Tick Tock (2 page)

“Sorry, Father,” Chrissy said, a sentiment that was repeated eleven more times in rough ascending order by Shawna, Trent, Fiona, Bridget, Eddie, Ricky, Jane, Brian, Juliana, my eldest, Mary Catherine, and last, but not least, yours truly.

Seamus put a hand on my elbow as I was fruitlessly searching for a pew that would seat a family of twelve.

“Just to let you know, I’m offering mass for Maeve today,” he said.

Maeve was my late wife, the woman who put together my ragtag wonderful family before falling to ovarian cancer a few years later. I still woke up some mornings, reaching
out for a moment before my brutal shitty aha moment that I was alone.

I smiled and nodded as I patted Seamus’s wrinkled cheek.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way, Monsignor,” I said as the organ started.

THE SERVICE WAS QUICK but quite nice. Especially the part where we prayed for Maeve. I’m not in line to become pope anytime soon, but I like mass. It’s calming, restorative. A moment to review where you’ve gone wrong over the past week and maybe think about getting things back on track.

Call it Irish psychotherapy.

Therapy for this Irish psycho, anyway.

All in all, I came back out into the sun feeling pretty calm and upbeat. Which lasted about as long as it took the holy water I blessed myself with to dry.

“Get him! Hit him harder! Yeah, boyyyyzzz!” some kid was yelling.

There was some commotion alongside the church. Through the departing crowd and cars, I saw about half a dozen kids squaring off in the parking lot.

“Look out, Eddie!” someone yelled.

Eddie? I thought.
Wait a second.

That was one of my kids!

I rushed into the brawl, with my oldest son, Brian, at my heels. There was a pile of kids swinging and kicking on the sun-bleached asphalt. I started grabbing shirt collars, yanking kids away, putting my NYPD riot police training to good use.

I found my son Eddie at the bottom of the scrum, red-faced and near tears.

“You want some more, bitch? Come and get it!” one of the kids who’d been kicking my son yelled as he lurched forward. Eddie, our resident bookworm, was ten. The tall, pudgy kid with the Mets cap askew looked at least fourteen.

“Back it up!” I yelled at the earringed punk with a lot of cop in my voice. More in my eyes.

Eddie, tears gone, just angry now, thumbed some blood from a nostril.

“What happened?” I said.

“That jerk called Trent something bad, Dad.”

“What?”

“An Irish jig.”

I turned and glared at the big kid with the even bigger mouth. Trent was even younger than Eddie, an innocent seven-year-old kid who happened to be black. I really felt like knocking the fat kid’s hat back straight with a slap. Instead, I quickly thought of another idea.

“In that case,” I said, staring at the delinquent, “kick his ass.”

“My pleasure,” Eddie said, trying to lunge from my grip.

“No, not you, Eddie. Brian’s not doing anything.”

Brian, six foot one and on the Fordham Prep JV football team, smiled as he stepped forward.

At the very last second, I placed a palm on his chest. Violence never solved anything. At least when there were witnesses around. Twenty or thirty loyal St. Edmund’s parishioners had stopped to watch the proceedings.

“What’s your name?” I said as I walked over and personally got in the kid’s face.

“Flaherty,” the kid said with a stupid little smile.

“That’s Gaelic for dumb-ass,” Juliana said by my shoulder.

“What’s your problem, Flaherty?” I said.

“Who has a problem?” Flaherty said. “Maybe it’s you guys. Maybe the Point isn’t your cup of tea. Maybe you should bring your rainbow-coalition family out to the Hamptons. You know, Puff Daddy? That crowd?”

I took a deep breath and released it even more slowly. This kid was getting on my nerves. Even though he was just a teen, my somewhat cleansed soul was wrestling valiantly not to commit the sin of wrath.

“I’m going to tell you this one time, Flaherty. Stay away from my kids or I’m going to give you a free ride in my police car.”

“Wow, you’re a cop. I’m scared,” Flaherty said. “This is the Point. I know more cops than you do, old man.”

I stepped in closer to him, close enough to head butt, anyway.

“Do any of them work at Spofford?” I said in his ear.

Spofford was New York’s infamous juvy hall. By his swallow, I thought I’d finally gotten through.

“Whatever,” Flaherty said, walking away.

Why me? I thought, turning away from the stunned crowd of churchgoers. You never saw this kind of crap on TLC. And what the hell did he mean by
old
man?

