NYPD Red 2(85)

“Well, we can’t leave her in the garage.”

“Sure we can,” Gideon said. “We just can’t leave her in the garage alive.”

“So what are you saying—just kill her? Without the video?”

“I’d rather think of it as kill her without getting caught,” Gideon said. “Hey, you can’t win them all. She didn’t crack, and we don’t have time to wait. We have no choice. We have to kill her.”

“When?”

“No time like the present,” Gideon said as he came off the bridge and turned onto Vernon Boulevard. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”

“Just like that?” Dave said. “Just run right in and kill her?”

“What do you want to do? Stop off and bring her another pizza? Buy her some parting gifts? Dave, this isn’t going to be a big production number like with Enzo. We know how to do this. We put a plastic bag over her head, pack up the equipment, and leave her there. They’ll find her eventually.”

Dave nodded, trying to adjust to the fact that they were going to kill someone in five minutes. He never got used to it. That was Gideon’s thing. “Did anyone ever tell you that you are one sick motherfucker?”

“Yeah,” Gideon said. “But tell me again. I never get tired of hearing it.”





Chapter 78



In the ten minutes that Casey and Bell spent being lied to by Captain Cates, Matt Smith had planted a GPS tracker and two bugs in their car. Then he used his geek magic so that Kylie and I could track their movements and listen to their conversation on an iPad.

In the thirty minutes before that, Cates had pulled together a twelve-man SWAT team and a helicopter whose NYPD markings were covered with ABC Eyewitness News logos. It was the perfect rush-hour cover for a cop chopper.

The entire operation was coordinated through the city’s newest defense against terrorism—Monitor—a twenty-million-dollar electronic hub linked to more than a hundred thousand eyes and ears across all five boroughs. It was like Big Brother on steroids.

All those resources were being brought to bear to save one woman—a young mother whose criminal negligence had led to the death of her innocent five-year-old daughter and who only two days ago couldn’t get the city to spring for a couple of cops in a patrol car to escort her to a safe haven.

That was then. Now Rachael O’Keefe had been upgraded from an anonymous fifteen-dollar-an-hour phlebotomist to one of New York’s most important citizens. And the fact that the mayor’s ass was on the line if she was murdered didn’t hurt her cause.

Kylie and I put on Kevlar vests and NYPD windbreakers, and the instant Casey and Bell’s SUV drove away from the precinct, we sprinted for our car. Kylie got behind the wheel, and the six SWAT vehicles that had been idling out of sight over on York Avenue barreled up East 67th Street and fell in behind us.

We moved out, and I tracked Casey and Bell, keeping us as close as I could, but always out of sight.

As expected, they headed for Queens, and it was clear from the verbal battle they were having in the car that we had found our Hazmat Killer.

Heads turned as our heavily armed convoy moved south down Second Avenue. “You’ve got to hand it to Cates,” I said, “for pulling all this firepower together in no time flat.”

“If you ask me, it’s overkill,” Kylie said when we were halfway across the Ed Koch Bridge. “Especially the clown car bringing up the rear.”

The clowns she was referring to were Detectives Donovan and Boyle. Cates had called them in on the operation. No explanation. Kylie was not happy about it, but she knew better than to question Cates’s judgment.

“What would you rather do?” I said. “Storm the castle in your designer camo with a gun in each hand and a nine-inch KA-BAR between your teeth?”

And then a bright orange fireball lit up the sky.

Like so many bright red dominoes, the taillights in front of us popped on, and Kylie slammed on the brakes to avoid plowing into the rear of a white van.

I radioed Big Brother. “Explosion on the Queens side of the EKB. What’s going on?”

“We know. Our bells and whistles are going off. Hang on, I’m pulling up the traffic cams in front of you. There’s a ten fifty-three—looks like a city bus slammed into an eighteen-wheeler, blew his fuel tank. People are pouring out of the bus, drivers abandoning their cars.”

I checked the GPS. Casey and Bell were on the other side of the accident. They had just passed through Queensboro Plaza and were moving along at a rapid clip.

And then I heard Gideon come in over the wire. “We have no choice. We have to kill her.”