I, Michael Bennett

  “But isn’t the guy a billionaire?” said the little agent as he lifted a rubber band off the desk and started playing with it. “I mean, Perrine’s—what? Late forties? He’s financially set. Why not retire? Also, why risk your ass coming into the U.S. at all? Crafty bastards, even evil ones like Perrine here, don’t usually act stupid, as a general rule.”

  “Who knows?” I said to the annoying devil’s advocate with a shrug. “He hates America? He thinks he’s bulletproof? He’s rubbing our noses in it?”

  I pointed to the photo of the restaurant again.

  “Whatever the reason is,” I said, “at noon today, two blocks from where we’re sitting, Perrine is due to meet Candelerio. We’re going to let Perrine sit down and get comfy, and then we’re going to crash the party. We all know our jobs. It’s time to do them.”

  “Sounds good. How’s the legal situation?” asked a young, bored-looking FBI SAC as he checked his BlackBerry.

  “We already have the paperwork,” I said, lifting up the yellow envelope containing Perrine’s sealed indictment and the warrant for his arrest, which had been signed by the U.S. District Court.

  “All we need now is to deliver it,” Hughie said.

  CHAPTER 6

  SWEATING UNDER HEAVY Kevlar in a Saint Nicholas Avenue tenement stairwell, I panned my binoculars over a C-Town supermarket and a cell phone store onto Candelerio’s restaurant, Margaritas.

  It was cold and windy outside, the sky over the jagged skyline of five-story walk-ups the color of a lead pipe. As in all stakeouts, the minutes were going by in geologic time, as if everything in the world had hit slo-mo.

  I checked my phone for the hundredth time. The screen said 10:40. Another hour or so to go until noon. A depressing thought came as I remembered the photos of the armed-to-the-teeth Mexican drug dealers and the shot-to-pieces mini-van: High Noon.

  I certainly didn’t want the arrest to turn into a showdown, but considering the person we were arresting, I was ready if it did. Like the rest of the task force, I was packing heavy firepower—an M4 assault rifle with a holographic sight, along with my Glock. New York cops aren’t necessarily Boy Scouts, but we do like to always be prepared.

  The DEA SWAT team, bristling with ballistic shields and MP5 submachine guns, was hidden in a bakery van around the corner, and there were another half dozen backup cops and FBI agents in the building across the street, watching the alley at the restaurant’s rear.

  We were settled in our blind with the trap set. Now all we needed was for Perrine to walk into it.

  “Hey, what’s that?” Hughie said, suddenly sitting up at the windowsill beside me.

  “What? Where?” I said, frantically swiveling my binoculars left and right, down toward the sidewalk.

  “Not the street,” McDonough said. “The sound. Listen.”

  I dropped the Nikon binocs and cocked an ear out the open stairwell window to catch the heavy driving thump of a dance song coming from somewhere in the wilderness of tenements around us.

  “Someone’s having a morning disco party. So what?”

  “Don’t you remember?” McDonough said, bopping his head up and down to the beat. “‘Rhythm Is a Dancer.’ That’s the same song they played that summer we worked together in the nineties. I used to vogue to this jammie.”

  “Growing up just flat-out isn’t going to happen for you, is it, Hughie?” I said, passing my shirtsleeve over my sweat-soaked face.

  We continued to watch and wait. A vein twitched along my eye when Hughie’s cell phone trilled at eleven on the dot.

  The thumbs-up he gave me confirmed it was the FBI operations team up in Westchester County that was surveilling Candelerio. Aerial and ground teams had been covering the Dominican for the last week. This morning we’d brought every local PD from Westchester to the Bronx into the loop in case there was some unforeseen detour and we had to do a traffic stop.

  “Candelerio is rolling, headed out toward the Saw Mill River Parkway right on schedule,” Hughie said, ending the call. “ETA in thirty. Get this, though. Our spotter said his wife and three girls are with him, and they’re all dressed up.”

  I frowned. We were already doing the arrest in a public place. Having Candelerio’s family around would only make things even more complicated.

  “Dressed up?” I said. “He’s bringing his family to meet Perrine?”

