I, Michael Bennett

by James Patterson

  Besides, the bulky vest would have ruined the tailored line of my jacket, I thought as I headed across the plaza toward the courthouse steps. Perrine wasn’t the only one who liked to get his GQ on.

  Because of the cop killing the previous evening, security had been beefed up, even on top of the already beefed-up security surrounding the courthouse. In addition to the guard booths and hydraulic metal street barriers and truck-bombproof steel pylons, the entire NYPD Hercules team was deployed. Beside a long line of black Suburbans stood a small army of submachine-gun-toting cops wearing helmets and knee pads and armor-plated vests over their NYPD blue fatigues.

  For all the police presence outside, inside the courthouse, past the metal detectors, the halls were pretty empty. That was because all civil and all but the most urgent criminal cases had been postponed for the week due to the incredible circumstances.

  Arriving early at the fourteenth-floor witness room, I declined a coffee from Tara’s assistant, but I did accept a bottled water. I didn’t ask her where Tara was and, funny enough, she didn’t tell me.

  As I waited, I checked my smartphone for messages. There was only one that I was looking for-Mary Catherine’s, of course. She hadn’t contacted Seamus again, and I was worried as hell.

  But there was nothing. No matter how many times I shifted all the stupid screens on the phone back and forth with my thumb.

  “Detective Bennett?” the assistant whispered as she stuck her head through the cracked door. “You’ve just been called to the stand. It’s time.”

  All eyes shifted to me as I came through the double doors into the soundproofed, windowless courtroom. The expressions from the rows of seated people were solemn and sort of surprised, as if I were a black-sheep relative arriving out of the blue for someone’s funeral.

  It was a funeral, all right, I thought. Manuel Perrine’s. And it was high time we slammed the lid on his casket.

  He was sitting up front, heavily shackled. I could hardly see him behind a larger-than-usual retinue of cops and court officers. He didn’t have a gag on, as the judge had promised, I noticed as I sat. Like all dangerous animals, he definitely deserved one. I would have preferred a dog muzzle or Hannibal Lecter-style hockey mask, at the very least, but there was nada.

  I glanced at the judge and shook my head. No wonder trust in the government was at an all-time low.

  Prosecutor Vogel stood.

  “Detective Bennett, good morning. Yesterday, you were telling us about a gunfight that arose during your attempt to arrest Manuel Perrine. Where did that gunfight take place?”

  “In an alley alongside Madison Square Garden.”

  “Why did you go to the location?”

  “We learned that Manuel Perrine had come to New York to see his daughter graduate from NYU law school.”

  “Exactly!” Perrine screamed. “I come here to this shithole of a country to this utter shithole of a city only to see my daughter, and then I am accused of things I had nothing to do with.”

  He stood and banged on the table with both fists.

  “These are false accusations and lies brought against me. You think I’m afraid of you? Of these trumped-up charges? I’ll cut that black lying tongue from your throat, cop. I’ll cut it out and feed it to you until you choke!”

  “That’s it,” the judge said. “Strike three. You’re out, Mr. Perrine. We’re going to try you in absentia. Officers, remove him now.”

  At first, Perrine resisted, pushing the cops back and forth. But then he suddenly stopped completely. One second he was in a rage, and the next, he was calm, as though he had hit a switch. Strange, I thought. He actually smiled at me as he was leaving.

  I sat there as the door closed.

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” the prosecutor said. “Now back to what you were saying, Detective. You learned that Manuel Perrine had come to New York to see his daughter graduate from NYU law school. Please continue for the jury, Detective Bennett.”

  I stood, a quizzical look on my face. This didn’t feel right. Not at all. Perrine was acting. It seemed like the whole outburst was staged.

  “Wait,” I said, climbing out of the witness box.

  “What in good God are you doing, Bennett?” the prosecutor said under his breath as I passed him.

  “This isn’t right,” I said. “Something isn’t right.”

  CHAPTER 85

  PERRINE AND HIS scrum of jailers were turning the corner of the outer corridor to my right, toward the elevators, when I pushed out the doors into the hallway. Not knowing exactly what I was doing, going solely on gut instinct, I hurried after them.

