I, Michael Bennett

CHAPTER 1

THEY SAY THE neon lights are bright on Broadway, but from where I sat, beside an upstairs window of the Thirty-Fourth Precinct’s brown brick pillbox on Broadway and 183rd Street in Washington Heights, I was seriously having my doubts. In fact, the only illumination I caught at all as I stared out that cold predawn morning was from an ancient set of cheap Christmas lights strung across the faded plastic awning of a bodega across the street.

And they weren’t even blinking.

Yawning down at the grim street, I knew it could have been worse. Much worse. Back in 1992, the year I started in the NYPD up here in the Heights-once one of northern Manhattan’s most notorious, drug-riddled neighborhoods-if you saw any twinkling lights in the sky, it was most likely a muzzle flash from a gun being fired on one of the rooftops.

I was twenty-two back then, fresh out of the Police Academy and looking for action. I got it in heaps. That year, the three-four stacked up a staggering 122 murders. Death really does come in threes, the precinct detectives used to joke, because every three days, like clockwork, it seemed someone in the neighborhood was murdered.

In the early nineties, the neighborhood had become a wholesale drug supermarket, an open-air cocaine Costco. At 2:00 a.m. on Saturdays, it looked like the dinner rush at a McDonald’s drive-through, as long lines of jittery customers idled in the narrow, tenement-lined streets.

But we had turned it around, I reminded myself as I looked out at the still-dark streets. Eventually, we locked up the dealers and boarded up the crack houses until the cokeheads and junkies were finally convinced that the Heights was back to being a neighborhood instead of a drugstore.

And by “we,” I mean the veteran cops who “raised” me, as they say on the job-the Anti-Crime Unit grunts who took me under their wing, who showed me what it was to be a cop. A lot of them were actual Vietnam veterans who’d traded a foreign war for our unending domestic drug war. Day in and day out, we cruised the streets, making felony collars, taking guns off the street, putting bad guys behind bars.

Sitting here twenty years later, working my latest case, I kept thinking more and more about those fearless cops. As I sat looking out the window, I actually fantasized that they would arrive any minute, pulling into the special angled parking spaces below and hopping out of their cars, ready to give me some much-needed backup.

Because though we’d won the battle of Washington Heights, the war on drugs wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.

I turned away from the window and looked back at the pages of an arrest report spread across the battered desk in front of me.

In fact, the war was just getting started. It was about to flare up bigger and badder and deadlier than ever before.

CHAPTER 2

I SIFTED THROUGH some photographs until I found the reason why I was up here so early. I propped the color shot over the screen of my open laptop and did what I’d been doing a lot of in the last few weeks-memorizing one of the faces in it.

The photograph showed three men standing in a run-down Mexican street beside a brand-new fire-engine red Ford Super Duty pickup truck. Two of the men were wearing bandannas and baseball caps to cover their faces and gripped AR-15 assault rifles with extended magazines. Between them stood a bareheaded, broad-shouldered, light-skinned black man. A gold Cartier tank watch was just visible above the cuff of his dark, tailored suit as he smoothed a Hermès tie.

I stared at the man in the middle-his pale blue eyes, his cropped salt-and-pepper hair, his expensive attire. Smiling as he glanced in the direction of the camera, the handsome dusky-skinned black man had the casual grace of a model or a sports star.

He was a star, all right.

A death star.

The man’s name was Manuel “the Sun King” Perrine, and he was the notorious drug kingpin who ran the Tepito drug cartel, the most violent in Mexico. Two years earlier, Perrine had had two U.S. Border Patrol agents and their families murdered in Arizona and burned their houses to the ground. Though the ruthless killer and Forbes magazine-listed billionaire had been in a Mexican prison at the time of the ordered hits, he’d promptly escaped and gone on the run when the proceedings for his extradition to the U.S. had begun last year. It was as though he had disappeared into thin air.

It turned out he hadn’t. Manuel Perrine was coming to New York City today. We knew where, and we knew when.

The ten-page arrest package I’d been working on spelled it all out in exhaustive detail. It had surveillance photos of the meeting place, building descriptions, Google maps. It even had the location and directions from the planned arrest site to the trauma unit of the New York-Presbyterian Hospital emergency room, which I was praying we wouldn’t need.

If all went well today, by five o’clock, I’d be at a bar, surrounded by cops and DEA and FBI agents, buying rounds as we toasted our success in taking down one of the most dangerous men on the face of the earth.

That was the plan, anyway, and it was a good one, I thought, staring at the pages. But even with all its detail and foresight, I was still wary-nervous as hell, to be perfectly frank.

Because I knew about plans. Especially the best-laid ones. If the Heights had taught me anything, it was that.

It’s like the wise sage Mike Tyson once said: “Everybody got plans… until they get hit.”

CHAPTER 3

“HEY, FIRST ONE in. I like that in a team leader. You deserve a gold star and a smiley-face sticker,” someone said five minutes later, as a massive cup of coffee thudded down beside my elbow.

“No, wait. I take that back,” said the bearded, long-haired undercover cop who sat down across from me. “I forgot that Your Highness doesn’t have to drive in from the ass end of the Bronx, but actually lives nearby, here in the glorified borough of Manhattan. Forgive me for forgetting what a yuppie fop you’ve become.”

I smiled back at the grinning, wiseacre cop. His name was Hughie McDonough, and his egregious chop-busting stemmed from our days at Saint Barnabas Elementary School in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx, where we grew up. In addition to being school chums, Hughie and I had been in the same Police Academy class and had worked together in a street crime unit here in the three-four for a couple of years.

We’d lost touch when I went on to the five-two in the Bronx and he transferred out of the NYPD and into the DEA. Over the course of the last fifteen years, McDonough had built a rock-star reputation as a fearless undercover agent. He was also one of the foremost experts on Colombian, and now Mexican, cartels. Which was what had us working together after all these years on a joint NYPD-federal task force, hoping to nail Perrine.

“Late again, huh, McDonough?” I said shaking my head. “Let me guess. You were blow-drying that Barbie hair of yours? No, wait. You ran out of Just For Men for your Jesus beard.”

“Tell me. What does it look like below Ninety-Sixth Street?” Hughie said, ignoring my dig and continuing the trash talk. “And what about those cocktail parties, Mike? I mean, you are one of NYC’s top cops, according to the latest New York magazine article. You must be on the cocktail party circuit.”

I glanced across the table thoughtfully.

“Cocktail parties are pretty much like keg parties, Hughie, except they’re indoors and the cups are different. Crystal instead of the plastic ones you’re used to.”

“Indoors?” Hughie said, scratching his head. “How does that work? Where do you put the Slip’N Slide? And don’t you get holes in the walls when it’s time for the strippers to shoot the beer bottles?”

“McDonough, McDonough, McDonough,” I said as I Frisbeed my coffee-cup lid at him. “Such sinful talk. And to think once you were such a nice little church boy.”

McDonough actually cracked up at that one. Church Boy was what the black and Hispanic public school toughs called us on the subway when they spotted our Catholic school dress shoes and ties. In Hughie’s case, that was about all it took for him to start swinging. He wasn’t a big kid, but his crazy fireman father made him and his four older brothers compete in the citywide Golden Gloves boxing tournament every year, so he had no problem at all mixing it up. One time, as high school legend had it, he knocked a huge mouthy kid from Pelham down the back stairs of a city bus and out the door onto East 233rd Street with one shot.

“To church boys,” McDonough said, leaning over the desk and touching his coffee cup to mine in a toast. “May we never run out of ugly plaid ties and white socks to wear with our black shoes.”

I toasted him back and smiled at the old-school crazy cop over the rim of my cup.

Considering the danger inherent in what we were about to do, it was good to have my pugnacious old friend here now. He was as cocky and brass-balled as ever. There wasn’t anyone else I’d like to be partnered with for this major arrest-or to have watching my back, for that matter. Even with his seriously warped personality.

I smiled as I glanced back at the window. Then down at the photograph of Manuel Perrine. Seems like maybe my backup had arrived after all.

CHAPTER 4

“SO: HAVE YOU finally got this arrest plan sussed out, Fearless Team Leader?” McDonough said, fingering through the papers covering the desk.

“Just finishing up,” I said. “I was working on an ass-covering rider at the end in case the Sun King doesn’t stick to the script. How does this sound? ‘If necessary, we will immediately alter from the original plan and effect as safely as possible the arrest as referred to herein.’”

“That’s good,” McDonough said, squinting up at the ceiling tiles. “But also add something like, ‘We will neutralize the adversary in the quickest, most effective, most efficient, and safest manner that presents itself at that point in time.’”

I shook my head as I typed it into my Toshiba.

“I like it, Church Boy,” I said. “If that’s not some prime slinging, I don’t know what is. You’re actually not completely witless, which is saying something for a guy who went to Fordham.”

Having gone to Manhattan College, I couldn’t let a chance to get a dig in on any graduate of Manhattan’s rival, Fordham-the Bronx’s other Catholic college-slip by.

McDonough shrugged his broad shoulders.

“I wanted to go to Manhattan College like you, Mike, but it was so small I couldn’t find it. And silly me, I looked for it in Manhattan, when all along it was inexplicably hidden in the Bronx,” he said. “But, my impeccable Jesuit training has got nothing to do with slinging it. I’m a DEA agent, baby. I have a BA in BS.”

“A bachelor’s degree in bullshit? You must have gotten a four-point-oh,” I said as I continued typing.

“This is true,” McDonough said, closing his eyes and leaning his broad-shouldered bulk back in the office chair until he was almost horizontal. “And yet somehow I find myself unable to hold a candle to your law enforcement prowess. Seriously, bro, I’ve tagged along on some of these rides, and this is as major-league as it comes. This is one world-class bag of shit we’re about to grab, and to think it’s all because of little old you.”

I took a bow as I typed.

“Stick around, kid,” I said. “Maybe you might learn something.”

This crazy case actually was mine. It had started out as a real estate corruption probe, of all things. My Major Case Unit had been brought in when the board president of a new billion-dollar luxury high-rise on Central Park West suspected that the building’s real estate manager was getting kickbacks from the contractors he was hiring.

