I, Michael Bennett

by James Patterson

  Blood-red, Eddie thought as the black youth raised his hand, and they saw the gray-and-black gun he was holding.

  “Eddie! Run!” Brian said, pushing him back in the direction they had come from.

  The guy just started shooting. No warning. No “Get out of here” or “Gimme your money.” It was like a nightmare somehow made real in the middle of that bright and sunny summer day. Someone was actually shooting at them!

  Eddie fell to the cracked concrete as Brian collapsed next to him, screaming. Eddie put his arm around Brian and felt wetness at his back. No! What? Brian was bleeding! He was shot. They were getting killed. How could this be happening?

  Hovering over his brother and trying to get out his cell phone, Eddie shook as the gun cracked again and again. He’d actually gotten his phone out and opened when he felt something hot and sharp tug at his left shoulder. The phone clattered on the cement as Eddie fell facedown.

  He cradled his throbbing arm. It felt scary and weird, like it was hanging on by a string, like it was about to fall off. When he looked up, Brian was hopping toward the street, the back of his white T-shirt splattered with blood and dirt. He fell through the rusted gate and started crawling over the sidewalk, screaming wildly. Eddie had never heard his brother scream so loud. He’d never heard anyone scream so loud.

  What had they done? Eddie thought, looking up at the scary house beside him. He cried as he took in its graffiti, its high empty windows. He looked for his phone and saw it ten feet away, its screen cracked, its battery lying on the ground.

  Mary Catherine wouldn’t find them. Dad wouldn’t find them. They were all alone now, Eddie thought. Bleeding and lost and alone.

  CHAPTER 44

  SIX O’CLOCK THAT evening found me trudging up a thick, wooded ridge a couple of miles east of the lake house. Sweating and swatting at bugs, I stopped on a deer path.

  “Eddie! Brian!” I called at the trees for the thousandth time.

  I stood there listening for a reply, but there was nothing. Nothing except the sound of crickets and the hot wind pushing the leaves.

  I’d already been by the pizza parlor. The owner told me he had seen Eddie and Brian leave with two older teenage girls. That Eddie and Brian would run off with two mysterious older girls wasn’t that alarming. What was strange was that the owner said he had never seen the girls before. And why weren’t Brian and Eddie answering their phones?

  After driving around and spotting no sign of them, I decided that maybe they had all gone to some teen hangout in the woods near the lake. The area, after all, was very secluded. Where else could they have gone?

  As I walked through the forest, I had to force myself to stop scanning the underbrush for their bodies. I was being a paranoid cop. Eddie and Brian were just knuckleheads, young male teens in the midst of some hormone-inspired mischief. I would come upon them any moment up here in a clearing, having a beer party or something. We would all laugh about it after I grounded them for the rest of their natural lives.

  I picked up my pace, broke into a half jog. Who was I kidding? This wasn’t normal. This was incredibly bad. Frantic and now almost physically sick with worry, I was not in a good place. The boys were nowhere. What the hell was I going to do?

  The forest ended suddenly, and I arrived at a blacktop road. I looked around and spotted house foundations, a rusted dump truck, weeds growing up between stacks of concrete sewer drains. It was a development, I realized. An abandoned one that had probably run out of money after the real estate bubble burst.

  Though it was a desolate place, I was heartened by the sight of it. It was just the kind of secluded place a couple of stupid young teen boys would bring some girls. Or was it the other way around these days?

  I was a couple of hundred yards up the road, heading toward a windowless colonial, when my phone rang. It was Mary Catherine, back at the cabin.

  “Mike!” she said, frantic. “The police just called.”

  “The police?!”

  “They said it was about Eddie and Brian. They wouldn’t tell me what. They said they had to talk to you immediately.”

  Mary gave me the number as I hit the woods and started back for the cabin at a dead run.

  Please let it be something minor, I thought as it rang. Maybe it was nothing. Some vandalism, maybe. Just the cops up here being strict.

  “Newburgh PD,” came a voice as I crashed through the trees.

  I stopped and leaned against a tree, sweat dripping from my face onto the screen of the phone.

