I, Michael Bennett

by James Patterson

  This last part was the gut check. The line he was in was for the Homeland Security vehicle imaging scanner, where the in-sides of all containers had to be inspected by an X-ray machine before they were allowed to leave. Remembering his very specific instructions, O’Neill waited until it was right before his turn and then immediately sent a wordless text message to a number he’d already preprogrammed into his phone.

  He assumed the text was a signal to someone working in the security office, but he wasn’t sure and he didn’t really want to know. He just held his breath as he slowly rolled between the goalpost-like metal X-ray poles that bookended the security lane.

  There was a traffic light with a gate arm on the other side, where you had to wait after you went through the scanner. O’Neill stared at the red light, his heart ticking like a clock attached to a bomb. He was wondering how much prison time they would give him for smuggling several metric tons of coke, and what his clueless wife and daughters would think, and how did one actually hang oneself in a prison cell, when the green light suddenly flashed and the arm tilted up.

  O’Neill Zippoed himself a victory cigarette as he clutched and shifted and pulled out.

  CHAPTER 53

  AN HOUR LATER, still following specific instructions, O’Neill pulled into an I-95 rest stop just south of the New York State line and unhitched the trailer. A minute after he pulled away, a spanking new cherry-red Peterbilt 388 swung in front of the cargo container, and three hard-looking Hispanic men in jeans and denim work shirts hopped out. The largest of them checked the container’s seal and locks carefully before nodding to the other two to hook it up.

  The final destination of the shipment was a warehouse on the East River in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Inside, just beyond its open steel overhead door, a white Mercedes S600 sedan with tinted windows was parked beside a large silver Ford van. After the warehouse door was safely back down, an effeminate Hispanic man in seersucker shorts and a butter-colored tennis sweater exited the van and checked the seal and locks on the container. When the foppish man nodded, the driver of the truck, who had been waiting with a pair of bolt cutters, clipped the container’s heavy padlocks and swung the doors back.

  “Vámonos!” the truck driver called.

  There was a pause, then out of the mouth of the container came young girls. Sweaty and disheveled, they gasped and squinted at the clean air and light after spending three days in the box. They were dirt-poor Mexican country girls who’d been told they were being recruited for factory jobs in the U.S. fashion industry. Not one of them was over fourteen. One of them was only eleven.

  As the men helped them down to the floor of the warehouse, the driver’s door of the white Mercedes popped open and out came Manuel Perrine’s right-hand woman, beautiful Marietta herself. Even in their exhaustion, the girls marveled at her white Chanel summer pouf dress, the white Chanel purse draping from her slim, cinnamon-tan arm, her white Chanel watch. Beautiful and serene and all smiles, she went among the tired girls with a checklist and a digital camera, taking pictures and pausing here and there to inspect skin and hair and teeth.

  She quickly divided the girls into categories and prices. The last shipment had been overpacked, and there had been some damage to the material. A girl had died on the second day, and several of the rest of them had become so ill, they, too, had to be destroyed.

  What had Manuel called it?

  Spillage. Exactly.

  There had been no spillage this time. The sex-slave trade was a new avenue for the cartel, but, as she did with everything, Marietta was picking up the learning curve quickly.

  Marietta clopped to the van on her pristine white heels and handed the dapper pimp her checklist and camera. They spoke quietly for a moment, the wiry, almost pretty dark-skinned Dominican nodding thoughtfully at her recommendations before returning his hungry gaze to the line of unkempt girls.

  “Who wants a treat?” Marietta called in Spanish as she took a plastic bag of snack-size Milky Ways from her white purse and tossed it into the van.

  The famished girls flooded into the vehicle, giggling. In a moment, they were buckled into their seats, chewing ravenously, chocolate on their cheeks and chins. The pimp, already behind the wheel, looked at them over the driver’s seat, his soft, seemingly friendly face beaming like a proud father’s.

