I, Michael Bennett Read online

  “Southern District?” I said, whistling. “Hughie never mentioned he had a big-league ballplayer in the family. So you must already be familiar with Perrine’s case?”

  Tara chewed at an ice cube as she nodded.

  “I’m pulling every string I can pull to get on the prosecution team,” she said. “When I get it, I’m going to work night and day to bury that son of a bitch.”

  “You text me when and where, and I’ll bring the shovels and the backhoe,” I said, clinking her glass.

  CHAPTER 22

  “SO WHAT’S YOUR story, Mike?” Tara said, smiling. “I read about you in New York magazine. How your wife passed away and about all your adopted kids. You’re quite the New York celebrity, aren’t you?”

  I laughed at that.

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “Me and Brad and Angelina are heading to George’s Lake Como villa tonight on the G6. Doing anything?”

  She touched my arm and looked into my eyes.

  “You’re still as fun and funny as I remember, Mike. That was some weekend we had way back when, if memory serves me right.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. It was almost embarrassing how attracted we were to each other after all this time. There was a lot of eye and physical contact. So much that even I was picking up on things. That’s what funerals did sometimes, I knew. Nothing like the yawning abyss of death to make you want to cling to something-or, more specifically, someone.

  Soon the Irish music was replaced with some quiet stuff over the sound system. It was nice sitting there with Tara as Ray Charles sang, “You Don’t Know Me.” After a minute or so, I took another sip of Irish whiskey and sat up, blinking. I was here to mourn my friend, after all, not put the moves on his cousin, no matter how attractive she was.

  As Ray brought the song to a soft, weepy close, there was another sound from outside. It wasn’t so romantic. It was car horns honking, several of them blaring on and on without letup. In addition to the honking, there was loud, manic music and police whistles.

  What now?

  CHAPTER 23

  THE BAR IMMEDIATELY cleared. When I finally stepped out into the street behind the crowd, I could see that the honking was coming from the parking lot of a bank across the street. A couple of dark-colored SUVs, a kitted-out Hummer, and a sparkly-rimmed Cadillac Escalade were leaning on their horns.

  As I stepped off the curb, I saw that Hughie’s brother Fergus was already across the street trying to pull open the Hummer’s driver’s-side door.

  “Off that frigging horn, jackass!” Fergus was yelling. His face was red with sorrow and drink. He kneed the door. “You crazy or stupid? Can’t you see this is a funeral? People are in mourning. Cut that shit off!”

  When he kneed the door again, the smoked-glass window slowly zipped down. At the wheel was a small, young, almost pretty-looking Hispanic guy in a wifebeater. There were two older and tougher-looking Hispanic men sitting beside him, and several more in the back.

  My radar went off immediately. This felt wrong. The men looked expressionless. What the hell was this? I thought.

  “Is this where it’s happening?” the pretty-boy driver said, stroking his goatee as he smiled.

  “Where what’s happening?” said Eamon, now standing beside Fergus with rage in his face.

  “The roast,” the Hispanic guy said as he placed a large revolver between Fergus’s wide eyes. “The Irish pig roast.”

  There was movement and a bunch of clicking sounds, and suddenly the gangbangers in the Hummer and Escalade were holding guns. Not just regular guns, either. They were tactical shotguns and AK-47 assault rifles. A guy in the backseat had an AR-15 with what looked like a grenade launcher attachment. It was completely surreal. How was this happening? Who would threaten people with assault weapons at a cop’s wake?

  Out came my Glock. Around me, I saw at least half a dozen other cops and DEA guys from the wake draw as well. Even one of the pipe-band guys had a piece out, a.45, pointed at the Escalade’s windshield.

  “Drop it! Drop it! Drop it!” everyone was yelling.

  “Listen to me,” the pretty-boy gangbanger said. “We got a warning to you from our king. He’s not going to stand for this shit. You want to live? You want your family to live, you better wise up. Bad shit is about to go down. Kind you never seen before. You understand? You got all that? Message received? Now back off before we put you in a pine box next to your friend.”

