CHAPTER 42
FROM THE BACKSEAT of the growling Mustang convertible, Eddie Bennett wiped the blowing hair out of his eyes, looked out at the green blur of passing roadside trees, and shook his head.
He couldn’t believe it. He thought coming up here into the country was going to be dullsville 24-7, but wow, had he gotten it all wrong. Right off the bat, as he and Brian walked into the country-road pizza place, they met two girls, Jessica and Claire. Not just any girls, either. They were older, pretty high school girls wearing Daisy Duke shorts and tank tops and lots of makeup. They started talking to Brian first, joking with him, but after a little while, they were saying how cute Eddie was and asking him if he liked older women.
“Come on, we’re going to go for a ride,” the redheaded one, Claire, said, pulling out her cell phone as they came outside in the pizza joint’s parking lot.
“Yeah, come on. It’ll be fun,” added Jessica, who had wild, mascara-rimmed eyes. “Or do you have to go home and ask Mommy?”
“Of course we’ll go,” Brian said before Eddie could open his mouth.
Then Claire sent a text message, and this guy, Bill, a long-haired dude with tattoos and those freaky flesh-tunnel earrings, rolled up in a rumbling black Mustang convertible. It was hard to tell how old he was. At least twenty. Eddie had gotten into the backseat with Brian and Claire, and now here he was, roaring through these wild country roads with the top down and Mac Miller blasting from the stereo.
I ain’t gotta Benz, no just a Honda
But try to get my money like an Anaconda.
Who knew life could get this cool? Eddie thought.
“Hey, you dudes havin’ fun?” Bill said, turning down the stereo. “Jessica tells me you boys are from New York. That right?”
“Yep,” Brian said with gusto. “New York, New York. Born and raised.”
“Big Apple in the house!” Eddie tossed out, but then shut his mouth as Brian gave him a glare.
Bill nodded and looked at them in the rearview mirror. He had a long, weird-looking face, Eddie thought, like one of the elves from The Lord of the Rings. Kind of cool but also sort of creepy, actually. Eddie looked away.
“That’s cool,” Bill, the tattooed elf, said. “I love the city. It’s good to meet people who are down. Hey, I have an idea. I know a spot over in Newburgh where they sell some primo smoke, you know what I’m sayin’?”
Jessica started giggling in the front seat. She stopped as Bill gave her a long cold look.
“Problem is,” Bill continued, “I don’t like buyin’ on my own. You guys mind if I make a stop there and have ourselves a party? If you don’t, that’s cool, too. It’s a pretty hairy, scary block. I just thought it’d be no biggie since you were from New York and all.”
The girls grinned at each other then turned and stared at Brian expectantly. Eddie stared as well, his stomach getting a strange, light feeling in it, as though he were in the first car of a roller coaster right before the first drop.
“Let’s do it,” Brian said, pumping a fist.
Eddie sat there, blinking, trying to catch up. Everything was blurring by faster than the roadside trees. What had Brian just agreed to? To go buy weed? Dad would kill them. Hell, he was a cop. He’d arrest them first and then kill them. But never mind that. Brian was an athlete. He wouldn’t know one end of a cigarette from the other, let alone what to do with a joint if he saw one. He was just doing it because he liked the girls, Eddie realized.
Eddie opened his mouth to say something, but Brian glared him down again.
The Mustang slowed and then chirped to a stop. Eddie slid against the door hard as Bill the elf did a dust-raising U-turn.
“All righty, then, homies. Newburgh, here we come,” Bill said.
CHAPTER 43
THE MUSTANG FLEW over a couple of tiny back roads and then bumped over some railroad tracks onto a real road that had businesses on it. A BP gas station, a T.G.I. Friday’s, a Home Depot.
As they rolled up a hill into the city where they’d gotten hot dogs, Eddie’s stomach dropped again. He wanted to ask Brian why the hell they were doing all this, but when he turned, he could see why. Brian was busy kissing Claire. Great.
