“Where’d you learn all that?” I said, hiding my smile as she handed me back the gun.
“I grew up on a cattle farm, Mike. There wasn’t as much rustling going on in Tipperary as in the Wild West, but we had some. Not at our farm, though.”
“I’ll bet,” I said, and started to laugh. This attractive young woman never failed to shock.
She put her hands on her hips, Wonder Woman-style, which made sense.
“Now, if there’s any locking and loading to be done around here when Mike is at work, I’ll be the one to do it. Agreed, gentlemen?” she said.
“You win, Annie O’Oakley,” I said, making her smile.
Seamus folded his arms, frowning at the both of us.
“Fine. I’m going back to bed,” he said after another half a minute.
“I never get to have any fun at all,” he whined as he left.
CHAPTER 63
A BRIEF HORN honk came from outside a moment later.
“And where are you headed this early?” Mary Catherine said as I clipped my holster to my belt by the front door.
I debated whether to tell her. I decided I didn’t want to say anything about bagging the son of a bitch who’d hurt Eddie and Brian until we had him.
“Ah, nowhere, really,” I said as I pulled down my shirt over my gun. “Just going to see a man about a dog.”
“Well, please don’t get bit, Michael,” Mary Catherine said. “We have all the Bennetts on the mend that we can handle at present.”
“Don’t worry, lass,” I said, showing her the handcuffs I had in the pocket of my Windbreaker. “I brought a strong leash.”
There were two patrol cars in the arrest team besides the unmarked one I rode in with Detectives Ed and Bill, who had brought me a coffee and had laid a Kevlar vest out for me in the backseat.
“Just my size, too,” I said, slipping it on. “You guys are the best.”
It took about twenty more minutes to roll up to the address in Newburgh. It was actually on a block of pretty well-kept houses on Bay View Terrace. Behind them, there was a pure, stunning view of the Hudson. How much would Newburgh real estate be worth if the city wasn’t riddled with crime? I wondered. It was only an hour and twenty minutes away from New York City. I stared out at the sky, just starting to lighten behind Beacon, as we pulled to a stop.
“This is where his aunt lives,” Bill said. “He’s been hiding out with her ever since he got word we were looking for him.”
A dog started barking nearby as we waited for one of the cruisers to get into position on the next block, in case Jay D went out the back. The Motorola in Ed’s hand suddenly crackled.
“Heads up,” said someone in the cruiser parked behind us. “We have a figure in the alleyway across the street with a long object in their hand.”
That tensed things up. There was word that the Bloods had automatic weapons, including AK-47s.
A moment later, an old thin black woman in a tracksuit appeared, mumbling to herself as she began haphazardly sweeping her porch with a broom.
“Stand down. It’s just Grandma doing her six a.m. tidy-up,” the radio said.
“Or the Wicked Witch of West Newburgh,” Detective Moss mumbled after a loud exhale.
CHAPTER 64
“OKAY. WE’RE SET. We’re in position at the back,” came word from the other cruiser.
“Roger Dodger,” Ed Boyanoski said as he grabbed the battering ram. “We’re going in.”
It turned out that we didn’t need the battering ram. As we came up the stairs, the door opened and a tall middle-aged black man wearing blue Dickies work clothes walked out. He waved his arms over his head.
“Now, now. Calm down. Calm down. You don’t need to be bustin’ my brand-new door down,” he said, eyeing us. “You here for James, I take it?”
“You take it right, sir,” Detective Moss said.
“Thank God,” the man said, turning and holding the door open for us. “Hallelujah.”
“Woman!” the man called back into the house. “Get that child out here now!”
A moment later, a petite black woman appeared with her arms around a hard-looking, stocky teenager. He was in flip-flops and wore white shorts, a white beater, and a blood-red Yankees cap.
“This is all wrong. All wrong,” said the aunt as Ed and Bill frisked and cuffed Jay D on the porch. “James is a good boy.”
“I’m sure he is, ma’am,” Detective Moss said. “We’d like to go and search his room now if that’s okay.”
