“Three men,” he whispered immediately after he peeled the tape off his lips.
He pointed animatedly at a corridor on the other side of the bank by the tellers’ counter.
“They went down that hall for the basement vault maybe ten minutes ago,” he said in hushed panic. “Be careful. They have guns. Machine guns, it looked like. I believe they’re still down there.”
CHAPTER
95
I HANDED HIM THE
knife to free the others as Arturo, Robertson, Brooklyn, and three other cops followed me toward the hall. Beyond an empty office was a stairwell that went down to a half-flight landing and then made a blind turn.
“Mike, this is nuts, man,” Arturo whispered, wiping his sweaty hand on his jeans before retightening his grip on his Glock. “We can’t handle machine guns, can we? Shouldn’t we get ESU for this?”
I put a finger to my lips before I tiptoed down the stairs and waited by the turn in the stairs, listening carefully. The only thing I could hear was the muffled clang of alarms still going off outside, so I shot a quick peek around the corner.
At the bottom of the stairs, a pudgy thirty-something black bank guard sat gagged and duct-taped like the folks upstairs. As I stared at him from up the half flight of stairs, showing him my shield, I thought he might indicate with his eyes where the still-unseen thieves were in relation to him. But he only stared at me in terror as he tried to say something through the gag of tape.
I finally went down the last flight of stairs over the barrel of the shotgun. Past the neutralized guard was the thick steel door of a huge floor-to-ceiling vault. It was wide open. The vault filled the basement space, and I could tell immediately that it was empty. The thieves were gone.
“Where’d they go?” I said to the guard as Arturo cut his hands free and helped him take the gag off his mouth.
“They got something from the vault and went back up the stairs,” the guard said between hyperventilating breaths.
“How long ago?” I said.
“Five, maybe six minutes.”
I stared at him as I hurriedly thought about that. The manager upstairs would have seen them leave through the front. But he hadn’t. He thought they were still down here.
“Brooklyn, Robertson,” I said. “They must have gone up the stairs and left out the back of the bank somehow. Get up there and check.”
They ran back up the stairs, and I poked my head into the vault and looked down at its floor, thinking I’d see it completely trashed like at the first jewelry store. But it was surprisingly clean. There was nothing on the concrete floor. Everything was as neat as a pin.
Everything except for one small anomaly.
Above and a little to the right of center of the wall of steel triple-key safe-deposit boxes, a small box—little bigger than an apartment house mailbox—stood open. Its stainless-steel door was scratched up and mangled, hanging off one hinge.
I clicked on a small flashlight from my belt and walked over and played its beam over the interior of the empty metal slot.
“What the hell?” Arturo said. “These guys knock over two diamond stores and then they come in here for this one little bank box? Was it a special kind of diamond in there, maybe?”
“Maybe it wasn’t diamonds,” I said. “Maybe it was never about diamonds at all.”
We stood there dumbfounded for another ten seconds, thinking about that.
“OK, I’ll say it if you won’t,” Arturo finally said. “What in the hell could have been in that little box?”
CHAPTER
96
THE THIEVES HADN’T FLED
out the back of the bank, we quickly learned.
They’d exited through the bank’s ceiling.
It was Arturo who found the rope ladder in the bank’s janitor closet. Though it looked like it was from a child’s swing set, it was surprisingly sturdy when I went up it into what looked like a vacant office on the bank building’s second floor. My eyes went directly to an open window, outside of which I could see scaffolding extending from the construction site to the east of the bank.
Arturo and I went back down the ladder and sprinted out of the bank and past a middle-aged Hispanic guard into the five-story construction site. I cursed and immediately started running when I saw that the site went all the way through the block to Forty-Sixth Street.
“Hey, you see anybody come through here in the last twenty minutes or so?” I yelled at a thinner, younger, and more bored-looking version of the Forty-Seventh Street guard.
He squinted as he began picking at his teeth with his pinkie.
“Just those three messenger dudes,” he said as he wiped his pinky on the lap of his cheap rent-a-cop pants.
“Bike messengers? Where’d they go?” I said.
