Burn: (Michael Bennett 7) Read online

  “Holy cow, Dad! Look!” Ricky suddenly cried from the back of the van as there was a thunderous ripping sound and three South Bronx youths shot off an expressway entrance ramp. At first I thought they were on motorcycles, but then I looked again and realized they were on ATV four-wheelers. Huh?

  “Check it out!” Eddie yelled as they roared around the van. “They’re not even wearing helmets!”

  “And they’re wearing blue bandannas and LA Dodgers jerseys,” Ricky said. “I saw this on the Internet, Dad. They’re Crips! Actual Bronx gangbangers!”

  “On actual ATVs,” Eddie cried excitedly. “Quick, Dad! Lend me your phone so I can video this! YouTube, here I come!”

  Instead, I slowed down to let the Bronx Inner City Road Warriors get safely ahead before I shared a head shake and a smile with Mary Catherine.

  “Mary Catherine, if we can handle getting you through this city to the airport alive, we can handle you being gone for a couple of weeks. Everything’s going to be fine,” I said.

  We did manage to escape from the Bronx and get to JFK about thirty minutes later. I got us a little lost when I instinctively took us to the massive, busy airport’s Terminal 4, where I’d been many times before, sending off and receiving Irish relatives hopping the pond on Aer Lingus for weddings and visits and wakes. But Brian looked up on my phone that Aer Lingus had recently moved to JetBlue’s Terminal 5.

  Everybody had been doing relatively well in the stiff-upper-lip department, but as we finally approached Terminal 5, it started. Everybody, seemingly at once, started weeping. When I stopped the van and turned to my right, I saw why.

  There, on the other side of the fence, it was, standing on the tarmac, waiting. The big green-and-white Aer Lingus 747 with the shamrock on its tail that was about to take Mary Catherine away from us.

  “Stop crying, please, now, would you? It’s not so sad,” Mary Catherine said, using both hands in a useless attempt to stop her own tears.

  I quickly popped the doors and got out and grabbed the bags as Mary Catherine doled out hugs to the sobbing children. Shawna, who seemed to be taking it the hardest, clung to Mary Catherine so fiercely I didn’t think she’d ever let her go.

  “It’s OK. I’ll be back before you know it,” Mary Catherine whispered to her between her own sobs.

  But Shawna wasn’t having any of it. She just kept clinging and silently crying as she shook her head. Smart kid.

  I finally got Juliana to take Shawna into the van and was just about to tell Brian to sit in the front seat until I got back from seeing Mary Catherine off inside, when Mary Catherine put her foot down.

  “No, Mike. I got it from here,” she said, taking her bags from me.

  Then she was kissing me, clutching me almost painfully, sobbing wetly against my neck.

  “I…” she said.

  A plane took off from somewhere with a terrific vacuumlike whoosh as we clinched on the sidewalk. Around us, car and trunk doors thunked opened and closed. And then it was happening. She was letting me go.

  Torn from her, I stood, rooted, on the sun-bleached concrete beside the van, watching her leave. As if as long as I kept my eyes on the bob of her curly blond hair, on the outline of her sweater and jeans, it somehow wouldn’t happen.

  But it did. She went through the sliding doors. I still stood there and stood there.

  Even when the parking enforcement guy walking toward the van to get us moving stopped and turned around when he saw my face.

  PART FOUR

  LAST SUPPER

  CHAPTER 73

  THAT MONDAY MORNING, AFTER somehow getting my still-devastated kids off to school, I put my high-profile jewel-heist case on the back burner for the moment. Instead, I trekked up to Harlem to head the Ombudsman Outreach Squad morning briefing.

  As we went over all the current open cases as well as some new ones, I could see that good things were happening here in terms of the group dynamic. Doyle and Brooklyn Kale seemed to be getting along much better now, Noah Robertson had toned down the sartorial splendor, and good ol’ Arturo Lopez actually seemed to have a lost a few.

  Like every great squad, they were acting much more like a team now, depending on one another, developing their own unique culture. Best of all, instead of being laid back like on the first day I’d gotten here, everybody seemed to be stepping up and taking personal ownership of the squad’s mission to truly help people. How do you like that? Progress at last.