When we got up on the manager’s phones, we learned that the kickbacks weren’t the only thing he was into. He was a sick pervert who frequented prostitutes on a daily basis, despite the fact that he was supposed to be a pious Hasidic Jew with a large family up in Rockland County. What he liked best were Hispanic girls-the more underage the better-from a Spanish Harlem brothel.

When we swooped down on the building manager and the brothel, we also arrested the pimp running the place. It was the pimp, a Dominican named Ronald Quarantiello, who turned out to be a gift that kept on giving. The jittery, fast-talking criminal was extremely well connected in New York’s Hispanic criminal underworld. And staring at a thirty-year sentence for sex trafficking, he’d cut a juicy deal. He agreed to flip against his business partner, Angel Candelerio, the head of DF, Dominicans Forever, the city’s largest Dominican drug gang.

And boy, did he flip. Like a gymnast during an Olympic floor exercise. Ronald helped us bug Candelerio’s house, his Washington Heights restaurant, where he did all his business, and his encrypted phone.

I thought the pimp was high when he told us that Candelerio was a childhood friend of the globally notorious drug kingpin Perrine. But a wiretap on Candelerio’s phones and bugs confirmed it.

Once the transcripts of his conversations with Perrine were obtained, my boss told her boss, and the DEA and FBI were brought in to form a task force with yours truly as the team leader.

The icing on the cake came a month ago, when Perrine and Candelerio started talking about a visit Perrine was going to make to New York.

A meet that was going down at noon today.

As McDonough stood up to take a cell call, I went over the arrest papers for a final time. I double-checked the mission statements and interior layouts and maps. Lastly, I went over the grisly crime-scene photos of the Border Patrol agents and their families whom Perrine had murdered.

The most gruesome shot, the one I couldn’t forget, showed a Dodge Caravan sitting in the one-car garage of a suburban house. Where its windshield had been, there was just a bloody, jagged hole. The front end was riddled to Swiss cheese with hundreds upon hundreds of bullet holes.

I studied the picture and took in the violence it displayed and wondered if being put in charge of this arrest was a blessing or a curse.

I glanced up at the yellow face of the wall clock above the window, which framed a slowly lightening sky.

I guess I’d soon see.

CHAPTER 5

BY 8:00 A.M., the upstairs muster room was crowded with our FBI, DEA, and NYPD joint task force.

Joint task forces usually comprise about a dozen agents and cops, but for this international event, a total of thirty handpicked veteran investigators were present and accounted for. They stood around, joking and backslapping, buzzing with caffeine, anticipation, and adrenaline.

As the final prearrest meeting got started, I spotted about a dozen or so big bosses from each of the represented agencies. Bringing them in at the last second was a courtesy, an opportunity for them to say they were part of things when the TV cameras started rolling.

Of course, that’s what they’d say if it all turned out okay, I thought as Hughie and I went up to the front of the room. If it all went to hell and heads needed to roll, the honchos were never there.

“Morning, ladies and gents,” I said. “We’ve been over this a number of times, but I see a few new faces late to the party, so here’s the lowdown.”

I turned to the whiteboard beside me and tapped the Sun King’s picture.

“This, as everyone knows by now, is our main target, Manuel Perrine. He runs the Tepito Mexican drug cartel, which has been tied to as many as seven hundred murders in the last three years.”

“That guy’s Mexican?” said some white-haired NYPD chief whom I’d never seen before. It was always the upper-echelon tourists in these meetings who busted the most chops.

I rolled my eyes toward Hughie, prompting him to take the question.

“Actually, he’s from French Guiana originally,” McDonough said. “In the nineties, his family moved to France, where he became a member of the Naval Commandos, France’s version of the Navy SEALs. In the early aughts, he returned to South America and did a stint as a mercenary, training guerrillas for FARC, the narco-terrorist group in Colombia. He’s been linked to dozens of FARC kidnappings and murders, as well as a 2001 truck-bomb assassination of a Colombian regional governor, which killed fifteen people.”

I jumped in before the chief could interrupt again. “Around 2005, after the Colombian military crackdown, Perrine ended up in Mexico again, working as a mercenary, this time for the various cartels to train their drug mules and enforcers.”

Hughie added, “He’s one of the guys personally responsible for the escalation of the hyperviolence we’ve seen over the last few years among the cartels. He militarized these scumbags and has planned, and personally taken part in, several dozen Mexican law enforcement ambushes and assassinations.”

“That’s why when we make contact, we need to take him down as soon as possible and use wrist and ankle cuffs,” I said to the people who would actually take part in the arrest. “This guy might dress like Clinton from What Not to Wear, but he’s a stone-cold special forces-trained psychopathic killer. You give him a chance, he’ll embed a chunk of lead in your brain like he’s picking out a silk tie.”

“Why is he in New York, again?” said another tourist, a short, pasty FBI lifer who was sitting like an overgrown cave troll on the edge of a desk. “He run out of people to kill in Mexico?”

“Because of this man,” I said over the chuckles.

I pointed to a photo of a smiling, heavyset Angel Candelerio on the whiteboard beside the photo of Perrine.

“Candelerio is the head of the Dominicans Forever drug gang, which runs most of the drugs, sex trafficking, and gambling north of Ninety-Sixth Street. Not that you could tell by the image he likes to front. He lives up in Bedford next to Mariah Carey and Martha Stewart and has a chauffeur-driven Lincoln limo and a daughter in NYU law school.

“The FBI Special Surveillance Group is on Candelerio’s house as we speak. They’re going to follow him to the arrest site here,” I said, pointing to a third photograph, which showed Margaritas, Candelerio’s Washington Heights restaurant, where the reunion with Perrine was to take place.

“I didn’t ask where,” the old FBI troll said as he twiddled his thumbs. “I asked why.”

“NYPD received info that Candelerio and Perrine are old friends from the same village in French Guiana,” Hughie said, taking my back. “Candelerio has connections in the Caribbean and Europe in addition to the city, so we think that with Perrine taking so much heat down in Mexico, he’s going to make another move with the help of his old friend.”

“But isn’t the guy a billionaire?” said the little agent as he lifted a rubber band off the desk and started playing with it. “I mean, Perrine’s-what? Late forties? He’s financially set. Why not retire? Also, why risk your ass coming into the U.S. at all? Crafty bastards, even evil ones like Perrine here, don’t usually act stupid, as a general rule.”

“Who knows?” I said to the annoying devil’s advocate with a shrug. “He hates America? He thinks he’s bulletproof? He’s rubbing our noses in it?”

I pointed to the photo of the restaurant again.

“Whatever the reason is,” I said, “at noon today, two blocks from where we’re sitting, Perrine is due to meet Candelerio. We’re going to let Perrine sit down and get comfy, and then we’re going to crash the party. We all know our jobs. It’s time to do them.”

“Sounds good. How’s the legal situation?” asked a young, bored-looking FBI SAC as he checked his BlackBerry.

“We already have the paperwork,” I said, lifting up the yellow envelope containing Perrine’s sealed indictment and the warrant for his arrest, which had been signed by the U.S. District Court.

“All we need now is to deliver it,” Hughie said.

CHAPTER 6

SWEATING UNDER HEAVY Kevlar in a Saint Nicholas Avenue tenement stairwell, I panned my binoculars over a C-Town supermarket and a cell phone store onto Candelerio’s restaurant, Margaritas.

It was cold and windy outside, the sky over the jagged skyline of five-story walk-ups the color of a lead pipe. As in all stakeouts, the minutes were going by in geologic time, as if everything in the world had hit slo-mo.

I checked my phone for the hundredth time. The screen said 10:40. Another hour or so to go until noon. A depressing thought came as I remembered the photos of the armed-to-the-teeth Mexican drug dealers and the shot-to-pieces mini-van: High Noon.

I certainly didn’t want the arrest to turn into a showdown, but considering the person we were arresting, I was ready if it did. Like the rest of the task force, I was packing heavy firepower-an M4 assault rifle with a holographic sight, along with my Glock. New York cops aren’t necessarily Boy Scouts, but we do like to always be prepared.

The DEA SWAT team, bristling with ballistic shields and MP5 submachine guns, was hidden in a bakery van around the corner, and there were another half dozen backup cops and FBI agents in the building across the street, watching the alley at the restaurant’s rear.

We were settled in our blind with the trap set. Now all we needed was for Perrine to walk into it.

“Hey, what’s that?” Hughie said, suddenly sitting up at the windowsill beside me.

“What? Where?” I said, frantically swiveling my binoculars left and right, down toward the sidewalk.

“Not the street,” McDonough said. “The sound. Listen.”

I dropped the Nikon binocs and cocked an ear out the open stairwell window to catch the heavy driving thump of a dance song coming from somewhere in the wilderness of tenements around us.

“Someone’s having a morning disco party. So what?”

“Don’t you remember?” McDonough said, bopping his head up and down to the beat. “‘Rhythm Is a Dancer.’ That’s the same song they played that summer we worked together in the nineties. I used to vogue to this jammie.”

“Growing up just flat-out isn’t going to happen for you, is it, Hughie?” I said, passing my shirtsleeve over my sweat-soaked face.

We continued to watch and wait. A vein twitched along my eye when Hughie’s cell phone trilled at eleven on the dot.

The thumbs-up he gave me confirmed it was the FBI operations team up in Westchester County that was surveilling Candelerio. Aerial and ground teams had been covering the Dominican for the last week. This morning we’d brought every local PD from Westchester to the Bronx into the loop in case there was some unforeseen detour and we had to do a traffic stop.

“Candelerio is rolling, headed out toward the Saw Mill River Parkway right on schedule,” Hughie said, ending the call. “ETA in thirty. Get this, though. Our spotter said his wife and three girls are with him, and they’re all dressed up.”

I frowned. We were already doing the arrest in a public place. Having Candelerio’s family around would only make things even more complicated.

“Dressed up?” I said. “He’s bringing his family to meet Perrine?”

McDonough shrugged.

“Who knows with a family of drug dealers?” he said. “Maybe meeting the Sun King is like meeting real royalty to them. How many opportunities do you get to have an audience with a king?”

I went back to my window perch. I pinned the glasses onto every car that slowed, onto every pedestrian who walked past on the sidewalk. With Candelerio on the way, it meant that Perrine would be coming along any moment now.

