I, Michael Bennett mb-5 Read online

  It would be the last thing he would ever know.

  The assassins opened fire, muzzle flashes just visible in the twilight. Lozada was cut down to the concrete immediately as more than a dozen bullets struck his face and throat. Morelli, running from the cruiser at a loping backpedal, managed to just draw his Glock before he, too, was hit with a fusillade of automatic gunfire that struck him in the right side of his head. He was dead well before he and his unfired weapon hit the ground.

  The shooters in the van continued to fire on the fallen policemen. When their guns were empty, they reloaded, and fired off another magazine apiece into the cop car.

  When they were done, the spray-painter hurdled over the body of Lozada and removed a large red plastic jug from the knapsack on his back. Upending the jug, he poured gasoline all over the cop car’s trunk and roof and hood and interior. He tossed the empty jug into the car as he ignited a Zippo lighter with his calloused thumb. He was already in the van by the time the tossed lighter landed on the front seat and the car went up.

  The van sped away. The light of the burning NYPD car’s flames flickered on the blood-drenched fallen cops and on what had been spray-painted on the side of the bank building next to their bodies.

  D

  OS POR

  D

  ÍA

  H

  ASTA

  Q

  UE

  S

  E

  L

  IBERA!

  Two a day until he is released.

  L

  IBERTAD

  ! L

  IBERTAD!

  F

  REE

  M

  ANUEL

  P

  ERRINE!

  CHAPTER 83

  AFTER THE TRIAL, I went straight out to Woodside, Queens, on the number 7 train to look for Mary Catherine.

  Seamus had called and left a message to say that Mary Catherine had called the lake house. It was a cryptic call. She needed to spend some time with friends now, she said, and would call back in a few days. I remembered how she had stayed with friends out in Woodside when she first came to the States, so I took a chance of heading out there to see if I might bump into her.

  It was a truly desperate move, the act of a madman, really. With more than eight million people in New York City, human beings don’t just bump into each other. I didn’t even know if she was staying in Woodside. She could have been out in the Hamptons or on a plane back to Ireland. Needless to say, I didn’t find her. All I found out as I hit a few bars and wandered up and down Queens Boulevard was how guilty I felt, and how incredibly lonely.

  Officer Williams, the gung ho cop assigned to watch my apartment, flashed his lights and quickly got out of his cruiser as I came up West End Avenue to my apartment house around ten. There were two other squad cars on the block now, I noticed. This couldn’t be good.

  “There you are! Everybody, and I mean everybody, is looking for you,” Williams said. “Don’t you turn on your phone?”

  “The battery died,” I said. “What the heck’s up?”

  Heck was up, all right. I sat on the hood of his cruiser, my head going lower and lower, as Williams told me about the double cop execution on Canal Street. When he told me about the message spray-painted on the wall, I closed my eyes. The sergeant who was killed had four kids, his oldest girl at Loyola University.

  I sat there as the horror of it all sank in like a dull knife between my shoulder blades. This is what happened now? NYPD cops were being gunned down? Shot to smithereens with automatic weapons? How did that compute? It didn’t. How could it? I sat there, dizzy. The world was truly spinning off its axis. How in the name of God were we supposed to set it right again?

  I left Officer Williams and went up to my silent and empty apartment. I thought I was lonely before. I couldn’t have been more wrong. After some rummaging around, I found a dusty bottle of Smirnoff Lemon Twist vodka with a Christmas ribbon on it in the back of my closet. I cracked the cap and sat on my bed, sipping it.

  I didn’t bother taking off my trial suit or even my shoes as I propped myself against the headboard. Of course not. When I get shitfaced on discount vodka by myself, I always like to keep it as formal as possible. To cheer myself up, I spun the Christmas bow on my finger and thought about my dead wife, Maeve. I tried to picture her face in my mind, but I couldn’t.

  I cried for a bit. For Maeve. For Mary Catherine. For those two dead cops. After a minute or two, I tried to break the bottle by slamming it down on the nightstand. But nothing happened, so I took another sip.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen, I thought. None of it. This wasn’t in the original script.

