I, Michael Bennett

  Instead of getting angry as I knelt there, all I felt was numbing coldness spreading from my chest to the rest of my body.

  This was payback for the arrest, I realized. This was Perrine showing me what he could do.

  “Coward” was right, I thought. I should have pulled the trigger when I had the chance. If I had, this girl would probably still be alive.

  After a minute, I did the only thing there was left to do. I took off my suit jacket and lay it over the poor girl as I sat down beside her.

  CHAPTER 20

  THERE WERE FLOWERS in the shape of the Yankees logo, flowers in the form of an American flag, and green, white, and gold flowers arranged in the shape of a Celtic cross.

  Hughie’s casket sat in the center of them, candlelight shining on its closed, varnished pine lid. There was music playing from the funeral parlor speakers overhead—Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, that crushing, ineffably sad classical piece from the movie Platoon.

  Not that any help was needed to produce crushing, ineffable sadness today, I thought as I signed the visitors’ book.

  I’d been to Irish wakes before, but this one was outrageous. Half the Hibernian people in New York seemed to have made the pilgrimage to Woodlawn. A three-block-long line of mourners stood on McLean Avenue waiting to pay Hughie their respects. An FDNY fire truck stood outside the funeral parlor next to cop cars from New York and Yonkers and Westchester, their spinning lights flashing red, white, and blue on the regiments of sad, pale faces.

  I’d just come from Detective Martinez’s wake out in Brooklyn and had another wake for the Midtown South cop to hit before tomorrow’s two funerals. I hadn’t seen this many funeral parlors since 9/11. Or sadness. Or broken people.

  My bosses had forced me to speak to a PD shrink for a psychological debriefing. Though I didn’t hear word one of what the nice doctor woman tried to tell me, as I came out of her office, I decided that I wasn’t allowed to feel bad about what Hughie had done for me.

  His act of courage was so incredible and selfless, all I could do was be happy and in awe of it. All I could do was to try to make myself live up to his sacrifice. It wasn’t going to happen, but I had to try.

  The family had laid out about five hundred photographs of Hughie around the funeral parlor. Hughie in swimming pools; in Santa Claus suits. Hughie putting his fingers up behind his brothers’ heads. I was in a few of the older ones, me and Hughie in graduation gowns. Hughie and me with a couple of young ladies we met on a college trip to Myrtle Beach. I smiled as I remembered how Hughie, a true classic clown, had picked up the two by feigning a British accent.

  Then it was my turn at Hughie’s coffin.

  I dropped to my knees and said my prayer. I tried to imagine Hughie on the other side of the wood right in front of me, but I couldn’t.

  It was because he wasn’t there, I realized suddenly. His spirit was long gone, roaring somewhere through the universe in the same no-holds-barred, awe-inspiring way it had roared through this world.

  I finally laid my palm on the cool wood as I stood, and then I turned and gave a hug to Hughie’s mother, sitting beside it.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE GATHERING AFTER the wake was held near the funeral home at a pub called Rory Dolan’s.

  Spotting the Irish and American flags along its facade as I crossed the street, I tried to think of the last time I’d been to my old neighborhood. It looked exactly as I remembered it. The same narrow two-family houses lining the streets. The same delis that sold Galtee Irish sausages and Crunchie candy bars along with cigarettes and lotto tickets.

  Staring out at it all, I recalled warm summer nights about twenty years before, when Hughie and I and our friends would grab a gypsy cab and head north, up to Bainbridge Avenue, where the bars didn’t look too hard at our fake IDs. We’d usually end up in a loud, smoky place called French Charlie’s to try to pick up the girls listening to the New Wave cover bands who performed there. What I would give to be there now, blowing my summer-job paycheck at the bar, laughing as Hughie grabbed some girl and spun her right ’round like a record, baby, right ’round ’round ’round.

  Inside Rory Dolan’s, it was three deep at the lacquered, wood-paneled bar. As I was waiting my turn, the door flew open and I heard a long, clattering roll of drums. Everyone turned as the DEA Black and Gold Pipe Band solemnly entered, their bagpipes droning.

