Tick Tock (7 page)

“On my way,” I said, shaking my head. “Give me an hour.”

INBOUND MANHATTAN TRAFFIC WAS lighter than usual due to the heart-stopping news. I’d taken my unmarked Impala home the day before, and as I got on the LIE, I buried the pin of its speedometer, flashers and siren cranked.

Keeping off the crowded police-band radio, I had my iPod turned up as far as it would go, and blasted the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” Gritty, insane seventies rock seemed extremely appropriate theme music for the world coming apart at its seams.

The Anti-Terror Unit in full force had already set up a checkpoint at the 59th Street Bridge. Instead of stopping, I killed some cones as I put the Imp on the shoulder and took out my ID and tinned the rookie at the barricade at around forty. There were two more checkpoints, one at 50th and Third, and the final one at 45th and Lex. Sirens screaming in my ears, I parked behind an ambulance and got out.

Behind steel pedestrian barricades to the south, dozens of firefighters and cops were running around in all directions. I walked to take my place among them, shaking my head.

When I arrived at the corner and saw the flame-gutted box truck, I just stood gaping.

I spotted Bomb Squad chief Cell through a debris-covered lobby. It looked like a cave-in had happened. One of the fire chiefs at the blast site’s command center made me put on some Tyvek and a full-face air mask before letting me through.

“Guess our friend wasn’t lying about the next one,” Cell said. “Looks like the same plastique that we found at the library.”

He smiled, but I could see the frozen rage in his eyes. He was angry. We all were. Even through the filters of the mask, I could smell death. Death and concrete dust and scorched metal.

There was no predicting what would happen next.

THE REST OF THE DAY was as hellacious as any in my career. Later that morning, I helped an EMT dig out the body of an old, tiny homeless man who’d been buried under the collapsed Grand Central Lexington Avenue Corridor. When I went to grab his leg to put him in the body bag, I almost collapsed when his leg separated freely from his body. In fact, all of his limbs had been dismembered by the bomb’s shock wave. We had to bag him in parts like a quartered chicken.

If that wasn’t stressful enough, I spent the afternoon in the on-site morgue with the medical examiner, compiling a list of the dead. The morgue was set up in the Campbell Apartment, an upscale cocktail bar and lounge, and there was something very wrong about seeing covered bodies laid out in rows under a sparkling chandelier.

The worst part was when the slain police officer was brought in. In a private ceremony, the waiting family
members were handed his personal effects. Hearing the sobbing moans, I had to get out of there. I walked out and headed down one of Grand Central’s deserted tracks. I peered into the darkness at its end for a few minutes, tears stinging in my eyes. Then I wiped my eyes, walked back, and got back to work.

I met Miriam that afternoon at the Emergency Operations trailer set up by the main entrance of Grand Central on 42nd Street. I spotted a horde of media cordoned off on the south side of the street by the overpass behind barricades. National this time. Global newsies would be showing up pretty soon to get their goddamn sound bites from this hellhole.

“We got Verizon pulling recs of the nearest cell sites to see if it was a mobile trigger,” Miriam said to me. “The rest of our guys are getting the security tapes from the nearest stores up and down the block. Preliminary witnesses said a large box truck pulled up around seven. A homeless guy sleeping in the ATM alcove in the bank across the street said he looked out and saw a guy pushing a hand truck with something on it before the first explosion.”

Miriam paused, staring at me funny, before she pulled me closer.

“Not only that, Mike. You need to know this. A letter came to the squad this morning. It was addressed to you. I had them X-ray it before they opened it. It was a typed message. It had today’s date along with two words:
For Lawrence
.”

I closed my eyes, the hair standing up on the back of my neck.

Addressed to me?

“For Lawrence?” I said. “What the hell? I mean, give me a break. This is insane. There’s no rationale, no demand for ransom. Why was it addressed to
me?
”

Miriam shrugged as Intelligence chief Flaum came out of the trailer.

“ATF is flying in their guys as we speak to help identify the explosive,” he said. “You still think we have a single actor, Mike? Could that be possible? One person caused all this?”

Before I could answer, the mayor came out of the trailer, flanked by the police and fire commissioners.