“Eddie?” I said as I started leading my gang back along the hot, sandy road toward the promised land of our saltbox.

“Yes, Dad?”

“Stay away from that kid.”

“Brian?” I said a few seconds later.

“Yeah, Pop?”

“Keep an eye on that kid.”

AN HOUR LATER, I was out on the back deck of my ancestral home, working the ancestral grill full-tilt boogie. Dogs on the warming rack. Cheese slices waiting to be applied to the rows of sizzling, freshly ground burgers. Blue smoke in my face, ice-cold bottle of Spaten lager in my hand. We were so close to the water, I could actually hear the rhythmic roll-and-crash of saltwater dropping onto hard-packed sand.

If I leaned back on the creaky rail of the deck and turned to my left, I was actually able to see the Atlantic two blocks to the east. If I turned to the right, to the other side of Jamaica Bay, I could see the sun starting its long descent toward the skyline of Manhattan, where I worked. I hadn’t had to look in that direction for over a week now and was praying that it stayed that way until the first of August.

No doubt about it. My world was a fine place and worth fighting for. Maybe not in church parking lots, but still.

I heard something on XM Radio behind me. It was the eighties song “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears. I laughed as I remembered dancing to it with Maeve at our wedding. I cranked it. You better believe I was preoccupied with 1985. No Internet. Spiky, gelled hair. Weird Al Yankovic. John Hughes movies. If they build a real hot-tub time machine, I’m going back.

“Bet’s to you, Padre,” I heard Trent say behind me.

Inside at the kitchen table, a tense game of Irish Riviera Hold ’em was under way. A lot of candy had been trading hands all evening.

“All right, hit me,” Seamus said.

“Grandpa, this isn’t blackjack,” Fiona complained with a giggle.

“Go fish?” Seamus tried.

I thought about what my new young friend Flaherty had said about my multicultural family. It was funny how wrong people got it. My family wasn’t a Hollywood social experiment. Our gang had come from my cop cases and from my departed wife Maeve’s work as a trauma nurse at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx. Our children were the survivors of the most horrible circumstances New York City had to offer. Drug addiction, poverty, suicide. Maeve and I were both from big families, but we weren’t able to have kids. So we took them in one by one by one. It was as simple and crazy as that.

I turned as Trent opened the sliders to the deck.

I was prepping my father-son sit-down about racist
dumb-asses when I saw that he was holding something. It was my work cell, and it was vibrating. I threw a panicked glance back toward the Manhattan skyline. I knew it. Things had been too good for too long, not to mention way too quiet.

“Answer it,” I finally said to him, pissed.

“Bennett,” Trent said in a deep voice. “Gimme a crime scene.”

“Wise guy,” I said, snatching the phone out of his hand.

“That wasn’t me,” I said, turning down the radio. “And you can keep the crime scene.”

“Wish I could,” my new boss, Inspector Miriam Schwartz, said.

I closed my eyes. Idiot! I knew we should have gone to the Grand Canyon.

“I’m on vacation,” I protested.

“We both are, but this is big, Mike. Homeland Security big. Just got off the phone with Manhattan Borough Command. Someone left one hell of a bomb at the main branch of the New York Public Library.”

I almost dropped the phone as a pulse of cold crackled down my spine and the backs of my legs. My stomach churned as memories of working down at the World Trade Center pit after 9/11 began to flash before my eyes. Fear, sorrow, useless anger, the end-of-the-world stench of scorched metal in my clothes, in the palms of my hands. Screw that, I thought.
Not again. Please
.

“A bomb?” I said slowly. “Is it armed?”

“No, thank God. It’s disarmed. But it’s ‘sophisticated as shit,’ to quote Paul Cell from Bomb Squad. There was a note with it.”

“I hate fucking notes. Was it a sorry one?” I said.

“No such luck, Mike,” Miriam said. “It said, ‘This wasn’t supposed to go boom, but the next one will.’ Something like that. The commissioner wants Major Case on this. I need my major player. That’s you, Mickey.”

“Mickey just left,” I groaned. “This is Donald. Can I take a message?”

“They’re waiting on you, Mike,” my boss urged.

“Yeah, who isn’t?” I said, dropping the spatula as my burgers burned.

