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.
He'd just erased it.
Chapter 19
I got up early the next morning. In the predawn gray, I threw on some flip-flops and biked over to a deli a couple of blocks north of our beach bungalow. After I bought a dozen and a half Kaiser rolls and two pounds of bacon, I sat with a cup of coffee on a beat-up picnic table in the deli's still-dark parking lot, gazing out at the beach.
As the sun came up over the ocean, it reminded me of the summer I was seventeen. A buddy and I pulled a Jack Kerouac and hitchhiked down to the Jersey Shore to visit a girl that he knew. My friend cut out with the girl, and I ended up sleeping on the beach. Waking alone to the sound of gulls, I was depressed at first, but then I turned to the water and sat there, wide-eyed and frozen, overwhelmed for the first time by what a flat-out miracle this world could be.
I smiled as I remembered being with Mary Catherine last night. No wonder I was thinking about my teen years, I thought, finishing the dregs of my Green Mountain French vanilla. After last night, I certainly felt like I was seventeen all over again. I was definitely acting like a kid. Not a bad thing, by any stretch in my book. I highly recommend it.
Seamus was on the porch waiting for me when I got back. I could tell by the bloodless look on his face that something was very wrong. He had my phone in his hand for some reason. I screeched to a stop and dropped the bike as I bolted up the stairs.
'No! What is it? One of the kids?'
Seamus shook his head.
'The kids are fine, Michael,' he said with a surreal calm.
Michael?
Shit, this was bad. The last time I remembered him using my Christian name was the morning I buried my wife.
I noticed that the radio was on in the house behind him. A lot of silence between the announcer's halting words. Seamus handed me my vibrating phone. There were fourteen messages from my boss.
'Bennett,' I said into it as I watched Seamus close his eyes and bless himself.
'Oh, Mike,' my boss, Miriam, said. 'You're not going to believe this. A bomb just went off in Grand Central Terminal. Four people are dead. Dozens more wounded. A cop is dead, too, Mike.'
I looked up at the pink-and-blue-marbled sky, then at Seamus, then finally down at the sandy porch floorboards. My morning's peaceful Deepak Chopra contemplation session was officially over. The big bad world had come back to get my attention like another chunk of cinder block right through my bay window.
'On my way,' I said, shaking my head. 'Give me an hour.'
Chapter 20
Inbound Manhattan traffic was lighter than usual due to the heart-stopping news. I'd taken my unmarked Impala home the day before, and as I got on the LIE, I buried the pin of its speedometer, flashers and siren cranked.
Keeping off the crowded police-band radio, I had my iPod turned up as far as it would go, and blasted the Stones' 'Gimme Shelter.' Gritty, insane seventies rock seemed extremely appropriate theme music for the world coming apart at its seams.
The Anti-Terror Unit in full force had already set up a checkpoint at the 59th Street Bridge. Instead of stopping, I killed some cones as I put the Imp on the shoulder and took out my ID and tinned the rookie at the barricade at around forty. There were two more checkpoints, one at 50th and Third, and the final one at 45th and Lex. Sirens screaming in my ears, I parked behind an ambulance and got out.
Behind steel pedestrian barricades to the south, dozens of firefighters and cops were running around in all directions. I walked to take my place among them, shaking my head.
When I arrived at the corner and saw the flame-gutted box truck, I just stood gaping.
I spotted Bomb Squad chief Cell through a debris-covered lobby. It looked like a cave-in had happened. One of the fire chiefs at the blast site's command center made me put on some Tyvek and a full-face air mask before letting me through.
'Guess our friend wasn't lying about the next one,' Cell said. 'Looks like the same plastique that we found at the library.'
He smiled, but I could see the frozen rage in his eyes. He was angry. We all were. Even through the filters of the mask, I could smell death. Death and concrete dust and scorched metal.
There was no predicting what would happen next.
Chapter 21
The rest of the day was as hellacious as any in my career. Later that morning, I helped an EMT dig out the body of an old, tiny homeless man who'd been buried under the collapsed Grand Central Lexington Avenue Corridor. When I went to grab his leg to put him in the body bag, I almost collapsed when his leg separated freely from his body. In fact, all of his limbs had been dismembered by the bomb's shock wave. We had to bag him in parts like a quartered chicken.
If that wasn't stressful enough, I spent the afternoon in the on-site morgue with the medical examiner, compiling a list of the dead. The morgue was set up in the Campbell Apartment, an upscale cocktail bar and lounge, and there was something very wrong about seeing covered bodies laid out in rows under a sparkling chandelier.
The worst part was when the slain police officer was brought in. In a private ceremony, the waiting family members were handed his personal effects. Hearing the sobbing moans, I had to get out of there. I walked out and headed down one of Grand Central's deserted tracks. I peered into the darkness at its end for a few minutes, tears stinging in my eyes. Then I wiped my eyes, walked back, and got back to work.
I met Miriam that afternoon at the Emergency Operations trailer set up by the main entrance of Grand Central on 42nd Street. I spotted a horde of media cordoned off on the south side of the street by the overpass behind barricades. National this time. Global newsies would be showing up pretty soon to get their goddamn sound