  McDonough shrugged.

  “Who knows with a family of drug dealers?” he said. “Maybe meeting the Sun King is like meeting real royalty to them. How many opportunities do you get to have an audience with a king?”

  I went back to my window perch. I pinned the glasses onto every car that slowed, onto every pedestrian who walked past on the sidewalk. With Candelerio on the way, it meant that Perrine would be coming along any moment now.

  My heart fluttered into my throat as a kitted-out black Escalade suddenly pulled up in front of the restaurant. A back door popped open, and out came three men. I tried to spot faces, but all I caught were Yankees baseball caps and aviator sunglasses before the three were inside.

  “Did anybody see? Is it Perrine? Can anyone confirm ID?” I frantically called over the radio.

  “Negative. No confirmation,” called the DEA SWAT.

  “Not sure,” called a cop from the team at the restaurant’s rear. “They went in too fast.”

  “Damn it,” I said as Hughie whistled by the window.

  “Mike, movement. Six o’clock,” he said.

  I panned the glasses back to the restaurant, where a dark-skinned Dominican waitress with big silver hoop earrings and short black hair was stepping out onto the sidewalk.

  The attractive Rihanna look-alike was named Valentina Jimenez, and she was a cousin of the informant who was helping us out on the case. She’d come out to give us the signal. If Valentina lit a cigarette, it would mean that she had spotted Perrine.

  I watched her intently as she stood in front of the restaurant, looking up and down the street.

  “Stand by,” I said into the radio, ready to give the other teams the green light.

  That’s when it happened.

  Valentina did something, but it wasn’t lighting a cigarette.

  She glanced back into the restaurant and then bolted in her high heels at top speed down Saint Nicholas Avenue as though she were running for her life.

  CHAPTER 7

  “WHAT IN THE name of God?” Hughie yelled, giving voice to my thoughts.

  “Have her picked up,” I said into the radio.

  “What does it mean? It was Perrine who just went in there? Did she forget the signal?” Hughie said.

  “We still don’t know. We have to wait and talk to her,” I said. “She could have just gotten spooked.”

  My cell phone rang a second later.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do, okay? I’m so sorry,” Valentina said, sobbing.

  “It’s okay, Valentina. I’m having you picked up. You’re safe. Just listen closely. Was it him? Did Manuel Perrine just come into the restaurant?”

  “No. Those men were members of Candelerio’s crew. They were just laughing with the manager about how much par-tying they would be doing today since Candelerio is away. Candelerio isn’t coming to lunch. I knew I had to call you, but I was afraid they’d see. You know what they would do to me if they saw me calling a cop? That’s why I left. And I’m not going back. I don’t care what you do to my cousin. These guys are killers. I can’t take working there anymore.”

  I stared down at the restaurant in disbelief. Candelerio wasn’t coming? Which meant Perrine wasn’t coming. What did that mean? They were onto us? Were the drug dealers meeting somewhere else?

  “Why isn’t he coming? Did you hear anything?” I said as calmly as my racing pulse would allow.

  “They said it was a family thing. A graduation? Something like that.”

  A graduation? I thought. This early in the year it would have to be Candelerio’s oldest daughter, Daisy, the one at NYU la
w school. That actually made sense. It explained why Candelerio had brought his family, and why they were all dressed up. Except on the phone for the past month, the drug dealer had said he wanted to meet Perrine at noon today at the restaurant. How did that make sense?

  The answer was it didn’t. Exactly nothing was going the way we’d expected. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

  “A squad car is pulling over. Can I please, please, please go home?” my informant said.

  “Of course, Valentina. You did good. I’ll call you,” I said, hanging up.

  The metal clang of a passing garbage truck bouncing over potholes in the street rang off the gouged walls and dirty marble steps as I stood there trying to figure out what was happening.

  “So?” Hughie said, holding up his hands.

  “We were wrong,” I said. “Candelerio isn’t coming. He’s going to his daughter’s graduation.”

  “How is this happening?” Hughie said, speed-tapping the barrel of his M4 as he paced back and forth. “You heard the transcripts. Perrine said the meet’s at Margaritas! This is Margaritas. Candelerio is a silent partner in the place. He eats here three times a week.”