My heart fluttered into my throat as a kitted-out black Escalade suddenly pulled up in front of the restaurant. A back door popped open, and out came three men. I tried to spot faces, but all I caught were Yankees baseball caps and aviator sunglasses before the three were inside.

“Did anybody see? Is it Perrine? Can anyone confirm ID?” I frantically called over the radio.

“Negative. No confirmation,” called the DEA SWAT.

“Not sure,” called a cop from the team at the restaurant’s rear. “They went in too fast.”

“Damn it,” I said as Hughie whistled by the window.

“Mike, movement. Six o’clock,” he said.

I panned the glasses back to the restaurant, where a dark-skinned Dominican waitress with big silver hoop earrings and short black hair was stepping out onto the sidewalk.

The attractive Rihanna look-alike was named Valentina Jimenez, and she was a cousin of the informant who was helping us out on the case. She’d come out to give us the signal. If Valentina lit a cigarette, it would mean that she had spotted Perrine.

I watched her intently as she stood in front of the restaurant, looking up and down the street.

“Stand by,” I said into the radio, ready to give the other teams the green light.

That’s when it happened.

Valentina did something, but it wasn’t lighting a cigarette.

She glanced back into the restaurant and then bolted in her high heels at top speed down Saint Nicholas Avenue as though she were running for her life.

CHAPTER 7

“WHAT IN THE name of God?” Hughie yelled, giving voice to my thoughts.

“Have her picked up,” I said into the radio.

“What does it mean? It was Perrine who just went in there? Did she forget the signal?” Hughie said.

“We still don’t know. We have to wait and talk to her,” I said. “She could have just gotten spooked.”

My cell phone rang a second later.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do, okay? I’m so sorry,” Valentina said, sobbing.

“It’s okay, Valentina. I’m having you picked up. You’re safe. Just listen closely. Was it him? Did Manuel Perrine just come into the restaurant?”

“No. Those men were members of Candelerio’s crew. They were just laughing with the manager about how much par-tying they would be doing today since Candelerio is away. Candelerio isn’t coming to lunch. I knew I had to call you, but I was afraid they’d see. You know what they would do to me if they saw me calling a cop? That’s why I left. And I’m not going back. I don’t care what you do to my cousin. These guys are killers. I can’t take working there anymore.”

I stared down at the restaurant in disbelief. Candelerio wasn’t coming? Which meant Perrine wasn’t coming. What did that mean? They were onto us? Were the drug dealers meeting somewhere else?

“Why isn’t he coming? Did you hear anything?” I said as calmly as my racing pulse would allow.

“They said it was a family thing. A graduation? Something like that.”

A graduation? I thought. This early in the year it would have to be Candelerio’s oldest daughter, Daisy, the one at NYU law school. That actually made sense. It explained why Candelerio had brought his family, and why they were all dressed up. Except on the phone for the past month, the drug dealer had said he wanted to meet Perrine at noon today at the restaurant. How did that make sense?

The answer was it didn’t. Exactly nothing was going the way we’d expected. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

“A squad car is pulling over. Can I please, please, please go home?” my informant said.

“Of course, Valentina. You did good. I’ll call you,” I said, hanging up.

The metal clang of a passing garbage truck bouncing over potholes in the street rang off the gouged walls and dirty marble steps as I stood there trying to figure out what was happening.

“So?” Hughie said, holding up his hands.

“We were wrong,” I said. “Candelerio isn’t coming. He’s going to his daughter’s graduation.”

“How is this happening?” Hughie said, speed-tapping the barrel of his M4 as he paced back and forth. “You heard the transcripts. Perrine said the meet’s at Margaritas! This is Margaritas. Candelerio is a silent partner in the place. He eats here three times a week.”

I slowly went over the case in my mind, especially the telephone transcripts. They were written in a weird mix of Spanish and Creole that had been translated by two different FBI experts. But Hughie was right. In the calls, Perrine kept talking about being at Margaritas. Margaritas at noon.

“Maybe Margaritas isn’t a place,” I said.

“What is it, then?” Hughie said. “You think Perrine wants to meet Candelerio for a margarita?”

“Maybe it’s a code word or something. Does margarita mean anything in Spanish?”

“Um… tequila and lime juice?” Hughie said, lifting his phone. “I’m the Gaelic expert. Let me ask Agent Perez.”

“It’s a name of a flower,” Hughie said, listening to his phone a moment later. “It means… daisy.”

We both did a double take as the realization hit us simultaneously.

“Candelerio’s daughter!” we said at the same time.

“Margarita must mean Daisy, then,” Hughie said. “Has to be. But how does that make sense? Perrine wants to see Candelerio’s daughter graduate? That’s why he came to the States?”

I thought about it. “Maybe he wants to meet in the crowd, or-”

I snapped a finger as I remembered something from the surveillance photographs, something that was out of place. I immediately called our control post back at the precinct.

“There’s a picture of Candelerio’s family on my desk. Text it to me pronto,” I said to the detective manning the shop.

Less than a minute later, my phone vibrated, and Hughie and I looked at the photo, which was tagged with the family members’ names. I looked more closely at the oldest daughter’s face and smiled.

“I knew it. Look at the oldest one. She has darker skin than the others. And her eyes-she has blue eyes. Both Candelerio and his wife have brown eyes, and she has light blue eyes. That’s impossible. How did we miss it?” I said.

“You’re right. She even looks like Perrine!” Hughie yelled. “Shit! That’s it! That’s goddamn it. You’re a genius. Daisy must be Perrine’s daughter.”

“That FBI lifer was right,” I said. “Perrine isn’t risking his ass coming to the States for money. It’s to see his daughter graduate.”

Hughie answered his ringing phone.

“Candelerio just passed the exit for Washington Heights and is continuing downtown,” he said. “Aerial is staying on him. SWAT wants to know what’s what.”

“Tell them to saddle up and move ’em out,” I said excitedly as I started down the stairs. “We’re jumping to plan B now. Looks like we have a graduation to attend.”

CHAPTER 8

TEN MINUTES LATER, our four-car task force caravan was gunning it south, sirens ripping, down the West Side Highway.

Hughie was at the wheel as I worked the phone and radio, coordinating with my bosses and the other arrest teams. I don’t know which was flying faster, the frazzled cop-radio traffic or the highway’s guardrail, zipping an inch past my face at around ninety.

“Thank God you added that ass-covering rider to your arrest report, huh?” Hughie shouted as he tried to set a new land speed record. He gave a rebel yell as the traffic cone we clipped sailed over the guardrail into the Hudson River.

My partner seemed to be enjoying himself, but I wasn’t feeling it. Not even close. I’d called NYU law school and learned that graduation was to take place at 12:30 today, but not at the law school.

It was taking place at Madison Square Garden!

Thousands of people were supposed to be there, and we were somehow supposed to pluck Perrine from the crowd? Safely? The towers of midtown began to loom on my left. I didn’t know how or even if that could be done.

We killed the sirens when we got off the West Side Highway at Thirty-Fourth Street. It took a few minutes to weave through the heavy Manhattan gridlock to the Garden, on Seventh Avenue at Thirty-Second Street. As we turned the corner, we could see that people were already pouring into the famed arena-smiling, well-dressed families holding balloons and video cameras, surrounding twentysomethings in black-and-purple gowns.

Even if we spotted Perrine at this thing, there had to be a million ways in and out of the Garden, I thought, rapidly scanning faces. It was way too porous. We needed a way to box in the cartel head. But how?

I still hadn’t figured it out as we circled the block and pulled in behind the disguised FBI SWAT van onto the apron of a fire station driveway on Thirty-First.

“Bad news, Mike. We don’t have the go-ahead to do this. Not even a little,” Hughie said after he got back from a quick powwow with the SWAT guys. “The bosses are going nuts because there are thousands of potential lawyers and lawsuits in there, not to mention the mayor, who’s actually the keynote speaker. What do you think?”

I took a long moment to do just that, given that this was the biggest arrest in my career. Taking down a suspect in the middle of a graduation would certainly make a lot of waves. Especially at the notoriously überliberal NYU law school, where they probably had courses called Cops: Friend or Enemy? and The Art and Science of Claiming Police Brutality.

But NYU or no NYU, if Perrine was in there, the time to strike was in the middle of the ceremony. Safe in the crowd, he’d only be thinking about his daughter and how proud he was. We’d need to use that. Use his vulnerability. Because afterward, he’d only be thinking about one thing. Getting away.

“So what’s up? You want to wait?” Hughie said.

“Hell, no!” I finally said.

“Good,” said McDonough, rubbing his hands together, his Irish eyes a-smiling. “Me, neither, Church Boy. What do we do?”

I thought about it for another minute. Then I had it. It was a crazy idea, but this was a crazy time. Not to mention a crazy, extremely violent criminal we were up against. We needed to grab this guy. Badly. It had been a while since the good guys had put one up on the board.

“We have all the phones for all the Candelerios, right? The wife and the kids?” I said.

“Control does,” Hughie said, scrolling through his phone.

“Get me Daisy Candelerio’s number, then,” I said, giving one of my own smiling Irish eyes a wink as I took out my phone. “Least I could do is send the graduate a congratulatory text.”

CHAPTER 9

AFTER RISING FROM the dregs of a third-world hellhole called Kourou, French Guiana, Manuel Perrine, a.k.a. the Sun King, vowed to never again go anywhere near its poverty, its filth, its putrid stink.

Promises, promises, Perrine thought as he vigorously washed his hands inside a crowded Madison Square Garden men’s room.

Too many mimosas and cappuccinos on his chartered Global Express jet into Teterboro Airport was the reason for this unfortunate pit stop. Or is it an enlarged prostate? he wondered with a stab of depression as he remembered his upcoming forty-eighth birthday.

Like many men of means, Perrine obsessed over germs, disease, his general health. With more money in accounts scattered throughout the world than even he could possibly spend, the only thing that could curtail the full, well-deserved enjoyment of his accumulated riches was illness. Which was why he and his personal physician were constantly on guard.