  “My name is Mike Bennett. Someone called about my sons, Eddie and Brian.”

  “Hold, please.”

  Oh, God. Let them be okay, I said to the Muzak.

  “Mr. Bennett, I’m Detective William Moss,” a voice said a moment later. “Your boys were both shot this afternoon. You need to get to St. Luke’s Hospital.”

  CHAPTER 45

  SCREECHING OUT FROM the lake house minutes later, I ran every stop sign and blasted through every intersection with my hand on the horn. Coming across the Newburgh city line, I lost a hubcap as I put the bus up on the sidewalk to get around a double-parked pickup.

  Dale Earnhardt wouldn’t have beaten me to the hospital in Newburgh. Not even with a head start.

  “Stop it, Mike. Stop it! You’ll kill us!” Mary Catherine yelled, hanging on for dear life in the seat behind me.

  I didn’t answer her. Hell, I could hardly hear her. Ever since I got the news about Eddie and Brian, I’d become separated from everything, as though I were looking out at the world through a numbing block of ice.

  The phrase “Your boys were both shot this afternoon” kept playing and replaying through my head. How could this be happening? I kept asking myself. It was totally insane.

  I came a hairbreadth from snapping through the hospital parking lot’s gate arm before I stopped in front of St. Luke’s emergency room with an enormous shriek of the brakes.

  “Eddie and Brian Bennett,” I called to the nurse behind the counter inside.

  A female doctor in surgical scrubs behind her spun around and waved Mary Catherine and me into an empty examination room.

  The slender, fiftyish doctor’s name was Mary Ann Walker. She sat us down and made me have a paper cup of water before she explained what was going on.

  “They were both shot with nine-millimeter rounds,” the doctor explained. “Eddie was shot in the shoulder, and Brian was hit in one of the scalene muscles in his neck, above his clavicle. We were able to remove the bullet in Eddie’s shoulder, but left the one in Brian’s neck for now.”

  “Is that a good idea?” I asked.

  “Actually, going in to get it would be more trouble than it’s worth and I’d just as well leave it in there. They both lost a significant amount of blood, but we were able to stabilize them. Their circulation and breathing and neurological function all seem to be completely normal. Treatment is basically the same as a puncture wound now. Some stitches and clean bandages and in time, they’ll completely heal.”

  “What about internal damage?” I said.

  The doctor shook her head.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Bennett. We are very vigilant in checking for internal tissue damage. After stabilizing the patient, we do a CT scan, since bullets can ricochet or break up. These, fortunately, did not. No major arteries or blood vessels or nerves were severed.”

  “Thank God,” Mary Catherine and I said simultaneously.

  “Your boys were lucky on several counts,” Dr. Walker continued. “Gunshot wounds are all about response time. Treatment needs to start before blood loss sends the victim into hypovolemic shock. Your son Brian made a lot of noise at the scene, and about a dozen people called nine-one-one. Your boys were in the emergency room within ten minutes.

  “If you need to get shot, Newburgh is the place. We get an incredible number of shooting victims here. Everyone from the responding officers to the EMTs to the ER team is a veteran expert, and everyone did a terrific job.”

 
“Thank you, Doctor. Where are the boys now?” I said.

  “We just finished stitching them up. They’re in recovery.”

  “Can we see them?” Mary Catherine asked.

  “They’ve both been sedated after all they’ve been through. They need sleep now. The morning would be better, Mrs. Bennett.”

  I let the “Mrs. Bennett” go. So did Mary Catherine.

  “We won’t bother them. We just need to see them,” I said.

  Dr. Walker let out a breath. She pulled off her surgeon’s cap, showing a spill of red hair. She checked her slim stainless steel Rolex.

  “Okay. I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

  CHAPTER 46

  THE BOYS WERE on the third floor, asleep in the recovery room. Dr. Walker wouldn’t let us go inside, so we crowded around the window in the door.

  Standing there staring at them, it occurred to me how insane it is to be a parent. You go through this life, and it’s hard enough to keep yourself safe. When you have a kid, it’s like you take your heart and you just cross your fingers and hand it to each of your kids. I really, really felt like punching a hole through the glass in the door.

