I, Michael Bennett mb-5 Page 4

  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.

  “How am I doing? Do I make a convincing doc?” I said.

  “Just perfect, Mike,” the young cop said with another eye roll. “Like the pre-Darfur George Clooney.”

  “He’s Clooney!?” Hughie said in outrage as he opened the window of the office to get some much-needed fresh air. “No way. I’m Clooney. He’s the other one—Clooney’s bald, caring, nerdy friend.”

  With Detective Martinez’s back to the medical office’s glass front door, we were hoping that someone passing on the interior concourse might mistake her for Perrine’s daughter. Our bait was set. Now all we needed was for Perrine to bite. If Perrine had gone to all this trouble to sneak into the States to see his daughter graduate, there was no way he would hear about a medical emergency and leave without trying to find out if she was okay.

  Above the examination table on the wall hung a poster of the Heimlich maneuver. I glanced at the first panel, in which there was an illustration of a man holding both hands at his throat to indicate that he was choking.

  With our trap set and the biggest arrest in New York City in a decade on the line, the question now was, would I choke?

  CHAPTER 11

  I GLANCED OUT into the hallway of the arena and spotted giant posters of Knicks basketballs and Rangers hockey pucks and boxers squaring off. I couldn’t believe all this was going down here at the Garden, of all places, but I guess it was appropriate to have this boxing mecca be the site of the heavyweight fight between the cartels and U.S. law enforcement.

  “Hey, Hughie,” I said to my partner. “You were in Golden Gloves, right? You ever fight here?”

  “Nope,” Hughie said. “They only had the finals here. I never made it that far, but my oldest brother Fergus did.”

  “What happened?”

  Hughie squinted at the floor.

  “Some monster from Queens knocked him out in the second round,” he said. “The beast pounded his ear against the side of his head so hard, I swear to God it looked like a veal cutlet. He couldn’t hear for a month.”

  I shook my head.

  “Forget I asked,” I said as the tactical radio in my ear squawked.

  “Okay, Mike. Heads up. I think I see something,” the DEA SWAT team head, Patrick Zaretski, told me in my earpiece.

  Zaretski was upstairs in the Garden security office, working the cameras. The other arrest teams were next door in an empty office, waiting to take down Perrine at the first sight of him.

  “What’s up, Patrick? Talk to me,” I said.

  “It looks like you’re being watched. I can just make out a person on the concourse pointing a video camera at the medical office door.”

  “Is it Perrine?” I said excitedly.

  “I can’t tell. It’s a big old-style camera. Hold it. The subject just put the camera down and is heading directly for your location. Be advised, the subject is heading right for you.”

  This was it, I thought as I heard the front door of the office open.

  Now or never.

  Do or die.

  “You just need to breathe, Miss Candelerio,” I said in a loud voice as I stood blocking Detective Martinez’s face from view of the front door. “Stay with
me, okay? The ambulance is coming. It’s on its way.”

  “Excuse me. I’m sorry. You can’t come in here now. We’re having an emergency,” I heard the female cop posing as the receptionist say through the open door behind me.

  “I’m here to see Miss Daisy Candelerio. Is she all right? What’s happened to her?” said a Spanish-accented voice.

  What the hell? Something was wrong. It wasn’t Perrine.

  It was a female voice.

  When I turned, I spotted a young dark-haired woman in a flowered dress. She was trying to peek around the receptionist to look at Detective Martinez.

  An alarm went off inside my head as I stepped into the front room and saw how tall and striking the young woman was. The dress looked cheap, but the woman wearing it was extremely poised, her lustrous hair expensively maintained. She looked like an actress or a model.

  Billionaire bait, I thought. Something told me this tall drink of water was with Perrine. He must have sent his girlfriend in first to scout things out.

  We’d bag her and her phone and then bag Perrine. My trap was working. Perrine was even closer now, so close I could almost smell his French aftershave.

  “Did you say you’re Daisy’s family?” I said breathlessly as I rushed toward the woman and took her by the elbow. “Thank God. The poor young woman is having a seizure. We need to stabilize her until the ambulance arrives. You need to come back here. Please, she needs someone she knows to talk to her in order to keep her conscious.”

  The young woman glanced in my eyes, trying to read my face as I brought her into the room. Her eyes were a light amber, I noticed, almost gold, an eye color I’d never seen before. Her flawless skin glowed like fresh cream and even in flats, she was at eye level with my six-two. Definitely an exotic piece of arm candy.

  She bristled when we stepped into the exam room and Detective Martinez turned around. Hughie stood up from the stool on the other side of the table, dangling a set of handcuffs on his finger.

  “Yes, Virginia,” Hughie said with a smile. “There is a Santa Claus after all.”

  She did something weird next. The lovely brunette’s gold eyes swiveled to Hughie and then back to Detective Martinez then back to Hughie again and then she burst out laughing.

  She must have really thought something was funny because after a moment, she was shaking and cackling, wiping tears of hilarity out of her eyes.

  Hughie and I shook our heads at her fevered, high-pitched gigglefest. Was she nuts? I thought. High on her boyfriend’s drugs?

  Still laughing, she broke my grip on her elbow. She actually doubled over as she leaned against the right-hand wall. That’s when I noticed, through her lustrous dark hair, that she had something in her ear. A curious piece of flesh-colored plastic.

  A piece that looked just like my tactical microphone.

  A stark and paralyzing horror gripped hold of me right then as the woman’s laughter cut off in midcackle.

  Two things happened next, almost simultaneously.

  “Get out!” the doubled-over woman screamed into her purse.

  Then her purse exploded.

  CHAPTER 12

  IT WAS A flashbang grenade, I learned later.

