James Patterson - I, Michael Bennett

Out came my Glock. Around me, I saw at least half a dozen other cops and DEA guys from the wake draw as well. Even one of the pipe-band guys had a piece out, a. 45, pointed at the Escalade’s windshield.

“Drop it! Drop it! Drop it!” everyone was yelling.

“Listen to me,” the pretty-boy gangbanger said. “We got a warning to you from our king. He’s not going to stand for this shit. You want to live? You want your family to live, you better wise up. Bad shit is about to go down. Kind you never seen before. You understand? You got all that? Message received? Now back off before we put you in a pine box next to your friend.”

When I turned, I saw Patrick Zaretski, the DEA SWAT guy, with his SIG Sauer leveled at the driver’s temple. The safety was off, and his finger was firmly on the trigger. I could tell by the look in his eye that he was more than ready to blow the driver away.

“Not here, Patrick,” I said. “Look at the heavy weapons they have. There are too many innocent people here. Better to let them roll, and we’ll call it in.”

After a moment, he reluctantly nodded and stood down, along with the rest of the outraged cops.

As the gangbanger SUVs pulled out onto McLean Avenue, a motorcycle roared up behind them, a huge black Suzuki Hayabusa. Its rider flicked down the helmet visor as the bike passed. I caught a glimpse of a face-a fine-boned face with black hair and gold eyes-and then the bike was screaming as it streaked away.

That was the worst outrage of all, I thought as I stood there with my mouth open, watching the woman who had killed Hughie roar away.

As the SUVs tore down McLean Avenue behind the motorcycle, we all jumped on our cell phones to call in a car stop. Twenty minutes later, we heard that the local precinct found the expensive cars abandoned five blocks away. It turned out both SUVs were stolen, and the men had probably switched cars.

It had been an elaborate operation. All for what? To warn us? To intimidate us? It had worked. I was definitely shaken up. My friend’s wake had come incredibly close to becoming a bloody massacre.

“What does it mean?” Tara asked me back in Rory Dolan’s, as I ordered another Jameson’s-a double this time. “Why would these men do this? Why come here? Haven’t they done enough?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I had been a cop for a long time, but I couldn’t deny how scary this felt. It seemed like I was looking at something entirely new.

“I don’t know, Tara,” I finally said, truthfully. “I have absolutely no freaking clue.”

Not too far from SoHo and Wall Street, the MCC, or Metropolitan Correctional Center, is a twelve-story concrete bunker located on Park Row, behind the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse at Foley Square.

In a break room on the eighth floor, Manuel Perrine, the Sun King, flicked an imaginary dust speck from the sleeve of his baggy prison jumpsuit as he listened to a phone call. He nodded, and nodded again, then said, “Very good,” and thumbed off the iPhone.

With the phone’s video FaceTime feature, he’d just watched the whole incident at the cop’s wake in the Bronx. The chaos, the baffled-looking cops. In real time, no less. It was as though he’d been there himself. Good com was essential to all operations. What field marshal would have it any other way?

Being in jail was no excuse to avoid strategizing. Already there were planes taking off and packages being delivered, arrangements being set in motion. He was still in a position to put his considerable resources to good use.

Still, the indignity of every moment spent in this place was such an unforgivable offense. The steel grid embedded into an air shaft that passed for a window in his cell; the metal bunk beds and white brick walls. The amount of money he had spent on the operation in bribes alone, so that he could sneak in and out of the country, was insane. And yet here he was, back where he started, in a squalid rat cage. All of it was for nothing.

He’d already ordered the death of his old friend Candelerio and his entire family. He would then kill Candelerio’s crew after all was said and done. They needed to be taught, brutally taught. Everyone involved would be held up as an example of what happened when a king was crossed. Every knee would bend for the crime of his being put in this unclean box in this concrete coffin of a city.

He tapped his nose where the cop had shattered it. There was tape over the gauze now, a ridiculous X, like the burial spot on a treasure map. All his life fighting, and no one had ever broken it until now.

He looked up with his heavy-lidded blue eyes when a bald, muscular guard came in. But the guard wasn’t there to bring him back to his cell. Perrine wasn’t supposed to be in the break room in the first place.

There was another person with the jacked-up guard, a prisoner with a black eye in a baggy jumpsuit identical to his own.

The handsome young blond inmate was named Jonathan Alder, and he was in for running a Wall Street Ponzi scheme. Now, instead of bilking senior citizens out of their retirement savings in his silk moire suspenders, Jonathan reluctantly provided a whole host of new services to his fellow cons. The soft, freshly turned-out punk bitch had been a gift to Perrine from the jail’s current shot caller, a notoriously brutal incarcerated Mob boss. It was a sign of respect. A housewarming present that Perrine-bored, enraged, violent, and incredibly frustrated-couldn’t wait to unwrap.

Standing, Perrine grabbed Jonathan Alder’s chin and looked him over carefully, like a man inspecting a horse he was about to purchase. He caught one of the jewel-like tears that dropped from the shivering young man’s eyes and giggled as he licked it off his palm. Yummy. He turned to the guard.

“Do you have the other item?” Perrine asked in his strange French-like accent.

“How could I forget?” the tan musclehead of a guard, whose name was Doug Styles, said as he reached into his shirt pocket and handed Perrine a fat white wax-paper packet of prime Peruvian coke.

“Anything else, monsieur? Hope you find the service to your liking,” the hard-eyed guard said sarcastically. His voice was the deep, rough, not-to-be-trifled-with bark of a drill sergeant.

Perrine looked up at the guard thoughtfully. Every man had his price, and Doug’s here was three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in tens and twenties delivered to his shit-box split-level in East Brunswick, New Jersey. Doug thought it was just for the phone and other courtesies, but of course that was just the beginning of the arrangements.

“No, thank you, Doug. How long do you think Jonathan and I have to become acquainted? I don’t want to make trouble for you.”

Doug raised his beefy forearm and checked his watch.

“Twenty more minutes. Night count is coming up.”

“Yes, yes. Twenty minutes is nice, but half an hour would be so much better,” Perrine said, batting his baby blues at the guard. The deep creases of his dimples showed as he smiled.

“Really? How about eight hours and a mint under your pillow for you two lovebirds? Screw you, you sick bastard. I’m in charge here. You want a phone? I can get you a phone or this worthless punk, that’s fine. But if you think you can lean on me, you’re going to find yourself down in sub-basement two in twenty-four solitary, drinking your frog’s legs through a broken jaw. You don’t own me. Don’t for a second think you own me.”

Perrine waited a long second and then put up his palms in a conceding gesture.

“I understand completely, Doug. I did not want to step on your toes. You are indeed the boss.”

“Damn straight,” Styles said.