I, Michael Bennett

CHAPTER 26

IT WAS AROUND five thirty in the morning and still dark when I passed the ghostly Asian guy doing tai chi. In a misty clearing to one side of the northern Central Park jogging trail, birds were tweeting like mad as an elderly Asian man wearing a kung fu getup straight out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon went through the slow, graceful motions.

I always saw him on my predawn Saturday morning Central Park suicide run and, as always, I wondered what his story was. Was he actually a ghost? Were the Shaolin monks opening a Harlem branch? What did he do when he wasn’t being ancient and mystical?

Sweat dripped from my perplexed head as I kept running. A lot of questions and no answers, which was about par for the course lately.

I’d been running a lot in the year since Hughie’s murder. I mean, a lot. Twenty-five miles a week. Sometimes thirty. Was I punishing myself? I didn’t know. I certainly was pushing the envelope on my knees, though.

It just felt right, I guess. When I was moving, huffing and puffing and slapping my size-eleven Nikes on asphalt, I felt safe, human, okay. It was when I stopped and let the world catch up to me that the problems seemed to start.

The sun was just coming up behind my kids’ school-Holy Name, on Ninety-Seventh Street-twenty minutes later as I dropped to its front steps, my tank completely empty. As my face dripped sweat onto the concrete, I watched a guy in a newspaper truck load the corner box. When he left, I saw Manuel Perrine’s face on the cover beneath the headline:

SUN KING’S NEW YORK TRIAL

IT’S ON!

It actually wasn’t news to me. Hughie’s cousin Tara McLellan had been assigned to the trial, as she had wanted to be, and was keeping me up to speed. There had been a lot of back-and-forth to move the trial to Arizona, but in the end, the feds decided to try him first for the murder of the waiter in the department store, maximizing the trial’s impact by holding it in the largest, most visible venue possible. The whole thing was very political. National elected officials and even the president had weighed in, everyone wanting to show how serious they were about the Mexican cartel problem and border security.

Even with the politics, I didn’t care. I was glad he was being tried here. The son of a bitch had killed my friend, and even after I testified, I was going to go to the trial every chance I got, so that I could see justice done. I was going to do my best to have Perrine put where he belonged, namely, strapped to a lethal-injection table.

It was a harsh way of looking at things, but it suited my recent mood just fine. I stood up from the school steps and wiped my sweaty face. It was a harsh old world we lived in, after all.

CHAPTER 27

I TRIED TO be as quiet as possible as I came back into the apartment with breakfast, but of course Mary Catherine was already up and at ’em in the kitchen, sewing something in her lap while a pot came to a boil. As I came in and dropped the bagels onto the kitchen’s center island, she gave me a look. An extremely Irish, skeptical look.

“Good… eh, morning?” I tried.

“I knew it. That’s where you were. Running. Again,” she said.

“Um… I thought exercise was good.”

“Usually it is, Mike, but that’s all you do these days. Work and run and work some more. You have to stop pushing yourself. You’re going to run yourself into an early grave if you’re not careful. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately? You’re getting too thin.”

“Too thin?” I said, handing her a latte. “C’mon, that’s impossible. Besides, let’s face it, with these kids, I’ll never be too rich, so what the heck.”

She shook her head.

“It’s your life, Mr. Bennett. I just work here,” she mumbled, going back to her sewing.

Wow, I thought, carefully retreating back into the hallway. “Mr. Bennett?” I must have done something really atrocious for my nanny to be busting out a stone-cold “Mr. Bennett” on me. If only I could figure out what it was.

The front door almost hit me in the back as Brian and Ricky came in, arms filled with dusty suitcases and bags.

“Hey, boys. You’re up early. What’s the occasion?”

“Just grabbing all the luggage from storage, Dad, for the really wonderful summer vacay we’re about to embark on next week,” Brian said.

“Yeah,” Ricky said. “I can’t wait to get up to the old cabin in the woods. And for the rest of the summer instead of last year’s two weeks. People think the woods are boring, but c’mon. You have trees and branches and leaves and bark and stuff.”

“Animals, too. Birdies and even squirrels,” Brian continued. “I mean, who needs PlayStation high-definition gaming when you have the chance to see a squirrel looking for a nut? It’s riveting.”

I stared at my kids, resisting the urge to roll my eyes. They’d acted the same way the summer before and then ended up having the time of their lives.

“Honestly, Dad. We don’t have to go to Hicksville again this year, do we?” Ricky said. “There’s nothing to do.”

“He means except getting bitten by mosquitoes and getting poison ivy,” Brian added helpfully.

I peered at them and scratched my chin for a bit.

“Well, sons. I didn’t know you had such huge objections to the trip. Besides, you guys are a year older. Maybe we can arrange something else for you two-like we’ll head upstate, and you guys can man the fort down here.”

Ricky and Brian looked at each other ecstatically.

“That would be awesome!” Brian said. “The whole apartment to ourselves. You know you can trust us. We’re down, Dad!”

They began to step past me. I let them get five feet. Maybe four.

“Oh, wait. I just thought of something. What was it, now? Oh, yeah. I was only kidding. Start packing, knuckleheads, and don’t forget the OFF! Next stop for you two happy campers is Hicksville, USA.”

CHAPTER 28

WISPS OF BLUE smoke stung my eyes as I lifted the roasted chickens from their foil packets. I listened to the satisfying sizzle as I slipped them one by one onto the grill to finish smoking. The mahogany-colored birds looked awesome and smelled even better-of sweet mesquite smoke and lemon.

“Bobby Flay, eat your heart out,” I mumbled as I closed the lid of my trusty Weber grill.

It was my grandfather Seamus’s birthday, and I was most definitely doing some grillin’ and chillin’ for his surprise party this evening. On the table behind me, the Philly cheesesteak sliders were waiting with the rest of the appetizers, the chips, the fruit platter, the beer, and Cokes on ice in galvanized buckets.

Since everything was ready to go, I decided to crack open one of the Coronas to ease my smoky throat.

The whole setting looked as awesome as the food. Colored plastic Japanese lanterns were strung above white paper tablecloths. In the distance, over the buildings and Riverside Park treetops, the Hudson River was sparkling. My West End Avenue building really didn’t have a designated rooftop space, but I helped the super out with his traffic tickets, so he looked the other way a couple of times a year when I wanted to have a tar-beach barbecue. I couldn’t think of a better venue for tonight’s event.

I put down my beer as my phone jangled.

“This is Falcon One. The target is in the box. I repeat, Dumbledore is in the building.”

Dumbledore, I thought, shaking my head. Leave it to my nutty kids to turn a surprise birthday party into a covert operation with code words.

“Roger, Falcon One. Keep me posted.”

I sipped my beer as I waited for the next transmission.

“Falcon One here again. Dumbledore fell for it,” Trent reported five minutes later. “Grandpa actually thinks he needs to help Mary Catherine take clothes up to the roof to dry. He must think its 1912 instead of 2012. Anyway, we have him hook, line, and sinker. They’re taking the elevator. We’re coming up the back stairs. ETA two minutes.”

The other kids and I were huddled together, my youngest, Chrissy, beside me, literally shaking with excitement as the roof door opened.

“Surprise!” we all yelled.

“What?” Seamus said, wide-eyed, dropping the laundry basket he was holding. “Oh, my goodness!”

“He’s speechless!” Mary Catherine cried, coming up behind him. “Someone mark the date and time. I think we actually made him speechless!”

We sat down and commenced eating. It was a delicious meal. In addition to the perfectly smoked chicken, we had smoked sausages and German potato salad and slaw. As we joked and bantered, we watched the sun go down and the lights go bright in the city to the south.

As I sat there smiling, one of those perfect New York moods hit me. Sad and happy and serene all at the same time. I had trouble remembering the last time I felt this good. Definitely before Hughie lost his life. Thinking about him, I lifted my plastic cup to the dark silver sky.

After we dispensed with the paper plates, I popped a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Champagne as Mary Catherine brought over the cake she’d baked.

“How many is it, Father?” I said, filling his glass with bubbly. “How many cases of candles are we going need to light this puppy up? Should I call LaGuardia to warn the air traffic controllers?”

“Please, no candles-and especially no numbers. Not today,” Seamus said. “That can be my present from you, Michael. No mention of any numbers.”

Jane cleared her throat.

“Before we sing happy birthday, Gramps, we wanted to share with you the top ten reasons why having a priest for a grandfather is great.”

“Oh, no. I should have known,” Seamus said, shaking his head in mock despair. “First roast chicken, now roast grandpa.”

He wasn’t fooling anyone. The old man couldn’t stop smiling from ear to ear as the kids stood with their index cards.

“Number ten: extra-special ‘God bless yous’ when you sneeze,” Jane said.

“Number nine: front-row pews on holidays,” said Shawna.

“Number eight: last rites before the more treacherous amusement park rides,” Eddie chimed in.

“Number seven: Roman collar provides excellent grip on horsie rides,” said Chrissy.

“Number six: top-notch pet burials,” said Trent.

“Number five: reminding Gramps that you’re an innocent child of God easily gets you out of trouble,” Fiona and Bridget said in unison.

“Number four,” said Ricky. “Fear of excommunication is a really great incentive to floss teeth.”

“Number three,” said Brian. “Sanctity of confessional box keeps Dad in the dark forever.”

“Number two,” said Juliana. “Lots of chances to wear nifty YOUR GRANDPA LIVES IN FLORIDA BUT MINE CAN EXORCISE DEMONS T-shirt.”

“And number one,” I said, standing.

The last zinger was mine, of course. Seamus winced.

“Nonstop sermons,” I said. “Every darn day of the week.”

CHAPTER 29

AFTER THE BIRTHDAY dinner, the kids took Seamus to the most recent summer blockbuster while Mary Catherine and I cleaned up. We’d wrapped up the leftovers and were breaking down the tables and chairs when I spotted something.

“Hey, what’s this?” I said as I saw something gold at the bottom of an ice bucket. I put my hand into the freezing water and pulled out a second bottle of Veuve Clicquot, which I’d forgotten about.

“Look, a straggler,” I said as the ice-water droplets tickled the tops of my flip-flopped feet.

“We can’t let this go to waste,” I said, putting the music back on. My iPod was jam-packed with fifties and sixties music these days, all the doo-wop crooning and violins and melodies and sweet, soulful love songs I could download off iTunes. I had been playing the songs during the party, to Seamus’s delight.

We took the bottle over to the southwest corner of the roof, where we could look out over the West Side and the Hudson River. As we arrived, “Up on the Roof” by the Drifters soon started floating through the warm summer night air.

Millions of tiny lights sparkled in the dark water as the Drifters sang about being up above the bustling crowd and having all your cares sail away. I peeled away the foil on the Veuve Clicquot and untwisted the wire. When the cork popped, it ricocheted off the terra-cotta rim of the building and went spinning out into the night.

“That’s a long way down. You think we hit anyone?” Mary Catherine said, looking over the railing.

