I, Michael Bennett Read online

  I was diving for it when Perrine dropped from the awning over the door where he was hanging and kicked me in the kidney. I whirled around, swinging at his face. I just missed as he bobbed his head back. He bounced back again on the balls of his feet, and before I knew what was going on, he kicked me on the inside of my thigh so hard I thought he broke it. He made a high kind of karate scream as he elbowed me in the face and knocked me to my knees.

  As he grabbed the back of my head and kneed me in the forehead, I remembered something important. My hand went to my ankle, and I pulled free the backup pepper spray canister I always carry. I depressed its trigger and proceeded to mace the living crap out of him. As he backpedaled, clawing at his burning eyes, I reached for the collapsible baton I carried on my other ankle and flicked it open. With a loud, whip-cracking sound, the ball on the metal baton’s tip made contact with the bridge of Perrine’s nose.

  He didn’t seem in the mood for any more karate after that. He dropped to his knees, blood from his broken nose spraying the sidewalk, as he screamed and blinked and shook his head.

  CHAPTER 16

  I FINALLY BROUGHT him all the way down to the concrete with a knee to his back and cuffed him. As Perrine moaned and thrashed around helplessly, I fished my Glock out from under the city-approved, low-carbon-emission sanitation vehicle.

  I stood up and looked around. There had been hundreds of people on the corner of Thirty-Fourth Street, but here at the dirty service entrance at the back of Macy’s, there was absolutely no one. I knelt on Perrine’s neck and jammed my gun in his ear.

  I thought about things for a little while then. Mostly about my friend Hughie, back in the medical office, with his head blown apart. Dead.

  No more beers. No more Yankees games. No more deep-sea fishing trips on his City Island rust bucket with his twenty nieces and nephews. The life of the party was gone now. Forever gone. Forever cold.

  I moved the barrel of my gun to Perrine’s brain stem. Two pounds of pull on the trigger under my finger, two measly little pounds here on this dim, narrow, deserted street, was all it would take to avenge Hughie and rid the world of this instrument of evil.

  I looked up. It had been overcast earlier in the morning, but now I saw through the gaps of the dark line of rooftops above me a sky of immaculate bright blue. I could also see the top of the Empire State Building, iconic and massive, its constellation of set-back windows like a million square eyes staring down at me, waiting to see what I would do.

  But I couldn’t do it. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I took the gun off Perrine’s skull pan after another second, and then arriving squad cars were screeching behind me. Over the sirens, I heard Perrine say something. He leaned up from where I sat on top of him and craned his neck around to look into my eyes as he uttered one word.

  “Coward,” he said, and then strong hands were helping me up as the sound of helicopter blades whapped at the late-spring air.

  CHAPTER 17

  WHEN THE REST of the task force team arrived, they were very concerned about me. The line-of-duty death of a close colleague was reason enough by itself to be worried about a person’s emotional health, and on top of that, I had shot two suspects. They took away my gun and buttoned me up in the SWAT van until an ambulance arrived.

  I listened through the door of the van and learned that the waiter in the Macy’s restaurant was dead. When he’d tried to stop Perrine from coming in, the drug dealer had snapped the twenty-three-year-old kid’s neck in front of fifty witnesses. That bothered me almost as much as Hughie’s death. I should have killed the son of a bitch when I had the chance.

  I guess my colleagues were right to be worried about my stability because the second the ambulance pulled away from the curb to go to the hospital, I jumped off the gurney and put the med tech in the back in a headlock until the driver agreed to let me out.

  I hit the corner of Broadway and just started walking. It was a nice day for a walk. Three o’clock; in the low sixties with a blue sky; the clear light sparkling off the glass midtown buildings. I didn’t know where the hell I was going. I just needed to move.

  First, I went up to Times Square, then crosstown, past Bryant Park, then up Madison Avenue.

  A dazed couple of hours later, one of the security guys at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral gave me a look as I pushed in through the large bronze doors on Fifth Avenue.

