I, Michael Bennett

The head jokester was a thin, six-foot-three kid of about nineteen. He was relaxed, smiling, enjoying himself. A broad-shouldered youth sitting on the corner mailbox beside him took a toke of the blunt he was smoking and blew the rancid smoke in my direction.

As I approached them, I felt a flicker of fear for the first time as the sane part of my mind began to realize what kind of situation I was putting myself in. There were six of them. Two of them were ski

Armed cop or not, I was all alone and didn’t even know where the hell I was. What the hell was I doing? You needed backup in an area like this. SWAT, maybe.

But then I did a smart thing. I told the rational Dr. Jekyll part of me to put a sock in it, and let the unhinged Mr. Hyde part of me begin to roll.

“No, no. I’m not Bill O’Reilly,” I said with a laugh as I finally showed them what was in my hand.

They reared back, whoa-ing and raising their hands in unison as I leveled my chunky black polymer Glock in their faces. The gangbangers stood in complete shock, absolutely frozen, as though I’d just conjured up an elephant or a cruise ship out of thin air.

“But I am looking for news,” I said. “You guys hear about some little kids that got shot over on Lander Street last week? Speak up, fellas. I can’t hear you. I heard the shooter was wearing a red Yankees cap. You guys look like red’s your favorite color, like maybe you shop at the same store. I’ll ask nice one more time. Who shot those kids?”

They kept staring at me in mute wonder.

The fu

As a cop, you draw your gun for one reason: to kill someone. You don’t wing people, you don’t let off warning shots. When you take out your gun, it’s for putting bullets into someone’s head or chest before they can do the same to you. If you’re not willing to go that far, then you leave it in the holster.

“Hey, chill, Officer,” the pot-smoking tough finally said. “We didn’t do nothing. This ain’t Lander Street. This be the east end. Just chill. We got no beef with you.”

“Oh, yes, you do, homey,” I growled, my knuckles whitening around the grip of my gun. “See, those kids who got shot, they were my kids. I’m not a cop here. I’m a father. Now you tell me right now which one of you red-rag-wearing jackasses shot my kids or by tomorrow morning, your girlfriends and mommas are going to be laying out so many damn memorial candles on this corner it’s going to be lit up like Times Square.”

That’s when I heard it. It was the high squeal of tires behind me. For a second, I panicked, thinking my Irish temper had finally gone and gotten my dumb ass killed. For a moment, I was seriously convinced that I was about to get run over or hosed in a drive-by.

Then over the engine roar of the rapidly approaching car, I heard a glorious sound. It was the metallic double woop of a squad-car growler. The flickering blue and red lights made the darkened north side of Broadway look like a carnival as the car screeched to a stop at my back.

The gang kids scattered as I turned around, holstering my weapon.

Two cops got out of the unmarked car and stood behind its flung-open doors.

“Hi, Mike. Um, out for an evening stroll?” Detective Bill Moss said, rolling his eyes.

His partner, Ed Boyanoski, shook his head at me with an expression somewhere between disappointment and awe.

“Well, what do you know? The cavalry, right on time,” I said.

“Let me guess. Long day at the office, Mike?” Bill said as I climbed into the backseat.

I smiled.

“It was, but that little meet and greet has rejuvenated me all of a sudden,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “I think I just got my second wind.”

CHAPTER 60

INSTEAD OF HEADING to the police department, the detectives took me to an all-night diner a little north of the city, near the interstate, to meet their colleagues.

At a semicircular red vinyl booth toward the rear of the chrome-and-mirrored space, I was introduced to Sergeant Grant Walrond and Officer Timothy Groover. Walrond was Mike-Tyson stocky, a young friendly black cop with a dry sense of humor. Groover, on the other hand, was white and tall, with a mullet hairdo that made him look more like a farmer than a cop. Both of them were extremely dedicated veteran cops and were the major players in the Newburgh PD gang unit.

Bill Moss said, “Sergeant Walrond here received some information this afternoon that the shooter was a Blood, but not from Lander Street.”

“The kid we got word about is pretty well known,” Walrond said. “His name’s James Glaser, but they call him Jay D. He’s a Blood from the east end, a low-level punk who jumps from crew to crew because he’s a loose-ca

“Got more holes in him than a colander,” Groover mumbled over the rim of his coffee cup.

“Crew to crew?” I said. “How many Bloods are there?”

“About a hundred and fifty members altogether,” Walrond said.

“In a town of thirty thousand?” I said in shock. “When the heck did all this start? I thought the Bloods were an L.A. thing.”

“It’s true that most of the gangs, like the Bloods and the Latin Kings, originated in L.A. and Chicago,” Groover said. “But because selling drugs is so profitable, members started branching out to expand their markets. Most of the gang members in Newburgh are offshoots of the gangs in New York, primarily those on Rikers Island, which are predominantly run by the Bloods and the Latin Kings.”

“Usually, the gang will make contacts among the locals and contract out the street sales,” Walrond added. “The locals are brought into the gang, taught its culture and rules, and pretty soon you have yourself a serious problem. The Newburgh kids are like kids anywhere else—just bored teenagers looking for direction and excitement. When the gang rep shows up, it’s like a match on gasoline.”

“The gangs provide direction, all right,” Bill Moss piped in. “How to get to the graveyard before your twenty-first birthday. We had seven murders last year. Six of them were male gangbangers under the age of twenty-five. The seventh was a second grade girl caught in the crossfire.”

I shook my head. And I thought New York was bad.

Sergeant Walrond excused himself as he received a text message.

“All right. Here we go,” he said. “That’s Pops. He’s one of my informants. Why don’t you come meet him with us, Mike? He’s sort of a street guy, but he actually feels for how bad Newburgh has gotten. He feels especially horrible about what happened to your kids.”

Walrond didn’t have to ask me twice.

We met Pops a block away, in the empty parking lot of a medical office building. He was a heavyset, kind of goofy, fast-talking black guy with a deep voice who reminded me of the clownish old-school rapper Biz Markie.

“Like I was tellin’ you, Sarge,” Pops said. “It wasn’t the Bloods shot those kids. Shootin’ customers be bad for business, ’specially white ones ’fraid to come into the ’hood in the first place.”

“But Jay D is a Blood,” Walrond argued.

“Aw, he just a peewee. He got no rank,” Pops said dismissively. “Plus the kid’s just damn crazy. The way I heard it, he was working with the Kings, man. He was like hired out.”