A DAY OR TWO AFTER 9/11, a dramatic photograph of a firetruck crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on its way to the burning Twin Towers was splashed across the front page of the
Daily News
. It’s an incredible shot, even before you learn that every fireman on the truck, Ladder 118, ended up dying in the subsequent collapse.

As I rolled my beat-up Suburban along the same route under the famous bridge’s arches back into the city toward my date with a bomb on 42nd Street, for some strange reason, I couldn’t stop thinking of that picture.

I skipped the backed-up FDR Drive and took the side streets, St. James to the Bowery to Park Avenue South. Half a block west of Grand Central Terminal, wooden NYPD sawhorses had been set up, cordoning off 42nd Street in both directions. Behind the yellow tape, a crowd of summering Asian and European tourists stood front-row-center, cameras aloft, taking in some action.

After I badged my way through the outer perimeter, I parked behind a Seventeenth Precinct radio car half a block south of 42nd Street. As I was getting out, I spotted a shiny new blue Crown Vic and a couple of tall and neat-looking guys in JTTF polo shirts sitting on its hood, talking on their cell phones.

I doubted they were here to play polo. Calling in the Joint Terrorism Task Force Feds at the slightest hint of the
T
word was standard operating procedure in our jittery post-9/11 metropolis. The Feds didn’t seem too impressed with me or my gold shield as I walked past them. I knew I should have put a jacket on over my Hawaiian shirt.

When I arrived at the corner diagonal to the library, I could see more barricades far down 42nd Street at Sixth Avenue and three blocks in both directions up and down Fifth Avenue. The silence and lack of traffic on what was usually one of the busiest intersections on earth was zombie-movie eerie.

“¿Sarge, qué pasa?”
I said, showing my bling to the Hispanic female uniform at the inner perimeter’s aluminum gate.

“Seems like some skell forgot his overdue books so he returned a booby-trapped bomb to the library instead,” she said as I signed into her crime scene logbook. “We got the place evacked, including Bryant Park. The Bomb Nuts are inside. Midtown North Squad took a bus of witnesses and staff back to the precinct, but I heard it ain’t looking too good.”

Among the library’s columns and fountains, I passed nervous-looking Midtown North Task Force and Seventeenth Precinct uniforms. Some of the cops were holding what appeared to be radar guns but were really radiation detectors. An unmarked van geared with god knew what kind of testing equipment was parked at the curb.

At the front entrance of the library, a redheaded guy in a white marshmallow-man Tyvek suit was walking out with a yellow Lab on a leash. The Labrador wasn’t a seeing-eye dog, I knew, but an EDC, an explosive-detecting canine. I loved dogs, just not at crime scenes. A dog at a crime scene means bombs or dead bodies, and I wasn’t particularly jazzed about seeing either one.

Ain’t looking too good
seemed like the midsummer evening’s theme, I thought as I climbed the stairs between the two giant stone lions.

A BIG BALD GUY with a twirly black mustache and tactical blue fatigues met me beneath the landmark building’s massive portico. With his mustache, Paul Cell bore a striking resemblance to the guy on the Bomb Squad’s logo patch, depicting a devil-may-care Red Baron–looking guy riding a bomb in front of the skyline of Manhattan.

“We got the parked cars and street furniture sniffed, so I’m pretty sure there aren’t any secondary devices,” Cell said. “Think about it. Draw in the first responders with a decoy. That’s what I’d do. Look at all these windows. Some jihadist could be behind any one of them right now with his finger on the button, watching us, aching for that glorious thump and flash of holy light.”

“Christ, Paul, please,” I said, clutching my chest. “I skipped my Lipitor this morning.”

Cell and his guys were the world’s elite in bomb handling, as tight and quick and efficient as an NHL team.
More so probably since the penalty box on this squad was made of pine. All cops are crazy, but these guys took the cake.

“Fine, fine. You ready to see the main attraction?” Cell said, ushering me through the library door with a gracious wave of his hand.

“No, but let’s do it, anyway,” I said, taking a breath.

We passed another half dozen even more nervous-looking cops as we crossed the library’s monster marble entry hall to a flight of stone stairs. More bomb techs were helping their buddy out of the green astronaut-like Kevlar bomb suit in the ostentatious wood-paneled rotunda on the third floor. Another guy was putting away the four-wheeler wireless robot and the X-ray equipment.

“Uh, won’t we need that stuff?” I said.

Cell shook his head.