Concincaid watched me from across the room, his eyes glittering in the flashing emergency lights of the arriving police cruisers, his smile widening into a triumphant, predatory leer.
"I told you, Thorne," Concincaid whispered into the silence of the room. "You should have stayed on your knees."
Maya’s scream through the receiver cut through the humid, toner-choked air of the annex like a serrated blade.
"Ramos, talk to me!" I barked into the phone, my voice flat, cold, and stripped of everything except tactical focus. "What is your exact location?"
"Queens-bound lower roadway, coming off the north outer roadway toward 21st Street," Ramos panted over the harsh groan of crushed sheet metal and spinning tires. "Two black Chargers, no lightbars, tinted windows, heavy front push bumpers. They pitted us into the concrete divider. One of them is pinning my driver's side door shut. Two shooters out of the second vehicle in tactical gray, heavy balaclavas—they’re trying to breach the rear passenger glass with a Halligan bar!"
In the background, the sharp, hollow *crack-crack-crack* of a sidearm echoed through the speaker.
"I’m engaging through the windshield!" Ramos yelled. "Maya is on the floorboards under the Kevlar blanket! Elias, they aren't trying to scare us! They’re trying to pull her out of the vehicle!"
Concincaid was still grinning from against the floor safe, his bloodied teeth showing through split lips. "Tick-tock, Thorne. How long does it take to cross the river in the rain? Twenty minutes? Thirty? That little girl is going to be on a container vessel out of Red Hook before you even clear 67th Street."
I didn't answer him with words.
I crossed the room in two strides, seized Concincaid by the collar of his damp undershirt, and hauled his two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame off the floor with one arm. I drove him forward like a battering ram, slamming his chest against the heavy steel frame of the front doorway where Garrison and Miller stood with their weapons leveled at the police line outside.
Through the rain-slick glass, the flashing red and blue lights of the Nineteenth Precinct cruisers illuminated Captain Thomas Bradley standing behind the open door of his command sedan, the bullhorn still raised to his lips.
"Bradley!" I roared, my voice carrying over the idle rumble of eight idling V8 engines and the hiss of downpour on asphalt.
Bradley lowered the bullhorn, his silver eyebrows pulling together beneath the brim of his braided service cap.
I shoved Concincaid’s face hard against the plate glass, right into the glare of the cruisers' spotlight. The sergeant's bruised, swollen face and the heavy federal steel around his wrists were visible to every uniform on the street.
"Listen to me very carefully, Captain!" I shouted, the cold authority of my voice slicing through the rain. "Ten seconds ago, two unmarked pursuit vehicles registered with municipal exempt tags rammed a United States Marshals transport vehicle on the Queensboro Bridge off-ramp! Inside that transport is a Deputy United States Marshal and an eight-year-old child! They are taking active fire right now!"