Tick Tock (Michael Bennett 4)

“Marone a mi,” the cop said, the smoke from his cupped cigarette rising like incense as he crossed himself. “It’s her. They found her in the back. The clerk thought she was just sleeping.”

Emily and I both turned as a car squealed up behind my cruiser. It was a black Lexus with tinted windows. I had my hand on my Glock when its door was flung wide open and a man got out. A man with red hair and even redder eyes.

It was Kenneth Cavuto, Angela’s father.

“No!” I yelled as Cavuto bolted toward the store’s entrance.

I managed to

get there a second before him. No way could I let Angela’s dad see his little girl. Not here. Not like this.

Apparently the distraught father had other plans. I’m not a small guy, but Cavuto shoved me off my feet like I was an empty cardboard box. I grunted as I fell forward and my chin hit the concrete.

I got back up and ran after Cavuto into the empty store. I bolted down some steps past museum-quality displays of giant stuffed animals: ostriches and horses and giraffes. I was scrambling past the Puppet Park when I heard a sound that stopped me.

It was a scream in a pitch I’d never heard before. I looked at Emily. She shook her head. We both knew what it was. It was the sound of Cavuto’s heart breaking.

It took me, Emily, and three uniforms to get Cavuto off his daughter. I actually had to cuff him. He started crying soundlessly as he banged his head against the polka-dot-carpeted floor.

“Go out to your truck and get something to knock this poor son of a bitch out, would you?” I yelled at a gawking EMT.

I noticed only then that my chin was bleeding. I put my thumb on it to stop the drip as I turned and looked at the girl. She was sitting in a stroller with her eyes closed, her white-blond hair the same shade as the oversize polar bear on the shelf beside her.

I turned away and got down on my knees next to the father and placed my hand on his sobbing back.

I opened my mouth to say something. Then I closed it. What was there to say?

Chapter 52

THE EVENING LIGHT WAS just starting to change as Berger steered the Mercedes convertible into the line for the car wash at East 109th Street. He stared up at the fading blue of the sky above the construction site across the street. What he wouldn’t give to be in his tub right now, humming on Vitamin P as the sun descended toward the Dakota.

He turned as an unshaven bubble-butted old white guy knocked on his window. Berger thought it was a homeless person until he realized it was one of the car wash employees.

“What?” the guy asked in a Russian accent as the window buzzed down.

“The works,” Berger said, handing him a crisp twenty.

“Interior vacuum, too?” Gorbachev wanted to know.

“Not today,” Berger said with a grin before zipping the window back up.

Berger sighed as the machinery bumped under the car and began towing him through the spinning brushes and water spray. What a bust of a day.

The girl wasn’t supposed to die. The plan had been to torture the parents over a two-day period with the ruse of a ransom and then kill her. But that was all blown to shit now, wasn’t it?

It had been the Valium. The girl had had some kind of allergic reaction as he was taking her from the taxi to the Mercedes that he had parked in Brooklyn Heights. By the time they were back in Manhattan, she was gone. He’d screwed up, made his first mistake. He could kick himself.

Oh, well, he thought, as the lemony scent of soap filled the car. He had to stop beating himself up about it. No mission went perfectly. He smoothed out the fiber-optic camera cord sewn into the lining of his jacket. At the very least he’d gotten a little more footage.

Anyway, he didn’t have time to dwell on his failures. So much to do, so little time to do it. He’d just have to go on to the next thing. He needed to keep heading in his two favorite directions, onward and upward, and hope it would all come out in the wash.

As the car wash spat him back out into the driveway, he rolled down the window and tossed something into the trash can by the fence.

The Elmo juice box spun as it arced lazily into the can’s exact center. Boots the Monkey followed.

“Swish! Nothing but net, and the crowd goes wild,” Berger said as he popped the clutch and squealed the Merc out into the street.

Chapter 53