Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

“It’s OK,” I said to them. “It’s all right. I was actually dumb enough to want to be a cop.”

After I skittered over an empty Coors Light bottle on the shoulder, almost wiping out, I pawed for the radio in the pocket of my raid jacket to tell Arturo my location. That was when I noticed something. My radio was AWOL. It had fallen out of my pocket during all my running and jumping around.

I screamed in frustration as I stood up on the pedals and started pumping into the dark mouth of the tunnel for the first leg of my Tour de Brooklyn.

The inside of the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel, more commonly called the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, was about as charming as you would think. It was humid and dark, the air so thick with exhaust my lungs felt like they were chewing on it. To add some excitement to my recreational afternoon spin, I almost came off the seat as I hit a dip, only a moment later to have an eye-opening seat-to-crotch collision as I hit an unseen metal street plate.

A gust from a massive speeding Verizon reel truck had almost plastered me to the tunnel’s dirty tiled wall when a blue light started bubbling behind me. There was the deafening double bloop of a siren, and I turned to see a sight for sore eyes.

“Mike!” Arturo said from our Chevy’s driver-side window as I hopped off the still-rolling bike and ran for the car.

I shoved Arturo over to the passenger side and pinned it. Now, this is more like it, I thought as we roared at top speed.

“What’s up, man? You’re bleeding like a stuck pig,” Arturo said.

“Thanks for noticing, Lopez,” I said as I gunned it on the shoulder, siren blasting.

I weaved around the Verizon truck, and after another thirty seconds, I could see light at the far end of the slightly curving tunnel. What I couldn’t see was any sign of Rylan as we came out into daylight by the tollbooths.

Then I did see him out of the corner of my left eye, a speck of light blue as Rylan, running with the bike on his shoulder, hopped over the railing on the opposite side of the Gowanus Expressway.

I hit the switch for the car’s megaphone as I turned all the sirens up to eleven. “Go through the tolls! Now! Move, move!” I called to the three cars I was waiting behind.

We jetted through the tolls and hit the first exit ramp we could find, a quarter mile farther south down the Gowanus. I floored through the light at the end of it, and kept it floored until I saw an underpass in the direction where Rylan had bolted.

We roared through, into a quiet residential Brooklyn neighborhood of brownstones and low buildings, screeching to a stop at intersections to look up and down the blocks. We were stopped at the third one, beside a dry cleaner, when we saw Rylan bullet across the road three blocks ahead. We got to the corner just in time to see him disappear under yet another underpass.

“Now he’s just starting to piss me off,” I said as I raced down the hill.

On the other side of the underpass, the residential neighborhood morphed into an industrial area. There were clusters of windowless industrial hangars behind rusting chain-link on the right, a sole orange Hyundai shipping container in a weed- and rubble-strewn field on the left, and Rylan in the middle of the forlorn street between them, still pedaling madly.

But we were gaining on him now.

Rylan rolled up on the sidewalk to the right and looked back at us once under his left arm the way a jockey would. Then again.

Then he simply disappeared.

There was a guardrail at the foot of the dead-end industrial block, and Rylan hit it head-on at almost thirty miles an hour and went flying up, up, and away over the handlebars and into a stand of high strawberry-blond weeds.

If it weren’t for the ABS on the Chevy, we would surely have hit the guardrail as well. Instead, we skidded to a hard, seat-belt-whipping stop against the raised curb, and I was out of the car and over the rail, scrambling and sliding over takeout containers and Preston cans down a weedy, rocky slope toward where Rylan was doing the doggy paddle in a body of brownish water.

I stared around me in wide-eyed wonder at the seagulls wheeling over the recycling center on the opposite shoreline and the 1950s-era Airstream trailer with plastic covering its rear windows jutting from the middle of the water behind Rylan like a half-sunken art deco sub.

Rylan had been flung into the Gowanus Canal, one of the most polluted bodies of water in New York City and probably on the planet. Despite the afternoon’s heart-attack-inducing chase, I actually felt sorry for the poor guy. Especially after I was treated to the canal’s aroma, which was heavy on the raw sewage, accompanied by strong sulfur notes and a not-so-invigorating waft of burnt plastic.

Rylan, doggy-paddling about thirty feet from where I stood, made a few valiant strokes away, as if he were actually going to try to swim the nearly two-mile-long canal.

“Really, Rylan?” I said, trying to control my gag reflex. “I mean really?”

He looked at me again and then lowered his eyes and quickly began swimming back toward me.

CHAPTER 100

AN HOUR LATER, ARTURO and I were huddled together in a dim closet in the Major Crimes Division squad room watching closed-circuit video of Rylan in interview #2.

The puffy-marshmallow white Tyvek jumpsuit we’d let him change into from his stinking clothes made an annoying crinkling sound as Rylan, arms crossed, rocked back and forth with his head down. With his lean, boyish good looks, he reminded me of an athlete, a closing pitcher angry at himself for having just given up a disastrous home run on the game’s last pitch.

“For a guy who claims he doesn’t know what the heck is going on, he sure seems pretty darn upset,” Arturo said.