Tick Tock (30 page)

THE PALE, blond autograph seeker from L’Arène told the pathetic sonofabitch of a cabdriver to pull over on Ninth Avenue, a block north of St. Vincent’s Hospital. He stuffed a ten into the grimy divider slot and elbowed open the greasy door latch to avoid touching it. There were good reasons he was known as the
Neat Man.

A Channel 12 EyeScene news van screeched to a halt beside him as he made it to the corner. He stopped on his heels when he saw uniformed NYPD holding back a growing crowd of reporters and cameramen at the entrance to the hospital’s emergency room.

No, he thought. It couldn’t be! Were the fun and games already over?

He was crossing 52nd Street when he spotted a distraught-looking female EMT slumping out of the crowd.

“Miss?” he said, stepping up to her. “Could you tell me? Is this where they’ve brought First Lady Caroline?”

The full-figured Hispanic woman nodded her head, and then she suddenly moaned. Tears began to stream down her cheeks. A quivering hand went to her mouth.

“She just
died,
” she said. “Caroline Hopkins just died.”

The Neat Man felt dizzy for a second. Like the wind had been knocked right out of him. He blinked rapidly as he shook his head, stunned and elated.

“No,” he said. “Are you sure?”

The overwrought paramedic sobbed as she suddenly embraced him. “
Ay Dios mío!
She was a saint. All the work she did for poor people and AIDS. One time, she came to my mother’s project in the Bronx, and we shook her hand like she was the queen of England. Her Service America campaign was one of the reasons I became a paramedic. How could she be dead?”

“Lord knows,” the Neat Man said soothingly. “But she’s in His hands now, isn’t she?”

He could practically feel the billions of germs the woman was carrying. He shuddered, thinking of the indescribable filth a New York City paramedic came into contact with every day of her pitiful existence. A Hell’s Kitchen hospital worker for that matter!

“God, what am I doing?” the medic said, releasing him. “The news. The shock of it. I guess it tore me up. I was thinking about going to get some candles or flowers or something. It’s just so unreal. I… I’m Yolanda, by the way.”

“Yolanda? Yeah. I’m… uh… leaving,” the Neat Man said, brushing past her into the street.

He had his cell phone in his hand by the time he made it to the east side of Ninth Avenue. He could hear loudly clattering plates and chefs yelling in French when his call was picked up at L’Arène.

“It’s done, Julio,” he said. “She’s dead. Now get the hell out of there. You killed Caroline Hopkins. Congratulations.”

The Neat Man was about to shake his head in wonder at his good luck, but then stopped himself. Luck had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Three years to plan, he thought wistfully as he rounded the corner of 49th Street and headed east. Now they had just three days to pull off the rest of this job.

Minutes later, he was in the back of another taxi, heading north up Eighth. He took a couple of alcohol wipes out of his wallet and scoured his hands and face. He smoothed his lapels and crossed his hands in his lap as he sped through the bright lights, escaping the unclean city.

I’ll tell you what’s really so unreal, Yolanda baby,
the Neat Man thought as the cab swerved around Columbus Circle and made its way up Broadway.

First Lady Caroline’s death is just the beginning!

I’LL TELL YOU THIS—even on the so-called mean streets of New York, where the only thing harder to get than a taxi in the rain is attention, we were managing to turn heads that grim, gray December afternoon.

If anything could tug at the coiled-steel heartstrings of the Big Apple’s residents, I guess the sight of my mobilized Bennett clan—Chrissy, three; Shawna, four; Trent, five; twins Fiona and Bridget, seven; Eddie, eight; Ricky, nine; Jane, ten; Brian, eleven; and Juliana, twelve—all dressed in their Sunday best and walking in size order behind me, could do the trick.

I suppose I should have felt some privilege in being granted the knowledge that the milk of human kindness hasn’t completely dried up in our jaded metropolis.

But at the time, the gentle nods and warm smiles we received from every McClaren stroller–pushing Yummie, construction worker, and hot dog vendor from the subway exit next to Bloomingdale’s all the way to First Avenue were completely lost on me.

I had a lot on my mind.

The only New Yorker who
didn’t
seem like he wanted to go on a cheek-pinching bender was the old man in the hospital gown who cupped his cigarette and wheeled his IV cart out of the way to let us into our destination—the main entrance of the terminal wing of the New York Hospital Cancer Center.

I guess he had a lot on his mind, too.

I don’t know where New York Hospital recruits its staff for the terminal cancer wing, but my guess is somebody in Human Resources hacks into St. Peter’s mainframe and swipes the saint list. The constancy of their compassion and the absolute decency with which they treated me and my family were truly awe-inspiring.

