Naked Heat Read Online Free PDF Page B

Nikki saw the masked smile on her friend’s face as Lauren eavesdropped. As Nikki turned onto 82nd and double-parked in front of the precinct, she thought, hey, they were adults and she wasn’t the den mother. Let them have whatever happiness there was to be found in this work. If a man is willing to ride with a corpse just to be with you, that’s more effort than you get from most.
    The coroner’s van took a nasty pothole on Second Avenue, and in the back, ME Parry and Detective Ochoa took some air and came down hard on the seats flanking Cassidy Towne’s body bag. “Sorry,” came the driver’s voice from up front. “Blame last winter’s blizzards. And the deficit.”
    “You OK?” Ochoa asked the ME.
    “Fine, I’m used to it, believe me,” she said. “Are you sure this doesn’t weird you out?”
    “This? Nah, fine. No sweat.”
    “You were telling me about your soccer league.”
    “I’m not boring you?”
    “Please,” Lauren said. And after the slightest hitch, she continued, “I’d like to come see you play sometime.”
    Ochoa beamed. “For real? Nah, you’re just being polite to me because I’m a live person in your day.”
    “True . . .” And they both laughed. His eyes fell away from hers for a second or two, and when he looked up she was smiling at him.
    He gathered his courage and said, “Listen, Lauren, I’m playing goalie this Saturday, and if you’re—”
    The tires squealed, glass shattered, and metal crunched. The van crashed so hard to a sudden stop that its rear tires lifted and slammed down, tossing Ochoa and Lauren. The back of her head smacked the side wall of the cargo bay as the van came to rest.
    “What the hell . . . ?” she said.
    “You all right?” Ochoa unbuckled his belt to cross to her, but before he could get out of it, the rear doors flew open and three men in ski masks and gloves were filling it, holding guns on them. Two were Glocks, the third guy had a nasty-looking assault rifle.
    “Hands!” shouted the one with the AR-15. Ochoa hesitated, and the shooter put a round in the rear tire underneath him. Lauren screamed, and even with all his range experience, the muzzle blast made Ochoa jump. “Hands, now!” Ochoa raised his high. Lauren’s were already up. The other two masks belted their Glocks and went to work unlatching the hardware securing the gurney holding Cassidy Towne’s body to the floor of the van. They made quick work of it, and as the rifleman adjusted his position to keep his aim on Ochoa, his crew rolled the gurney out of the cargo bay and wheeled it somewhere to the side of the vehicle where Ochoa had no view.
    Behind them southbound traffic on Second was bunching up. The lane immediately behind the shooter was at a stop; the other lanes were crawling around the blockage. Ochoa tried to memorize all the details for later, if there was going to be a later. Not much to go on. He saw one passing driver on his cell phone and was hoping it was a call to Emergency when the crew returned to slam the cargo doors.
    “Come out, and you’re dead,” called the AR-15 through the metal.
    “Stay in here,” said Lauren, but the detective had his weapon in his hand.
    “Don’t move,” he told her and kicked the door open. He jumped out on the opposite side of where they had taken the gurney and did a cover roll behind the rear wheel. Underneath the van he could see broken glass, fluid streaming from the engine, and the wheels of the dump truck they had T-boned.
    Tires burned rubber, and Ochoa booked it around the van in shooting position, but the big SUV—black, no plates—sped off. Its driver cut a sharp, evasive turn to put the dump truck between himself and Ochoa. In the seconds it took the detective to run up to the truck and brace, the SUV had turned off onto 38th Street for the FDR, the East River, or who knew where?
    Behind Ochoa a driver called out, “Hey, buddy, can you move this?”
    The detective turned. Sitting out there in the