I, Michael Bennett (Michael Bennett 5)

Seamus had called and left a message to say that Mary Catherine had called the lake house. It was a cryptic call. She needed to spend some time with friends now, she said, and would call back in a few days. I remembered how she had stayed with friends out in Woodside when she first came to the States, so I took a chance of heading out there to see if I might bump into her.

It was a truly desperate move, the act of a madman, really. With more than eight million people in New York City, human beings don’t just bump into each other. I didn’t even know if she was staying in Woodside. She could have been out in the Hamptons or on a plane back to Ireland. Needless to say, I didn’t find her. All I found out as I hit a few bars and wandered up and down Queens Boulevard was how guilty I felt, and how incredibly lonely.

Officer Williams, the gung ho cop assigned to watch my apartment, flashed his lights and quickly got out of his cruiser as I came up West End Avenue to my apartment house around ten. There were two other squad cars on the block now, I noticed. This couldn’t be good.

“There you are! Everybody, and I mean everybody, is looking for you,” Williams said. “Don’t you turn on your phone?”

“The battery died,” I said. “What the heck’s up?”

Heck was up, all right. I sat on the hood of his cruiser, my head going lower and lower, as Williams told me about the double cop execution on Canal Street. When he told me about the message spray-painted on the wall, I closed my eyes. The sergeant who was killed had four kids, his oldest girl at Loyola University.

I sat there as the horror of it all sank in like a dull knife between my shoulder blades. This is what happened now? NYPD cops were being gunned down? Shot to smithereens with automatic weapons? How did that compute? It didn’t. How could it? I sat there, dizzy. The world was truly spinning off its axis. How in the name of God were we supposed to set it right again?

I left Officer Williams and went up to my silent and empty apartment. I thought I was lonely before. I couldn’t have been more wrong. After some rummaging around, I found a dusty bottle of Smirnoff Lemon Twist vodka with a Christmas ribbon on it in the back of my closet. I cracked the cap and sat on my bed, sipping it.

I didn’t bother taking off my trial suit or even my shoes as I propped myself against the headboard. Of course not. When I get shitfaced on discount vodka by myself, I always like to keep it as formal as possible. To cheer myself up, I spun the Christmas bow on my finger and thought about my dead wife, Maeve. I tried to picture her face in my mind, but I couldn’t.

I cried for a bit. For Maeve. For Mary Catherine. For those two dead cops. After a minute or two, I tried to break the bottle by slamming it down on the nightstand. But nothing happened, so I took another sip.

This wasn’t supposed to happen, I thought. None of it. This wasn’t in the original script.

What had I ever asked for? A chance to be a good man. And I had been. Just like my dad, I’d been a cop and put away bad guys. Cleared the streets so that the good people could live their lives, love their wives and husbands, love their kids.

But what was it all for? People weren’t even getting married anymore, and if they had kids, they soon abandoned them to the street, to the Internet. It wasn’t just the times, either. I was starting to think it was humanity. It was changing. People didn’t seem to want to be people anymore.

Ah, who the heck was I to talk? I thought, savoring the warm, lemony, burning Smirnoff. I couldn’t even keep my nanny from exiting stage left.

I looked out the window at the lights of the city, at the dark.

“Mary Catherine, where are you?” I whispered. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I need you, Mary Catherine. Please come home.”

CHAPTER 84

THE NEXT MORNING, I had the taxi drop me off on lower Broadway, and I walked across Duane Street in a light rain, past the bomb-squad vans, toward the courthouse. Helicopters rumbled overhead. Though I had declined a police escort, I knew I was being tailed anyway by two cars full of undercover cops, watching my back.

Showered, shaved, and rested despite a hangover, I was wearing my best suit. I’d briefly thought about putting a Kevlar vest underneath it, but then gave it a thumbs-down. Perrine was hiring highly trained mercenaries now. If they got a bead on me, they wouldn’t waste their time killing me with a torso shot but would do it properly, putting a high-velocity bullet or two directly into my head.

Besides, the bulky vest would have ruined the tailored line of my jacket, I thought as I headed across the plaza toward the courthouse steps. Perrine wasn’t the only one who liked to get his GQ on.

Because of the cop killing the previous evening, security had been beefed up, even on top of the already beefed-up security surrounding the courthouse. In addition to the guard booths and hydraulic metal street barriers and truck-bombproof steel pylons, the entire NYPD Hercules team was deployed. Beside a long line of black

Suburbans stood a small army of submachine-gun-toting cops wearing helmets and knee pads and armor-plated vests over their NYPD blue fatigues.

For all the police presence outside, inside the courthouse, past the metal detectors, the halls were pretty empty. That was because all civil and all but the most urgent criminal cases had been postponed for the week due to the incredible circumstances.

Arriving early at the fourteenth-floor witness room, I declined a coffee from Tara’s assistant, but I did accept a bottled water. I didn’t ask her where Tara was and, funny enough, she didn’t tell me.

As I waited, I checked my smartphone for messages. There was only one that I was looking for—Mary Catherine’s, of course. She hadn’t contacted Seamus again, and I was worried as hell.

But there was nothing. No matter how many times I shifted all the stupid screens on the phone back and forth with my thumb.

“Detective Bennett?” the assistant whispered as she stuck her head through the cracked door. “You’ve just been called to the stand. It’s time.”

All eyes shifted to me as I came through the double doors into the soundproofed, windowless courtroom. The expressions from the rows of seated people were solemn and sort of surprised, as if I were a black-sheep relative arriving out of the blue for someone’s funeral.

It was a funeral, all right, I thought. Manuel Perrine’s. And it was high time we slammed the lid on his casket.

He was sitting up front, heavily shackled. I could hardly see him behind a larger-than-usual retinue of cops and court officers. He didn’t have a gag on, as the judge had promised, I noticed as I sat. Like all dangerous animals, he definitely deserved one. I would have preferred a dog muzzle or Hannibal Lecter–style hockey mask, at the very least, but there was nada.