Tick Tock (29 page)
Authors: James Patterson
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Thrillers, #Fiction / Thrillers
But it’s over,
I cry.
No,
she says again as a finger wipes away a tear and presses against my lips.
It’s not the end. There is no end. That’s the good part. How are all my babies?
I have trouble breathing, I’m crying so hard.
Baby, you should see Juliana. She’s so brave and capable, just like you. And Brian, he’s this huge, wonderful, polite young man.
Just like you,
Maeve says.
And the rest of them. Eddie’s so funny, and Trent. The younger girls have left me in the dust, honey. Pink is cool one second, then it’s so babyish. I can’t keep up. Oh, God, you’d be so proud of them.
I am, Michael. I see them sometimes. When they need me, I’m with them. That’s another good part.
I reach out and suddenly hold her thin wrist. I move over to her hand, run my finger over her wedding ring.
I made it back to you. I knew I would. I never doubted it.
When she squeezes my hand back, my sadness evaporates,
and I’m overcome with a pulsing warmth. I’m being filled inside and out with peace. Suddenly there’s a pop, and a rushing sound fills my ears, like water roaring violently through a pipe. The bed starts to shake.
Will you show me everything?
I say, holding on to her hand for dear life.
Of course, Michael,
she says as she lets go of my hand.
But not now. It’s not the right time.
But I don’t want to go back,
I yell.
Not yet. I have so many questions. What about us? What about Mary Catherine?
I know you’ll be good to her, Michael,
Maeve yells over the increasing roar.
I know you. You would never play with a person’s heart.
That’s when I turn.
But Maeve isn’t there.
Nothing is. Everything is gone. My room, the block, the city, the planet. There is nothing but the roar, and my breath and sight fail as it swallows me whole.
FIRST, there was just blackness and pain and a relentless chirping beep. It was like a bird had gotten inside of me somehow and was trying to peck its way out. Two large predator birds. One in my side, one in my face.
I opened my stinging eyes. Outside the window beside me, sun sparkled off an unfamiliar parking lot. On a highway in the distance, cars passed normally under a blue, cloudless sky.
A red-haired nurse with her back to me was moving some kind of wheeled cart in the corner. When I opened my mouth to call to her, I tasted blood again. I felt dizzy and weak, and nausea crowded up on me, and I slipped under again.
Next time I woke up, my eyes adjusted to the gray shapes. At first I thought there were people hovering above me, but then I realized they were balloons. Red and blue and shimmering Mylar ones. About as many as floated out of Carl’s chimney in the movie
Up
.
I looked away from them, wincing in pain. My face and my side were hot and tight with an itchy, horrendous stinging. The head-to-toe tightness was the worst. I felt like a sheet being pulled apart.
“Thank the Lord. Oh, thank you, God,” someone said. It definitely wasn’t me.
A second later, Seamus’s face appeared.
“Please don’t tell me it’s last rites.”
“No, no, you’ve got at least another fifty years to suffer in this vale of tears, you crazy SOB. You scared the H-E-double-hockey-sticks out of us all.”
“How long have I been out?”
“This would be day three.”
“How’s…?”
“Apt? Deader than dog excrement,” said another voice.
Emily Parker appeared next to my grandfather.
“Mary Catherine followed you down to the beach. She said when she saw you fighting, she ran back and started ringing doorbells. I guess it pays to have half the police and fire department for neighbors when you’re on vacation.”
I nodded.
“How’s…?”
“Your condition?” Seamus said.
I shook my head.
“Mary Catherine.”
“She cried for two days,” Seamus said. “But now I believe she’s fine, Mike. She’s one remarkable girl, or I should say, woman.”
“It’s true,” Emily agreed. “She saved your life. And Ricky’s. All of your lives. Feel better, Mike. Call me when you can. I have to go now. There’s about a thousand people waiting to see you.”
I squeezed Emily’s hand.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?” she said.
“For leaving the hotel.”
She smiled.
“You’re where you’re supposed to be, Mike. I know that now.”
The redheaded nurse came back then, looking pissed.
“Visiting time is over,” she said as she shoved Seamus toward the door.
“Get better,” ordered Seamus.
“I will.”
“Promise,” he called back.
I smiled.
“I swear to God, Father,” I said.
I slept for another stretch. When I opened my eyes, it was dark and all my kids were there.
At first, I flinched. I didn’t want them to see me this way. Their mother had died in a hospital bed. They’d seen enough horror in their young lives, hadn’t they? But after a minute, I found myself smiling as I looked from concerned face to concerned face.
They were all trying to be brave and to make me smile, I saw. Mary Catherine most of all. A wall of concern and
love and support was bearing down on me whether I liked it or not.
