I, Michael Bennett

by James Patterson

  “How’s it going, buddy?” I said.

  He looked at me for a second in complete relief. But after a moment, his face fell and he stared at the wall.

  After a few seconds, I realized he was crying, silent tears streaming down his cheeks.

  “What is it, son? Are you in pain?”

  Mary Catherine put a hand on his shoulder.

  “What is it, Brian? Should we call the doctor?”

  Brian looked up at the ceiling.

  “All you ever tell us is to look out for one another,” he said. “Especially me because I’m one of the oldest. I let you down, Dad. I got Eddie shot. He’s going to die, and it’s all my fault.”

  “No, no. He’s just sleeping. He’s going to be okay. You both are,” I said, thumbing the tears off his face.

  “But-”

  “But nothing, Brian. “You’re both okay. That’s all that matters now,” I said. “Eddie getting shot was the fault of the person who shot him. In fact, your hollering saved both your lives. The only thing you have to do now is tell me what happened from the beginning.”

  He did. He told me about the girls and their friend in the black Mustang, the driver asking them to watch his back only to run away as a drug dealer-a gang drug dealer, judging by Brian’s description of him-just started shooting.

  The whole thing was bizarre. Why would these older girls take so much interest in Eddie and Brian? Not to mention the guy with the Mustang. Also, why would some dealer just start shooting? He felt threatened by a thirteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old? It didn’t add up.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, what are you doing in here?” Dr. Walker said as she barged in and busted us. “You must leave this instant.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Bennett?” Brian said, baffled, as Dr. Walker shooed us out. “You guys got married? Finally!”

  Mary Catherine blushed as I winked at him.

  “Rest up, wise guy. I’ll talk to you later.”

  But the best surprise of the morning, by far, came as the door closed behind us. Down the other end of the hallway was the whole Bennett bunch, walking toward us and bearing homemade cards and balloons and a “get well soon” banner. I needed a heart lift by that point, and there it was, right on time. The band was back together again.

  “We couldn’t wait any longer, so we took a cab,” Seamus said. “How are Jesse James and Billy the Kid holding up? What a vacation so far! Are we having fun yet?”

  “The hooligans are doing okay, Father. So far, at least,” I said.

  CHAPTER 49

  PLATINUM LADIES WAS housed in a dilapidated barnlike wooden building a little south of Newburgh in New Windsor, near the airport.

  Upstairs in the loft, which he jokingly referred to as his command center, Ramon Puentes hauled his muscled bulk out from behind his desk. He walked to the window that overlooked the stage and slammed down the blinds in order to take his visitor’s attention away from the new white girl down below, starting her routine.

  The kid who called himself Jay D squared his red Yankees ball cap in frustration.

  “Damn. C’mon, G. I was watchin’ that,” the kid growled.

  Ramon groaned as he sat back down. He shouldn’t be dealing with this. Ramon was the brains of the operation. The homicidal man-child in front of him was the responsibility of his younger brother, Miguel, no question. But as luck would have it, Miguel was on vacation in Hawaii with his fiancée of the month, so it was up to him to do everything. What else was new?

  Ramon and his brother, Miguel, ran the Newburgh chapter of the Latin Kings, which meant they ran everything. The dope, the whores, the gambling. At least in the eastern, Hispanic part of town. He normally didn’t do any business with the Bloods, who ran the west end.

  But then again, putting a hit on a cop’s kids wasn’t normal by any stretch.

  “Look at me when I talk to you,” Ramon said. “Do you have ADD? Look at me. You think this is a party? Let me answer that for you. It’s not.”

  “You the one making me wait,” the kid complained, giving him a look of magnificent insolence. “Pony up the green already, Ramo. I need to get rollin’ before someone from the Blood Nation sees me in here.”

  Ramon tapped a finger to his aching head. This punk was actually trying to be hard with him? With a whistle, he could have the bouncers, Bartolo and Cricket, up here. They’d teach this kid some manners with machetes before “Hefty-Hefty-cinch-sacking” his worthless ass into an Orange County swamp. He wondered if that was how he should play this. Wipe the slate. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

  “Yeah?” Ramon said. “Deal was half later for getting the job done. I was told there was a lot of screamin’ after you left the scene. Dead don’t scream, last I heard.”

