Tick Tock (20 page)

“Holy crap! I saw that picture in the
Post,
” the doorman said, scratching at a zit on his pasty double chin. “I didn’t think anything of it, but you’re right. It’s him. It’s Carl Berger.”

“You mean Carl Apt,” Emily said.

Alex gaped at us.

“His name is Apt? I thought he was Mr. Berger’s brother Carl. That’s what we were told. We all called him Mr. Berger.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Was this Carl guy upstairs when we came in?”

The doorman nodded rapidly. “The board says he’s been in since last night.”

“How long have Berger and Carl been living here?” Emily said.

“Berger grew up here. Carl came much more recently. I’d say about five years ago,” the doorman said, nervously flicking at his zit again.

“Where did Carl come from?” Emily said.

“I don’t know,” the doorman said with a shrug. “But I do know that when he moved in, Mr. Berger stopped going outside. Mr. B was always an odd duck, but after Carl
came, he went full-tilt cuckoo. Started having all his meals catered. Mr. B was always rotund, but holy crap! I hear he’s a real whale now, am I right? I mean, break-the-boxspring, TLC-show fat. Imagine what a scandal this is going to be for his family, especially his famous brother.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“You don’t know?” the doorman said, surprised. “Lawrence Berger’s brother is David Berger, the Oscar-winning Hollywood composer. The whole Berger family are, like, rich and famous geniuses from way back.

“Lawrence’s grandfather was Robert Moses’s right-hand engineer or something, and his father was some kind of A-list computer-whiz business guy. The old super told us that, before the older Berger died, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs showed up here one night for a birthday dinner.”

I blinked at Emily. Bill Gates? Could this case get any weirder?

“Does Berger have any vehicles, other residences?” Emily said.

“Let’s see. They have an estate in Connecticut. The address is around here somewhere. Mr. B never went, but Carl went every other weekend in that slick Merc convertible of his. He keeps it at the garage around the corner on Seventy-seventh. Mr. Carl is the cold, silent type, but I’ll tell you one thing, he always slips me a crisp, warm twenty just for packing the trunk. He really kill all those people? Planted bombs?”

“Who knows? Thanks, Alex,” I said, going back to the lobby.

Outside I spotted Hobart.

“EMT says fatty-fatty-two-by-four is healthy enough for questioning,” he told me. “They’re taking him over to the One-Nine Precinct.”

“Good,” I said. “Any sign of Carl?”

“We’re doing apartments and the house-by-house on the building side of the block, but so far not a whisper,” Hobart said with a shrug. “Ain’t that the way? Fat fell down and broke his crown, but so far, Skinny is still winning the race.”

STILL DRIPPING WATER FROM HIS WET HAIR, Carl Apt hung on in the shaft of the building’s front elevator.

He had been hanging on for the past forty minutes on a vertical beam using a rock-climbing method known as laybacking. With the fingers of both hands and the soles of both bare feet gripping the cold metal, he hung sideways with the side of his butt and lower back pressed against the brick of the elevator’s shaft.

Grabbing only the kit bag the moment after the authorities blew the door down, he was completely nude. Inside the duffel bag was everything he needed—a pistol, his ATM cards, five hundred Percocet, and a change of clothes. The bag dangled in the breeze along with the rest of him, eighteen stories above the hot, pitch-black pit of the elevator shaft.

Every once in a while, he had to shift his grip and foothold to avoid cramping, but he wasn’t worried yet. One
thing he knew was pain, and he wasn’t even in the ballpark of his threshold yet.

What he needed now was a hole. A place to get inside of and stay until things cooled down enough for him to move again. Until dark at least. He knew just the place, too. He’d get to it in a few minutes. Despite the sudden turn of events, he was completely calm. He’d been planning everything in his mind, every contingency, for the past year.

A silver blue electric spark flashed down from above as the elevator motor clacked on, and the cables in front of him began to whir.

After a minute, the top of the elevator began to approach. It stopped ten feet below him, police radios squawking as the cops inside got off.

Now was his chance. He shimmied down the girder and onto the top of the elevator as silently as a cat. His toes squished in the cable grease. The now-empty elevator started heading down toward the lobby.