I stared at her blue eyes and fine-lined face, uplit in the soft glow of the city lights.

“No chance,” I said, smiling, as I looked down. “But even so, I’d certainly take a Champagne cork over your usual New York City ‘airmail’-the kind delivered by pigeons, high-rise construction sites, and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons.”

When I passed her the bottle, she gave me a soft kiss on the cheek.

“What’s that for?” I said.

“For celebrating Seamus, Mike. It was really wonderful. The kids love you so much. They love seeing you happy. They’ve been worried about you. So have I. I know how hard it’s been for you since losing your buddy Hughie.”

I looked down at the tar paper between my flip-flops.

“I’ve been pretty pensive lately, haven’t I?”

“‘Pensive’ is a word,” she said. “‘Silent’ is another one.”

Unable to deal with where the conversation was headed, I cha-cha’d her around a rusty AC unit as “Up on the Roof” was replaced by Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem.”

It seemed like music from a different world. It was as though the tune came from a different planet-a simple, happy one, where young people longed for adulthood and love.

I knew that getting older meant being skeptical about the music of a new generation, but what I heard on the radio these days was truly new territory. How in fifty years had the human race gone from popular music in which young men sang about things like buying their girl a ring and getting married to popular music in which young women boastfully sang about how much they enjoyed hard-core, dirty sex?

“Ding-dong,” Mary Catherine sang. “I’m right here. Penny for your thoughts.”

“They’re not worth that much,” I said, twirling her around.

It was maybe another thirty seconds before we heard footsteps behind us.

“Hello? Anyone up here?” a voice said.

We turned as Petey Armijo, the pudgy super of my building, stepped over, swinging a set of keys.

“Hey, Mr. Bennett, if you guys are… eh… done here, I’d like to lock the roof door.”

“We just finished, Petey,” Mary said, walking over and turning off Ben in mid-croon before hitting the stairs.

“Exactly, Petey. All done,” I said, grabbing a couple of folding chairs. “Your timing is impeccable.”

CHAPTER 30

BY THE TIME I made it back downstairs into the apartment, I heard the dishwasher and the washing machine going. Mary Catherine was in full cleaning mode, which by now I knew meant that she was feeling anxious and emotional, and we’d probably shared our last dance of the evening.

My relationship with Mary Catherine was obviously complicated. So complicated, in fact, that even I didn’t know what was going on half the time. There was something deep and special between us, but every time it seemed like we were about to make a solid connection, something-life, the world, one of New York City’s unending supply of murderous maniacs, or, most often, my big mouth-would get in the way.

Thankfully, I noticed we’d run out of milk and eggs and bacon for Sunday breakfast, so I grabbed my keys and went out for a breath of what passes for fresh air in New York. Outside my building, I immediately walked over to the NYPD cruiser on the near corner.

“Don’t shoot,” I said, with hands raised, to the stocky young black cop behind the wheel as he rolled down the window.

The department had assigned nonstop protection to me and my family ever since I’d collared Perrine. And with good reason. In Mexico, during his reign of terror, Perrine had had dozens of cops, Federales, and prosecutors killed.

“I’m hitting the deli, Officer Williams. You need anything?”

“No, I’m fine, Detective,” the soft-spoken, affable Afghan war vet said as if he were coming to attention.

“At ease, Private Williams,” I said, smiling. “Half-and-half, one sugar, right?”

“Okay, Detective. But I thought I was the one who was supposed to be watching out for you,” the rookie said, finally smiling a little back.

“Got it covered,” I said, showing him the 9mm Glock in my waistband as I walked away.

I actually had another one on my right ankle, a subcompact Glock 30 filled to the brim with fat, shiny golden.45-caliber bullets. If Perrine’s guys came for me, they’d better bring their lunch, because if I thought my life or the life of my family was in jeopardy, I was going to throw down first and ask questions later. I’d already killed two of Perrine’s assassins at Madison Square Garden. If killing the rest of them was what this thing took, then, as Paul McCartney so eloquently put it, let it be.

I went two blocks south down West End to the deli on the corner of Ninety-Sixth and was coming back up the hill, balancing a coffee with my bag of grocery loot, when my phone rang.

I glanced at the screen. It was assistant U.S. attorney Tara McLellan, Hughie’s cousin, to whom I’d been practically glued at the hip for the last two weeks, prepping for Perrine’s trial. I thought it was a little weird to be hearing from her this late, but jury selection on the trial was supposed to start Monday. I stopped on the corner, leaning against a sidewalk construction shed to take the call.

“Hey, Tara. What’s up?” I said.

“Mike, sorry to bother you so late,” she said. “I’m wrapping up the trial strategy report that I’m going to present to my boss tomorrow, and I was wondering if you could come by and take a look at it and give me some last-minute feedback. Talk me off the ledge.”

I could understand her anxiety. Not only was this the biggest case of Tara’s career, the whole Perrine thing was a major international news event. This was a very public opportunity for the U.S. to show the world that it was taking on the cartel problem, which had run amok for so long.

“I’d be happy to,” I said. “Where are you? Downtown at the office?”

“No. Midtown, actually. I’m at the St. Regis Hotel.”

I blinked. The St. Regis on Fifth Avenue was probably the most exclusive luxury hotel in New York, a place where celebrities stayed and where the cheapest room went for eight hundred bucks a night.

“Wow, that’s a pretty nice ledge you’re sitting on,” I said.

“I was late at the office and didn’t want to head back to Bronxville, so I decided to splurge. They did say we should shake up our routine for security reasons, Mike.”

“Good point,” I said. “The St. Regis is certainly the last place a cartel hit man would look for me. Give me thirty to get into my tux.”

“Where are you going?” Mary Catherine said upstairs, when she spotted me putting on a suit jacket.

“Work. Last-minute details on the Perrine trial,” I said.

“It’s Saturday night,” she said skeptically.

I tried to come up with one of my patented fast-talking quips as a reply, but drew a big fat zero.

“Tell me, Mr. Bennett. Do all assistant U.S. attorneys look like Fox News babes, or just this one who keeps calling you?” Mary Catherine said as I made my escape into the hall.

“My phone’s on. Be back soon,” I mumbled as I hit the door.

CHAPTER 31

IN NO SHAPE to drive after all that birthday bubbly, I, too, splurged. On a cab to the St. Regis instead of the subway.

I stared up at the dramatically lit, turn-of-the-century hotel as my cab turned off Central Park South onto Fifth Avenue. It was hard not to stare. The iconic French Second Empire-style building was one of the most beautiful in the city-twenty highly embellished stories of glowing limestone columns and cornices topped off by a copper mansard roof.

A doorman ushered me through an elaborate brass revolving door into a lobby of squint-inducing brilliant white marble. Even the furniture was old and French, I noticed, spotting Louis XVI armchairs with fluted legs backed up against the massive stone columns. This hotel was as imposing, over-the-top, and as expensive as New York City could get, which was saying something.

Tara had already sent me a text message when I was in the cab telling me to meet her in the landmark’s famous King Cole Bar. I stepped into the cavernous space, which had a mahogany bar and a massive mural behind it.

Sitting at the bar, Tara looked pretty grand and imposing herself, in a black jacket, ivory blouse, and black pencil skirt. She was wearing her long shiny black hair up a way I’d never seen before. I liked it.

A gaunt old bow-tied bartender, who looked as though he might have served some of the robber barons who built the joint, was waiting for me as I arrived beside Tara.

“What are you drinking, Ms. McLellan?” I said.

“Irish whiskey, what else?” she said with a wink. “No rocks this time.”

“Jameson?” I said.

“No, Bushmills sixteen-year.”

“Sweet sixteen sounds good to me,” I said, giving the ancient barkeep a thumbs-up.

After the relic brought my drink and took away two twenties I’d likely never see again, we clinked glasses and drank.

“So you finished your report?” I said.

Tara put a finger to her lips and giggled.

“Shh. Drink first, work in a minute,” she said, slurring her words a little.

She blinked at me, a wide, fixed smile on her face. By the glaze in her eyes, I could tell the drink in front of her wasn’t her first.

We chitchatted for a while about the weather and the latest Yankees loss before I realized something. I looked around on the floor beside her bar stool.

“Tara?”

“Yes, Detective?” she said, batting her eyes at me. “May I call you Detective, Detective?”

“Tara, where’s your briefcase? You know, your work? All the paper you wanted me to see?”

She smiled mischievously.

“Upstairs in my room. I was just taking a drink. I mean, a break.”

“How many breaks-I mean, drinks-have you had?”

“Just the one, Detective, I swear. Please don’t arrest me,” she said, smiling, as she raised her palms.

“I have an idea. How about we call it a night, and we go over it tomorrow?” I said, grabbing her clutch purse from the bar and gently taking her elbow.

Outside the bar, in the lobby, the grim, middle-aged woman behind the hotel’s desk gave me a frosty glare as I escorted Tara unsteadily into a brass elevator.

No fair. I’m the good guy, I felt like saying to the clerk. Can’t you see my shining armor?

When the door binged closed, Tara turned and touched my face.

“Mike, ever since the wake, I haven’t stopped thinking about you,” she said quickly. “Did you know that I practically killed about six people to get put on this case? I thought it was for Hughie, but it wasn’t. It was so I could spend time with you.”

“That’s… that’s… ” I said, flabbergasted. “I’m flattered.”

Tara put her head on my shoulder.

“My husband died in a plane crash, you know. He was a weekend pilot, and he screwed up somehow over Long Island Sound and crashed. We were best friends. We did everything together. When he died, I felt like dying, too.”

She pulled away from me and shook her head as she stared up into my eyes.

“I read how your wife died, too, Mike. I know what it’s like to lose someone that close. You understand. You’re the first man I’ve met in five years with whom I felt that click. I’ve just been so lonely. I went on an Internet date a few months ago. Have you ever gone on an Internet date, Mike? My God, the horror.”

The elevator stopped on the eleventh floor, and we stepped out into a white, furniture-lined hallway.

“You think I’m a stalker now, don’t you?” she said, pouting, when we arrived at her door. “I’m not a stalker, Mike. No, wait-that’s what a stalker would say.”

I got her room door open with her passkey. Inside, she immediately ran down a short hallway and then through another doorway. Then she ran back out.

“Don’t leave, Michael Bennett,” she said. “If you leave, I’ll come looking for you. You wouldn’t want a drunk woman running around the streets of New York on your conscience, would you?”

I stepped in and closed the door.

“Not me. I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

She went back into what I assumed was the bedroom. The room was a suite, with a living room window that looked north up Fifth Avenue, toward Central Park. How much money did she have, exactly? I thought. And exactly how drunk was she?

After a minute, I heard water running in the next room. When she came back out a minute or so later, my jaw dropped. Uh-oh. She was wearing a fluffy white bathrobe-quite a short fluffy white bathrobe.

She stopped at the love seat, sat, and tucked her long legs up underneath her.