  I knew I had to be strong, but memories of the death of Maeve, my late wife, flooded back. Still, to this day, I had nightmares about hospitals and waiting rooms. In addition to being ripped up, I was angry. This wasn’t fair. Our family had had enough pain. Why couldn’t this bullshit happen to someone else? Anyone else but us.

  “Oh, they look pale, Mary Catherine. Look at them. Especially Eddie.”

  She grabbed my hand.

  “They’re going to be okay, Mike,” she said. “The doctor said so.”

  “I don’t know. Look at them. Doctors lie all the time. Look at them.”

  I teared up then, and when Mary Catherine saw it, she did the same. I don’t know how long we stood there like that, holding hands, while the boys slept.

  I called Seamus at the lake house maybe an hour later.

  “They’re going to be okay?” Seamus said. “But they were shot!”

  “In the right places,” I assured him. “No organs or bones were hit. At least that’s what the doctor said.”

  “Don’t listen to these quacks up here in Hicktown, Michael,” Seamus said angrily. “You need to figure out what’s really going on.”

  My patience was wearing thin, but I knew the old man, like me, was just sick with worry.

  “Seamus, what do you want me to do? Interrogate the hospital staff?”

  “That would be a fine start,” he said. “And on that note, what did the police say? Who shot them? And how did they end up in Newburgh, miles from the lake house?”

  When I looked up, a thin, middle-aged black man wearing a Newburgh PD jacket was standing in the hallway.

  “I’m about to find out, Seamus. I’ll call you back.”

  “Mr. Bennett, I’m Detective Moss,” the friendly cop said as he shook my hand. My first impression was that he looked and even sounded a little like the old Yankees player Willie Randolph. “So sorry about your kids. Someone told me you guys are up at Orange Lake on vacation. Is that right?”

  I showed him my gold NYPD detective shield.

  “I thought I was on vacation, Detective, but it seems like I’m back at work after all,” I said.

  “Oh, wow. A cop. That’s just terrible. I have two girls your sons’ age myself. Please call me Bill. You must be going through hell, Mike. Can you walk me through what happened?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question, Bill,” I said.

  Moss twirled the pen in his fingers as he took out his notes.

  “Around six this evening, we received a call of shots fired on Lander Street,” he said. “That’s actually not a rare occurrence. We get so many shootings there that the locals call it Blood Alley. After the shots-fired call, some nine-one-one calls came in about someone shot on the sidewalk. Our guys got there a minute before the EMTs. Both your boys were down on the sidewalk, bleeding.”

  I shook my head in terrified disbelief. One second, my kids are splashing in the lake, the next, they’re shot down in the middle of some dangerous ’hood. How could that happen?

  “It’s a drug area, I take it?” I said after another stunned moment.

  “Yep. Crack and powder coke and heroin. Gangs run it. Lander is run by the Bloods.”

  “The Bloods?” I said. “Like the L.A. Bloods gang?”

  “One and the same,” DT Moss said with a nod. “The Bloods run the west side. We also have a heavy contingent of the Latin Kings gang to the east. They’re at war with each other right now.”

  “A gang drug war? I vacation up here at my lake house every once in a while, but I had no idea. It’s that bad?”

  Moss rubbed at his mustache as he nodded.

  “Outside of New York City, Newburgh has the highest murder rate per capita in New York State. They’re starting to call us the Sixth Borough and the Little Apple, thanks to the heavyweight big-city crime stats. Too bad we don’t have thirty thousand cops to keep a lid on it. Anyway, can you think of any reason why your kids were there? I don’t even want to ask, but do either of them use drugs?”

  “Drugs?! Over their dead bodies,” I said.

  I saw Mary Catherine wince beside me.

  “Sorry. Poor choice of words,” I said. “They met some girls is all I know. But how they got from Orange Lake to Newburgh, I don’t know. You’ve probably heard it as many times as I have, but they’re actually good kids. My whole family has been worried sick. We thought they’d gotten lost in the woods.”

