I, Michael Bennett (Michael Bennett 5)

“A bachelor’s degree in bullshit? You must have gotten a four-point-oh,” I said as I continued typing.

“This is true,” McDonough said, closing his eyes and leaning his broad-shouldered bulk back in the office chair until he was almost horizontal. “And yet somehow I find myself unable to hold a candle to your law enforcement prowess. Seriously, bro, I’ve tagged along on some of these rides, and this is as major-league as it comes. This is one world-class bag of shit we’re about to grab, and to think it’s all because of little old you.”

I took a bow as I typed.

“Stick around, kid,” I said. “Maybe you might learn something.”

This crazy case actually was mine. It had started out as a real estate corruption probe, of all things. My Major Case Unit had been brought in when the board president of a new billion-dollar luxury high-rise on Central Park West suspected that the building’s real estate manager was getting kickbacks from the contractors he was hiring.

When we got up on the manager’s phones, we learned that the kickbacks weren’t the only thing he was into. He was a sick pervert who frequented prostitutes on a daily basis, despite the fact that he was supposed to be a pious Hasidic Jew with a large family up in Rockland County. What he liked best were Hispanic girls—the more underage the better—from a Spanish Harlem brothel.

When we swooped down on the building manager and the brothel, we also arrested the pimp running the place. It was the pimp, a Dominican named Ronald Quarantiello, who turned out to be a gift that kept on giving. The jittery, fast-talking criminal was extremely well connected in New York’s Hispanic criminal underworld. And staring at a thirty-year sentence for sex trafficking, he’d cut a juicy deal. He agreed to flip against his business partner, Angel Candelerio, the head of DF, Dominicans Forever, the city’s largest Dominican drug gang.

And boy, did he flip. Like a gymnast during an Olympic floor exercise. Ronald helped us bug Candelerio’s house, his Washington Heights restaurant, where he did all his business, and his encrypted phone.

I thought the pimp was high when he told us that Candelerio was a childhood friend of the globally notorious drug kingpin Perrine. But a wiretap on Candelerio’s phones and bugs confirmed it.

Once the transcripts of his conversations with Perrine were obtained, my boss told her boss, and the DEA and FBI were brought in to form a task force with yours truly as the team leader.

The icing on the cake came a month ago, when Perrine and Candelerio started talking about a visit Perrine was going to make to New York.

A meet that was going down at noon today.

As McDonough stood up to take a cell call, I went over the arrest papers for a final time. I double-checked the mission statements and interior layouts and maps. Lastly, I went over the grisly crime-scene photos of the Border Patrol agents and their families whom Perrine had murdered.

The most gruesome shot, the one I couldn’t forget, showed a Dodge Caravan sitting in the one-car garage of a suburban house. Where its windshield had been, there was just a bloody, jagged hole. The front end was riddled to Swiss cheese with hundreds upon hundreds of bullet holes.

I studied the picture and took in the violence it displayed and wondered if being put in charge of this arrest was a blessing or a curse.

I glanced up at the yellow face of the wall clock above the window, which framed a slowly lightening sky.

I guess I’d soon see.

CHAPTER 5

BY 8:00 A.M., the upstairs muster room was crowded with our FBI, DEA, and NYPD joint task force.

Joint task forces usually comprise about a dozen agents and cops, but for this international event, a total of thirty handpicked veteran investigators were present and accounted for. They stood around, joking and backslapping, buzzing with caffeine, anticipation, and adrenaline.

As the final prearrest meeting got started, I spotted about a dozen or so big bosses from each of the represented agencies. Bringing them in at the last second was a courtesy, an opportunity for them to say they were part of things when the TV cameras started rolling.

Of course, that’s what they’d say if it all turned out okay, I thought as Hughie and I went up to the front of the room. If it all went to hell and heads needed to roll, the honchos were never there.

“Morning, ladies and gents,” I said. “We’ve been over this a number of times, but I see a few new faces late to the party, so here’s the lowdown.”

I turned to the whiteboard beside me and tapped the Sun King’s picture.

“This, as everyone knows by now, is our main target, Manuel Perrine. He runs the Tepito Mexican drug cartel, which has been tied to as many as seven hundred murders in the last three years.”

“That guy’s Mexican?” said some white-haired NYPD chief whom I’d never seen before. It was always the upper-echelon tourists in these meetings who busted the most chops.

I rolled my eyes toward Hughie, prompting him to take the question.

“Actually, he’s from French Guiana originally,” McDonough said. “In the nineties, his family moved to France, where he became a member of the Naval Commandos, France’s version of the Navy SEALs. In the early aughts, he returned to South America and did a stint as a mercenary, training guerrillas for FARC, the narco-terrorist group in Colombia. He’s been linked to dozens of FARC kidnappings and murders, as well as a 2001 truck-bomb assassination of a Colombian regional governor, which killed fifteen people.”

I jumped in before the chief could interrupt again. “Around 2005, after the Colombian military crackdown, Perrine ended up in Mexico again, working as a mercenary, this time for the various cartels to train their drug mules and enforcers.”

Hughie added, “He’s one of the guys personally responsible for the escalation of the hyperviolence we’ve seen over the last few years among the cartels. He militarized these scumbags and has planned, and personally taken part in, sev