But as I passed forever-smiling Kevin at reception and angelic Sally Hitchens, the head of the Nursing Department, it took everything I had to raise my head and manage a weak nod back at them.

To say I wasn’t feeling very social would have been putting it mildly.

“Oh, look, Tom,” a middle-aged woman, clearly a
visitor,
said to her husband at the elevator. “A teacher brought some students in to sing Christmas carols. Isn’t that so nice? Merry Christmas, children!”

We get that a lot. I’m of Irish American extraction, but my kids—all adopted—run the gamut. Trent and Shawna are African American; Ricky and Julia, Hispanic; and Jane is Korean. My youngest’s favorite show is
The Magic School Bus.
When we brought home the DVD, she exclaimed, “Daddy, it’s a show about our family!”

Give me a fuzzy red wig and I’m a six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound Ms. Frizzle. I certainly don’t look like what I am—a senior detective with the NYPD Homicide Division, a troubleshooter, negotiator, whatever’s needed by whoever needs it.

“Do you boys and girls know ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’?” the woman who had latched on to us persisted. I was just about to sharply point out her ignorance when Brian, my oldest son, glanced at the smoke coming out of my ears and piped up.

“Oh, no, ma’am. I’m sorry. We don’t. But we know ‘Jingle Bells.’ ”

All the way up to dreaded
Five,
my ten kids sang “Jingle Bells” with gusto, and as we piled out of the elevator, I could see a happy tear in the woman’s eye. She wasn’t here on vacation either, I realized, and my son had salvaged the situation better than a United Nations diplomat, certainly better than I ever could have.

I wanted to kiss his forehead, but eleven-year-old boys have killed over less, so I just gave him a manly pat on the back as we turned down a silent, white corridor.

Chrissy, with her arm around Shawna, her “best little pal” as she calls her, was into the second verse of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” as we passed the nurses’ station. The little ones could have been life-size Precious Moments figurines in their dresses and pigtailed hair, thanks to the extreme makeover work of their older sisters, Juliana and Jane.

My kids are great. Amazing, really. Like everyone else lately, they had gone so far above and beyond that it was hard to believe sometimes.

I guess it just pissed me off that they had to.

At the end of the second hallway we turned, a woman, wearing a flowered dress over her ninety-pound frame and a Yankees cap over her hairless head, was sitting in a wheelchair at the open door of 513.

“MOM!” the kids yelled, and the thunder of twenty feet suddenly shattered the relative silence of the hospital hall.

THERE WAS HARDLY enough of my wife left to get twenty arms around, but the kids managed it somehow. There were twenty-two arms when I got there. My wife was on morphine, codeine, and Percocet, but the only time I saw her completely pain-free was that first moment when we arrived, when she had all her ducklings pressed around her.

“Michael,” Maeve whispered to me. “Thank you.
Thank you.
They look so wonderful.”

“So do you,” I whispered back. “You didn’t get out of that bed by yourself again, did you?”

Every day when we came to see her, she was dressed for company, her intravenous pain pack hidden away, a smile on her face.

“If you didn’t want glamour, Mr. Bennett,” my wife said, fighting the weariness in her glazed eyes, “I guess you should have married someone else.”

It was the morning of the previous New Year’s Day when Maeve had complained about some stomach pain. We’d thought it was just some holiday indigestion, but when it hadn’t gone away in two weeks, her doctor wanted to do a laparoscopy just to be on the safe side. They found growths on both ovaries, and the biopsy came back with the worst news of all. Malignant. A week later, a second biopsy of the lymph nodes they took out with her uterus reported even worse news. The cancer had spread, and it wasn’t going to stop.

“Let me help you up this time, Maeve,” I whispered as she started to push herself up out of the chair.

“You
want
to get seriously hurt?” she said, glaring at me. “Mr.
Tough Guy
Detective!”

Maeve fought for her life and dignity like a banshee. She took on cancer the way the outclassed Jake LaMotta took on Sugar Ray Robinson in the fifties, with an epic ferocity not to be believed.

She was a nurse herself and used every contact and every ounce of wisdom and experience she’d gained. She underwent so many chemo and radiation treatments, it put a life-threatening strain on her heart. But even after the radical attempts, after everything there was to be done had been done, the CAT scan revealed growing tumors in both lungs, her liver, and her pancreas.

A quote from LaMotta rang in my ears as I watched Maeve stand on her wobbling toothpick legs to prop herself up behind her wheelchair. “You never knocked me down, Ray,” he supposedly said after Robinson TKO’d him. “
You never knocked me down.”

Detective Michael Bennett hunts a violent crime lord who is terrorizing New York—and targeting Bennett’s ten children.

For an excerpt of the new Michael Bennett novel, turn the page.