  When I turned, I saw Patrick Zaretski, the DEA SWAT guy, with his SIG Sauer leveled at the driver’s temple. The safety was off, and his finger was firmly on the trigger. I could tell by the look in his eye that he was more than ready to blow the driver away.

  “Not here, Patrick,” I said. “Look at the heavy weapons they have. There are too many innocent people here. Better to let them roll, and we’ll call it in.”

  After a moment, he reluctantly nodded and stood down, along with the rest of the outraged cops.

  As the gangbanger SUVs pulled out onto McLean Avenue, a motorcycle roared up behind them, a huge black Suzuki Hayabusa. Its rider flicked down the helmet visor as the bike passed. I caught a glimpse of a face-a fine-boned face with black hair and gold eyes-and then the bike was screaming as it streaked away.

  That was the worst outrage of all, I thought as I stood there with my mouth open, watching the woman who had killed Hughie roar away.

  As the SUVs tore down McLean Avenue behind the motorcycle, we all jumped on our cell phones to call in a car stop. Twenty minutes later, we heard that the local precinct found the expensive cars abandoned five blocks away. It turned out both SUVs were stolen, and the men had probably switched cars.

  It had been an elaborate operation. All for what? To warn us? To intimidate us? It had worked. I was definitely shaken up. My friend’s wake had come incredibly close to becoming a bloody massacre.

  “What does it mean?” Tara asked me back in Rory Dolan’s, as I ordered another Jameson’s-a double this time. “Why would these men do this? Why come here? Haven’t they done enough?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. I had been a cop for a long time, but I couldn’t deny how scary this felt. It seemed like I was looking at something entirely new.

  “I don’t know, Tara,” I finally said, truthfully. “I have absolutely no freaking clue.”

  CHAPTER 24

  NOT TOO FAR from SoHo and Wall Street, the MCC, or Metropolitan Correctional Center, is a twelve-story concrete bunker located on Park Row, behind the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse at Foley Square.

  In a break room on the eighth floor, Manuel Perrine, the Sun King, flicked an imaginary dust speck from the sleeve of his baggy prison jumpsuit as he listened to a phone call. He nodded, and nodded again, then said, “Very good,” and thumbed off the iPhone.

  With the phone’s video FaceTime feature, he’d just watched the whole incident at the cop’s wake in the Bronx. The chaos, the baffled-looking cops. In real time, no less. It was as though he’d been there himself. Good com was essential to all operations. What field marshal would have it any other way?

  Being in jail was no excuse to avoid strategizing. Already there were planes taking off and packages being delivered, arrangements being set in motion. He was still in a position to put his considerable resources to good use.

  Still, the indignity of every moment spent in this place was such an unforgivable offense. The steel grid embedded into an air shaft that passed for a window in his cell; the metal bunk beds and white brick walls. The amount of money he had spent on the operation in bribes alone, so that he could sneak in and out of the country, was insane. And yet here he was, back where he started, in a squalid rat cage. All of it was for nothing.

  He’d already ordered the death of his old friend Candelerio and his entire family. He would then kill Candelerio’s crew after all was said and done. They needed to be taught, brutally taught. Everyone involved would be held up as an example of what happened when a king was crossed. Every knee would bend for the crime of his
being put in this unclean box in this concrete coffin of a city.

  He tapped his nose where the cop had shattered it. There was tape over the gauze now, a ridiculous X, like the burial spot on a treasure map. All his life fighting, and no one had ever broken it until now.

  He looked up with his heavy-lidded blue eyes when a bald, muscular guard came in. But the guard wasn’t there to bring him back to his cell. Perrine wasn’t supposed to be in the break room in the first place.

  There was another person with the jacked-up guard, a prisoner with a black eye in a baggy jumpsuit identical to his own.

