Burn: (Michael Bennett 7) Read online

  I racked my weapon to make it safe as I came back down the stairs.

  “I mean, Emily, you of all people should understand how paranoid I am these days about things like, I don’t know, mysterious vans racing up on me. Is this some kind of practical joke? Why didn’t you tell me you and the FBI were watching my house?”

  “It was just a precaution for your court appearance today,” she said as three drab-fatigue-clad FBI agents with large guns suddenly emerged from the foliage along the side of our house.

  “Additional security was ordered,” she said. “I kept it low key because you guys have been through enough. I didn’t want to get you upset.”

  “In that case, I guess I’m not having a heart attack,” I said.

  “Listen, you should be the last one to talk about jokes, Mike,” Emily said. “You know how many people are looking for you? Ditching the marshals after that verdict was beyond childish. We thought the bad guys got you. We’ve been worried sick.”

  “Ditched? I texted Joe. Besides, I’m a grown man, Parker,” I said. “A grown man who needed some fresh air.”

  “During a gang riot?”

  I shrugged.

  “Taking my life back needs to start somewhere. I’m tired, Emily, of the death threats, all the worrying. I came out here because of Perrine, and now he’s in the ground, and I’m done hiding. You and I both know the cartels are too busy killing each other for Perrine’s turf to bother coming after me. Perrine was a monster. Monsters don’t get avenged, last time I checked. Judge Barnett has seen to that. What was it that BP oil spill CEO guy said? ‘I want my life back.’”

  I walked over and knelt down and finally paid my cabdriver, still facedown on the asphalt.

  “What’s the quote, Emily? ‘Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither and will lose both’?”

  “What’s that other quote about a well-balanced Irish-man?” Emily said, hopping from the van. “‘They have a chip on both shoulders’?”

  Then she surprised me for the second time in two minutes. She walked up and wrapped her arms around me and pressed her face hard against my neck.

  “I going to miss you, Mike…working with you. Just working. Don’t get the wrong idea,” she whispered in my ear.

  “Good-bye yourself, Parker. It was fun strictly and platonically working with you as well,” I whispered back as she broke it up.

  She hopped back into the fed van with the rest of the agents. As they pulled away, I looked up to see Mary Catherine standing at the top of the stairs by the iron railing of the porch.

  I immediately gave her my brightest smile. The on-again, off-again relationship I had with Mary Catherine had most definitely become on-again during our close-quarters California exile. She’d actually had to kill a cartel hit woman to protect the kids. We’d talked about it, cried about it. I don’t think I’d ever been closer to this incredible young woman. Or more attracted.

  I thought her dander might be up a little at seeing me share a hug with Parker, who I’d once or twice almost had a romantic relationship with, but to my happy surprise, Mary Catherine’s slim hand slid easily into mine as I got to the top of the stairs.

  “Time to go home, Detective Bennett,” Mary Catherine said in her musical brogue as she suddenly broke my grip and playfully pushed me toward the door.

  EIGHT

  IT SEEMED LIKE EVERYBODY in LA had decided to come to see us off at LAX that evening.

  There were people just about everywhere, packing the garish fluorescent-lit corridors, riding in humming golf carts, escalating up and down escalators, floating along on those George Jetson moving sidewalk thingies. Undeterred, our Bennett troupe trekked onward—under, over, and around the billboards and luggage carts and mobs of distressed-looking travelers.

  I was a little distressed myself as I watched a tatted-up young street hoodlum in a flat-brim Dodgers cap saunter up from the opposite direction. I know it’s not polite to stare, but I did so anyway, keeping my eyes on the illustrated young gentleman’s hands until he was well past us.

  Even in the airport on the opposite side of the TSA security checkpoint, I guess I still wasn’t completely over my fear of our being attacked by some gang fools looking to get in good with the cartels.

  We kept rolling. Somewhere ahead in the crowd, Mary Catherine was on point, trying to get us to Terminal 4 and our American Airlines flight home. Seamus and I were taking up the rear to keep track of the laggards.

