The Bone Collector

chest, gazing at the silhouette of his handsome Italian face on her pillow as he told her about hostage-rescue entry—“Somebody inside wants to nail you when you go in they’ll do it from above and behind . . .”
    “Shit.” She dropped to a crouch, spinning around and aiming the Glock toward the ceiling, ready to empty the entire clip.
    “What?” Tad whispered, cowering. “What?”
    The emptiness gaped at her.
    “Nothing.” And breathed deeply, stood up.
    “Don’t do that.”
    There was a gurgling noise ahead of them.
    “Jesus,” came Tad’s high voice again. “I hate this.”
    This guy’s a pussy, she thought. I know that ’cause he’s saying everything I want to.
    She stopped. “Shine the light up there. Ahead.”
    “Oh, my everloving . . .”
    Sachs finally understood the hairs she’d found at the last scene. She remembered the look that had passed between Sellitto and Rhyme. He’d known then what the unsub had planned. He’d known this was what was happening to her—and still he’d told ESU to wait. She hated him that much more.
    In front of them a pudgy girl lolled on the floor, in a pool of blood. She glanced toward the light with glazed eyes and passed out. Just as a huge black rat—big as a housecat—crawled up onto her belly and moved toward the girl’s fleshy throat. It bared its dingy teeth to take a bite from the girl’s chin.
    Sachs smoothly lifted the chunky black Glock, her left palm circling under the butt for support. She aimed carefully.
    Shooting is breathing.
    Inhale, out. Squeeze.
    Sachs fired her weapon for the first time in the line of duty. Four shots. The huge black rat standing on the girl’s chest exploded. She hit one more on the floor behind and another one that, panicking, raced toward Sachs and the medic. The others vanished silently, fast as water on sand.
    “Jesus,” the medic said. “You could’ve hit the girl.”
    “From thirty feet?” Sachs snorted. “Not hardly.”
    The radio burst to life and Haumann asked if they were under fire.
    “Negative,” Sachs replied. “Just shooing a few rats.”
    “Roger, K.”
    She took the flashlight from the medic and shining it low, started forward.
    “It’s all right, miss,” Sachs called. “You’ll be all right.”
    The girl’s eyes opened, head flipping from side to side.
    “Bitte, bitte . . .”
    She was very pale. Her blue eyes clung to Sachs, as if she was afraid to look away. “ Bitte, bitte  . . . Pleece . . .”Her voice rose to a wild keening and she began to sob and thrash in terror as the medic pressed bandages on her wounds.
    Sachs cradled her bloody blond head, whispering, “You’ll be all right, honey, you’ll be all right, you’ll be all right. . . .”

FOURTEEN
    T he office, high above downtown Manhattan, looked out over Jersey. The crap in the air made the sunset absolutely beautiful.
    “We gotta.”
    “We can’t.”
    “Gotta,” Fred Dellray repeated and sipped his coffee—even worse than in the restaurant where the Scruff and he’d been sitting not long before. “Take it away from ’em. They’ll live with it.”
    “It’s a local case,” responded the FBI’s assistant special agent in charge of the Manhattan office. The ASAC was a meticulous man who could never work undercover—because when you saw him you thought, Oh, look, an FBI agent.
    “It’s not local. They’re treating it local. But it’s a big case.”
    “We’re down eighty men because of the UN thing.”
    “And this’s related to it,” Dellray said. “I’m positive.”
    “Then we’ll tell UN Security. Let everybody . . . Oh, don’t give me that look.”
    “UN Security? UN Security? Say, you ever heara the words oxy-moron? . . . Billy, you see that picture? Of the scene this morning? The hand comin’ outa the dirt, and all the skin cut offa that finger? That’s a sick fuck out there.”
    “NYPD’s keeping us informed,” the ASAC said smartly. “We’ve got Behavioral on call if they want.”
    “Oh, Jesus Christ on the merry cross. ‘Behavioral on call’? We gotta catch this ripper, Billy. Catch him. Not figger out his tick-tocky workings.”
    “Tell me what your snitch said again.”
    Dellray knew a crack in a rock when he saw one. Wasn’t going to let it seal up again. Rapid fire now: about the Scruff and Jackie in Johannesburg or Monrovia and the hushed word throughout the illicit arms trade that something was going down at a New York airport this