Tick Tock (Michael Bennett 4)

Mary Catherine smiled and gave me a playful kick in the shin. Then we climbed up into the lifeguard chair and started kissing again.

We went at it for quite some time, holding each other, warm against the cold. I didn’t want to stop, even with the skeeters biting the crap out of my back, but after a while we climbed back down.

We headed back to the party, but everyone was gone and the fire was out.

“Oh, no. We’re so busted,” Mary Catherine said.

“Who knows? Maybe we’ll be lucky and Seamus’s fish monsters got them,” I tried.

I knew we were in trouble when I saw Shawna and Chrissy on the front porch.

“They’re coming. They’re coming. They’re not dead,” they chanted, running back into the house.

“Oh, yes, we are,” Mary Catherine said under her breath.

“Now, where could the two of you have been for the last eon?” Seamus said with a stupid all-too-knowing grin on his face.

“Yeah, Dad,” Jane said. “Where’d you go to get the soda? The Bronx?”

“There was, uh, none left, so I tried, I mean, we, uh, went to the store.”

“But it was closed, and we walked back,” Mary Catherine finished quickly.

“But there’s a case of Coke right here,” Eddie said from the kitchen.

“That can’t be. I must have missed it,” I said.

“In the fridge?” Eddie said.

“Enough questions,” I said. “I’m the cop here and the dad, in fact. One more question and it’s everyone straight to bed.”

I saw Seamus open his mouth.

“With spankings,” I added, pointing at him as everybody burst into giggles.

“Fine, no questions,” Seamus said. “How about a song? Ready, kids? Hit it.”

“Mike and Mary sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” they regaled us. Seamus was by far the loudest.

“First comes love, then comes marriage,” they said, making a circle and dancing around us like evil elves. “Then comes Mary with a baby carriage.”

“You’re all dead, you know that,” I said, red-faced and unable to contain my laughter. “As doornails.”

Chapter 18

IT WAS ALREADY HOT at seven fifteen in the morning when Berger downshifted the massive Budget rental box truck with a roar and pulled over onto Lexington Avenue near 42nd Street. Even this early on Monday morning, people in office clothes were spilling out of Grand Central Terminal like rats from a burning ship.

He threw the massive truck into park and climbed out, leaving it running. He was wearing a Yankees cap backward, cutoff jeans, construction boots, and yellowish-green cheap CVS shades. A wifebeater and a gold chain with a massive head of Christ topped off his outer-borough truck-driver look.

He made a showy display of dropping the back gate and rattling up the steel shutter before wheeling out the hand truck. On it were three thick plastic-strapped bundles of New York Times newspapers. He rolled them to the truck’s hydraulic ramp and started it humming down.

Weaving around morning commuters on the sidewalk, he quickly navigated the hand truck into the massive train station. Inside, hundreds of people were crisscrossing through the cathedral-like space, running like kids playing musical chairs to get into place before the Stock Exchange’s golden opening bell.

A pudgy antiterror cop strapping an M16 yawned as Berger rolled right on past him. He dropped his bundles by a crowded stationery store called Latest Edition that adjoined the main waiting room. The short, mahogany-colored Asian guy behind the counter came out of the store with a puzzled look on his face as Berger spun the hand truck around with a squeal.

“More Times?” the little brown guy said. “This is a mistake. I already got my delivery.”

“Wha’?” Berger said, throwing up his arms. “You gotta be f——ing kiddin’ me. I should be finished my deliveries already. Central just called and said to drop these off. Let me call these jag-offs back. Left my cell phone in the truck. I’ll be back in a second.”