  Public Lollygaggers One and Two, respectively, were Eddie and Trent, who, when they weren’t screaming and chasing each other around the banks of pleather seats, wanted to stop to get something from every Wendy’s and Starbucks and gimcrack souvenir stand we passed.

  I knew the box of Mike and Ike movie candy I’d let them purchase at the gas station on the van ride over would come back to haunt me.

  “Dad, can we get Lakers caps?” Trent said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Dad, can we at least get a Kobe bobblehead?” said Eddie.

  “No, there are enough bobbleheads in the Bennett family, thank you. I’m talking to two of them right now, in fact.”

  “Dad, can we at the very least use the bathroom?” Trent cried.

  “No, no, no,” I said.

  “Well, actually, that might be a good idea,” Seamus said, smiling sheepishly beside me.

  “Lollygagger Number Three, I presume,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  I pinched two fingers together and put them in my mouth and whistled up ahead to halt our rolling army.

  “Pit stop!” I yelled.

  I stayed by the massive mound of our carry-ons as the sexes split up into the restrooms. As I nervously checked and rechecked the time on my phone, I heard some excited yelling that at first I thought might be a flash mob or something. Then I saw some teenage Asian guy walk by on the concourse with an entourage, followed by a gaggle of screaming girls trying to snap cell phone pictures of him.

  Was it the Chinese Justin Bieber? I wondered with a shrug. I had no clue. This LA Asian stuff was way beyond my Bronx Irish Catholic sense and sensibilities. The good news was I wouldn’t have to worry about all things Hollywood once we made our flight.

  That is, if we made our flight, I thought, frowning at my phone again. American Airlines had bent over backward to accommodate all thirteen of us on the red-eye on short notice. If we missed our plane, I feared we’d never escape from LA.

  I took a quick head count as my family spilled back out onto the concourse.

  Eleven, twelve, and lucky number thirteen.

  “OK, boys and girls and um…priests, is everybody, um, unhydrated now? Excellent. OK, let’s move, people. Forward march.”

  We were all on the plane and somewhere in the night sky, probably over Colorado, an hour and a half later when I finally was able to calm down. Socky, our now-tranquilized cat, was purring peacefully in his travel box between my feet. Mary Catherine, who probably could have used a tranquilizer or two herself after getting everyone ready for our coast-to-coast trip, was sleeping beside me in the window seat.

  It felt good when she shifted toward the aisle and rested her head on my shoulder. It felt very good there, just right, in fact. We’d had our ups and downs, but it felt like we were settling in now, finally. At least I hoped so.

  Just as I closed my weary eyes and was about to follow Mary Catherine’s lead, we hit the turbulence. The two-footed kind.

  As if on cue, I heard some commotion behind me. There was a sweet-voiced yell of “No!” followed by the distinctive loud and wet sound of a child tossing his or her cookies. The retching sound fired three times in quick succession, and then Fiona and Bridget were standing in the aisle beside me.

  “Daddy, Bridget threw up in the seat pouch! Bridget threw up all over the magazines!” Fiona called out excitedly.

  I sat up and hugged the poor kid as Mary Catherine shot awake and quickly thrust some napkins into my hand.

  From somewhere up ahead in
the wall-to-wall-crowded cabin, I heard a male voice moan, “Oh, the stench! Oh, for the love of Pete!”

  My sentiments exactly, fella, I thought as I sopped up the mess with one hand and rapidly hit the button for the flight attendant with the other.

  For the love of Peter and Paul and the rest of the apostles, may we get back to New York in one piece, I prayed.

  PART ONE

  HARLEM SHUFFLE

  CHAPTER 1

  HARLEM

  3:12 A.M.

  THERE WERE ONLY TWO tonight to start off the season in New York. Though there were a total of a dozen in the group, the members, all being at the highest echelons of wealth and power, had busy lives, charities to chair and companies to acquire, so attendance was sporadic and often fluctuated. Four, including the two founding members, were from the US, four were from Europe, and there were two each from Hong Kong and Russia. They were considering two new members, one from India and one from Brazil, but the jury was still out.

