Tomorrow was going to be one hell of a day.
Chapter 17
WAY PAST ALL OUR BEDTIMES and loving it, the kids and I were soaked to the skin and shivering around the bonfire. I heard Seamus clear his throat to tell one of his famous ghost stories.
I remembered them from when I was a kid. Run-of-the-mill ghost stories were for pansies. Seamus's tales were H. P. Lovecraft-inspired yarns about fish creatures so horrifying, just the sight of them made people go insane. I mean, anyone can scare a little child. Few can introduce them to cosmic horror.
"Make it a PG tale, huh, Padre?" I said, taking him aside. "I don't want the kids to have nightmares. Or me, either."
"Fine, fine. I'll water it down, ya party pooper," Seamus grumbled.
"Mike?" Mary Catherine whispered to me. "Would you help me get some more soda?"
She didn't even make a pretense of heading toward the house. We walked north along the dark beach parallel to the waterline. Mary Catherine was wearing a new white-cotton sheer summer dress I'd never seen before. Over the past two weeks, she'd become quite brown, which made her blue eyes pop even paler and prettier than usual. She turned those eyes on me and held them there as we walked, an adorably nervous look on her fine-boned face.
"Mike," she said as I followed her on our mystical soda quest.
"Yes, Mary?"
"I have a confession to make," she said, stopping by an empty lifeguard chair. "This party wasn't the kids' idea. It was mine."
"I'll forgive you on one condition," I said, suddenly holding her shoulders.
There were no head butts this time or hesitating. We kissed.
"This is crazy. What the hell are we doing?" Mary Catherine said when we came up for air.
"Looking for soda?" I said.
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."
The Asian guy shook his head at the chest-high stack as Berger quickly rolled the hand truck away.
As Berger passed the antiterror cop on his way out, he went into his pocket and slid ballistic ear protectors into his ears. Then he turned into the long Lexington Avenue Corridor exit, took the cell phone from his pocket, and dialed the number for the trigger in the massive paper-wrapped bomb he'd just planted.
He winced as fifty pounds of plastic explosive detonated with an eardrum-splitting ba-bam! Ten feet from the exit door, a chunk of cream-colored marble the size of a pizza slid past him like a shuffleboard disk. A man's briefcase followed. A cloud of dust and hot smoke followed him out the door into the street.
Outside on Lexington, cars had stopped. On the sidewalk, people were turned toward the station's entrance, arrested in place like figures in a model-train display. The hand truck clattered over as Berger rolled it off the curb. Passing the rear of the truck he'd parked, he crossed the street and turned the corner of 43rd Street, walking quickly with his head down, the iPhone still in his hand.
When he was halfway up the block, he took a breath and dialed the other mobile phone trigger.
The one attached to the incendiary device in the cab of the truck.
Someone screamed. When he glanced over his shoulder, a pillar of thick black smoke was billowing up between the office towers.
Instead of creating just a distracting blazing truck, he'd seriously thought about filling the rear of the truck with diesel-soaked ammonium nitrate, like the Oklahoma City bomber did, but in the end he'd decided against it.
He chucked the hat and the glasses and the Christ head, feeling unsure for a moment, shaking his head.
All in due time, he thought.
He glanced back at the ink black pinwheeling mushroom cloud sailing into the July morning sky as he hit Third Avenue and started walking uptown. The first sirens started in the distance.
He hadn't crossed the line this time, Berger knew.