I, Michael Bennett

by James Patterson

  That got some hearty applause from the let’s-make-the-cops-put-down-the-doughnuts crowd. I looked over at Ed and Bill, who paid informants out of their own pockets and didn’t look like they had gotten a good night’s sleep in years, let alone taken a vacation.

  “Giuliani?” someone called out. “That guy was a Nazi!”

  “Damn straight he was a Nazi,” Mustache said. “The Nazi who saved New York City.”

  The rest of the meeting wasn’t very effective. There was a lot of yelling, people venting their frustration. You couldn’t blame them. The Newburgh residents wanted their city back. They wanted to do the right thing for their town and for their families.

  But how?

  CHAPTER 72

  THE FIRST TIME Seamus spoke was when we got back into the minibus.

  “I was thinking about what that nice young woman said,” he said after he clicked his seat belt in place. “About turning around New York. Did you know that Giuliani wasn’t the first crusader to clean up New York?”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “It happened in the late eighteen hundreds. The plight of the Irish in New York City after the 1849 potato famine was far worse than that of the poor people here in Newburgh. The Irish were considered a menace to society, and the run-down parts of the city where they lived were rife with crime and drugs, prostitution and gangs, and deplorable conditions.”

  “We were the original gangsters?” I said with a grin.

  “Exactly,” Seamus said in his brogue. “What turned it around was a moral and cultural revolution. A bishop named John Hughes went into the slums and took the people to task, condemning their criminality on the one hand and offering a sense of self-respect and hope through God on the other. Hughes was actually the one who started the Catholic school system. With his efforts, in a generation, all the criminals were cops and the Irish were solid citizens.”

  “You think that might work, Father?” I said skeptically. “Me and you should walk down Lander Street thumping a Bible? I mean, really? Could I hollow mine out for my Glock?”

  My grandfather looked very old as he shrugged and looked out the window.

  “It’s in the DNA of young male human beings to enjoy acting like hooligans,” he said. “Everyone knows that. Nothing will ever stop that. The only effective curb to that unacceptable behavior is the presence of a larger male human being known as a father who will kick the young man’s keister when he acts up. Where are the fathers here?”

  “So that’s it? Fatherlessness is the root of the gang problem?”

  “It’s not rocket science, Mick,” Seamus said. “I don’t need to tell you how much hands-on help a teenage boy needs to become a self-reliant, law-abiding man.”

  “You have a point there,” I said.

  “Exactly. A mother can’t control a fifteen-year-old young man by herself. School can’t. So these kids run wilder and wilder until they get killed or the police have to step in.”

  “They are wild,” I said.

  “See, the Church emphasizes the family and frowns on premarital sex and divorce, and people laugh and call us killjoys and plug their ears,” Seamus said. “There are many ways to raise children and none is perfect, but anyone who says a traditional nuclear family isn’t the best way is flat-out fooling himself.”

  He sighed.

  “People say it’s society’s fault, and they’re right. In our society, fatherlessness is considered a lifestyle choice. But it’s not. To have a child and not be its father is criminal abandonment. You might as well leave your baby in his stroller on the corner and run away, because that’s basically what you’re doing. Without a father, these kids have been abandoned to the street, and hence the situation here in Newburgh. Lord of the Flies with drugs and guns.”

  “So all of a sudden these gangbangers are going to put away their nine-millimeters and drugs and settle down with formula and diapers? How’s that going to happen? And why didn’t you say all this at the meeting?” I said. “Put the message out there?”

  “They don’t want to hear it from an old Irish priest,” Seamus said. “They’d shut me out as an interloper before I got to the podium.”

  “Who should be the messenger, then?”

  “I don’t know. Jay-Z might be a start, or that P. Diddy fella. The message has to come from someone prominent, someone who already has their respect. Bill Cosby tried to say some sensible things a few years back, but the secular crowd shouted him down. It has to be someone who won’t be shouted down by anyone. Someone with fire in his belly.”