  What had I ever asked for? A chance to be a good man. And I had been. Just like my dad, I’d been a cop and put away bad guys. Cleared the streets so that the good people could live their lives, love their wives and husbands, love their kids.

  But what was it all for? People weren’t even getting married anymore, and if they had kids, they soon abandoned them to the street, to the Internet. It wasn’t just the times, either. I was starting to think it was humanity. It was changing. People didn’t seem to want to be people anymore.

  Ah, who the heck was I to talk? I thought, savoring the warm, lemony, burning Smirnoff. I couldn’t even keep my nanny from exiting stage left.

  I looked out the window at the lights of the city, at the dark.

  “Mary Catherine, where are you?” I whispered. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I need you, Mary Catherine. Please come home.”

  CHAPTER 84

  THE NEXT MORNING, I had the taxi drop me off on lower Broadway, and I walked across Duane Street in a light rain, past the bomb-squad vans, toward the courthouse. Helicopters rumbled overhead. Though I had declined a police escort, I knew I was being tailed anyway by two cars full of undercover cops, watching my back.

  Showered, shaved, and rested despite a hangover, I was wearing my best suit. I’d briefly thought about putting a Kevlar vest underneath it, but then gave it a thumbs-down. Perrine was hiring highly trained mercenaries now. If they got a bead on me, they wouldn’t waste their time killing me with a torso shot but would do it properly, putting a high-velocity bullet or two directly into my head.

  Besides, the bulky vest would have ruined the tailored line of my jacket, I thought as I headed across the plaza toward the courthouse steps. Perrine wasn’t the only one who liked to get his GQ on.

  Because of the cop killing the previous evening, security had been beefed up, even on top of the already beefed-up security surrounding the courthouse. In addition to the guard booths and hydraulic metal street barriers and truck-bombproof steel pylons, the entire NYPD Hercules team was deployed. Beside a long line of black Suburbans stood a small army of submachine-gun-toting cops wearing helmets and knee pads and armor-plated vests over their NYPD blue fatigues.

  For all the police presence outside, inside the courthouse, past the metal detectors, the halls were pretty empty. That was because all civil and all but the most urgent criminal cases had been postponed for the week due to the incredible circumstances.

  Arriving early at the fourteenth-floor witness room, I declined a coffee from Tara’s assistant, but I did accept a bottled water. I didn’t ask her where Tara was and, funny enough, she didn’t tell me.

  As I waited, I checked my smartphone for messages. There was only one that I was looking for—Mary Catherine’s, of course. She hadn’t contacted Seamus again, and I was worried as hell.

  But there was nothing. No matter how many times I shifted all the stupid screens on the phone back and forth with my thumb.

  “Detective Bennett?” the assistant whispered as she stuck her head through the cracked door. “You’ve just been called to the stand. It’s time.”

  All eyes shifted to me as I came through the double doors into the soundproofed, windowless courtroom. The expressions from the rows of seated people were solemn and sort of surprised, as if I were a black-sheep relat
ive arriving out of the blue for someone’s funeral.

  It was a funeral, all right, I thought. Manuel Perrine’s. And it was high time we slammed the lid on his casket.

  He was sitting up front, heavily shackled. I could hardly see him behind a larger-than-usual retinue of cops and court officers. He didn’t have a gag on, as the judge had promised, I noticed as I sat. Like all dangerous animals, he definitely deserved one. I would have preferred a dog muzzle or Hannibal Lecter–style hockey mask, at the very least, but there was nada.

  I glanced at the judge and shook my head. No wonder trust in the government was at an all-time low.

  Prosecutor Vogel stood.

  “Detective Bennett, good morning. Yesterday, you were telling us about a gunfight that arose during your attempt to arrest Manuel Perrine. Where did that gunfight take place?”

  “In an alley alongside Madison Square Garden.”

  “Why did you go to the location?”

  “We learned that Manuel Perrine had come to New York to see his daughter graduate from NYU law school.”

  “Exactly!” Perrine screamed. “I come here to this shithole of a country to this utter shithole of a city only to see my daughter, and then I am accused of things I had nothing to do with.”