  The handsome young blond inmate was named Jonathan Alder, and he was in for running a Wall Street Ponzi scheme. Now, instead of bilking senior citizens out of their retirement savings in his silk moiré suspenders, Jonathan reluctantly provided a whole host of new services to his fellow cons. The soft, freshly turned-out punk bitch had been a gift to Perrine from the jail’s current shot caller, a notoriously brutal incarcerated Mob boss. It was a sign of respect. A housewarming present that Perrine-bored, enraged, violent, and incredibly frustrated-couldn’t wait to unwrap.

  Standing, Perrine grabbed Jonathan Alder’s chin and looked him over carefully, like a man inspecting a horse he was about to purchase. He caught one of the jewel-like tears that dropped from the shivering young man’s eyes and giggled as he licked it off his palm. Yummy. He turned to the guard.

  “Do you have the other item?” Perrine asked in his strange French-like accent.

  “How could I forget?” the tan musclehead of a guard, whose name was Doug Styles, said as he reached into his shirt pocket and handed Perrine a fat white wax-paper packet of prime Peruvian coke.

  “Anything else, monsieur? Hope you find the service to your liking,” the hard-eyed guard said sarcastically. His voice was the deep, rough, not-to-be-trifled-with bark of a drill sergeant.

  Perrine looked up at the guard thoughtfully. Every man had his price, and Doug’s here was three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in tens and twenties delivered to his shit-box split-level in East Brunswick, New Jersey. Doug thought it was just for the phone and other courtesies, but of course that was just the beginning of the arrangements.

  “No, thank you, Doug. How long do you think Jonathan and I have to become acquainted? I don’t want to make trouble for you.”

  Doug raised his beefy forearm and checked his watch.

  “Twenty more minutes. Night count is coming up.”

  “Yes, yes. Twenty minutes is nice, but half an hour would be so much better,” Perrine said, batting his baby blues at the guard. The deep creases of his dimples showed as he smiled.

  “Really? How about eight hours and a mint under your pillow for you two lovebirds? Screw you, you sick bastard. I’m in charge here. You want a phone? I can get you a phone or this worthless punk, that’s fine. But if you think you can lean on me, you’re going to find yourself down in sub-basement two in twenty-four solitary, drinking your frog’s legs through a broken jaw. You don’t own me. Don’t for a second think you own me.”

  CHAPTER 25

  PERRINE WAITED A long second and then put up his palms in a conceding gesture.

  “I understand completely, Doug. I did not want to step on your toes. You are indeed the boss.”

  “Damn straight,” Styles said.

  Perrine lifted the iPhone off the table and brought up an app. He showed the screen to the guard.

  “Actually, before you go, could I show you something? Won’t take a moment,” Perrine said.

  On the screen was a video of a reddish-haired woman, the back of her head visible over the top of a couch as she sat watching TV. It seemed like the camera was filming from a partially open closet door.

  “This little video, Doug, is a real-time feed,” Perrine said. “I believe that chubby little morsel on the couch there is your wife, Sharon, correct? No wonder she’s taking a breather-watching those twin boys the stork brought you two last year would tire anyone out. And she breast-feeds them, too; I saw that a couple of minutes ago. Talk about double duty. Quite impressive.

  “Did you know that with one snap of my finger, instead of watching her watch Real Housewives of Who-Gives-a-Fuck, you and I, Doug, could instead watch that impressive little lady of yours be forced to perform the most startling of things? Things truly beyond your wildest imaginings. It would be an amateur video, to be sure, but sometimes those are the ones that really get the blood pumping the most, don’t you agree?”

  The guard’s face was no longer so tan. He swallowed hard as he stared at the iPhone.

  “I’ll do whatever you want,” Doug said, his command voice not so commanding anymore. “Whatever. My God. Sharon. Please don’t hurt her.”

  “Please what?” Perrine said putting a hand to his ear.

  “Please, sir?” Doug said, his lips trembling.

  “Fuck SIR!” Perrine barked, his smile suddenly gone, his eyes like blue steel. “PLEASE WHAT!?”

  “Please… ” the bald guard said, shrugging his massive shoulders. He closed his eyes as he realized it.