  The song they played was called “The Minstrel Boy,” I knew. I remembered my father singing the old Irish rebel song about harps and swords and the faith of fallen soldiers at a wedding when I was a kid. I remembered how embarrassed I’d been to listen to my father sing the corny, old-fashioned song in front of everyone. Now, years later, I thought of Hughie, and I sang along with tears in my eyes, remembering every word.

  “Mike?” said a voice as a hand touched my shoulder.

  I turned to find an attractive woman with dark tousled hair at my elbow, smiling at me. She seemed vaguely familiar.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” she said, laughing. “I’m hurt. But it has been a couple of years—or decades, actually. I’m Tara. Tara McLellan? Hughie’s cousin from Boston. You and Hughie came up and visited me once at a BC–Notre Dame game.”

  My eyes went wide as I took in her blue-gray eyes and radiant skin and really did remember. The drunken kiss I shared with the brunette looker as BC won was one of the highlights of my long-ago romantic youth.

  “Of course. Tara. Wow. It has been a couple, hasn’t it? How are you?” I said, giving her a quick hug.

  It all came back to me. We’d made out a little bit that weekend, held hands. Afterward, we’d even exchanged letters. Which showed how long ago it was. Actual paper letters. In envelopes with stamps. My nineteen-year-old heart was most definitely smitten. We’d planned to meet again the following summer, but a month or so later, Hughie let me know she’d gotten engaged to some Harvard guy and that was that.

  She’d been very easy to look at then. Now she looked even better, in a sultry, Catherine Zeta-Jones kind of way.

  “The family was happy that you were with Hughie at the end,” Tara told me with another smile. “It was comforting that he didn’t die alone.”

  Cold comfort, I thought but didn’t say. A traditional Irish delicacy.

  I nodded. “I’m sorry we have to meet again under such horrible circumstances. What are you drinking?” I said.

  “Jameson on the rocks.”

  I ordered us a couple, and we sat and drank and caught up.

  It turned out that, like pretty much everybody in Hughie’s extended family, she worked in law enforcement. She’d worked as a tax lawyer for a Greenwich, Connecticut, hedge fund, but after 9/11, she needed a change and joined up with the government. First with the state’s attorney’s office and now with the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, where she’d just become an assistant U.S. attorney.

  “Southern District?” I said, whistling. “Hughie never mentioned he had a big-league ballplayer in the family. So you must already be familiar with Perrine’s case?”

  Tara chewed at an ice cube as she nodded.

  “I’m pulling every string I can pull to get on the prosecution team,” she said. “When I get it, I’m going to work night and day to bury that son of a bitch.”

  “You text me when and where, and I’ll bring the shovels and the backhoe,” I said, clinking her glass.

  CHAPTER 22

  “SO WHAT’S YOUR story, Mike?” Tara said, smiling. “I read about you in New York magazine. How your wife passed away and about all your adopted kids. You’re quite the New York celebrity, aren’t you?”

  I laughed at that.

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “Me and Brad and Angelina are heading to George’s Lake Como villa tonight on the G6. Doing anything?”

  She touched my arm and looked into my eyes.

  “You’re still as fun and funny as I remember, Mike. That was some weekend we had way back whe
n, if memory serves me right.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. It was almost embarrassing how attracted we were to each other after all this time. There was a lot of eye and physical contact. So much that even I was picking up on things. That’s what funerals did sometimes, I knew. Nothing like the yawning abyss of death to make you want to cling to something—or, more specifically, someone.

  Soon the Irish music was replaced with some quiet stuff over the sound system. It was nice sitting there with Tara as Ray Charles sang, “You Don’t Know Me.” After a minute or so, I took another sip of Irish whiskey and sat up, blinking. I was here to mourn my friend, after all, not put the moves on his cousin, no matter how attractive she was.

  As Ray brought the song to a soft, weepy close, there was another sound from outside. It wasn’t so romantic. It was car horns honking, several of them blaring on and on without letup. In addition to the honking, there was loud, manic music and police whistles.

