Tick Tock - James Patterson [17]
He decided to draw himself a bath. And what a bath it was, he thought, entering his favorite room. Inside the four-hundred-square-foot vault of Tyrolean marble sat a small swimming pool of a sunken tub. On its right stood a baronial fireplace big enough to roast an ox on a spit. On its left, a wall of French doors opened onto the highest of the sprawling apartment’s many balconies.
Berger particularly loved being in here in the wintertime. When there was snow on the balcony, he’d open the doors and have the fire roaring as he lay covered in bubbles, looking out at the lights.
He opened the doors before he disrobed and lowered himself slowly into the hot bath.
He floated on his back, resting while staring out at the city lights, yellow and white, across the dark sea of trees.
Tomorrow he would be “kickin’ it up to levels unknown,” to borrow the words of some obnoxious Food Network chef. This weekend was nothing compared with what people would wake up to tomorrow morning.
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