  He stood and banged on the table with both fists.

  “These are false accusations and lies brought against me. You think I’m afraid of you? Of these trumped-up charges? I’ll cut that black lying tongue from your throat, cop. I’ll cut it out and feed it to you until you choke!”

  “That’s it,” the judge said. “Strike three. You’re out, Mr. Perrine. We’re going to try you in absentia. Officers, remove him now.”

  At first, Perrine resisted, pushing the cops back and forth. But then he suddenly stopped completely. One second he was in a rage, and the next, he was calm, as though he had hit a switch. Strange, I thought. He actually smiled at me as he was leaving.

  I sat there as the door closed.

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” the prosecutor said. “Now back to what you were saying, Detective. You learned that Manuel Perrine had come to New York to see his daughter graduate from NYU law school. Please continue for the jury, Detective Bennett.”

  I stood, a quizzical look on my face. This didn’t feel right. Not at all. Perrine was acting. It seemed like the whole outburst was staged.

  “Wait,” I said, climbing out of the witness box.

  “What in good God are you doing, Bennett?” the prosecutor said under his breath as I passed him.

  “This isn’t right,” I said. “Something isn’t right.”

  CHAPTER 85

  PERRINE AND HIS scrum of jailers were turning the corner of the outer corridor to my right, toward the elevators, when I pushed out the doors into the hallway. Not knowing exactly what I was doing, going solely on gut instinct, I hurried after them.

  I was next to an ancient pay-phone recess ten feet from the hall corner when I heard it. It was a sudden, heavy wumpff sound, followed immediately by the trailing crinkle of breaking glass. It sounded as if, nearby, a giant baseball had just punched a home run into a giant windshield. I felt the floor shake a little under my wingtips as well.

  What the hell now?

  I barreled around the corner. Perrine and the police were in front of the elevators. The cops must have heard the weird sound, too, because they were all looking around, some with their guns out. Most of them were staring at a doorway opposite the elevators.

  “We have a situation here,” one said into his radio. “Some sort of situation.”

  There was the impatient click of the elevator call button being pressed over and over, and then the doorway opposite the elevator bank exploded outward with a concussive roar.

  I fell to my knees and drew my gun, my ears ringing. When I looked up, thick yellow smoke was already billowing from the blown-open doorway and filling the hallway. When a waft of it passed over my face, I knew it was tear gas.

  Eyes burning, snot pouring from my nose as from a faucet, I plastered myself into a recessed doorway on my right and covered my face with my tie. A moment later, a crisp gunshot went off so close it sounded like a pencil being snapped in my ear. Crouching, I found a doorknob and opened the door beside me, ducking into an empty courtroom.

  Then I saw what was in the courtroom’s large south-facing window, and I wondered if I was hallucinating.

  On the outside of the building, pressed against the window of the room just to the east of me, was a large yellow metal cage. It was a heavy machinery basket being suspended by the tower crane of the construction site nearby. In it, plain as day, maybe ten feet away from me, stood two men in tan construction coveralls, wearing gas masks and holding automatic weapons.

  It looked like a SWAT team. But not our SWAT team.

  They were trying to break out Perrine, I realized. Literally trying to break him out of the building from the fourteenth floor!

  Without thinking about it, without saying “Freeze,” I lifted my gun and started shooting at the two men through the window. My Glock’s 9mm rounds sprayed holes through the heavy window glass, but the bullets were either deflected by the glass or the metal grate of the basket, because neither of the two armed-to-the-teeth men went down.

  All I did was get their attention. A moment later, I backpedaled as they raised their weapons over the metal rim of the basket. I dove back into the hallway as the window and half of the empty courtroom’s wooden pews were ripped to shreds by automatic gunfire.

  I peeked through the doorway a moment later when I heard a high-rpm hum. Through the shattered window, I saw the yellow basket on the move. The tower crane arm above it swung as it pivoted the metal rig away from the courthouse. I also saw, sitting in the basket between the armed men, a light-skinned black man in a prison jumpsuit.

