James Patterson - Tick Tock

"Can anyone loan me a fresh pair of boxer shorts?" asked one of the commandos.

A moment later, Hobart and his men paused by an open doorway on our left. When I arrived beside them, I was surprised by a breeze.

That wasn't the only surprising thing. Inside was a bathroom. The most enormous white-marble bathroom I'd ever seen. It had a sunken tub, a fireplace, and French doors that opened onto a massive stone balcony. A soft breeze fluttered the bubbles in the tub along with the tiered flames of candles that blazed in the enormous fireplace.

"Where the hell is this creep, already?" Hobart said, sighting his submachine gun at the tub. "Did Calgon take him away?"

We followed Hobart out onto the balcony. A tar beach this was not. Talk about a million-dollar view. Over the ornate granite railing in front of us was nothing but Central Park's trees and the distant, iconic towers of the Dakota and San Remo apartment houses on Central Park West.

"What have we here?" Hobart said, kneeling down at the terrace's south end. A rock-climbing rope was knotted expertly around one of the stone balustrades, its other end pooled onto the roof three stories below.

Hobart cupped his mike with his fist.

"I want a team on the roof at the base of the penthouse pronto. Be advised, it looks like our guy has bugged out, either into the building or onto one of the fire escapes."

I followed Hobart's gaze. He was right. Looking down below on the roof of the building, I spotted the openings for at least two fire escapes. If our man Carl had bolted the moment we'd knocked the door down, he could have gotten down to the ground floor by now or onto the roof of one of the block's adjoining buildings.

Shit. We would have to go floor by floor now or maybe even building by building. It was possible he could even have gotten away.

I immediately called Miriam.

"I got good news and bad news," I told my boss. "We found Berger, but apparently the guy from the security camera is his accomplice. Not only that, but he just went Spider-Man on us. We're going to need Aviation on the block here, eyeballing the rooftops."

"On it," my boss said.

"Wait up. What's this?" Hobart said, suddenly climbing over the railing on the north side of the balcony and hopping down.

Five feet below the terrace around the side of the penthouse was another balcony with a massive garden of potted palms and shrubs and exotic plants. Beside the garden, alongside the building itself, was a suburban-type garden shed. Hobart raised his foot to kick its door in, but then thought better of it.

Brian Dunning from the NYPD Bomb Squad popped a gum bubble as he climbed down and stepped forward. He took a digital video recorder out of a bag and worked its fiber-optic camera under the door's bottom crack.

"It's okay. Clear," he said after a minute.

Still, a tense, collective breath was held as he opened the shed's door.

Most of the dim room was taken up by a massive worktable. The flashlight taped to Hobart's MP5 played over a soldering iron and bricks of what looked like modeling clay.

"That's plastic explosive," Dunning said, waving his arms frantically, warning everyone back. "Enough to crater this roof. We need an evac of the penthouse and the roof right now."

An EMT guy with long black headbanger hair stood beside a stretcher in the hallway outside Berger's bedroom when we hurried back downstairs.

"What do you mean ASAP?" he was saying to a cop as he pointed down at Berger with an incredulous expression. "You don't need me, you need to call a piano mover with a boom crane."

Due to the evacuation condition, everyone pitched in. Everyone except Emily, who I noticed was suddenly conveniently absent. Very much like a beached whale, Berger was rolled onto a comforter and on the count of three was hoisted by ten groaning first responders out of the room and the apartment into the freight elevator.

Downstairs, I hustled the doorman, whose name was Alex Rissell, into the coatroom off the lobby. We needed info-and quickly. For all we knew, Berger could have been totally bullshitting us about Carl.

Alex seemed to have calmed down from our initial storming of the building. I walked over to Emily as she unfolded the surveillance photo of Carl Apt and showed it to him.

"Does this man live in Mr. Berger's apartment, Alex? It's really important," she said.

"Holy crap! I saw that picture in the Post," the doorman said, scratching at a zit on his pasty double chin. "I didn't think anything of it, but you're right. It's him. It's Carl Berger."

"You mean Carl Apt," Emily said.

Alex gaped at us.

"His name is Apt? I thought he was Mr. Berger's brother Carl. That's what we were told. We all called him Mr. Berger."

"Whatever," I said. "Was this Carl guy upstairs when we came in?"

The doorman nodded rapidly. "The board says he's been in since last night."

"How long have Berger and Carl been living here?" Emily said.

"Berger grew up here. Carl came much more recently. I'd say about five years ago," the doorman said, nervously flicking at his zit again.

"Where did Carl come from?" Emily said.

"I don't know," the doorman said with a shrug. "But I do know that when he moved in, Mr. Berger stopped going outside. Mr. B was always an odd duck, but after Carl came, he went full-tilt cuckoo. Started having all his meals catered. Mr. B was always rotund, but holy crap! I hear he's a real whale now, am I right? I mean, break-the-boxspring, TLC-show fat. Imagine what a scandal this is going to be for his family, especially his famous brother."

"What are you talking about?" I said.

"You don't know?" the doorman said, surprised. "Lawrence Berger's brother is David Berger, the Oscar-winning Hollywood composer. The whole Berger family are, like, rich and famous geniuses from way back.

"Lawrence's grandfather was Robert Moses's right-hand engineer or something, and his father was some kind of A-list computer-whiz business guy. The old super told us that, before the older Berger died, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs showed up here one night for a birthday dinner."

I blinked at Emily. Bill Gates? Could this case get any weirder?

"Does Berger have any vehicles, other residences?" Emily said.

"Let's see. They have an estate in Connecticut. The address is around here somewhere. Mr. B never went, but Carl went every other weekend in that slick Merc convertible of his. He keeps it at the garage around the corner on Seventy-seventh. Mr. Carl is the cold, silent type, but I'll tell you one thing, he always slips me a crisp, warm twenty just for packing the trunk. He really kill all those people? Planted bombs?"

"Who knows? Thanks, Alex," I said, going back to the lobby.

Outside I spotted Hobart.

"EMT says fatty-fatty-two-by-four is healthy enough for questioning," he told me. "They're taking him over to the One-Nine Precinct."

"Good," I said. "Any sign of Carl?"

"We're doing apartments and the house-by-house on the building side of the block, but so far not a whisper," Hobart said with a shrug. "Ain't that the way? Fat fell down and broke his crown, but so far, Skinny is still winning the race."

Still dripping water from his wet hair, Carl Apt hung on in the shaft of the building's front elevator.

He had been hanging on for the past forty minutes on a vertical beam using a rock-climbing method known as laybacking. With the fingers of both hands and the soles of both bare feet gripping the cold metal, he hung sideways with the side of his butt and lower back pressed against the brick of the elevator's shaft.

Grabbing only the kit bag the moment after the authorities blew the door down, he was completely nude. Inside the duffel bag was everything he needed-a pistol, his ATM cards, five hundred Percocet, and a change of clothes. The bag dangled in the breeze along with the rest of him, eighteen stories above the hot, pitch-black pit of the elevator shaft.