  What now?

  CHAPTER 23

  THE BAR IMMEDIATELY cleared. When I finally stepped out into the street behind the crowd, I could see that the honking was coming from the parking lot of a bank across the street. A couple of dark-colored SUVs, a kitted-out Hummer, and a sparkly-rimmed Cadillac Escalade were leaning on their horns.

  As I stepped off the curb, I saw that Hughie’s brother Fergus was already across the street trying to pull open the Hummer’s driver’s-side door.

  “Off that frigging horn, jackass!” Fergus was yelling. His face was red with sorrow and drink. He kneed the door. “You crazy or stupid? Can’t you see this is a funeral? People are in mourning. Cut that shit off!”

  When he kneed the door again, the smoked-glass window slowly zipped down. At the wheel was a small, young, almost pretty-looking Hispanic guy in a wifebeater. There were two older and tougher-looking Hispanic men sitting beside him, and several more in the back.

  My radar went off immediately. This felt wrong. The men looked expressionless. What the hell was this? I thought.

  “Is this where it’s happening?” the pretty-boy driver said, stroking his goatee as he smiled.

  “Where what’s happening?” said Eamon, now standing beside Fergus with rage in his face.

  “The roast,” the Hispanic guy said as he placed a large revolver between Fergus’s wide eyes. “The Irish pig roast.”

  There was movement and a bunch of clicking sounds, and suddenly the gangbangers in the Hummer and Escalade were holding guns. Not just regular guns, either. They were tactical shotguns and AK-47 assault rifles. A guy in the backseat had an AR-15 with what looked like a grenade launcher attachment. It was completely surreal. How was this happening? Who would threaten people with assault weapons at a cop’s wake?

  Out came my Glock. Around me, I saw at least half a dozen other cops and DEA guys from the wake draw as well. Even one of the pipe-band guys had a piece out, a .45, pointed at the Escalade’s windshield.

  “Drop it! Drop it! Drop it!” everyone was yelling.

  “Listen to me,” the pretty-boy gangbanger said. “We got a warning to you from our king. He’s not going to stand for this shit. You want to live? You want your family to live, you better wise up. Bad shit is about to go down. Kind you never seen before. You understand? You got all that? Message received? Now back off before we put you in a pine box next to your friend.”

  When I turned, I saw Patrick Zaretski, the DEA SWAT guy, with his SIG Sauer leveled at the driver’s temple. The safety was off, and his finger was firmly on the trigger. I could tell by the look in his eye that he was more than ready to blow the driver away.

  “Not here, Patrick,” I said. “Look at the heavy weapons they have. There are too many innocent people here. Better to let them roll, and we’ll call it in.”

  After a moment, he reluctantly nodded and stood down, along with the rest of the outraged cops.

  As the gangbanger SUVs pulled out onto McLean Avenue, a motorcycle roared up behind them, a huge black Suzuki Hayabusa. Its rider flicked down the helmet visor as the bike passed. I caught a glimpse of a face—a fine-boned face with black hair and gold eyes—and then the bike was screaming as it streaked away.

  That was the worst outrage of all, I thought as I stood there with my mouth open, watching the woman who had killed Hughie roar away.

  As the SUVs tore down McLean Avenue behind the motorcycle, we all jumped on our cell phones to call in a car stop. Twenty minutes later, we heard that the local precinct found the expensive cars abandoned five blocks away. It turned out both SUVs were stolen, and the men had probably switched cars.

  It had been an elaborate operation. All for what? To warn us? To intimidate us? It had worked. I was definitely shaken up. My friend’s wake had come incredibly close to becoming a bloody massacre.

  “What does it mean?” Tara asked me back in Rory Dolan’s, as I ordered another Jameson’s—a double this time. “Why would these men do this? Why come here? Haven’t they done enough?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. I had been a cop for a long time, but I couldn’t deny how scary this felt. It seemed like I was looking at something entirely new.

  “I don’t know, Tara,” I finally said, truthfully. “I have absolutely no freaking clue.”

