Michael Ledwidge - Alert

“What?” I said, glaring at him.

“What’s wrong?” asked Bridget.

“Oh, it’s nothing really, little sis. We’re just under attack by a bunch of insane terrorists again,” Brian said, staring at me like it was my fault. “Not for nothing, Dad, but if we have to move again somewhere, you can count me out. I’m going to lie about my age and join the marines or something.”

“Relax,” I said, looking around the table. “There was a blackout on the East Side. They think somebody did it deliberately. That’s all. We don’t know who’s doing it, okay? It’s a mess, and we need to pray for a lot of poor people who are affected, but it’s okay. Honestly.”

“Okay?” said Juliana. “First they blow up a train tunnel, then they kill the mayor, and now—”

“You’re going to pass the garlic salt, young lady, and we’re all going to have some nice dinner-table conversation,” I insisted loudly.

I guess I was a little louder than I intended to be, because everyone stared at me like I was nuts. Except for Martin, who, I could see, was trying hard not to laugh at me and the rest of us Bennett lunatics from behind his napkin.

In the awkward silence, I suddenly tossed out an even more awkward conversation starter.

“Hey, how about those Yanks, Eddie, huh? Pettitte’s looking sharp, isn’t he?”

Eddie stared at me quizzically, as though I had just grown another head.

“Well?” I said again, louder.

Eddie put his slice down on his paper plate carefully.

“I don’t know, Dad,” he said slowly. “He’s retired.”

That’s when Martin couldn’t hold it in anymore and burst out laughing. Seamus joined him. Then everybody else.

“Go ahead. Yuck it up, everybody. See this, Martin? It’s laugh-at-Daddy time here at the Bennett abode. It’s a common dinnertime stress reliever,” I said, sticking out my tongue at them before I started laughing at myself. “Works every time.”

I leaped up immediately three minutes later when the phone rang. It was Mary Catherine, I saw on the caller ID in the living room. Finally! I was so eager to talk to her that I managed to hang up instead of pick up, and I was placing the handset back down when she called back.

“Finally, Mike! Oh, you had me so worried!” Mary Catherine said. “I had the damnedest time getting through. I just saw the news. What’s going on? Tell me everybody is okay.”

“We’re all fine, Mary Catherine. Everybody is as healthy and sarcastic as ever,” I said.

“But what is this EMP bomb? What about the nuclear stuff they were saying on the news?”

Even after I explained it to her as best I could, she — like everyone else — didn’t seem very reassured.

“How’s things on your end?” I said, changing the subject.

“The new buyer is looking very serious. I’ll know on Monday,” she said.

I could hear the smile in her voice.

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” I said, hearing music in the background. “Are you celebrating already?”

“Oh, no. That’s just some Australians reliving the eighties.”

“Any room for an American?” I said. “I could be there in six hours. I do a killer Depeche Mode.”

Mary Catherine laughed.

“Wow, how I wish I were there with you, Michael. I can’t tell you how much I miss those kids, too. All of them.”

“All of them?”

“Oh, Michael, you’ll never know. Every little stinker in the bunch. It’s killing me not being there. What did that oil-spill CEO guy say? ‘I want my life back.’”

“I want our life back,” I said.

There was a pause.

“I have to go,” said Mary Catherine.

“So do I,” I said.

There was a pause.

“Why haven’t you hung up yet?” I said.

“I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

We laughed. There was another pause.

Then it happened.

“I love you,” I said.

I heard a gasp and then a loud earful of dial tone a second later.

What the hell are you doing? I thought, smiling at my reflection in the TV screen.

I’m reliving the eighties, all right, I thought as I realized that I had butterflies in my stomach. I felt like I was about sixteen. I liked it.

“Detective Bennett, what have you finally gone and done?” I mumbled as I stood.

My cell phone rang a little after three o’clock that morning. Like most calls that come at ungodly hours, it was not good. It was from Neil Fabretti, the chief of detectives himself.

“Mike, sorry to bother you. I just got off the phone with the new mayor’s people. The gist of it is they’re beyond pissed at the pace of the investigation and want whoever’s on it off it and someone new put on pronto.”

Though I was a little stunned to actually hear it, part of me had been waiting for this call. I’d been on high-profile cases before, and I knew that now with several people dead, including the mayor, tens of thousands of people displaced, and millions more on edge, the pressure to do something, even unfairly sacrificing a convenient scapegoat like me, was immense.

Good investigations were about being patient and meticulous, but that wasn’t exactly a popular sentiment, I knew from reading yesterday’s New York Post headline, WHAT THE #$%@ IS BEING DONE?

When you lost the usually NYPD-friendly Post , you knew you were in deep trouble.

“Is that right?” I finally said.

“Yeah, well, I told them to pound sand,” Fabretti continued, surprising me. “I said that we couldn’t just go shuffling investigators around because of the pressure of the twenty-four/seven news cycle. I told them you were the best we had and that I was behind you one hundred percent, yada, yada, yada.

“But there’s a big meeting scheduled for one o’clock this afternoon at the commissioner’s office, and you need to be there for the investigation’s update with bells on, if you know what I’m saying. Nothing personal, but the reality is, if you want to keep being the lead on this, Mike, you got about ten hours to make something drop.”

“I’ll be there. Thanks for the ‘look out’ and the heads-up, Chief,” I said before I hung up.

Wide awake now, I knew it was time to make my own 3:00 a.m. calls to see if there had been any developments. Doyle and Arturo didn’t pick up, but I caught Brooklyn Kale burning the midnight oil at the NYPD intelligence desk we’d been assigned.

“Mike, thank goodness. I was just going to call you,” she said.

“What have you got, Brooklyn?”

“Something good for a change. We got video of the guys — two guys — bringing the EMP device into East Eighty-First Street.”

“Video?” I said. “But I thought the super said that the on-site computer where they store the feed was fried with the EMP.”

“It was, but we canvassed at the high-rise across the street, and it turns out their video is run by a national firm that backs up everything off-site. The security firm sent the film over about an hour ago. It’s beautiful. You can see the guys bringing in the box, Mike... the plates on the van they were driving — the whole shebang. Check your e-mail. I just sent a clip of it to you.”

I opened the video.

It was incredible.

I thought it was going to be the two men from the video of the train tunnel bombing, but it wasn’t. I watched in color as two young guys in a white van, college kids, maybe, pulled into the garage next to the building and unloaded the metal device onto a hand truck.

“The plates on the van look funny to you?” I said to Brooklyn as I hit Pause. “They’re New York State, but what are they? Commercial?”

“Yep. Already ran them. The van is from a Hertz location downtown — or at least its plates are,” Brooklyn said. “Doyle’s on the phone with the manager, who’s on his way in. The manager said you can’t rent without a credit card and a driver’s license, so we’re looking good on a potential lead there. I’ll hit you with it the second Doyle calls me back and I hear anything.”