  “Jay-Z, Seamus? C’mon. That’s just not going to happen.”

  “In that case, we need to start building more prisons and graveyards,” Seamus said. “Because if someone doesn’t come along and somehow convince these young men to live their lives in a different way, they’re going to go right on killing each other. Generation after generation after generation.”

  “As much as I hate to say this, old man,” I said as I finally put the bus into drive, “I think you’re actually right.”

  BOOK FOUR. ALL THE KING’S MEN

  CHAPTER 73

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night-3:00 a.m. on Monday, to be exact-I got a call from DEA chief Patrick Zaretski. It was big news. Good big news, for a change.

  A tip had come in on a group linked to Manuel Perrine. Apparently, a team of killers was holed up in a house in Staten Island. It was being speculated that they were there to plot another brazen assault at Perrine’s trial. The house was currently under surveillance while an arrest team was put together.

  “There’s word that there’s an attractive brunette at the location,” Patrick said. “We think it’s that bitch Marietta, Mike. Hughie’s killer. We might have finally caught a break on this.”

  By 4:00 a.m., I was on the New York State Thruway, flying at nearly a hundred miles an hour, with Jimmy Sanchez, a DEA agent from the joint task force who lived in Orange County. His car was an undercover vehicle, a souped-up Dodge Charger, and the bubbling roar of its 6.4-liter HEMI V8 was the perfect sound track to my mounting adrenaline and anticipation. My foot was aching to kick a door down-and even more aching to finally kick some scumbag, drug-dealer ass-as we headed toward New York City like bats out of hell.

  We toned it down considerably by the time we got to the rallying point. We rolled up to the wagon train of DEA and NYPD unmarked cars already waiting in the deserted parking lot of a Chili’s on Richmond Avenue near the College of Staten Island.

  All stops had been thoroughly pulled. There were almost three dozen detectives, DEA agents, and Emergency Service Unit cops helping each other into Kevlar and prepping guns on the trunks of their cruisers. They looked like a pro football defensive squad getting their game faces on, just about ready to mix it up. I know I was ready to trade some helmet paint with Perrine’s people. Raring to go, in fact.

  It was a strange and sort of wonderful moment there, getting prepared with those men. Though no one said anything, we knew that this was bigger than just a drug raid. The audacious violence of Perrine’s men had turned his trial into an international event. The man hadn’t just broken American laws, he’d gleefully spat in the face of everything we stood for.

  And the rest of the planet was waiting to see what we were going to do about it.

  The dedicated cops around me were aching to show the world exactly what we were going to do about it. Because they were tired of the evil and the drugs, tired of the terrorists tearing at the fabric of our great country. We were completely freaking sick of it.

  After we divided up the raid duties, a quick prayer was said as the sun came up over the restaurant’s giant red plastic chili. I don’t know who started it, but mostly everyone joined in. We probably flew in the face of several Supreme Court decisions by actually having the unbridled audacity to bring God into government proceedings, but we just went ahead and did it anyway. I guess we were feeling really wild and crazy that morning as we prepared to stare death in its ugly f
ace. Just completely off the hook.

  Jimmy gunned the engine of the muscle car as I got in, the air around me vibrating with every surge of its deep, rumbling thunder. Who needed coffee?

  “It’s ass-clobberin’ time,” Jimmy said as he dropped it into drive.

  “Amen to that, brother,” I said, shucking a round into my tactical shotgun as we peeled out.

  CHAPTER 74

  THE TARGET WAS a cruddy stucco two-family house on Hillman Avenue. If it stood out at all on the worn suburban street, it was because of the just-off-the-lot black Chevy Tahoe in its concrete driveway. There were five entrances, including the one to the basement apartment, and the plan was to hit all of them at once, very, very hard, with everything in our arsenal-battering rams, flashbang grenades, tactical ballistic shields.