  The audacity of it was stunning, literally amazing. This couldn’t be happening, and yet it was.

  They were really doing it, I thought, staring up at the basket as it started to ascend. As hard as it was to believe, it was happening before my very eyes.

  Manuel Perrine was actually getting away.

  CHAPTER 86

  THE TEAR-GAS SMOKE was clearing as I ran down the hallway among the fallen cops. Half of them were shot up pretty bad.

  “Gun!” I yelled to a burly black federal cop who was holding his hand over a bleeding thigh. I caught his SIG Sauer as I turned the corner, hit the stairwell door, and went up.

  There were another ten floors to the roof, but I didn’t feel them. With my adrenaline pumping the way it was, I could probably have ascended the stairs on my hands. The next thing I remember, I was out on the roof and running across to the south side of the building.

  I arrived at the edge just in time to see the crane dropping the yellow cage onto the roof of the building across from the courthouse. A moment later, as I was trying to get a bead on the men with my handgun, I heard the close sound of a helicopter. Turning, I thought it would be the overhead NYPD chopper, but incredibly, it was an NBC News chopper!

  “Get lost, you idiots!” I screamed at it. “Get your damn scoop somewhere else!”

  But I was wrong again.

  The chopper swooped down and descended right onto the roof! It was part of the escape plan!

  I started firing as Perrine and his gunmen clambered aboard the chopper. I emptied the SIG Sauer at the pilot’s-side door. I must have missed, because a moment later, the nose of the chopper lifted, and it swung in a lazy circle westward, over the courthouse, and disappeared behind the FBI headquarters on Federal Plaza.

  I couldn’t believe it. Perrine had done the impossible.

  The Sun King had gotten away!

  CHAPTER 87

  IF THERE WAS any consolation in the wake of the whole fiasco, it was that no one had been killed. In addition to the federal cop, three other corrections officers had been shot, but they were all in stable condition and would survive.

  I was livid. I’m talking bed-bath-and
-beyond pissed. Obviously, the drug boss was able to buy off people everywhere outside and inside the justice system, probably even inside the damn courthouse itself.

  Back downstairs in the street, I went immediately over to the construction site near the courthouse. The leader of the NYPD Hercules team was already there talking to the workers and the site’s general contractor, a man named Rocco Sampiri.

  “He claims the tower crane operator was on a break,” the ESU cop said. “No one on the site saw who got into the basket.”

  I stared at Sampiri. He looked pretty well groomed for a construction worker—silk-screened T-shirt showing off his tan, muscular arms, spotless designer jeans and boots. With his gold Rolex and tidy manicure, it seemed like the only work this musclehead really did was at the gym, lifting dumbbells while gazing lovingly at himself in the mirror.

  “Really?” I said to Sampiri. “A guy climbs up three hundred feet into that cab and swings up a bandito SWAT team into the courthouse and no one saw? What kind of break was this? A nap?”

  “That’s funny, Officer, but really, we didn’t see nothing,” Sampiri said, his steroid-deepened voice sounding like it was coming from the bottom of a barrel.

  “Come on, guys,” I said, turning toward the laborers standing around. I pointed at the sky. “You know who that guy was who just got away? He’s a mass murderer who’s declared war on this country, no different from a terrorist. Please, anyone. I need some help here. Didn’t anyone see anything?”

  In my peripheral vision, I watched Sampiri glare at his workers. They all seemed to put their heads down at the same time.

  “See? Like I said. No one on my crew saw shit,” Sampiri said with a shrug. “We don’t know what the hell happened. Maybe you should be looking for this guy instead of busting our crank. He sounds really dangerous.”

  I stared at the general contractor. I didn’t need to type “Rocco Sampiri” into an FBI database to come to the conclusion that he might’ve been involved in organized crime. Or to make the jump that the Mafia would be more than willing to help out Perrine for the right price. This musclehead had probably given the person who had swung the cage over to the courthouse a cup of espresso before he busted out Perrine. And he was actually smirking a little. Even with all this heat, Rocco couldn’t help but enjoy telling bald-faced lies to us idiot cops.