As an assassin in good standing for the Perrine cartel, he never thought that the tables would turn like this. But there you had it. The squeeze was on now with the boss in jail, and the shit had rolled downhill, right onto him.
It wasn’t for the lives of his wife or even his children that he had agreed to do this. Living with them 24-7 over the last few comfortable years, he’d learned they were vain, selfish, stupid people, takers and connivers, especially the children. No, it was for his mother, who lived with them, that he’d finally said okay. His mother had lived her hard life like a saint, and he could not let her die as he’d seen so many die-in horror and pain and fear.
He let out a breath and checked the loads in the men’s guns. His mind was already thinking ahead to the floor plans he had memorized. Where the stairs were, the elevator, the layout of the hallway.
Finally, he looked down at the men he had just slain and knelt down and said the prayer that he always said before facing danger.
“Most Holy Death,” he said in Spanish. “Help me to overcome all obstacles, and may my house be filled with all the virtues of your protection.”
He stood and opened the door. Like all good assassins, he feared just one thing now.
Not death, but failure.
CHAPTER 35
HALF AN HOUR after I left the voir dire session, I was on a bench in City Hall Park, three blocks south of the courthouse, becoming one with nature. Actually, I was feeding the last of my early lunch of an Au Bon Pain croissant to a depressed-looking squirrel, which, for lower Manhattan, is about as Walden Pond as it gets.
I definitely needed the time-out. Like most cops, I pride myself on being bulletproof, body and soul, but I couldn’t deny how troubling it was to see Perrine again. I couldn’t stop thinking about Hughie, about those last terrible moments in the cramped medical office where he’d given up his life for me. I wondered if I ever would.
So I took an early lunch break with a side of squirrel therapy. Not exactly textbook, I know, but don’t knock it till you try it. It works for bag ladies, right? What I truly couldn’t wait to do was embark on my long-awaited vacation to the old Bennett lake house up in Orange County. I love New York City from the Battery to the Bronx, but it grinds on you. You need to get it off of you from time to time or you’ll go nuts.
I was finishing my coffee when the first squad car screamed past. I didn’t think much of it, but then two more zipped by less than a minute later, sirens wailing. Knowing something was up, I stood and canned the remnants of my lunch and went to the park railing alongside Centre Street, where the squad cars had headed.
I let out a breath and bit my lip. In the distance, I could see that all three cop cars were halted, their roof lights bubbling, in front of the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse, where I’d been all morning. Their doors were flung open, and things most definitely did not look good.
I started walking north, back toward the courthouse. I took out my cell phone and speed-dialed my squad room to see if they had heard anything over the radio. After four rings, I gave up and called Tara. My stomach lurched as I got kicked into her voice mail. I stared at the flashing blue and red lights ahead of me.
Whatever was happening, it was bad. I picked up my pace. I could feel it, practically taste it, in the cloying, warm air.
More cop cars were screeching up to the front of the majestic courthouse steps as I dropped all pretense and sprinted across Foley Square. I grabbed a female cop who was hollering into her radio by the curb.
“What’s up?” I said as I showed her my shield. “Is it Perrine? The drug trial?”
“I don’t know. Our call was a ten ten in a courtroom on the second floor.”
Good God! Ten ten was the code for “shots fired,” and Perrine’s trial was on the second floor, I thought as I went up the massive stone stairs two by two.
I badged my way through the chaotic crowd in the lobby. People were pouring out of the elevators and stairwells, some talking on cell phones, some crying. It looked like they were in the midst of an evac. My drawn gun set off a buzzer as I hustled through the metal detector against the stream of people exiting the building.
As I was going up the steps, I was almost knocked down by U.S. marshals as they came running down.
With Perrine!
“What is it? What’s happening?” I yelled at them, but they just blew past me into a stairwell. That’s when I heard several shots above me, followed by screaming.
I topped the stairwell, flew down the hallway, and came through the wooden double doors of the courtroom, preceded by my Glock. Off to the right, by the jury box, cops were yelling and swinging, and piling on top of a man. I saw it was a Hispanic man dressed in Dickies work clothes.
I was almost run down as the potential jurors and journalists and spectators who had ducked down between the benches bolted in a stampede for the door. I looked toward the front of the courtroom and saw the holes in the paneling beside the district court seal, huge chunks blown out of the mahogany. Beneath it, the court stenographer was giving CPR to someone.
I spotted robes and realized it was the judge, Susan Baym.
I jumped to the side as a team of EMTs rushed past me toward the fallen woman. I ran up to the front of the room, frantically looking around for Tara. She jumped up and hugged me when I found her, wide-eyed, hiding behind the overturned prosecutor’s table with the rest of the lawyers on her team.
“Tara, it’s okay. It’s over. They got the guy. What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Tara said, staring over to where the EMTs were slipping the judge onto a stretcher. “We were doing the voir dire, and then all of a sudden this janitor was here, firing. He shot the court officer, and then went straight for the judge. He shot her three or four times, Mike. Right in the side of her head. In front of everybody. When more court officers showed up, he barricaded himself behind the judge’s bench. Every time someone would run for the door, he’d pop up and start shooting again. We didn’t know what the hell to do.”
