Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

Around midnight, I was doing what I always like to do after helicopter crashes and meeting US presidents.

I was kneeling on the floor of my apartment bathroom, pinning the family cat, Socky, to the tile floor.

The Sockster had been sick the last couple of days—some upper respiratory thing—and he wasn’t eating or hardly even drinking, so Mary Catherine and I had to, per the vet’s order, syringe-feed him. Mary Catherine was on syringe duty while I wrapped him up tight in a bath towel. I was wearing kitchen gloves as I held him down to avoid getting clawed.

With good reason, too, because Socky didn’t seem to be enjoying his force-fed meal in the slightest. In fact, he sounded a lot like a Harley at full throttle as he squirmed.

“So anyway,” I said to Mary Catherine over the ungodly howls as she slipped a paper towel bib over Socky’s head, “I’m standing there, and the door opens and there he is! Buckland’s sitting five feet away, talking with one of his advisers.”

“No!” she said, staring at me.

“Yes!” I said, nodding, still hopped-up from the day’s excitement. “If I wasn’t currently using it for lion taming, I’d show you the hand that shook the hand that shakes the world.”

Mary Catherine smiled as she tried to squirt cat vitamin water between Socky’s fangs.

“You’re not so bad yourself, Detective Bennett. You saved his life, you did.”

“Well, keep that to yourself, please. They’re actually trying to keep that under wraps for now, a full media blackout, and it’s working for once. Plus I don’t want the kids to know that I was in the helicopter crash. Not yet. They have enough to worry about.”

“It’s so hard to believe somebody would want to kill Buckland after his landslide election,” Mary Catherine said, shaking her head. “How many states did he win? Forty-four? Forty-five?”

“Forty-six,” I said. “Maybe that’s just it. He said he was going to shake up the status quo, and he’s got the mandate to do it. You have to think that there are a lot of folks with entrenched power at home and abroad who are feeling pretty rattled right now.”

“Rattled enough to put a hit on a sitting US president?” Mary Catherine said.

I looked at her.

I didn’t even want to mention the Russian tip from the FBI. That an attempt on Buckland’s life might have actually come from the Russians and that some new vicious revamping of the Cold War could right now be under way. It was too terrible to contemplate. I almost wished that I didn’t know.

Socky hissed, got a claw out, and raked my gloved wrist before I was able to subdue him with the towel.

“I don’t know, Mary Catherine,” I said with a shrug. “Who knows today? Anything seems possible.”

“Well, all that matters now is that you’re home in one piece,” she said, smiling.

“Couldn’t agree more,” I said. “Now let’s just hope Socky here will let me stay that way.”

Chapter 14

Next day around four thirty, I was uptown in Hamilton Heights, standing on the third-floor fire escape of a building on West 141st between Broadway and Riverside Drive.

Taking in the lay of the land, I decided that it had to be one of the most architecturally interesting crime-ridden neighborhoods I’d ever been to. There were stone row houses with Greek-columned entrances and apartment buildings with Juliet balconies. I noticed there was an equal number of reno Dumpsters and beat-up, tinted-windowed cheap Nissans and Mazdas in the street in front of the buildings.

Like everyplace else in the perpetually skyrocketing rent zone that is NYC, even the Heights seemed to be in the midst of gentrifying. Too bad I wasn’t looking to flip an apartment, I thought. A shooting had occurred here the week before, when an entire seven-member drug crew running an ecstasy lab in the apartment behind me had been slaughtered.

Such things happened from time to time in New York, of course, but the weird thing about it was how it had happened. Apparently, suppressors had been used. The power line to the building had been cut. In sum, it had the earmarks of a professional hit.

Just like the attempt on the president.

We were still stone cold in the leads department on the MetLife Building assassin’s whereabouts, so we were looking at anything and everything that might be related.

“Don’t jump, Mike. It’s not that bad,” Detective Jimmy Doyle said as he and Detective Arturo Lopez came out of the drug apartment and stood beside me by the snow-topped railing. My buddies and protégés from my special assignment in Harlem a while back were among the many Thirtieth Precinct detectives who’d caught the seven-body case.

“Yeah? Tell that to Chief Fabretti,” I said, flipping up the lapels of my overcoat as a cold wind sliced in off the Hudson to my left. “Now, one more time from the top.”

“Shots fired call comes in at eight fifteen,” Doyle said, Magliting the clipboard he was holding. “Responding officers were here in five. Straight off the bat, they see the first bodies slumped in the exterior sidewalk stairwell down there on the left, then head into the lobby. The other four they spot just off the lobby at the foot of the east stairwell.”

“All dead? Not dying? Dead?” I said.