  I was next to an ancient pay-phone recess ten feet from the hall corner when I heard it. It was a sudden, heavy wumpff sound, followed immediately by the trailing crinkle of breaking glass. It sounded as if, nearby, a giant baseball had just punched a home run into a giant windshield. I felt the floor shake a little under my wingtips as well.

  What the hell now?

  I barreled around the corner. Perrine and the police were in front of the elevators. The cops must have heard the weird sound, too, because they were all looking around, some with their guns out. Most of them were staring at a doorway opposite the elevators.

  “We have a situation here,” one said into his radio. “Some sort of situation.”

  There was the impatient click of the elevator call button being pressed over and over, and then the doorway opposite the elevator bank exploded outward with a concussive roar.

  I fell to my knees and drew my gun, my ears ringing. When I looked up, thick yellow smoke was already billowing from the blown-open doorway and filling the hallway. When a waft of it passed over my face, I knew it was tear gas.

  Eyes burning, snot pouring from my nose as from a faucet, I plastered myself into a recessed doorway on my right and covered my face with my tie. A moment later, a crisp gunshot went off so close it sounded like a pencil being snapped in my ear. Crouching, I found a doorknob and opened the door beside me, ducking into an empty courtroom.

  Then I saw what was in the courtroom’s large south-facing window, and I wondered if I was hallucinating.

  On the outside of the building, pressed against the window of the room just to the east of me, was a large yellow metal cage. It was a heavy machinery basket being suspended by the tower crane of the construction site nearby. In it, plain as day, maybe ten feet away from me, stood two men in tan construction coveralls, wearing gas masks and holding automatic weapons.

  It looked like a SWAT team. But not our SWAT team.

  They were trying to break out Perrine, I realized. Literally trying to break him out of the building from the fourteenth floor!

  Without thinking about it, without saying “Freeze,” I lifted my gun and started shooting at the two men through the window. My Glock’s 9mm rounds sprayed holes through the heavy window glass, but the bullets were either deflected by the glass or the metal grate of the basket, because neither of the two armed-to-the-teeth men went down.

  All I did was get their attention. A moment later, I backpedaled as they raised their weapons over the metal rim of the basket. I dove back into the hallway as the window and half of the empty courtroom’s wooden pews were ripped to shreds by automatic gunfire.

  I peeked through the doorway a moment later when I heard a high-rpm hum. Through the shattered window, I saw the yellow basket on the move. The tower crane arm above it swung as it pivoted the metal rig away from the courthouse. I also saw, sitting in the basket between the armed men, a light-skinned black man in a prison jumpsuit.

  The audacity of it was stunning, literally amazing. This couldn’t be happening, and yet it was.

  They were really doing it, I thought, staring up at the basket as it started to ascend. As hard as it was to believe, it was happening before my very eyes.

  Manuel Perrine was actually getting away.

  CHAPTER 86

  THE TEAR-GAS SMOKE was clearing as I ran down the hallway among the fallen cops. Hal
f of them were shot up pretty bad.

  “Gun!” I yelled to a burly black federal cop who was holding his hand over a bleeding thigh. I caught his SIG Sauer as I turned the corner, hit the stairwell door, and went up.

  There were another ten floors to the roof, but I didn’t feel them. With my adrenaline pumping the way it was, I could probably have ascended the stairs on my hands. The next thing I remember, I was out on the roof and running across to the south side of the building.

  I arrived at the edge just in time to see the crane dropping the yellow cage onto the roof of the building across from the courthouse. A moment later, as I was trying to get a bead on the men with my handgun, I heard the close sound of a helicopter. Turning, I thought it would be the overhead NYPD chopper, but incredibly, it was an NBC News chopper!

  “Get lost, you idiots!” I screamed at it. “Get your damn scoop somewhere else!”

  But I was wrong again.

  The chopper swooped down and descended right onto the roof! It was part of the escape plan!

