Tick Tock Read Free Page A

ended up dying in the subsequent collapse.
    As I rolled my beat-up Suburban along the same route under the famous bridge’s arches back into the city toward my date with a bomb on 42nd Street, for some strange reason, I couldn’t stop thinking of that picture.
    I skipped the backed-up FDR Drive and took the side streets, St. James to the Bowery to Park Avenue South. Half a block west of Grand Central Terminal, wooden NYPD sawhorses had been set up, cordoning off 42nd Street in both directions. Behind the yellow tape, a crowd of summering Asian and European tourists stood front-row-center, cameras aloft, taking in some action.
    After I badged my way through the outer perimeter, I parked behind a Seventeenth Precinct radio car half a block south of 42nd Street. As I was getting out, I spotted a shiny new blue Crown Vic and a couple of tall and neat-looking guys in JTTF polo shirts sitting on its hood, talking on their cell phones.
    I doubted they were here to play polo. Calling in the Joint Terrorism Task Force Feds at the slightest hint of the
T
word was standard operating procedure in our jittery post-9/11 metropolis. The Feds didn’t seem too impressed with me or my gold shield as I walked past them. I knew I should have put a jacket on over my Hawaiian shirt.
    When I arrived at the corner diagonal to the library, I could see more barricades far down 42nd Street at Sixth Avenue and three blocks in both directions up and down Fifth Avenue. The silence and lack of traffic on what was usually one of the busiest intersections on earth was zombie-movie eerie.
    “¿Sarge, qué pasa?”
I said, showing my bling to the Hispanic female uniform at the inner perimeter’s aluminum gate.
    “Seems like some skell forgot his overdue books so he returned a booby-trapped bomb to the library instead,” she said as I signed into her crime scene logbook. “We got the place evacked, including Bryant Park. The Bomb Nuts are inside. Midtown North Squad took a bus of witnesses and staff back to the precinct, but I heard it ain’t looking too good.”
    Among the library’s columns and fountains, I passed nervous-looking Midtown North Task Force and Seventeenth Precinct uniforms. Some of the cops were holding what appeared to be radar guns but were really radiation detectors. An unmarked van geared with god knew what kind of testing equipment was parked at the curb.
    At the front entrance of the library, a redheaded guy in a white marshmallow-man Tyvek suit was walking out with a yellow Lab on a leash. The Labrador wasn’t a seeing-eye dog, I knew, but an EDC, an explosive-detecting canine. I loved dogs, just not at crime scenes. A dog at a crime scene means bombs or dead bodies, and I wasn’t particularly jazzed about seeing either one.
    Ain’t looking too good
seemed like the midsummer evening’s theme, I thought as I climbed the stairs between the two giant stone lions.

Chapter 5
    A BIG BALD GUY with a twirly black mustache and tactical blue fatigues met me beneath the landmark building’s massive portico. With his mustache, Paul Cell bore a striking resemblance to the guy on the Bomb Squad’s logo patch, depicting a devil-may-care Red Baron–looking guy riding a bomb in front of the skyline of Manhattan.
    “We got the parked cars and street furniture sniffed, so I’m pretty sure there aren’t any secondary devices,” Cell said. “Think about it. Draw in the first responders with a decoy. That’s what I’d do. Look at all these windows. Some jihadist could be behind any one of them right now with his finger on the button, watching us, aching for that glorious thump and flash of holy light.”
    “Christ, Paul, please,” I said, clutching my chest. “I skipped my Lipitor this morning.”
    Cell and his guys were the world’s elite in bomb handling, as tight and quick and efficient as an NHL team.More so probably since the penalty box on this squad was made of pine. All cops are crazy, but these guys took the