Tick Tock (Michael Bennett 4)

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.

Chapter 4

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.