I, Michael Bennett Read online

  My cell phone rang a second later.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do, okay? I’m so sorry,” Valentina said, sobbing.

  “It’s okay, Valentina. I’m having you picked up. You’re safe. Just listen closely. Was it him? Did Manuel Perrine just come into the restaurant?”

  “No. Those men were members of Candelerio’s crew. They were just laughing with the manager about how much par-tying they would be doing today since Candelerio is away. Candelerio isn’t coming to lunch. I knew I had to call you, but I was afraid they’d see. You know what they would do to me if they saw me calling a cop? That’s why I left. And I’m not going back. I don’t care what you do to my cousin. These guys are killers. I can’t take working there anymore.”

  I stared down at the restaurant in disbelief. Candelerio wasn’t coming? Which meant Perrine wasn’t coming. What did that mean? They were onto us? Were the drug dealers meeting somewhere else?

  “Why isn’t he coming? Did you hear anything?” I said as calmly as my racing pulse would allow.

  “They said it was a family thing. A graduation? Something like that.”

  A graduation? I thought. This early in the year it would have to be Candelerio’s oldest daughter, Daisy, the one at NYU law school. That actually made sense. It explained why Candelerio had brought his family, and why they were all dressed up. Except on the phone for the past month, the drug dealer had said he wanted to meet Perrine at noon today at the restaurant. How did that make sense?

  The answer was it didn’t. Exactly nothing was going the way we’d expected. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

  “A squad car is pulling over. Can I please, please, please go home?” my informant said.

  “Of course, Valentina. You did good. I’ll call you,” I said, hanging up.

  The metal clang of a passing garbage truck bouncing over potholes in the street rang off the gouged walls and dirty marble steps as I stood there trying to figure out what was happening.

  “So?” Hughie said, holding up his hands.

  “We were wrong,” I said. “Candelerio isn’t coming. He’s going to his daughter’s graduation.”

  “How is this happening?” Hughie said, speed-tapping the barrel of his M4 as he paced back and forth. “You heard the transcripts. Perrine said the meet’s at Margaritas! This is Margaritas. Candelerio is a silent partner in the place. He eats here three times a week.”

  I slowly went over the case in my mind, especially the telephone transcripts. They were written in a weird mix of Spanish and Creole that had been translated by two different FBI experts. But Hughie was right. In the calls, Perrine kept talking about being at Margaritas. Margaritas at noon.

  “Maybe Margaritas isn’t a place,” I said.

  “What is it, then?” Hughie said. “You think Perrine wants to meet Candelerio for a margarita?”

  “Maybe it’s a code word or something. Does margarita mean anything in Spanish?”

  “Um… tequila and lime juice?” Hughie said, lifting his phone. “I’m the Gaelic expert. Let me ask Agent Perez.”

  “It’s a name of a flower,” Hughie said, listening to his phone a moment later. “It means… daisy.”

  We both did a double take as the realization hit us simultaneously.

  “Candelerio’s daughter!” we said at the same time.

  “Margarita must mean Daisy, then,” Hughie said. “Has to be. But how does that make sense? Perrine wants to see Candelerio’s daughter graduate? That’s why he came to the States?”

  I thought about it. “Maybe he wants to meet in the crowd, or-”

  I snapped a finger as I remembered something from the surveillance photographs, something that was out of place. I immediately called our control post back at the precinct.

  “There’s a picture of Candelerio’s family on my desk. Text it to me pronto,” I said to the detective manning the shop.

  Less than a minute later, my phone vibrated, and Hughie and I looked at the photo, which was tagged with the family members’ names. I looked more closely at the oldest daughter’s face and smiled.

  “I knew it. Look at the oldest one. She has darker skin than the others. And her eyes-she has blue eyes. Both Candelerio and his wife have brown eyes, and she has light blue eyes. That’s impossible. How did we miss it?” I said.

  “You’re right. She even looks like Perrine!” Hughie yelled. “Shit! That’s it! That’s goddamn it. You’re a genius. Daisy must be Perrine’s daughter.”

