I, Michael Bennett

“The Maldives?” I said, raising an eyebrow as if I were considering it. “They do sound pleasant, but the question is would they be more pleasant than what I’m going to do to you on that witness stand? More pleasant than watching your face when the verdict is read?”

I could see a vein pulse on Perrine’s neck as I slowly shook my head.

“Sorry, Perrine. Truly, my apologies,” I whispered back. “But even a silly clown like me wouldn’t miss that for the entire world.”

CHAPTER 57

THE METRO-NORTH TRAIN back to the lake house in Newburgh was half empty that night after nine o’clock. I didn’t read a paper or send out any e-mails. All I did for an hour straight was sip the Budweiser tallboy I’d bought in Grand Central as I sat in a window seat on the Hudson River side, listening to the clickety-clack of the train. If I’d had a harmonica, I would have busted into the saddest blues solo ever heard as I stared out at the dark water and chugga-chugga choo-chooed it north up the Hudson Valley.

And I didn’t even know how to play the harmonica.

That pretty much summed up how good things weren’t going in United States v. Perrine. Due both to Perrine’s unsettling presence and his legal team’s constant stream of delays, I didn’t get anywhere near testifying. By day’s end, only the selection of the final members of the jury had been nailed down.

The whole day had been nothing but one long, exhausting, frustrating emotional grind. At least for all the good people involved. The worst part was having to watch Perrine sit through the proceedings, sipping Perrier, with his dream-team legal counsel alongside him. Every few minutes, he’d swivel around to give me a little wink along with his arrogant Cheshire cat smile.

After court and a quick powwow with Tara and the rest of the prosecutors, I’d thought briefly about staying over in the apartment, then decided against it. Everyone would probably be asleep by the time I made it back to the lake house, but it didn’t matter. The need to be with my guys, especially Eddie and Brian, over the last week was undeniable.

Was it guilt over not being able to protect them?

No doubt it was.

I couldn’t stop thinking about what a miracle it was that they weren’t dead, and that we weren’t pla

As the lonely lights of the Tappan Zee Bridge swung past on my left, I got a text message from Mary Catherine asking me if she should come to pick me up in Beacon. I begged off, texting back that I’d just get a taxi.

Though she’d certainly be a sight for my very sore eyes, I actually had one more stop to make before calling my heck of a long day a night.

I needed to meet up with Newburgh detectives Moss and Boyanoski, who had notified me that there was some potential progress on my kids’ case.

Forty minutes later, after exiting the train, I waved over a beat-up Chevy gypsy cab waiting in the Beacon train station’s otherwise deserted parking lot. The cabbie was a surprisingly young Hispanic girl with blue hair and earrings in her lower lip and colorful tattoos covering one arm, as though she’d been attacked by a gang of graffiti vandals. I could see that underneath all the junk was a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old young lady with gentle blue eyes who should have been home packing her book bag with paper and sharpened pencils for the new school year instead of out hustling for fares.

“Where to?” she asked before I could ask her if her parents knew where she was.

I shook my head. I had enough on my plate, I decided. Too much, probably.

“The Newburgh police department,” I told her, plopping down into the backseat.

CHAPTER 58

WE ROLLED OVER the Newburgh–Beacon Bridge back into the run-down town that had almost taken the lives of two of my kids.

I still couldn’t get over the dichotomy between the town’s Gilded Age history—not to mention its pleasant layout and architecture—and its current decrepit state. Every other house seemed to be a Carpenter Gothic or a Greek Revival or a Queen A

I continued to shake my head as we pulled onto the four-lane thoroughfare called Broadway. With its forty-five-degree parking and three-story brick buildings, it looked quintessentially American, like a street scene in an Edward Hopper painting. I was almost expecting a trolley car to turn one of the corners or a soda jerk to walk out of one of the corner stores in a bow tie and white paper hat. But like so many Rust Belt towns in the northeast, Newburgh reminded me of the scene from It’s a Wonderful Life in which George Bailey gets to see his hometown as it would have been had he never been born.

Talk about wasted potential, I thought. What the heck had happened to this once beautiful place? Staring out at Newburgh’s blighted streets, I wondered if George Bailey had maybe caught a bullet in a drive-by.

“I knew I should’ve taken Water Street,” the cabbie said before letting out a loud, slow, scared breath.

We stopped at a red light near Lutheran Street. I leaned forward and watched as a group of teenage black kids crossed in front of the cab. Every one of them was wearing a red do-rag, whether tied to their wrists or peeking out from under their hoods and ball caps. Staring back at their swaggering and arrogant malevolence, I was reminded of Perrine’s demeanor in the courtroom. Like Perrine, these kids seemed quite used to driving fear into people’s hearts. In fact, they seemed to enjoy it.

I instantly felt myself getting worked up, really starting to seethe. The Newburgh detectives had already told me that the town’s drug trade was run by the Bloods and the Latin Kings, and that it looked like it was a member of the rag-wearing Bloods who had shot my sons.

I couldn’t take my eyes off them as the group made the opposite corner. I was seeing red, all right. All I kept thinking was that my outgoing son Eddie wasn’t so outgoing anymore. That these bastards might have screwed him up for the rest of his life.

By the time the light turned green, I was done. I literally couldn’t take it anymore.

“Wait. Stop. Let me out here,” I said to the driver.

“What the heck? What are you doing?” my young blue-haired cabbie said. “You don’t want to get out on this block. This is like the ’hood, you know what I’m sayin’? The police department is only a couple of blocks down.”

Instead of answering her, I dropped a twenty into the front seat.

I opened the door with the hand that wasn’t holding my quickly drawn and cocked Glock.

Now it was time for some answers.

CHAPTER 59

“HEY, WHAT HAVE we here?” one of the gangbangers said as the cab sped away. “That Men’s Wearhouse two-for-one you wearing says you definitely ain’t no pimp. You one of Newburgh’s Finest? Or maybe you Bill O’Reilly from the TV?”

The rest of his crew broke up laughing as I approached the north side of Broadway. Every ground-floor business up and down the beat-up block was closed, I noticed. Nothing but steel gates in both directions as far as the eye could see. Everyone had gotten out of Dodge, which was only smart because drug gangs like these Bloods protected their turf with beatings and stabbings and shootings.