I, Michael Bennett mb-5 Read online

  At the massive booming noise, the courtroom broke into complete bedlam. Spectators immediately hit the deck in the seats behind me as the dowdy stenographer screamed. She knocked over her typing stand in a clatter and left a shoe behind as she dove into the witness box for cover.

  It was unbelievable how fast all the court officers drew on Perrine, as though it were a Wild West show.

  “Hands!” they screamed at him.

  A six-foot-five redheaded cop circled in front of Perrine, the chunky device in his freckled hand pointed a foot from Perrine’s chest.

  “Hey, you deaf? Hands up now or you will be Tasered, you son of a bitch!” he yelled.

  The ghost of a smile played on Perrine’s lips as he sat as still as a paperweight in his chair. After a moment, he raised his hands in a slow, graceful motion.

  “What’s that expression? ‘Don’t Tase me, bro’?” he said in the tense silence.

  He turned toward the judge then, laughing softly.

  The towering redheaded cop’s radio gave off a loud beep followed by the long squawk of a message.

  “It’s okay. All clear, Judge,” the cop said, listening to his radio. “Looks like a truck at the construction site on Centre Street dropped a load of scaffolding.”

  “How ironic. I almost dropped a load myself,” Perrine said with a girlish giggle.

  “Can the comedy routine, Perrine,” the judge said. “I mean it. One more word out of you, and I might not Taser you, but I will gag you … bro.”

  Closest to the witness stand, I went to help the shaken stenographer up from the floor of the witness box. I exchanged smiles with Perrine at the nearby defense table as I helped right her stenotype. When he gestured me over toward the defense table with his shackled hands, I was more than happy to oblige.

  As I leaned in over the table, the drug lord flashed me a grin.

  “You don’t scare easily, do you, Michael Bennett?” he whispered. “Neither do I. Believe it or not, I like you. With all your antics, I find you a very funny man. This circus needs a clown, and you’re doing a great job. Despite your silliness, my offer still stands. You could take a nice long vacation from all this stress, a permanent one, in fact. I hear the Maldives are quite pleasant this time of year.”

  “The Maldives?” I said, raising an eyebrow as if I were considering it. “They do sound pleasant, but the question is would they be more pleasant than what I’m going to do to you on that witness stand? More pleasant than watching your face when the verdict is read?”

  I could see a vein pulse on Perrine’s neck as I slowly shook my head.

  “Sorry, Perrine. Truly, my apologies,” I whispered back. “But even a silly clown like me wouldn’t miss that for the entire world.”

  CHAPTER 57

  THE METRO-NORTH TRAIN back to the lake house in Newburgh was half empty that night after nine o’clock. I didn’t read a paper or send out any e-mails. All I did for an hour straight was sip the Budweiser tallboy I’d bought in Grand Central as I sat in a window seat on the Hudson River side, listening to the clickety-clack of the train. If I’d had a harmonica, I would have busted into the saddest blues solo ever heard as I stared out at the dark water and chugga-chugga choo-chooed it north up the Hudson Valley.

  And I didn’t even know how to play the harmonica.

  That pretty much summed up how good things weren’t going in United States v. Perrine. Due both to Perrine’s unsettling presence and his legal team’s constant stream of delays, I didn’t get anywhere near testifying. By day’s end, only the selection of the final members of the jury had been nailed down.

  The whole day had been nothing but one long, exhausting, frustrating emotional grind. At least for all the good people involved. The worst part was having to watch Perrine sit through the proceedings, sipping Perrier, with his dream-team legal counsel alongside him. Every few minutes, he’d swivel around to give me a little wink along with his arrogant Cheshire cat smile.

  After court and a quick powwow with Tara and the rest of the prosecutors, I’d thought briefly about staying over in the apartment, then decided against it. Everyone would probably be asleep by the time I made it back to the lake house, but it didn’t matter. The need to be with my guys, especially Eddie and Brian, over the last week was undeniable.

  Was it guilt over not being able to protect them?

  No doubt it was.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about what a miracle it was that they weren’t dead, and that we weren’t planning their funerals right now instead of finishing our vacation.