“There. Okay. Much better. My head isn’t spinning so much,” she said. “Hey, c’mon. Sit down. Do you want a drink?”

I started laughing at that.

“I think the bar’s closed, Tara.”

“I like how you laugh, Mike,” she said, sounding a little more sober. “I’m so glad you came. Down at the bar, some Eurotrash creep tried to pick me up. When I blew him off, he said some nasty things to me before he left. I got afraid. That’s when I called you. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re in trouble, right? Call a cop?”

I laughed again.

“And here I am.”

“Exactly. Here you are,” she said, and stood and undid the spill of her hair.

As I watched it fall, I thought of a fragment of an Irish song from my childhood for some reason.

Her eyes, they shone like diamonds

I thought her the queen of the land

And her hair, it hung over her shoulder

Tied up with a black velvet band.

It was actually her robe that slipped down over her shoulders a moment later, revealing pale tan lines at the nape of her neck. I swallowed. It was a really nice nape.

CHAPTER 32

BUT AT THE last second, as Tara rose up to kiss me, for some unknown reason I suddenly gave her my cheek and turned her embrace into a quick hug.

She stiffened in my arms. Then her head sank.

“Too much?” she said.

She turned, stomping away, and collapsed back onto the love seat.

“I always push it. Always,” she mumbled into the arm of it. After a minute or two, she started to sob as if I’d just broken her heart.

I stood there, speechless, in the middle of the luxury suite. What was I doing here? First hugs and kisses, and now tears?

Well, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into, Michael Bennett, I could hear Seamus say.

But as I scrambled for a clue, I finally caught a break. I thanked my lucky stars as the muffled sobbing turned into soft snoring.

After another minute, I lifted Tara up and carried her back into her bedroom, where I laid her under the seven-hundred-thread-count ivory sheets, carefully keeping her robe properly placed at all times.

I stood for a moment and smiled down at her as she slept. I didn’t think goofballs came this attractive. Would she even remember all this tomorrow? I wondered. I thought about deleting her text messages to me, but then decided not to. It was what it was. She’d gotten a little drunk and gone a little crazy. I knew how that felt. I was the last one to judge.

“See you at the trial, Tara,” I said as I closed the door behind me.

The same stern desk clerk frowned at me downstairs as I stepped back into the lobby. I suddenly remembered who she reminded me of-my fierce seventh grade teacher, Sister Dominick.

“Do you have the time, ma’am?” I said, winking as I passed her.

“Actually, no,” the reincarnated Sister D. said, as if she were aching to put a ruler to my knuckles one last time. “Fresh out.”

The cop cruiser on the corner hit me with his brights as I got out of the taxi in front of my building back on West End Avenue. Great. It was bad enough that my doorman knew all my dirty rotten nocturnal activities; now my coworkers did as well. There goes the department’s Father of the Year award.

When I got upstairs, the house was dark, everyone snug as a bug in a rug. Even Mary Catherine wasn’t waiting up for me, which was probably a good thing, considering I smelled like Tara’s perfume.

Though when I finally completed the last steps into my bedroom, I did see something. On my bed were lumps. Highly suspicious lumps.

“We miss you, Daddy,” one of the lumps mumbled as I took off my shoes.

“Miss you so much,” the other cute lump said as I searched for a hanger, gave up, and just tossed my jacket in the corner.

“It’s okay. I’m here now, girls. You can go to your own beds,” I said to Chrissy and Shawna as I lay down. I felt a whole bunch of smaller lumps flatten underneath me. Oh, criminy, I thought, pulling an itchy fur ball out from under the back of my neck. It looked like the girls had invited their entire Beanie Baby collection to the Daddy’s-room sleepover.

“Nugglance?” Chrissy said, pulling on the sheet beside me.

I shook my head. Nugglance in Chrissyese, if I remembered correctly, was a cross between nestling and snuggling.

“Yes, Daddy. We need nugglance,” Shawna said, pulling on the sheet from the other side.

“Fine, fine. Have your nugglance,” I said scooting over as I let them burrow in behind me. Giggles started as one of them started to pet the back of my head. With her foot.

I closed my eyes, too tired to protest. More women. I was completely surrounded. Resistance was futile. There was no escape.

CHAPTER 33

THE HISTORY BOOKS say that when the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, entered one of the seven hundred glittering rooms at his Palace at Versailles, his courtiers would fall to their knees and shade their eyes from his royal face as if from the sun itself.

Times change, I guess, because when U.S. marshals led Manuel “the Sun King” Perrine into the federal courtroom in his prison jumpsuit that Monday morning, falling to my knees completely slipped my mind. And instead of looking away, I stared nothing but daggers at the murdering son of a bitch.

I wasn’t the only one in a lather at the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse that morning. One of the dozen off-duty cops and federal agents who had come out in support of Hughie and the other murdered officers stood and began loudly letting Perrine know exactly what he thought of him. The newly appointed federal judge, Susan Baym, banged her gavel, but instead of shying away from the four-letter barrage, the cartel head turned toward the heckler, his double-cuffed hands to his ear, as though he were a TV wrestler playing to the crowd.

Perrine looked thinner now than when I arrested him. A goatee enhanced the angles of his face. Even in his jumpsuit, he carried himself well-head up, broad shoulders back, an almost military bearing. Probably the only thing off about his elegant visage was the sharp bend in his nose, which I’d put there when I’d broken it for him.

Oh, well, I thought, smiling when I saw it. Even into charmed lives a little rain must fall.

Already some in the press were gushing about the man’s money and European taste and manners. Vanity Fair had done a three-page spread that featured photos of Perrine in several different designer suits.

Despite his obvious elegance, I didn’t for a split second forget who we were dealing with here. I’d seen some of the videotaped beheadings and castrations he had ordered, and heard witnesses testify about several of the horrific murders he had personally participated in. In one instance, he had captured a rival drug dealer at a Chihuahua nightclub and killed all the members of his family one by one in front of the detained crowd. I don’t know which suit he’d been wearing as he poured a bottle of grain alcohol over the man’s wife and lit her up, but I’m sure it was haute couture.

Perrine was living proof that evil existed in the world. Excuse me for not giving a shit about his penchant for stylish cufflinks.

Perrine continued his strut to the defendant’s table, where his team of lawyers was waiting for him. The head of his defense team was an affable, bony, middle-aged Washington lawyer named Arthur Boehme. Tara had told me that Boehme had just completed successfully defending a hedge fund manager in an insider trading case for a fee that ran into the tens of millions. I’d read a New York magazine article in which Boehme had said that the law was so important to him that he’d represent the devil himself.

I shook my head as Perrine sat down beside him.

The lawyer very well may have gotten his wish.

Perrine leaned back and leisurely took in the courtroom, as though he were a VIP on a private architectural tour. He peered at the dark mahogany in the paneling, the milling in the high, coffered ceiling, the great seal of the United States District Court, set in heavy bronze above the judge’s bench. As he nodded with satisfaction at the august setting, another one of his lawyers, a tall, elegant ash-blond woman, sat down beside him. Perrine leaned in and spoke into her ear, a smile on his lips, his long finger wagging the air to emphasize some point he was making.

After fifteen minutes, the courtroom doors opened and a large group of potential jurors came in for the voir dire. Each candidate stated his or her name and occupation, and the lawyers from both sides took turns asking questions. They asked the candidates if they had any family members who were currently incarcerated, if they knew anyone in law enforcement. At one point, Arthur Boehme asked a hairdresser if she’d ever heard about the “alleged” Mexican drug cartels.

“Alleged” cartels, I thought, wanting to vomit. If only the thirty-five thousand people the cartels had killed in the decade-long Mexican drug war could be “allegedly” dead.

As the process ground on, I noticed something that I’d never seen before. After each potential juror gave his or her name, the lawyers on both sides started typing into laptops. Sometimes they’d read something, then tug at the questioning lawyer’s sleeve, and that person would be dismissed. After a while, I realized the lawyers were probably scouring social networking sites to find out about the candidates and their opinions. As a cop, I’d often do it to get a read on suspects and witnesses. Note to self: stay off Facebook.

After an hour or so, only three potential jurors had been selected-a female editor at a university press who lived in Flushing, Queens, a fortyish female occupational therapist from Staten Island, and a heavyset, smiley Hispanic guy who ran the food concessions at the Bronx Zoo.

I checked the time on my phone. I’d love to spend all day watching the total ridiculousness of these expensive lawyers, but it was my day off and I had places to go and multiple children to attend to.

As I stood, I exchanged eye contact with Tara where she sat with the other lawyers on the prosecution side. We’d already had a good laugh about her Saturday night antics. Apparently, she’d forgotten to read the “do not drink alcohol” fine print on some prescription meds she’d just taken and couldn’t apologize enough. I told her not to worry about it-with my ten kids, I was an expert at tucking people in.

Tara gave me a quick wave and a smile, and as I turned to leave, I caught Perrine out of the corner of my eye. He was turned around in his seat, facing me. We looked at each other for a beat. I thought one of my molars might crack as I smiled hard at this monster who was in the process of being brought to the justice he so richly deserved.

I yawned elaborately and waved bye-bye before I slowly headed for the courtroom door.

CHAPTER 34

THE COURT OFFICER break room was in the Marshall Courthouse’s hot, musty basement, just off the north stairwell. At four minutes past 10:00 a.m., there were three officers there on break-a white, mustached twenty-two-year veteran officer named Tom Porte and two recent hires, Ronald Pinzano, a short and stout Asian ex-marine, and Stacy Mays, a young black man who’d become a father for the first time three days before.

The armed and uniformed men were used to frequent breaks and delays in the cases they were assigned to and were seated at a table playing a game of hearts when the door opened behind them. As they glanced up from their cards, they noticed a Hispanic janitor smiling at them from the doorway. If there was anything distinguishing about him, it was that he was short and very stocky. Clutched in his wide fist was a coffee mug with the words I SEE DUMB PEOPLE emblazoned across it.

“Help you?” Officer Mays said, eyeing him.

“May… I… use?” the janitor said in halting English as he gestured the mug toward the microwave in the break room’s corner.

“Mi casa es su casa,” Tom Porte said as he picked up a card.

The janitor nodded and grinned as he quickly crossed the room and put the coffee mug into the bulky old microwave. There were loud beeps as he pressed buttons, followed by a loud hum.

“Hey, buddy. How’s ol’ Pedro in maintenance doing?” Officer Pinzano said from the table. “Is he back from his knee surgery?”

The janitor turned, smiling blankly, and stared at the officer.

“Thank you,” he said, nodding. “Thank you. Thank you.”

“Thank you?” the pudgy Asian said, shaking his shaved head in disgust as he threw down a card. “These friggin’ illegals. This cat doesn’t speak word one of English, and here he is living high on the hog with a government union job. Hell, he probably makes more than us.”

