Tick Tock

by Patterson, James

  WAY PAST ALL OUR BEDTIMES and loving it, the kids and I were soaked to the skin and shivering around the bonfire. I heard Seamus clear his throat to tell one of his famous ghost stories.

  I remembered them from when I was a kid. Run-of-the-mill ghost stories were for pansies. Seamus’s tales were H. P. Lovecraft–inspired yarns about fish creatures so horrifying, just the sight of them made people go insane. I mean, anyone can scare a little child. Few can introduce them to cosmic horror.

  “Make it a PG tale, huh, Padre?” I said, taking him aside. “I don’t want the kids to have nightmares. Or me, either.”

  “Fine, fine. I’ll water it down, ya party pooper,” Seamus grumbled.

  “Mike?” Mary Catherine whispered to me. “Would you help me get some more soda?”

  She didn’t even make a pretense of heading toward the house. We walked north along the dark beach parallel to the waterline. Mary Catherine was wearing a new white-cotton sheer summer dress I’d never seen before. Over the past two weeks, she’d become quite brown, which made her blue eyes pop even paler and prettier than usual. She turned those eyes on me and held them there as we walked, an adorably nervous look on her fine-boned face.

  “Mike,” she said as I followed her on our mystical soda quest.

  “Yes, Mary?”

  “I have a confession to make,” she said, stopping by an empty lifeguard chair. “This party wasn’t the kids’ idea. It was mine.”

  “I’ll forgive you on one condition,” I said, suddenly holding her shoulders.

  There were no head butts this time or hesitating. We kissed.

  “This is crazy. What the hell are we doing?” Mary Catherine said when we came up for air.

  “Looking for soda?” I said.

  Mary Catherine smiled and gave me a playful kick in the shin. Then we climbed up into the lifeguard chair and started kissing again.

  We went at it for quite some time, holding each other, warm against the cold. I didn’t want to stop, even with the skeeters biting the crap out of my back, but after a while we climbed back down.

  We headed back to the party, but everyone was gone and the fire was out.

  “Oh, no. We’re so busted,” Mary Catherine said.

  “Who knows? Maybe we’ll be lucky and Seamus’s fish monsters got them,” I tried.

  I knew we were in trouble when I saw Shawna and Chrissy on the front porch.

  “They’re coming. They’re coming. They’re not dead,” they chanted, running back into the house.

  “Oh, yes, we are,” Mary Catherine said under her breath.

  “Now, where could the two of you have been for the last eon?” Seamus said with a stupid all-too-knowing grin on his face.

  “Yeah, Dad,” Jane said. “Where’d you go to get the soda? The Bronx?”

  “There was, uh, none left, so I tried, I mean, we, uh, went to the store.”

  “But it was closed, and we walked back,” Mary Catherine finished quickly.

  “But there’s a case of Coke right here,” Eddie said from the kitchen.

  “That can’t be. I must have missed it,” I said.

  “In the fridge?” Eddie said.

  “Enough questions,” I said. “I’m the cop here and the dad, in fact. One more question and it’s everyone straight to bed.”

  I saw Seamus open his mouth.

  “With spankings,” I added, pointing at him as everybody burst into giggles.

  “Fine, no questions,” Seamus said. “How about a song? Ready, kids? Hit it.”

  “Mike and Mary sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” they regaled us. Seamus was by far the loudest.

  “First comes love, then comes marriage,” they said, making a circle and dancing around us like evil elves. “Then comes Mary with a baby carriage.”

  “You’re all dead, you know that,” I said, red-faced and unable to contain my laughter. “As doornails.”

  Chapter 18

  IT WAS ALREADY HOT at seven fifteen in the morning when Berger downshifted the massive Budget rental box truck with a roar and pulled over onto Lexington Avenue near 42nd Street. Even this early on Monday morning, people in office clothes were spilling out of Grand Central Terminal like rats from a burning ship.

  He threw the massive truck into park and climbed out, leaving it running. He was wearing a Yankees cap backward, cutoff jeans, construction boots, and yellowish-green cheap CVS shades. A wifebeater and a gold chain with a massive head of Christ topped off his outer-borough truck-driver look.

  He made a showy display of dropping the back gate and rattling up the steel shutter before wheeling out the hand truck. On it were three thick plastic-strapped bundles of New York Times newspapers. He rolled them to the truck’s hydraulic ramp and started it humming down.

  Weaving around morning commuters on the sidewalk, he quickly navigated the hand truck into the massive train station. Inside, hundreds of people were crisscrossing through the cathedral-like space, running like kids playing musical chairs to get into place before the Stock Exchange’s golden opening bell.