  No wonder he was concerned. With my friend’s blood still flecked on my cheek and my hair standing up, I’d been turning heads all afternoon. Like I was a movie star. Charlie Sheen, maybe. Or Jack Nicholson from The Shining.

  When I showed the guard my shield, he still looked worried, but in the end, he let me walk past him up the cathedral’s center aisle.

  I collapsed in a pew halfway to the altar. I could hear a tourist Mass going on, the soft melodious voice of an African priest. I took comfort in it, in all of it. The still, silent darkness. The jewel-like light of the stained glass windows. I sat there for a long time, thinking about Hughie and about friendship and sacrifice.

  Who would take Hughie’s place? I thought. But I knew the answer. The answer was no one.

  I was tired. My body, my mind, my heart, and my soul so weary. I was not in a good place. I thought about calling my grandfather Seamus up at the lake house, but I was afraid I’d get Mary Catherine or one of the kids. I just couldn’t talk to them now. No way-not like this.

  I looked up high into the cathedral arches, toward the heaven that no one wanted to believe in anymore. I took out my shield. I turned the golden piece of metal through my fingers before I placed it down on the pew beside me and spun it.

  “God bless you, Hughie. God bless you, Church Boy,” I whispered as it came to a stop.

  Then I put my head down on the fragrant wood and I cried like a baby as I prayed for my friend and for the world.

  CHAPTER 18

  AFTER ANOTHER TWENTY minutes or so of having a nervous breakdown, I wiped my eyes and got the heck out of there before the guys from Bellevue showed.

  Outside, I decided to make another pilgrimage through the rush-hour crush. It was to one of Hughie’s favorite places, O’Lunney’s Times Square Pub. I sat at the bar, watching a hurling game on the TV as I pounded down three pints of bracing Guinness. By the time Sligo beat Waterford by the head-scratching score of a goal and three points, I’d managed to avoid crying even once. I was making real progress.

  Absolutely shot from the arrest and all my walking, I took a cab home to my West End Avenue apartment. As much as I love my huge family, I was very happy to find it silent and empty. The day I’d just had and the horrors I’d just seen were things I didn’t want to share with anyone. Not ever.

  I went back to my room and took the longest, hottest shower in history. Then I did what any self-respecting stressed-out cop would do. I got dressed and made myself a cup of coffee and went back to work.

  First on my to-do list was to drive out to Woodlawn in my unmarked PD car to tell Hughie’s family. By the time I drove down the street, I knew from all the cars and the lights blazing that Hughie’s family had already been told, thank God.

  Coming out of the car, I saw two of his brothers, Eamon and Fergus, smoking on the stoop in their FDNY uniforms. I remembered sitting on the same stoop on Saturday mornings in my polyester Little League jersey waiting for Hughie so we could walk up to Van Cortlandt Park for our games. I hugged both brothers and offered my condolences before I explained what happened, how Hughie had saved my life.

  “Out like a man,” Fergus said, wiping a tear. “He always had balls. Too many, maybe. Well, he’s with Pop now.”

  “But is that such a good thing?” Eamon said, wiping his eyes and flicking his cigarette out into the street. “The crazy old bastard probably already has him training, making him do chin-ups on Saint Peter’s gate.”

  We were laughing at that when a frail and haggard old woman in a flowered housecoat appeared at the door.

  “Michael Bennett, is that you?” Hu
ghie’s mom said in her thick Northern Ireland accent as she beamed at me.

  Hughie had told me that she had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and they were trying to make arrangements for her to move in with one of them.

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. McDonough,” I said, gently taking her tiny hands.

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said, staring at me with her rheumy blue eyes. “The party is just starting. Is he with you? Is Hughie with you? All my boys are here except for my baby, Hughie.”

  I stood there speechless, holding her skinny hands, until Fergus took them from me and led his poor old mother back inside.

  CHAPTER 19

  IT WAS ABOUT nine o’clock when I finally pulled up in front of the Thirty-Fourth Precinct again. I spotted two news vans on the corner as I went inside. After the broad-daylight midtown shootout and the deaths of three cops, I had a funny feeling I’d be seeing more of them.