“Speak for yourself, Ron,” Tom Porte said, raising a white eyebrow. “The way you sponge up the overtime, some of the judges around here make less than you.”

The janitor kept smiling as the microwave continued to hum. Two minutes passed. Three.

“Jeez, this guy is really frying that joe,” Mays commented as the bell finally dinged.

“You like that coffee muy caliente, huh, buddy?” Tom Porte said with a wink.

The janitor had his back to the men as he very carefully removed the cup from the oven. Next to the microwave, a radio played at low volume. The zany percussion of a xylophone, the familiar station ID of a local news channel, filled the small room as the janitor reached out with his free hand and turned it up.

“Sí. Muy, muy caliente,” the janitor said, turning deftly with the cup and flinging the boiling baby oil he’d just superheated into the officers’ faces.

The scalding oil made a crisp, sizzling sound as it made contact with the men’s skin. As Tom Porte screamed, the janitor stepped forward and nimbly removed the.38-caliber revolver from his holster and aimed the gun. Three shots and less than ten seconds later, all three men were down on the concrete floor, flailing in a mess of blood splatter and baby oil and fallen cards.

Officer Stacy Mays shook horribly as he bled out, his ruined head beating against the cement almost in time to the xylophone music. The janitor watched with a bored expression. He counted backward from twenty as he waited for the twitching to slow and then stop.

He turned down the radio and peeked out the door. Nothing. Not even a footstep. He needed to be quick now. He tucked the gun into his waistband and knelt down to remove the weapons from the bodies of the other two men. He would have much preferred something from his own vast collection, of course, but there was no way to get them through the metal detectors.

Getting the guns was the first part of the plan. The second part was to go to courtroom 203 upstairs and put them to use.

The killer’s name was Rodrigo Kahlo, and he had been flown to New York on a private jet from Grand Bahama Island the day before. In comfortable semiretirement from cartel work, he had at first declined the highly dangerous American contract offered to him by Perrine’s men. Then they had kidnapped his family.

As an assassin in good standing for the Perrine cartel, he never thought that the tables would turn like this. But there you had it. The squeeze was on now with the boss in jail, and the shit had rolled downhill, right onto him.

It wasn’t for the lives of his wife or even his children that he had agreed to do this. Living with them 24-7 over the last few comfortable years, he’d learned they were vain, selfish, stupid people, takers and connivers, especially the children. No, it was for his mother, who lived with them, that he’d finally said okay. His mother had lived her hard life like a saint, and he could not let her die as he’d seen so many die-in horror and pain and fear.

He let out a breath and checked the loads in the men’s guns. His mind was already thinking ahead to the floor plans he had memorized. Where the stairs were, the elevator, the layout of the hallway.

Finally, he looked down at the men he had just slain and knelt down and said the prayer that he always said before facing danger.

“Most Holy Death,” he said in Spanish. “Help me to overcome all obstacles, and may my house be filled with all the virtues of your protection.”

He stood and opened the door. Like all good assassins, he feared just one thing now.

Not death, but failure.

CHAPTER 35

HALF AN HOUR after I left the voir dire session, I was on a bench in City Hall Park, three blocks south of the courthouse, becoming one with nature. Actually, I was feeding the last of my early lunch of an Au Bon Pain croissant to a depressed-looking squirrel, which, for lower Manhattan, is about as Walden Pond as it gets.

I definitely needed the time-out. Like most cops, I pride myself on being bulletproof, body and soul, but I couldn’t deny how troubling it was to see Perrine again. I couldn’t stop thinking about Hughie, about those last terrible moments in the cramped medical office where he’d given up his life for me. I wondered if I ever would.

So I took an early lunch break with a side of squirrel therapy. Not exactly textbook, I know, but don’t knock it till you try it. It works for bag ladies, right? What I truly couldn’t wait to do was embark on my long-awaited vacation to the old Bennett lake house up in Orange County. I love New York City from the Battery to the Bronx, but it grinds on you. You need to get it off of you from time to time or you’ll go nuts.

I was finishing my coffee when the first squad car screamed past. I didn’t think much of it, but then two more zipped by less than a minute later, sirens wailing. Knowing something was up, I stood and canned the remnants of my lunch and went to the park railing alongside Centre Street, where the squad cars had headed.

I let out a breath and bit my lip. In the distance, I could see that all three cop cars were halted, their roof lights bubbling, in front of the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse, where I’d been all morning. Their doors were flung open, and things most definitely did not look good.

I started walking north, back toward the courthouse. I took out my cell phone and speed-dialed my squad room to see if they had heard anything over the radio. After four rings, I gave up and called Tara. My stomach lurched as I got kicked into her voice mail. I stared at the flashing blue and red lights ahead of me.

Whatever was happening, it was bad. I picked up my pace. I could feel it, practically taste it, in the cloying, warm air.

More cop cars were screeching up to the front of the majestic courthouse steps as I dropped all pretense and sprinted across Foley Square. I grabbed a female cop who was hollering into her radio by the curb.

“What’s up?” I said as I showed her my shield. “Is it Perrine? The drug trial?”

“I don’t know. Our call was a ten ten in a courtroom on the second floor.”

Good God! Ten ten was the code for “shots fired,” and Perrine’s trial was on the second floor, I thought as I went up the massive stone stairs two by two.

I badged my way through the chaotic crowd in the lobby. People were pouring out of the elevators and stairwells, some talking on cell phones, some crying. It looked like they were in the midst of an evac. My drawn gun set off a buzzer as I hustled through the metal detector against the stream of people exiting the building.

As I was going up the steps, I was almost knocked down by U.S. marshals as they came running down.

With Perrine!

“What is it? What’s happening?” I yelled at them, but they just blew past me into a stairwell. That’s when I heard several shots above me, followed by screaming.

I topped the stairwell, flew down the hallway, and came through the wooden double doors of the courtroom, preceded by my Glock. Off to the right, by the jury box, cops were yelling and swinging, and piling on top of a man. I saw it was a Hispanic man dressed in Dickies work clothes.

I was almost run down as the potential jurors and journalists and spectators who had ducked down between the benches bolted in a stampede for the door. I looked toward the front of the courtroom and saw the holes in the paneling beside the district court seal, huge chunks blown out of the mahogany. Beneath it, the court stenographer was giving CPR to someone.

I spotted robes and realized it was the judge, Susan Baym.

I jumped to the side as a team of EMTs rushed past me toward the fallen woman. I ran up to the front of the room, frantically looking around for Tara. She jumped up and hugged me when I found her, wide-eyed, hiding behind the overturned prosecutor’s table with the rest of the lawyers on her team.

“Tara, it’s okay. It’s over. They got the guy. What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Tara said, staring over to where the EMTs were slipping the judge onto a stretcher. “We were doing the voir dire, and then all of a sudden this janitor was here, firing. He shot the court officer, and then went straight for the judge. He shot her three or four times, Mike. Right in the side of her head. In front of everybody. When more court officers showed up, he barricaded himself behind the judge’s bench. Every time someone would run for the door, he’d pop up and start shooting again. We didn’t know what the hell to do.”

Tara followed the stretcher with her eyes as the EMTs left.

“Perrine assassinated the judge who was going to preside at his own trial, Mike,” Tara said, and started crying. “Don’t you understand? They do this kind of thing in Mexico, and now it’s here, too. Are we safe, Mike? Is my family safe? What the hell is this?”

I stood there, patting her hand like an idiot as my mind reeled.

“It’s okay. It’s over. They got the guy,” I repeated.

CHAPTER 36

UNBELIEVABLE, I THOUGHT as I stood in the court officers’ basement break room, breathing through my tie.

If there was a word in my vocabulary that I overused, “unbelievable” was it, but was there any other way to describe the sight of three court officers lying dead at your feet, shot point-blank in the head? Not only had they been shot, but it looked like their faces had been scalded or chemically burned.

Day one, I thought blinking at the carnage. This was only day one of jury selection?

I went back upstairs to the courtroom. The medical examiner team was just about to zip up the green body bag over the assassin when I noticed a ribbon of green tattoo ink on the man’s neck.

“Hold up a sec,” I said to the medical examiner’s people as I unbuttoned the man’s work shirt.

I nodded to myself as I squatted over the dead guy. The man had another tattoo, this one over his heart. It looked like a skull wearing a woman’s red shawl. I’d seen it before on the chests of both Perrine’s driver and the shooter I’d killed at Madison Square Garden.

The tattoo was a depiction of Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, a deity at the center of a religious cult that many of the cartels were involved in. The cult was a weird mix of Catholicism and Aztec religion, and Santa Muerte was a kind of evil Virgin Mary figure. Some of the cartel people would offer blood sacrifices to her in exchange for a peaceful death. Sometimes, Mexican drug dealers would even be found shot dead on altars dedicated to Santa Muerte. It was primitive, out there, very spooky stuff.

I was still squatting and staring at the tattoo when my phone rang.

“Bennett here,” I said.

“Hey, pig. How’s your morning? So far so good?” a woman said in Spanish-accented English.

No! I thought, immediately jumping to my feet. My heart started beating like crazy. Though I’d never heard her speak, I knew exactly who it was.

I was talking to the gold-eyed witch who had killed Hughie.

“Look around and take in your world now,” she said. “Death has come, and she is thirsty. She will not leave until you let him go.”

“Ma’am, that’s not how it works here in the good ol’ USA,” I said, trying to recover. “This is how it works. First, we’re going to catch every last one of you, and then we’re going to put you either in jail or the morgue. Got it? Jail or morgue.”

It put a chill down my spine when she laughed. I remembered the unhinged giggle from the moment before she killed Hughie.

“You think you have authority over him because we are in America? You think those bars and walls can actually contain him? You think you are teaching him a lesson, but it is you who will learn. You have offended him. Do you know what happens when you offend a living god?”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Um… floor seats for the Knicks games?”

“Laugh now. You will cry later, I assure you,” she said, and hung up.

“Unbelievable,” I mumbled as I closed my phone and my eyes.

CHAPTER 37

I MADE SOME calls and found out they were keeping Perrine in a maximum-security protective custody unit back at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, around the corner from the courthouse.

It was about two in the afternoon, after a lot of favor collecting, when I was allowed to conduct an interview with Perrine concerning the murdered judge.

In an interview room on the second floor, with a one-way mirror along one wall, we sat on plastic chairs on opposite sides of a table. As the guards brought him in, Perrine didn’t look concerned in the slightest about the bloodbath at the courthouse. In fact, he looked happy and at ease, as relaxed as a man who’d just gotten his hair cut.

“You wish to speak with me, Detective?” Perrine said in his weird, accented English as he was handcuffed to the cinder-block wall.

The guard left and closed the door.

“It’s so nice to have a visitor. What shall we talk about?” Perrine said, crossing his legs and leaning back.

“I don’t know. The usual,” I said. “Sports, the weather, your upcoming lethal injection.”

Perrine laughed.