  I started firing as Perrine and his gunmen clambered aboard the chopper. I emptied the SIG Sauer at the pilot’s-side door. I must have missed, because a moment later, the nose of the chopper lifted, and it swung in a lazy circle westward, over the courthouse, and disappeared behind the FBI headquarters on Federal Plaza.

  I couldn’t believe it. Perrine had done the impossible.

  The Sun King had gotten away!

  CHAPTER 87

  IF THERE WAS any consolation in the wake of the whole fiasco, it was that no one had been killed. In addition to the federal cop, three other corrections officers had been shot, but they were all in stable condition and would survive.

  I was livid. I’m talking bed-bath-and-beyond pissed. Obviously, the drug boss was able to buy off people everywhere outside and inside the justice system, probably even inside the damn courthouse itself.

  Back downstairs in the street, I went immediately over to the construction site near the courthouse. The leader of the NYPD Hercules team was already there talking to the workers and the site’s general contractor, a man named Rocco Sampiri.

  “He claims the tower crane operator was on a break,” the ESU cop said. “No one on the site saw who got into the basket.”

  I stared at Sampiri. He looked pretty well groomed for a construction worker-silk-screened T-shirt showing off his tan, muscular arms, spotless designer jeans and boots. With his gold Rolex and tidy manicure, it seemed like the only work this musclehead really did was at the gym, lifting dumbbells while gazing lovingly at himself in the mirror.

  “Really?” I said to Sampiri. “A guy climbs up three hundred feet into that cab and swings up a bandito SWAT team into the courthouse and no one saw? What kind of break was this? A nap?”

  “That’s funny, Officer, but really, we didn’t see nothing,” Sampiri said, his steroid-deepened voice sounding like it was coming from the bottom of a barrel.

  “Come on, guys,” I said, turning toward the laborers standing around. I pointed at the sky. “You know who that guy was who just got away? He’s a mass murderer who’s declared war on this country, no different from a terrorist. Please, anyone. I need some help here. Didn’t anyone see anything?”

  In my peripheral vision, I watched Sampiri glare at his workers. They all seemed to put their heads down at the same time.

  “See? Like I said. No one on my crew saw shit,” Sampiri said with a shrug. “We don’t know what the hell happened. Maybe you should be looking for this guy instead of busting our crank. He sounds really dangerous.”

  I stared at the general contractor. I didn’t need to type “Rocco Sampiri” into an FBI database to come to the conclusion that he might’ve been involved in organized crime. Or to make the jump that the Mafia would be more than willing to help out Perrine for the right price. This musclehead had probably given the person who had swung the cage over to the courthouse a cup of espresso before he busted out Perrine. And he was actually smirking a little. Even with all this heat, Rocco couldn’t help but enjoy telling bald-faced lies to us idiot cops.

  That’s when I guess you could say I lost it. It was the smirk that did it. There aren’t too many things I truly hate, but the Mafia is one of them. People acted like the Mob was cool-The Sopranos, The Godfather. They only kill their own, everyone said. But that’s the problem. The secrecy of it, the conspiracy of it. As they were at this work site, normally decent people are induced through intimidation to “not see nothin’,” allowing evil animals like Perrine and Rocco here to just go to town.

  “Okay, Rocco. You win. I guess I’m done here, then. Thanks for your help,” I said, turning.

  “Actually, there is one more thing, Rocco,” I said, taking the collapsible baton off my belt and flicking it out by my leg as I turned around.

  The next thing I knew, the metal baton and Rocco’s crotch had collided violently. I must have tapped something important, because he immediately went down on one knee like he was about to propose, tears springing onto his suddenly beet-red cheeks. I quickly slipped the baton into my pocket and put a hand to his gym-chiseled shoulder.

  “Jeez, Rocco. You all right? You don’t look so good. Can I get you something? A glass of water?” I said.

  “You son of a bitch,” he finally got out in a gasping voice, which was much higher than it was before. “You prick. Why did you do that?”

