodded. “Real good. Because there’s something you should know about me: I’m such a badass, I’m guilty of crimes they haven’t even invented yet.”

  The assassin brightened. “Like fucking a space alien?”

  Boz squinted in confusion. “What?”

  “Kidnapping a tiger and driving it across state lines?” The assassin grinned, enjoying this.

  Boz shook his head. “Look, forget it. The point is, we’re all sitting here, having as good a time as we can in the middle of a major storm, and I don’t need you eyeing me, okay—”

  A rapping on the bulkhead. Boz rapped back before sliding open the cover, revealing the driver’s ice-blue eyes. “Getting close,” the driver said. “No way anyone’s getting out in this shit, though.”

  “Thanks.” Boz slammed the cover shut and tapped a few more keys on the laptop. “The eye’s almost overhead, according to this. Another forty minutes, maybe? Then it’ll be clear.”

  “That’ll be a relief,” Fiona said.

  “Truly.” Boz clicked another window, and his brow scrunched in concentration. He snapped his fingers, and the bodyguards’ heads swiveled in his direction. Boz tilted the laptop so they had a better view.

  One of the bodyguards whistled. The other one gave Fiona an appraising look she didn’t like at all. She slipped her hand beneath her jacket, her thumb on the pistol’s cold steel. Beside her, the assassin tensed.

  Boz’s hands stayed on the laptop’s keyboard. If they slipped beneath the table, she would have to do something.

  “What’s up?” she asked through a clenched jaw.

  “Nothing,” Boz said. “Just something funny online.”

  “Why don’t you tell us?” the assassin rasped. He was no longer the jokester in the polyester Elvis costume, no. This was the boogeyman who stalked the nighttime streets of too many cities, just as ready to kill you with either a paintbrush or a sniper rifle.

  Boz’s left hand drifted beneath the table.

  Boz started to say, “It has to do with…”

  Fiona yanked at her pistol but it snagged on the lining of her wet jacket, and she was already too late, Boz was about to—

  The world imploded.

  The RV wall dented inward, as if slammed by a giant boot.

  Bodyguards flew across the space, a quarter-ton of gym-toned beef crashing into Boz.

  The RV tilted, the wall becoming the floor as Fiona slid across it, the assassin tumbling beside her. A hard rain of bottles and glasses and bullets and hard drives, sex toys like deep-sea creatures in glowing pink and blue, pills in all colors of the rainbow, and a leopard-print bra.

  With a bone-rattling boom, the RV landed on its side. Fiona took a deep breath and patted her body for anything broken. Nope, all good. Beside her, the assassin poked his head up and groaned.

  Below her, water gurgled through a tear in the RV’s door. Oily water, deepening quickly.

  There were no windows in here. If the water filled the RV—and there was more than enough water outside to do that—they would drown in the middle of the street, inches from the open air.

  She started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” the assassin slurred.

  “Two car crashes in one night. What are the odds?” She rolled and rose onto her knees, hoping everyone else in the RV was dead.

  The bodyguards were dead or unconscious, their bulk pinning Boz’s legs. Boz’s upper half twisted against the wall, his tank top torn away to reveal pasty flesh, his cracked laptop still in his grip. The cracked screen displayed a browser-based version of the same app the assassin had shown her in the subway.

  It was the bidding page for her death.

  Even if her idea of the Bitcoin exchange rate was way off, the bidding was now up to a cool million dollars.

  Wonderful.

  Boz’s head stirred, and his bloodshot eyes opened. “Don’t,” he said.

  “Don’t what?” Fiona asked, standing.

  “Don’t take my red wagon,” Boz said, frowning.

  Diagnosis: concussion. “No worries on that, buddy,” Fiona said. The crash had stripped the cushions from the bench, revealing a storage space with an arsenal of weapons and ammunition strapped to the bottom. She selected an MP5 submachine gun finished in bright pink, a popular cartoon cat etched into the grip.

  “It’s very you,” the assassin said. “Hand me that pump-action shotgun beside it, will ya? Box of ammo would be nice, too.”

  She did, and he upended the box of 12-gauge shells into his pocket. “Let’s see what we hit, huh?” he said.

  The water was two inches deep, pooling around her ankles, and rising fast. They needed an out. Now.

  A drop of water smacked her forehead. She looked up at the wall-turned-ceiling. Water pooled around a crack in the fake wood paneling. Balancing on the edge of the overturned table, she gripped the edge of the paneling and yanked as hard as her tired muscles allowed.

  The paneling cracked. So did something in her shoulder. Pain blazed down her back.

  “You okay?” the assassin asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Plenty of pills floating down here, if you’re not.”

  “Nope, I’m good.” She gripped the jagged edge of the panel, took a deep breath, and pulled again. A larger piece snapped away. She winced.

  “Like, this purple one,” the assassin continued. “It’s either a painkiller or you’ll see neon elephants.”

  “Stop.” Rain poured through the new gap, cool on her face. Shredded metal beyond. A hole right to the outside, the air whistling around. Reversing the MP5 in her grip, she slammed the stock against the ragged edges, soggy bits of paneling slapping her cheeks, water in her eyes. The whistling air deepened into a roar, a fiercer wind scattering pills and bullets and scraps of paper.

  Now she had widened the hole enough to wriggle through. Slinging the ridiculous pink gun around her shoulder, she gripped the edges and hoisted herself onto the outside of the RV—rain and wind slapping her blind. She almost slid headfirst off the edge.

  Placing a hand over her eyes, she squinted at the street below. An NYPD cruiser, of all damn things, had crashed into the RV. Its lights were off, its hood accordioned into crumpled metal. The storm made it impossible to see a driver behind the wheel, or any passengers.

  “Hey, should I grab the Tupac head?” the assassin called. “It’s right up in the corner here. Like, embedded in the wall. Although I guess it’s the ceiling now.”

  “Come out right now or I’m leaving you.” She stuck her hand through the hole. The assassin gripped it as he emerged, wincing as his gut snagged on the hole’s rough edges.

  “Like toothpaste in a tube,” he said, offering her a sorry little grin, and she felt a flush of pity and sadness for this man she once shot in the back.

  “Watch out once you’re up, it’s slippery,” she said. It was windy, too, but the RV lay at an angle that blocked at least some of it.

 

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