“You think I ordered this hit of the judge, yes?” he said, rocking his chair back and forth. “But you are wrong. I had nothing to do with it. Some men get excited, and they do things. It is the same with a beautiful woman. People fight over her. Is she to blame if someone is hurt?”

“Interesting analogy,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “Since you’re such an insightful guy, maybe you could shed a little light on that skull chick you guys keep drawing on yourselves. She’s what? A cartoon? Like SpongeBob SquarePants?”

He looked at me hard, with a funny smile on his face.

“I would not take La Santa Muerte, or, more properly La Santisima Muerte, so lightly, my friend. Some say the old gods of Mexico are still alive. Who is anyone to dispute it? La Santisima Muerte may seem repulsive to your stale, modern mind, but she and her message and her protections are sound. Death is the only truth in life. Even Catholics believe this.”

“Wait a second. You actually worship death?” I said, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

“In a way, yes,” Perrine said. “Death wins eventually, always, and every time.”

“But I don’t get it,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

“Get what?” he said.

“If death is so great, why don’t you put your money where your mouth is and kill yourself? I mean, go for it. Please.”

He shook his head.

“You do not understand,” he said.

“I understand perfectly,” I said raising a finger and pointing it at him. “It’s you who doesn’t get it. You don’t worship death, Perrine. You worship murder. You worship power and evil and hurting people.”

Perrine sat up with a loud snap of his chair.

“What I believe and what my men believe is… ”

He suddenly stopped and caught hold of himself. He smiled as he smoothed his jumpsuit.

“My apologies, Detective. I promised myself that I would not lose my composure, but here I am letting my temper get the best of me.”

He dropped his voice into a whisper as he leaned forward, staring into my eyes.

“Now, let us stop fucking around, yes? I have a one-time offer for you, and it is quite a deal, so consider it closely. I give you two hundred fifty million dollars. Let me repeat, that is two hundred fifty million dollars, and you get me out of here. Offshore account. My girl’s number is already on your phone. You’ll have access within two hours.”

“What?” I said, stifling a laugh.

“You do not think I am serious?” he said, light flashing in his weird, faded-blue eyes. “I am a man of very considerable means, but what can money do for me here in this place? We need to get rolling immediately. What’s the American expression? ‘Window of opportunity’? Our window of opportunity here is closing very rapidly.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Or, more precisely, I couldn’t believe how open and confident Perrine was as he offered his bribe. He truly seemed to believe that I would take his blood money.

Since time was of the essence, I decided to give him my answer right away. My right hand suddenly reached under the table, grabbed one of the legs of his chair, and pulled it. Perrine yelled as he slammed down backward onto the concrete floor.

I heard the guard, watching through the one-way mirror, come running. Perrine cursed a blue streak at me as he tried to scramble to his feet.

“When are you going to get it into that thick skull of yours, Perrine?” I said as the locks on the door clicked open. “You’re in the big city now, and no matter how much money or how many freakish drug soldiers you have, I’m going to make you pay for all the evil you’ve done.

“Do you know why? It’s simple. I’m going to do it because it’s my job. I’m the garbageman and you’re the garbage, so into the back of the truck and on to the dump we go. Comprenez-vous?”

As the guards took him away, Perrine tried to spit on me but ended up just spitting on himself. As he began to curse at me again, I smiled. I knew all along that talking to Perrine would be useless. The only reason I’d come up here was to piss him off as much as I could. Knocking his ass onto the floor had been icing on the cake.

Finally, my day was taking a turn for the better, I thought as I headed back toward the room where they were holding my gun.

This was even better than squirrel therapy.

CHAPTER 38

BRIGHT AND EARLY Wednesday morning, I was finally doing it. Finally and happily hitting the road on the long-awaited Bennett family vacation. It was smooth sailing, too. Well, at least for the first five blocks it was. As I pulled onto the West Side Highway, the air conditioner of the beat-up rented bus I was driving began hosing my knees with ice water.

I wouldn’t have minded so much except that the bus had a stick shift, and we were in the middle of bumper-to-bumper traffic. For the better part of an hour, it was clutch and soak and brake and soak and clutch. To make matters worse, all my wiseacre kids were scrunched down in their seats behind me so as not to be spotted by anyone they knew.

When I pulled up in front of our building in the Cheez-It-colored minibus, I guess Trent’s cry of, “Hey, look, everyone! Dad bought a dorkmobile!” summed up the general consensus on the transportation. We usually travel in our Ford Econoline van, but with all our luggage, even that was too small for my clan of cave bears.

And the kids were right. The bus was a beat-up yellow eyesore. Luckily for me, though, as a well-seasoned dad, I had long ago become immune to embarrassment on matters of style.

Yet even an incontinent bus and my ten mortified dependents couldn’t remove the smile from my face as I made my escape from New York. No price was too high for the privilege of not having to look at or think about Perrine or body bags or my bosses, at least for a little while.

Thankfully, the traffic, along with my kids’ complaining groans, finally thinned out after we put the George Washington Bridge and its truly mind-blowing vehicular congestion in our rearview mirror. I really couldn’t wait to get up to the old family house on Orange Lake. This year, we had the place to ourselves for the last two months of summer. I couldn’t wait to force-feed a little peace and quiet and country living to my kids, who thought the New York City border was the very edge of the earth.

My mood lifted even more five minutes later, as we came over the span of the Henry Hudson Bridge and I saw the majestic river sparkling far below. Even the kids seemed duly impressed with the massive Hudson and the stark cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades.

“This is it, kids,” I said as we finally came through the toll-booth. “Full speed ahead for the SS Dorkmobile. Northward ho!”

I put the Bennett magic bus in the left-hand lane and gave her all she had, which turned out to be about fifty-five. About an hour later, I knew we were home free as we got off I-684 onto westbound I-84. I always loved that section of I-84 between Connecticut and the Hudson, where it’s nothing but trees and rugged hills.

I was taking in the distant Catskill Mountains vista near East Fishkill when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Hey, Dad,” Jane suddenly said in my ear. “A sign back there said Ludingtonville. Is that named after Sybil Ludington?”

“Actually, yes. I believe it is.”

“Sybil who?” said Bridget, pulling out her earbuds.

“Sybil Ludington. She was only like the coolest sixteen-year-old girl ever,” Jane said, turning to her little sister. “In the Revolutionary War, she got on a horse and warned everyone in the New York militia that the British were coming. She was like Paul Revere, only better because she had to ride farther and faster. This is awesome, Dad,” she said, patting me on the shoulder. “I didn’t know this was going to be a historical trip.”

“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” I said.

“Tell me I didn’t just hear a history lesson,” Ricky yelled from a few rows back. “News flash, Lady Einstein. Just because Dad is making us ride this stupid school bus doesn’t mean we’re at school.”

Eddie raised his hand.

“Ooh, ooh, Teacher Jane! Please finish your lesson about the Ride of Sybil Paddington, and when you’re done, may I have permission to open the window and hurl?”

“Enough, ye scalawags,” Father Seamus Bennett announced from the last row. “There’ll be no hurling on this bus except if it’s the sport that Irishmen play.”

I looked over at Mary Catherine, who was trying not to grin at me over the Anne Rivers Siddons paperback in her hand.

“Are we there yet?” I whined.

CHAPTER 39

THE LAST OF my thoughts and concerns about my job and the city flew away as we crossed the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge. This was always the best part of the trip when I was a kid: the final marker that said good-bye, concrete and crowds and sweating on the subway, and hello, swim trunks and blue sky and summer fun.

“Speaking of road markers,” I said out loud, suddenly remembering something and putting on the bus’s turn signal.

“Everything okay?” Mary Catherine said as I pulled off the first exit after the bridge into the city of Newburgh. “Don’t we need to head up a few more exits?”

“I have to make a quick stop first,” I said as I made a left onto North Robinson Avenue.

We drove through Newburgh. Like many northeastern towns on navigable waters, the small city had had its heyday back in the 1800s, when goods traveled by ship. You could still see that nineteenth-century history reflected in its old oak-lined streets, its red-brick factories, its rambling Victorian houses. I always thought it had a faint resemblance to San Francisco, with its quaint old structures and steep streets that sloped down toward the majestic river.

But as we continued deeper into town, I started noticing changes, and they weren’t for the better. The city, even when I was a kid, had never been exactly bustling, but I definitely didn’t remember this many boarded-up buildings and businesses. Actually, as I passed a 99 cents store and an Internet café that advertised wire-transfer service to “Centro y Sudamérica,” I wondered if I’d made a wrong turn and was now rolling through a grittier section of New York City.

I made some turns and got lost once before I finally found what I was looking for.

Mary gaped out the window as I stopped the bus.

“Hot dogs, Mike?” she said. “We have hot dogs in the cooler.”

“These aren’t hot dogs,” I said. “These are Pete’s hot dogs. It’s a family tradition. My dad always stopped here first thing to kick off the summer. Just you wait. They’ll knock your flip-flops off.”

I picked up a baker’s dozen loaded with lots of Gulden’s mustard and sauerkraut. I sighed as I snapped into the first bite. Tube-steak heaven. The dogs were as perfect as I remembered. Pete’s hadn’t changed one bit. The kids seemed to like them, too. At least they couldn’t complain or aggravate each other while they were chewing.

I closed my eyes as I took a sip of orange soda. When I open them again, I’ll be twelve, I thought. My first summer with braces and E.T. playing in the movie house down the block.

I opened them, but instead of traveling back to the simpler days of yesteryear, I watched as a tricked-out Acura rolled by the hot dog stand, the thump of its megawatt rap music like a heart under a stethoscope. Not only that, but the two tough-looking Hispanic males in the front seat glared at me and my kids with silent malevolence until the light turned green and they peeled away. What was that all about?

I thought about Perrine for a second before dismissing it. It was just a coincidence. Had to be. I was just being paranoid.

“Okay, kids, back in the bus,” I said as I wiped mustard off my chin with a napkin. “This city living is for the birds. Time to get off the grid.”

CHAPTER 40

TWENTY MINUTES AFTER our hot dog lunch, we made a turn off a forested road and rolled the bus over a tree-lined gravel driveway to its final stop.

I couldn’t stop smiling as the old rambling lakeside cabin came into view. It looked the same as I remembered it, as if I’d traveled back in time. Any second, the screen door would creak open and out would come my grandma and uncles and aunts and all my cousins, waving and smiling and sunburned.

The vacation house had been in the Bennett family for a couple of generations, until Seamus’s brother, Cosmo, retired from the fire department and moved in year-round. Cosmo had died a few years before and in his will gave the old girl back to the family as a whole to be used as a vacation place again.

“So what do you think?” I said to Seamus as he stepped over beside me.

Seamus had been a skilled carpenter, among other things, before he had become a priest, and he and his brother, Cosmo, and a few of their friends had built the place over the course of one long summer back in the early sixties.

Seamus took a deep breath as he stared at it. His blue eyes were wet, misted over.