After a little bit, I smiled back through my tears. I couldn’t have helped it if I’d wanted to. Resistance was futile.
“Go give your Da a kiss,” Seamus instructed my kids.
And incredibly, somehow, all at the same time, that’s exactly what they did.
Detective Michael Bennett of the NYPD made his debut in
Step on a Crack.
For an excerpt of the first Michael Bennett novel, turn the page.
THE BACK OF THE TABLE captain’s cream-colored evening jacket had just turned away when Stephen Hopkins leaned across the secluded corner booth and kissed his wife. Caroline closed her eyes, tasting the cold champagne he’d just sipped, then felt a tug as Stephen’s hand caught one of the silk spaghetti straps of her Chanel gown.
“These puppies aren’t exactly secured in this frock, if you haven’t noticed,” she said as she came up for air. “Keep playing around and we’re going to have a serious wardrobe malfunction. How’s my lipstick?”
“Delicious,” Stephen said, smiling like a bleeping movie star. Then he touched her thigh.
“You’re past
fifty,
” Caroline said. “Not fifteen.”
Having this much fun with your husband, Caroline thought, playfully twisting Stephen’s hand away, had to be illegal. That their annual “Christmas in New York” date got better every year was beyond her, but there you had it. Dinner here at L’Arène, probably the most elegant, most seductive French restaurant in New York City; a horse-and-buggy ride through Central Park; and then back to the Pierre’s presidential suite. It had been their Christmas gift to themselves for the past four years. And every year it turned out to be more romantic than the last, more and more exquisite.
As if on cue, snow began falling outside the copper-trimmed windows of the restaurant, big silver flakes that hung in glittering cones from Madison Avenue’s old-fashioned black-iron lampposts.
“If you could have anything this Christmas, what would it be?” Caroline asked suddenly.
Stephen raised his gold-tinged glass of Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle Brut, trying to come up with something funny.
“I wish… I wish…”
A stilling sadness extinguished the humor from his face as he stared into his flute.
“I wish this were hot chocolate.”
Caroline felt dizzy as her mouth opened and her breath left.
Many years ago, she and Stephen had been homesick scholarship freshmen at Harvard, without enough money to make it home for Christmas. One morning they’d been the only two breakfast diners in cavernous Annenberg Hall, and Stephen had sat down at her table. “Just for a little warmth,” he’d said.
Soon they learned they were both planning to be poli-sci majors, and they hit it off immediately. In the Yard outside, in front of redbrick Hollis Hall, Caroline impulsively dropped to the ground and made a snow angel. Their faces almost touched when Stephen helped her up. Then she took a quick sip of the hot chocolate she’d smuggled out of the dining hall—so as not to kiss this boy she’d just met and somehow already cared about.
Caroline could still see Stephen as he had been, smiling in the bright, nickeled winter light. That lovely boy standing before her in Harvard Yard, clueless to the fact that he would marry her. Give her a beautiful daughter. Go on to become the president of the United States.
The question he’d asked as she’d lowered her cocoa mug thirty years before reverberated poignantly now in her ears, like crystal struck by shining silver: “Does yours taste like champagne, too?”
Hot chocolate to champagne, Caroline thought, lifting her bubbling flute. Now champagne to hot chocolate. Two and a half decades of marriage come full circle.
What a life they’d had, she thought, savoring the moment. Lucky and worthwhile and…
“Excuse me, Mr. President,” a voice whispered. “I’m sorry.
Excuse me.
”
A pasty-looking blond man in a metallic-gray double-breasted suit stood ten feet in front of their booth. He was waving a menu and a pen. Henri, the maître d’, arrived immediately. He assisted Steve Beplar, the Hopkinses’ Secret Service agent, in trying to escort the intruder discreetly out of sight.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the man said to the Secret Service agent in a defeated voice. “I just thought the president could sign my menu.”
“It’s okay, Steve,” Stephen Hopkins said with a quick wave. He shrugged at his wife in apology.
Fame,
Caroline thought, placing her champagne glass down onto the immaculate linen.
Ain’t it a bitch.
“Could you make that out to my wife? Carla,” the pale man spoke over the Secret Service agent’s wide shoulder.
“Carla’s my wife!” the man said a little too loudly. “Oh my God! I just said that, didn’t I? I have the insane luck to run into the greatest president of the last century, and what do I do? Jesus, look, I’m blushing now. I have to say, you guys look terrific tonight. Especially you, Mrs. Hopkins.”
“Merry Christmas to you, sir,” Stephen Hopkins said, smiling back as graciously as he could manage.
