I, Michael Bennett (Michael Bennett 5)
“They don’t want to hear it from an old Irish priest,” Seamus said. “They’d shut me out as an interloper before I got to the podium.”
“Who should be the messenger, then?”
“I don’t know. Jay-Z might be a start, or that P. Diddy fella. The message has to come from someone prominent, someone who already has their respect. Bill Cosby tried to say some sensible things a few years back, but the secular crowd shouted him down. It has to be someone who won’t be shouted down by anyone. Someone with fire in his belly.”
“Jay-Z, Seamus? C’mon. That’s just not going to happen.”
“In that case, we need to start building more prisons and graveyards,” Seamus said. “Because if someone doesn’t come along and somehow convince these young men to live their lives in a different way, they’re going to go right on killing each other. Generation after generation after generation.”
“As much as I hate to say this, old man,” I said as I finally put the bus into drive, “I think you’re actually right.”
BOOK FOUR
ALL THE KING’S MEN
CHAPTER 73
IN THE MIDDLE of the night—3:00 a.m. on Monday, to be exact—I got a call from DEA chief Patrick Zaretski. It was big news. Good big news, for a change.
A tip had come in on a group linked to Manuel Perrine. Apparently, a team of killers was holed up in a house in Staten Island. It was being speculated that they were there to plot another brazen assault at Perrine’s trial. The house was currently under surveillance while an arrest team was put together.
“There’s word that there’s an attractive brunette at the location,” Patrick said. “We think it’s that bitch Marietta, Mike. Hughie’s killer. We might have finally caught a break on this.”
By 4:00 a.m., I was on the New York State Thruway, flying at nearly a hundred miles an hour, with Jimmy Sanchez, a DEA agent from the joint task force who lived in Orange County. His car was an undercover vehicle, a souped-up Dodge Charger, and the bubbling roar of its 6.4-liter HEMI V8 was the perfect sound track to my mounting adrenaline and anticipation. My foot was aching to kick a door down—and even more aching to finally kick some scumbag, drug-dealer ass—as we headed toward New York City like bats out of hell.
We toned it down considerably by the time we got to the rallying point. We rolled up to the wagon train of DEA and NYPD unmarked cars already waiting in the deserted parking lot of a Chili’s on Richmond Avenue near the College of Staten Island.
All stops had been thoroughly pulled. There were almost three dozen detectives, DEA agents, and Emergency Service Unit cops helping each other into Kevlar and prepping guns on the trunks of their cruisers. They looked like a pro football defensive squad getting their game faces on, just about ready to mix it up. I know I was ready to trade some helmet paint with Perrine’s people. Raring to go, in fact.
It was a strange and sort of wonderful moment there, getting prepared with those men. Though no one said anything, we knew that this was bigger than just a drug raid. The audacious violence of Perrine’s men had turned his trial into an international event. The man hadn’t just broken American laws, he’d gleefully spat in the face of everything we stood for.
And the rest of the planet was waiting to see what we were going to do about it.
The dedicated cops around me were aching to show the world exactly what we were going to do about it. Because they were tired of the evil and the drugs, tired of the terrorists tearing at the fabric of our great country. We were completely freaking sick of it.
After we divided up the raid duties, a quick prayer was said as the sun came up over the restaurant’s giant red plastic chili. I don’t know who started it, but mostly everyone joined in. We probably flew in the face of several Supreme Court decisions by actually having the unbridled audacity to bring God into government proceedings, but we just went ahead and did it anyway. I guess we were feeling really wild and crazy that morning as we prepared to stare death in its ugly face. Just completely off the hook.
Jimmy gunned the engine of the muscle car as I got in, the air around me vibrating with every surge of its deep, rumbling thunder. Who needed coffee?
“It’s ass-clobberin’ time,” Jimmy said as he dropped it into drive.
“Amen to that, brother,” I said, shucking a round into my tactical shotgun as we peeled out.
CHAPTER 74
&
nbsp; THE TARGET WAS a cruddy stucco two-family house on Hillman Avenue. If it stood out at all on the worn suburban street, it was because of the just-off-the-lot black Chevy Tahoe in its concrete driveway. There were five entrances, including the one to the basement apartment, and the plan was to hit all of them at once, very, very hard, with everything in our arsenal—battering rams, flashbang grenades, tactical ballistic shields.
The word was that the people inside weren’t your run-of-the-mill dopers, but highly trained killers and mercenaries. We weren’t taking any chances. We parked a block away, and a moment later, thirty armed-to-the-teeth cops were jogging quickly and quietly down the dim, narrow street.
When we arrived at the address, Jimmy and I and our five-man team split off through the house’s short alley to the backyard. It was a hot summer morning, and under my body armor I was sweating quite profusely as I knelt in the dirt of a small vegetable garden by the house’s rear sliding glass door. I had to wipe my hand on my pants several times to keep the shotgun from slipping.
From a house on the other side of the backyard, I could hear an a.m. news station rising in volume as a clock radio’s alarm went off. Don’t bother slapping it this morning, buddy, I thought. This whole street is about to hear one hell of a wake-up call.
It happened right before we got the go-ahead. We were crouching there like runners at the starting line when all of a sudden we heard the metallic, clacking plah-plah-plah of a machine gun. Our team stared at each other. It was coming from the front of the house, along with a lot of hollering over the tactical microphone.
“What do we do?” Jimmy said. “Go in or go out front?”