  Suddenly, Ariel Tyson, the squad’s affable clerk, burst through the open doors, not looking so affable. In fact, her eyes were wide and looking pretty panicked behind her red-framed eyeglasses.

  “Detective Bennett, I just got a call from dispatch. The Twenty-Eighth Precinct squad supervisor just spotted Holly Jacobs’s murder suspect. They pursued him and apparently now he’s holed himself up in a construction site on a Hundred and Twenty-Seventh between Madison and Fifth.”

  The entire squad cleared out and headed over. Three blue-and-whites were there already. Half a dozen worried-looking uniforms were outside their cars, standing in front of a row of scaffolding-clad town houses on the north side of 127th Street neighboring St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church.

  The house the cops were focused on was in horrendous shape. Bricked-up windows and crumbling stairs and an NYC subway system of cracks webbed over the whole narrow length of its brownstone facade. It was leaning a little to the left like it was going to collapse. Even the fantasy sales brochure mockup of what the run-down block was going to look like on the huge LUMINOUS PROPERTIES sign attached to the scaffolding was faded and covered in graffiti.

  “What do you got?” I said to Gomez, the wiseacre cop Doyle and I had dealt with at the gang-related shooting scene a couple of weeks before.

  “An alert security guard at the dollar store on Lenox ID’d your guy from those flyers we handed out and called us the second he walked in,” Gomez said. “He took off as soon as he saw us. Guy is faster than a Kenyan.

  “I thought we had him penned in between Fifth and Madison, but then he squeezes himself into the leaning tower of Harlem here. Went through the tiny gap between those padlocked doors like a rat or something, the skinny bastard. I got another car around back covering the back alley. He hasn’t come out. He’s holed himself up. ESU is five minutes out.”

  I turned as Doyle went to my car and returned with the bolt cutters from the trunk.

  “ESU?” Doyle scoffed as he stepped up the stairs. He gave me a wink as he snipped neatly through the chain.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of improvising, Gomez?” he said.

  Under the cavelike shade of the scaffolding, I watched Doyle borrow a flashlight from one of the patrolmen and take out his gun. His usually glib expression was tauter as he stood by the brownstone’s now-unlocked plywood doors, his brows knitted in concentration. Then I watched Arturo take out his gun as well, along with Brooklyn and Noah.

  My squad was stepping up, all right, I thought, walking to the front of the line and taking the flashlight from Doyle.

  The plywood door swung in silently when I toed it. The narrow building was even rougher inside, if that was possible. There was no sign of the decorative wainscoting or pocket doors that charming brownstones are generally known for. There was nothing but rubble and squatters’ garbage and the almost unbearable smell of a backed-up sewer.

  “And I thought Detroit was bad,” Brooklyn said, covering her nose with a hand.

  Within a minute of carefully stepping inside, we heard a scuffing sound from up the stairs directly opposite the front door. I ran the flashlight over the staircase. Some of the steps were missing, as well as the banister. I kept the light’s beam trained on the top, where Roger was holed up somewhere, probably waiting for us.

  I was just about to tell Doyle that we should wait for ESU after all when he started up the stairs.

  That was when the odd creaking sound came. A split second later, something huge and square fell from above and exploded onto the staircase
a foot in front of Doyle’s nose. It went through the stairs with a crunching, thunderous metal bang. The staircase ripped apart like a bomb had hit it, sending plaster chunks and dusty wood shrapnel flying all over everyone.

  Through the dust and my fluttering heart, I watched Doyle teetering on the edge of the gaping hole that had been the staircase.

  I was on the bottom step when he lost his balance and fell forward and disappeared.

  CHAPTER 74

  LUCKILY, WE FOUND DOYLE after a minute of screaming for him. Disoriented and bleeding and extremely pissed off but thankfully very much alive, he stumbled up from the rear stairs of the basement he’d fallen into. He’d been banged up pretty good in the fall. His face was scratched and his right arm had been sliced open almost from his wrist to his elbow. He was also covered in sewage, which wasn’t doing any wonders to soothe his Irish temper.