  CHAPTER 24

  NOT TOO FAR from SoHo and Wall Street, the MCC, or Metropolitan Correctional Center, is a twelve-story concrete bunker located on Park Row, behind the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse at Foley Square.

  In a break room on the eighth floor, Manuel Perrine, the Sun King, flicked an imaginary dust speck from the sleeve of his baggy prison jumpsuit as he listened to a phone call. He nodded, and nodded again, then said, “Very good,” and thumbed off the iPhone.

  With the phone’s video FaceTime feature, he’d just watched the whole incident at the cop’s wake in the Bronx. The chaos, the baffled-looking cops. In real time, no less. It was as though he’d been there himself. Good com was essential to all operations. What field marshal would have it any other way?

  Being in jail was no excuse to avoid strategizing. Already there were planes taking off and packages being delivered, arrangements being set in motion. He was still in a position to put his considerable resources to good use.

  Still, the indignity of every moment spent in this place was such an unforgivable offense. The steel grid embedded into an air shaft that passed for a window in his cell; the metal bunk beds and white brick walls. The amount of money he had spent on the operation in bribes alone, so that he could sneak in and out of the country, was insane. And yet here he was, back where he started, in a squalid rat cage. All of it was for nothing.

  He’d already ordered the death of his old friend Candelerio and his entire family. He would then kill Candelerio’s crew after all was said and done. They needed to be taught, brutally taught. Everyone involved would be held up as an example of what happened when a king was crossed. Every knee would bend for the crime of his being put in this unclean box in this concrete coffin of a city.

  He tapped his nose where the cop had shattered it. There was tape over the gauze now, a ridiculous X, like the burial spot on a treasure map. All his life fighting, and no one had ever broken it until now.

  He looked up with his heavy-lidded blue eyes when a bald, muscular guard came in. But the guard wasn’t there to bring him back to his cell. Perrine wasn’t supposed to be in the break room in the first place.

  There was another person with the jacked-up guard, a prisoner with a black eye in a baggy jumpsuit identical to his own.

  The handsome young blond inmate was named Jonathan Alder, and he was in for running a Wall Street Ponzi scheme. Now, instead of bilking senior citizens out of their retirement savings in his silk moiré suspenders, Jonathan reluctantly provided a whole host of new services to his fellow cons. The soft, freshly turned-out punk bitch had been a gift to Perrine from the jail’s current shot caller, a notoriously brutal incarcerated Mob boss. It was a sign of respect. A housewarming present that Perrine—bor
ed, enraged, violent, and incredibly frustrated—couldn’t wait to unwrap.

  Standing, Perrine grabbed Jonathan Alder’s chin and looked him over carefully, like a man inspecting a horse he was about to purchase. He caught one of the jewel-like tears that dropped from the shivering young man’s eyes and giggled as he licked it off his palm. Yummy. He turned to the guard.

  “Do you have the other item?” Perrine asked in his strange French-like accent.

  “How could I forget?” the tan musclehead of a guard, whose name was Doug Styles, said as he reached into his shirt pocket and handed Perrine a fat white wax-paper packet of prime Peruvian coke.

  “Anything else, monsieur? Hope you find the service to your liking,” the hard-eyed guard said sarcastically. His voice was the deep, rough, not-to-be-trifled-with bark of a drill sergeant.

  Perrine looked up at the guard thoughtfully. Every man had his price, and Doug’s here was three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in tens and twenties delivered to his shit-box split-level in East Brunswick, New Jersey. Doug thought it was just for the phone and other courtesies, but of course that was just the beginning of the arrangements.

  “No, thank you, Doug. How long do you think Jonathan and I have to become acquainted? I don’t want to make trouble for you.”

  Doug raised his beefy forearm and checked his watch.

  “Twenty more minutes. Night count is coming up.”

  “Yes, yes. Twenty minutes is nice, but half an hour would be so much better,” Perrine said, batting his baby blues at the guard. The deep creases of his dimples showed as he smiled.