“I remember sitting with Grandma out on the back porch, and we’d hear that sound of tires on the gravel, and you had to see her face light up,” Seamus said. “Thirty years would disappear in a second because the family was together, her children and grandchildren.”

He looked down at the ground.

“God, she was a beautiful woman. I still miss her. This place brings back so many memories,” he said.

“Let’s go make some more, Seamus,” I said, putting my arm around him as we came up the creaky steps.

Even inside, it looked the same. There was the same massive bay window in the back that looked out over a faded dock and the mile-long lake. I smirked up at the old deer head on the wall, which we used for games of hat toss. My thirst for nostalgia ended abruptly in the kitchen when I realized we would be using the same old hit-or-miss 1960s appliances.

In the family room, I walked over to the wall where some old framed photographs were hanging beneath a mounted boat oar. I took down the one that showed two rows of grinning men above the caption THE SHAMROCK HUNTING & FISHING CLUB.

“Kids, come here. Have a look at this!” I yelled.

Everyone ran over. Seamus rolled his eyes when he saw what I was holding.

“Who can guess who this is?” I said, pointing to a strapping, shirtless, handsome young man in the back row of the photo.

“That’s not Grandpa Seamus, is it?” said Mary Catherine in shock.

“Hubba-hubba,” said my eldest, Juliana, squeezing Seamus’s bicep. “Pleased to meet you, Monsignor Stud Muffin.”

Everyone laughed.

“No, Daddy,” said eight-year-old Chrissy, shaking her head at the photo. “That’s not Grandpa Seamus. Grandpa Seamus is old, silly.”

“Yes, Daddy is silly, isn’t he?” a red-faced Seamus said, putting the picture back on the wall. “Who’s ready for some badminton?” he said, making a beeline for the yard.

CHAPTER 41

THE NEXT MORNING, after preparing a late breakfast fit for a king-or a dozen starving wolverines-I took to the water. By a little past noon, the only thing between me and my most natural state was an inner tube and my surfer Jams. Sun on my face, heels trailing in the cool water as I floated gently down the lake, my only earthly concern was keeping the adult beverage prepared for me by the great people at Anheuser-Busch upright on my stomach.

I took another hit of my red, white, and blue Budweiser tallboy, squinted up at the tiny clouds high above me, and smiled. The Mike Bennett stress reduction program was going swimmingly indeed.

Off to my right came the occasional sound of my kids laughing and screaming as they cannonballed off the house’s faded old dock. Seamus, who had already swum the entire length of the lake earlier that morning, was teaching them how to swim. Or at least how not to drown.

Besides a volleyball tournament scheduled for three, I was planning on filling my day with a massive amount of nothing except kicking back and letting the pristine lake take me hither and yon.

But plans change. Sometimes drastically.

It was about two o’clock, as I lay there in a beery, sun-dazzled state, when I heard the whistle. When I sat up, I saw Mary Catherine waving from the distant dock. I looked over for a panicked moment to see if it had anything to do with any of the kids in the water, but it looked like everyone was in the backyard playing volleyball.

Mary Catherine whistled and waved some more. Something was up.

“I knew it,” I said as I started kicking and splashing back toward the house. It had been too quiet for too long.

“Sorry to bother you, Mike. It’s probably nothing,” Mary Catherine said as I finally made it back and tossed the tube up onto the dock.

Unfortunately, one glance at the concerned look on her face as I pulled my dripping self out of the lake said the opposite.

“Okay. I’m here. What’s wrong?” I said.

“It’s Brian and Eddie. They left to go to the pizza place down the road about an hour ago, and they’re not back yet. I called and texted Brian’s phone, but it seems like maybe the battery is dead. I just sent Seamus down the street to see if maybe they went to the neighbor’s. They weren’t there, but the neighbor said when he passed the pizza place, he might have seen Brian and Eddie talking to two girls and a teenager with a car.”

No wonder Mary Catherine was looking concerned. Brian was sixteen but Eddie was only thirteen, and they were hanging around some older kids and girls? It just didn’t sound right.

“A car? What kind of car?” I said, pissed. We’d had a big family meeting with the older ones about always making sure to let people know where they were.

“A black convertible,” Mary Catherine said, biting at a thumbnail.

“A black convertible?!” I repeated after a frustrated breath. “Oh, well, that’s just great. Maybe they’ll learn how to drag race. Let me get dressed, and I’ll go find them.”

“Do you think they’re in trouble?” she said.

“No, no, Mary Catherine. I’m sure it’s probably nothing. I mean, how much trouble could they possibly get into up here in the sticks?”

CHAPTER 42

FROM THE BACKSEAT of the growling Mustang convertible, Eddie Bennett wiped the blowing hair out of his eyes, looked out at the green blur of passing roadside trees, and shook his head.

He couldn’t believe it. He thought coming up here into the country was going to be dullsville 24-7, but wow, had he gotten it all wrong. Right off the bat, as he and Brian walked into the country-road pizza place, they met two girls, Jessica and Claire. Not just any girls, either. They were older, pretty high school girls wearing Daisy Duke shorts and tank tops and lots of makeup. They started talking to Brian first, joking with him, but after a little while, they were saying how cute Eddie was and asking him if he liked older women.

“Come on, we’re going to go for a ride,” the redheaded one, Claire, said, pulling out her cell phone as they came outside in the pizza joint’s parking lot.

“Yeah, come on. It’ll be fun,” added Jessica, who had wild, mascara-rimmed eyes. “Or do you have to go home and ask Mommy?”

“Of course we’ll go,” Brian said before Eddie could open his mouth.

Then Claire sent a text message, and this guy, Bill, a long-haired dude with tattoos and those freaky flesh-tunnel earrings, rolled up in a rumbling black Mustang convertible. It was hard to tell how old he was. At least twenty. Eddie had gotten into the backseat with Brian and Claire, and now here he was, roaring through these wild country roads with the top down and Mac Miller blasting from the stereo.

I ain’t gotta Benz, no just a Honda

But try to get my money like an Anaconda.

Who knew life could get this cool? Eddie thought.

“Hey, you dudes havin’ fun?” Bill said, turning down the stereo. “Jessica tells me you boys are from New York. That right?”

“Yep,” Brian said with gusto. “New York, New York. Born and raised.”

“Big Apple in the house!” Eddie tossed out, but then shut his mouth as Brian gave him a glare.

Bill nodded and looked at them in the rearview mirror. He had a long, weird-looking face, Eddie thought, like one of the elves from The Lord of the Rings. Kind of cool but also sort of creepy, actually. Eddie looked away.

“That’s cool,” Bill, the tattooed elf, said. “I love the city. It’s good to meet people who are down. Hey, I have an idea. I know a spot over in Newburgh where they sell some primo smoke, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Jessica started giggling in the front seat. She stopped as Bill gave her a long cold look.

“Problem is,” Bill continued, “I don’t like buyin’ on my own. You guys mind if I make a stop there and have ourselves a party? If you don’t, that’s cool, too. It’s a pretty hairy, scary block. I just thought it’d be no biggie since you were from New York and all.”

The girls grinned at each other then turned and stared at Brian expectantly. Eddie stared as well, his stomach getting a strange, light feeling in it, as though he were in the first car of a roller coaster right before the first drop.

“Let’s do it,” Brian said, pumping a fist.

Eddie sat there, blinking, trying to catch up. Everything was blurring by faster than the roadside trees. What had Brian just agreed to? To go buy weed? Dad would kill them. Hell, he was a cop. He’d arrest them first and then kill them. But never mind that. Brian was an athlete. He wouldn’t know one end of a cigarette from the other, let alone what to do with a joint if he saw one. He was just doing it because he liked the girls, Eddie realized.

Eddie opened his mouth to say something, but Brian glared him down again.

The Mustang slowed and then chirped to a stop. Eddie slid against the door hard as Bill the elf did a dust-raising U-turn.

“All righty, then, homies. Newburgh, here we come,” Bill said.

CHAPTER 43

THE MUSTANG FLEW over a couple of tiny back roads and then bumped over some railroad tracks onto a real road that had businesses on it. A BP gas station, a T.G.I. Friday’s, a Home Depot.

As they rolled up a hill into the city where they’d gotten hot dogs, Eddie’s stomach dropped again. He wanted to ask Brian why the hell they were doing all this, but when he turned, he could see why. Brian was busy kissing Claire. Great.

Eddie took out his new cell phone and saw 8 NEW MESSAGES pop up on the screen. They were all from his dad, he knew. They were already in trouble. He slid the phone back into his pocket. This wasn’t fun anymore. It was crazy.

The Mustang swerved onto a side street that headed steeply down toward the Hudson. They passed old houses. One of them had plywood nailed over its windows. Was a hurricane coming or something? Eddie thought.

Bill turned down the radio before they pulled onto a narrow road. It looked like something out of Grand Theft Auto IV. Sidewalks strewn with couches and tires, abandoned cars, graffiti all over everything.

When they suddenly stopped, Eddie felt his lungs seize up. On both sides of the street, sitting on parked cars and the stoops of crumbling, haunted-looking houses, were a dozen or more really muscular black dudes. Most of them were wearing red-red ball caps, red do-rags.

These are gang members, Eddie thought with sudden terror. Actual real-life gang members.

Jessica, in the front seat, laughed as she lit a cigarette.

Bill jumped out of the car and walked over to one of the black kids and slapped hands. They talked for a second, and then Bill came back.

“He says I have to follow him into the backyard for a second to do the buy. Will you come and watch my back?”

Staring at Bill, the evil elf, Eddie realized that he was even older than twenty. More like thirty. He was like a junkie or something. Junkies and gangbangers! What the hell had they gotten themselves into?

“Don’t do it, Brian,” Eddie whispered to his brother. “This is bad.”

Brian looked as scared as Eddie.

“Yeah, Brian. Don’t do it,” Jessica whispered and laughed again.

Brian bit his lip as he looked at her. Then he climbed out of the backseat onto the sidewalk.

“It’s okay. Stay here, Eddie,” Brian said, blinking nervously at the gangsters across the street.

“No way. I’m not staying here by myself,” Eddie said, hopping out after his big brother.

Eddie tried not to make eye contact with any of the gang people as they walked across the street. Bill and the dealer or whoever he was crawled through a hole in a rusted chain-link fence. Following Brian through the fence into an alley strewn with broken bottles, Eddie smelled what he thought had to be weed. He felt like crying. He would never listen to a rap song again. This was so wrong.

They’d just come to the end of the alley, between two crazy dilapidated wooden houses, when it happened. There was a yell, and then Bill and the black guy just bolted, suddenly running behind the house on the left.

Stunned, Brian and Eddie just stood there as a new guy, another black teen, jumped off the back porch of the crumbling house on the right. He had a do-rag tied around his face like a cowboy bad guy. Like everything else he wore, it was red. Red basketball shorts, red Nike sneakers, red tank top.

Blood-red, Eddie thought as the black youth raised his hand, and they saw the gray-and-black gun he was holding.