“Hope it was no bother,” the man said, the sheen of his suit flashing as he backed away, bowing.
“Bother?” Stephen Hopkins said, grinning at his wife after the man had departed. “Now how could Carla’s husband think that demolishing the most romantic moment of our lives was a bother?”
They were still laughing when a beaming waiter materialized out of the shadows, put down their plates, and vanished. Caroline smiled at the avant-garde architecture of her terrine of foie gras as her husband topped off her champagne.
It’s almost too beautiful to eat,
Caroline thought, lifting her knife and fork.
Almost.
The first bite was so ethereal that it took a few seconds for her to place the taste.
By then it was too late.
What felt like high-pressure superheated air instantly inflated Caroline Hopkins’s lungs, throat, and face. Her eyeballs felt like they were going to pop by the time her scrolled silver fork fell from her lips and clattered against china.
“Oh my God, Caroline,” she heard Stephen say as he looked at her in horror. “Steve! Help! Something’s wrong with Caroline! She can’t breathe.”
PLEASE, GOD, NO. Don’t let this happen. Don’t!
Stephen Hopkins thought as he staggered to his feet. He was just opening his mouth to cry out again when Steve Beplar snatched the edge of the dining table and flung it out of the way.
Crystal and china exploded against the varnished hardwood floor as Agent Susan Wu, the next closest of their four-person security detail, pulled Mrs. Hopkins from the booth seat. The female agent immediately probed Caroline’s mouth with her finger to dislodge any food. Then she got behind her, a fist already under her rib cage as she began the Heimlich maneuver.
It was as if an ice-cold hand had reached into Stephen’s chest. He watched helplessly as his wife’s face turned from red to almost blackish purple.
“Stop. Wait!” he said. “She’s not choking. It’s her allergy! She’s allergic to peanuts. Her emergency adrenaline! The little pen thing she carries. Where’s her bag?”
“It’s in the car out front!” Agent Wu said. She bolted across the dining room and returned a moment later at a run. She had Caroline’s bag!
Stephen Hopkins upended his wife’s handbag onto the satin of the booth seat. “It’s not here!” he said, sending makeup and perfume flying.
Steve Beplar barked into his sleeve mike; then he scooped up the former First Lady in his arms as if she were a tired toddler.
“Time to get to a hospital, sir,” he said, moving toward the exit as everyone else in the restaurant stared in horror.
Moments later, in the rear of a speeding Police Interceptor Crown Victoria, Stephen Hopkins cradled his wife’s head in his lap. Breath whistled weakly from her throat as if it were coming through a cocktail straw. He ached for his wife, watching her eyes tighten in severe pain.
A doctor and a gurney were already waiting out on the sidewalk when the sedan came to a curb-hopping stop out in front of the St. Vincent’s Midtown Hospital emergency room entrance on 52nd Street.
“You think it’s an allergic reaction?” one of the doctors asked, taking Caroline’s pulse as two attendants rushed her through the sliding glass doors on a stretcher.
“She’s highly allergic to peanuts. Ever since she was a kid,” Stephen said, jogging at Caroline’s other side. “We told the kitchen at L’Arène. There must have been some mix-up.”
“She’s in shock, sir,” the doctor said. He blocked the former president as Caroline was pushed through a
hospital personnel only
side door. “We’re going to have to try to stabilize her. We’ll do everything—”
Stephen Hopkins suddenly shoved the stunned doctor out of the way. “I’m not leaving her side,” he said. “Let’s go. That’s
an order.
”
They were already attaching an IV drip to Caroline’s arm and an oxygen mask to her face when he entered the trauma room. He winced as they sliced her beautiful gown to the navel so they could attach the leads of the heart monitor.
The machine bleated out an awful, continuous beep when they flicked it on. Then a flat black line appeared on the scrolling red graph readout. A nurse immediately started CPR.
“Clear,” the doctor yelled, and put the electrified paddles to Caroline’s chest.
Stephen watched Caroline’s chest surge upward with a pulse, and then a new, gentle
bloop-bloop
started on the monitor. A sharp, glorious scratch spiked upward on the spooling readout. Then another.
One for every miraculous beat of Caroline Hopkins’s heart.
Tears of gratitude had formed in Stephen’s eyes—when the awful
beeeeeeeeeeep
returned.
The doctor tried several more times with the defibrillator, but the screeching monitor wouldn’t change its grating one-note tune. The last thing the former president witnessed was another act of mercy by his loyal Secret Service.
Teary-eyed, Steve Beplar reached over and yanked the plug out of the yellow tile wall, halting the machine’s evil shriek.
“I’m so sorry, sir. She’s gone.”