  As the lonely lights of the Tappan Zee Bridge swung past on my left, I got a text message from Mary Catherine asking me if she should come to pick me up in Beacon. I begged off, texting back that I’d just get a taxi.

  Though she’d certainly be a sight for my very sore eyes, I actually had one more stop to make before calling my heck of a long day a night.

  I needed to meet up with Newburgh detectives Moss and Boyanoski, who had notified me that there was some potential progress on my kids’ case.

  Forty minutes later, after exiting the train, I waved over a beat-up Chevy gypsy cab waiting in the Beacon train station’s otherwise deserted parking lot. The cabbie was a surprisingly young Hispanic girl with blue hair and earrings in her lower lip and colorful tattoos covering one arm, as though she’d been attacked by a gang of graffiti vandals. I could see that underneath all the junk was a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old young lady with gentle blue eyes who should have been home packing her book bag with paper and sharpened pencils for the new school year instead of out hustling for fares.

  “Where to?” she asked before I could ask her if her parents knew where she was.

  I shook my head. I had enough on my plate, I decided. Too much, probably.

  “The Newburgh police department,” I told her, plopping down into the backseat.

  CHAPTER 58

  WE ROLLED OVER the Newburgh–Beacon Bridge back into the run-down town that had almost taken the lives of two of my kids.

  I still couldn’t get over the dichotomy between the town’s Gilded Age history—not to mention its pleasant layout and architecture—and its current decrepit state. Every other house seemed to be a Carpenter Gothic or a Greek Revival or a Queen Anne. These “painted ladies” had definitely seen better days, though, since many of their windows were either missing or boarded up and their gingerbread molding was blistered and rotting.

  I continued to shake my head as we pulled onto the four-lane thoroughfare called Broadway. With its forty-five-degree parking and three-story brick buildings, it looked quintessentially American, like a street scene in an Edward Hopper painting. I was almost expecting a trolley car to turn one of the corners or a soda jerk to walk out of one of the corner stores in a bow tie and white paper hat. But like so many Rust Belt towns in the northeast, Newburgh reminded me of the scene from It’s a Wonderful Life in which George Bailey gets to see his hometown as it would have been had he never been born.

  Talk about wasted potential, I thought. What the heck had happened to this once beautiful place? Staring out at Newburgh’s blighted streets, I wondered if George Bailey had maybe caught a bullet in a drive-by.

  “I knew I should’ve taken Water Street,” the cabbie said before letting out a loud, slow, scared breath.

  We stopped at a red light near Lutheran Street. I leaned forward and watched as a group of teenage black kids crossed in front of the cab. Every one of them was wearing a red do-rag, whether tied to their wrists or peeking out from under their hoods and ball caps. Staring back at their swaggering and arrogant malevolence, I was reminded of Perrine’s demeanor in the courtroom. Like Perrine, these kids seemed quite used to driving fear into people’s hearts. In fact, they seemed to enjoy it.

  I instantly felt myself getting worked up, really starting to seethe. The Newburgh detectives had already told me that the town’s drug trade was run by the Bloods and the Latin Kings, and that it looked like it was a member of the r
ag-wearing Bloods who had shot my sons.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off them as the group made the opposite corner. I was seeing red, all right. All I kept thinking was that my outgoing son Eddie wasn’t so outgoing anymore. That these bastards might have screwed him up for the rest of his life.

  By the time the light turned green, I was done. I literally couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Wait. Stop. Let me out here,” I said to the driver.

  “What the heck? What are you doing?” my young blue-haired cabbie said. “You don’t want to get out on this block. This is like the ’hood, you know what I’m sayin’? The police department is only a couple of blocks down.”

  Instead of answering her, I dropped a twenty into the front seat.

  I opened the door with the hand that wasn’t holding my quickly drawn and cocked Glock.

  Now it was time for some answers.

  CHAPTER 59

  “HEY, WHAT HAVE we here?” one of the gangbangers said as the cab sped away. “That Men’s Wearhouse two-for-one you wearing says you definitely ain’t no pimp. You one of Newburgh’s Finest? Or maybe you Bill O’Reilly from the TV?”