Eddie took out his new cell phone and saw 8 NEW MESSAGES pop up on the screen. They were all from his dad, he knew. They were already in trouble. He slid the phone back into his pocket. This wasn’t fun anymore. It was crazy.
The Mustang swerved onto a side street that headed steeply down toward the Hudson. They passed old houses. One of them had plywood nailed over its windows. Was a hurricane coming or something? Eddie thought.
Bill turned down the radio before they pulled onto a narrow road. It looked like something out of Grand Theft Auto IV. Sidewalks strewn with couches and tires, abandoned cars, graffiti all over everything.
When they suddenly stopped, Eddie felt his lungs seize up. On both sides of the street, sitting on parked cars and the stoops of crumbling, haunted-looking houses, were a dozen or more really muscular black dudes. Most of them were wearing red—red ball caps, red do-rags.
These are gang members, Eddie thought with sudden terror. Actual real-life gang members.
Jessica, in the front seat, laughed as she lit a cigarette.
Bill jumped out of the car and walked over to one of the black kids and slapped hands. They talked for a second, and then Bill came back.
“He says I have to follow him into the backyard for a second to do the buy. Will you come and watch my back?”
Staring at Bill, the evil elf, Eddie realized that he was even older than twenty. More like thirty. He was like a junkie or something. Junkies and gangbangers! What the hell had they gotten themselves into?
“Don’t do it, Brian,” Eddie whispered to his brother. “This is bad.”
Brian looked as scared as Eddie.
“Yeah, Brian. Don’t do it,” Jessica whispered and laughed again.
Brian bit his lip as he looked at her. Then he climbed out of the backseat onto the sidewalk.
“It’s okay. Stay here, Eddie,” Brian said, blinking nervously at the gangsters across the street.
“No way. I’m not staying here by myself,” Eddie said, hopping out after his big brother.
Eddie tried not to make eye contact with any of the gang people as they walked across the street. Bill and the dealer or whoever he was crawled through a hole in a rusted chain-link fence. Following Brian through the fence into an alley strewn with broken bottles, Eddie smelled what he thought had to be weed. He felt like crying. He would never listen to a rap song again. This was so wrong.
They’d just come to the end of the alley, between two crazy dilapidated wooden houses, when it happened. There was a yell, and then Bill and the black guy just bolted, suddenly running behind the house on the left.
Stunned, Brian and Eddie just stood there as a new guy, another black teen, jumped off the back porch of the crumbling house on the right. He had a do-rag tied around his face like a cowboy bad guy. Like everything else he wore, it was red. Red basketball shorts, red Nike sneakers, red tank top.
Blood-red, Eddie thought as the black youth raised his hand, and they saw the gray-and-black gun he was holding.
“Eddie! Run!” Brian said, pushing him back in the direction they had come from.
The guy just started shooting. No warning. No “Get out of here” or “Gimme your money.” It was like a nightmare somehow made real in the middle of that bright and sunny summer day. Someone was actually shooting at them!
Eddie fell to the cracked concrete as Brian collapsed next to him, screaming. Eddie put his arm around Brian and felt wetness at his back. No! What? Brian was bleeding! He was shot. They were getting killed. How could this be happening?
Hovering over his brother and trying to get out his cell phone, Eddie shook as the gun cracked again and again. He’d actually gotten his phone out and opened when he felt something hot and sharp tug at his left shoulder. The phone clattered on the cement as Eddie fel
l facedown.
He cradled his throbbing arm. It felt scary and weird, like it was hanging on by a string, like it was about to fall off. When he looked up, Brian was hopping toward the street, the back of his white T-shirt splattered with blood and dirt. He fell through the rusted gate and started crawling over the sidewalk, screaming wildly. Eddie had never heard his brother scream so loud. He’d never heard anyone scream so loud.
What had they done? Eddie thought, looking up at the scary house beside him. He cried as he took in its graffiti, its high empty windows. He looked for his phone and saw it ten feet away, its screen cracked, its battery lying on the ground.