Now for the tricky part, he thought as the floors fell away.

When the elevator car got to three, he stood and stepped off the top of the elevator car onto the lip of the second floor’s elevator door. He waited for the door of the elevator to open onto the lobby before he popped the release lever at the top of the second floor’s door and stepped out onto the landing. As he let the door slide back, he wrapped his bag’s handle on the shaft-side door release.

He waited on the furniture-filled landing of the second
floor, staring at the two doors of the A and B apartments. Now was the bugger, he knew.

He would have to wait until the elevator went back upstairs in order to open the door and actually get underneath the elevator. It was the only way of getting into the basement undetected. That’s where his hole was. His life now depended on getting down into the building’s basement.

He glanced at the apartment doors, his hand on the suppressed 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson semiauto in his bag. If someone came out, he would kill them. On that note, if the police came to the second floor, he would also be forced to have it out right here, right now. He’d go for face shots at this close range, grab one of the automatic rifles, go down to the lobby, and go balls to the walls. Shoot his way out or die trying.

He smiled. It wasn’t such a bad plan, definitely not a bad way to go. If he was anything, he was a warrior, and like all warriors, what he ultimately wanted was a good death.

One way or the other. It was up to the fates now. It was completely out of his hands.

CARL WAITED. Watching, listening. After a minute, he heard more police radios and then footsteps going into the elevator one floor below. He heard the elevator door whir to a close, and the car began to ascend with a mechanical hum.

He tightened his grip on the pistol as the car seemed to slow down. But then it was past the second floor and going up.

Excellent, he thought. So far, so good.

When he heard the elevator stop somewhere far above a long minute later, he yanked on the strap of his bag and opened the door onto the elevator shaft. He leapt onto the vertical girder he’d been hanging onto and began laybacking down as silently and quickly as he could. Past the lobby door, he jumped the last ten feet into the well of the elevator. There was a small door in its corner that led into the basement. He pushed it open and climbed out and then closed it quickly behind him.

He pulled out the gun and ran quickly down a corridor alongside dusty storage bins. He made a turn past the boiler room and came to a thick steel door at the end. He banged on the door with his fist once and then again.

Carl stuck his gun in the face of the ugly girl who opened the door. Her stained bathrobe was loose enough at the collar to reveal a tattoo of a butterfly beneath her dirty collarbone.

“What is this? Who are you? You have no right to be here,” she said in broken Slavic-accented English as she flinched from the gun.

“I’m an American citizen, bitch, unlike yourself. Now, shut your mouth and move,” Carl said.

It had taken Carl six months of living in the building to realize the super had turned one of the basement rooms into an apartment for Eastern European illegal aliens. It was the smell. He had caught a whiff of it when he came down to put away luggage in Lawrence’s storage bin. He had smelled the same rank stench of bad sausages when he was in Delta Force and had body-guarded state officials in the Bosnian War.

He knew the building’s super was a Serb the moment he first met him. Probably fleeing some war crime, from the way the beady-eyed guy operated. You wanted work done? Garbage taken away? He always got paid first.

In fact, Carl wouldn’t be surprised if the girl in front of him was a whore, paying off her smuggling fee on her back. All this in the basement of a Fifth Avenue luxury
high-rise, Carl thought with a grin. Economies within economies. Capitalism at its finest. USA, land of the free, where the streets were paved with gold.

All that aside, here was his hole. He had arrived. He would be safe for the next twelve hours at least. The police wouldn’t search here. Since his job and his green card depended on it, the crafty mobster Serb super would never allow it.

Carl waved the girl inside with the gun, grabbed the back of her dirty housecoat, and shoved her forward toward the sound of a TV.

Inside the small room, he pushed the girl into a pale, bald old man with a regal-looking gray mustache who was cutting a swarthy teenager’s hair with an electric buzzer.

“Drago mi je,”
Carl said with a smile. It meant, nice to meet you, or something like that, in one of those utterly confusing Yugo languages. It was the only scrap of nonsense he could remember from his boots on the ground in Eastern Europe.