To dispel his morbid thoughts, and take himself away from his even more morbid current surroundings, Perrine closed his eyes and envisioned his luxury penthouse suite in the Fairmont Le Château Frontenac in Quebec City, where he had been staying since fleeing Mexico. In his mind, he saw white everywhere. White furniture, white towels, white bubbles in the pristine white marble bathtub.

Hearing the clamor of coughs and wall-mounted dryers and flushing toilets all around him, he truly couldn’t return soon enough.

The Sun King winced as he glanced at himself in the mirror. He was completely bald now. He’d had some work done on his eyes to change their shape, and was wearing brown contact lenses to disguise their color. To further alter his appearance on this trip-which he hoped was his last ever to the U.S.-he’d intentionally put on an unhealthy thirty pounds, which gave him a disgusting double chin.

But, because he was known for his style, the greatest offense to his sensibilities was that he could wear no Prada, no Yves, no Caraceni hand-tailored suits today. The suit he wore now was an ill-fitting, off-the-rack, green gabardine atrocity from a New Jersey Kohl’s department store that made him look like he drove something for a living. He needed to not stand out for once, and in his puke-colored American rags, he’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Coming back out into the buzzing Madison Square Garden concourse, Perrine exchanged a glance with Marietta, who was leaning against the wall, watching his flank and rear. In Mexico, he rode with a rolling armada of men and trucks, but that might look a little conspicuous here in the country where he was wanted for double murder, so today he had Marietta, and a few handpicked men, with him.

Thankfully, Marietta was as good as a small army. She was deadly with a gun, a knife-even her hands, if it came down to it. The tall, thin brunette looked about as dangerous as a kindergarten teacher, and yet she was an expert in the Brazilian martial art capoeira, and had the strongest and quickest hands of any woman he’d ever come across. He’d seen more than once the surprise and pain in an unmannerly cartel soldier’s eyes after she was forced to show him who was truly boss. His lovely Marietta never hesitated to give new meaning to the term “bitch slap.”

Now she, too, was sporting a garish American getup-a loud flowered print dress, also courtesy of the Paramus Kohl’s-that hid those amazingly long legs of hers. Perrine allowed himself a chuckle. So different from the all-white Chanel and Vuitton and Armani ensembles that were the dark, statuesque beauty’s signature. They were truly slumming here in New York City.

But all in all, his daughter Margarita-or Daisy, as she liked to be called, now that she was an American-was worth it, Perrine reminded himself. She was the only one of his many children who could make him feel… what? Tenderness? Admiration? Hope? Love?

That’s why he had sent her away at the age of seven to live in America with his friend Angel. He never wanted her to know the ugly reality of what he did for a living. He’d been a frog his whole life. His daughter Daisy would now be a princess, even if it killed him.

Perrine followed the crowd of clueless American bourgeois sheep into the arena. He was sitting on the left side of the cavernous theater, as far away from his friend Angel Candelerio as possible. He knew his old friend Angel was smart and loyal and discreet, but there could be no room for risk now. Perrine would hear his daughter’s speech and be gone. His waiting car would take them directly out to Teterboro, where the jet was gassed and ready. He’d be back in Quebec City by dinner, and Marietta would be back in her white Armani, showing off those legs. For a little while, at least. Until he tore the dress off his brutal, beautiful bodyguard.

As the lights of the dark, wide theater dimmed, and “Pomp and Circumstance” began to play, Perrine allowed himself a moment of long-awaited pride. Though he had money and was intelligent and well read, he had no illusions about the fact that the nature of his work and the general hypocrisy of mankind would always cause him to be seen as a thug. Daisy would rise above all that, he knew. With all his resources at her command, she would ascend above all the savage but necessary things he had ever done, just as a butterfly rises from a swamp. She was his one pure and sure thing.

Sitting here among the American-educated elite, he couldn’t help but note what a far cry it was from his hometown, Kourou, near Devil’s Island, the place made infamous by the film Papillon. Some said his mother’s people were actually descended from Henri Charrière, the famous escape artist, Papillon himself.

Perrine secretly liked the idea of being a descendant of Charrière, a French navy veteran and criminal like himself, who never took anything from anyone. He even liked the American actor Steve McQueen, who had played Charrière in Papillon. Like Perrine, and unlike almost any American after him, McQueen had had some style.

As the tune played on, Perrine looked for his daughter’s always smiling face among the ranks of dark-robed graduates filing in. Like most of the happy fathers around him, he took out his video camera and hit the record button before raising it. He panned and zoomed the camera, but he couldn’t see his daughter. He wasn’t worried. As the valedictorian, she was going to speak. He pointed the camera at the stage. His little Daisy. He couldn’t be more proud or eager to hear what she had to say.

The first speaker was the school president, a short, effeminate man who went on and on about modern America’s greatest peril, long-term climate change.

Climate change? Perrine thought, stifling laughter. Forget the fact that as the eunuch blathered, corrupt U.S. politicians were busy burying the nation in trillions upon trillions of dollars in debt. Forget the fact that instead of getting a job or having families, bands of young faithless and clueless American citizens wandered around the dilapidated remnants of its once-bustling cities, so usefully “occupying” things. No, no. Save the planet. Of course. Bravo!

Perrine was still smiling when a robed student suddenly appeared next to the speaker. The president cleared his throat before reading the paper the student handed him.

“I’m sorry. Excuse me. I have an announcement. Will the family of Daisy Candelerio please come to the medical office out on the main concourse? That’s Daisy Candelerio’s family. This is a medical emergency.”

Perrine sat up, wide-eyed, as a surprised buzz went through the crowd. His video camera rolled off his lap and hit the floor as he looked back. Marietta, sitting behind him, already had her cell phone to her ear, the concerned expression on her face mirroring his thoughts.

Daisy? What was this? Something was wrong with Daisy!?

CHAPTER 10

PERCHED ON A cold metal stool at the rear of Madison Square Garden’s tiny medical office, I rolled my neck to relieve the tension. I gave up on the fifth try and patted my Glock, tucked under the borrowed EMT shirt I was wearing.

Like the rest of the task force, I was most definitely “Glocked” and loaded for bear by that point. Bagging a grizzly would have been simple compared to the difficulty and danger of trying to take down a lethal billionaire cartel head. In a crowded Madison Square Garden, no less!

Actually, the first part of my plan had gone off hitch-free. By using the podium announcement and false text messages and phone calls, we’d been able to lure Perrine’s daughter and the rest of the Candelerio family to the commandeered medical office.

Before they knew what was happening, our arrest teams swooped in and rushed them outside through the office’s back door into the guarded driveway of Madison Square Garden’s midblock entrance, where all the VIP athletes and performers entered and left. We’d made sure to take all cell phones before we buttoned down each of the loud, aggressively resisting family members into waiting squad cars.

I knew why they were so upset. Once they spotted our DEA and NYPD raid jackets and assault rifles, they knew exactly what was going on. Who we were going after.

Perrine’s childhood friend Angel Candelerio was especially emotional, so much so that he had to be pepper-sprayed in order to be subdued. The man knew what he was looking at-if Perrine was caught, he was the one who’d be blamed by the cartel. Probably not the best position to be in, considering he worked for an organization in which reprimands were usually delivered by death squads.

Sitting on the medical office examination table beside me, wearing a borrowed NYU law school purple-and-black graduation gown, was a female NYPD detective named Alicia Martinez. She rolled her eyes as I put a stethoscope on her wrist for the thousandth time.

“How am I doing? Do I make a convincing doc?” I said.

“Just perfect, Mike,” the young cop said with another eye roll. “Like the pre-Darfur George Clooney.”

“He’s Clooney!?” Hughie said in outrage as he opened the window of the office to get some much-needed fresh air. “No way. I’m Clooney. He’s the other one-Clooney’s bald, caring, nerdy friend.”

With Detective Martinez’s back to the medical office’s glass front door, we were hoping that someone passing on the interior concourse might mistake her for Perrine’s daughter. Our bait was set. Now all we needed was for Perrine to bite. If Perrine had gone to all this trouble to sneak into the States to see his daughter graduate, there was no way he would hear about a medical emergency and leave without trying to find out if she was okay.

Above the examination table on the wall hung a poster of the Heimlich maneuver. I glanced at the first panel, in which there was an illustration of a man holding both hands at his throat to indicate that he was choking.

With our trap set and the biggest arrest in New York City in a decade on the line, the question now was, would I choke?

CHAPTER 11

I GLANCED OUT into the hallway of the arena and spotted giant posters of Knicks basketballs and Rangers hockey pucks and boxers squaring off. I couldn’t believe all this was going down here at the Garden, of all places, but I guess it was appropriate to have this boxing mecca be the site of the heavyweight fight between the cartels and U.S. law enforcement.

“Hey, Hughie,” I said to my partner. “You were in Golden Gloves, right? You ever fight here?”

“Nope,” Hughie said. “They only had the finals here. I never made it that far, but my oldest brother Fergus did.”

“What happened?”

Hughie squinted at the floor.

“Some monster from Queens knocked him out in the second round,” he said. “The beast pounded his ear against the side of his head so hard, I swear to God it looked like a veal cutlet. He couldn’t hear for a month.”

I shook my head.

“Forget I asked,” I said as the tactical radio in my ear squawked.

“Okay, Mike. Heads up. I think I see something,” the DEA SWAT team head, Patrick Zaretski, told me in my earpiece.

Zaretski was upstairs in the Garden security office, working the cameras. The other arrest teams were next door in an empty office, waiting to take down Perrine at the first sight of him.

“What’s up, Patrick? Talk to me,” I said.

“It looks like you’re being watched. I can just make out a person on the concourse pointing a video camera at the medical office door.”

“Is it Perrine?” I said excitedly.

“I can’t tell. It’s a big old-style camera. Hold it. The subject just put the camera down and is heading directly for your location. Be advised, the subject is heading right for you.”

This was it, I thought as I heard the front door of the office open.

Now or never.

Do or die.

“You just need to breathe, Miss Candelerio,” I said in a loud voice as I stood blocking Detective Martinez’s face from view of the front door. “Stay with me, okay? The ambulance is coming. It’s on its way.”

“Excuse me. I’m sorry. You can’t come in here now. We’re having an emergency,” I heard the female cop posing as the receptionist say through the open door behind me.

