I, Michael Bennett (Michael Bennett 5)

Mary Catherine sighed.

“Or how about for once we could go on a real date, Mike? Three or four hours of just me and you. No kids, no phones. Just two adults together alone, enjoying each other’s company. I would like that so much. Wouldn’t you?”

“You’re right, Mary Catherine,” I said feeling suddenly very guilty.

How could I be such an insensitive clod? I had to stop taking this wonderful woman for granted or I was going to be very sorry.

“Enough of squeezing in a moment here and there,” I said. “You’re absolutely right. I’ll arrange the whole thing. We’ll put Seamus on duty and go wherever you want. Down into the city. We’ll paint the town red. Where do you want to go?”

I waited for a few moments. But even after a full minute, she was still silent. I turned and glanced at her, laughing to myself as I watched her sleep.

“Oh, Sleeping Beauty,” I said as I gathered up the remnants of our picnic. “What did I do to deserve someone as lovely as you?”

CHAPTER 67

IT WAS STILL dark when I heard the doorbell ring the next morning. Hungover and bleary-eyed, I went ass over teakettle into a beanbag chair as I tripped over an inner tube in the unlit family room. I was still in my boxer shorts, dusting myself off, as I peeked out the window and saw a Newburgh police cruiser in the driveway and a uniformed cop on the porch.

“Good morning,” I said, opening the door.

The young, attractive, black female cop smiled and blushed a little when she saw my bamboozled face and skimpy attire.

“Detective Bennett, sorry to bother you so early,” she said, quickly recovering. “Detective Boyanoski sent me. He tried your phone, but you didn’t pick up. Something’s come up. It’s about the assailant who shot your boys. The gang member, Jay D—James Glaser?”

“What about him?” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“He was murdered in jail last night,” she said.

That got me moving. I threw on a pair of jeans and a polo shirt, grabbed my gun, and took a ride into town with the good-looking rookie cop, whose name was Belinda Saxon. Bill and Ed were already outside waiting for me in the Newburgh PD parking lot. Behind them, the sun was just coming up over the Hudson.

“Let me guess. The party’s over?” I said as I got out of the cruiser.

“So’s our friend James Glaser,” Bill Moss said, opening the unmarked Ford’s back door as though he were a chauffeur.

After some coffee and a quick breakfast at the diner out by I-84, we headed to the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in nearby Wallkill, New York, where Glaser had been transferred. The sunny green farm fields we passed had horses in them, rows of corn. I thought about the eighteen-year-old kid we’d picked up the day before and shook my head. How could he be dead on this beautiful summer morning? And how could this bucolic area have a gang problem?

After being processed just inside the steel gate of the maximum-security prison, we were brought into a formidable building to meet with the assistant warden, Kenneth Bozman, in his ground-floor office.

“Twenty inmates from B block went to B yard for evening rec around seven,” the well-groomed, round-faced bureaucrat explained as he drummed his chewed-to-the-nub fingernails on a metal file cabinet next to his desk. “Come seven thirty, James Glaser was seen in a scuffle with another black male. Glaser was dead as a doornail upon arrival of staff. His attacker was still hovering over him. The assailant’s name is Gary McKay, a lifer. He’s been segregated in our special housing unit since the incident.”

“How’d he kill him?” Ed Boyanoski asked.

Bozman stopped drumming and pointed to the hollow of his throat above his tie.

“He buried the sharpened end of a broken mop handle into Glaser’s clavicle,” Bozman said, shaking his head. “Stabbed it all the way down into his heart like a skewer. Unbelievable. What a shitstorm. We’re max security, but we run a tight ship. We haven’t had a murder here since oh three.”

“What’s McKay’s story?” Bill asked.

“I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him,” Bozman said. “He’s old-school. Drug dealer who used to run the Newburgh drug scene back in the eighties. He’s in for a triple homicide and attempted murder of a cop. Now he heads the Bloods here in the prison. I take it this is a Bloods thing, some kind of street beef?”

“You take it correctly,” Ed told him.

“I figured,” Bozman said. “I mean, McKay’s a homicidal maniac, but skewering a son of a bitch is a little excessive for having a newbie look at you funny.”

“We’d like to talk to him, if that’s okay,” Bill Moss said.

“Wait here,” Bozman said. “I’ll go into the warden and ask.”

Bozman came back less than a minute later.