I, Michael Bennett (Michael Bennett 5)

“I haven’t had too much to celebrate in a while, so I’m pulling out all the stops, my man. You guys deserve it. Now my family can put all this nonsense in the rearview.”

“How many kids do you have, anyway?” Groover wanted to know.

I shook my head. “Dude, I lost count a long time ago.”

Groover looked down into his beer thoughtfully before raising his plastic cup.

“The more the merrier,” he called.

I looked over at my son Eddie, talking and laughing with one of Ed Boyanoski’s kids, and raised my own.

“The more the merrier,” I agreed with a smile.

Damn right.

It was the Bennett family motto, after all.

CHAPTER 66

AT AROUND NINE, the party wrapped up pretty much the way all cop parties do—with some beery high fives and fist bumps and promises to do it again real soon.

It had really been a fun time, even for all our cop kids, who had broken into teams and had wrapped up the night playing an epic game of ring-a-levio. Eddie had been the last one caught as he made a heroic attempt to free his team from jail.

Hearing his squealing laughter again as he was tackled was by far the best part of the night. Hell, the best part of the month.

“These Newburgh guys are all right in my book,” I said to Mary Catherine as we waved good-bye to the last set of retreating headlights from the porch.

“Is that just the beer talking?” Mary Catherine asked, eyeing the half-full Heineken in my hand.

“Well, maybe not just the beer,” I said sheepishly.

Even though the house and backyard and especially the dock looked like they’d been attacked by a host of marauding barbarians, Mary Catherine and I turned our backs on the paper plates. We left all our sleeping, sunburned charges in Seamus’s care and decided to take a long walk around the lake.

We ended up taking the secluded forest path I’d frantically scoured the week before when I’d searched for Eddie and Brian. At the top of the hill, Mary Catherine suddenly stopped and turned around.

“Look. It’s beautiful,” she said.

I followed her pointing finger just above the treetops to a bright, glowing sliver of quarter moon, tinged with pink. All around it, stars—too many to count—sparkled against the seemingly endless navy-blue sky. We could have been the only people in the world, in the universe.

We sat, and I broke out the midnight picnic I’d packed. An old flannel blanket, some Cheddar and grapes, a cold bottle of sauvignon blanc that I had to laboriously work open with the Leatherman tool on my key chain, since I’d forgotten to bring a corkscrew.

I laid out the blanket in the middle of the forest clearing and poured wine into a couple of plastic glasses.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to mix beer and wine,” Mary Catherine said, leaning back with the cup on her stomach and staring up at the sky.

“Midnight picnics are the exception,” I said, sitting cross-legged across from her.

Mary Catherine yawned and closed her eyes.

“You know what would be really great, Mike?”

“What’s that?” I said.

“If we could really go on vacation. You know, one where you’re not working and actually here?”

I laughed.

“That’s quite a concept,” I said. “A nonworking vacation, is it?”