The gray walrus’s mouth dropped open. Why not? Shock was probably the appropriate reaction to seeing an elevator grease–covered naked man pointing a gun at you. Carl noticed that a rerun of
Full House
was on the corner TV. A pre-anorexic toddler Olsen twin was saying something cute and sassy.

Carl waited for the canned laughter to start before he shot the girl in the back of her head and threw her across the lap of the seated teen. It turned out the old man had
some fight. He managed to throw the buzzing razor at Carl’s face. It missed by only an inch, making a sound like frying grease as it sailed by. Carl smiled again as he shot the feisty old codger right in his proud gray mustache.

Carl watched the man go down in a heap. When he turned, he saw that the teenager was still seated, making a two-handed begging gesture as the dead girl spasmed and bled out in his lap. There was something artistic and powerful about the whole thing, a sense of the tragic here in this single-hanging-bulb-lit shithole basement room, a low-rent
La Pietà
under way.

“Drago mi je,”
Carl said again and put a bullet in each of the kid’s closed eyes.

IT WAS ALMOST an hour later when Emily and I arrived at the Nineteenth Precinct house to interview Berger.

Berger’s building and block were still a chaos of running SWAT guys and bomb techs when we left. Worst of all, there was still absolutely no sign of Carl Apt. It was like he had disappeared into thin air.

Emily and I had a quick pre-game powwow in the tight cinder-block hallway outside one of the precinct’s first-floor interview rooms. Through the one-way mirror, we stared at Lawrence Berger where he reclined, looking quite relaxed on a massive wheeled stretcher. He still had his shirt off, but someone had managed to fit a pair of Tyvek pants on him.

As I watched him, I was barely keeping my anger under control. Berger seemed to actually enjoy wallowing in the crimes committed and the repulsiveness he radiated. Though he was obviously mentally disturbed, I was having trouble
giving a shit. I was sick of craziness, sick of this case, especially sick that it was still open.

We finally decided that I would go in first to warm him up.

“Remember, Mike,” Emily said as I left. “This guy’s a predator. He’s all about manipulation, domination, control, and displaced rage. Don’t let him get under your skin.”

“Well, if he does,” I said as I left, “just give me a minute or two before you try to pull me off him.”

“Hi, Lawrence,” I said, smiling, despite my fury as I stepped inside. “Can I call you Lawrence?”

“Absolutely, Detective,” Berger said, looking around the old precinct’s dingy space. “I used to be an auxiliary cop here, can you believe it? After my shift, I would go to cop bars to watch Yankees games and check out the badge bunnies with the guys. They called me super-buff behind my back, but I didn’t mind. I was like a mascot, one who was always good for a round.”

“That’s really interesting, Lawrence,” I said. “But actually I wanted to ask you some more about Carl. We looked for him upstairs in your apartment, like you said, but he wasn’t around. Where would Carl go, do you think? To your weekend property in Connecticut?”

“Maybe,” Berger said, squinting. “But I doubt it. To tell you the truth, I think you’ll have a hard time finding him. He grew up in terrible poverty in Appalachia, and when I met Carl, he was living on the street near Union Square
Park. He called it “urban camping.” Carl’s ex-military, he likes things hard. He claimed he was in Delta Force before getting kicked out. I think he actually enjoys pain. He’s a pretty singular individual.”

“In what way?” I said.

“Well, for one thing, he wasn’t formally educated, but he has a truly keen intelligence. After I got him off the street, I introduced him to things. Art. Literature. I even sent him to City College. He absorbed everything instantly. He was like a sponge.”

“Wow,” I said.

“ ‘Wow’ is right,” Berger said. “We used to stay up late, sometimes all night, just talking about everything under the sun. What we loved. What we hated. When I opened up about some of my darker tastes, like my obsessions with the bloodiest crimes of the century, Carl was always cool with it, always nonjudgmental.”

“You guys were good buddies,” I said, wishing I had some aspirin.

“Yes. We were friends,” Berger said. “Is it that hard to believe that even someone as disgusting as me could have a friend? Carl proved it when I found out I was going to die. Did I tell you? I have a congenital heart condition. Coupled with a little excessive snacking. You can laugh, Mike. That’s a joke.”