NYPD Red (7 page)

NYPD HAS DOZENS of command posts on wheels. The one parked on the corner of 50th Street and Sixth Avenue is the biggest, baddest one in the fleet. It’s a joint product of American, British, and Israeli ingenuity—a two-million-dollar, forty-eight-foot-long rolling nerve center affectionately known as Copzilla.

“Hard to believe we need all this hardware to catch one guy,” Captain Cates said.

“If it is one guy,” I said.

Cates had changed from her civvies to her dress blues and stopped by before heading out to spend the rest of the night within screaming distance of the mayor, who wanted to be—quote—
kept in the goddamned loop every goddamned step of the goddamned way.

“I just spoke to Mandy Sowter at the Public Information Office,” Cates said. “Ian Stewart led the evening news. Mainstream media is still calling it a ‘tragic incident that’s under investigation,’ but the tabloids are hitting hard on the Jealous Wife Shoots Cheating Husband in Front of Hundreds of Witnesses angle.”

“Technically, they’re both right,” I said.

“Sid Roth’s autopsy isn’t public yet, so most people haven’t connected his death with Stewart’s. But the bloggers have picked up on TMZ’s poison story, and now the social networks are buzzing with serial-killer rumors. You’d think that the threat of a murderer on the loose would keep people as far from the red carpet event as possible, but look at that mob out there.”

“Die-hard fans,” I said. “If their favorite celebrity is going to get gunned down, they don’t want to miss it.”

“Even if a couple of stray bullets come their way?” Cates said.

“Like I said, die…hard…fans.”

Cates left, and I sat down at the console with Jerry Brainard, a civilian dispatcher who knew every inch of Copzilla’s hundreds of miles of microfiber.

“My partner should be in the lobby of the Music Hall,” I said. “Can I get a picture?”

Brainard cued up the corresponding camera and zoomed in on Kylie. She was wearing a silky, cream-colored, jaw-dropping gown that hugged her waist, then flared out to the floor—an absolute fashion must for anyone wearing an ankle holster. I had no idea who the designer was, but the handsome guy at her side was definitely Spence Harrington.

I keyed the mic. “Command to Yankee One,” I said.

A big smile spread across her face and she shook her head in obvious protest to the code name I’d assigned her. “This is
Yankee
One.”

“What are you looking at so far?” I said.

“It’s like DEFCON One in here,” she said. “There are more cops than Rockettes. So far there have been metal detectors, radiation detectors, and four-legged bomb detectors. If the mayor is looking for security, he’s got it.”

“And if they gave out awards for best undercover wardrobe, you guys would win. You both look terrific,” I said. “How’s Spence doing? Is he okay with this?”

“Are you kidding? He does cop shows for a living. Now he feels like he’s in one.”

“Just make sure he doesn’t try to do any of his own stunts,” I said. “Command out.”

I turned to Brainard. “Pan the crowd,” I said.

Our truck is thirteen feet high. There’s a camera on the roof that’s mounted on a telescoping mast that extends another twenty-seven feet into the air. Brainard did a slow three-sixty of the people below. It was more than just a cursory sweep. The lens on the camera was powerful enough to zoom in on a license plate a city block away.

I studied the faces. Fans hoping to reach out and touch their favorite movie star, paparazzi hoping to get the one picture that the media would pay through the nose for, and cops, in uniform and plainclothes—nearly a hundred strong, working the crowd—New York’s Finest doing what they do best.

I had no idea where or how or even if the killer would strike, but sitting behind that console, looking up that wall of monitors, I knew one thing for sure. We were damn ready for him.

THE SCENE DIDN’T go exactly as writ. It went better. There were two cops at the barricade, an older white guy and a young Latina woman.

“What’s that mean on your ID,” she said. “‘Best Boy’? You don’t look like no boy.”

“It’s a film term,” The Chameleon said. “It means I’m the main assistant to the gaffer—you know, the head electrician.”

“Funny,” the second cop said. “I always see ‘Best Boy’ in the credits at the end of a movie. Never knew what it meant.”

“Well, next time you see it, you can think of me,” The Chameleon said.

“What happens if the main assistant is a woman,” the female cop said.

The Chameleon gave her his most charming grin. “Then the head electrician does whatever she tells him.”

Big laugh, and the two cops ushered him through the barrier.

The E! channel had set up three TV camera scaffolds—one on 50th Street, one on 51st, and this one on Sixth Avenue, directly across from the theater.

It was dark under the scaffold, and he turned on his flashlight. The ground was a hodgepodge of feeder cables snaking off in different directions, but the transformer where they all met was clearly labeled.

He found the two cables he was looking for and yanked them both.

He couldn’t hear over the crowd, but he’d bet that thirty feet above him the TV cameraman was cursing up a storm.

The Chameleon climbed three quarters of the way up the scaffold.

“You having power problems?” he yelled up to the cameraman.

“Yeah. I got no picture. No audio to the booth. No nothing.”

“Tranny problem,” The Chameleon said. “I can fix it. But I need a third hand. Can I borrow one of yours?”

“Not my union, bucko.”

“I just need you to hold the flashlight. I promise I won’t report you to the gaffers’ union.”

“All right, all right,” the cameraman said.