  “This is Mateo. He will take you to where you’ll be staying,” Marietta told them gently in Spanish as the warehouse’s steel door rolled back up. “He’ll make sure to get you to a phone right away so you can call home and tell your parents that you’re okay, okay?”

  The girls-like Madeline and her friends responding politely to Miss Clavel-thanked Marietta in unison.

  Marietta slipped on a pair of whimsical Chanel sunglasses and stuck her tongue out at them playfully.

  “Bye, now. I’m so proud of you all,” Marietta called, tossing a wave and a blown kiss over her sleeveless shoulder as she headed back for the Mercedes.

  “You made it, girls!” she said. “You really made it. Welcome to America!”

  CHAPTER 54

  AT LEAST THE lobby security guard wasn’t lying down on the job, I thought as I arrived at the U.S. attorney’s secret office on lower Broadway. Even after I flashed my shield and showed the guard my driver’s license, he made no less than three phone calls before he allowed me to go upstairs.

  Tara was on the other side of the elevator door when it opened on the seventeenth floor. I was instantly reminded how lovely she was. She was wearing a crisp Tiffany-blue blouse and a tobacco-colored skirt, her dark hair shining.

  She surprised me by giving me an affectionate hug and planting a fat kiss on my cheek. As she guided me through a maze of cubicles into a conference room, I think I might have blushed a little. Or, to be more accurate, quite a lot.

  She sat me down at a table stacked with law books and legal pads, and for the next half hour, we drank black coffee as she brought me up to speed on the prosecution strategy. She hadn’t seemed to have heard about my kids and what happened to them, so I didn’t bring it up. I’m a man who, if possible, always likes to compartmentalize the disasters in his life.

  “As you already know, Mike,” she said, slipping on a pair of glasses as she showed me the indictment, “Perrine’s original warrant for the murders of the Border Patrol agents was put on the back burner while we shifted our focus to the murder of Scott Melekian, the Macy’s waiter Perrine killed while fleeing from you.”

  She suddenly let out a huge yawn that turned into a sigh.

  “My bad,” she said, blinking. “It’s been nothing but late nights since Judge Baym was killed.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” I said, stifling a yawn myself.

  “Anyway, we thought it was going to be a slam dunk at first,” she said. “We interviewed fifteen eyewitnesses who were ready to testify that they saw Melekian turn and stumble into Perrine as he was running into the restaurant. Then they saw Perrine grasp Melekian by the head and violently snap his neck with his bare hands, causing almost instantaneous death.”

  She sighed again.

  “That number of witnesses is now down to seven. Only three of the wait staff and four patrons are willing to say what they saw. We’re not sure if the witnesses are apprehensive since the courthouse shooting or if Perrine is getting to them in other ways, but people are becoming less and less willing to testify. That’s why I need you to be ready to go as soon as the jury is picked. We need to jump right into this with both feet-put you on the stand to set the whole thing up and get the ball rolling quickly. Because the longer we delay, the more witnesses we’re going to lose.”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re right,” I said. “With Perrine’s money and global reach, he’s already started to go all-in to ruin the government’s case through violence. It’s unbelievable.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Tara said. “The Mob used to do the same thing at the height of their power in the nineteen freaking thirties. All they
seemed to do was find witnesses and kill them. The most depressing thing about it is that the bloody tactic has a tendency of being highly effective.”

  She checked her watch and stood, stacking papers.

  “Come on. Tempus fugit. We need to get to the courthouse. Grab one of these file boxes for me.”

  Back at the elevator, Tara smiled at me sort of slyly after she pressed the button.

  The last time we’d been in an elevator together was that night at the St. Regis.

  I stood there in the pregnant silence, thinking about that night-Tara bringing me up to her room, how nice she looked in her fuzzy white bathrobe. For all its nuttiness, it was actually quite a fond memory. A man could get used to putting this vivacious young prosecutor to bed. In theory, of course.

  The elevator binged open.

  Tara stared at me, puzzled.

  “After you,” I said.