“I’m here to see Miss Daisy Candelerio. Is she all right? What’s happened to her?” said a Spanish-accented voice.

What the hell? Something was wrong. It wasn’t Perrine.

It was a female voice.

When I turned, I spotted a young dark-haired woman in a flowered dress. She was trying to peek around the receptionist to look at Detective Martinez.

An alarm went off inside my head as I stepped into the front room and saw how tall and striking the young woman was. The dress looked cheap, but the woman wearing it was extremely poised, her lustrous hair expensively maintained. She looked like an actress or a model.

Billionaire bait, I thought. Something told me this tall drink of water was with Perrine. He must have sent his girlfriend in first to scout things out.

We’d bag her and her phone and then bag Perrine. My trap was working. Perrine was even closer now, so close I could almost smell his French aftershave.

“Did you say you’re Daisy’s family?” I said breathlessly as I rushed toward the woman and took her by the elbow. “Thank God. The poor young woman is having a seizure. We need to stabilize her until the ambulance arrives. You need to come back here. Please, she needs someone she knows to talk to her in order to keep her conscious.”

The young woman glanced in my eyes, trying to read my face as I brought her into the room. Her eyes were a light amber, I noticed, almost gold, an eye color I’d never seen before. Her flawless skin glowed like fresh cream and even in flats, she was at eye level with my six-two. Definitely an exotic piece of arm candy.

She bristled when we stepped into the exam room and Detective Martinez turned around. Hughie stood up from the stool on the other side of the table, dangling a set of handcuffs on his finger.

“Yes, Virginia,” Hughie said with a smile. “There is a Santa Claus after all.”

She did something weird next. The lovely brunette’s gold eyes swiveled to Hughie and then back to Detective Martinez then back to Hughie again and then she burst out laughing.

She must have really thought something was funny because after a moment, she was shaking and cackling, wiping tears of hilarity out of her eyes.

Hughie and I shook our heads at her fevered, high-pitched gigglefest. Was she nuts? I thought. High on her boyfriend’s drugs?

Still laughing, she broke my grip on her elbow. She actually doubled over as she leaned against the right-hand wall. That’s when I noticed, through her lustrous dark hair, that she had something in her ear. A curious piece of flesh-colored plastic.

A piece that looked just like my tactical microphone.

A stark and paralyzing horror gripped hold of me right then as the woman’s laughter cut off in midcackle.

Two things happened next, almost simultaneously.

“Get out!” the doubled-over woman screamed into her purse.

Then her purse exploded.

CHAPTER 12

IT WAS A flashbang grenade, I learned later.

When it went off in the woman’s purse a foot away from my face, I didn’t know what had happened. Or where I was or even who I was for a few seconds. I didn’t know anything except the burning smell of cordite in my nose, the blinding, vibrating stars of light in my eyes, and an excruciatingly painful ringing in my ears.

As I struggled to keep my balance, I heard a rhythmic, low-pitched thudding through the ringing sound. At first I thought it might have been some construction outside. Then I saw bright licks of light blossoming in my shaky vision and Detective Martinez, her face spurting blood, sliding off the exam table and falling with a crash at my feet.

Still struggling with what I was seeing, I looked up to find the dark young woman holding a gun, a little black polymer machine pistol with a ribbon of smoke curling from its suppressor. As she swung the gun at me from the other side of the table, I yelled incoherently as I tried to draw my own gun. Time seemed to slow, the air itself to change, as if I were suddenly swimming in Jell-O. My eyes focused on one thing as my palm finally grazed the checkered grip of my holstered service weapon-the black bore of the woman’s gun as it stopped dead level with my face.

The next thing I knew, I felt a weight slam into me. I thought it was a bullet, but I was wrong. It was Hughie tackling me, taking me down like a linebacker sacking a quarterback. He knocked out my breath as he hit me up top, pushing me sideways, away from the front of the gun.

Gasping for breath, I looked up from the floor to see Hughie rising and turning. He sent the exam-table mat flying as he launched himself upward, reaching out empty-handed for the gun and the girl.

“Ten thirteen! Ten thirteen! Ten thirteen!” I started yelling. Or thought I was yelling, because I still couldn’t hear anything, not even myself. Then the violent thudding ripped the air again, and Hughie stopped in his tracks. There was a nauseating, wet, splattering sound as his head snapped back, as if he’d been punched.

I’d finally cleared my gun and was getting to my feet when Hughie’s lifeless body toppled back on top of me. As we went down in a heap again, I felt the slugs hit the back of Hughie’s vest. I also felt Hughie’s blood, warm and gushing, on the back of my neck and down the back of my shirt. I finally stuck out the Glock from underneath Hughie’s arm and pulled the trigger-and pulled the trigger and pulled the trigger.

When the slide slapped all the way back after the last round, I poked my head up and saw that the woman was, amazingly, gone. Had she run back out? I thought as I quickly reloaded my Glock.

In the hallway, I could see one of the female detectives screaming into her radio as the gold-eyed woman leaped up from the other side of the exam table, where she’d been crouching.

But before I could move, before I could even breathe, she was past me.

She took three running steps, dove out the medical office’s window headfirst, and was gone.

CHAPTER 13

I ROLLED OUT from underneath Hughie. Through the stench of blood and gun smoke, I knelt over my friend on the floor. I reached a hand out above his blood-soaked hair as if to somehow mend the gaping red-black holes there. But I couldn’t because he was dead. Detective Martinez was dead. Everyone was dead.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was one of the DEA SWAT guys, mouthing something into his crackling radio. Without thinking about it, I holstered my Glock and found myself ripping away the M4 assault rifle he held in his hand. Then I went to the open window and threw myself out of it.

The hard plastic butt of the gun almost knocked me out as I went ass over teakettle and landed hard on my back on the asphalt. As I got up, I saw a woman’s shoe in front of me. Then I looked up and saw the tall pale woman it belonged to running hard in her bare feet fifty feet north of me, down the alley outside the medical office window.

As I started running after the woman, a black Lincoln Town Car screeched off the street and came to a jarring halt at the alley’s mouth. A thin Spanish driver got out, calling and waving like a maniac at the woman. I brought the rifle to my shoulder just as the tinted rear passenger-side window of the Lincoln zipped down and the baffled holes of a gigantic gun barrel appeared.

I dropped as if someone had yanked my ankles from behind and rolled behind a fire hydrant as the huge gun opened up. In that narrow alley, the report of it was unreal. Concrete dust stung my eyes as a fluttering deluge of lead chewed up the pavement and ripped at the hydrant like an invisible jackhammer.

As the heavy, deafening rounds pounded and tore apart everything around me, I had what I guess you would call a near-death experience. In the awesomely violent rumble of the gun and the way it shook the air, I detected a God-like message. To keep perfectly still was life. To move even the tiniest part of my body was instant death.

I was thinking how wise the message was and how the post office could forward my mail to Behind the Fire Hydrant, Alleyway, Madison Square Garden, New York City, when I remembered Hughie. In my mind, I saw him get shot again, saw the Heimlich poster on the wall behind him get splattered with his blood.

Lying on my back, I flicked the switch on the M4 to full auto. Then, when there was a pause in the firing, I swung up on my knee in a firing position.

The thin driver was getting into the front seat, right next to the woman who’d killed Hughie, when I shot him three times in the side of his head. Then I put the rear passenger-side window behind the red dot of my rifle’s holographic sight and opened up. I poured about a dozen shots into the window, then stood up in the awesome silence and began to run.

Running toward the Lincoln, I noticed for the first time that there were other people in the alley, construction workers crouched alongside a wall beside a UPS guy.

“Ground! On the ground!” I kept yelling.

I slowed as I circled the Lincoln behind the barrel of the assault rifle. The driver I’d killed had his bloody head leaning out the window as though he were checking the front tire. Under the 30-caliber machine gun in the backseat, I saw the shooter, a pudgy, middle-aged Spanish man in a silk-screened T-shirt. He was on his back, moaning, coughing, and spitting up blood. More blood gurgled out the side of his right hand, where he clutched at the hole in his throat.

It was only then that I noticed that the doors on the other side of the car were wide open.

No!

The woman who’d killed Hughie was gone.

Someone cried out as I backpedaled into the street and swung the rifle east, down Thirty-Third Street. On the north side of the street, between a couple of work vans, I could see a stocky, light-skinned black guy in a dress shirt and green slacks running hard, arms pumping, like a sprinter.

I raised the gun, but the sprinting bastard turned the corner before I could shoot him. Though I’d only caught a glimpse of his profile, I’d studied his picture hard enough to instantly know who it was.

I’d finally laid eyes on Manuel Perrine.

CHAPTER 14

I COULD HEAR backup approaching hard behind me when I tossed my rifle into the window of the Lincoln over the dead driver. I opened the door of the still-chugging vehicle, pulled out the dead criminal, and let him drop into the gutter. I did the same thing to the dying shooter in the backseat, too. Pulled him out and let him fall facedown onto the street. Not standard NYPD practice for wounded suspects, but I was in a hurry, not to mention in a daze of adrenaline-fueled mental and emotional shock.

I hopped in and slammed the accelerator against the floor as I dropped the Lincoln into reverse.

“Out of the way! Move! Move!” I screamed as I sped backward with my hand on the horn, knowing what a challenge it was to navigate the impenetrable gridlock of midtown Manhattan in the correct direction.

I slalomed around a double-decker tourist bus and a Nissan Altima yellow taxi, then drove on the sidewalk until I finally arrived at the corner of Seventh Avenue, where Perrine had headed.

Through the rear window, I saw Perrine about a block north. He had his head down and was still booking and dodging through the clogged crowd of pedestrians as though he were trying out for running back for the Dallas Cowboys. He moved fast for a big man, I thought as I floored the Lincoln-still in reverse-north up southbound Seventh Avenue.

I was met with a sheer wall of horn blasts as I carved the vehicle through the onslaught of oncoming traffic. I missed three cars before I sideswiped a plumbing van and then an eighteen-wheeler mail truck. A bike messenger actually took a swing at me through the open window after I came within a foot of putting him under the Lincoln’s back wheels.