  When it went off in the woman’s purse a foot away from my face, I didn’t know what had happened. Or where I was or even who I was for a few seconds. I didn’t know anything except the burning smell of cordite in my nose, the blinding, vibrating stars of light in my eyes, and an excruciatingly painful ringing in my ears.

  As I struggled to keep my balance, I heard a rhythmic, low-pitched thudding through the ringing sound. At first I thought it might have been some construction outside. Then I saw bright licks of light blossoming in my shaky vision and Detective Martinez, her face spurting blood, sliding off the exam table and falling with a crash at my feet.

  Still struggling with what I was seeing, I looked up to find the dark young woman holding a gun, a little black polymer machine pistol with a ribbon of smoke curling from its suppressor. As she swung the gun at me from the other side of the table, I yelled incoherently as I tried to draw my own gun. Time seemed to slow, the air itself to change, as if I were suddenly swimming in Jell-O. My eyes focused on one thing as my palm finally grazed the checkered grip of my holstered service weapon—the black bore of the woman’s gun as it stopped dead level with my face.

  The next thing I knew, I felt a weight slam into me. I thought it was a bullet, but I was wrong. It was Hughie tackling me, taking me down like a linebacker sacking a quarterback. He knocked out my breath as he hit me up top, pushing me sideways, away from the front of the gun.

  Gasping for breath, I looked up from the floor to see Hughie rising and turning. He sent the exam-table mat flying as he launched himself upward, reaching out empty-handed for the gun and the girl.

  “Ten thirteen! Ten thirteen! Ten thirteen!” I started yelling. Or thought I was yelling, because I still couldn’t hear anything, not even myself. Then the violent thudding ripped the air again, and Hughie stopped in his tracks. There was a nauseating, wet, splattering sound as his head snapped back, as if he’d been punched.

  I’d finally cleared my gun and was getting to my feet when Hughie’s lifeless body toppled back on top of me. As we went down in a heap again, I felt the slugs hit the back of Hughie’s vest. I also felt Hughie’s blood, warm and gushing, on the back of my neck and down the back of my shirt. I finally stuck out the Glock from underneath Hughie’s arm and pulled the trigger—and pulled the trigger and pulled the trigger.

  When the slide slapped all the way back after the last round, I poked my head up and saw that the woman was, amazingly, gone. Had she run back out? I thought as I quickly reloaded my Glock.

  In the hallway, I could see one of the female detectives screaming into her radio as the gold-eyed woman leaped up from the other side of the exam table, where she’d been crouching.

  But before I could move, before I could even breathe, she was past me.

  She took three running steps, dove out the medical office’s window headfirst, and was gone.

  CHAPTER 13

  I ROLLED OUT from underneath Hughie. Through the stench of blood and gun smoke, I knelt over my friend on the floor. I reached a hand out above his blood-soaked hair as if to somehow mend the gaping red-black holes there. But I couldn’t because he was dead. Detective Martinez was dead. Everyone was dead.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was one of the DEA SWAT guys, mouthing something into his crackling radio. Without thinking about it, I holstered my Glock and found myself ripping away the M4 assault rifle he held in his hand. Then I went to the open window and threw myself out of it.

  The hard plastic butt of the gun almost knocked me out as I went ass over teakettle and landed hard on my back on the asphalt. As I got up, I saw a woman’s shoe in front of me. Then I looked up and saw the tall pale woman it belonged to running hard in her bare feet fifty feet north of me, down the alley outside the medical office window.

  As I started running after the woman, a black Lincoln Town Car screeched off the street and came to a jarring halt at the alley’s mouth. A thin Spanish driver got out, calling and waving like a maniac at the woman. I brought the rifle to my shoulder just as the tinted rear passenger-side window of the Lincoln zipped down and the baffled holes of a gigantic gun barrel appeared.

  I dropped as if someone had yanked my ankles from behind and rolled behind a fire hydrant as the huge gun opened up. In that narrow alley, the report of it was unreal. Concrete dust stung my eyes as a fluttering deluge of lead chewed up the pavement and ripped at the hydrant like an invisible jackhammer.

  As the heavy, deafening rounds pounded and tore apart everything around me, I had what I guess you would call a near-death experience. In the awesomely violent rumble of the gun and the way it shook the air, I detected a God-like message. To keep perfectly still was life. To move even the tiniest part of my body was instant death.

  I was thinking how wise the message was and
how the post office could forward my mail to Behind the Fire Hydrant, Alleyway, Madison Square Garden, New York City, when I remembered Hughie. In my mind, I saw him get shot again, saw the Heimlich poster on the wall behind him get splattered with his blood.

  Lying on my back, I flicked the switch on the M4 to full auto. Then, when there was a pause in the firing, I swung up on my knee in a firing position.

  The thin driver was getting into the front seat, right next to the woman who’d killed Hughie, when I shot him three times in the side of his head. Then I put the rear passenger-side window behind the red dot of my rifle’s holographic sight and opened up. I poured about a dozen shots into the window, then stood up in the awesome silence and began to run.

  Running toward the Lincoln, I noticed for the first time that there were other people in the alley, construction workers crouched alongside a wall beside a UPS guy.

  “Ground! On the ground!” I kept yelling.

  I slowed as I circled the Lincoln behind the barrel of the assault rifle. The driver I’d killed had his bloody head leaning out the window as though he were checking the front tire. Under the 30-caliber machine gun in the backseat, I saw the shooter, a pudgy, middle-aged Spanish man in a silk-screened T-shirt. He was on his back, moaning, coughing, and spitting up blood. More blood gurgled out the side of his right hand, where he clutched at the hole in his throat.

  It was only then that I noticed that the doors on the other side of the car were wide open.