“By all means,” Jay D’s uncle said. “This good boy’s room is just to the right at the top of the stairs. Try not to trip over all the Bibles and choir robes, now.”
“I didn’t do nothin’,” Jay D said after Bill read him his rights and got him into the back of the cruiser. Ed sat in the back with him, wisely leaving me in the front passenger seat, where I couldn’t get my hands around his neck.
“This is total bullshit, man,” the punk cried as he rocked back and forth violently against the seat. “You only doin’ this because those kids shot over on Lander were white kids.”
“Now, James, we’re not out of the driveway yet, and already you’re dropping the race card,” Ed Boyanoski said with a tsk. “Didn’t we investigate your shooting last year, James? I’m sorry, I mean shootings?”
“Bullshit, man,” Jay D repeated. He stomped on the floor of the cruiser. “You don’t think I know that the only reason you bugging everybody like this is because those white boys were the kids of a cop?”
Bill Moss and I exchanged a surprised glance before I turned around and stared the punk in his eye.
“You’re actually right about that,” I said, showing him my shield. “We cops do tend to get a little upset when you shoot up our children. See, I’m in a gang, too. It’s called the NYPD. They don’t issue us those ratty dishrags you guys like to sport, but we do have some pretty cool hats.”
The kid smirked and looked at me sideways. “You him, ain’t you?” he said.
He nodded with a sudden smile.
“Bennett, right? Knew it. This ain’t just racist-ass bullshit. This is some racist-ass cop bullshit.”
“Quick question, James,” Ed said. “How do you know who the kids were? I mean that stuff about them being the kids of a cop was deliberately left out of the paper.”
“How much did the Latin Kings pay you?” I yelled. “I hope it was worth it, punk, because if you think I’m pulling strings now, this is nothing compared to the favors I’m going to call in to make sure you earn every single goddamn penny of it.”
Jay D looked at us one by one. He started biting his lower lip like it was a chew toy. The punk suddenly squeezed himself into the rear seat’s corner as if it contained an escape hatch.
“That’s it. I want my lawyer,” he mumbled. “I ain’t talkin’ no more.”
“You’re shutting up?” Detective Bill Moss said as he finally put the unmarked into drive. “Is that a promise, James? Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!”
CHAPTER 65
WE HAD A cookout to end all cookouts that night. The three-burner grill out on the dock was completely covered with burgers, dogs, corn on the cob, peppers, lamb shish kebabs. I even had an Italian sausage wheel that I’d found in a terrific deli not too far from the lake house, where I also scored some real New York-style Italian bread to wrap around the sausage and peppers. Tony Soprano would have been impressed.
“Hey, Father. How do you say ‘fuhgeddaboudit’ in Gaelic?” I asked Seamus over the smoke.
Of course we were having a feast. That’s what your friendly neighborhood heroes did when they bagged the beast: got the grill going and broke out the mead, like Beowulf and his men after offing Grendel.
But Beowulf actually had to go and fight Grendel’s mother next, didn’t he? I thought, remembering how Perrine still needed to be deep-sixed. He certainly was a mother, wasn’t he?
Whatever, I thought, pulling on the frosty beer at my elbow and wiping sweat off my b
row with my grill mitt. Line ’em up, and I’ll put ’em down one at a time. No, wait. That was Hughie’s policy on shots. Poor Hughie. Man, I missed him.
Half the Newburgh PD showed up. Ed Boyanoski was there with his wife, Celia, and three kids as well as Bill Moss and his wife, Cordelia, and their two daughters. Even the gang-unit cops, Walrond and Groover, showed up with their respective clans.
Walrond’s clan included his new wife and beautiful four-month-old baby girl, Iris. My girls-including Mary Catherine, for some strange reason-surrounded Iris’s car seat and could not be peeled away during the entire party.
All’s well that was ending well, at least for the current moment.