Then Perrine was right there in back of me, running diagonally across the intersection of Thirty-Fourth and Seventh.

I revved the engine and was almost on top of him as he dove and made the northeast corner. I was still seriously thinking about just jumping the curb and hitting him with the back end of the car, but then I noticed the hundreds of innocent people standing there on one of Manhattan’s busiest corners, and I hesitated before slamming on the brake.

I pulled my Glock, cocking it as I jumped out onto the sidewalk. I watched as Perrine disappeared into the store on the corner, underneath a pair of enormous electronic billboards.

“Shit,” I said when I saw a giant red star appear on the billboard screen and realized where Perrine had just headed.

“Where are you, Mike? Where are you?” I heard one of the arrest team members yelling over my crackling radio.

“Macy’s. Thirty-Fourth Street,” I yelled as I ran. “Send backup.”

And another miracle while you’re at it, I thought as I flung open the door to the world’s largest department store.

CHAPTER 15

IT TOOK ME a couple of moments of blinking like mad to adjust to the store’s dim mood lighting. I sprinted up a short flight of stairs, cosmetics counters and jewelry cases blurring on both sides of me. Between the displays, shocked-looking shoppers and tourists stood staring, most of them women and kids.

“NYPD! Get out of the store!” I yelled, waving my Glock as I ran.

I was running past the Louis Vuitton bags into men’s sportswear when I heard a scream from the bottom of a wooden escalator to my left. I took its moving stairs down two by two into the Cellar-the food and kitchenware section of the store. The sickly sweet smell of gourmet coffee and candy assaulted my nostrils as I breathed hard, panning left and right with my gun.

There was a clatter of metal behind me, and I turned around to see the glass entrance to the store’s basement restaurant. The sound must have come from the restaurant kitchen. I rushed inside the wood-paneled space.

“Oh, my gawd! Oh, my gawd!” a massively overweight blond woman kept saying. She was kneeling beside a slim blond waiter who was laid out on the floor by the bar. The guy’s head seemed wrong. It was twisted too far around, almost looking over his own back.

“Where?” I yelled, and saw a dozen shocked customers pointing toward the still-swinging door to the kitchen. I ran past a sizzling flattop grill toward an open door at the kitchen’s opposite end. There were dusty metal stairs on the other side of it, with heavy footsteps hammering up them. I followed up the stairs, and as I made the top, I finally saw Perrine again, the back of his dress shirt soaked through with sweat, as he bolted down a corridor piled with folded cardboard boxes.

“Freeze!” I yelled.

He didn’t listen. An alarm went off and daylight flashed as he slammed open a fire-exit door on the street level. I was coming through that same exit onto Thirty-Fifth Street a split second later when I got kicked in the face. My right cheekbone felt shattered as my Glock flew from my hand. I watched it ricochet off the base of a pay-phone kiosk before skidding across the sidewalk and coming to rest under a sanitation department Prius.

I was diving for it when Perrine dropped from the awning over the door where he was hanging and kicked me in the kidney. I whirled around, swinging at his face. I just missed as he bobbed his head back. He bounced back again on the balls of his feet, and before I knew what was going on, he kicked me on the inside of my thigh so hard I thought he broke it. He made a high kind of karate scream as he elbowed me in the face and knocked me to my knees.

As he grabbed the back of my head and kneed me in the forehead, I remembered something important. My hand went to my ankle, and I pulled free the backup pepper spray canister I always carry. I depressed its trigger and proceeded to mace the living crap out of him. As he backpedaled, clawing at his burning eyes, I reached for the collapsible baton I carried on my other ankle and flicked it open. With a loud, whip-cracking sound, the ball on the metal baton’s tip made contact with the bridge of Perrine’s nose.

He didn’t seem in the mood for any more karate after that. He dropped to his knees, blood from his broken nose spraying the sidewalk, as he screamed and blinked and shook his head.

CHAPTER 16

I FINALLY BROUGHT him all the way down to the concrete with a knee to his back and cuffed him. As Perrine moaned and thrashed around helplessly, I fished my Glock out from under the city-approved, low-carbon-emission sanitation vehicle.

I stood up and looked around. There had been hundreds of people on the corner of Thirty-Fourth Street, but here at the dirty service entrance at the back of Macy’s, there was absolutely no one. I knelt on Perrine’s neck and jammed my gun in his ear.

I thought about things for a little while then. Mostly about my friend Hughie, back in the medical office, with his head blown apart. Dead.

No more beers. No more Yankees games. No more deep-sea fishing trips on his City Island rust bucket with his twenty nieces and nephews. The life of the party was gone now. Forever gone. Forever cold.

I moved the barrel of my gun to Perrine’s brain stem. Two pounds of pull on the trigger under my finger, two measly little pounds here on this dim, narrow, deserted street, was all it would take to avenge Hughie and rid the world of this instrument of evil.

I looked up. It had been overcast earlier in the morning, but now I saw through the gaps of the dark line of rooftops above me a sky of immaculate bright blue. I could also see the top of the Empire State Building, iconic and massive, its constellation of set-back windows like a million square eyes staring down at me, waiting to see what I would do.

But I couldn’t do it. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I took the gun off Perrine’s skull pan after another second, and then arriving squad cars were screeching behind me. Over the sirens, I heard Perrine say something. He leaned up from where I sat on top of him and craned his neck around to look into my eyes as he uttered one word.

“Coward,” he said, and then strong hands were helping me up as the sound of helicopter blades whapped at the late-spring air.

CHAPTER 17

WHEN THE REST of the task force team arrived, they were very concerned about me. The line-of-duty death of a close colleague was reason enough by itself to be worried about a person’s emotional health, and on top of that, I had shot two suspects. They took away my gun and buttoned me up in the SWAT van until an ambulance arrived.

I listened through the door of the van and learned that the waiter in the Macy’s restaurant was dead. When he’d tried to stop Perrine from coming in, the drug dealer had snapped the twenty-three-year-old kid’s neck in front of fifty witnesses. That bothered me almost as much as Hughie’s death. I should have killed the son of a bitch when I had the chance.

I guess my colleagues were right to be worried about my stability because the second the ambulance pulled away from the curb to go to the hospital, I jumped off the gurney and put the med tech in the back in a headlock until the driver agreed to let me out.

I hit the corner of Broadway and just started walking. It was a nice day for a walk. Three o’clock; in the low sixties with a blue sky; the clear light sparkling off the glass midtown buildings. I didn’t know where the hell I was going. I just needed to move.

First, I went up to Times Square, then crosstown, past Bryant Park, then up Madison Avenue.

A dazed couple of hours later, one of the security guys at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral gave me a look as I pushed in through the large bronze doors on Fifth Avenue.

No wonder he was concerned. With my friend’s blood still flecked on my cheek and my hair standing up, I’d been turning heads all afternoon. Like I was a movie star. Charlie Sheen, maybe. Or Jack Nicholson from The Shining.

When I showed the guard my shield, he still looked worried, but in the end, he let me walk past him up the cathedral’s center aisle.

I collapsed in a pew halfway to the altar. I could hear a tourist Mass going on, the soft melodious voice of an African priest. I took comfort in it, in all of it. The still, silent darkness. The jewel-like light of the stained glass windows. I sat there for a long time, thinking about Hughie and about friendship and sacrifice.

Who would take Hughie’s place? I thought. But I knew the answer. The answer was no one.

I was tired. My body, my mind, my heart, and my soul so weary. I was not in a good place. I thought about calling my grandfather Seamus up at the lake house, but I was afraid I’d get Mary Catherine or one of the kids. I just couldn’t talk to them now. No way-not like this.

I looked up high into the cathedral arches, toward the heaven that no one wanted to believe in anymore. I took out my shield. I turned the golden piece of metal through my fingers before I placed it down on the pew beside me and spun it.

“God bless you, Hughie. God bless you, Church Boy,” I whispered as it came to a stop.

Then I put my head down on the fragrant wood and I cried like a baby as I prayed for my friend and for the world.

CHAPTER 18

AFTER ANOTHER TWENTY minutes or so of having a nervous breakdown, I wiped my eyes and got the heck out of there before the guys from Bellevue showed.

Outside, I decided to make another pilgrimage through the rush-hour crush. It was to one of Hughie’s favorite places, O’Lunney’s Times Square Pub. I sat at the bar, watching a hurling game on the TV as I pounded down three pints of bracing Guinness. By the time Sligo beat Waterford by the head-scratching score of a goal and three points, I’d managed to avoid crying even once. I was making real progress.

Absolutely shot from the arrest and all my walking, I took a cab home to my West End Avenue apartment. As much as I love my huge family, I was very happy to find it silent and empty. The day I’d just had and the horrors I’d just seen were things I didn’t want to share with anyone. Not ever.

I went back to my room and took the longest, hottest shower in history. Then I did what any self-respecting stressed-out cop would do. I got dressed and made myself a cup of coffee and went back to work.

First on my to-do list was to drive out to Woodlawn in my unmarked PD car to tell Hughie’s family. By the time I drove down the street, I knew from all the cars and the lights blazing that Hughie’s family had already been told, thank God.

Coming out of the car, I saw two of his brothers, Eamon and Fergus, smoking on the stoop in their FDNY uniforms. I remembered sitting on the same stoop on Saturday mornings in my polyester Little League jersey waiting for Hughie so we could walk up to Van Cortlandt Park for our games. I hugged both brothers and offered my condolences before I explained what happened, how Hughie had saved my life.

“Out like a man,” Fergus said, wiping a tear. “He always had balls. Too many, maybe. Well, he’s with Pop now.”

“But is that such a good thing?” Eamon said, wiping his eyes and flicking his cigarette out into the street. “The crazy old bastard probably already has him training, making him do chin-ups on Saint Peter’s gate.”

We were laughing at that when a frail and haggard old woman in a flowered housecoat appeared at the door.

“Michael Bennett, is that you?” Hughie’s mom said in her thick Northern Ireland accent as she beamed at me.

Hughie had told me that she had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and they were trying to make arrangements for her to move in with one of them.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. McDonough,” I said, gently taking her tiny hands.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said, staring at me with her rheumy blue eyes. “The party is just starting. Is he with you? Is Hughie with you? All my boys are here except for my baby, Hughie.”

