Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

CHAPTER 93

WE

JUMPED INTO THE truck’s cab, and Arturo turned it over with a roar, and we made a suicidal, multiple-horn-inducing left turn through the red light onto Fifth. Ten blocks later, we could hear the incredibly high-pitched clanging of alarms as we got out on the sidewalk by one of the plastic-diamond-topped lampposts that flank Forty-Seventh Street.

The scene on the street was chaos on steroids. To the west down the block, diamond industry workers were pouring onto the sidewalks. On the street, armored car guards had weapons drawn beside their trucks. As if the deafening alarms weren’t enough, from somewhere came the strong, acrid stench of smoke and burnt rubber.

A fire? Or was it a bomb? I thought.

The sound of sirens joined in with the alarms a moment later as Midtown North squad cars began arriving on both sides of the block. I stared at faces in the milling crowd, trying to eyeball any of our suspects. Instead, out of the chaotic swirl came Brooklyn and Robertson, running.

“What’s up with the smoke?” was the first thing I said.

“We don’t know,” Robertson said. “All we know is five minutes ago most of the store alarms on the south side of the street just started going off at once.”

“We’ll have to start checking the stores one by one,” I said loudly over the bedlam. “Arturo and I will start on this end. You guys head down the other end and grab some uniforms for backup and start working your way back toward the middle. Take your time and do this by the book, guys. We know these guys are armed and dangerous. There’s potential for a hostage situation, OK? Potential for any damn thing, so be careful.”

Arturo and I grabbed the first two uniforms we could and told them the plan. The male-female patrol team nodded, pale-faced and wide-eyed. They looked like raw rookies just out of high school, which wasn’t making me happy, considering they’d be behind me with drawn firearms. Too bad we didn’t have time to complain to the personnel department.

I peered through the bulletproof window of the first luxury jewelry store whose alarm was jangling on the southeast corner of Fifth and Forty-Seventh. I couldn’t see much because the inside of the store was obscured by the tiers of diamond rings and necklaces and watches. I hefted my Remington pump and pulled the door open.

“NYPD!” I yelled.

Inside were four baffled-looking female clerks holding their ears as they pointed us to a back room. Inside it, behind a steel desk, a broad-shouldered, slightly bug-eyed middle-aged man was hollering in Yiddish into a cell phone. A chunky revolver held down a clutter of invoices on the blotter in front of him like a paperweight.

“What is this? What’s going on?” the balding owner said. “Why are all my alarms going off?”

“We’re not sure yet, sir,” I said. “Are you OK? Is everybody OK? Did you see anything? Is your safe secure?”

“We’re fine. Everything’s OK,” the owner said, rubbing at his eyes. “I just checked the safe in the basement. It’s fine. My alarm is going off for some reason, and the alarm company won’t even pick up. What is this? Terrorism? My cousin Moshe up near Sixth said he heard there was an explosion?”

I didn’t have time to stay and chat with the man. Or his cousin, for that matter. We immediately cleared out to the sidewalk and were about to go into the jewelry store next door, whose alarm was wailing, when my radio blooped.

“Mike!” Robertson said. “You need to get up here. Sixth Avenue. We’re at the bank and it’s locked. The front door of the bank is locked!”

“The bank?” Arturo and I said in unison as we stared at each other. Then we took off west through the churning crowd.

CHAPTER 94

ABOUT A HUNDRED FIFTY feet in from Sixth Avenue, Robertson and Brooklyn were standing with a trio of uniforms by the front door of a branch of the Northwest River Bank.

A lot of banks in New York are the old-fashioned fancy columned granite jobs, but this one was a storefront affair like a dry cleaner or a pharmacy. It was the only bank on the block, I quickly noticed. In fact, it looked like the only establishment on the block that wasn’t a diamond store.

I pulled at the glass double doors, and like Robertson had said they wouldn’t budge. They were definitely locked.

A Midtown Manhattan bank just up and closes in the middle of a Friday? I thought. Not likely. In fact, impossible.

I cupped my eyes and leaned my forehead against the cool glass. Same as in the two stores we’d been to, the bank’s alarm was firing on all pistons. Past the ATM foyer through a second set of glass doors, I could see the teller counter beyond the stanchions for the customer line. But there were no tellers at the counter and no customers on line.

I called over a patrol cop, who handed me a tactical knife that had a tungsten carbide glass-breaking tip on the bottom of its handle. It was incredible how thoroughly and easily the door shattered when I leveled the tip perpendicular to the glass and gave it a slight tap. I cleared the glass and crawled in under the push handle, and then repeated the process on the locked glass door on the other side of the ATM foyer.

Inside, in the corner of the bank to the right, ten feet from the door, a dozen or so wide-eyed people were lying bound and gagged in a line on the industrial carpet. There were several male and female tellers, two Hasidic Jews in funeral black, a security guard, even a female traffic cop. All of them with their ankles and wrists and mouths wrapped with heavy-duty duct tape.

Pegging a thin middle-aged man in a dark-gray suit on the far end of the line as the manager, I flicked open the blade of the tactical knife I was still holding as I hurried over, and cut the tape off his wrists.

“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.