Mary Catherine wouldn’t find them. Dad wouldn’t find them. They were all alone now, Eddie thought. Bleeding and lost and alone.
CHAPTER 44
SIX O’CLOCK THAT evening found me trudging up a thick, wooded ridge a couple of miles east of the lake house. Sweating and swatting at bugs, I stopped on a deer path.
“Eddie! Brian!” I called at the trees for the thousandth time.
I stood there listening for a reply, but there was nothing. Nothing except the sound of crickets and the hot wind pushing the leaves.
I’d already been by the pizza parlor. The owner told me he had seen Eddie and Brian leave with two older teenage girls. That Eddie and Brian would run off with two mysterious older girls wasn’t that alarming. What was strange was that the owner said he had never seen the girls before. And why weren’t Brian and Eddie answering their phones?
After driving around and spotting no sign of them, I decided that maybe they had all gone to some teen hangout in the woods near the lake. The area, after all, was very secluded. Where else could they have gone?
As I walked through the forest, I had to force myself to stop scanning the underbrush for their bodies. I was being a paranoid cop. Eddie and Brian were just knuckleheads, young male teens in the midst of some hormone-inspired mischief. I would come upon them any moment up here in a clearing, having a beer party or something. We would all laugh about it after I grounded them for the rest of their natural lives.
I picked up my pace, broke into a half jog. Who was I kidding? This wasn’t normal. This was incredibly bad. Frantic and now almost physically sick with worry, I was not in a good place. The boys were nowhere. What the hell was I going to do?
The forest ended suddenly, and I arrived at a blacktop road. I looked around and spotted house foundations, a rusted dump truck, weeds growing up between stacks of concrete sewer drains. It was a development, I realized. An abandoned one that had probably run out of money after the real estate bubble burst.
Though it was a desolate place, I was heartened by the sight of it. It was just the kind of secluded place a couple of stupid young teen boys would bring some girls. Or was it the other way around these days?
I was a couple of hundred yards up the road, heading toward a windowless colonial, when my phone rang. It was Mary Catherine, back at the cabin.
“Mike!” she said, frantic. “The police just called.”
“The police?!”
“They said it was about Eddie and Brian. They wouldn’t tell me what. They said they had to talk to you immediately.”
Mary gave me the number as I hit the woods and started back for the cabin at a dead run.
Please let it be something minor, I thought as it rang. Maybe it was nothing. Some vandalism, maybe. Just the cops up here being strict.
“Newburgh PD,” came a voice as I crashed through the trees.
I stopped and leaned against a tree, sweat dripping from my face onto the screen of the phone.
“My name is Mike Bennett. Someone called about my sons, Eddie and Brian.”
“Hold, please.”
Oh, God. Let them be okay, I said to the Muzak.
“Mr. Bennett, I’m Detective William Moss,” a voice said a moment later. “Your boys were both shot this afternoon. You need to get to St. Luke’s Hospital.”
CHAPTER 45
SCREECHING OUT FROM the lake house minutes later, I ran every stop sign and blasted through every intersection with my hand on the horn. Coming across the Newburgh city line, I lost a hubcap as I put the bus up on the sidewalk to get around a double-parked pickup.
Dale Earnhardt wouldn’t have beaten me to the hospital in Newburgh. Not even with a head start.
“Stop it, Mike. Stop it! You’ll kill us!” Mary Catherine yelled, hanging on for dear life in the seat behind me.
I didn’t answer her. Hell, I could hardly hear her. Ever since I got the news about Eddie and Brian, I’d become separated from everything, as though I were looking out at the world through a numbing block of ice.
The phrase “Your boys were both shot this afternoon” kept playing and replaying through my head. How could this be happening? I kept asking myself. It was totally insane.
I came a hairbreadth from snapping through the hospital parking lot’s gate arm before I stopped in front of St. Luke’s emergency room with an enormous shriek of the brakes.
“Eddie and Brian Bennett,” I called to the nurse behind the counter inside.
A female doctor in surgical scrubs behind her spun around and waved Mary Catherine and me into an empty examination room.