Even the kids’ surgeon, Dr. Mary Ann Walker, showed up for a quick ale. It turned out that she and Ed were already friends because they both served on the board of the Newburgh Historical Society. I learned that Ed, a former marine, was also a deacon at downtown Newburgh’s Saint Patrick’s Church and spent much of his free time coaching basketball at the Boys and Girls Club.
“So many people have written off this town to the gangs, Mike, but I know we can turn it around,” Ed said. “This place is my home. I’m never leaving.”
Ed was a top-notch guy. They all were. Good people who truly cared about their community and were trying to do their best in a bad situation.
“Man, you know how to toss a soiree here, Mike,” a swim-trunk-clad Groover called from a floating inner tube off the dock. He had a sausage-and-peppers hero in one hand and a beer in the other.
“I haven’t had too much to celebrate in a while, so I’m pulling out all the stops, my man. You guys deserve it. Now my family can put all this nonsense in the rearview.”
“How many kids do you have, anyway?” Groover wanted to know.
I shook my head. “Dude, I lost count a long time ago.”
Groover looked down into his beer thoughtfully before raising his plastic cup.
“The more the merrier,” he called.
I looked over at my son Eddie, talking and laughing with one of Ed Boyanoski’s kids, and raised my own.
“The more the merrier,” I agreed with a smile.
Damn right.
It was the Bennett family motto, after all.
CHAPTER 66
AT AROUND NINE, the party wrapped up pretty much the way all cop parties do-with some beery high fives and fist bumps and promises to do it again real soon.
It had really been a fun time, even for all our cop kids, who had broken into teams and had wrapped up the night playing an epic game of ring-a-levio. Eddie had been the last one caught as he made a heroic attempt to free his team from jail.
Hearing his squealing laughter again as he was tackled was by far the best part of the night. Hell, the best part of the month.
“These Newburgh guys are all right in my book,” I said to Mary Catherine as we waved good-bye to the last set of retreating headlights from the porch.
“Is that just the beer talking?” Mary Catherine asked, eyeing the half-full Heineken in my hand.
“Well, maybe not just the beer,” I said sheepishly.
Even though the house and backyard and especially the dock looked like they’d been attacked by a host of marauding barbarians, Mary Catherine and I turned our backs on the paper plates. We left all our sleeping, sunburned charges in Seamus’s care and decided to take a long walk around the lake.
We ended up taking the secluded forest path I’d frantically scoured the week before when I’d searched for Eddie and Brian. At the top of the hill, Mary Catherine suddenly stopped and turned around.
“Look. It’s beautiful,” she said.
I followed her pointing finger just above the treetops to a bright, glowing sliver of quarter moon, tinged with pink. All around it, stars-too many to count-sparkled against the seemingly endless navy-blue sky. We could have been the only people in the world, in the universe.
We sat, and I broke out the midnight picnic I’d packed. An old flannel blanket, some Cheddar and grapes, a cold bottle of sauvignon blanc that I had to laboriously work open with the Leatherman tool on my key chain, since I’d forgotten to bring a corkscrew.
I laid out the blanket in the middle of the forest clearing and poured wine into a couple of plastic glasses.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to mix beer and wine,” Mary Catherine said, leaning back with the cup on her stomach and staring up at the sky.
“Midnight picnics are the exception,” I said, sitting cross-legged across from her.
Mary Catherine yawned and closed her eyes.
“You know what would be really great, Mike?”
“What’s that?” I said.
“If we could really go on vacation. You know, one where you’re not working and actually here?”
I laughed.
“That’s quite a concept,” I said. “A nonworking vacation, is it?”
Mary Catherine sighed.
“Or how about for once we could go on a real date, Mike? Three or four hours of just me and you. No kids, no phones. Just two adults together alone, enjoying each other’s company. I would like that so much. Wouldn’t you?”
“You’re right, Mary Catherine,” I said feeling suddenly very guilty.
How could I be such an insensitive clod? I had to stop taking this wonderful woman for granted or I was going to be very sorry.
