I, Michael Bennett (Michael Bennett 5)

I was finally getting to my feet when there was a soft knock on my bedroom door, and Mary Catherine came in with a cup of coffee.

“You’re up already. Good,” she whispered, quickly handing me the chipped blue mug. “Do you want to eat a little first, or shower?”

If there was anyone worried about our gang as much as I was, it was MC. She was one of those people who, when nervous, gets busy. So from sunup to sundown, when she wasn’t directing camp activities, she was a domestic whirlwind of baking and cleaning and cutting the grass. When she went out to paint the mailbox the day before, one of the neighbors asked us if we were fixing to sell the place.

Over the rim of my coffee mug, I noticed the blue glow of the stove light in the kitchen just as I caught a heavenly aroma.

“Bacon?” I said, walking into the kitchen and setting my empty mug onto the countertop. “I thought I told you not to fuss, Mary Catherine. I’m glad you didn’t listen to me.”

“It’s not me who’s fussing. That’s Seamus manning the stove. He insisted on a hot meal for you before your trip into the city,” she said, smiling.

“Wow, I’m really touched,” I said, refilling my coffee. “The old codger really does care about me after all, huh?”

“Why? Because he woke up so early?” Mary Catherine said.

“No,” I explained. “Because frying bacon is how we stoic Irishmen say I love you.”

CHAPTER 51

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, clean-shaven and wearing my best trial suit, I waved good-bye to Mary Catherine after being dropped off across the Newburgh–Beacon Bridge at the Beacon Metro-North train station.

As I got onto the Grand Central Terminal–bound 7:21 train a few minutes later, I noticed something odd. Over the tops of their Wall Street Journals and smartphones, some of the business commuters sitting near me were giving me double takes. Not warm, fuzzy ones, either. Even though I was wearing dapper attire, they kept glancing over at me suspiciously, as if they thought I was about to star in the latest YouTube subway fight video.

I thought maybe my picture was in the paper concerning the Perrine trial, or maybe there was a huge piece of Irish bacon stuck in my teeth, when I suddenly realized what it was.

Commuting into New York City from the hinterlands of the tristate area is a strange business. Regular passengers on the rush-hour trains see each other every morning or every evening for years and years. Friendships form; floating card games; affairs.

All the fuss was about me being a new face, I realized. Their furtive, spooked glances were a result of the fact that I’d upset their regular morning routine.

You want spooked? I thought. How about cleaning out your young teen’s bullet wound? I felt like asking them as I found a window seat and stretched out before closing my eyes.

Though Beacon was sixty miles north of New York City, we arrived at Grand Central Terminal only about an hour and twenty minutes later. I shuffled out with the throng, walking up one dirty underground tunnel until I found another one for the downtown subway.

Instead of heading straight to the courthouse, the plan was to go over the case with Tara McLellan first. She had sent me a text message, asking me to meet her at an inconspicuous office building on lower Broadway that the federal prosecutor’s office was now renting due to the trial’s unprecedented need for security.

Running early and dying for light and oxygen, I decided to get off the number 6 train at Canal Street and walk the rest of the way. I walked west to Broadway, and then made a left, going south, down into the Canyon of Heroes.

New York can truly drive you nuts, but every once in a while, you glance around and realize you live in one of the most beautiful man-made places that has ever existed. Washington, D.C., evokes the long line of American presidents, but for me, it’s the Canyon of Heroes, with its history of old-fashioned showers of ticker tape, that always reminds me of our country’s most shining human triumphs—driving in the golden railroad spike, Edison’s lightbulb, the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, Armstrong’s not-so-small step on the moon.

As I walked, smiling up at the high, massive walls of the majestic buildings, a much more vivid and personal memory suddenly occurred to me. It was the first time I actually came to lower Manhattan with my father, to see the 1977 world champion Yankees in their ticker-tape parade.

Glowing with Yankees pride—and warmed by three or four pints of Guinness from a nearby Blarney Stone pub, packed wall-to-wall with customers—he hoisted me to his shoulders. With me riding on his broad back, we went up and down Broadway, where he pointed out all the landmarks—Trinity Church, where George Washington attended services following his inauguration at Federal Hall, across from the New York Stock Exchange; John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Building.

“Look around, Michael. Take it all in,” he said, a happy tear in his eye as we finally watched the tape glittering down over Reggie Jackson and Ron Guidry and George Steinbrenner, who were passing by in convertibles.

“Never forget we’re the good guys, Michael,” he said. “We win. They lose. End of story.”

I teared up a little as I thought about that. I thought about my life, the state of the country, the state of the world. I was the man now, and it was my turn to be the good guy, wasn’t it? A good father, a good cop, a good man. I’d like to think I was trying to fight the good fight, but I was starting to wonder more and more if the good guys weren’t becoming an endangered species these days—if we weren’t quickly getting outnumbered, outmaneuvered, outgunned.

No wonder the people on the train were spooked, I thought, shivering in the cool morning air as I walked. I, too, was spooked. Being spooked, I guess, was the only sane response to watching the world come apart at the seams.

CHAPTER 52

NINE MILES TO the southwest of the dazzling glass-and-steel skyline of lower Manhattan lie the Maher Terminals in Elizabeth, New Jersey, North America’s largest container-ship facility.

It was coming on 8:30 a.m. when the dockside crane along the southern wharf sounded its horn, and the train-like column of trucks idling beside it finally began to move into position.

At the head of the line, a boyish, silver-haired trucker by the name of Norman O’Neill quickly stubbed out his tenth Marlboro of the morning before pulling his rumbling Volvo VN 630 semi beneath the massive steel legs of the towering unloading crane. He felt like lighting up a fresh one as he listened to the overhead cable’s shrill whine. Since all the paper and manifests had been stamped hours before, it was looking good, though he wasn’t out of the woods yet, he knew. He’d breathe again after he got the box and got the heck out of there.