  The word was that the people inside weren’t your run-of-the-mill dopers, but highly trained killers and mercenaries. We weren’t taking any chances. We parked a block away, and a moment later, thirty armed-to-the-teeth cops were jogging quickly and quietly down the dim, narrow street.

  When we arrived at the address, Jimmy and I and our five-man team split off through the house’s short alley to the backyard. It was a hot summer morning, and under my body armor I was sweating quite profusely as I knelt in the dirt of a small vegetable garden by the house’s rear sliding glass door. I had to wipe my hand on my pants several times to keep the shotgun from slipping.

  From a house on the other side of the backyard, I could hear an a.m. news station rising in volume as a clock radio’s alarm went off. Don’t bother slapping it this morning, buddy, I thought. This whole street is about to hear one hell of a wake-up call.

  It happened right before we got the go-ahead. We were crouching there like runners at the starting line when all of a sudden we heard the metallic, clacking plah-plah-plah of a machine gun. Our team stared at each other. It was coming from the front of the house, along with a lot of hollering over the tactical microphone.

  “What do we do?” Jimmy said. “Go in or go out front?”

  I answered him by shattering the sliding glass door with the butt of my Mossberg and tossing in a flashbang. It went off like a stick of dynamite, and then we were inside.

  “Freeze! Police! Police!”

  As the grenade smoke cleared, we saw a shirtless Hispanic man, maybe eighteen years old, standing wide-eyed in the kitchen in front of an open closet door. First he put his hands up, but then, snake-quick, he reached into the closet and swung something out of it. Both Jimmy and I shot the kid as he lifted the AK-47 to his shoulder. Our three-and-a-half-inch-barrel 12-gauge Mossbergs were loaded with double-aught buck, and the shooter went down as if he’d fallen through a hole in the floor.

  As Jimmy and I entered the living room, we could clearly hear the chopping sound of the machine gun upstairs. Rattles of gunfire were also coming from outside in the street and hitting the house. We crouched as rounds shattered the living room window and thumped into the walls. It was return fire from our guys, who must have been pinned down outside.

  “Cease fire on the lower level!” I called into the microphone. “Cops on the ground floor!”

  The firing stopped, and Jimmy and I had just shucked new rounds into our guns and were heading toward the stairs when it happened. There was a thunderous ripping sound from above, and I was suddenly airborne. It was the weirdest feeling, almost pleasant, as though I were on some carnival ride.

  I grayed out for a second as I landed hard on my back in the kitchen. When I came to, the first thing I noticed was that my shotgun was missing, as well as my shoes. The room and everything in it, including me, were completely covered in plaster and debris. Every inch of my exposed skin felt like it had been slapped. My ears were ringing, and blood was pouring from my nose.

  Jimmy rose from beside me, coughing. I just lay there for a minute, trying to reorient myself. The house was roofless, the second floor completely open to the sky.

  I smelled fire and grabbed Jimmy, and we ran out into the backyard.

  It had been a bomb, of course. Not a large enough one to kill me, but almost. After the FDNY put out the fire, we found two bodies in the charred debris. Another Hispanic man with an AK-47 and a middle-aged white guy with an enormous sniper rifle in his lap.

  There was no sign of Marietta. We found the cellar door open right next to where we breached, so she must have escaped during the confusion. The speculation was that there had been bomb-making materials upstairs, and one of our guys must have hit it during the firefight. My pet theory was that Marietta detonated it remotely as a distraction in order to escape.

  I certainly wouldn’t put it past her to kill some underlings or anyone else in order to get away.

  CHAPTER 75

  I’D TAKEN A licking, but I kept right on ticking. Well, at least for the moment.

  Actually, I thought I’d feel more screwed up, having so narrowly missed buying the farm, but after the explosion I felt strangely exhilarated and energized. In fact, for a few buzzing hours, I felt about as invincible as a sixteen-year-old motocross champ, and that’s truly saying something.