  Upstairs, the cops on the task force team were filling out paperwork. Every eye in the room swiveled on me as I came through the door, as though I’d just come back from the dead.

  “Okay, what’s the scoop, troops?” I said, ignoring the gawking.

  After someone gave me back my gun, they told me the feds had Perrine in the federal lockup downtown, near Centre Street. He’d already lawyered up and wasn’t talking to anyone. Of the attractive young woman who had murdered Hughie, Detective Martinez, and the Midtown South beat cop at the booth, there was no sign.

  “Press conference is set for tomorrow down at Fed Plaza,” the SWAT leader, Patrick Zaretski, told me. “Everyone will understand if you don’t want to be there.”

  “You kidding me? I love press conferences. I mean, never waste a crisis, right?” I said. “It’s just too bad Detective Martinez and Hughie won’t be able to make it.”

  But the longest day of my life wasn’t over.

  I was at the end of one of the paper-covered tables, filling out incident reports and calling up my various bosses to assure them I hadn’t completely cracked up, when we heard the noise. It was from outside, down on Broadway-a loud metal thump, followed by tires shrieking and then a long, wailing scream.

  I ran downstairs and saw a form sprawled facedown between two unmarked police department Chevys. It was a young woman, her black skirt completely torn on one side, her white shirt covered in blood. I knelt beside her and then reared back as I saw the short black hair and the face framed by silver hoop earrings.

  It was Valentina Jimenez, my informant. After I checked for a pulse that I knew I wouldn’t find, I looked at the deep ligature burns along her wrists. There were cigarette holes along her collarbone and two star-shaped, point-blank bullet wounds in her right and left cheeks. She’d been thoroughly tortured before someone had executed her.

  Instead of getting angry as I knelt there, all I felt was numbing coldness spreading from my chest to the rest of my body.

  This was payback for the arrest, I realized. This was Perrine showing me what he could do.

  “Coward” was right, I thought. I should have pulled the trigger when I had the chance. If I had, this girl would probably still be alive.

  After a minute, I did the only thing there was left to do. I took off my suit jacket and lay it over the poor girl as I sat down beside her.

  CHAPTER 20

  THERE WERE FLOWERS in the shape of the Yankees logo, flowers in the form of an American flag, and green, white, and gold flowers arranged in the shape of a Celtic cross.

  Hughie’s casket sat in the center of them, candlelight shining on its closed, varnished pine lid. There was music playing from the funeral parlor speakers overhead-Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, that crushing, ineffably sad classical piece from the movie Platoon.

  Not that any help was needed to produce crushing, ineffable sadness today, I thought as I signed the visitors’ book.

  I’d been to Irish wakes before, but this one was outrageous. Half the Hibernian people in New York seemed to have made the pilgrimage to Woodlawn. A three-block-long line of mourners stood on McLean Avenue waiting to pay Hughie their respects. An FDNY fire truck stood outside the funeral parlor next to cop cars from New York and Yonkers and Westchester, their spinning lights flashing red, white, and blue on the regiments of sad, pale faces.

  I’d just come from Detective Martinez’s wake out in Brooklyn and had another wake for the Midtown South cop to hit before tomorrow’s two funerals. I hadn’t seen this many funeral parlors since 9/11. Or sadness. Or broken people.

  My bosses had forced me to speak to a PD shrink for a psychological debriefing. Though I didn’t hear word one of what the nice doctor woman tried to tell me, as I came out of her office, I decided that I wasn’t allowed to feel bad about what Hughie had done for me.

  His act of courage was so incredible and selfless, all I could do was be happy and in awe of it. All I could do was to try to make myself live up to his sacrifice. It wasn’t going to happen, but I had to try.

  The family had laid out about five hundred photographs of Hughie around the funeral parlor. Hughie in swimming pools; in Santa Claus suits. Hughie putting his fingers up behind his brothers’ heads. I was in a few of the older ones, me and Hughie in graduation gowns. Hughie and me with a couple of young ladies we met on a college trip to Myrtle Beach. I smiled as I remembered how Hughie, a true classic clown, had picked up the two by feigning a British accent.