“Enough of squeezing in a moment here and there,” I said. “You’re absolutely right. I’ll arrange the whole thing. We’ll put Seamus on duty and go wherever you want. Down into the city. We’ll paint the town red. Where do you want to go?”
I waited for a few moments. But even after a full minute, she was still silent. I turned and glanced at her, laughing to myself as I watched her sleep.
“Oh, Sleeping Beauty,” I said as I gathered up the remnants of our picnic. “What did I do to deserve someone as lovely as you?”
CHAPTER 67
IT WAS STILL dark when I heard the doorbell ring the next morning. Hungover and bleary-eyed, I went ass over teakettle into a beanbag chair as I tripped over an inner tube in the unlit family room. I was still in my boxer shorts, dusting myself off, as I peeked out the window and saw a Newburgh police cruiser in the driveway and a uniformed cop on the porch.
“Good morning,” I said, opening the door.
The young, attractive, black female cop smiled and blushed a little when she saw my bamboozled face and skimpy attire.
“Detective Bennett, sorry to bother you so early,” she said, quickly recovering. “Detective Boyanoski sent me. He tried your phone, but you didn’t pick up. Something’s come up. It’s about the assailant who shot your boys. The gang member, Jay D-James Glaser?”
“What about him?” I said, rubbing my eyes.
“He was murdered in jail last night,” she said.
That got me moving. I threw on a pair of jeans and a polo shirt, grabbed my gun, and took a ride into town with the good-looking rookie cop, whose name was Belinda Saxon. Bill and Ed were already outside waiting for me in the Newburgh PD parking lot. Behind them, the sun was just coming up over the Hudson.
“Let me guess. The party’s over?” I said as I got out of the cruiser.
“So’s our friend James Glaser,” Bill Moss said, opening the unmarked Ford’s back door as though he were a chauffeur.
After some coffee and a quick breakfast at the diner out by I-84, we headed to the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in nearby Wallkill, New York, where Glaser had been transferred. The sunny green farm fields we passed had horses in them, rows of corn. I thought about the eighteen-year-old kid we’d picked up the day before and shook my head. How could he be dead on this beautiful summer morning? And how could this bucolic area have a gang problem?
After being processed just inside the steel gate of the maximum-security prison, we were brought into a formidable building to meet with the assistant warden, Kenneth Bozman, in his ground-floor office.
“Twenty inmates from B block went to
B yard for evening rec around seven,” the well-groomed, round-faced bureaucrat explained as he drummed his chewed-to-the-nub fingernails on a metal file cabinet next to his desk. “Come seven thirty, James Glaser was seen in a scuffle with another black male. Glaser was dead as a doornail upon arrival of staff. His attacker was still hovering over him. The assailant’s name is Gary McKay, a lifer. He’s been segregated in our special housing unit since the incident.”
“How’d he kill him?” Ed Boyanoski asked.
Bozman stopped drumming and pointed to the hollow of his throat above his tie.
“He buried the sharpened end of a broken mop handle into Glaser’s clavicle,” Bozman said, shaking his head. “Stabbed it all the way down into his heart like a skewer. Unbelievable. What a shitstorm. We’re max security, but we run a tight ship. We haven’t had a murder here since oh three.”
“What’s McKay’s story?” Bill asked.
“I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him,” Bozman said. “He’s old-school. Drug dealer who used to run the Newburgh drug scene back in the eighties. He’s in for a triple homicide and attempted murder of a cop. Now he heads the Bloods here in the prison. I take it this is a Bloods thing, some kind of street beef?”
“You take it correctly,” Ed told him.
“I figured,” Bozman said. “I mean, McKay’s a homicidal maniac, but skewering a son of a bitch is a little excessive for having a newbie look at you funny.”
“We’d like to talk to him, if that’s okay,” Bill Moss said.
“Wait here,” Bozman said. “I’ll go into the warden and ask.”
Bozman came back less than a minute later.
“Shit. Sorry, fellas. They actually just took him to the courthouse in Shawangunk for his arraignment. Maybe you can catch him there.”
I, Michael Bennett Page 15