  She suddenly smiled again as we got into the car.

  “Sir Michael Bennett, New York City’s last, and perhaps only, chivalrous knight.”

  CHAPTER 55

  AND I THOUGHT Foley Square in front of the federal courthouse had looked like a zoo when the trial first started.

  As Tara and I exited our cab and mounted the marble steps, it again looked like a zoo, only this time with open cages. There were reporters, protesters, cops, and sidewalk barriers everywhere. Most of the faces in the crowd looked even more nervous than the ones on the 7:21 out of Beacon. And why wouldn’t they be afraid?

  The federal court in New York had been around since the days of Alexander Hamilton, and this was the first time a judge had been murdered in her own courtroom in the middle of a trial!

  I elbowed Tara gently and pointed my chin up at the NYPD chopper that sailed into view above the courthouse.

  “Wow, this is the first trial I’ve ever been on that required air cover!” I yelled as we moshed our way through the nervous crowd of photographers and newsies at the top of the stairs.

  “Come on, Mike. Didn’t you read the paper?” she said. “The mayor insists that Perrine’s trial will move forward. New York City will not be intimidated by a drug cartel and its boss!”

  “Of course. Not intimidated. How silly of me,” I said over the deafening rotor wash. “Isn’t it funny, though, how our job is not to be intimidated down here, at the site of a potential attack, while for the duration of the trial our fearless billionaire mayor will be busy not being intimidated at his Upper East Side town house, guarded by his double-digit-strong security detail?”

  Because bullet holes were perhaps not the greatest visual stimulus for potential jurors, the trial had been moved from the majestic courtroom where Judge Baym had been gunned down to a much more modest one on the fourteenth floor.

  Perrine was already sitting at the defense table when we arrived. I’d seen a lot of security inside a courtroom before, but this was over the top. There were at least eight uniformed court officers and another half dozen or so U.S. marshals standing in a wide semicircle around him. The men were all huge and intimidating, like an angry, violent defensive squad on a football team waiting tensely for the snap.

  But if Perrine was intimidated or even noticed all the fuss, he hid it quite well. His demeanor and posture were as impressive as always, his head canted back commandingly, his crease-free prison jumpsuit worn officiously, as though it were formal military dress.

  There was a playful sparkle in his blue eyes as he smiled at something that his thousand-bucks-an-hour lawyer said. You could tell the mass murderer thought the whole thing was a joke, that he was playing us and loving every minute of it.

  CHAPTER 56

  THE NEW JUDGE, Mary Elizabeth Fleming, was a tall, elegant black woman with a striking resemblance to Condoleezza Rice. She was just entering the courtroom from her chambers with the court clerk when it happened. There was a sound from outside, a sudden and tremendous window-rattling bang that seemed to increase in volume as it rose up from the street fourteen stories below.

  At the massive booming noise, the courtroom broke into complete bedlam. Spectators immediately hit the deck in the seats behind me as the dowdy stenographer screamed. She knocked over her typing stand in a clatter and left a shoe behind as she dove into the witness box for cover.

  It was unbelievable how fast all the court officers drew on Perrine, as though it were a Wild West show.

  “Hands!” they screamed at him.

  A six-foot-five redheaded cop circled in front of Perrine, the chunky device in his freckled hand pointed a foot from Perrine’s chest.

  “Hey, you deaf? Hands up now or you will be Tasered, you son of a bitch!” he yelled.

  The ghost of a smile played on Perrine’s lips as he sat as still as a paperweight in his chair. After a moment, he raised his hands in a slow, graceful motion.

  “What’s that expression? ‘Don’t Tase me, bro’?” he said in the tense silence.

  He turned toward the judge then, laughing softly.

  The towering redheaded cop’s radio gave off a loud beep followed by the long squawk of a message.

  “It’s okay. All clear, Judge,” the cop said, listening to his radio. “Looks like a truck at the construction site on Centre Street dropped a load of scaffolding.”

