I, Michael Bennett

Lozada opened the passenger door and put his right foot out onto the sidewalk. He was just standing up when he heard a sudden engine roar and a long tire shriek.

As he glanced forward, he watched as a beat-up white Dodge van veered off the Bowery and stopped directly in front of the cruiser. Its side door rattled open and three squat Hispanic men wearing banda

It took him a fraction of a second to register that they had guns in their hands. Long ones.

They were M4 automatic rifles, Lozada knew. He had one just like them in the trunk of the cruiser.

It would be the last thing he would ever know.

The assassins opened fire, muzzle flashes just visible in the twilight. Lozada was cut down to the concrete immediately as more than a dozen bullets struck his face and throat. Morelli, ru

The shooters in the van continued to fire on the fallen policemen. When their guns were empty, they reloaded, and fired off another magazine apiece into the cop car.

When they were done, the spray-painter hurdled over the body of Lozada and removed a large red plastic jug from the knapsack on his back. Upending the jug, he poured gasoline all over the cop car’s trunk and roof and hood and interior. He tossed the empty jug into the car as he ignited a Zippo lighter with his calloused thumb. He was already in the van by the time the tossed lighter landed on the front seat and the car went up.

The van sped away. The light of the burning NYPD car’s flames flickered on the blood-drenched fallen cops and on what had been spray-painted on the side of the bank building next to their bodies.

D

OS POR

D

ÍA

H

ASTA

Q

UE

S

E

L

IBERA!

Two a day until he is released.

L

IBERTAD

! L

IBERTAD!

F

REE

M

ANUEL

P

ERRINE!

CHAPTER 83

AFTER THE TRIAL, I went straight out to Woodside, Queens, on the number 7 train to look for Mary Catherine.

Seamus had called and left a message to say that Mary Catherine had called the lake house. It was a cryptic call. She needed to spend some time with friends now, she said, and would call back in a few days. I remembered how she had stayed with friends out in Woodside when she first came to the States, so I took a chance of heading out there to see if I might bump into her.

It was a truly desperate move, the act of a madman, really. With more than eight million people in New York City, human beings don’t just bump into each other. I didn’t even know if she was staying in Woodside. She could have been out in the Hamptons or on a plane back to Ireland. Needless to say, I didn’t find her. All I found out as I hit a few bars and wandered up and down Queens Boulevard was how guilty I felt, and how incredibly lonely.

Officer Williams, the gung ho cop assigned to watch my apartment, flashed his lights and quickly got out of his cruiser as I came up West End Avenue to my apartment house around ten. There were two other squad cars on the block now, I noticed. This couldn’t be good.

“There you are! Everybody, and I mean everybody, is looking for you,” Williams said. “Don’t you turn on your phone?”

“The battery died,” I said. “What the heck’s up?”

Heck was up, all right. I sat on the hood of his cruiser, my head going lower and lower, as Williams told me about the double cop execution on Canal Street. When he told me about the message spray-painted on the wall, I closed my eyes. The sergeant who was killed had four kids, his oldest girl at Loyola University.

I sat there as the horror of it all sank in like a dull knife between my shoulder blades. This is what happened now? NYPD cops were being gu

I left Officer Williams and went up to my silent and empty apartment. I thought I was lonely before. I couldn’t have been more wrong. After some rummaging around, I found a dusty bottle of Smirnoff Lemon Twist vodka with a Christmas ribbon on it in the back of my closet. I cracked the cap and sat on my bed, sipping it.

I didn’t bother taking off my trial suit or even my shoes as I propped myself against the headboard. Of course not. When I get shitfaced on discount vodka by myself, I always like to keep it as formal as possible. To cheer myself up, I spun the Christmas bow on my finger and thought about my dead wife, Maeve. I tried to picture her face in my mind, but I couldn’t.

I cried for a bit. For Maeve. For Mary Catherine. For those two dead cops. After a minute or two, I tried to break the bottle by slamming it down on the nightstand. But nothing happened, so I took another sip.

This wasn’t supposed to happen, I thought. None of it. This wasn’t in the original script.

What had I ever asked for? A chance to be a good man. And I had been. Just like my dad, I’d been a cop and put away bad guys. Cleared the streets so that the good people could live their lives, love their wives and husbands, love their kids.

But what was it all for? People weren’t even getting married anymore, and if they had kids, they soon abandoned them to the street, to the Internet. It wasn’t just the times, either. I was starting to think it was humanity. It was changing. People didn’t seem to want to be people anymore.

Ah, who the heck was I to talk? I thought, savoring the warm, lemony, burning Smirnoff. I couldn’t even keep my na

I looked out the window at the lights of the city, at the dark.

“Mary Catherine, where are you?” I whispered. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I need you, Mary Catherine. Please come home.”

CHAPTER 84

THE NEXT MORNING, I had the taxi drop me off on lower Broadway, and I walked across Duane Street in a light rain, past the bomb-squad vans, toward the courthouse. Helicopters rumbled overhead. Though I had declined a police escort, I knew I was being tailed anyway by two cars full of undercover cops, watching my back.

Showered, shaved, and rested despite a hangover, I was wearing my best suit. I’d briefly thought about putting a Kevlar vest underneath it, but then gave it a thumbs-down. Perrine was hiring highly trained mercenaries now. If they got a bead on me, they wouldn’t waste their time killing me with a torso shot but would do it properly, putting a high-velocity bullet or two directly into my head.

Besides, the bulky vest would have ruined the tailored line of my jacket, I thought as I headed across the plaza toward the courthouse steps. Perrine wasn’t the only one who liked to get his GQ on.

Because of the cop killing the previous evening, security had been beefed up, even on top of the already beefed-up security surrounding the courthouse. In addition to the guard booths and hydraulic metal street barriers and truck-bombproof steel pylons, the entire NYPD Hercules team was deployed. Beside a long line of black Suburbans stood a small army of submachine-gun-toting cops wearing helmets and knee pads and armor-plated vests over their NYPD blue fatigues.