  The young New York financier who hosted all the NYC events was a founding member. The Brit, whose real estate baron family owned a large chunk of Notting Hill and most of Manchester, had a fortune in the upper hundred millions, but he was a pauper compared with the New York financier. Though the American kept his name off the Forbes list by choice, his hedge fund–acquired wealth was rumored to be mind-boggling.

  So it was more than a little ironic that the financier and the well-heeled Brit were riding like a couple of schmucks in an ugly metallic-brown Mazda CX-9 crossover as they cruised up Lenox Avenue in East Harlem.

  The Brit didn’t mind. Slumming, roughing it, enhanced the manly intimacy and esprit de corps that the organization had been formed to engender. Besides, as they all knew, discretion was entirely necessary.

  The building where they finally pulled to the curb was at Lenox Avenue and 145th Street, in front of a subway pit for the 3 train. It was a broad, three-story prewar structure that probably had once been a luxurious apartment house. Now its high windows were sealed with cinder blocks and its once-grand arched doorway held an ugly spray-painted steel shutter.

  The Brit, who had just been elected an executive director at the IMF, gazed up at the curious structure. Having briefly flirted with becoming an architect at Warwick before coming to his senses, he detected a golden-mean, Parthenon-like quality in the well-constructed building, slightly wider than it was tall. He also picked up a faint flavor of French classical style in the building’s quoins and the porthole-like oculus window beneath its open cornice. It made one think of ruins, he thought. Of rituals.

  Something stirred deep in the pit of his empty stomach. Might the French aspect of the location denote tonight’s fare? he wondered, licking his thin lips. Was there a little haute cuisine on the menu tonight? Hmmmm. It was always a surprise, per club rule, and the anticipation was killing him.

  “I hate to admit it, but you nailed the venue this time,” the Brit said, turning toward the financier sitting directly behind him. “This is like coming upon a temple in the middle of a jungle.”

  The tall American hedge fund owner smiled as he patted the driver on the shoulder.

  “Don’t thank me. It was Alberto who found it, of course.”

  The Brit, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, smiled at the hulking chauffeur, Alberto Witherspoon, beside him. Alberto smiled back, a twinkle in his brown eyes as he nodded proudly.

  “Least I could do,” he said.

  The Brit had heard all about Alberto. The story was that the handsome, six-foot-four-inch gentle-seeming black man from Oakland had once been a bodyguard to the infamous cult leader Jim Jones. He’d been there from the early days when Jones was still a darling of political figures like First Lady Rosalynn Carter, California governor Jerry Brown, and gay rights activist Harvey Milk. Alberto had been off on a supply run when Jones had persuaded the nine hundred Americans who had signed up for his socialist agrarian paradise in Guyana to raise a glass of cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.

  Or at least that was what the deviant claimed, thought the Brit. One could only happily imagine the kinds of unholy things the not-so-gentle giant had seen and done.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE BRIT WATCHED AS Alberto gazed up and down the darkened street, listening to the police radio in the drink holder. The placard he removed from his jacket and placed on the dash denoted the car as on official NYPD business.

  The Brit shook his head and smiled gleefully at the official-looking document. It looked real, it probably was real. The financier was supposed to have connections virtually everywhere.

  That was what he loved about this club, the Brit thought as Alberto handed him a flashlight. Its reach was something altogether new. Literally nothing was prohibited. There was nothing they couldn’t do.

  A clatter of steel from the subway pit sounded like some far-off torture in a dungeon as they crossed the deserted sidewalk to the building’s steel-shuttered entrance. Before he unlocked the gate, Alberto set down the large suitcase he had taken from the crossover’s trunk. Then he rattled the gate up and lifted the case again.

  The first thing the Brit noticed was that it smelled like fire inside—rich, fragrant wood smoke. He thought of rituals again as he looked up at the cracked, blistered black walls and ceiling in the beam of his flashlight. Marble steps appeared in the light, an iron balustrade heading up.

  Everything was set up on the third floor in a large room broom-swept of rubble. The grill was top-of-the-line and massive, its stainless steel gleaming from the moonlight that fell in through a ragged basketball-size hole in the ceiling. Beside the grill was a large sheet of thick plastic, rattling in the cold wind that came in with the moonlight.

