NYPD Red(23)

“I found this guy under the TV camera scaffold,” he said. “I smelled his breath. He’s not drunk. Judging by the bruise on the side of his head, I think somebody coldcocked him. I called for an ambulance.”

The man on the ground had the E! channel logo on his blue shirt. The badge on his breast pocket had turned around, and I flipped it over.

“Oh shit,” I said. “Jerry, get back to the board.”

“You know him?” Brainard said, scrambling back to his chair.

“No. Never saw him before in my life. But he’s with E! TV, and his badge says ‘Cameraman.’”

“So?”

I’ve been playing chess since I was seven years old. Somewhere along the way I learned how to think three, four, five moves ahead. But I didn’t have time to explain to Jerry where I was going.

“Just give me the mast camera, and zoom in on those E! channel camera scaffolds,” I said.

Jerry panned over to the 50th Street scaffold and zoomed in on the camera at the top.

“Looks normal,” I said. “Next one.”

I turned to the cop in uniform. “Where did you find him? Under what scaffold?”

“Sixth Avenue.”

Jerry was already panning over to the scaffold on 51st Street.

“Forget that one!” I yelled. “Give me the guy in the center. Sixth Avenue.”

Jerry leaned on the toggle switch and the camera slowly started to creep back in the opposite direction. It was agonizing, like watching someone park a battleship.

“Zoom in on the cameraman,” I said.

Jerry brought the man sharply into focus. For a few seconds it all looked perfectly normal, and I was starting to doubt my instincts. And then the cameraman stepped away from the camera.

“Pull back!” I yelled. “Track him, track him!”

The cameraman moved to the edge of the scaffold. He had something in his right hand. He pulled his arm back, like he was about to throw a Hail Mary pass.

“It’s glass,” Brainard said, zooming in on the man’s hand. “A bottle, I think.”

And then he let it fly. The camera tracked the bottle perfectly as it arced through the air over Sixth Avenue.

I didn’t have to be a chess player to know what was going to happen next.

The Molotov cocktail hit the roof of Brad Schuck’s Hummer and exploded on impact. The screen lit up bright orange, and Brainard pulled back to get a wider picture.

“This is Command,” I said into the mic. “I need every available unit to the camera scaffold on Sixth Avenue between Five Zero and Five One. There’s a white male, fifty to sixty years old, wearing a blue E! channel uniform. He’s our bomb thrower. Stop him. He’s probably coming down the north side of the tower. I can’t see him from here.”

I stood up and watched what I could see. Brad Schuck, in flames, frantically crawling onto the roof of his scorched limo.

He rolled off the car onto the road, got up, and stumbled, screaming, toward the theater, globs of flaming napalm flying off his body.

Just before he could rush headlong into Ryan Seacrest and the horrified crowd under the marquee, Schuck blessedly lost consciousness and collapsed in a smoldering heap on the red carpet.





Chapter 26



ONE SECOND I was staring at the guy who torched Brad Schuck, and the next he was gone.

“We lost him,” I said. “He knows where our camera is, and he’s climbing down the back side of the scaffold.”

I’d never worked with Jerry Brainard before, but the man was a total pro. Unflappable. Grace under fire.

“Of course he knows where that camera is. It’s twenty-seven feet high and pointing right at him,” Brainard said. “But I wonder if he knows about this one.”

His fingers worked the console, the picture changed, and suddenly there was our bomber, climbing down the opposite side of the camera tower.

“Traffic cam,” Brainard said. “I preset every one in a six-block radius before we started. Just in case.”

Jerry was good, but the guy we were after wasn’t stupid. He had to know we’d pick him up with another camera soon enough. As soon as his feet touched the ground, I understood why he needed to be off camera, even if for just a few seconds.

In one swift, almost invisible move his distinctive blue E! channel shirt was transformed into a red, orange, and gold tie-dyed T.

“Velcro,” Brainard said. “Pretty slick.”

I grabbed the mic. “Command to all units. Suspect is on the ground and on the run. He’s removed the E! channel uniform and is now wearing jeans and a red, orange, and gold tie-dyed sixties-type T-shirt. He’s in front of the Time-Life Building and headed for West Five One Street.”