  “That FBI lifer was right,” I said. “Perrine isn’t risking his ass coming to the States for money. It’s to see his daughter graduate.”

  Hughie answered his ringing phone.

  “Candelerio just passed the exit for Washington Heights and is continuing downtown,” he said. “Aerial is staying on him. SWAT wants to know what’s what.”

  “Tell them to saddle up and move ’em out,” I said excitedly as I started down the stairs. “We’re jumping to plan B now. Looks like we have a graduation to attend.”

  CHAPTER 8

  TEN MINUTES LATER, our four-car task force caravan was gunning it south, sirens ripping, down the West Side Highway.

  Hughie was at the wheel as I worked the phone and radio, coordinating with my bosses and the other arrest teams. I don’t know which was flying faster, the frazzled cop-radio traffic or the highway’s guardrail, zipping an inch past my face at around ninety.

  “Thank God you added that ass-covering rider to your arrest report, huh?” Hughie shouted as he tried to set a new land speed record. He gave a rebel yell as the traffic cone we clipped sailed over the guardrail into the Hudson River.

  My partner seemed to be enjoying himself, but I wasn’t feeling it. Not even close. I’d called NYU law school and learned that graduation was to take place at 12:30 today, but not at the law school.

  It was taking place at Madison Square Garden!

  Thousands of people were supposed to be there, and we were somehow supposed to pluck Perrine from the crowd? Safely? The towers of midtown began to loom on my left. I didn’t know how or even if that could be done.

  We killed the sirens when we got off the West Side Highway at Thirty-Fourth Street. It took a few minutes to weave through the heavy Manhattan gridlock to the Garden, on Seventh Avenue at Thirty-Second Street. As we turned the corner, we could see that people were already pouring into the famed arena-smiling, well-dressed families holding balloons and video cameras, surrounding twentysomethings in black-and-purple gowns.

  Even if we spotted Perrine at this thing, there had to be a million ways in and out of the Garden, I thought, rapidly scanning faces. It was way too porous. We needed a way to box in the cartel head. But how?

  I still hadn’t figured it out as we circled the block and pulled in behind the disguised FBI SWAT van onto the apron of a fire station driveway on Thirty-First.

  “Bad news, Mike. We don’t have the go-ahead to do this. Not even a little,” Hughie said after he got back from a quick powwow with the SWAT guys. “The bosses are going nuts because there are thousands of potential lawyers and lawsuits in there, not to mention the mayor, who’s actually the keynote speaker. What do you think?”

  I took a long moment to do just that, given that this was the biggest arrest in my career. Taking down a suspect in the middle of a graduation would certainly make a lot of waves. Especially at the notoriously überliberal NYU law school, where they probably had courses called Cops: Friend or Enemy? and The Art and Science of Claiming Police Brutality.

  But NYU or no NYU, if Perrine was in there, the time to strike was in the middle of the ceremony. Safe in the crowd, he’d only be thinking about his daughter and how proud he was. We’d need to use that. Use his vulnerability. Because afterward, he’d only be thinking about one thing. Getting away.

  “So what’s up? You want to wait?” Hughie said.

  “Hell, no!” I finally said.

  “Good,” said McDonough, rubbing his hands together, his Irish eyes a
-smiling. “Me, neither, Church Boy. What do we do?”

  I thought about it for another minute. Then I had it. It was a crazy idea, but this was a crazy time. Not to mention a crazy, extremely violent criminal we were up against. We needed to grab this guy. Badly. It had been a while since the good guys had put one up on the board.

  “We have all the phones for all the Candelerios, right? The wife and the kids?” I said.

  “Control does,” Hughie said, scrolling through his phone.

  “Get me Daisy Candelerio’s number, then,” I said, giving one of my own smiling Irish eyes a wink as I took out my phone. “Least I could do is send the graduate a congratulatory text.”

  CHAPTER 9

  AFTER RISING FROM the dregs of a third-world hellhole called Kourou, French Guiana, Manuel Perrine, a.k.a. the Sun King, vowed to never again go anywhere near its poverty, its filth, its putrid stink.

  Promises, promises, Perrine thought as he vigorously washed his hands inside a crowded Madison Square Garden men’s room.