“Good morning, everyone,” the mayor said into a microphone. “I’m sorry to have to address you all on this sad, sad day in our city’s history,” he said.

Not as sorry as I am, I thought, blinking at the packs of popping flash bulbs.

Around four o’clock, I was at Bellevue Hospital, having just interviewed an old Chinese woman who’d lost one of her eyes in the blast, when my cell rang.

“Mike, I hate to tell you this,” Mary Catherine said. “With everything going on, I know it’s not the right time, but—”

“What, Mary?” I barked.

“Everyone’s okay, but we’re at the hospital. St. John’s Episcopal.”

I put down the phone for a minute. I took a breath. Another hospital? Another problem? This was getting ridiculous.

“Tell me what happened.”

“It’s Eddie and Ricky. They got into a fight with that Flaherty kid. Ricky got the worst of it, five stitches in his chin, but he’s fine. Really. They both are. Please don’t worry. How is it down there? You must be going through hell.”

“It’s not that bad,” I lied. “I’m actually leaving now. I’m on my way.”

ANGRY, DIRTY, AND EMOTIONALLY HOLLOW, I parked in my driveway and sat for a moment. I smelled my hands. I’d scrubbed them at the hospital, but they still smelled like burnt metal and death. I poured another squirt of Purell into them and rubbed until they hurt. Then I stumbled out and up the porch steps and through the front door.

The dining-room table was packed full with my family having dinner. It was silent as a graveyard as I came through the kitchen door. I stepped down to the end of the table and checked out Ricky’s chin and Eddie’s shiner.

While I was carrying out the dead, some sick kid had savagely beaten up my ten-and eleven-year-old sons. This was my sanctuary, and even this was under siege. Nowhere was safe anymore.

“What happened, guys?”

“We were just playing basketball at the court by the beach,” Ricky said.

“Then that Flaherty kid came with his older friends,” Eddie jumped in. “They took the ball, and when we tried to get it back, they started punching.”

“Okay, guys. I know you’re upset, but we’re going to have to try to get through this the best we can,” I said with a strained smile. “The good news is that everyone is going to be okay, right?”

“You call this okay?” Juliana said, pointing at Ricky’s chin. She made Eddie open his mouth to show me his chipped tooth.

“Dad, you’re a cop. Can’t you just arrest this punk?” Jane wanted to know.

“It’s not that simple,” I said, my voice calm, and a convincing fake smile plastered on my face. “There’s witnesses and police reports and other adult stuff you guys shouldn’t worry about. I’ll take care of this. Now, until then, I want everyone to lay low. Stick around the house. Maybe stay away from the beach for a few days.”

“A few days? But this is our vacation,” Brian said.

“Yeah, our
beach
vacation,” Trent chimed in.

“Now, now, children. Your, uh, father knows best,” Seamus said, sensing how I was about to snap. “We need to be Christian about this. We need to turn the other cheek.”

“Yeah,” Brian said, “so the next time we get socked, the first stitches don’t get reopened.”

Brian was right. We were getting our asses kicked, and
I was too drained to come up with some good bullshit to bluff them that everything was fine.

That’s when Bridget started crying from the other end of the table, followed almost simultaneously by her twin, Fiona.

“I want to go home,” Fiona said.

“I don’t like it here anymore,” Bridget added. “I don’t want Ricky and Eddie to be hurt, Daddy. Let’s go to Aunt Suzie’s for the rest of our vacation.” Aunt Suzie lived in Montgomery, New York, where she and Uncle Jerry owned a mind-blowingly fabulous restaurant called Back Yard Bistro. We had vacationed at nearby Orange Lake the previous summer.

“Girls, look at me. No one’s going to get hurt again, and we can still have fun. I really will take care of this. I promise.”

They smiled. Small smiles, but smiles nonetheless.

I couldn’t let them down, I thought. No excuses. New York City under attack or not.

I’d have to think of something. But what?

IT WAS DARK WHEN Berger crossed the Whitestone Bridge. He buzzed up the hardtop as he pulled the Mercedes convertible off 678 onto Northern Boulevard in Flushing, Queens.

Traffic, crummy airports, an even crummier baseball team. Was there anything that
didn’t
suck about Queens?