  The rest of his crew broke up laughing as I approached the north side of Broadway. Every ground-floor business up and down the beat-up block was closed, I noticed. Nothing but steel gates in both directions as far as the eye could see. Everyone had gotten out of Dodge, which was only smart because drug gangs like these Bloods protected their turf with beatings and stabbings and shootings.

  The head jokester was a thin, six-foot-three kid of about nineteen. He was relaxed, smiling, enjoying himself. A broad-shouldered youth sitting on the corner mailbox beside him took a toke of the blunt he was smoking and blew the rancid smoke in my direction.

  As I approached them, I felt a flicker of fear for the first time as the sane part of my mind began to realize what kind of situation I was putting myself in. There were six of them. Two of them were skinny high school kids, but the others were hardened-looking street punks, tattooed and prison-jacked under spotless XXXL white tees. I could tell at least one of them had a gun in his waistband by the way he was standing a little hunched to one side.

  Armed cop or not, I was all alone and didn’t even know where the hell I was. What the hell was I doing? You needed backup in an area like this. SWAT, maybe.

  But then I did a smart thing. I told the rational Dr. Jekyll part of me to put a sock in it, and let the unhinged Mr. Hyde part of me begin to roll.

  “No, no. I’m not Bill O’Reilly,” I said with a laugh as I finally showed them what was in my hand.

  They reared back, whoa-ing and raising their hands in unison as I leveled my chunky black polymer Glock in their faces. The gangbangers stood in complete shock, absolutely frozen, as though I’d just conjured up an elephant or a cruise ship out of thin air.

  “But I am looking for news,” I said. “You guys hear about some little kids that got shot over on Lander Street last week? Speak up, fellas. I can’t hear you. I heard the shooter was wearing a red Yankees cap. You guys look like red’s your favorite color, like maybe you shop at the same store. I’ll ask nice one more time. Who shot those kids?”

  They kept staring at me in mute wonder.

  The funny thing was, at that moment, I was willing to shoot them, and they knew it. They could see it in my eyes that I was about as far from messing around as one can get.

  As a cop, you draw your gun for one reason: to kill someone. You don’t wing people, you don’t let off warning shots. When you take out your gun, it’s for putting bullets into someone’s head or chest before they can do the same to you. If you’re not willing to go that far, then you leave it in the holster.

  “Hey, chill, Officer,” the pot-smoking tough finally said. “We didn’t do nothing. This ain’t Lander Street. This be the east end. Just chill. We got no beef with you.”

  “Oh, yes, you do, homey,” I growled, my knuckles whitening around the grip of my gun. “See, those kids who got shot, they were my kids. I’m not a cop here. I’m a father. Now you tell me right now which one of you red-rag-wearing jackasses shot my kids or by tomorrow morning, your girlfriends and mommas are going to be laying out so many damn memorial candles on this corner it’s going to be lit up like Times Square.”

  That’s when I heard it. It was the high squeal of tires behind me. For a second, I panicked, thinking my Irish temper had finally gone and gotten my dumb ass killed. For a moment, I was seriously convinced that I was about to get run over or hosed in a drive-by.

  Then over the engine roar of the rapidly approaching car, I heard a glorious sound. It was the metallic double woop of a squad-car growler. The flickering blue and red lights made the darkened north side of Broadway look like a carnival as the car screeched to a stop at my back.

  The gang kids scattered as I turned around, holstering my weapon.

  Two cops got out of the unmarked car and stood behind its flung-open doors.

  “Hi, Mike. Um, out for an evening stroll?” Detective Bill Moss said, rolling his eyes.

  His partner, Ed Boyanoski, shook his head at me with an expression somewhere between disappointment and awe.

  “Well, what do you know? The cavalry, right on time,” I said.

  “Let me guess. Long day at the office, Mike?” Bill said as I climbed into the backseat.

  I smiled.

  “It was, but that little meet and greet has rejuvenated me all of a sudden,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “I think I just got my second wind.”

