I, Michael Bennett

The wacko, beautiful bitch held up a restraining hand as she thumbed a smartphone.

“The mark is where we were informed he would be, as pla

“Yes,” Perrine said on the line from his downtown Manhattan prison cell. “By all means. Kill the son of a bitch.”

Marietta raised a pair of night-vision goggles and trained them on the Newburgh shore. Then she tapped the mercenary gently on the shoulder.

“Do it now!” she said enthusiastically. “Blow the cop’s fucking head off!”

Gabler waited and waited, and then just as the boat rose up from a dip, he squeezed the trigger. The shot, even suppressed to the maximum, made a crisp firecracker pop as the big gun hopped up off the bench rest.

In his sight, Gabler watched the satisfying red explosion of the .408-caliber bullet striking home. It was a direct hit. The huge round entered the cop’s right temple and came out his left, cleanly shearing off the top of his head.

Gabler let out a proud breath as he ejected the warm casing. It was a nice shot, considering all the factors. A tidy little piece of work, if he did say so himself. Even those Navy SEAL wankers who had snipered those Somali pirates would have been impressed.

“I wish you could see this, darling,” Marietta said into her phone. She was still gazing through her night-vision goggles at the carnage as Gabler went below deck with his gear.

“I’m there in spirit, Marietta,” Perrine said as one of the bodyguards winched up the anchor and the streamlined yacht’s engine softly rumbled to life.

CHAPTER 71

IT WAS DARK that Sunday night when Seamus and I pulled into the almost-full parking lot of Saint Patrick’s Church on Grand Street in downtown Newburgh.

No sultry moonlight or romance in sight on this particular summer night, I thought as I got out. Not even close.

The night before, a uniformed on-duty cop had been shot to death in his cruiser. Actually, I guess “assassinated” would be a better term, since it seemed to have been done with a very high-powered rifle. As if that weren’t bad enough, beside the veteran cop was a bag with three kilos of cocaine inside of it.

That’s why Seamus and I were here. Ed Boyanoski had told us about a special emergency meeting of several law enforcement, church, and civic groups who wanted to discuss the latest atrocities and see what could be done about them.

As we crossed the parking lot, I looked out on the lights of Newburgh and thought of the big rip theory in physics. Scientists speculate that the ever-expanding universe will reach a point where forces like gravity can’t hold things together anymore, and everything in the entire universe will tear apart at the same time.

Maybe that’s what was going on, because this killing wasn’t just a hard blow to this small city already on the ropes with drugs and gangs and so many young people shooting each other. It was really starting to look like the knockout punch.

After we passed through a battered metal door, we descended some steps into the church’s dank basement, where the meeting hall was. The people there were a mix of Spanish-speaking businessmen and laborers, concerned-looking black moms and grandmoms, and blue- and white-collar Caucasians. The Newburgh PD was well represented, too. Ed and Bill were in the center of the front row, with Walrond and Groover and most of the guys from the gang unit. I passed trauma surgeon Dr. Mary A

If there was a common thread among them, it seemed to be devastation. There was also some shock, and even more fear.

I walked over to Ed, who was standing beside a plate of ci

“Is this the part where I say, ‘Hi, my name’s Mike, and I’m an alcoholic’?” I said as I grabbed a coffee.

“I feel like becoming an alcoholic with the way things are looking around here,” Ed said dourly.

Okay, then, I thought as I found a metal folding chair. So much for the witty banter.

An older Hispanic woman with brightly dyed blond hair spoke first.

“I have a seventeen-year-old nephew in jail for murder,” she said. “My son isn’t even in a gang, but he’s been shot. It’s like the Wild West out there, or Iraq. Please, won’t someone help us?”

After she sat back down, a regal young black woman wearing business clothes and carrying an infant in a baby carrier stepped to the front of the room.

“Hi, everyone. I’m Tasha Je

As she sat, a mustached white guy in an Orange County Choppers T-shirt and dusty jeans stood up.

“She’s right,” he said angrily. “That’s exactly what we need. We need a Giuliani. Some hard-ass who will make the cops do their goddamn jobs instead of stealing drugs!”

That got some hearty applause from the let’s-make-the-cops-put-down-the-doughnuts crowd. I looked over at Ed and Bill, who paid informants out of their own pockets and didn’t look like they had gotten a good night’s sleep in years, let alone taken a vacation.

“Giuliani?” someone called out. “That guy was a Nazi!”

“Damn straight he was a Nazi,” Mustache said. “The Nazi who saved New York City.”

The rest of the meeting wasn’t very effective. There was a lot of yelling, people venting their frustration. You couldn’t blame them. The Newburgh residents wanted their city back. They wanted to do the right thing for their town and for their families.

But how?

CHAPTER 72

THE FIRST TIME Seamus spoke was when we got back into the minibus.

“I was thinking about what that nice young woman said,” he said after he clicked his seat belt in place. “About turning around New York. Did you know that Giuliani wasn’t the first crusader to clean up New York?”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“It happened in the late eighteen hundreds. The plight of the Irish in New York City after the 1849 potato famine was far worse than that of the poor people here in Newburgh. The Irish were considered a menace to society, and the run-down parts of the city where they lived were rife with crime and drugs, prostitution and gangs, and deplorable conditions.”

“We were the original gangsters?” I said with a grin.

“Exactly,” Seamus said in his brogue. “What turned it around was a moral and cultural revolution. A bishop named John Hughes went into the slums and took the people to task, condemning their criminality on the one hand and offering a sense of self-respect and hope through God on the other. Hughes was actually the one who started the Catholic school system. With his efforts, in a generation, all the criminals were cops and the Irish were solid citizens.”

“You think that might work, Father?” I said skeptically. “Me and you should walk down Lander Street thumping a Bible? I mean, really? Could I hollow mine out for my Glock?”