  The kid waved a hand.

  “Don’t mean nothing,” he said. “I shot ’em up good with my trusty.380. Those kids are done.”

  A double knock suddenly came from the door behind Ramon’s desk.

  At the sound, Ramon bent and spun the dial of the floor safe beside his chair. He reached in and took out a manila envelope with what looked like two paperback books in it. He flung it at the kid. The kid took out the twenty thousand dollars that was inside and flipped through the hundreds. He sniffed at the money with relish before he put it back into the envelope and slid the envelope into his knapsack.

  When Jay D was gone, the rear office door opened, and the woman, Marietta, from Manuel Perrine’s organization entered with her two bodyguards. When she stopped before him, Ramon stared at a spot on the wall just to the left of her exquisite face. Anything that had to do with Perrine or his billion-dollar organization was as touchy as a bomb defusing. Even the tiniest offense or misstep, and-ba-boom!

  “I’m not sure how successful this has been,” Ramon said. “The… um, children were shot, but I don’t know how badly. Please, let me first apologize to you and then to the great Manuel, who-”

  She cut him off with a look.

  “That’s not necessary, Ramon. What is done is sufficient for our purposes. The policeman will get the message. You have done well. I will let Manuel know that the Latin Kings have as always proven their loyalty to him. He will be very pleased.”

  Ramon looked away as she left. He didn’t even look at the bodyguards. That crowd was from a different planet. Their drugs were pure, their supply line as reliable as Walmart’s. But they really believed in all that Santa Muerte stuff. That’s why you didn’t mess around. He’d heard the rumors. Make the wrong move, and you woke up on a stone altar with some freak spouting mumbo jumbo as he raised a knife over your chest.

  Ramon took a bottle of wine out of a drawer. He trimmed the foil and popped it open with a corkscrew. He knew he should probably aerate it and let it breathe, but he didn’t give a shit. He found a balloon glass and gave himself a nice pour.

  It was a four-hundred-dollar bottle of ’89 Chateau d’Yquem that he was saving for a special occasion. Having pulled off his dealings with the Perrine cartel without a bullet to his head qualified as a special occasion in spades.

  He sighed and finally closed his eyes and took a sip. Honey, tobacco, some vanilla notes. Happy still-alive day to me, he thought.

  BOOK THREE. COUNTRY LIVING, COUNTRY DYING

  CHAPTER 50

  I WOKE WITH a start in the predawn dark of my lake cabin bedroom, bathed in a pool of cold sweat.

  It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence of late, unfortunately. In fact, every night of the week since my kids had been assaulted, I kept having a terrible recurring nightmare.

  In the dream, I’m running, frantically searching for Eddie and Brian through some dark city streets, and right at the moment I finally spot them in the distance, at the end of some impossibly long alleyway, I hear these awful reverberating cracks of gunfire and wake up with a stifled scream in my throat.

  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to interpret the dream, since I was spending much of my time feeling horrendously guilty for not being there for the
m, for failing to protect them when they needed me most. Mary Catherine and Seamus told me several times that I needed to stop beating myself up about it, but try as I might, I just couldn’t.

  I guess if there was any consolation, it was that the boys were home from the hospital and seemed to be healing. Dr. Mary Ann Walker from St. Luke’s had been right about there not being any complications with either of my sons’ wounds, thank God, but I guess it wasn’t the physical damage I was most worried about.

  Brian seemed to have come around the emotional corner, already making jokes about how the bullet left in his neck would make him a lifetime TSA target. It was Eddie who was most concerning. Normally the life of the party, he seemed to have drawn into himself like a turtle into its shell. The other kids told me he was also yelling in his sleep, no doubt reliving the horror of what had happened to him.