  “What the hell happened?” Doyle said as we quickly led him out of the death-trap hovel and back outside.

  It was a stove that had been airmailed, we found out later. Since he was out of anvils, I guess Roger had pulled a Wile E. Coyote from the structure’s third floor with a vintage Royal Rose oven that he had pushed through a gaping hole in the floor. Another step and Doyle would have been instantly killed by two hundred pounds of falling rusted steel.

  I immediately instructed Brooklyn to take Doyle to the hospital for some stitches, not to mention a tetanus shot.

  The unkindest cut of all came when ESU finally arrived. The SWAT cops cleared the house twenty minutes later with no sign of Roger. They speculated that he might have escaped over the rooftops and scurried down into the alley at the back of the church. We’d missed him. Again.

  I brooded in my car for a bit, feeling sorry for myself, then looked out my window at the deplorable disgrace of a building. Staring at the LUMINOUS PROPERTIES sign, I took out my smartphone. The more I researched, the angrier I got. Twenty minutes later, I left my squad mates at the scene for my morning’s first I’m-mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore moment.

  I pointed my Crown Vic south below Ninety-Sixth Street until I shrieked up in front of a pagoda-like glass office building on Lexington near Grand Central Terminal. Still covered in dust from the near-death experience in Harlem, I got quite a few looks from the well-heeled office workers inside.

  Luminous Properties was on two. The receptionist was a too-thin, harshly beautiful brunette, her big dark eyes rimmed with garish makeup. She reminded me very much of some of the Russian hookers from the Mob database I’d been searching, so I was a little surprised when she said, “Uh, yeah?” with an accent straight out of Staten Island.

  I took out my shield and showed her who I was and then told her why I was there. Five minutes later, I quickly left and took a spin west and then north over to Fifty-Seventh and Seventh, to the site of a luxury condo that was going up beside Carnegie Hall.

  The cofounder of Luminous Properties, Maximilian Schlack, looked very much like his glossy photo in the New York Magazine Power 100 Real Estate Edition, so I was able to spot him straightaway as I got off the rickety construction elevator on the site’s unfinished thirty-second floor.

  The tan, buff thirty-three-year-old was standing at the orange-safety-netted north edge of the windy, still-open floor. He was with a group of other guys in expensive suits and hard hats, listening intently to a tall, curly-haired exec as he gestured with his hands at the money-green sea of Central Park.

  I’d decided to introduce myself to ol’ Max when he suddenly moved off from the group a little ways to type a text. I snuck up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. The look he gave me over his phone was equal parts annoyance and disdain. As if I were a new waiter who’d just tried to clear the cheese course he was still enjoying.

  He didn’t seem to like it so much as I stood there silently staring at him.

  “And you are? Silent Bob, one of the new contractors? I give up. Try to spit it out, OK? I’m busy,” he said.

  His haughty expression switched off instantly, his hazel eyes flashing with a sudden panicked guilt, when I reached into my pocket and showed him my shield.

  “Guilty conscience, Max?” I said.

  CHAPTER 75

  “NYPD? WHAT IS THIS about?” Max Schlack said, quickly leading me away from the group and back down the freshly Sheetrocked corridor for the elevator.

  “This is about a dump you own on a Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street,” I said.

  He stared at me. We were about the same height. When he took off his hard hat, I saw that his deep, rich tan continued to his cleanly shaved head. He was one of those white guys who actually look good bald. It suited him. He was also broad in the shoulders. I remembered the article saying he had played rugby at Yale. A real stud.

  “I own a lot of properties. Who are you, again?”

  “Oh, it’s yours,” I said, ignoring him. “I looked it up. Twenty-Seven East One Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street is owned by Luminous Properties. You own Luminous Properties, ergo you own the dump on a Hundred Twenty-Seventh.”

  He was also the owner of the building we thought Naomi had been abducted from. But I didn’t say that.