  The Brit thought it looked like a dinner setup at one of the high-end safaris his wife had dragged him to in Botswana. Nothing but the best, he thought, accepting a warmed brandy glass from Alberto as he took his seat.

  “That’s not what I think it is, is it?” the Brit said as Alberto brought over a dark, heart-shaped bottle and poured a careful measure.

  “I remembered how much you liked the Courvoisier last month in Tokyo, so I thought I’d blow the dust off some of the Jenssen Arcana I received for my fortieth,” the financier said as he leaned back in his chair and lit a cigar.

  “That was incredibly thoughtful of you. I mean that,” the Brit said, touched. He took a sip of the fifty-five-hundred-dollar-a-bottle hundred-year-old brandy.

  “I have incredible respect for you, Martin. The others don’t seem to fully appreciate what I’ve set up here as much as you. You get it. I can’t explain how important that is to me,” the financier said as Alberto tied on a simple white chef’s apron and fired the grill to preheat.

  The financier passed over some Ecstasy and then a large bag of coke. As the excellent drugs started to work their glittery magic, there was a squeak, and Alberto was rolling over an empty gurney he’d produced from the shadowed corner of the room.

  When Alberto brought over the suitcase, the Brit’s stomach churned again deliciously. He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end as a heady cocktail of narcotic- and alcohol-enhanced emotions swirled through him. Anticipation, joy, fear.

  He swallowed as Alberto slowly zipped open the suitcase and took out what was in it. Though he knew what was coming, the Brit watched as the brandy in his hand wavered, and his eyes almost bugged out of his head. The dust between his feet darkened in coinlike shapes where the expensive liquor splattered upon the floor.

  This was far better than the Marquis de Sade he had slavered over after lights-out at Beau Soleil, he thought, gazing on the stunning scene before him. Better even than the parties he had attended in Libya that time with the sultan. For so many years, he had wrestled with what he was. Now, with the help of his comrades, he could finally accept it, relish it, worship it, as the thing that made him truly superior to other men.

  This is real, the Brit thought, making eye contact with the bound, wide-awake, nude young woman A
lberto easily lifted above his head.

  Dear me, this is so very, very real.

  CHAPTER 3

  IT WAS LIKE SLIPPING into a favorite old pair of shoes that first Monday morning back in New York.

  As I woke in our West End Avenue apartment, I smiled at everything, the ceiling that needed painting, the traffic sounds out the window, the tick of Mary Catherine’s teakettle from the kitchen. Even the sound of the kids fighting and teasing and slamming bathroom doors and clomping around on our big old apartment’s worn oak floors was like music to my ears.

  Mary Catherine had the troops lined up and ready for inspection as I came into the dining room. I scanned all the happy, scrubbed, bright-eyed faces. I’d never seen my guys so happy to be geared up with backpacks and lunch bags in their plaid Holy Name uniforms.

  “Hey, everybody. Did Mary Catherine tell you the good news?” I said to them. “Homeschooling went so well in California, we’re going to continue it here. Only with uniforms. So sit down, children, and take out your math workbooks.”

  “No! Ughhh! Wrong, so wrong! Never! Please, no!” they cried with accompanying Bronx cheers.

  Ricky dropped and lay on his back with his eyes closed and his tongue stuck out. “Can’t homeschool!” he gasped. “No friends. Need teacher. School. Need school!”

  “Oh, well. If that’s the way you feel about it, I guess we could try regular school on a day-to-day basis. But if there are any problems, you know you always have a place here all day with Teacher Daddy.”

  “Daddy!” Chrissy said, laughing as she tugged on one of my pockets. “Stop teasing and being so silly!”

  “Yes, Daddy, please do,” said Seamus, appearing in the doorway of the kitchen with my favorite DAD: THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE coffee mug in his fist. “I mean, bad enough you have ’em traipsing off to the ends of the earth like a pack of tinkers. Do you have to make them late on their first day back?”