Tara followed the stretcher with her eyes as the EMTs left.
“Perrine assassinated the judge who was going to preside at his own trial, Mike,” Tara said, and started crying. “Don’t you understand? They do this kind of thing in Mexico, and now it’s here, too. Are we safe, Mike? Is my family safe? What the hell is this?”
I stood there, patting her hand like an idiot as my mind reeled.
“It’s okay. It’s over. They got the guy,” I repeated.
CHAPTER 36
UNBELIEVABLE, I THOUGHT as I stood in the court officers’ basement break room, breathing through my tie.
If there was a word in my vocabulary that I overused, “unbelievable” was it, but was there any other way to describe the sight of three court officers lying dead at your feet, shot point-blank in the head? Not only had they been shot, but it looked like their faces had been scalded or chemically burned.
Day one, I thought blinking at the carnage. This was only day one of jury selection?
I went back upstairs to the courtroom. The medical examiner team was just about to zip up the green body bag over the assassin when I noticed a ribbon of green tattoo ink on the man’s neck.
“Hold up a sec,” I said to the medical examiner’s people as I unbuttoned the man’s work shirt.
I nodded to myself as I squatted over the dead guy. The man had another tattoo, this one over his heart. It looked like a skull wearing a woman’s red shawl. I’d seen it before on the chests of both Perrine’s driver and the shooter I’d killed at Madison Square Garden.
The tattoo was a depiction of Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, a deity at the center of a religious cult that many of the cartels were involved in. The cult was a weird mix of Catholicism and Aztec religion, and Santa Muerte was a kind of evil Virgin Mary figure. Some of the cartel people would offer blood sacrifices to her in exchange for a peaceful death. Sometimes, Mexican drug dealers would even be found shot dead on altars dedicated to Santa Muerte. It
was primitive, out there, very spooky stuff.
I was still squatting and staring at the tattoo when my phone rang.
“Bennett here,” I said.
“Hey, pig. How’s your morning? So far so good?” a woman said in Spanish-accented English.
No! I thought, immediately jumping to my feet. My heart started beating like crazy. Though I’d never heard her speak, I knew exactly who it was.
I was talking to the gold-eyed witch who had killed Hughie.
“Look around and take in your world now,” she said. “Death has come, and she is thirsty. She will not leave until you let him go.”
“Ma’am, that’s not how it works here in the good ol’ USA,” I said, trying to recover. “This is how it works. First, we’re going to catch every last one of you, and then we’re going to put you either in jail or the morgue. Got it? Jail or morgue.”
It put a chill down my spine when she laughed. I remembered the unhinged giggle from the moment before she killed Hughie.
“You think you have authority over him because we are in America? You think those bars and walls can actually contain him? You think you are teaching him a lesson, but it is you who will learn. You have offended him. Do you know what happens when you offend a living god?”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Um… floor seats for the Knicks games?”
“Laugh now. You will cry later, I assure you,” she said, and hung up.
“Unbelievable,” I mumbled as I closed my phone and my eyes.
CHAPTER 37
I MADE SOME calls and found out they were keeping Perrine in a maximum-security protective custody unit back at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, around the corner from the courthouse.
It was about two in the afternoon, after a lot of favor collecting, when I was allowed to conduct an interview with Perrine concerning the murdered judge.
In an interview room on the second floor, with a one-way mirror along one wall, we sat on plastic chairs on opposite sides of a table. As the guards brought him in, Perrine didn’t look concerned in the slightest about the bloodbath at the courthouse. In fact, he looked happy and at ease, as relaxed as a man who’d just gotten his hair cut.
“You wish to speak with me, Detective?” Perrine said in his weird, accented English as he was handcuffed to the cinder-block wall.
The guard left and closed the door.
“It’s so nice to have a visitor. What shall we talk about?” Perrine said, crossing his legs and leaning back.
“I don’t know. The usual,” I said. “Sports, the weather, your upcoming lethal injection.”
Perrine laughed.
“You think I ordered this hit of the judge, yes?” he said, rocking his chair back and forth. “But you are wrong. I had nothing to do with it. Some men get excited, and they do things. It is the same with a beautiful woman. People fight over her. Is she to blame if someone is hurt?”
“Interesting analogy,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “Since you’re such an insightful guy, maybe you could shed a little light on that skull chick you guys keep drawing on yourselves. She’s what? A cartoon? Like SpongeBob SquarePants?”
He looked at me hard, with a funny smile on his face.
“I would not take La Santa Muerte, or, more properly La Santisima Muerte, so lightly, my friend. Some say the old gods of Mexico are still alive. Who is anyone to dispute it? La Santisima Muerte may seem repulsive to your stale, modern mind, but she and her message and her protections are sound. Death is the only truth in life. Even Catholics believe this.”
“Wait a second. You actually worship death?” I said, raising a skeptical eyebrow.
“In a way, yes,” Perrine said. “Death wins eventually, always, and every time.”
“But I don’t get it,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.
“Get what?” he said.
“If death is so great, why don’t you put your money where your mouth is and kill yourself? I mean, go for it. Please.”