  It just broke my heart to see him like that. Thirteen-year-old boys have enough on their plates in the growing-up department without throwing post-traumatic stress disorder into the mix.

  That’s why over the last seven days, I’d been meeting up with the Newburgh police. Even though I was probably harassing Detective Bill Moss and his friendly grizzly bear of a partner, Detective Edward Emmanuel Boyanoski, with my constant inquiries, they’d been more than tolerant. In fact, as fellow cops and fathers, they couldn’t have been more understanding.

  They let me ride along with them on canvasses and even let me sit in on a few interviews. So far, no one in the tightly knit Lander Street drug neighborhood was talking about the shooting, but the two veteran detectives assured me they wouldn’t stop until they got to the bottom of it.

  I hoped they were right. For my boys’ sake and everyone else’s.

  I finally sat up, yawning. Outside the window, over the still, dark lake, there was only the faintest light in the sky, but already the whippoorwills were whippoorwilling to beat the band.

  They actually weren’t the only early birds out to get a worm this morning. I had to go back into New York City today. The Perrine trial was resuming after the shooting of Judge Baym at the federal courthouse, and there was a possibility that I might be called to testify. For my departed buddy, Hughie, I needed to go in and do whatever I could to nail the coffin shut on the evil, bloodsucking cartel king Perrine.

  I was finally getting to my feet when there was a soft knock on my bedroom door, and Mary Catherine came in with a cup of coffee.

  “You’re up already. Good,” she whispered, quickly handing me the chipped blue mug. “Do you want to eat a little first, or shower?”

  If there was anyone worried about our gang as much as I was, it was MC. She was one of those people who, when nervous, gets busy. So from sunup to sundown, when she wasn’t directing camp activities, she was a domestic whirlwind of baking and cleaning and cutting the grass. When she went out to paint the mailbox the day before, one of the neighbors asked us if we were fixing to sell the place.

  Over the rim of my coffee mug, I noticed the blue glow of the stove light in the kitchen just as I caught a heavenly aroma.

  “Bacon?” I said, walking into the kitchen and setting my empty mug onto the countertop. “I thought I told you not to fuss, Mary Catherine. I’m glad you didn’t listen to me.”

  “It’s not me who’s fussing. That’s Seamus manning the stove. He insisted on a hot meal for you before your trip into the city,” she said, smiling.

  “Wow, I’m really touched,” I said, refilling my coffee. “The old codger really does care about me after all, huh?”

  “Why? Because he woke up so early?” Mary Catherine said.

  “No,” I explained. “Because frying bacon is how we stoic Irishmen say I love you.”

  CHAPTER 51

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, clean-shaven and wearing my best trial suit, I waved good-bye to Mary Catherine after being dropped off across the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge at the Beacon Metro-North train station.

  As I got onto the Grand Central Terminal-bound 7:21 train a few minutes later, I noticed something odd. Over the tops of their Wall Street Journals and smartphones, some of the business commuters sitting near me were giving me double takes. Not warm, fuzzy ones, either. Even though I was wearing dapper attire, they kept glancing over at me suspiciously, as if they thought I was about to star in the latest YouTube subway fight video.

  I thought maybe my picture was in the paper concerning the Perrine trial, or maybe there was a huge piece of Irish bacon stuck in my teeth, when I suddenly realized what it was.

  Commuting into New York City from the hinterlands of the tristate area is a strange business. Regular passengers on the rush-hour trains see each other every morning or every evening for years and years. Friendships form; floating card games; affairs.

  All the fuss was about me being a new face, I realized. Their furtive, spooked glances were a result of the fact that I’d upset their regular morning routine.

  You want spooked? I thought. How about cleaning out your young teen’s bullet wound? I felt like asking them as I found a window seat and stretched out before closing my eyes.

  Though Beacon was sixty miles north of New York City, we arrived at Grand Central Terminal only about an hour and twenty minutes later. I shuffled out with the throng, walking up one dirty underground tunnel until I found another one for the downtown subway.

