I, Michael Bennett (Michael Bennett 5)

AT A LITTLE before 8:00 p.m., the Fifth Precinct evening patrol supervisor, Sergeant Wayne Lozada, and his driver, Officer Michael M

orelli, parked in their favorite cooping spot, the southeast corner of Canal and the Bowery, facing the ramp for the Manhattan Bridge.

After Morelli put it into park, he lifted a massive binder from the backseat. He flipped through the NYPD Patrol Guide to the section covering the use of the Taser on emotionally disturbed people. Morelli, who was actually quite proficient in the use of the electrical device due to the neighborhood’s proliferation of nuts, didn’t really need to go over it but was brushing up for a sergeant’s test he was scheduled to take at the end of the month.

As Morelli studied, Sergeant Lozada idly listened to the fizz and pop of the radio as he stared at the monumental arch and colonnade at the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. He never got sick of looking at that thing. Above the Chinese billboards, crappy stores, and skells selling fake handbags on the piss-stained Bowery sidewalk, the intricate baroque stonework looked fantastical, like a Rembrandt peeking out over the rim of a Dumpster.

Lozada, who briefly had been a high school history teacher before becoming a cop, was an architecture buff. After he retired at the end of the year, he was thinking about starting a walking tour.

“You see that thing, Morelli?” Lozada said. “That thing was built by the same architects who designed the iconic New York Public Library. It’s called a triumphal arch, and this one was modeled in the tradition of both the Porte Saint-Denis in Paris and the first-century Arch of Titus in Rome. It was part of the City Beautiful movement, started by a bunch of rich folks at the turn of the last century who thought they could promote civic virtue and harmonious social order through beautiful public spaces and grandiose buildings.”

“Real nice, Sarge,” mumbled Morelli, who couldn’t wait for his long-winded boss’s retirement party. “Classy stuff, all right.”

“A hundred years ago, they erected stunning works of classical art for the opening of a bridge, Morelli,” Lozada said with a sigh. “Today, a decade after the nine-eleven attacks, we can’t even rebuild two ugly skyscrapers.”

“I know, right? Exactly, exactly,” Morelli said, flipping a page in the gargantuan binder.

Lozada was still sighing when they heard the sound coming from somewhere off behind them.

“No, it can’t be,” Lozada said as the lazy ka-click ka-click ka-click ka-click came closer.

He glanced in the side-view mirror. A young Hispanic guy was walking up the sidewalk behind the cruiser, shaking a can of spray paint.

The guy stopped ten feet behind the cruiser and commenced painting. They watched in silence as he went to town, bombing the stone wall of the building they were parked beside.

Morelli and Lozada looked at each other for a moment, then broke into riotous laughter.

“Your iPhone charged, Morelli?” Lozada said, grasping the door handle. “Because I believe we either have a vandal with a serious vision deficiency or a contender here for world’s dumbest criminal.”

Lozada opened the passenger door and put his right foot out onto the sidewalk. He was just standing up when he heard a sudden engine roar and a long tire shriek.

As he glanced forward, he watched as a beat-up white Dodge van veered off the Bowery and stopped directly in front of the cruiser. Its side door rattled open and three squat Hispanic men wearing bandannas over their faces and baseball caps and mechanic’s coveralls tucked into construction boots stood there staring at him.

It took him a fraction of a second to register that they had guns in their hands. Long ones.

They were M4 automatic rifles, Lozada knew. He had one just like them in the trunk of the cruiser.

It would be the last thing he would ever know.

The assassins opened fire, muzzle flashes just visible in the twilight. Lozada was cut down to the concrete immediately as more than a dozen bullets struck his face and throat. Morelli, running from the cruiser at a loping backpedal, managed to just draw his Glock before he, too, was hit with a fusillade of automatic gunfire that struck him in the right side of his head. He was dead well before he and his unfired weapon hit the ground.

The shooters in the van continued to fire on the fallen policemen. When their guns were empty, they reloaded, and fired off another magazine apiece into the cop car.

When they were done, the spray-painter hurdled over the body of Lozada and removed a large red plastic jug from the knapsack on his back. Upending the jug, he poured gasoline all over the cop car’s trunk and roof and hood and interior. He tossed the empty jug into the car as he ignited a Zippo lighter with his calloused thumb. He was already in the van by the time the tossed lighter landed on the front seat and the car went up.

The van sped away. The light of the burning NYPD car’s flames flickered on the blood-drenched fallen cops and on what had been spray-painted on the side of the bank building next to their bodies.

DOS POR DÍA HASTA QUE SE LIBERA!

Two a day until he is released.

LIBERTAD! LIBERTAD!

FREE MANUEL PERRINE!

CHAPTER 83

AFTER THE TRIAL, I went straight out to Woodside, Queens, on the number 7 train to look for Mary Catherine.