He shook his head.
“You do not understand,” he said.
“I understand perfectly,” I said raising a finger and pointing it at him. “It’s you who doesn’t get it. You don’t worship death, Perrine. You worship murder. You worship power and evil and hurting people.”
Perrine sat up with a loud snap of his chair.
“What I believe and what my men believe is… ”
He suddenly stopped and caught hold of himself. He smiled as he smoothed his jumpsuit.
“My apologies, Detective. I promised myself that I would not lose my composure, but here I am letting my temper get the best of me.”
He dropped his voice into a whisper as he leaned forward, staring into my eyes.
“Now, let us stop fucking around, yes? I have a one-time offer for you, and it is quite a deal, so consider it closely. I give you two hundred fifty million dollars. Let me repeat, that is two hundred fifty million dollars, and you get me out of here. Offshore account. My girl’s number is already on your phone. You’ll have access within two hours.”
“What?” I said, stifling a laugh.
“You do not think I am serious?” he said, light flashing in his weird, faded-blue eyes. “I am a man of very considerable means, but what can money do for me here in this place? We need to get rolling immediately. What’s the American expression? ‘Window of opportunity’? Our window of opportunity here is closing very rapidly.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Or, more precisely, I couldn’t believe how open and confident Perrine was as he offered his bribe. He truly seemed to believe that I would take his blood money.
Since time was of the essence, I decided to give him my answer right away. My right hand suddenly reached under the table, grabbed one of the legs of his chair, and pulled it. Perrine yelled as he slammed down backward onto the concrete floor.
I heard the guard, watching through the one-way mirror, come running. Perrine cursed a blue streak at me as he tried to scramble to his feet.
“When are you going to get it into that thick skull of yours, Perrine?” I said as the locks on the door clicked open. “You’re in the big city now, and no matter how much money or how many freakish drug soldiers you have, I’m going to make you pay for all the evil you’ve done.
“Do you know why? It’s simple. I’m going to do it because it’s my job. I’m the garbageman and you’re the garbage, so into the back of the truck and on to the dump we go. Comprenez-vous?”
As the guards took him away, Perrine tried to spit on me but ended up just spitting on himself. As he began to curse at me again, I smiled. I knew all along that talking to Perrine would be useless. The only reason I’d come up here was to piss him off as much as I could. Knocking his ass onto the floor had been icing on the cake.
Finally, my day was taking a turn for the better, I thought as I headed back toward the room where they were holding my gun.
This was even better than squirrel therapy.
CHAPTER 38
BRIGHT AND EARLY Wednesday morning, I was finally doing it. Finally and happily hitting the road on the long-awaited Bennett family vacation. It was smooth sailing, too. Well, at least for the first five blocks it was. As I pulled onto the West Side Highway, the air conditioner of the beat-up rented bus I was driving began hosing my knees with ice water.
I wouldn’t have minded so much except that the bus had a stick shift, and we were in the middle of bumper-to-bumper traffic. For the better part of an hour, it was clutch and soak and brake and soak and clutch. To make matters worse, all my wiseacre kids were scrunched down in their seats behind me so as not to be spotted by anyone they knew.
When I pulled up in front of our building in the Cheez-It-colored minibus, I guess Trent’s cry of, “Hey, look, everyone! Dad bought a dorkmobile!” summed up the general consensus on the transportation. We usually travel in our Ford Econoline van, but with all our luggage, even that was too small for my clan of cave bears.
And the kids were right. T
he bus was a beat-up yellow eyesore. Luckily for me, though, as a well-seasoned dad, I had long ago become immune to embarrassment on matters of style.
Yet even an incontinent bus and my ten mortified dependents couldn’t remove the smile from my face as I made my escape from New York. No price was too high for the privilege of not having to look at or think about Perrine or body bags or my bosses, at least for a little while.
Thankfully, the traffic, along with my kids’ complaining groans, finally thinned out after we put the George Washington Bridge and its truly mind-blowing vehicular congestion in our rearview mirror. I really couldn’t wait to get up to the old family house on Orange Lake. This year, we had the place to ourselves for the last two months of summer. I couldn’t wait to force-feed a little peace and quiet and country living to my kids, who thought the New York City border was the very edge of the earth.
My mood lifted even more five minutes later, as we came over the span of the Henry Hudson Bridge and I saw the majestic river sparkling far below. Even the kids seemed duly impressed with the massive Hudson and the stark cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades.
“This is it, kids,” I said as we finally came through the toll-booth. “Full speed ahead for the SS Dorkmobile. Northward ho!”
I put the Bennett magic bus in the left-hand lane and gave her all she had, which turned out to be about fifty-five. About an hour later, I knew we were home free as we got off I-684 onto westbound I-84. I always loved that section of I-84 between Connecticut and the Hudson, where it’s nothing but trees and rugged hills.
I was taking in the distant Catskill Mountains vista near East Fishkill when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Hey, Dad,” Jane suddenly said in my ear. “A sign back there said Ludingtonville. Is that named after Sybil Ludington?”
I, Michael Bennett Page 9
