Ruiz didn’t think she had even had a chance to notice him before Shepard shredded the can and her face with a tight controlled burst.

Ruiz breezed forward over the dead cop’s feet, careful of the pool of soda and blood. He poked his head through the muster room doorway. There was a podium, a TV in the corner. A flyer tacked to a bulletin board beside the TV advertised an upcoming blood drive. He scanned the empty tables.

“Clear,” he said.

They pressed forward through the empty muster room and pulled open a door in its corner into a back concrete stairwell. There was a low whistle from above and they filed upward and linked up with the top-down team already waiting on the next landing.

“In, in, in,” Ruiz said, pulling open the detective room’s side door.

Inside was a surprisingly beautiful, high-ceilinged room. Paneled in old dark oak, it seemed formal, like a library. It was filled with cubicles, all empty now. Along the back wall was a row of old-fashioned pebbled-glass–doored offices.

Ruiz hand signaled at the one farthest left.

It was the only one with a light on inside of it.

The commandos hurried in a silent column, going low past the desks. Two men flanked the lit office door as Ruiz and his backup man came forward again.

Ruiz put a couple of pounds of pressure on the short reset trigger of the SIG and turned the knob and pushed open the door.

“Oh, shit,” he said, immediately letting off the trigger as he saw the bricks and rubble and dust on the carpet.

In the left-hand wall of the office, there was a hole. It was three feet high and three feet wide, and from it poured in cold air and the sound of loud sirens.

Before the hole on the dusty carpet were a couple of sledgehammers. Ruiz lifted one. NYPD Anti-Crime was written on the yellow handle in Sharpie.

Ruiz crouched and clicked on the flashlight on the bottom of his SIG’s barrel and turkey peeked his head and shoulders out of the hole. He looked left and right. The hole led out onto a one person–wide breezeway that separated the precinct from its neighboring building to the west. The thin alley at its bottom was blocked off on the 67th Street side, but the other end of it led north into what looked like a backyard for the adjoining building.

“Bad news, boss,” Ruiz said into the radio after he crawled back inside.

Shepard helped him easily up to his feet.

“They freaking mouse-holed us,” he said.

“What?” Reyland said.

“They busted a hole in the outside wall of the building on the second floor. They went out of the building into an alley to the west. It looks like it might lead out onto Lexington.”

“What are you waiting for? After them, Ruiz. We can still get these bastards,” Reyland said.

“They’ve got eight, ten minutes on us,” Ruiz said, looking at his watch. “It ain’t gonna happen, Reyland. We lost this round. They’re gone.”