  Too many mimosas and cappuccinos on his chartered Global Express jet into Teterboro Airport was the reason for this unfortunate pit stop. Or is it an enlarged prostate? he wondered with a stab of depression as he remembered his upcoming forty-eighth birthday.

  Like many men of means, Perrine obsessed over germs, disease, his general health. With more money in accounts scattered throughout the world than even he could possibly spend, the only thing that could curtail the full, well-deserved enjoyment of his accumulated riches was illness. Which was why he and his personal physician were constantly on guard.

  To dispel his morbid thoughts, and take himself away from his even more morbid current surroundings, Perrine closed his eyes and envisioned his luxury penthouse suite in the Fairmont Le Château Frontenac in Quebec City, where he had been staying since fleeing Mexico. In his mind, he saw white everywhere. White furniture, white towels, white bubbles in the pristine white marble bathtub.

  Hearing the clamor of coughs and wall-mounted dryers and flushing toilets all around him, he truly couldn’t return soon enough.

  The Sun King winced as he glanced at himself in the mirror. He was completely bald now. He’d had some work done on his eyes to change their shape, and was wearing brown contact lenses to disguise their color. To further alter his appearance on this trip-which he hoped was his last ever to the U.S.-he’d intentionally put on an unhealthy thirty pounds, which gave him a disgusting double chin.

  But, because he was known for his style, the greatest offense to his sensibilities was that he could wear no Prada, no Yves, no Caraceni hand-tailored suits today. The suit he wore now was an ill-fitting, off-the-rack, green gabardine atrocity from a New Jersey Kohl’s department store that made him look like he drove something for a living. He needed to not stand out for once, and in his puke-colored American rags, he’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

  Coming back out into the buzzing Madison Square Garden concourse, Perrine exchanged a glance with Marietta, who was leaning against the wall, watching his flank and rear. In Mexico, he rode with a rolling armada of men and trucks, but that might look a little conspicuous here in the country where he was wanted for double murder, so today he had Marietta, and a few handpicked men, with him.

  Thankfully, Marietta was as good as a small army. She was deadly with a gun, a knife-even her hands, if it came down to it. The tall, thin brunette looked about as dangerous as a kindergarten teacher, and yet she was an expert in the Brazilian martial art capoeira, and had the strongest and quickest hands of any woman he’d ever come across. He’d seen more than once the surprise and pain in an unmannerly cartel soldier’s eyes after she was forced to show him who was truly boss. His lovely Marietta never hesitated to give new meaning to the term “bitch slap.”

  Now she, too, was sporting a garish American getup-a loud flowered print dress, also courtesy of the Paramus Kohl’s-that hid those amazingly long legs of hers. Perrine allowed himself a chuckle. So different from the all-white Chanel and Vuitton and Armani ensembles that were the dark, statuesque beauty’s signature. They were truly slumming here in New York City.

  But all in all, his daughter Margarita-or Daisy, as she liked to be called, now that she was an American-was worth it, Perrine reminded himself. She was the only one of his many children who could make him feel… what? Tenderness? Admiration? Hope? Love?

  That’s why he had sent her away at the age of seven to live in America with his friend Angel. He never wanted her to know the ugly reality of what he did for a living. He’d been a frog his whole life. His daughter Daisy would now be a princess, even if it killed him.

  Perrine followed the crowd of clueless American bourgeois sheep into the arena. He was sitting on the left side of the cavernous theater, as far away from his friend Angel Candelerio as possible. He knew his old friend Angel was smart and loyal and discreet, but there could be no room for risk now. Perrine would hear his daughter’s speech and be gone. His waiting car would take them directly out to Teterboro, where the jet was gassed and ready. He’d be back in Quebec City by dinner, and Marietta would be back in her white Armani, showing off those legs. For a little while, at least. Until he tore the dress off his brutal, beautiful bodyguard.