“Eddie! Run!” Brian said, pushing him back in the direction they had come from.

The guy just started shooting. No warning. No “Get out of here” or “Gimme your money.” It was like a nightmare somehow made real in the middle of that bright and sunny summer day. Someone was actually shooting at them!

Eddie fell to the cracked concrete as Brian collapsed next to him, screaming. Eddie put his arm around Brian and felt wetness at his back. No! What? Brian was bleeding! He was shot. They were getting killed. How could this be happening?

Hovering over his brother and trying to get out his cell phone, Eddie shook as the gun cracked again and again. He’d actually gotten his phone out and opened when he felt something hot and sharp tug at his left shoulder. The phone clattered on the cement as Eddie fell facedown.

He cradled his throbbing arm. It felt scary and weird, like it was hanging on by a string, like it was about to fall off. When he looked up, Brian was hopping toward the street, the back of his white T-shirt splattered with blood and dirt. He fell through the rusted gate and started crawling over the sidewalk, screaming wildly. Eddie had never heard his brother scream so loud. He’d never heard anyone scream so loud.

What had they done? Eddie thought, looking up at the scary house beside him. He cried as he took in its graffiti, its high empty windows. He looked for his phone and saw it ten feet away, its screen cracked, its battery lying on the ground.

Mary Catherine wouldn’t find them. Dad wouldn’t find them. They were all alone now, Eddie thought. Bleeding and lost and alone.

CHAPTER 44

SIX O’CLOCK THAT evening found me trudging up a thick, wooded ridge a couple of miles east of the lake house. Sweating and swatting at bugs, I stopped on a deer path.

“Eddie! Brian!” I called at the trees for the thousandth time.

I stood there listening for a reply, but there was nothing. Nothing except the sound of crickets and the hot wind pushing the leaves.

I’d already been by the pizza parlor. The owner told me he had seen Eddie and Brian leave with two older teenage girls. That Eddie and Brian would run off with two mysterious older girls wasn’t that alarming. What was strange was that the owner said he had never seen the girls before. And why weren’t Brian and Eddie answering their phones?

After driving around and spotting no sign of them, I decided that maybe they had all gone to some teen hangout in the woods near the lake. The area, after all, was very secluded. Where else could they have gone?

As I walked through the forest, I had to force myself to stop scanning the underbrush for their bodies. I was being a paranoid cop. Eddie and Brian were just knuckleheads, young male teens in the midst of some hormone-inspired mischief. I would come upon them any moment up here in a clearing, having a beer party or something. We would all laugh about it after I grounded them for the rest of their natural lives.

I picked up my pace, broke into a half jog. Who was I kidding? This wasn’t normal. This was incredibly bad. Frantic and now almost physically sick with worry, I was not in a good place. The boys were nowhere. What the hell was I going to do?

The forest ended suddenly, and I arrived at a blacktop road. I looked around and spotted house foundations, a rusted dump truck, weeds growing up between stacks of concrete sewer drains. It was a development, I realized. An abandoned one that had probably run out of money after the real estate bubble burst.

Though it was a desolate place, I was heartened by the sight of it. It was just the kind of secluded place a couple of stupid young teen boys would bring some girls. Or was it the other way around these days?

I was a couple of hundred yards up the road, heading toward a windowless colonial, when my phone rang. It was Mary Catherine, back at the cabin.

“Mike!” she said, frantic. “The police just called.”

“The police?!”

“They said it was about Eddie and Brian. They wouldn’t tell me what. They said they had to talk to you immediately.”

Mary gave me the number as I hit the woods and started back for the cabin at a dead run.

Please let it be something minor, I thought as it rang. Maybe it was nothing. Some vandalism, maybe. Just the cops up here being strict.

“Newburgh PD,” came a voice as I crashed through the trees.

I stopped and leaned against a tree, sweat dripping from my face onto the screen of the phone.

“My name is Mike Bennett. Someone called about my sons, Eddie and Brian.”

“Hold, please.”

Oh, God. Let them be okay, I said to the Muzak.

“Mr. Bennett, I’m Detective William Moss,” a voice said a moment later. “Your boys were both shot this afternoon. You need to get to St. Luke’s Hospital.”

CHAPTER 45

SCREECHING OUT FROM the lake house minutes later, I ran every stop sign and blasted through every intersection with my hand on the horn. Coming across the Newburgh city line, I lost a hubcap as I put the bus up on the sidewalk to get around a double-parked pickup.

Dale Earnhardt wouldn’t have beaten me to the hospital in Newburgh. Not even with a head start.

“Stop it, Mike. Stop it! You’ll kill us!” Mary Catherine yelled, hanging on for dear life in the seat behind me.

I didn’t answer her. Hell, I could hardly hear her. Ever since I got the news about Eddie and Brian, I’d become separated from everything, as though I were looking out at the world through a numbing block of ice.

The phrase “Your boys were both shot this afternoon” kept playing and replaying through my head. How could this be happening? I kept asking myself. It was totally insane.

I came a hairbreadth from snapping through the hospital parking lot’s gate arm before I stopped in front of St. Luke’s emergency room with an enormous shriek of the brakes.

“Eddie and Brian Bennett,” I called to the nurse behind the counter inside.

A female doctor in surgical scrubs behind her spun around and waved Mary Catherine and me into an empty examination room.

The slender, fiftyish doctor’s name was Mary Ann Walker. She sat us down and made me have a paper cup of water before she explained what was going on.

“They were both shot with nine-millimeter rounds,” the doctor explained. “Eddie was shot in the shoulder, and Brian was hit in one of the scalene muscles in his neck, above his clavicle. We were able to remove the bullet in Eddie’s shoulder, but left the one in Brian’s neck for now.”

“Is that a good idea?” I asked.

“Actually, going in to get it would be more trouble than it’s worth and I’d just as well leave it in there. They both lost a significant amount of blood, but we were able to stabilize them. Their circulation and breathing and neurological function all seem to be completely normal. Treatment is basically the same as a puncture wound now. Some stitches and clean bandages and in time, they’ll completely heal.”

“What about internal damage?” I said.

The doctor shook her head.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Bennett. We are very vigilant in checking for internal tissue damage. After stabilizing the patient, we do a CT scan, since bullets can ricochet or break up. These, fortunately, did not. No major arteries or blood vessels or nerves were severed.”

“Thank God,” Mary Catherine and I said simultaneously.

“Your boys were lucky on several counts,” Dr. Walker continued. “Gunshot wounds are all about response time. Treatment needs to start before blood loss sends the victim into hypovolemic shock. Your son Brian made a lot of noise at the scene, and about a dozen people called nine-one-one. Your boys were in the emergency room within ten minutes.

“If you need to get shot, Newburgh is the place. We get an incredible number of shooting victims here. Everyone from the responding officers to the EMTs to the ER team is a veteran expert, and everyone did a terrific job.”

“Thank you, Doctor. Where are the boys now?” I said.

“We just finished stitching them up. They’re in recovery.”

“Can we see them?” Mary Catherine asked.

“They’ve both been sedated after all they’ve been through. They need sleep now. The morning would be better, Mrs. Bennett.”

I let the “Mrs. Bennett” go. So did Mary Catherine.

“We won’t bother them. We just need to see them,” I said.

Dr. Walker let out a breath. She pulled off her surgeon’s cap, showing a spill of red hair. She checked her slim stainless steel Rolex.

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

CHAPTER 46

THE BOYS WERE on the third floor, asleep in the recovery room. Dr. Walker wouldn’t let us go inside, so we crowded around the window in the door.

Standing there staring at them, it occurred to me how insane it is to be a parent. You go through this life, and it’s hard enough to keep yourself safe. When you have a kid, it’s like you take your heart and you just cross your fingers and hand it to each of your kids. I really, really felt like punching a hole through the glass in the door.

I knew I had to be strong, but memories of the death of Maeve, my late wife, flooded back. Still, to this day, I had nightmares about hospitals and waiting rooms. In addition to being ripped up, I was angry. This wasn’t fair. Our family had had enough pain. Why couldn’t this bullshit happen to someone else? Anyone else but us.

“Oh, they look pale, Mary Catherine. Look at them. Especially Eddie.”

She grabbed my hand.

“They’re going to be okay, Mike,” she said. “The doctor said so.”

“I don’t know. Look at them. Doctors lie all the time. Look at them.”

I teared up then, and when Mary Catherine saw it, she did the same. I don’t know how long we stood there like that, holding hands, while the boys slept.

I called Seamus at the lake house maybe an hour later.

“They’re going to be okay?” Seamus said. “But they were shot!”

“In the right places,” I assured him. “No organs or bones were hit. At least that’s what the doctor said.”

“Don’t listen to these quacks up here in Hicktown, Michael,” Seamus said angrily. “You need to figure out what’s really going on.”

My patience was wearing thin, but I knew the old man, like me, was just sick with worry.

“Seamus, what do you want me to do? Interrogate the hospital staff?”

“That would be a fine start,” he said. “And on that note, what did the police say? Who shot them? And how did they end up in Newburgh, miles from the lake house?”

When I looked up, a thin, middle-aged black man wearing a Newburgh PD jacket was standing in the hallway.

“I’m about to find out, Seamus. I’ll call you back.”

“Mr. Bennett, I’m Detective Moss,” the friendly cop said as he shook my hand. My first impression was that he looked and even sounded a little like the old Yankees player Willie Randolph. “So sorry about your kids. Someone told me you guys are up at Orange Lake on vacation. Is that right?”

I showed him my gold NYPD detective shield.

“I thought I was on vacation, Detective, but it seems like I’m back at work after all,” I said.

“Oh, wow. A cop. That’s just terrible. I have two girls your sons’ age myself. Please call me Bill. You must be going through hell, Mike. Can you walk me through what happened?”

“I was about to ask you the same question, Bill,” I said.

Moss twirled the pen in his fingers as he took out his notes.

“Around six this evening, we received a call of shots fired on Lander Street,” he said. “That’s actually not a rare occurrence. We get so many shootings there that the locals call it Blood Alley. After the shots-fired call, some nine-one-one calls came in about someone shot on the sidewalk. Our guys got there a minute before the EMTs. Both your boys were down on the sidewalk, bleeding.”

I shook my head in terrified disbelief. One second, my kids are splashing in the lake, the next, they’re shot down in the middle of some dangerous ’hood. How could that happen?

“It’s a drug area, I take it?” I said after another stunned moment.

“Yep. Crack and powder coke and heroin. Gangs run it. Lander is run by the Bloods.”

“The Bloods?” I said. “Like the L.A. Bloods gang?”

“One and the same,” DT Moss said with a nod. “The Bloods run the west side. We also have a heavy contingent of the Latin Kings gang to the east. They’re at war with each other right now.”

“A gang drug war? I vacation up here at my lake house every once in a while, but I had no idea. It’s that bad?”

Moss rubbed at his mustache as he nodded.