  “How ironic. I almost dropped a load myself,” Perrine said with a girlish giggle.

  “Can the comedy routine, Perrine,” the judge said. “I mean it. One more word out of you, and I might not Taser you, but I will gag you… bro.”

  Closest to the witness stand, I went to help the shaken stenographer up from the floor of the witness box. I exchanged smiles with Perrine at the nearby defense table as I helped right her stenotype. When he gestured me over toward the defense table with his shackled hands, I was more than happy to oblige.

  As I leaned in over the table, the drug lord flashed me a grin.

  “You don’t scare easily, do you, Michael Bennett?” he whispered. “Neither do I. Believe it or not, I like you. With all your antics, I find you a very funny man. This circus needs a clown, and you’re doing a great job. Despite your silliness, my offer still stands. You could take a nice long vacation from all this stress, a permanent one, in fact. I hear the Maldives are quite pleasant this time of year.”

  “The Maldives?” I said, raising an eyebrow as if I were considering it. “They do sound pleasant, but the question is would they be more pleasant than what I’m going to do to you on that witness stand? More pleasant than watching your face when the verdict is read?”

  I could see a vein pulse on Perrine’s neck as I slowly shook my head.

  “Sorry, Perrine. Truly, my apologies,” I whispered back. “But even a silly clown like me wouldn’t miss that for the entire world.”

  CHAPTER 57

  THE METRO-NORTH TRAIN back to the lake house in Newburgh was half empty that night after nine o’clock. I didn’t read a paper or send out any e-mails. All I did for an hour straight was sip the Budweiser tallboy I’d bought in Grand Central as I sat in a window seat on the Hudson River side, listening to the clickety-clack of the train. If I’d had a harmonica, I would have busted into the saddest blues solo ever heard as I stared out at the dark water and chugga-chugga choo-chooed it north up the Hudson Valley.

  And I didn’t even know how to play the harmonica.

  That pretty much summed up how good things weren’t going in United States v. Perrine. Due both to Perrine’s unsettling presence and his legal team’s constant stream of delays, I didn’t get anywhere near testifying. By day’s end, only the selection of the final members of the jury had been nailed down.

  The whole day had been nothing but one long, exhausting, frustrating emotional grind. At least for all the good people involved. The worst part was having to watch Perrine sit through the proceedings, sipping Perrier, with his dream-team legal counsel alongside him. Every few minutes, he’d swivel around to give me a little wink along with his arrogant Cheshire cat smile.

  After court and a quick
powwow with Tara and the rest of the prosecutors, I’d thought briefly about staying over in the apartment, then decided against it. Everyone would probably be asleep by the time I made it back to the lake house, but it didn’t matter. The need to be with my guys, especially Eddie and Brian, over the last week was undeniable.

  Was it guilt over not being able to protect them?

  No doubt it was.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about what a miracle it was that they weren’t dead, and that we weren’t planning their funerals right now instead of finishing our vacation.

  As the lonely lights of the Tappan Zee Bridge swung past on my left, I got a text message from Mary Catherine asking me if she should come to pick me up in Beacon. I begged off, texting back that I’d just get a taxi.

  Though she’d certainly be a sight for my very sore eyes, I actually had one more stop to make before calling my heck of a long day a night.

  I needed to meet up with Newburgh detectives Moss and Boyanoski, who had notified me that there was some potential progress on my kids’ case.

  Forty minutes later, after exiting the train, I waved over a beat-up Chevy gypsy cab waiting in the Beacon train station’s otherwise deserted parking lot. The cabbie was a surprisingly young Hispanic girl with blue hair and earrings in her lower lip and colorful tattoos covering one arm, as though she’d been attacked by a gang of graffiti vandals. I could see that underneath all the junk was a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old young lady with gentle blue eyes who should have been home packing her book bag with paper and sharpened pencils for the new school year instead of out hustling for fares.

  “Where to?” she asked before I could ask her if her parents knew where she was.