The slender, fiftyish doctor’s name was Mary Ann Walker. She sat us down and made me have a paper cup of water before she explained what was going on.
“They were both shot with nine-millimeter rounds,” the doctor explained. “Eddie was shot in the shoulder, and Brian was hit in one of the scalene muscles in his neck, above his clavicle. We were able to remove the bullet in Eddie’s shoulder, but left the one in Brian’s neck for now.”
“Is that a good idea?” I asked.
“Actually, going in to get it would be more trouble than it’s worth and I’d just as well leave it in there. They both lost a significant amount of blood, but we were able to stabilize them. Their circulation and breathing and neurological function all seem to be completely normal. Treatment is basically the same as a puncture wound now. Some stitches and clean bandages and in time, they’ll completely heal.”
“What about internal damage?” I said.
The doctor shook her head.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Bennett. We are very vigilant in checking for internal tissue damage. After stabilizing the patient, we do a CT scan, since bullets can ricochet or break up. These, fortunately, did not. No major arteries or blood vessels or nerves were severed.”
“Thank God,” Mary Catherine and I said simultaneously.
“Your boys were lucky on several counts,” Dr. Walker continued. “Gunshot wounds are all about response time. Treatment needs to start before blood loss sends the victim into hypovolemic shock. Your son Brian made a lot of noise at the scene, and about a dozen people called nine-one-one. Your boys were in the emergency room within ten minutes.
“If you need to get shot, Newburgh is the place. We get an incredible number of shooting victims here. Everyone from the responding officers to the EMTs to the ER team is a veteran expert, and everyone did a terrific job.”
“Thank you, Doctor. Where are the boys now?” I said.
“We just finished stitching them up. They’re in recovery.”
“Can we see them?” Mary Catherine asked.
“They’ve both been sedated after all they’ve been through. They need sleep now. The morning would be better, Mrs. Bennett.”
I let the “Mrs. Bennett” go. So did Mary Catherine.
“We won’t bother them. We just need to see them,” I said.
Dr. Walker let out a breath. She pulled off her surgeon’s cap, showing a spill of red hair. She checked her slim stainless steel Rolex.
“Okay. I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
CHAPTER 46
THE BOYS WERE on the third floor, asleep in the recovery room. Dr. Walker wouldn’t let us go inside, so we crowded around the window in the door.
Standing there staring at them, it occurred to me how insane it is to be
a parent. You go through this life, and it’s hard enough to keep yourself safe. When you have a kid, it’s like you take your heart and you just cross your fingers and hand it to each of your kids. I really, really felt like punching a hole through the glass in the door.
I knew I had to be strong, but memories of the death of Maeve, my late wife, flooded back. Still, to this day, I had nightmares about hospitals and waiting rooms. In addition to being ripped up, I was angry. This wasn’t fair. Our family had had enough pain. Why couldn’t this bullshit happen to someone else? Anyone else but us.
“Oh, they look pale, Mary Catherine. Look at them. Especially Eddie.”
She grabbed my hand.
“They’re going to be okay, Mike,” she said. “The doctor said so.”
“I don’t know. Look at them. Doctors lie all the time. Look at them.”
I teared up then, and when Mary Catherine saw it, she did the same. I don’t know how long we stood there like that, holding hands, while the boys slept.
I called Seamus at the lake house maybe an hour later.
“They’re going to be okay?” Seamus said. “But they were shot!”
“In the right places,” I assured him. “No organs or bones were hit. At least that’s what the doctor said.”
“Don’t listen to these quacks up here in Hicktown, Michael,” Seamus said angrily. “You need to figure out what’s really going on.”
My patience was wearing thin, but I knew the old man, like me, was just sick with worry.
“Seamus, what do you want me to do? Interrogate the hospital staff?”
“That would be a fine start,” he said. “And on that note, what did the police say? Who shot them? And how did they end up in Newburgh, miles from the lake house?”
When I looked up, a thin, middle-aged black man wearing a Newburgh PD jacket was standing in the hallway.