  “It—like almost the rest of the block—was purchased three years ago. Since then, you’ve been fined thirty-six times for various building and fire code violations. I didn’t make the Power One Hundred list this year, but even to me, that seems like an excessive number.”

  “And you’re telling me this because?” the tall, tan GQ-ish guy said, glancing at his BlackBerry again.

  I reached out and placed my hand over his device’s screen.

  “Because I was just there chasing a suspect into your hazard zone, and my partner almost got greased when the floor collapsed. My partner is in the hospital right now. Do I have your attention now, moron?”

  “OK, OK. I think I know what you’re talking about. A Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street is in rough shape. That’s why we’re developing it. Why was your partner on my property, again?”

  “Bullshit you’re developing it,” I said. “You slapped up some scaffolding about a year ago on the outside, but inside you haven’t touched a thing. Just like with so many buildings you own. You buy them and then let them fester. Make the block as horrendous and unlivable as possible to drive down the values and drive everybody out, especially the rent control people.

  “Then you rush in with your buddy—Gabe Chayefsky, is it?—and his private hedge fund equity money and scoop up the whole block at cut-rate prices. Too bad New York Magazine doesn’t do a Scumbag 100 edition or you would have made the cover.”

  “You read too many blogs, Officer,” Max said, smiling easily, guilt erased now. His teeth were even and very white in his tan, exfoliated face.

  “That’s idle speculation,” he continued. “Listen, I am aware there are some problems, and it’s true, we have been fined. But we’ve paid those fines, and we’re working in good faith to get square with all of it. You can ask Judy Quincy at the Department of City Planning or Alan Dawes’s office.

  “You know Alan, the speaker of the City Council? Maybe not. I do, though. Perhaps your boss’s boss’s boss might. Anyway, all of our properties are secured. The criminal must have entered illegally. How am I to blame for that? I’m the victim of trespassing here, as far as I can tell.”

  I stood there staring at him. I wasn’t getting through to this guy, and I knew I wasn’t going to. The fact that Doyle wasn’t dead was a miracle, but this guy could not care less. It made me mad.

  After a moment, I glanced at the edge of the construction site’s open floor.

  “You look like a smart guy, Max. Ivy League, am I right? Objects fall at nine point eight meters per second squared, right?” I said. “We’re what? Thirty-two floors up? That’s three hundred and twenty feet. In a mere ten seconds, you could be in Carnegie Hall. Imagine that, Max. And it wouldn’t even take any practice at all.”

  “What?” he said, outraged.

  “Clean ’em u
p. That’s what I’m here to tell you. Clean them the hell up or sell them. I don’t give a shit.”

  “Or what?” he said, smiling again, almost amused.

  “Or your next New York Magazine photo shoot is going to go overtime when they have to try to figure out how to shoot around your badly broken nose.”

  “Are you kidding me? This is unreal. You really are threatening me, aren’t you?”

  I leaned in until we were almost chest to chest.

  “Look in my eyes. What do you think?”

  “This is outrageous. You can’t do this. Who the hell are you?”

  “My name is the Ghost of Your Ass-Kicking Yet to Come, Schlack. If you don’t get your company’s shit together,” I said, turning and walking back toward the elevator.

  A horn sounded far below down between the metal grates as I pressed the elevator button. When I looked up, Schlack was suddenly beside me, his sneering, haughty look back. It seemed to be his natural resting expression.

  “What are your name and badge number? I want them now,” Schlack said, squinting at me.

  “Oh, my badge number. Sure,” I said, reaching into my pocket. I wrapped my fist around my shield and then held my closed fist up in front of his face.

  “You’ll have to guess, Max. I’ll even give you a hint. The first number is a six. You know, the same percentage scumbags like you make in commission when you flip a slum house.”

  Even I could hardly believe where I was taking this, how angry I was, how much I wanted to start trading punches with this guy. I usually didn’t go around threatening to kick people’s asses or throw them off buildings. Even punks like this one.

  Was it all the stress I’d been under since coming back home? All my cases? The fact that Mary Catherine had left? Was I projecting all my troubles onto Max here, I wondered?