  “Well,” Detective Moss said, handing me his card. “The doc says they won’t be up for questioning until the morning. I’ll come back then. If you hear anything in the meantime, please give me a call. As a fellow service member, I’m going to go full press, Mike. Be with your family. We’ll find out who did this.”

  CHAPTER 47

  MARY CATHERINE AND I stayed over at the hospital. I would have said “slept over,” except we didn’t do any sleeping. We were still too shocked about the whole bizarre, horrible situation. Despite Dr. Walker’s assurances, we couldn’t help but worry that some horrendous complication would pop up unexpectedly.

  As my late wife, Maeve, slowly died of cancer, I remember actually aching with worry-physically aching-as my entire self, body and soul, went around from moment to agonizing moment clenched like a fist. I felt that same full-body ache again as I paced the dim halls of the hospital. Of course I did. Old habits die hard. Just like riding a bike.

  Around 6:00 a.m., after the morning shift nurse told me the boys were doing fine, I decided to go out and get some breakfast and coffee. After I picked up some takeout from a twenty-four-hour diner on Broadway, instead of heading back to the hospital, I decided to drive around.

  Newburgh really had seen better days, I thought, shaking my head at the blighted streets. I cruised past whole blocks of abandoned two- and three-story row houses-decrepit blocks where the only thing functional on the listing structures seemed to be the jury-rigged satellite-TV dishes.

  On one corner, I spotted rows of rum bottles and candles, a faded Mylar balloon tied to a Virgin Mary statue. It was a street shrine to someone who’d been murdered, I realized. There was even a picture of the victim, a handsome young Hispanic man, taped to the telephone pole above a stuffed hippo and a Happy Meal Pokémon toy.

  I stopped at the address where Moss had told me my boys had been assaulted. I stared down the alleyway between two dilapidated Victorian row houses. The peeling, weather-battered clapboard on both houses made them look scoured and beaten, punished for some horrible crime. Bent and twisted metal poles from an old missing fence stuck up from the concrete in front of the old houses, as if the area had taken a direct artillery hit.

  I turned off the bus and got out. Reluctantly. It was deserted and desolate this early, but it was definitely a scary-looking place. The only comfort I took as I headed down the alley was the Glock on my ankle.

>   I hadn’t taken more than a dozen steps when I saw it. The stain on the concrete. From my sons’ blood. Then I wasn’t afraid anymore. Just extremely pissed.

  Who the hell would shoot two unarmed kids?

  When I looked up, I saw someone on the back porch of the Victorian to my left. He was a cute six- or seven-year-old black child, standing there shirtless in his underwear, sucking his thumb as he watched me.

  I smiled at him. His happy brown eyes lit up as he smiled back. I’d been a cop for a long time, but it never failed to shock and break my heart when I saw innocents in the midst of such horror.

  He took his thumb out of his mouth.

  “You’re not from around here,” the kid said. “Are you a policeman?”

  “Yes, I am,” I said, showing him my shield.

  He peered at my badge.

  “Why you driving a bus, then?” he said, pointing down the alley at the street. “Policemen don’t drive no bus.”

  “That’s my family car,” I said, smiling again. “I have a really big family. That’s the reason I’m here. Two of my sons were hurt here yesterday. My two boys. Someone shot them with a gun. Did you see or hear anything, son?”

  The little boy’s eyes went wide as he nodded. But as I approached him, there was a sound on the porch behind him. A door opened and before I could open my mouth, the boy ran into it. Then the door slammed and its locks clicked.

  I let out a breath. No one wanted to get involved.

  Who could blame them? I thought, quickly heading back to my bus.

  CHAPTER 48

  WHEN I ARRIVED back at the hospital, Eddie was still sleeping, but I saw that Brian was awake. Knowing that it’s usually easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission, I made a command decision and just opened the door and went in with Mary Catherine.

  Brian had an enormous white gauze bandage tied around his neck and under his arm. He looked like an extra in a war movie, which I guess made sense, since he had, in fact, been shot in a drug war. The good news was that he looked worlds better than he had the night before. There was a lot more color back in his cheeks.