James Patterson: I, Michael Bennett

Absolutely shot from the arrest and all my walking, I took a cab home to my West End Avenue apartment. As much as I love my huge family, I was very happy to find it silent and empty. The day I’d just had and the horrors I’d just seen were things I didn’t want to share with anyone. Not ever.

I went back to my room and took the longest, hottest shower in history. Then I did what any self-respecting stressed-out cop would do. I got dressed and made myself a cup of coffee and went back to work.

First on my to-do list was to drive out to Woodlawn in my unmarked PD car to tell Hughie’s family. By the time I drove down the street, I knew from all the cars and the lights blazing that Hughie’s family had already been told, thank God.

Coming out of the car, I saw two of his brothers, Eamon and Fergus, smoking on the stoop in their FDNY uniforms. I remembered sitting on the same stoop on Saturday mornings in my polyester Little League jersey waiting for Hughie so we could walk up to Van Cortlandt Park for our games. I hugged both brothers and offered my condolences before I explained what happened, how Hughie had saved my life.

“Out like a man,” Fergus said, wiping a tear. “He always had balls. Too many, maybe. Well, he’s with Pop now.”

“But is that such a good thing?” Eamon said, wiping his eyes and flicking his cigarette out into the street. “The crazy old bastard probably already has him training, making him do chin-ups on Saint Peter’s gate.”

We were laughing at that when a frail and haggard old woman in a flowered housecoat appeared at the door.

“Michael Bennett, is that you?” Hughie’s mom said in her thick Northern Ireland accent as she beamed at me.

Hughie had told me that she had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and they were trying to make arrangements for her to move in with one of them.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. McDonough,” I said, gently taking her tiny hands.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said, staring at me with her rheumy blue eyes. “The party is just starting. Is he with you? Is Hughie with you? All my boys are here except for my baby, Hughie.”

I stood there speechless, holding her skinny hands, until Fergus took them from me and led his poor old mother back inside.

It was about nine o’clock when I finally pulled up in front of the Thirty-Fourth Precinct again. I spotted two news vans on the corner as I went inside. After the broad-daylight midtown shootout and the deaths of three cops, I had a funny feeling I’d be seeing more of them.

Upstairs, the cops on the task force team were filling out paperwork. Every eye in the room swiveled on me as I came through the door, as though I’d just come back from the dead.

“Okay, what’s the scoop, troops?” I said, ignoring the gawking.

After someone gave me back my gun, they told me the feds had Perrine in the federal lockup downtown, near Centre Street. He’d already lawyered up and wasn’t talking to anyone. Of the attractive young woman who had murdered Hughie, Detective Martinez, and the Midtown South beat cop at the booth, there was no sign.

“Press conference is set for tomorrow down at Fed Plaza,” the SWAT leader, Patrick Zaretski, told me. “Everyone will understand if you don’t want to be there.”

“You kidding me? I love press conferences. I mean, never waste a crisis, right?” I said. “It’s just too bad Detective Martinez and Hughie won’t be able to make it.”

But the longest day of my life wasn’t over.

I was at the end of one of the paper-covered tables, filling out incident reports and calling up my various bosses to assure them I hadn’t completely cracked up, when we heard the noise. It was from outside, down on Broadway-a loud metal thump, followed by tires shrieking and then a long, wailing scream.

I ran downstairs and saw a form sprawled facedown between two unmarked police department Chevys. It was a young woman, her black skirt completely torn on one side, her white shirt covered in blood. I knelt beside her and then reared back as I saw the short black hair and the face framed by silver hoop earrings.

It was Valentina Jimenez, my informant. After I checked for a pulse that I knew I wouldn’t find, I looked at the deep ligature burns along her wrists. There were cigarette holes along her collarbone and two star-shaped, point-blank bullet wounds in her right and left cheeks. She’d been thoroughly tortured before someone had executed her.

Instead of getting angry as I knelt there, all I felt was numbing coldness spreading from my chest to the rest of my body.

This was payback for the arrest, I realized. This was Perrine showing me what he could do.

“Coward” was right, I thought. I should have pulled the trigger when I had the chance. If I had, this girl would probably still be alive.

After a minute, I did the only thing there was left to do. I took off my suit jacket and lay it over the poor girl as I sat down beside her.

There were flowers in the shape of the Yankees logo, flowers in the form of an American flag, and green, white, and gold flowers arranged in the shape of a Celtic cross.

Hughie’s casket sat in the center of them, candlelight shining on its closed, varnished pine lid. There was music playing from the funeral parlor speakers overhead-Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, that crushing, ineffably sad classical piece from the movie Platoon.

Not that any help was needed to produce crushing, ineffable sadness today, I thought as I signed the visitors’ book.

I’d been to Irish wakes before, but this one was outrageous. Half the Hibernian people in New York seemed to have made the pilgrimage to Woodlawn. A three-block-long line of mourners stood on McLean Avenue waiting to pay Hughie their respects. An FDNY fire truck stood outside the funeral parlor next to cop cars from New York and Yonkers and Westchester, their spinning lights flashing red, white, and blue on the regiments of sad, pale faces.

I’d just come from Detective Martinez’s wake out in Brooklyn and had another wake for the Midtown South cop to hit before tomorrow’s two funerals. I hadn’t seen this many funeral parlors since 9/11. Or sadness. Or broken people.

My bosses had forced me to speak to a PD shrink for a psychological debriefing. Though I didn’t hear word one of what the nice doctor woman tried to tell me, as I came out of her office, I decided that I wasn’t allowed to feel bad about what Hughie had done for me.

His act of courage was so incredible and selfless, all I could do was be happy and in awe of it. All I could do was to try to make myself live up to his sacrifice. It wasn’t going to happen, but I had to try.

The family had laid out about five hundred photographs of Hughie around the funeral parlor. Hughie in swimming pools; in Santa Claus suits. Hughie putting his fingers up behind his brothers’ heads. I was in a few of the older ones, me and Hughie in graduation gowns. Hughie and me with a couple of young ladies we met on a college trip to Myrtle Beach. I smiled as I remembered how Hughie, a true classic clown, had picked up the two by feigning a British accent.

Then it was my turn at Hughie’s coffin.

I dropped to my knees and said my prayer. I tried to imagine Hughie on the other side of the wood right in front of me, but I couldn’t.

It was because he wasn’t there, I realized suddenly. His spirit was long gone, roaring somewhere through the universe in the same no-holds-barred, awe-inspiring way it had roared through this world.

I finally laid my palm on the cool wood as I stood, and then I turned and gave a hug to Hughie’s mother, sitting beside it.