  “I’m not sure, Rocco. Everything happened so fast, I didn’t see anything,” I said into his ear. “Weird, isn’t it? That I-don’t-know-what-the-hell-happened shit really seems to be catching around here.”

  CHAPTER 88

  OVER THE NEXT couple of frantic hours, I tried to position myself front and center on the Perrine escape investigation, but my, oh, my, how the attempt failed.

  Almost immediately, a young FBI special agent in charge by the name of Bill Bedford had taken charge of the scene. I’d heard about Bedford. Tara had told me that Bedford was an up-and-comer in the Bureau, a former running back at Duke University who never hesitated to plant a cleat or two between the shoulder blades of his blockers on the way to his touchdown dance.

  After I introduced myself, Bedford took me into an empty courtroom on the Foley Square courthouse’s ground floor for a few questions. It was more like a grilling than an interview. The fair-haired agent’s demeanor was reserved, but a few times, I caught something in his eyes. Something angry, the shining surface on a well of hostility.

  After I was quite professionally interviewed about everything that had happened, I was told he’d be in touch.

  “But wait, Bill,” I said as he started thumbing his BlackBerry at the speed of light. “I can help you on this. I know Perrine. I’ve been on this from day one.”

  “I’ll call you,” Bedford said without looking up.

  Yeah, right. I’d heard that before. I was being completely boxed out, I knew. It was obvious the feds didn’t want me anywhere near the investigation. Even when I tried to get some assistance from the higher-ups in the police department to bring me on board, I was told in no uncertain terms that the brass didn’t want me on the case, either.

  For once, I could hardly blame anyone. Because I’d had Perrine. Had him and then lost him in the worst, most publicly embarrassing way imaginable. My boss, Miriam Schwartz, even let me in on a few nasty rumors she heard-a few whispers that maybe I was actually in on the escape, since I had spoken to Perrine in court and interviewed him alone in prison.

  In my defense, I thought about bringing up Perrine’s quarter-billion-dollar bribe, which I’d rejected, but then I came to my senses and kept my lip thoroughly buttoned. It was obvious the brass was already sizing me up for a scapegoat suit. Why pour more fuel on my own bonfire?

  There was no way around it. I was toxic now, a bad-luck charm. Standing around in Foley Square with no one to talk to, I felt like a little kid at the moment he realizes he hasn’t been picked for either side in a game of sandlot baseball.

  And the tacit message
coming in from my law enforcement colleagues was just as clear.

  You suck, kid.

  Go home.

  CHAPTER 89

  SO THAT’S EXACTLY what I did. I hightailed it out of Manhattan on the Beacon-bound 6:12, went back up to Orange Lake, and stayed away for the next two weeks.

  I thought I’d be stressed out with Perrine in the wind and all the bad stuff hovering over me, but I surprised myself by having a really fun time hanging out with the kids. These were the last weeks of summer vacay, and we didn’t waste a second of them. We did something fun every day-go-kart racing, miniature golf. To the girls’ delight, one morning we got up at dawn and drove to a farm over in rural Sullivan County and rode horses.

  The best time of all was driving up to Massachusetts for a day to check out a massive state fair called the Big E, at which all the New England states were represented. My city kids’ heads were spinning at all the Ferris wheels and tractors and petting zoos. After we gorged ourselves on massive stuffed baked potatoes on the midway, we even attended a blue-ribbon cattle show just for the hell of it. I stood at a rail, shaking my head, as bright-faced young country boys wearing bow ties came into the tent, walking cattle on a leash as though they were in a dog show.

  “Now there’s something you don’t see on West End Avenue,” Seamus said, standing beside me. “Why are we here again?”

  “Well, Gramps,” I said. “My career as a city cop seems to be coming to a close. I might have to look for another line of work, so why not farming?”

  It goes without saying that being so close to my guys wasn’t just about fun and games. I knew my friend the Sun King wasn’t done with me. Even though he was free now, I’d seriously inconvenienced his arrogant ass. Not only had I caught His Highness, I’d actually broken his nose for him and laughed in his face. I knew there probably weren’t too many people in this world who had screwed with him as much as I had.