NYPD Red

Chapter 95



I SURFACED JUST in time to see the standoff. Kylie and Benoit, about twenty feet apart, neither of them moving.

And then the river exploded. A heart-stopping, earsplitting volcanic bang shattered the serenity of the Upper Bay and reverberated from Brooklyn to Bayonne. For an instant, the world turned a blinding bright orange. Then a geyser of boiling hot white water shot up, followed by large plumes of thick black smoke that blossomed out across the sky, showering down pieces of flaming Zodiac and human body parts.

Benoit, who had been at the center of the explosion, was vaporized. Kylie was only twenty feet away, and the seismic waves lifted her boat out of the water. One second she had been on her knees drawing a bead on Benoit, and the next her body was arcing through the air.

She hit the water fifty feet away from me and went under.

I called her name and started swimming through the oil slick and burning remnants of the fiberglass hull hissing in the water. I waited for her to pop her head up, but she didn’t, which meant she was either unconscious or worse.

My clothes and my shoes were dragging me down, and I felt like I was swimming in a dream—no matter how hard I pushed myself, I never seemed to get any closer.

When I finally got to the spot where I saw her hit the water, I dove down. It was dark and murky, and the best I could do was search frantically by sweeping my arms in front of me. After a minute, I shot up, gulped down some air, called her name again, and looked in every direction.

Nothing.

And then something broke the surface. A shoe. I dove back underwater and swam toward it. Ten feet. Twenty feet. I had lost all sense of direction. I no longer knew where I was or where Kylie had gone down.

Then I saw it. Swirling in the black water were strands of gold. Blond hair.

I kicked so hard I collided with her, then I grabbed her and pushed my way to the top. I sucked in some air, pressed my mouth to her mouth, and forced whatever oxygen I had in my lungs into hers.

She threw her head back and let out a loud gasp. I held on to her as she coughed up most of the water she had gulped down.

“Breathe,” I said.

She breathed.

“Just keep breathing. Don’t try to talk.”

She talked. “What happened?” she said.

“I saved your life. Second time today.”

“No, with Benoit.

“You blew him out of the water into bite-size chunks.”

“I was only trying to stun him.”

“He must’ve had a pocket full of C4. You couldn’t light it up with a bazooka, but if he had it primed with a blasting cap, all it took was one good Tase.”

I could hear the sirens. Then I saw them coming at us from all angles—Harbor Patrol, fireboats, Coast Guard, and at the front of the pack, Jim Rothlein in the Kristina.

The last traces of sun were disappearing into the water, and there in the distance, wrapped in a purple and pink New York City twilight, I could make out the Statue of Liberty.

“I guess this is how Benoit’s movie ends,” I said.

The water was cold, and Kylie, shivering, pressed her body as close to mine as she could get. “As they say in the biz,” she said, “‘fade to black.’”

I wrapped my arms around her, held her tight, and whispered in her ear, “Roll credits.”