  Then it was my turn at Hughie’s coffin.

  I dropped to my knees and said my prayer. I tried to imagine Hughie on the other side of the wood right in front of me, but I couldn’t.

  It was because he wasn’t there, I realized suddenly. His spirit was long gone, roaring somewhere through the universe in the same no-holds-barred, awe-inspiring way it had roared through this world.

  I finally laid my palm on the cool wood as I stood, and then I turned and gave a hug to Hughie’s mother, sitting beside it.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE GATHERING AFTER the wake was held near the funeral home at a pub called Rory Dolan’s.

  Spotting the Irish and American flags along its facade as I crossed the street, I tried to think of the last time I’d been to my old neighborhood. It looked exactly as I remembered it. The same narrow two-family houses lining the streets. The same delis that sold Galtee Irish sausages and Crunchie candy bars along with cigarettes and lotto tickets.

  Staring out at it all, I recalled warm summer nights about twenty years before, when Hughie and I and our friends would grab a gypsy cab and head north, up to Bainbridge Avenue, where the bars didn’t look too hard at our fake IDs. We’d usually end up in a loud, smoky place called French Charlie’s to try to pick up the girls listening to the New Wave cover bands who performed there. What I would give to be there now, blowing my summer-job paycheck at the bar, laughing as Hughie grabbed some girl and spun her right ’round like a record, baby, right ’round ’round ’round.

  Inside Rory Dolan’s, it was three deep at the lacquered, wood-paneled bar. As I was waiting my turn, the door flew open and I heard a long, clattering roll of drums. Everyone turned as the DEA Black and Gold Pipe Band solemnly entered, their bagpipes droning.

  The song they played was called “The Minstrel Boy,” I knew. I remembered my father singing the old Irish rebel song about harps and swords and the faith of fallen soldiers at a wedding when I was a kid. I remembered how embarrassed I’d been to listen to my father sing the corny, old-fashioned song in front of everyone. Now, years later, I thought of Hughie, and I sang along with tears in my eyes, remembering every word.

  “Mike?” said a voice as a hand touched my shoulder.

  I turned to find an attractive woman with dark tousled hair at my elbow, smiling at me. She seemed vaguely familiar.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” she said, laughing. “I’m hurt. But it has been a couple of years-or decades, actually. I’m Tara. Tara McLellan? Hughie’s cousin from Boston. You and Hughie came up and visited
me once at a BC-Notre Dame game.”

  My eyes went wide as I took in her blue-gray eyes and radiant skin and really did remember. The drunken kiss I shared with the brunette looker as BC won was one of the highlights of my long-ago romantic youth.

  “Of course. Tara. Wow. It has been a couple, hasn’t it? How are you?” I said, giving her a quick hug.

  It all came back to me. We’d made out a little bit that weekend, held hands. Afterward, we’d even exchanged letters. Which showed how long ago it was. Actual paper letters. In envelopes with stamps. My nineteen-year-old heart was most definitely smitten. We’d planned to meet again the following summer, but a month or so later, Hughie let me know she’d gotten engaged to some Harvard guy and that was that.

  She’d been very easy to look at then. Now she looked even better, in a sultry, Catherine Zeta-Jones kind of way.

  “The family was happy that you were with Hughie at the end,” Tara told me with another smile. “It was comforting that he didn’t die alone.”

  Cold comfort, I thought but didn’t say. A traditional Irish delicacy.

  I nodded. “I’m sorry we have to meet again under such horrible circumstances. What are you drinking?” I said.

  “Jameson on the rocks.”

  I ordered us a couple, and we sat and drank and caught up.

  It turned out that, like pretty much everybody in Hughie’s extended family, she worked in law enforcement. She’d worked as a tax lawyer for a Greenwich, Connecticut, hedge fund, but after 9/11, she needed a change and joined up with the government. First with the state’s attorney’s office and now with the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, where she’d just become an assistant U.S. attorney.