Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

CHAPTER 3

IT WAS LIKE SLIPPING into a favorite old pair of shoes that first Monday morning back in New York.

As I woke in our West End Avenue apartment, I smiled at everything, the ceiling that needed painting, the traffic sounds out the window, the tick of Mary Catherine’s teakettle from the kitchen. Even the sound of the kids fighting and teasing and slamming bathroom doors and clomping around on our big old apartment’s worn oak floors was like music to my ears.

Mary Catherine had the troops lined up and ready for inspection as I came into the dining room. I scanned all the happy, scrubbed, bright-eyed faces. I’d never seen my guys so happy to be geared up with backpacks and lunch bags in their plaid Holy Name uniforms.

“Hey, everybody. Did Mary Catherine tell you the good news?” I said to them. “Homeschooling went so well in California, we’re going to continue it here. Only with uniforms. So sit down, children, and take out your math workbooks.”

“No! Ughhh! Wrong, so wrong! Never! Please, no!” they cried with accompanying Bronx cheers.

Ricky dropped and lay on his back with his eyes closed and his tongue stuck out. “Can’t homeschool!” he gasped. “No friends. Need teacher. School. Need school!”

“Oh, well. If that’s the way you feel about it, I guess we could try regular school on a day-to-day basis. But if there are any problems, you know you always have a place here all day with Teacher Daddy.”

“Daddy!” Chrissy said, laughing as she tugged on one of my pockets. “Stop teasing and being so silly!”

“Yes, Daddy, please do,” said Seamus, appearing in the doorway of the kitchen with my favorite DAD: THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE coffee mug in his fist. “I mean, bad enough you have ’em traipsing off to the ends of the earth like a pack of tinkers. Do you have to make them late on their first day back?”

“Good morning to you, too, Father,” I said merrily as Mary Catherine finally got the Bennett train rolling out the door.

“And you’re welcome for the coffee,” I said. “And my mug.”

CHAPTER 4

AFTER WAVING EVERYONE GOOD-BYE in the lobby and getting into the unmarked Chevy the department had dropped off for me on the corner the day before, my first stop was a no-brainer.

I rolled down West End Avenue to Ninety-Sixth and double-parked and went into the no-name deli-grocery on the corner. I could have hugged the Middle Eastern gentleman behind the counter when he gave me his regular gruff “Hey, boss,” along with my too-hot, probably-not-fair-trade coffee and my buttered roll.

As I sat in the double-parked cop car eating my breakfast, I stared out, fascinated at the passing crosstown buses and Verizon vans and town cars and taxis. It was overcast, the September wind wafting the few trees West End still had lining the block to the south. I guess absence really does make the heart grow fonder, because all of it—the awnings on the buildings, the handymen hosing the sidewalks, the Sanitation Department street sweeper scraping the curb—seemed fresher, somehow more vibrant, more there.

The kids aren’t the only ones excited about their first day back, I thought as I tightened my tie in the rearview. I had a morning meeting with the police commissioner down at One Police Plaza. After my western adventures, I was more than eager to go back to my desk at Major Crimes, but my old boss, Miriam, had explained that the commish wanted to talk to me about a brand-new position opening up.

Is it a new homicide squad? I wondered as I drink-holdered my coffee and dropped the tranny into drive. An antiterror assignment? I didn’t care what it was as long as it was something juicy, something I could sink my teeth into.

After half an hour of threading my way around delivery trucks and suicidal bike messengers on the narrow downtown Manhattan streets, I pulled around a bomb barrier and up to the security booth at NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza.

Only VIPs got to park in the front lot, but since I was meeting with the commissioner, I thought, what the hey? I’d give it a shot.

“Yeah?” the old cop in the booth said, thoroughly ignoring my shield.

“Got a meeting with the big guy,” I said. “The commissioner.”

“Yeah, right,” the craggy-faced lifer said, trading his Post for a clipboard. “Name?”

“Bennett,” I said.

He flicked up a sheet, flicked it back down, and then re-lifted his Post.

“Sorry, Charlie. You need to park on the street because I guess you ain’t on the A-list this morning.”

CHAPTER 5

AS IT TURNED OUT, the old cop in the parking lot was righter than rain about me not being on the A-list. The only list I was on that morning, I was about to learn, was one of those four-letter ones that start with the letter s.

My not-so-warm welcome back into the bosom of the department family continued in the marble HQ lobby after I told one of the cops at the formidable security desk that I was there to see the commissioner.

“Are you sure?” said a tall, gray-haired black cop beside the security turnstile. “I was told the commissioner was on his way down to Washington this morning to testify before Congress about gun violence.”