“They got on their bikes and, like, jetted, you know. I wasn’t really watching them. I just check people coming in, man. I figured they must have come in from Roberto’s side. Did they have anything to do with those alarms?”
“Where were the bikes?” Arturo said.
“They had them, like, chained to the shed pole there.”
“What did they look like?” I said.
“They was, like, three white boys, like ESPN host types.”
Three minutes later, Arturo and I were in the dingy, sweltering back security room of a Dressbarn beside the construction site on Forty-Sixth Street, playing back footage from its sidewalk-facing security camera.
The first guy came out from under the construction site’s shed with the bike at the 12:13 mark.
He was a medium-size man in black-and-white sport-racing gear on a modern sky-blue multisport bike that had weird, almost cartoonishly thick black tires. The other two were on beat-up silver bikes and were wearing camo shorts and gray hoodies. It was hard to get their facial features under their sunglasses and helmets, but the sizes and general descriptions were a match for our suspects, three thirty-something white guys, two large and one smaller.
I was calling in the descriptions when I screamed at Arturo.
“Wait! Hit the Pause button!”
In the security footage, the biggest and smallest suspects had immediately crossed to the south side of the street without incident, but the third one, the medium-size guy on the blue bike, had to stop at the rear of a UPS truck to wait for a Poland Spring water truck to pass.
I bent closer to the desktop security monitor until my nose was almost touching the screen. Then I turned and fled the cramped room.
“Lopez, come on!” I yelled, scrambling at top speed out the back-room corridor into the bright store, past the bulging racks of clothes.
“What the hell, Mike?”
Instead of answering him, I pushed out through the front doors and back out onto the street.
“Freeze! Police! Don’t move!” I yelled at the UPS guy twenty feet to the east, who was rolling an empty hand truck toward the rear of the brown truck in front of the store.
“Mike, what the hell?” Lopez repeated behind me.
“The medium-size guy on the blue bike touched the truck here to balance himself when he was crossing the street,” I said, pointing at the UPS truck’s gate. “He wasn’t wearing gloves. Arturo, we need to get CSI down here yesterday. I think we just got lucky. I think we just got ourselves a print.”
CHAPTER
97
I WAS RIGHT.
We did get lucky. Half an hour later, all the planets finally aligned.
The prints that veteran CSU tech officer Gabriela Tremane took were beautiful. From the rear rolling gate of the UPS truck, she had peeled picture-perfect thumb, index, and middle fingerprints and a partial palm of the suspect’s right hand. Then, right there on the spot in front of the Dressbarn, she put them into her portable scanner, and before I even had a chance to cross my fingers, she smiled knowingly.
“We have a winner,” she said. “He’s in the system. Jeremy Rylan. Two Beekman Street, apartment four H, New York, New York.”
“If I weren’t in such a hurry, I’d go in there and buy you a dress, Gabriela. Make that two,” I said as I hopped into an undercover Chevy that we borrowed from the responding Midtown South detective squad.
“And I’d, uh, help you raise a barn to put it in,” Arturo said merrily as he hopped in beside me.
The address was downtown near City Hall on the northern end of the Financial District, at the intersection of Nassau and Beekman. It was a really nice, architecturally interesting building, a nineteenth-century palace of terra-cotta and brick that made me think of a red velvet wedding cake.
About an hour and twenty minutes had passed from the time of the robbery when we pulled up to the address. That was our advantage. There was no way Rylan would suspect that we could be onto him so fast. Especially after all the success he’d had.
As we were just about to get out of the car, we saw a guy on the sidewalk turn off the corner of Nassau from the north.
It was a guy on a bike.
A fancy sky-blue bike with funky black tires!
Too bad Rylan saw us at the same second. He immediately spun a lightning 180 and whipped to the right down Nassau.
I gunned the engine and roared forward into the intersection in pursuit.
For eight feet.
Nassau, the one-way street he’d turned down, at the moment was a no-way street. The middle of the road had been ripped up and a World War I–style trench was carved into the center of it, where earthmoving equipment stood behind barricades. Our car wouldn’t fit, and Rylan was on the left-hand sidewalk racing away.
