I, Michael Bennett mb-5 Read online

  “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 could
n’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.

  BOOK THREE

  COUNTRY LIVING, COUNTRY

  DYING

  CHAPTER 50

  I WOKE WITH a start in the predawn dark of my lake cabin bedroom, bathed in a pool of cold sweat.

  It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence of late, unfortunately. In fact, every night of the week since my kids had been assaulted, I kept having a terrible recurring nightmare.

  In the dream, I’m running, frantically searching for Eddie and Brian through some dark city streets, and right at the moment I finally spot them in the distance, at the end of some impossibly long alleyway, I hear these awful reverberating cracks of gunfire and wake up with a stifled scream in my throat.

  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to interpret the dream, since I was spending much of my time feeling horrendously guilty for not being there for them, for failing to protect them when they needed me most. Mary Catherine and Seamus told me several times that I needed to stop beating myself up about it, but try as I might, I just couldn’t.

  I guess if there was any consolation, it was that the boys were home from the hospital and seemed to be healing. Dr. Mary Ann Walker from St. Luke’s had been right about there not being any complications with either of my sons’ wounds, thank God, but I guess it wasn’t the physical damage I was most worried about.

  Brian seemed to have come around the emotional corner, already making jokes about how the bullet left in his neck would make him a lifetime TSA target. It was Eddie who was most concerning. Normally the life of the party, he seemed to have drawn into himself like a turtle into its shell. The other kids told me he was also yelling in his sleep, no doubt reliving the horror of what had happened to him.

  It just broke my heart to see him like that. Thirteen-year-old boys have enough on their plates in the growing-up department without throwing post-traumatic stress disorder into the mix.

  That’s why over the last seven days, I’d been meeting up with the Newburgh police. Even though I was probably harassing Detective Bill Moss and his friendly grizzly bear of a partner, Detective Edward Emmanuel Boyanoski, with my constant inquiries, they’d been more than tolerant. In fact, as fellow cops and fathers, they couldn’t have been more understanding.

  They let me ride along with them on canvasses and even let me sit in on a few interviews. So far, no one in the tightly knit Lander Street drug neighborhood was talking about the shooting, but the two veteran detectives assured me they wouldn’t stop until they got to the bottom of it.

  I hoped they were right. For my boys’ sake and everyone else’s.

  I finally sat up, yawning. Outside the window, over the still, dark lake, there was only the faintest light in the sky, but already the whippoorwills were whippoorwilling to beat the band.

  They actually weren’t the only early birds out to get a worm this morning. I had to go back into New York City today. The Perrine trial was resuming after the shooting of Judge Baym at the federal courthouse, and there was a possibility that I might be called to testify. For my departed buddy, Hughie, I needed to go in and do whatever I could to nail the coffin shu
t on the evil, bloodsucking cartel king Perrine.

  I was finally getting to my feet when there was a soft knock on my bedroom door, and Mary Catherine came in with a cup of coffee.

  “You’re up already. Good,” she whispered, quickly handing me the chipped blue mug. “Do you want to eat a little first, or shower?”

  If there was anyone worried about our gang as much as I was, it was MC. She was one of those people who, when nervous, gets busy. So from sunup to sundown, when she wasn’t directing camp activities, she was a domestic whirlwind of baking and cleaning and cutting the grass. When she went out to paint the mailbox the day before, one of the neighbors asked us if we were fixing to sell the place.

  Over the rim of my coffee mug, I noticed the blue glow of the stove light in the kitchen just as I caught a heavenly aroma.

  “Bacon?” I said, walking into the kitchen and setting my empty mug onto the countertop. “I thought I told you not to fuss, Mary Catherine. I’m glad you didn’t listen to me.”

  “It’s not me who’s fussing. That’s Seamus manning the stove. He insisted on a hot meal for you before your trip into the city,” she said, smiling.

  “Wow, I’m really touched,” I said, refilling my coffee. “The old codger really does care about me after all, huh?”

  “Why? Because he woke up so early?” Mary Catherine said.

  “No,” I explained. “Because frying bacon is how we stoic Irishmen say I love you.”

  CHAPTER 51

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, clean-shaven and wearing my best trial suit, I waved good-bye to Mary Catherine after being dropped off across the Newburgh–Beacon Bridge at the Beacon Metro-North train station.

  As I got onto the Grand Central Terminal–bound 7:21 train a few minutes later, I noticed something odd. Over the tops of their Wall Street Journals and smartphones, some of the business commuters sitting near me were giving me double takes. Not warm, fuzzy ones, either. Even though I was wearing dapper attire, they kept glancing over at me suspiciously, as if they thought I was about to star in the latest YouTube subway fight video.