  “Please, King,” he finally said in a near whisper.

  Perrine’s smile returned as he lowered the phone and started to unfold the package of coke.

  “You’re a fast learner, Doug. I appreciate that. Lovely Sharon and your two thirsty little boys appreciate that. Keep up the good work and we’re going to get on like gangbusters.”

  Perrine expertly laid out a fat line of top-shelf cocaine and even more expertly hoovered it off the scarred metal prison table before he thumbed at the door.

  “Now, leave us for thirty-and I repeat, thirty-minutes, Doug. And whatever you do, my large, helpful friend, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”

  BOOK TWO. SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN

  CHAPTER 26

  ONE YEAR LATER

  IT WAS AROUND five thirty in the morning and still dark when I passed the ghostly Asian guy doing tai chi. In a misty clearing to one side of the northern Central Park jogging trail, birds were tweeting like mad as an elderly Asian man wearing a kung fu getup straight out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon went through the slow, graceful motions.

  I always saw him on my predawn Saturday morning Central Park suicide run and, as always, I wondered what his story was. Was he actually a ghost? Were the Shaolin monks opening a Harlem branch? What did he do when he wasn’t being ancient and mystical?

  Sweat dripped from my perplexed head as I kept running. A lot of questions and no answers, which was about par for the course lately.

  I’d been running a lot in the year since Hughie’s murder. I mean, a lot. Twenty-five miles a week. Sometimes thirty. Was I punishing myself? I didn’t know. I certainly was pushing the envelope on my knees, though.

  It just felt right, I guess. When I was moving, huffing and puffing and slapping my size-eleven Nikes on asphalt, I felt safe, human, okay. It was when I stopped and let the world catch up to me that the problems seemed to start.

  The sun was just coming up behind my kids’ school-Holy Name, on Ninety-Seventh Street-twenty minutes later as I dropped to its front steps, my tank completely empty. As my face dripped sweat onto the concrete, I watched a guy in a newspaper truck load the corner box. When he left, I saw Manuel Perrine’s face on the cover beneath the headline:

  SUN KING’S NEW YORK TRIAL

  IT’S ON!

  It actually wasn’t news to me. Hughie’s cousin Tara McLellan had been assigned to the trial, as she had wanted to be, and was keeping me up to speed. There had been a lot of back-and-forth to move the trial to Arizona, but in the end, the feds decided to try him first for the murder of the waiter in the department store, maximizing the trial’s impact by holding it in the largest, most visible venue possible. The whole thing was very political. National elected officials and even the president had weighed in, everyone wanting to show how serious they were about the Mexican cartel problem and border security.

  Even with th
e politics, I didn’t care. I was glad he was being tried here. The son of a bitch had killed my friend, and even after I testified, I was going to go to the trial every chance I got, so that I could see justice done. I was going to do my best to have Perrine put where he belonged, namely, strapped to a lethal-injection table.

  It was a harsh way of looking at things, but it suited my recent mood just fine. I stood up from the school steps and wiped my sweaty face. It was a harsh old world we lived in, after all.

  CHAPTER 27

  I TRIED TO be as quiet as possible as I came back into the apartment with breakfast, but of course Mary Catherine was already up and at ’em in the kitchen, sewing something in her lap while a pot came to a boil. As I came in and dropped the bagels onto the kitchen’s center island, she gave me a look. An extremely Irish, skeptical look.

  “Good… eh, morning?” I tried.

  “I knew it. That’s where you were. Running. Again,” she said.

  “Um… I thought exercise was good.”

  “Usually it is, Mike, but that’s all you do these days. Work and run and work some more. You have to stop pushing yourself. You’re going to run yourself into an early grave if you’re not careful. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately? You’re getting too thin.”

  “Too thin?” I said, handing her a latte. “C’mon, that’s impossible. Besides, let’s face it, with these kids, I’ll never be too rich, so what the heck.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s your life, Mr. Bennett. I just work here,” she mumbled, going back to her sewing.