  I slowly went over the case in my mind, especially the telephone transcripts. They were written in a weird mix of Spanish and Creole that had been translated by two different FBI experts. But Hughie was right. In the calls, Perrine kept talking about being at Margaritas. Margaritas at noon.

  “Maybe Margaritas isn’t a place,” I said.

  “What is it, then?” Hughie said. “You think Perrine wants to meet Candelerio for a margarita?”

  “Maybe it’s a code word or something. Does margarita mean anything in Spanish?”

  “Um … tequila and lime juice?” Hughie said, lifting his phone. “I’m the Gaelic expert. Let me ask Agent Perez.”

  “It’s a name of a flower,” Hughie said, listening to his phone a moment later. “It means … daisy.”

  We both did a double take as the realization hit us simultaneously.

  “Candelerio’s daughter!” we said at the same time.

  “Margarita must mean Daisy, then,” Hughie said. “Has to be. But how does that make sense? Perrine wants to see Candelerio’s daughter graduate? That’s why he came to the States?”

  I thought about it. “Maybe he wants to meet in the crowd, or—”

  I snapped a finger as I remembered something from the surveillance photographs, something that was out of place. I immediately called our control post back at the precinct.

  “There’s a picture of Candelerio’s family on my desk. Text it to me pronto,” I said to the detective manning the shop.

  Less than a minute later, my phone vibrated, and Hughie and I looked at the photo, which was tagged with the family members’ names. I looked more closely at the oldest daughter’s face and smiled.

  “I knew it. Look at the oldest one. She has darker skin than the others. And her eyes—she has blue eyes. Both Candelerio and his wife have brown eyes, and she has light blue eyes. That’s impossible. How did we miss it?” I said.

  “You’re right. She even looks like Perrine!” Hughie yelled. “Shit! That’s it! That’s goddamn it. You’re a genius. Daisy must be Perrine’s daughter.”

  “That FBI lifer was right,” I said. “Perrine isn’t risking his ass coming to the States for money. It’s to see his daughter graduate.”

  Hughie answered his ringing phone.

  “Candelerio just passed the exit for Washington Heights and is continuing downtown,” he said. “Aerial is staying on him. SWAT wants to know what’s what.”

  “Tell them to saddle up and move ’em out,” I said excitedly as I started down the stairs. “We’re jumping to plan B now. Looks like we have a graduation to attend.”

  CHAPTER 8

  TEN MINUTES LATER, our four-car task force caravan was gunning it south, sirens ripping, down the West Side Highway.

  Hughie was at the wheel as I worked the phone and radio, coordinating with my bosses and the other arrest teams. I don’t know which was flying faster, the frazzled cop-radio traffic or the highway’s guardrail, zipping an inch past my face at around ninety.

  “Thank God you added that ass-covering rider to your arrest report, huh?” Hughie shouted as he tried to set a new land speed record. He gave a rebel yell as the traffic cone we clipped sailed over the guardrail into the Hudson River.

  My partner seemed to be enjoying himself, but I wasn’t feeling it. Not even close. I’d called NYU law school and learned that graduation was to take place at 12:30 today, but not at the law school.

  It was taking place at Madison Square Garden!

  Thousands of people were supposed to be there, and we were somehow supposed to pluck Perrine from the crowd? Safely? The towers of midtown began to loom on my left. I didn’t know how or even if that could be done.

  We killed the sirens when we got off the West Side Highway at Thirty-Fourth Street. It took a few minutes to weave through the heavy Manhattan gridlock to the Garden, on Seventh Avenue at Thirty-Second Street. As we turned the corner, we could see that people were already pouring into the famed arena—smiling, well-dressed families holding balloons and video cameras, surrounding twentysomethings in black-and-purple gowns.

  Even if we spotted Perrine at this thing, there had to be a million ways in and out of the Garden, I thought, rapidly scanning faces. It was way too porous. We needed a way to box in the cartel head. But how?

  I still hadn’t figured it out as we circled the block and pulled in behind the disguised FBI SWAT van onto the apron of a fire station driveway on Thirty-First.

