I, Michael Bennett Read online

  I glanced across the table thoughtfully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

  McDonough shrugged his broad shoulders.

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

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

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

  I took a bow as I typed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A meet that was going down at noon today.

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

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

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

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

  I guess I’d soon see.

  CHAPTER 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I pointed to the photo of the restaurant again.

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  McDonough shrugged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  That’s when it happened.

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

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

  CHAPTER 7

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

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

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

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