Tick Tock (Michael Bennett 4)

I thought about Mary Catherine then and how I was going to manage things. It was like a fifth-grade word problem. One love interest is waiting for you out at the beach as another one gets on a train from Washington traveling at a hundred miles an hour. How long will it take before you find yourself in the doghouse? I wasn’t sure. I knew I definitely wasn’t smarter than a fifth-grader.

“Mike, you still there?” Emily said.

“Right here, Emily,” I said. “Of course, I’ll come get you. What time does your train get in?”

Chapter 43

NYC’S EVENING RUSH HOUR was just getting started by the time I bumper-to-bumpered it back under the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge toward my squad room.

I evil-eyed my vacation-robbing workplace, One Police Plaza, as I crawled across the span. The slab concrete cube of a building had been butt-ugly even before it was surrounded with guard booths and bomb-barrier planters post 9/11. Because traffic from the financial district had been rerouted due to all the security measures, some Chinatown businesspeople had raised a fuss and suggested that headquarters be moved to another area. I had my fingers crossed for Hawaii, but so far I hadn’t heard anything.

Finally pulling off the bridge ramp onto the Avenue of the Finest, I spotted all the double-parked TV news vans. Since all the newsies and camera guys on the sidewalk beside them looked especially restless, I did myself a favor and decided to keep on going.

I drove a few blocks south and pulled over in front of a graffiti-scrawled deli on the corner of Madison and James. I got a coffee and one of those little Table Talk Pies and a Post, with its ever-subtle tabloid headline “WHO WILL BE NEXT?” on the front page.

Which turned out to be ironic because when I came back out onto the sidewalk, sitting on the hood of my car was Gary Aronson, the New York Post police beat reporter, who was probably responsible for the paper’s headline. Like most crime reporters, Gary was ruthless. He claimed color blindness and dyslexia for his habit of ignoring crime scene tape.

So instead of heading back for my vehicle, I hooked a hard left and stepped into Jerry’s Old School, an inner-city barbershop I sometimes used as a meeting spot with confidential informants.

And almost tripped over Cathy Calvin, the New York Times police beat reporter BlackBerry-ing by the door under a poster for the rapper Uncle Murda.

I glared over at the muscular owner, Jerry, giving some Chinese kid a fade.

“Is nothing sacred, my man?” I asked him as I did an immediate one-eighty back outside.

Calvin had exchanged her phone for a tape recorder by the time she caught up to me on the sidewalk.

“We have a bombing spree, a double murder that looks a lot like the Son of Sam, and now a girl is missing. Rumors are that all three are related. What’s going on, Detective?”

As if I had the time to perform in the media circus.

“Didn’t I blackball you?” I said as I picked up my pace.

“That was just for the last case,” Calvin said.

“Finally,” Aronson said, taking out his own recorder as he got off the hood of my Impala.

“I got this one, Gary,” Calvin said, waving him away.

The Post reporter stepped away, making call-me gestures at Calvin. All the newspaper hacks who covered crime hung out together. They were as thick as thieves and just about as considerate when it came to cops. They actually h

ad some space on the second floor of HQ called the Shack, where they came up with new ways to get cases and cops jammed up.

“No, she doesn’t, Gary,” I said, opening my car door. “You want info? Talk to the thirteenth floor, Cathy, my lass. I’m sure they’ll be willing to hand over everything you need to know.”

The thirteenth floor was home to the department’s Public Information Office. Because of the logjam in the white-hot case, its under-pressure chief wanted certain vital body parts of mine for breakfast, last I’d heard.

“C’mon, Mike. I do news, not propaganda,” Calvin said, rolling her eyes.

“That’s not what Fox News says,” I shot back before I jumped into the safety of my vehicle.

Chapter 44

I WAS STARTING THE CAR to make my escape when the passenger door opened, and Calvin hopped in beside me.

“What class of medication did you forget to take this morning?” I said.

“I’m screwed, Mike,” she said, letting out a weary breath. “I’m not kidding. You don’t understand how desperate things are in the paper biz right now. The city editor is waiting for any tiny excuse to clear some payroll. Can’t you give me anything? I’ll take a ‘no comment’ at this point.”