“Is there a back door to the precinct? The damn press is going to be all over this,” Ruiz complained as they turned the corner onto 67th.

“No, but there’s a garage just to the left of the front door with a rolling door. You can use it to get in and out without being seen. Will that work?” Farina said.

“Sounds perfect. Show me,” Ruiz said, quickly picturing the garage from the blueprints of the precinct that Reyland had already sent him.

They walked east down 67th to the sound of the screaming ambulances. Farina led them down a little alley beside the precinct. He opened a call box and pressed a code. Ruiz kept his head down at the overhead camera. The garage door began to roll open silently.

Inside was a dim and tiny exhaust-reeking garage with three personal cars in it and a row of NYPD moped scooters. To the left of the scooters was a pile of garbage bags and an old gun locker with a peeling American flag sticker on it.

“So do I have this right?” Ruiz said, pointing at a door on the right as they walked in. “Through that door is the patrol supervisor’s office and beyond that’s the muster room? And the back stairs are in the hall beyond that, right?”

“Yeah, you’re right. How’d you know?” Farina said.

Ruiz smiled as he raised his right arm up behind Farina as if he was about to give him a pat on the back.

Instead, he pressed his SIG Sauer P226’s long squared-off suppressor to the base of Farina’s skull and blew the back of his head off.

58

“How are we looking up top?” Ruiz called into the radio as two of his men dragged the cop’s body out of sight between the parked cars.

“They’re rappelling in as we speak,” Reyland said.

“Okay, inserting now,” Ruiz said as the four of them went in through the door behind the silenced H&K MP5 submachine guns they’d removed from their bags.

The dimly lit hallway inside was painted cement block. The four men moved down it in a silent flow, leapfrogging each other smoothly and quickly, keeping both ends of the hall covered at all times.

Ruiz hand signaled at a closed beige metal door on the left-hand side of the corridor and two of his men stopped and crouched along the side of it. Ruiz came forward, crouching low with Shepard behind him walking upright, his MP5 up over Ruiz’s head covering their twelve o’clock.

Ruiz checked the door’s knob. It was unlocked. He opened it.

Inside was an office space, chairs and desks and cubicles. Catty-cornered from the cubicles was another open doorway that he knew led into the muster room, and beyond that was the back stairs up to the second floor.

As Ruiz leaned in behind his SIG to check the corners, a uniformed female Hispanic cop walked in from the muster room doorway with a can of Diet Pepsi to her lips.