  Instead of heading straight to the courthouse, the plan was to go over the case with Tara McLellan first. She had sent me a text message, asking me to meet her at an inconspicuous office building on lower Broadway that the federal prosecutor’s office was now renting due to the trial’s unprecedented need for security.

  Running early and dying for light and oxygen, I decided to get off the number 6 train at Canal Street and walk the rest of the way. I walked west to Broadway, and then made a left, going south, down into the Canyon of Heroes.

  New York can truly drive you nuts, but every once in a while, you glance around and realize you live in one of the most beautiful man-made places that has ever existed. Washington, D.C., evokes the long line of American presidents, but for me, it’s the Canyon of Heroes, with its history of old-fashioned showers of ticker tape, that always reminds me of our country’s most shining human triumphs-driving in the golden railroad spike, Edison’s lightbulb, the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, Armstrong’s not-so-small step on the moon.

  As I walked, smiling up at the high, massive walls of the majestic buildings, a much more vivid and personal memory suddenly occurred to me. It was the first time I actually came to lower Manhattan with my father, to see the 1977 world champion Yankees in their ticker-tape parade.

  Glowing with Yankees pride-and warmed by three or four pints of Guinness from a nearby Blarney Stone pub, packed wall-to-wall with customers-he hoisted me to his shoulders. With me riding on his broad back, we went up and down Broadway, where he pointed out all the landmarks-Trinity Church, where George Washington attended services following his inauguration at Federal Hall, across from the New York Stock Exchange; John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Building.

  “Look around, Michael. Take it all in,” he said, a happy tear in his eye as we finally watched the tape glittering down over Reggie Jackson and Ron Guidry and George Steinbrenner, who were passing by in convertibles.

  “Never forget we’re the good guys, Michael,” he said. “We win. They lose. End of story.”

  I teared up a little as I thought about that. I thought about my life, the state of the country, the state of the world. I was the man now, and it was my turn to be the good guy, wasn’t it? A good father, a good cop, a good man. I’d like to think I was trying to fight the good fight, but I was starting to wonder more and more if the good guys weren’t becoming an endangered species these days-if we weren’t quickly getting outnumbered, outmaneuvered, outgunned.

  No wonder the people on the train were spooked, I thought, shivering in the cool morning air as I walked. I, too, was spooked. Being spooked, I guess, was the only sane response to watching th
e world come apart at the seams.

  CHAPTER 52

  NINE MILES TO the southwest of the dazzling glass-and-steel skyline of lower Manhattan lie the Maher Terminals in Elizabeth, New Jersey, North America’s largest container-ship facility.

  It was coming on 8:30 a.m. when the dockside crane along the southern wharf sounded its horn, and the train-like column of trucks idling beside it finally began to move into position.

  At the head of the line, a boyish, silver-haired trucker by the name of Norman O’Neill quickly stubbed out his tenth Marlboro of the morning before pulling his rumbling Volvo VN 630 semi beneath the massive steel legs of the towering unloading crane. He felt like lighting up a fresh one as he listened to the overhead cable’s shrill whine. Since all the paper and manifests had been stamped hours before, it was looking good, though he wasn’t out of the woods yet, he knew. He’d breathe again after he got the box and got the heck out of there.

  O’Neill glanced to his right at the rusty hull of the small container vessel, called a feeder, that the crane was starting to unpack. Named the Estivado, it was a Costa Rican ship with a French crew that flew a Panamanian flag. Having picked up containers from her before, O’Neill knew there was nothing on the Estivado’s cargo manifest, such as machine tools, that would set off any Homeland Security threat-matrix alarms. In fact, most of the nine hundred LEGO-like red metal boxes aboard the ship contained navel oranges and tangelos out of Toluca, Mexico.

  Most, O’Neill thought, as the weight of the lowered container settled onto the trailer attached to the truck with a slight thump and a creak.

  But not all.

  He shifted the five-hundred-horsepower Volvo into gear and pulled away from the crane and around a red brick warehouse to the end of another line of idling trucks. He nervously drummed the top of the Marlboro box sitting in his cup holder as he sat waiting.