I stood there speechless, holding her skinny hands, until Fergus took them from me and led his poor old mother back inside.

CHAPTER 19

IT WAS ABOUT nine o’clock when I finally pulled up in front of the Thirty-Fourth Precinct again. I spotted two news vans on the corner as I went inside. After the broad-daylight midtown shootout and the deaths of three cops, I had a funny feeling I’d be seeing more of them.

Upstairs, the cops on the task force team were filling out paperwork. Every eye in the room swiveled on me as I came through the door, as though I’d just come back from the dead.

“Okay, what’s the scoop, troops?” I said, ignoring the gawking.

After someone gave me back my gun, they told me the feds had Perrine in the federal lockup downtown, near Centre Street. He’d already lawyered up and wasn’t talking to anyone. Of the attractive young woman who had murdered Hughie, Detective Martinez, and the Midtown South beat cop at the booth, there was no sign.

“Press conference is set for tomorrow down at Fed Plaza,” the SWAT leader, Patrick Zaretski, told me. “Everyone will understand if you don’t want to be there.”

“You kidding me? I love press conferences. I mean, never waste a crisis, right?” I said. “It’s just too bad Detective Martinez and Hughie won’t be able to make it.”

But the longest day of my life wasn’t over.

I was at the end of one of the paper-covered tables, filling out incident reports and calling up my various bosses to assure them I hadn’t completely cracked up, when we heard the noise. It was from outside, down on Broadway-a loud metal thump, followed by tires shrieking and then a long, wailing scream.

I ran downstairs and saw a form sprawled facedown between two unmarked police department Chevys. It was a young woman, her black skirt completely torn on one side, her white shirt covered in blood. I knelt beside her and then reared back as I saw the short black hair and the face framed by silver hoop earrings.

It was Valentina Jimenez, my informant. After I checked for a pulse that I knew I wouldn’t find, I looked at the deep ligature burns along her wrists. There were cigarette holes along her collarbone and two star-shaped, point-blank bullet wounds in her right and left cheeks. She’d been thoroughly tortured before someone had executed her.

Instead of getting angry as I knelt there, all I felt was numbing coldness spreading from my chest to the rest of my body.

This was payback for the arrest, I realized. This was Perrine showing me what he could do.

“Coward” was right, I thought. I should have pulled the trigger when I had the chance. If I had, this girl would probably still be alive.

After a minute, I did the only thing there was left to do. I took off my suit jacket and lay it over the poor girl as I sat down beside her.

CHAPTER 20

THERE WERE FLOWERS in the shape of the Yankees logo, flowers in the form of an American flag, and green, white, and gold flowers arranged in the shape of a Celtic cross.

Hughie’s casket sat in the center of them, candlelight shining on its closed, varnished pine lid. There was music playing from the funeral parlor speakers overhead-Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, that crushing, ineffably sad classical piece from the movie Platoon.

Not that any help was needed to produce crushing, ineffable sadness today, I thought as I signed the visitors’ book.

I’d been to Irish wakes before, but this one was outrageous. Half the Hibernian people in New York seemed to have made the pilgrimage to Woodlawn. A three-block-long line of mourners stood on McLean Avenue waiting to pay Hughie their respects. An FDNY fire truck stood outside the funeral parlor next to cop cars from New York and Yonkers and Westchester, their spinning lights flashing red, white, and blue on the regiments of sad, pale faces.

I’d just come from Detective Martinez’s wake out in Brooklyn and had another wake for the Midtown South cop to hit before tomorrow’s two funerals. I hadn’t seen this many funeral parlors since 9/11. Or sadness. Or broken people.

My bosses had forced me to speak to a PD shrink for a psychological debriefing. Though I didn’t hear word one of what the nice doctor woman tried to tell me, as I came out of her office, I decided that I wasn’t allowed to feel bad about what Hughie had done for me.

His act of courage was so incredible and selfless, all I could do was be happy and in awe of it. All I could do was to try to make myself live up to his sacrifice. It wasn’t going to happen, but I had to try.

The family had laid out about five hundred photographs of Hughie around the funeral parlor. Hughie in swimming pools; in Santa Claus suits. Hughie putting his fingers up behind his brothers’ heads. I was in a few of the older ones, me and Hughie in graduation gowns. Hughie and me with a couple of young ladies we met on a college trip to Myrtle Beach. I smiled as I remembered how Hughie, a true classic clown, had picked up the two by feigning a British accent.

Then it was my turn at Hughie’s coffin.

I dropped to my knees and said my prayer. I tried to imagine Hughie on the other side of the wood right in front of me, but I couldn’t.

It was because he wasn’t there, I realized suddenly. His spirit was long gone, roaring somewhere through the universe in the same no-holds-barred, awe-inspiring way it had roared through this world.

I finally laid my palm on the cool wood as I stood, and then I turned and gave a hug to Hughie’s mother, sitting beside it.

CHAPTER 21

THE GATHERING AFTER the wake was held near the funeral home at a pub called Rory Dolan’s.

Spotting the Irish and American flags along its facade as I crossed the street, I tried to think of the last time I’d been to my old neighborhood. It looked exactly as I remembered it. The same narrow two-family houses lining the streets. The same delis that sold Galtee Irish sausages and Crunchie candy bars along with cigarettes and lotto tickets.

Staring out at it all, I recalled warm summer nights about twenty years before, when Hughie and I and our friends would grab a gypsy cab and head north, up to Bainbridge Avenue, where the bars didn’t look too hard at our fake IDs. We’d usually end up in a loud, smoky place called French Charlie’s to try to pick up the girls listening to the New Wave cover bands who performed there. What I would give to be there now, blowing my summer-job paycheck at the bar, laughing as Hughie grabbed some girl and spun her right ’round like a record, baby, right ’round ’round ’round.

Inside Rory Dolan’s, it was three deep at the lacquered, wood-paneled bar. As I was waiting my turn, the door flew open and I heard a long, clattering roll of drums. Everyone turned as the DEA Black and Gold Pipe Band solemnly entered, their bagpipes droning.

The song they played was called “The Minstrel Boy,” I knew. I remembered my father singing the old Irish rebel song about harps and swords and the faith of fallen soldiers at a wedding when I was a kid. I remembered how embarrassed I’d been to listen to my father sing the corny, old-fashioned song in front of everyone. Now, years later, I thought of Hughie, and I sang along with tears in my eyes, remembering every word.

“Mike?” said a voice as a hand touched my shoulder.

I turned to find an attractive woman with dark tousled hair at my elbow, smiling at me. She seemed vaguely familiar.

“Hi,” I said.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said, laughing. “I’m hurt. But it has been a couple of years-or decades, actually. I’m Tara. Tara McLellan? Hughie’s cousin from Boston. You and Hughie came up and visited me once at a BC-Notre Dame game.”

My eyes went wide as I took in her blue-gray eyes and radiant skin and really did remember. The drunken kiss I shared with the brunette looker as BC won was one of the highlights of my long-ago romantic youth.

“Of course. Tara. Wow. It has been a couple, hasn’t it? How are you?” I said, giving her a quick hug.

It all came back to me. We’d made out a little bit that weekend, held hands. Afterward, we’d even exchanged letters. Which showed how long ago it was. Actual paper letters. In envelopes with stamps. My nineteen-year-old heart was most definitely smitten. We’d planned to meet again the following summer, but a month or so later, Hughie let me know she’d gotten engaged to some Harvard guy and that was that.

She’d been very easy to look at then. Now she looked even better, in a sultry, Catherine Zeta-Jones kind of way.

“The family was happy that you were with Hughie at the end,” Tara told me with another smile. “It was comforting that he didn’t die alone.”

Cold comfort, I thought but didn’t say. A traditional Irish delicacy.

I nodded. “I’m sorry we have to meet again under such horrible circumstances. What are you drinking?” I said.

“Jameson on the rocks.”

I ordered us a couple, and we sat and drank and caught up.

It turned out that, like pretty much everybody in Hughie’s extended family, she worked in law enforcement. She’d worked as a tax lawyer for a Greenwich, Connecticut, hedge fund, but after 9/11, she needed a change and joined up with the government. First with the state’s attorney’s office and now with the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, where she’d just become an assistant U.S. attorney.

“Southern District?” I said, whistling. “Hughie never mentioned he had a big-league ballplayer in the family. So you must already be familiar with Perrine’s case?”

Tara chewed at an ice cube as she nodded.

“I’m pulling every string I can pull to get on the prosecution team,” she said. “When I get it, I’m going to work night and day to bury that son of a bitch.”

“You text me when and where, and I’ll bring the shovels and the backhoe,” I said, clinking her glass.

CHAPTER 22

“SO WHAT’S YOUR story, Mike?” Tara said, smiling. “I read about you in New York magazine. How your wife passed away and about all your adopted kids. You’re quite the New York celebrity, aren’t you?”

I laughed at that.

“Oh, sure,” I said. “Me and Brad and Angelina are heading to George’s Lake Como villa tonight on the G6. Doing anything?”

She touched my arm and looked into my eyes.

“You’re still as fun and funny as I remember, Mike. That was some weekend we had way back when, if memory serves me right.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It was almost embarrassing how attracted we were to each other after all this time. There was a lot of eye and physical contact. So much that even I was picking up on things. That’s what funerals did sometimes, I knew. Nothing like the yawning abyss of death to make you want to cling to something-or, more specifically, someone.

Soon the Irish music was replaced with some quiet stuff over the sound system. It was nice sitting there with Tara as Ray Charles sang, “You Don’t Know Me.” After a minute or so, I took another sip of Irish whiskey and sat up, blinking. I was here to mourn my friend, after all, not put the moves on his cousin, no matter how attractive she was.

As Ray brought the song to a soft, weepy close, there was another sound from outside. It wasn’t so romantic. It was car horns honking, several of them blaring on and on without letup. In addition to the honking, there was loud, manic music and police whistles.

What now?

CHAPTER 23

THE BAR IMMEDIATELY cleared. When I finally stepped out into the street behind the crowd, I could see that the honking was coming from the parking lot of a bank across the street. A couple of dark-colored SUVs, a kitted-out Hummer, and a sparkly-rimmed Cadillac Escalade were leaning on their horns.

