Tick Tock (Michael Bennett 4)

After a few more stress-killing margaritas and laughter from watching Seamus dance to “Wipe Out,” I was ready for the water. I gathered everyone up and drew a line in the sand with the heel of my bare foot.

“Okay. On your mark, get set…”

They were already bolting, the little cheating stinkers. I hit the ocean a second behind them. I collided with the water face-first, a nail bomb of salt and cold exploding through my skull. Damn, I needed this. My familia was awesome. I was so lucky. We all were.

I let the water knock me silly, then got up and threw someone small who smelled like a s’more up onto my shoulders and waited for the next dark wave. Everyone was screaming and laughing.

I stared up at the night sky, freezing and having an absolute panic. There was a roar, and another wave came straight at us. We howled as if to scare it away, but it was having none of it. It kept on coming.

“Hold on tight!” I screamed as tiny sticky fingers dug into my hair.

Chapter 15

IT WAS DARK WHEN Berger pulled the Mercedes under the cold, garish lights of a BP gas station at Tenth Avenue and 36th Street back in Manhattan.

He’d bagged his bloody clothes and changed back into jeans and a T-shirt immediately after the stabbing. Directly from the scene, he’d driven over the Throggs Neck Bridge, where he’d tossed everything, including the knife and the wig. For the past several hours, he’d been driving around the five boroughs, winding down, blowing off steam, and, as always, thinking and planning. He actually did some of his best thinking behind the wheel.

He’d pulled over now not just to fill his tank, but because his braced left knee was starting its all-too-familiar whine. Hey, greetings from down here, big guy, his knee seemed to say. Remember me? Iraq, RPG, the piece of shattered rebar that burned through me, cooking all my muscles, ligaments, nerves, and blood vessels into tomato soup? Yeah, well, I’m sorry to bring it up, but I’m starting to hurt like a bitch down here, bud, and was just wondering what you were planning to do about it?

Gritting his teeth at the pain, Berger popped the gas cap and dragged himself up and out of the car, rubbing his leg. He dry-swallowed a Percocet, or “Vitamin P,” as he liked to call it, as he filled the tank.

Twenty minutes later, he was piloting the convertible uptown near Columbia University in the Morningside Heights neighborhood. He went west and found meandering Riverside Drive, perhaps the coolest street in Manhattan. He passed Grant’s Tomb, all lit up, its bright white Greek columns and rotunda pale against the indigo summer night sky.

He smiled as he cruised Riverside Drive’s elegant curves. He had a lot to smile about. Beautiful architecture on his right, dark water on his left, Percocet in his bloodstream. He started blowing some red lights just for the heck of it, cutting people off, putting Stuttgart’s latest V8 incarnation through its paces.

He really couldn’t get enough of his new $100,000 toy. Its brute propulsion off the line. How low it squatted in the serpentine curves. Like Oscar Wilde said, “I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best,” he thought.

Tired of screwing around, Berger picked it up. Slaloming taxis, he hit the esplanade at 125th doing a suicidal eighty. When he spotted the full moon over the Hudson, he actually howled at it.

Then he thought of something.

Why not?

He suddenly sat up on the seat and drove with his feet the way Jack Nicholson did in a movie he saw once.

Wind in his face, holy madness roaring through his skull, Berger sat high up above the windshield, his bare feet on the wheel, arms folded like a genie riding a magic carpet. A woman in a car he flew past started honking her horn. He honked back. With his foot.

Nicholson wished he had balls as big as mine, Berger thought.

He really did feel good. Alive for the first time in years. Which was ironic, since he’d probably be as dead as old Ulysses S. back there in a week’s time.

All in Lawrence’s honor, of course.

Berger howled again as he dropped back down into his seat and pounded the sports car’s German-engineered accelerator into its German-engineered floor.

Chapter 16

A SILVER BENTLEY ARNAGE with a Union Jack bumper sticker pulled away from the hunter green awning as Berger came hobbling up 77th Street with the cane he kept in the Merc’s trunk.

Did the Bentley belong to landed gentry? he thought. The Windsors visiting from Buckingham Palace? Of course not. It was Jonathan Brickman from 7A, the biggest WASP-aspiring Jew since Ralph “Lifshitz” Lauren.

Berger was only joking. He actually liked Brickman. He’d sat on the board when they reviewed the businessman’s co-op application. He had the trifecta of impeccable creds, Jonathan did. Princeton, Harvard, Goldman Sachs. His financials were mind-boggling even for the Silk Stocking District.

Jonathan was a pleasant fellow, too. Amiable, self-deprecating, handsome, and crisp in his bespoke Savile Row pinstripe. The only thing the gentleman financier had left to do was get a Times wedding announcement for his debutante daughter so he could die and go to heaven, or maybe Greenwich.

Berger even liked Brickman’s Anglophile Ralph Lauren yearnings. What wasn’t to like about Ralph Lauren’s Great Gatsby –like idealized aristocratic world, filled with beautiful homes and clothes and furnishings and people? Brickman was attempting to become brighter, happier, better. In a word, more. What could be more triumphant and life-affirming than that?

When Berger entered the bird’s-eye maple-paneled lobby, he saw the Sunday doorman packed down with Brickman’s Coach leather bags. His name was Tony. Or at least that was what he said it was. His real name was probably Artan or Besnik or Zug, he figured, given the Croatian twang in his voice.