Tick Tock by James Patterson Read Free Book Online Page B

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 right here,” Eddie said from the kitchen.
    “That can’t be. I must have missed it,” I said.
    “In the fridge?” Eddie said.
    “Enough questions,” I said. “I’m the cop here and the dad, in fact. One more question and it’s everyone straight to bed.”
    I saw Seamus open his mouth.
    “With spankings,” I added, pointing at him as everybody burst into giggles.
    “Fine, no questions,” Seamus said. “How about a song? Ready, kids? Hit it.”
    “Mike and Mary sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” they regaled us. Seamus was by far the loudest.
    “First comes love, then comes marriage,” they said, making a circle and dancing around us like evil elves. “Then comes Mary with a baby carriage.”
    “You’re all dead, you know that,” I said, red-faced and unable to contain my laughter. “As doornails.”

Chapter 18
    IT WAS ALREADY HOT at seven fifteen in the morning when Berger downshifted the massive Budget rental box truck with a roar