“Outside of New York City, Newburgh has the highest murder rate per capita in New York State. They’re starting to call us the Sixth Borough and the Little Apple, thanks to the heavyweight big-city crime stats. Too bad we don’t have thirty thousand cops to keep a lid on it. Anyway, can you think of any reason why your kids were there? I don’t even want to ask, but do either of them use drugs?”

“Drugs?! Over their dead bodies,” I said.

I saw Mary Catherine wince beside me.

“Sorry. Poor choice of words,” I said. “They met some girls is all I know. But how they got from Orange Lake to Newburgh, I don’t know. You’ve probably heard it as many times as I have, but they’re actually good kids. My whole family has been worried sick. We thought they’d gotten lost in the woods.”

“Well,” Detective Moss said, handing me his card. “The doc says they won’t be up for questioning until the morning. I’ll come back then. If you hear anything in the meantime, please give me a call. As a fellow service member, I’m going to go full press, Mike. Be with your family. We’ll find out who did this.”

CHAPTER 47

MARY CATHERINE AND I stayed over at the hospital. I would have said “slept over,” except we didn’t do any sleeping. We were still too shocked about the whole bizarre, horrible situation. Despite Dr. Walker’s assurances, we couldn’t help but worry that some horrendous complication would pop up unexpectedly.

As my late wife, Maeve, slowly died of cancer, I remember actually aching with worry-physically aching-as my entire self, body and soul, went around from moment to agonizing moment clenched like a fist. I felt that same full-body ache again as I paced the dim halls of the hospital. Of course I did. Old habits die hard. Just like riding a bike.

Around 6:00 a.m., after the morning shift nurse told me the boys were doing fine, I decided to go out and get some breakfast and coffee. After I picked up some takeout from a twenty-four-hour diner on Broadway, instead of heading back to the hospital, I decided to drive around.

Newburgh really had seen better days, I thought, shaking my head at the blighted streets. I cruised past whole blocks of abandoned two- and three-story row houses-decrepit blocks where the only thing functional on the listing structures seemed to be the jury-rigged satellite-TV dishes.

On one corner, I spotted rows of rum bottles and candles, a faded Mylar balloon tied to a Virgin Mary statue. It was a street shrine to someone who’d been murdered, I realized. There was even a picture of the victim, a handsome young Hispanic man, taped to the telephone pole above a stuffed hippo and a Happy Meal Pokémon toy.

I stopped at the address where Moss had told me my boys had been assaulted. I stared down the alleyway between two dilapidated Victorian row houses. The peeling, weather-battered clapboard on both houses made them look scoured and beaten, punished for some horrible crime. Bent and twisted metal poles from an old missing fence stuck up from the concrete in front of the old houses, as if the area had taken a direct artillery hit.

I turned off the bus and got out. Reluctantly. It was deserted and desolate this early, but it was definitely a scary-looking place. The only comfort I took as I headed down the alley was the Glock on my ankle.

I hadn’t taken more than a dozen steps when I saw it. The stain on the concrete. From my sons’ blood. Then I wasn’t afraid anymore. Just extremely pissed.

Who the hell would shoot two unarmed kids?

When I looked up, I saw someone on the back porch of the Victorian to my left. He was a cute six- or seven-year-old black child, standing there shirtless in his underwear, sucking his thumb as he watched me.

I smiled at him. His happy brown eyes lit up as he smiled back. I’d been a cop for a long time, but it never failed to shock and break my heart when I saw innocents in the midst of such horror.

He took his thumb out of his mouth.

“You’re not from around here,” the kid said. “Are you a policeman?”

“Yes, I am,” I said, showing him my shield.

He peered at my badge.

“Why you driving a bus, then?” he said, pointing down the alley at the street. “Policemen don’t drive no bus.”

“That’s my family car,” I said, smiling again. “I have a really big family. That’s the reason I’m here. Two of my sons were hurt here yesterday. My two boys. Someone shot them with a gun. Did you see or hear anything, son?”

The little boy’s eyes went wide as he nodded. But as I approached him, there was a sound on the porch behind him. A door opened and before I could open my mouth, the boy ran into it. Then the door slammed and its locks clicked.

I let out a breath. No one wanted to get involved.

Who could blame them? I thought, quickly heading back to my bus.

CHAPTER 48

WHEN I ARRIVED back at the hospital, Eddie was still sleeping, but I saw that Brian was awake. Knowing that it’s usually easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission, I made a command decision and just opened the door and went in with Mary Catherine.

Brian had an enormous white gauze bandage tied around his neck and under his arm. He looked like an extra in a war movie, which I guess made sense, since he had, in fact, been shot in a drug war. The good news was that he looked worlds better than he had the night before. There was a lot more color back in his cheeks.

“How’s it going, buddy?” I said.

He looked at me for a second in complete relief. But after a moment, his face fell and he stared at the wall.

After a few seconds, I realized he was crying, silent tears streaming down his cheeks.

“What is it, son? Are you in pain?”

Mary Catherine put a hand on his shoulder.

“What is it, Brian? Should we call the doctor?”

Brian looked up at the ceiling.

“All you ever tell us is to look out for one another,” he said. “Especially me because I’m one of the oldest. I let you down, Dad. I got Eddie shot. He’s going to die, and it’s all my fault.”

“No, no. He’s just sleeping. He’s going to be okay. You both are,” I said, thumbing the tears off his face.

“But-”

“But nothing, Brian. “You’re both okay. That’s all that matters now,” I said. “Eddie getting shot was the fault of the person who shot him. In fact, your hollering saved both your lives. The only thing you have to do now is tell me what happened from the beginning.”

He did. He told me about the girls and their friend in the black Mustang, the driver asking them to watch his back only to run away as a drug dealer-a gang drug dealer, judging by Brian’s description of him-just started shooting.

The whole thing was bizarre. Why would these older girls take so much interest in Eddie and Brian? Not to mention the guy with the Mustang. Also, why would some dealer just start shooting? He felt threatened by a thirteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old? It didn’t add up.

“Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, what are you doing in here?” Dr. Walker said as she barged in and busted us. “You must leave this instant.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Bennett?” Brian said, baffled, as Dr. Walker shooed us out. “You guys got married? Finally!”

Mary Catherine blushed as I winked at him.

“Rest up, wise guy. I’ll talk to you later.”

But the best surprise of the morning, by far, came as the door closed behind us. Down the other end of the hallway was the whole Bennett bunch, walking toward us and bearing homemade cards and balloons and a “get well soon” banner. I needed a heart lift by that point, and there it was, right on time. The band was back together again.

“We couldn’t wait any longer, so we took a cab,” Seamus said. “How are Jesse James and Billy the Kid holding up? What a vacation so far! Are we having fun yet?”

“The hooligans are doing okay, Father. So far, at least,” I said.

CHAPTER 49

PLATINUM LADIES WAS housed in a dilapidated barnlike wooden building a little south of Newburgh in New Windsor, near the airport.

Upstairs in the loft, which he jokingly referred to as his command center, Ramon Puentes hauled his muscled bulk out from behind his desk. He walked to the window that overlooked the stage and slammed down the blinds in order to take his visitor’s attention away from the new white girl down below, starting her routine.

The kid who called himself Jay D squared his red Yankees ball cap in frustration.

“Damn. C’mon, G. I was watchin’ that,” the kid growled.

Ramon groaned as he sat back down. He shouldn’t be dealing with this. Ramon was the brains of the operation. The homicidal man-child in front of him was the responsibility of his younger brother, Miguel, no question. But as luck would have it, Miguel was on vacation in Hawaii with his fiancée of the month, so it was up to him to do everything. What else was new?

Ramon and his brother, Miguel, ran the Newburgh chapter of the Latin Kings, which meant they ran everything. The dope, the whores, the gambling. At least in the eastern, Hispanic part of town. He normally didn’t do any business with the Bloods, who ran the west end.

But then again, putting a hit on a cop’s kids wasn’t normal by any stretch.

“Look at me when I talk to you,” Ramon said. “Do you have ADD? Look at me. You think this is a party? Let me answer that for you. It’s not.”

“You the one making me wait,” the kid complained, giving him a look of magnificent insolence. “Pony up the green already, Ramo. I need to get rollin’ before someone from the Blood Nation sees me in here.”

Ramon tapped a finger to his aching head. This punk was actually trying to be hard with him? With a whistle, he could have the bouncers, Bartolo and Cricket, up here. They’d teach this kid some manners with machetes before “Hefty-Hefty-cinch-sacking” his worthless ass into an Orange County swamp. He wondered if that was how he should play this. Wipe the slate. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

“Yeah?” Ramon said. “Deal was half later for getting the job done. I was told there was a lot of screamin’ after you left the scene. Dead don’t scream, last I heard.”

The kid waved a hand.

“Don’t mean nothing,” he said. “I shot ’em up good with my trusty.380. Those kids are done.”

A double knock suddenly came from the door behind Ramon’s desk.

At the sound, Ramon bent and spun the dial of the floor safe beside his chair. He reached in and took out a manila envelope with what looked like two paperback books in it. He flung it at the kid. The kid took out the twenty thousand dollars that was inside and flipped through the hundreds. He sniffed at the money with relish before he put it back into the envelope and slid the envelope into his knapsack.

When Jay D was gone, the rear office door opened, and the woman, Marietta, from Manuel Perrine’s organization entered with her two bodyguards. When she stopped before him, Ramon stared at a spot on the wall just to the left of her exquisite face. Anything that had to do with Perrine or his billion-dollar organization was as touchy as a bomb defusing. Even the tiniest offense or misstep, and-ba-boom!

“I’m not sure how successful this has been,” Ramon said. “The… um, children were shot, but I don’t know how badly. Please, let me first apologize to you and then to the great Manuel, who-”

She cut him off with a look.

“That’s not necessary, Ramon. What is done is sufficient for our purposes. The policeman will get the message. You have done well. I will let Manuel know that the Latin Kings have as always proven their loyalty to him. He will be very pleased.”

Ramon looked away as she left. He didn’t even look at the bodyguards. That crowd was from a different planet. Their drugs were pure, their supply line as reliable as Walmart’s. But they really believed in all that Santa Muerte stuff. That’s why you didn’t mess around. He’d heard the rumors. Make the wrong move, and you woke up on a stone altar with some freak spouting mumbo jumbo as he raised a knife over your chest.

Ramon took a bottle of wine out of a drawer. He trimmed the foil and popped it open with a corkscrew. He knew he should probably aerate it and let it breathe, but he didn’t give a shit. He found a balloon glass and gave himself a nice pour.

It was a four-hundred-dollar bottle of ’89 Chateau d’Yquem that he was saving for a special occasion. Having pulled off his dealings with the Perrine cartel without a bullet to his head qualified as a special occasion in spades.

He sighed and finally closed his eyes and took a sip. Honey, tobacco, some vanilla notes. Happy still-alive day to me, he thought.