Chapter 9
While all of this had been going on, Drake had worked his way through the crowd to the station. Through the window of the barricaded front door, he saw personnel dashing back and forth. It appeared that someone had remembered the military ordinance kept in the basement for extreme situations like this.
Locked out of the station, Drake next surveyed the street to see what kind of backup had arrived. He saw two other squad cars parked beyond the crowd, the officers conferring with Muldoon and Kirby. The SWAT team had not arrived yet. There were a couple of news helicopters (and a remote-controlled toy plane) in the sky, but not the police copter that would have given the besieged station a much needed extra pair of eyes.
"Ah-ha!"
Drake craned his neck to scan the roof of the station, where the exclamation had come from, and briefly saw Detective Chenture leaning over and pointing across the street. A few seconds later, he heard the station door rattling. Looking through the window, he saw Spinelli and the chief arguing with Chenture (equipped with an array of surveillance equipment), who evidently was very eager to go outside. On being refused, he dashed up the stairs to the roof, then took the fire escape down the back side of the building. Drake heard the sounds of rapidly approaching footsteps, and turned to see Chenture.
"Did you see it? Did you see it?" demanded the detective.
Hmm...let's see. What was the most-insignificant thing I've seen in the last minute or so? thought Drake. Oh, I know...
"You mean the toy plane?"
"Yes, exactly! Watson, the game is afoot!"
Nimnul was only about four pages into his diatribe by this point, and the SWAT team was still nowhere to be seen, so Drake decided he had nothing better to do than follow the detective into an alley across the street from the station and watch him throw trash cans around.
About a minute into this, Drake spotted the toy plane in exactly the place you'd expect a kid to crash a toy plane, on the fire escape. However, he was still somewhat mad at being called Watson to Chenture's Sherlock Holmes, so he kept quiet. Chenture never lifted his head.
The search might have continued indefinitely, but it was abruptly terminated by a loud crash on the street, followed by a high-pitched wail. The two men rushed out to see the spider robot on its side, it's legs together. Drake figured one of the police officers had come up with the bright idea of pushing the spider legs together to wreck the machine's stability. As they got closer, they saw that the wail was coming from Norton Nimnul, who had gotten himself caught under the edge of the dome with his rear end sticking out. Attached to this rear end was none other than Plato, demonstrating his "crime bite" for the applauding crowd.