I, Michael Bennett (Michael Bennett 5)

IT TOOK ME a couple of moments of blinking like mad to adjust to the store’s dim mood lighting. I sprinted up a short flight of stairs, cosmetics counters and jewelry cases blurring on both sides of me. Between the displays, shocked-looking shoppers and tourists stood staring, most of them women and kids.

“NYPD! Get out of the store!” I yelled, waving my Glock as I ran.

I was running past the Louis Vuitton bags into men’s sportswear when I heard a scream from the bottom of a wooden escalator to my left. I took its moving stairs down two by two into the Cellar—the food and kitchenware section of the store. The sickly sweet smell of gourmet coffee and candy assaulted my nostrils as I breathed hard, panning left and right with my gun.

There was a clatter of metal behind me, and I turned around to see the glass entrance to the store’s basement restaurant. The sound must have come from the restaurant kitchen. I rushed inside the wood-paneled space.

“Oh, my gawd! Oh, my gawd!” a massively overweight blond woman kept saying. She was kneeling beside a slim blond waiter who was laid out on the floor by the bar. The guy’s head seemed wrong. It was twisted too far around, almost looking over his own back.

“Where?” I yelled, and saw a dozen shocked customers pointing toward the still-swinging door to the kitchen. I ran past a sizzling flattop grill toward an open door at the kitchen’s opposite end. There were dusty metal stairs on the other side of it, with heavy footsteps hammering up them. I followed up the stairs, and as I made the top, I finally saw Perrine again, the back of his dress shirt soaked through with sweat, as he bolted down a corridor piled with folded cardboard boxes.

“Freeze!” I yelled.

He didn’t listen. An alarm went off and daylight flashed as he slammed open a fire-exit door on the street level. I was coming through that same exit onto Thirty-Fifth Street a split second later when I got kicked in the face. My right cheekbone felt shattered as my Glock flew from my hand. I watched it ricochet off the base of a pay-phone kiosk before skidding across the sidewalk and coming to rest under a sanitation department Prius.

I was diving for it when Perrine dropped from the awning over the door where he was hanging and kicked me in the kidney. I whirled around, swinging at his face. I just missed as he bobbed his head back. He bounced back again on the balls of his feet, and before I knew what was going on, he kicked me on the inside of my thigh so hard I thought he broke it. He made a high kind of karate scream as he elbowed me in the face and knocked me to my knees.

As he grabbed the back of my head and kneed me in the forehead, I remembered something important. My hand went to my ankle, and I pulled free the backup pepper spray canister I always carry. I depressed its trigger and proceeded to mace the living crap out of him. As he backpedaled, clawing at his burning eyes, I reached for the collapsible baton I carried on my other ankle and flicked it open. With a loud, whip-cracking sound, the ball on the metal baton’s tip made contact with the bridge of Perrine’s nose.

He didn’t seem in the mood for any more karate after that. He dropped to his knees, blood from his broken nose spraying the sidewalk, as he

screamed and blinked and shook his head.

CHAPTER 16

I FINALLY BROUGHT him all the way down to the concrete with a knee to his back and cuffed him. As Perrine moaned and thrashed around helplessly, I fished my Glock out from under the city-approved, low-carbon-emission sanitation vehicle.

I stood up and looked around. There had been hundreds of people on the corner of Thirty-Fourth Street, but here at the dirty service entrance at the back of Macy’s, there was absolutely no one. I knelt on Perrine’s neck and jammed my gun in his ear.

I thought about things for a little while then. Mostly about my friend Hughie, back in the medical office, with his head blown apart. Dead.

No more beers. No more Yankees games. No more deep-sea fishing trips on his City Island rust bucket with his twenty nieces and nephews. The life of the party was gone now. Forever gone. Forever cold.

I moved the barrel of my gun to Perrine’s brain stem. Two pounds of pull on the trigger under my finger, two measly little pounds here on this dim, narrow, deserted street, was all it would take to avenge Hughie and rid the world of this instrument of evil.

I looked up. It had been overcast earlier in the morning, but now I saw through the gaps of the dark line of rooftops above me a sky of immaculate bright blue. I could also see the top of the Empire State Building, iconic and massive, its constellation of set-back windows like a million square eyes staring down at me, waiting to see what I would do.

But I couldn’t do it. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I took the gun off Perrine’s skull pan after another second, and then arriving squad cars were screeching behind me. Over the sirens, I heard Perrine say something. He leaned up from where I sat on top of him and craned his neck around to look into my eyes as he uttered one word.

“Coward,” he said, and then strong hands were helping me up as the sound of helicopter blades whapped at the late-spring air.

CHAPTER 17

WHEN THE REST of the task force team arrived, they were very concerned about me. The line-of-duty death of a close colleague was reason enough by itself to be worried about a person’s emotional health, and on top of that, I had shot two suspects. They took away my gun and buttoned me up in the SWAT van until an ambulance arrived.

I listened through the door of the van and learned that the waiter in the Macy’s restaurant was dead. When he’d tried to stop Perrine from coming in, the drug dealer had snapped the twenty-three-year-old kid’s neck in front of fifty witnesses. That bothered me almost as much as Hughie’s death. I should have killed the son of a bitch when I had the chance.

I guess my colleagues were right to be worried about my stability because the second the ambulance pulled away from the curb to go to the hospital, I jumped off the gurney and put the med tech in the back in a headlock until the driver agreed to let me out.

I hit the corner of Broadway and just started walking. It was a nice day for a walk. Three o’clock; in the low sixties with a blue sky; the clear light sparkling off the glass midtown buildings. I didn’t know where the hell I was going. I just needed to move.

First, I went up to Times Square, then crosstown, past Bryant Park, then up Madison Avenue.

A dazed couple of hours later, one of the security guys at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral gave me a look as I pushed in through the large bronze doors on Fifth Avenue.

No wonder he was concerned. With my friend’s blood still flecked on my cheek and my hair standing up, I’d been turning heads all afternoon. Like I was a movie star. Charlie Sheen, maybe. Or Jack Nicholson from The Shining.

When I showed the guard my shield, he still looked worried, but in the end, he let me walk past him up the cathedral’s center aisle.