  And why not be joyful? There weren’t too many people walking around who had the “experience a truly massive explosion” box checked off their bucket list. The luck o’the Irish indeed!

  After the EMTs cleaned me up and the Staten Island crime scene was secured, I went back to my Manhattan apartment for a shower and a change of clothes. I couldn’t believe it was only eleven o’clock when I plopped down on my couch. Talk about a full morning.

  I checked in with Seamus to let him know I was okay. I was about to tell him that I was planning on crashing in the city tonight until he told me that there was another late-evening Newburgh town meeting being called.

  I immediately changed my plans. I had to be there. Because in spite of all their frustration, it was obvious that there was an incredible thing going on with the folks of Newburgh. It might not have been exactly the moral crusade Seamus had been talking about, but it was powerful nonetheless. These good people had had it. They weren’t going to stop coming together until their bad situation was changed.

  Not only that, but I’d thought of something that might help.

  I grabbed a cab downtown and had a long lunch with my assistant U.S. attorney friend, Tara McLellan. I remembered that Tara had been on a violence task force in Boston, where the feds and local authorities had come together and helped several of the violent, gang-ridden communities come back from the brink. I was eager to get her feedback.

  “What do you think, Tara?” I said over the remains of the massive, greasy, life-affirming pub-style bacon cheeseburger I’d just devoured. “I know you work in the city, but these people in Newburgh are so desperate. Do you think we could get the federal ball rolling for them?”

  Tara lifted her light beer.

  “Actually, I work for the Southern District, Mike, which includes Newburgh. I also know full well what gangs do to a community-the insidious fear, the old ladies who can’t go outside. I’ll do everything I can.”

  She wasn’t kidding. I went back to her office with her, and for the rest of the afternoon, she did nothing except phone old colleagues and call in favors. She even insisted on coming back with me to the meeting and giving me a lift up the Thruway in her battered Jeep.

  She looked surprised when I told her to pull over for some Starbucks near Yonkers around six.

  “Coffee?” she said. “With the day you’ve had, I thought you might want to nap a little on the way.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Never better. Just getting my second wind.”

  “No rest for the weary, huh?” she said, smiling, as she hit her turn signal.

  “Not even weary, almost-blown-to-smithereens, workaholic cops,” I said.

  CHAPTER 76

  IT WAS SEVEN thirty when we came through Saint Pat’s battered doors and back down into the meeting hall. Several of the people whom Tara had called were already there, including
Ann Macaulay, the liaison from the local ATF office, and Larry Brown of the New York field office of the FBI.

  We gathered all the feds together with the Newburgh detectives at the back of the meeting hall. After I made all the introductions, Tara gave a brief explanation of how the gang violence reduction initiative in Boston had worked.

  “First, we got all the various local agencies together in a room-the prosecutors and cops, the state probation office, the school safety cops. Then we put our heads together to identify all the gang players. On a huge map, we ID’d the gangs and their turf boundaries. We put together the various beefs they had with one another, which ones in the gangs were the wannabes, which ones were the worst offenders. That was the hardest part.”

  “Not here in Newburgh, ma’am,” Groover said. “We know who the players are all too well. This is a target-rich environment, believe me.”

  “That’s good. Step two is the casework, which in this scenario would be undercover buys.”

  “Buy-and-busts, yeah, we do that all the time,” Walrond said skeptically. “Then they’re out in six months with new friends they met in jail.”

  “Actually, in this plan, all we do is buys with no busts. At least not yet,” Tara explained. “We gather ammo on the organizations slowly and surely, until we can prove that what we’ve identified is, in fact, a criminal organization. That way, under federal law, we can use the RICO statute and prosecute everyone at once to the fullest extent of the law. Clear out all the bad apples in one harvest, so to speak.”

  “You don’t know how good that sounds. Music to my ears,” Groover said.

  “We also give everyone involved maximum sentences of at least five years, which in federal prison means at least four years before probation,” Tara said.