  As the lights of the dark, wide theater dimmed, and “Pomp and Circumstance” began to play, Perrine allowed himself a moment of long-awaited pride. Though he had money and was intelligent and well read, he had no illusions about the fact that the nature of his work and the general hypocrisy of mankind would always cause him to be seen as a thug. Daisy would rise above all that, he knew. With all his resources at her command, she would ascend above all the savage but necessary things he had ever done, just as a butterfly rises from a swamp. She was his one pure and sure thing.

  Sitting here among the American-educated elite, he couldn’t help but note what a far cry it was from his hometown, Kourou, near Devil’s Island, the place made infamous by the film Papillon. Some said his mother’s people were actually descended from Henri Charrière, the famous escape artist, Papillon himself.

  Perrine secretly liked the idea of being a descendant of Charrière, a French navy veteran and criminal like himself, who never took anything from anyone. He even liked the American actor Steve McQueen, who had played Charrière in Papillon. Like Perrine, and unlike almost any American after him, McQueen had had some style.

  As the tune played on, Perrine looked for his daughter’s always smiling face among the ranks of dark-robed graduates filing in. Like most of the happy fathers around him, he took out his video camera and hit the record button before raising it. He panned and zoomed the camera, but he couldn’t see his daughter. He wasn’t worried. As the valedictorian, she was going to speak. He pointed the camera at the stage. His little Daisy. He couldn’t be more proud or eager to hear what she had to say.

  The first speaker was the school president, a short, effeminate man who went on and on about modern America’s greatest peril, long-term climate change.

  Climate change? Perrine thought, stifling laughter. Forget the fact that as the eunuch blathered, corrupt U.S. politicians were busy burying the nation in trillions upon trillions of dollars in debt. Forget the fact that instead of getting a job or having families, bands of young faithless and clueless American citizens wandered around the dilapidated remnants of its once-bustling cities, so usefully “occupying” things. No, no. Save the planet. Of course. Bravo!

  Perrine was still smiling when a robed student suddenly appeared next to the speaker. The president cleared his throat before reading the paper the student handed him.

  “I’m sorry. Excuse me. I have an announcement. Will the family of Daisy Candelerio please come to the medical office out on the main concourse? That’s Daisy Candelerio’s family. This is a medical emergency.”

  Perrine sat up, wide-eyed, as a surprised buzz went through the crowd. His video camera rolled off his lap and hit the floor as he looked back. Marietta, sitting behind him, already had her cell
phone to her ear, the concerned expression on her face mirroring his thoughts.

  Daisy? What was this? Something was wrong with Daisy!?

  CHAPTER 10

  PERCHED ON A cold metal stool at the rear of Madison Square Garden’s tiny medical office, I rolled my neck to relieve the tension. I gave up on the fifth try and patted my Glock, tucked under the borrowed EMT shirt I was wearing.

  Like the rest of the task force, I was most definitely “Glocked” and loaded for bear by that point. Bagging a grizzly would have been simple compared to the difficulty and danger of trying to take down a lethal billionaire cartel head. In a crowded Madison Square Garden, no less!

  Actually, the first part of my plan had gone off hitch-free. By using the podium announcement and false text messages and phone calls, we’d been able to lure Perrine’s daughter and the rest of the Candelerio family to the commandeered medical office.

  Before they knew what was happening, our arrest teams swooped in and rushed them outside through the office’s back door into the guarded driveway of Madison Square Garden’s midblock entrance, where all the VIP athletes and performers entered and left. We’d made sure to take all cell phones before we buttoned down each of the loud, aggressively resisting family members into waiting squad cars.

  I knew why they were so upset. Once they spotted our DEA and NYPD raid jackets and assault rifles, they knew exactly what was going on. Who we were going after.

  Perrine’s childhood friend Angel Candelerio was especially emotional, so much so that he had to be pepper-sprayed in order to be subdued. The man knew what he was looking at-if Perrine was caught, he was the one who’d be blamed by the cartel. Probably not the best position to be in, considering he worked for an organization in which reprimands were usually delivered by death squads.

  Sitting on the medical office examination table beside me, wearing a borrowed NYU law school purple-and-black graduation gown, was a female NYPD detective named Alicia Martinez. She rolled her eyes as I put a stethoscope on her wrist for the thousandth time.