He followed The Chameleon down to the bottom of the scaffold.

“Can you get down there and shine the light directly at the fun box,” The Chameleon said, pointing at the unit that picked up the power from the generator truck.

The cameraman grunted as he squatted. “Hurry up, I don’t have the knees for this kind of sh—”

The blow to the temple was swift and accurate. The cameraman collapsed in a heap. He was out cold, but that wouldn’t last long.

“What you need now is a little vitamin K,” The Chameleon said, sticking a syringe into the man’s right deltoid and injecting him with ketamine. “You have a nice nap. I’ll go upstairs and operate the camera,” he said, plugging the two cables back into the box and rebooting the audio and video feeds.

He climbed to the top of the scaffold and put on the headset that was dangling from the camera.

“Camera Three,” the voice came from the production truck a block away. “Brian, you there?”

“I’m here,” The Chameleon said.

“We lost you for a minute there. Everything okay?”

The Chameleon adjusted his E! channel cap and got comfortable behind the camera. “Everything’s perfect,” he said.

As writ.

LEXI SAT CROSS-LEGGED on the sofa, elbows on knees, chin resting on her open palms, eyes riveted to the TV screen, not wanting to miss a single tidbit Ryan Seacrest might unearth.

She was a full-fledged, card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool Celebrity Junkie, and she didn’t care who knew it. They were glamorous, they were hideous, they were superstars, they were flaming assholes—it didn’t matter, she couldn’t get enough of them. Even the ones she hated. Even the ones she wanted to kill.

The cheese platter was sitting on the coffee table, the Saran Wrap still on. She had brought out the two champagne glasses and filled hers with Bud Light. The bubbly was definitely staying on ice till Gabe got home.

The cell phone between her legs vibrated, and she grabbed it.

The text made her giddy:
Greetings from Camera 3. DTB. Luv, G

DTB. Don’t text back. God knows she wanted to, but this was Gabe’s biggest scene yet. Not fair to distract him.

She sipped her beer and watched Ryan joke around with all the celebs as their limos pulled up to the red carpet. It had to be the most awesome job in the world. Plus he got paid zillions.

“I’d do it for free, Ryan,” she said to the screen. “Hell, I’d even pay you to let me do it.”

She was born and raised in Indiana. Her family was still there. But she was a New Yorker now, so she really loved it when all the big stars said how fantastic it was to shoot movies and TV shows in New York City. That’s what this whole Hollywood on the Hudson thing was about. So, yeah, maybe they got paid to say stuff like that, but as far as she was concerned, it wasn’t hype. New York was the best.

“Look out, world,” Seacrest said to his audience. “Here comes the most-talked-about, most-written-about, most-tweeted-about bad boy in all of Hollywood. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you? It’s Braaaaaaaaaaaad Schuck.”

The picture cut away from Seacrest to a remote camera at street level. A stretch Hummer, blowing its horn, made its way slowly up Sixth Avenue. The moonroof was wide open, and standing on the backseat, half in, half out of the car, was Brad Schuck.

To toast the crowd, he raised a bottle of the vodka he was famous for hawking, tipped it to the sky, and guzzled down four long swallows. The fans howled.

The camera stayed on Schuck while Seacrest gave a running commentary. “I’ll ask him when he gets here, but knowing Brad Schuck, I’m going to bet five bucks that wasn’t water,” he said. “Wait a minute, he’s handing the bottle to someone in the limo.”

Schuck lowered the vodka, ducked down, and came up a second later with a two-foot-long tube.

“Oh, man!” Seacrest yelled off camera. “It’s a bleacher reacher. Bad Brad has a T-shirt cannon, and since he’s wearing one of his signature
GET SCHUCKED
T-shirts, I think we all know what he’s going to be shooting into the crowd.”

Whoomp.
The first T-shirt launched into the air, and the people behind the barrier went berserk scrambling for the souvenir.

Then the Hummer made an S-turn from one side of the street to the other and Schuck fired again.

“The mayor invited everyone to shoot in New York,” Seacrest said, laughing, “and crazy Brad is doing just that. Let’s watch.”

Lexi knew what was coming next. She was off the sofa now, jumping up and down, clapping her hands, her head spinning with excitement.

“Oh, God!” she screamed. “I heart New York.”

“I GUESS EVERYTHING they say about this Schuck character being a raving lunatic is true,” Jerry Brainard said.

He had thrown the feed from the E! channel onto the large center monitor and, along with a few million other viewers, we watched Brad Schuck fire T-shirts at the adoring multitude.

“You going to arrest him?” Jerry asked.

“Arrest him? It’s more likely the mayor will invite him to lunch at Gracie Mansion,” I said. “The first thing you learn at NYPD Red is that there’s a time and a place to crack down on celebrity bad-boy antics. Radio City in front of thousands of doting fans is not the place, and the week that the mayor is trying to encourage assholes like Schuck to shoot more movies in New York is definitely not the time. Besides, those T-shirt missiles are harmless enough. They’re only made of cott—”

The back door of the Command Center flew open and a uniformed cop struggled up the steps, trying to hold up a dazed, incoherent civilian. Brainard helped them both in, and the cop lowered the civilian gently to the floor.

“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.