  A pudgy antiterror cop strapping an M16 yawned as Berger rolled right on past him. He dropped his bundles by a crowded stationery store called Latest Edition that adjoined the main waiting room. The short, mahogany-colored Asian guy behind the counter came out of the store with a puzzled look on his face as Berger spun the hand truck around with a squeal.

  “More Times?” the little brown guy said. “This is a mistake. I already got my delivery.”

  “Wha’?” Berger said, throwing up his arms. “You gotta be f——ing kiddin’ me. I should be finished my deliveries already. Central just called and said to drop these off. Let me call these jag-offs back. Left my cell phone in the truck. I’ll be back in a second.”

  The Asian guy shook his head at the chest-high stack as Berger quickly rolled the hand truck away.

  As Berger passed the antiterror cop on his way out, he went into his pocket and slid ballistic ear protectors into his ears. Then he turned into the long Lexington Avenue Corridor exit, took the cell phone from his pocket, and dialed the number for the trigger in the massive paper-wrapped bomb he’d just planted.

  He winced as fifty pounds of plastic explosive detonated with an eardrum-splitting ba-bam! Ten feet from the exit door, a chunk of cream-colored marble the size of a pizza slid past him like a shuffleboard disk. A man’s briefcase followed. A cloud of dust and hot smoke followed him out the door into the street.

  Outside on Lexington, cars had stopped. On the sidewalk, people were turned toward the station’s entrance, arrested in place like figures in a model-train display. The hand truck clattered over as Berger rolled it off the curb. Passing the rear of the truck he’d parked, he crossed the street and turned the corner of 43rd Street, walking quickly with his head down, the iPhone still in his hand.

  When he was halfway up the block, he took a breath and dialed the other mobile phone trigger.

  The one attached to the incendiary device in the cab of the truck.

  Someone screamed. When he glanced over his shoulder, a pillar of thick black smoke was billowing up between the office towers.

  Instead of creating just a distracting blazing truck, he’d seriously thought about filling the rear of the truck with diesel-soaked ammonium nitrate, like the Oklahoma City bomber did, but in the end he’d decided against it.

  He chucked the hat and the glasses and the Christ head, feeling unsure for a moment, shaking his head.

  All in due time, he thought.

  He glanced back at the ink black pinwheeling mushroom cloud sailing into the July morning sky as he hit Third Avenue and started walking uptown. The first sirens started in the distance.

  He hadn’t crossed the line this time, Berger knew.

  He’d just erased it.

  Chapter 19

  I GOT UP EARLY THE NEXT MORNING. In the predawn gray, I threw on some flip-flops and biked over to a deli a couple of blocks north of our beach bungalow. After I bought a doz
en and a half Kaiser rolls and two pounds of bacon, I sat with a cup of coffee on a beat-up picnic table in the deli’s still-dark parking lot, gazing out at the beach.

  As the sun came up over the ocean, it reminded me of the summer I was seventeen. A buddy and I pulled a Jack Kerouac and hitchhiked down to the Jersey Shore to visit a girl that he knew. My friend cut out with the girl, and I ended up sleeping on the beach. Waking alone to the sound of gulls, I was depressed at first, but then I turned to the water and sat there, wide-eyed and frozen, overwhelmed for the first time by what a flat-out miracle this world could be.

  I smiled as I remembered being with Mary Catherine last night. No wonder I was thinking about my teen years, I thought, finishing the dregs of my Green Mountain French vanilla. After last night, I certainly felt like I was seventeen all over again. I was definitely acting like a kid. Not a bad thing, by any stretch in my book. I highly recommend it.

  Seamus was on the porch waiting for me when I got back. I could tell by the bloodless look on his face that something was very wrong. He had my phone in his hand for some reason. I screeched to a stop and dropped the bike as I bolted up the stairs.

  “No! What is it? One of the kids?”

  Seamus shook his head.

  “The kids are fine, Michael,” he said with a surreal calm.

  Michael?

  Shit, this was bad. The last time I remembered him using my Christian name was the morning I buried my wife.

  I noticed that the radio was on in the house behind him. A lot of silence between the announcer’s halting words. Seamus handed me my vibrating phone. There were fourteen messages from my boss.

  “Bennett,” I said into it as I watched Seamus close his eyes and bless himself.

  “Oh, Mike,” my boss, Miriam, said. “You’re not going to believe this. A bomb just went off in Grand Central Terminal. Four people are dead. Dozens more wounded. A cop is dead, too, Mike.”

  I looked up at the pink-and-blue-marbled sky, then at Seamus, then finally down at the sandy porch floorboards. My morning’s peaceful Deepak Chopra contemplation session was officially over. The big bad world had come back to get my attention like another chunk of cinder block right through my bay window.

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

  Chapter 20

  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.

  Chapter 21

  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 li
ed. “I’m actually leaving now. I’m on my way.”

  Chapter 22

  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.