  “Bad news, Mike. We don’t have the go-ahead to do this. Not even a little,” Hughie said after he got back from a quick powwow with the SWAT guys. “The bosses are going nuts because there are thousands of potential lawyers and lawsuits in there, not to mention the mayor, who’s actually the keynote speaker. What do you think?”

  I took a long moment to do just that, given that this was the biggest arrest in my career. Taking down a suspect in the middle of a graduation would certainly make a lot of waves. Especially at the notoriously überliberal NYU law school, where they probably had courses called Cops: Friend or Enemy? and The Art and Science of Claiming Police Brutality.

  But NYU or no NYU, if Perrine was in there, the time to strike was in the middle of the ceremony. Safe in the crowd, he’d only be thinking about his daughter and how proud he was. We’d need to use that. Use his vulnerability. Because afterward, he’d only be thinking about one thing. Getting away.

  “So what’s up? You want to wait?” Hughie said.

  “Hell, no!” I finally said.

  “Good,” said McDonough, rubbing his hands together, his Irish eyes a-smiling. “Me, neither, Church Boy. What do we do?”

  I thought about it for another minute. Then I had it. It was a crazy idea, but this was a crazy time. Not to mention a crazy, extremely violent criminal we were up against. We needed to grab this guy. Badly. It had been a while since the good guys had put one up on the board.

  “We have all the phones for all the Candelerios, right? The wife and the kids?” I said.

  “Control does,” Hughie said, scrolling through his phone.

  “Get me Daisy Candelerio’s number, then,” I said, giving one of my own smiling Irish eyes a wink as I took out my phone. “Least I could do is send the graduate a congratulatory text.”

  CHAPTER 9

  AFTER RISING FROM the dregs of a third-world hellhole called Kourou, French Guiana, Manuel Perrine, a.k.a. the Sun King, vowed to never again go anywhere near its poverty, its filth, its putrid stink.

  Promises, promises, Perrine thought as he vigorously washed his hands inside a crowded Madison Square Garden men’s room.

  Too many mimosas and cappuccinos on his chartered Global Express jet into Teterboro Airport was the reason for this unfortunate pit stop. Or is it an enlarged prostate? he wondered with a stab of depression as he remembered his upcoming for
ty-eighth birthday.

  Like many men of means, Perrine obsessed over germs, disease, his general health. With more money in accounts scattered throughout the world than even he could possibly spend, the only thing that could curtail the full, well-deserved enjoyment of his accumulated riches was illness. Which was why he and his personal physician were constantly on guard.

  To dispel his morbid thoughts, and take himself away from his even more morbid current surroundings, Perrine closed his eyes and envisioned his luxury penthouse suite in the Fairmont Le Château Frontenac in Quebec City, where he had been staying since fleeing Mexico. In his mind, he saw white everywhere. White furniture, white towels, white bubbles in the pristine white marble bathtub.

  Hearing the clamor of coughs and wall-mounted dryers and flushing toilets all around him, he truly couldn’t return soon enough.

  The Sun King winced as he glanced at himself in the mirror. He was completely bald now. He’d had some work done on his eyes to change their shape, and was wearing brown contact lenses to disguise their color. To further alter his appearance on this trip—which he hoped was his last ever to the U.S.—he’d intentionally put on an unhealthy thirty pounds, which gave him a disgusting double chin.

  But, because he was known for his style, the greatest offense to his sensibilities was that he could wear no Prada, no Yves, no Caraceni hand-tailored suits today. The suit he wore now was an ill-fitting, off-the-rack, green gabardine atrocity from a New Jersey Kohl’s department store that made him look like he drove something for a living. He needed to not stand out for once, and in his puke-colored American rags, he’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

  Coming back out into the buzzing Madison Square Garden concourse, Perrine exchanged a glance with Marietta, who was leaning against the wall, watching his flank and rear. In Mexico, he rode with a rolling armada of men and trucks, but that might look a little conspicuous here in the country where he was wanted for double murder, so today he had Marietta, and a few handpicked men, with him.