  CHAPTER 60

  INSTEAD OF HEADING to the police department, the detectives took me to an all-night diner a little north of the city, near the interstate, to meet their colleagues.

  At a semicircular red vinyl booth toward the rear of the chrome-and-mirrored space, I was introduced to Sergeant Grant Walrond and Officer Timothy Groover. Walrond was Mike-Tyson stocky, a young friendly black cop with a dry sense of humor. Groover, on the other hand, was white and tall, with a mullet hairdo that made him look more like a farmer than a cop. Both of them were extremely dedicated veteran cops and were the major players in the Newburgh PD gang unit.

  Bill Moss said, “Sergeant Walrond here received some information this afternoon that the shooter was a Blood, but not from Lander Street.”

  “The kid we got word about is pretty well known,” Walrond said. “His name’s James Glaser, but they call him Jay D. He’s a Blood from the east end, a low-level punk who jumps from crew to crew because he’s a loose-cannon troublemaker. He’s eighteen years old, and he was shot on two different occasions last year.”

  “Got more holes in him than a colander,” Groover mumbled over the rim of his coffee cup.

  “Crew to crew?” I said. “How many Bloods are there?”

  “About a hundred and fifty members altogether,” Walrond said.

  “In a town of thirty thousand?” I said in shock. “When the heck did all this start? I thought the Bloods were an L.A. thing.”

  “It’s true that most of the gangs, like the Bloods and the Latin Kings, originated in L.A. and Chicago,” Groover said. “But because selling drugs is so profitable, members started branching out to expand their markets. Most of the gang members in Newburgh are offshoots of the gangs in New York, primarily those on Rikers Island, which are predominantly run by the Bloods and the Latin Kings.”

  “Usually, the gang will make contacts among the locals and contract out the street sales,” Walrond added. “The locals are brought into the gang, taught its culture and rules, and pretty soon you have yourself a serious problem. The Newburgh kids are like kids anywhere else—just bored teenagers looking for direction and excitement. When the gang rep shows up, it’s like a match on gasoline.”

  “The gangs provide direction, all right,” Bill Moss piped in. “How to get to the graveyard before your twenty-first birthday. We had seven murders last year. Six of them were male gangbangers under the age of twenty-five. The seventh was a second grade girl caught
in the crossfire.”

  I shook my head. And I thought New York was bad.

  Sergeant Walrond excused himself as he received a text message.

  “All right. Here we go,” he said. “That’s Pops. He’s one of my informants. Why don’t you come meet him with us, Mike? He’s sort of a street guy, but he actually feels for how bad Newburgh has gotten. He feels especially horrible about what happened to your kids.”

  Walrond didn’t have to ask me twice.

  We met Pops a block away, in the empty parking lot of a medical office building. He was a heavyset, kind of goofy, fast-talking black guy with a deep voice who reminded me of the clownish old-school rapper Biz Markie.

  “Like I was tellin’ you, Sarge,” Pops said. “It wasn’t the Bloods shot those kids. Shootin’ customers be bad for business, ’specially white ones ’fraid to come into the ’hood in the first place.”

  “But Jay D is a Blood,” Walrond argued.

  “Aw, he just a peewee. He got no rank,” Pops said dismissively. “Plus the kid’s just damn crazy. The way I heard it, he was working with the Kings, man. He was like hired out.”

  “Hired out?” I said, my blood beginning to boil for the second time this evening.

  Walrond put a hand on my shoulder.

  I shut my mouth. Which wasn’t easy, considering I just wanted answers. I bit my tongue and allowed the detective to do his job.

  “Why would they do that, Pops?” Walrond continued.

  “Beats me,” Pops said. “All I know is the Bloods ain’t happy because tensions already be runnin’ high lately between the nations. They say it’s that Mexican cartel dude they got on trial. What’s his name? Perrine? Yeah, Perrine’s been franchising out all that good pure Mexican dope for cheap to the Latin King Nation from South Beach up to Boston. The Kings keep dropping their price, and the Bloods are getting crushed, losin’ business like crazy.”