He slowly cruised around the grid of streets, trying not to get lost. It wasn’t easy with all the small, tidy houses and low apartment buildings set in neat, boring rows everywhere he looked. Thank God for the car’s navigation system.

After five minutes, he finally stopped and pulled over behind a parked handicap bus near a wooded service road alongside the Cross Island Parkway. He turned the Merc’s engine off but left the radio on. He listened to a talk show for a bit, then found a soothing Brahms concerto.

When it was over, he sat silently in the darkness. Just
sitting there waiting was torture when there was still so much to do. He’d seriously debated contracting this part out, but in the end he had decided against it. Every small thing was part of the effort, he reminded himself. Even Michelangelo, when painting the Sistine Chapel, built the scaffolds himself and mixed his own paint.

It was almost half an hour later when a new Volvo Crossover passed him and turned off the road onto the secluded lover’s lane that ran up the wooded hill alongside an electrical tower cutout.

He waited ten minutes to let them get going. Then he slipped on his trusty surgical gloves, got out his new black, curly wig, and grabbed the sack.

Fireflies flickered among the weeds and wildflowers as he stepped up the muggy deserted stretch of service road. It could have been upstate Vermont but for the massive electrical pylon that looked like an ugly, sloppy black stitch across the face of midnight blue sky at the top of the hill.

Even though the parked Volvo’s lights were off, Berger caught a lot of motion behind the station wagon’s steamed windows as he approached. If the Volvo’s a rockin’, don’t come a knockin’, Berger thought, taking the heavy gun out of the paper sack.

He arrived at the passenger-side window and tapped the snub-nosed chunky .44 Bulldog against the glass.

Clink, clink
.

“Knock, knock,” he said.

They were both in the lowered passenger bucket seat. The young lady saw him first over the guy’s shoulder. She was pretty, a creamy-skinned redhead.

Berger took a few steps back in the darkness as she started to scream.

As the man struggled to pull up his pants, Berger walked around the rear of the car to the driver’s side and got ready. The Weaver shooting stance he adopted was textbook, two hands extended, elbows firm but not locked, weight evenly distributed on the balls of his feet. When the guy finally sat up, the Bulldog was leveled exactly at his ear.

The two huge booms and enormous recoil of the powerful gun were quite surprising after the light, smooth trigger pull. The driver-side window blew in. So did most of the horny middle-aged guy’s head. The girl in the passenger seat was splattered with blood and brain matter, and her sobbing scream rose in pitch.

With the elbow of his shirtsleeve, Berger wiped cordite and sweat out of his eyes. He lowered the heavy revolver and calmly walked around the front of the car back to the passenger side. In situations like this, you had to stay focused, slow everything down. The woman was trying to climb over her dead lover when he arrived at the other side of the car. Berger took up position again and waited until she turned.

Two more dynamite-detonating booms sounded out as he grouped two .44 Bulldog rounds into her pale forehead.

Then there was silence, Berger thought, listening.
And it was good
.

Recoil tingling his fingers, Berger dropped the gun back into the paper sack and retrieved the envelope from his pocket.

He flicked the envelope through the shattered window. There was something typed across the front of it.

MICHAEL BENNETT NYPD

Humming the concerto he’d just been listening to, Berger tugged at a rubber glove with his teeth as he hurried back down the hill toward his car.

“GOING OUT FOR ICE CREAM,” I said, getting up from the game of Trivial Pursuit that we started playing after dinner. Mary Catherine gave me a quizzical look as I was leaving. Her concern only seemed to increase when I gave her a thumbs-up on the way out the screen door.

But instead of getting ice cream, I hopped into the Impala and called into my squad to get the address for the Flaherty family in Breezy Point. Was that a little crazy? It was. But then again, so was I by that point.

Their house was on the Rockaway Inlet side of the Point about ten blocks away. I drove straight there.

They really did have a pit bull chained in their front yard. It went mad as I stepped out of my car and made my way up the rickety steps.

It wasn’t madder than me, though. I actually smiled at it. After today and everything that I had seen, I was in a man-bites-dog sort of mood.

I pounded on the door.

“Oh, this better be good,” said the bald guy who answered it.