Tick Tock (Michael Bennett 4)

He slowly cruised around the grid of streets, trying not to get lost. It wasn’t easy with all the small, tidy houses and low apartment buildings set in neat, boring rows everywhere he looked. Thank God for the car’s navigation system.

After five minutes, he finally stopped and pulled over behind a parked handicap bus near a wooded service road alongside the Cross Island Parkway. He turned the Merc’s engine off but left the radio on. He listened to a talk show for a bit, then found a soothing Brahms concerto.

When it was over, he sat silently in the darkness. Just sitting there waiting was torture when there was still so much to do. He’d seriously debated contracting this part out, but in the end he had decided against it. Every small thing was part of the effort, he reminded himself. Even Michelangelo, when painting the Sistine Chapel, built the scaffolds himself and mixed his own paint.

It was almost half an hour later when a new Volvo Crossover passed him and turned off the road onto the secluded lover’s lane that ran up the wooded hill alongside an electrical tower cutout.

He waited ten minutes to let them get going. Then he slipped on his trusty surgical gloves, got out his new black, curly wig, and grabbed the sack.

Fireflies flickered among the weeds and wildflowers as he stepped up the muggy deserted stretch of service road. It could have been upstate Vermont but for the massive electrical pylon that looked like an ugly, sloppy black stitch across the face of midnight blue sky at the top of the hill.

Even though the parked Volvo’s lights were off, Berger caught a lot of motion behind the station wagon’s steamed windows as he approached. If the Volvo’s a rockin’, don’t come a knockin’, Berger thought, taking the heavy gun out of the paper sack.

He arrived at the passenger-side window and tapped the snub-nosed chunky .44 Bulldog against the glass.

Clink, clink.

“Knock, knock,” he said.

They were both in the lowered passenger bucket seat. The young lady saw him first over the guy’s shoulder. She was pretty, a creamy-skinned redhead.

Berger took a few steps back in the darkness as she started to scream.

As the man struggled to pull up his pants, Berger walked around the rear of the car to the driver’s side and got ready. The Weaver shooting stance he adopted was textbook, two hands extended, elbows firm but not locked, weight evenly distributed on the balls of his feet. When the guy finally sat up, the Bulldog was leveled exactly at his ear.

The two huge booms and enormous recoil of the powerful gun were quite surprising after the light, smooth trigger pull. The driver-side window blew in. So did most of the horny middle-aged guy’s head. The girl in the passenger seat was splattered with blood and brain matter, and her sobbing scream rose in pitch.

With the elbow of his shirtsleeve, Berger wiped cordite and sweat out of his eyes. He lowered the heavy revolver and calmly walked around the front of the car back to the passenger side. In situations like this, you had to stay focused, slow everything down. The woman was trying to climb over her dead lover when he arrived at the other side of the car. Berger took up position again and waited until she turned.

Two more dynamite-detonating booms sounded out as he grouped two .44 Bulldog rounds into her pale forehead.

Then there was silence, Berger thought, listening. And it was good.

Recoil tingling his fingers, Berger dropped the gun back into the paper sack and retrieved the envelope from his pocket.

He flicked the envelope through the shattered window. There was something typed across the front of it.

MICHAEL BENNETT NYPD

Humming the concerto he’d just been listening to, Berger tugged at a rubber glove with his teeth as he hurried back down the hill toward his car.

Chapter 24

“GOING OUT FOR ICE CREAM,” I said, getting up from the game of Trivial Pursuit that we started playing after dinner. Mary Catherine gave me a quizzical look as I was leaving. Her concern only seemed to increase when I gave her a thumbs-up on the way out the screen door.

But instead of getting ice cream, I hopped into the Impala and called into my squad to get the address for the Flaherty family in Breezy Point. Was that a little crazy? It was. But then again, so was I by that point.

Their house was on the Rockaway Inlet side of the Point about ten blocks away. I drove straight there.

They really did have a pit bull chained in their front yard. It went mad as I stepped out of my car and made my way up the rickety steps.

It wasn’t madder than me, though. I actually smiled at it. After today and everything that I had seen, I was in a man-bites-dog sort of mood.

I pounded on the door.

“Oh, this better be good,” said the bald guy who answered it.

The guy was big. He was also shirtless and in damn good shape, I could see: huge bowling-ball shoulders, six-pack abs, prison-yard pumped. There was another man, just as big and mean-looking and covered in tattoos, standing behind him.