As I stepped off the curb, I saw that Hughie’s brother Fergus was already across the street trying to pull open the Hummer’s driver’s-side door.

“Off that frigging horn, jackass!” Fergus was yelling. His face was red with sorrow and drink. He kneed the door. “You crazy or stupid? Can’t you see this is a funeral? People are in mourning. Cut that shit off!”

When he kneed the door again, the smoked-glass window slowly zipped down. At the wheel was a small, young, almost pretty-looking Hispanic guy in a wifebeater. There were two older and tougher-looking Hispanic men sitting beside him, and several more in the back.

My radar went off immediately. This felt wrong. The men looked expressionless. What the hell was this? I thought.

“Is this where it’s happening?” the pretty-boy driver said, stroking his goatee as he smiled.

“Where what’s happening?” said Eamon, now standing beside Fergus with rage in his face.

“The roast,” the Hispanic guy said as he placed a large revolver between Fergus’s wide eyes. “The Irish pig roast.”

There was movement and a bunch of clicking sounds, and suddenly the gangbangers in the Hummer and Escalade were holding guns. Not just regular guns, either. They were tactical shotguns and AK-47 assault rifles. A guy in the backseat had an AR-15 with what looked like a grenade launcher attachment. It was completely surreal. How was this happening? Who would threaten people with assault weapons at a cop’s wake?

Out came my Glock. Around me, I saw at least half a dozen other cops and DEA guys from the wake draw as well. Even one of the pipe-band guys had a piece out, a.45, pointed at the Escalade’s windshield.

“Drop it! Drop it! Drop it!” everyone was yelling.

“Listen to me,” the pretty-boy gangbanger said. “We got a warning to you from our king. He’s not going to stand for this shit. You want to live? You want your family to live, you better wise up. Bad shit is about to go down. Kind you never seen before. You understand? You got all that? Message received? Now back off before we put you in a pine box next to your friend.”

When I turned, I saw Patrick Zaretski, the DEA SWAT guy, with his SIG Sauer leveled at the driver’s temple. The safety was off, and his finger was firmly on the trigger. I could tell by the look in his eye that he was more than ready to blow the driver away.

“Not here, Patrick,” I said. “Look at the heavy weapons they have. There are too many innocent people here. Better to let them roll, and we’ll call it in.”

After a moment, he reluctantly nodded and stood down, along with the rest of the outraged cops.

As the gangbanger SUVs pulled out onto McLean Avenue, a motorcycle roared up behind them, a huge black Suzuki Hayabusa. Its rider flicked down the helmet visor as the bike passed. I caught a glimpse of a face-a fine-boned face with black hair and gold eyes-and then the bike was screaming as it streaked away.

That was the worst outrage of all, I thought as I stood there with my mouth open, watching the woman who had killed Hughie roar away.

As the SUVs tore down McLean Avenue behind the motorcycle, we all jumped on our cell phones to call in a car stop. Twenty minutes later, we heard that the local precinct found the expensive cars abandoned five blocks away. It turned out both SUVs were stolen, and the men had probably switched cars.

It had been an elaborate operation. All for what? To warn us? To intimidate us? It had worked. I was definitely shaken up. My friend’s wake had come incredibly close to becoming a bloody massacre.

“What does it mean?” Tara asked me back in Rory Dolan’s, as I ordered another Jameson’s-a double this time. “Why would these men do this? Why come here? Haven’t they done enough?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I had been a cop for a long time, but I couldn’t deny how scary this felt. It seemed like I was looking at something entirely new.

“I don’t know, Tara,” I finally said, truthfully. “I have absolutely no freaking clue.”

CHAPTER 24

NOT TOO FAR from SoHo and Wall Street, the MCC, or Metropolitan Correctional Center, is a twelve-story concrete bunker located on Park Row, behind the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse at Foley Square.

In a break room on the eighth floor, Manuel Perrine, the Sun King, flicked an imaginary dust speck from the sleeve of his baggy prison jumpsuit as he listened to a phone call. He nodded, and nodded again, then said, “Very good,” and thumbed off the iPhone.

With the phone’s video FaceTime feature, he’d just watched the whole incident at the cop’s wake in the Bronx. The chaos, the baffled-looking cops. In real time, no less. It was as though he’d been there himself. Good com was essential to all operations. What field marshal would have it any other way?

Being in jail was no excuse to avoid strategizing. Already there were planes taking off and packages being delivered, arrangements being set in motion. He was still in a position to put his considerable resources to good use.

Still, the indignity of every moment spent in this place was such an unforgivable offense. The steel grid embedded into an air shaft that passed for a window in his cell; the metal bunk beds and white brick walls. The amount of money he had spent on the operation in bribes alone, so that he could sneak in and out of the country, was insane. And yet here he was, back where he started, in a squalid rat cage. All of it was for nothing.

He’d already ordered the death of his old friend Candelerio and his entire family. He would then kill Candelerio’s crew after all was said and done. They needed to be taught, brutally taught. Everyone involved would be held up as an example of what happened when a king was crossed. Every knee would bend for the crime of his being put in this unclean box in this concrete coffin of a city.

He tapped his nose where the cop had shattered it. There was tape over the gauze now, a ridiculous X, like the burial spot on a treasure map. All his life fighting, and no one had ever broken it until now.

He looked up with his heavy-lidded blue eyes when a bald, muscular guard came in. But the guard wasn’t there to bring him back to his cell. Perrine wasn’t supposed to be in the break room in the first place.

There was another person with the jacked-up guard, a prisoner with a black eye in a baggy jumpsuit identical to his own.

The handsome young blond inmate was named Jonathan Alder, and he was in for running a Wall Street Ponzi scheme. Now, instead of bilking senior citizens out of their retirement savings in his silk moiré suspenders, Jonathan reluctantly provided a whole host of new services to his fellow cons. The soft, freshly turned-out punk bitch had been a gift to Perrine from the jail’s current shot caller, a notoriously brutal incarcerated Mob boss. It was a sign of respect. A housewarming present that Perrine-bored, enraged, violent, and incredibly frustrated-couldn’t wait to unwrap.

Standing, Perrine grabbed Jonathan Alder’s chin and looked him over carefully, like a man inspecting a horse he was about to purchase. He caught one of the jewel-like tears that dropped from the shivering young man’s eyes and giggled as he licked it off his palm. Yummy. He turned to the guard.

“Do you have the other item?” Perrine asked in his strange French-like accent.

“How could I forget?” the tan musclehead of a guard, whose name was Doug Styles, said as he reached into his shirt pocket and handed Perrine a fat white wax-paper packet of prime Peruvian coke.

“Anything else, monsieur? Hope you find the service to your liking,” the hard-eyed guard said sarcastically. His voice was the deep, rough, not-to-be-trifled-with bark of a drill sergeant.

Perrine looked up at the guard thoughtfully. Every man had his price, and Doug’s here was three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in tens and twenties delivered to his shit-box split-level in East Brunswick, New Jersey. Doug thought it was just for the phone and other courtesies, but of course that was just the beginning of the arrangements.

“No, thank you, Doug. How long do you think Jonathan and I have to become acquainted? I don’t want to make trouble for you.”

Doug raised his beefy forearm and checked his watch.

“Twenty more minutes. Night count is coming up.”

“Yes, yes. Twenty minutes is nice, but half an hour would be so much better,” Perrine said, batting his baby blues at the guard. The deep creases of his dimples showed as he smiled.

“Really? How about eight hours and a mint under your pillow for you two lovebirds? Screw you, you sick bastard. I’m in charge here. You want a phone? I can get you a phone or this worthless punk, that’s fine. But if you think you can lean on me, you’re going to find yourself down in sub-basement two in twenty-four solitary, drinking your frog’s legs through a broken jaw. You don’t own me. Don’t for a second think you own me.”

CHAPTER 25

PERRINE WAITED A long second and then put up his palms in a conceding gesture.

“I understand completely, Doug. I did not want to step on your toes. You are indeed the boss.”

“Damn straight,” Styles said.

Perrine lifted the iPhone off the table and brought up an app. He showed the screen to the guard.

“Actually, before you go, could I show you something? Won’t take a moment,” Perrine said.

On the screen was a video of a reddish-haired woman, the back of her head visible over the top of a couch as she sat watching TV. It seemed like the camera was filming from a partially open closet door.

“This little video, Doug, is a real-time feed,” Perrine said. “I believe that chubby little morsel on the couch there is your wife, Sharon, correct? No wonder she’s taking a breather-watching those twin boys the stork brought you two last year would tire anyone out. And she breast-feeds them, too; I saw that a couple of minutes ago. Talk about double duty. Quite impressive.

“Did you know that with one snap of my finger, instead of watching her watch Real Housewives of Who-Gives-a-Fuck, you and I, Doug, could instead watch that impressive little lady of yours be forced to perform the most startling of things? Things truly beyond your wildest imaginings. It would be an amateur video, to be sure, but sometimes those are the ones that really get the blood pumping the most, don’t you agree?”

The guard’s face was no longer so tan. He swallowed hard as he stared at the iPhone.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” Doug said, his command voice not so commanding anymore. “Whatever. My God. Sharon. Please don’t hurt her.”

“Please what?” Perrine said putting a hand to his ear.

“Please, sir?” Doug said, his lips trembling.

“Fuck SIR!” Perrine barked, his smile suddenly gone, his eyes like blue steel. “PLEASE WHAT!?”

“Please… ” the bald guard said, shrugging his massive shoulders. He closed his eyes as he realized it.

“Please, King,” he finally said in a near whisper.

Perrine’s smile returned as he lowered the phone and started to unfold the package of coke.

“You’re a fast learner, Doug. I appreciate that. Lovely Sharon and your two thirsty little boys appreciate that. Keep up the good work and we’re going to get on like gangbusters.”

Perrine expertly laid out a fat line of top-shelf cocaine and even more expertly hoovered it off the scarred metal prison table before he thumbed at the door.

“Now, leave us for thirty-and I repeat, thirty-minutes, Doug. And whatever you do, my large, helpful friend, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”