I ripped the transmission into park and jumped out into the street, hitting the sidewalk at a dead run.
“He’s heading south!” I yelled to Arturo as I ran, clutching my radio like a sprinter’s baton. “There’s not much Manhattan left where he can hide. Coordinate with everyone. We need to box him in!”
On the sidewalk, I immediately almost plowed into a trio of Jamaican construction workers pushing a Sheetrock-filled Dumpster out of a building. As I ran stumbling into the street, alongside the construction barrier I could see that Rylan was already at the next corner, Ann Street, slaloming around pedestrians.
As I watched, Rylan blasted through an old Chinese food delivery guy, sending him flying back into the intersection. Then there was a sickening, bone-crunching crash as the Chinese guy got creamed by
another
bike messenger, a teenage Asian guy coming west on Ann.
As I ran up, I could see that the poor old food delivery guy’s nose and mouth were bleeding as he crawled around in the gutter on his hands and knees. On the ground beside him, the teen biker was making a hissing sound as he rocked back and forth, gently cradling what looked like a badly broken wrist.
“I need to borrow this!” I yelled as I jumped on the messenger’s fallen bike. “You’ll get it back. I think.”
CHAPTER
98
I LOOKED UP TO
see Rylan make an abrupt left onto Fulton Street, but when I got there, no blue bike was to be seen down the narrow street or on either sidewalk. Then my eyes fell on the descending stairs to the subway in the left-hand sidewalk, and I jumped off the bike and lifted it as I ran down the stairs.
There was a yell as I hopped the turnstile with the bike and came out onto a train platform. I could see a businesswoman sprawled on her back and just beyond her, Rylan on his sky-blue bike pedaling like mad.
“Move, move!” I yelled to the waiting passengers as I followed Rylan down the platform. At the other end of it was a set of three steps that I had to hop off the bike to mount. At the top, I spotted Rylan pedaling furiously down a long, brand-new pedestrian tunnel with shining white graffiti-free tiled walls.
I watched Rylan go around a bend in the tunnel, and when I finally got around the bend myself, I was just in time to see him leap nimbly off his bike and carry it gracefully through an exit turnstile before taking the stairs two at a time.
Damn, this guy is in good shape
, I thought, gasping as my elbow painfully clipped the metal frame of a billboard on the wall.
Finally coming up the exit stairs into daylight, I could see Rylan in the distance, south along traffic-filled lower Broadway. He skidded around a dog walker in the crosswalk, then did an actual wheelie between an old tow truck and a Smart car blocking the box.
“Arturo! Come to Broadway! We’re on Broadway heading south!” I yelled into the radio as I split the gap between a flatbed and a Range Rover.
Through my sweat, I was just able to see Rylan shoot around a pedicab and hook a right off Broadway onto Dey Street. Following him a moment later, I slammed the side of a delivery truck with a palm as it almost ran me over. Then I wobbled to my right and scraped the left side of my face against the side of a stopped city bus. A jutting burr or bolt or something on the bus cut my ear, and I added blood to the sweat I was already dripping onto the blurring asphalt.
When I made a lane-shifting, skidding right onto Dey myself, I was just able to see Rylan’s sky-blue guided missile make a left onto Church. I knew Church turned into Trinity Place, where the first Manhattan robbery had occurred.
Is that where he’s heading?
I wondered between my ragged breaths.
It wasn’t, I found out a few seconds later. Rylan made a right on Rector, and then as I hit Rector, I saw him make a left onto West Street.
“He’s coming south on West Street,” I called happily to Arturo as I pedaled like a man possessed. We were near Battery Park now, Manhattan’s southernmost tip, and Rylan, for all his phenomenal riding skills, was running out of city.
“Pin it down Broadway, Arturo,” I called into the radio over the driving tempo of my bike chain, “and you can cut him off by the Battery! There’s nowhere to run!”
But I spoke too soon.
Far ahead, I watched Rylan, racing down West Street, suddenly veer to the left and do a bunny hop over a low railing. Then he was rocketing down a short embankment onto an entrance ramp under an overpass. As I got closer, I read the sign on the overpass he’d just disappeared into and groaned.