James Patterson - I, Michael Bennett

I badged my way through the chaotic crowd in the lobby. People were pouring out of the elevators and stairwells, some talking on cell phones, some crying. It looked like they were in the midst of an evac. My drawn gun set off a buzzer as I hustled through the metal detector against the stream of people exiting the building.

As I was going up the steps, I was almost knocked down by U.S. marshals as they came running down.

With Perrine!

“What is it? What’s happening?” I yelled at them, but they just blew past me into a stairwell. That’s when I heard several shots above me, followed by screaming.

I topped the stairwell, flew down the hallway, and came through the wooden double doors of the courtroom, preceded by my Glock. Off to the right, by the jury box, cops were yelling and swinging, and piling on top of a man. I saw it was a Hispanic man dressed in Dickies work clothes.

I was almost run down as the potential jurors and journalists and spectators who had ducked down between the benches bolted in a stampede for the door. I looked toward the front of the courtroom and saw the holes in the paneling beside the district court seal, huge chunks blown out of the mahogany. Beneath it, the court stenographer was giving CPR to someone.

I spotted robes and realized it was the judge, Susan Baym.

I jumped to the side as a team of EMTs rushed past me toward the fallen woman. I ran up to the front of the room, frantically looking around for Tara. She jumped up and hugged me when I found her, wide-eyed, hiding behind the overturned prosecutor’s table with the rest of the lawyers on her team.

“Tara, it’s okay. It’s over. They got the guy. What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Tara said, staring over to where the EMTs were slipping the judge onto a stretcher. “We were doing the voir dire, and then all of a sudden this janitor was here, firing. He shot the court officer, and then went straight for the judge. He shot her three or four times, Mike. Right in the side of her head. In front of everybody. When more court officers showed up, he barricaded himself behind the judge’s bench. Every time someone would run for the door, he’d pop up and start shooting again. We didn’t know what the hell to do.”

Tara followed the stretcher with her eyes as the EMTs left.

“Perrine assassinated the judge who was going to preside at his own trial, Mike,” Tara said, and started crying. “Don’t you understand? They do this kind of thing in Mexico, and now it’s here, too. Are we safe, Mike? Is my family safe? What the hell is this?”

I stood there, patting her hand like an idiot as my mind reeled.

“It’s okay. It’s over. They got the guy,” I repeated.

Unbelievable, I thought as I stood in the court officers’ basement break room, breathing through my tie.

If there was a word in my vocabulary that I overused, “unbelievable” was it, but was there any other way to describe the sight of three court officers lying dead at your feet, shot point-blank in the head? Not only had they been shot, but it looked like their faces had been scalded or chemically burned.

Day one, I thought blinking at the carnage. This was only day one of jury selection?

I went back upstairs to the courtroom. The medical examiner team was just about to zip up the green body bag over the assassin when I noticed a ribbon of green tattoo ink on the man’s neck.

“Hold up a sec,” I said to the medical examiner’s people as I unbuttoned the man’s work shirt.

I nodded to myself as I squatted over the dead guy. The man had another tattoo, this one over his heart. It looked like a skull wearing a woman’s red shawl. I’d seen it before on the chests of both Perrine’s driver and the shooter I’d killed at Madison Square Garden.

The tattoo was a depiction of Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, a deity at the center of a religious cult that many of the cartels were involved in. The cult was a weird mix of Catholicism and Aztec religion, and Santa Muerte was a kind of evil Virgin Mary figure. Some of the cartel people would offer blood sacrifices to her in exchange for a peaceful death. Sometimes, Mexican drug dealers would even be found shot dead on altars dedicated to Santa Muerte. It was primitive, out there, very spooky stuff.

I was still squatting and staring at the tattoo when my phone rang.

“Bennett here,” I said.

“Hey, pig. How’s your morning? So far so good?” a woman said in Spanish-accented English.

No! I thought, immediately jumping to my feet. My heart started beating like crazy. Though I’d never heard her speak, I knew exactly who it was.

I was talking to the gold-eyed witch who had killed Hughie.

“Look around and take in your world now,” she said. “Death has come, and she is thirsty. She will not leave until you let him go.”

“Ma’am, that’s not how it works here in the good ol’ USA,” I said, trying to recover. “This is how it works. First, we’re going to catch every last one of you, and then we’re going to put you either in jail or the morgue. Got it? Jail or morgue.”

It put a chill down my spine when she laughed. I remembered the unhinged giggle from the moment before she killed Hughie.

“You think you have authority over him because we are in America? You think those bars and walls can actually contain him? You think you are teaching him a lesson, but it is you who will learn. You have offended him. Do you know what happens when you offend a living god?”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Um… floor seats for the Knicks games?”

“Laugh now. You will cry later, I assure you,” she said, and hung up.

“Unbelievable,” I mumbled as I closed my phone and my eyes.

I made some calls and found out they were keeping Perrine in a maximum-security protective custody unit back at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, around the corner from the courthouse.

It was about two in the afternoon, after a lot of favor collecting, when I was allowed to conduct an interview with Perrine concerning the murdered judge.

In an interview room on the second floor, with a one-way mirror along one wall, we sat on plastic chairs on opposite sides of a table. As the guards brought him in, Perrine didn’t look concerned in the slightest about the bloodbath at the courthouse. In fact, he looked happy and at ease, as relaxed as a man who’d just gotten his hair cut.

“You wish to speak with me, Detective?” Perrine said in his weird, accented English as he was handcuffed to the cinder-block wall.

The guard left and closed the door.

“It’s so nice to have a visitor. What shall we talk about?” Perrine said, crossing his legs and leaning back.

“I don’t know. The usual,” I said. “Sports, the weather, your upcoming lethal injection.”

Perrine laughed.

“You think I ordered this hit of the judge, yes?” he said, rocking his chair back and forth. “But you are wrong. I had nothing to do with it. Some men get excited, and they do things. It is the same with a beautiful woman. People fight over her. Is she to blame if someone is hurt?”

“Interesting analogy,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “Since you’re such an insightful guy, maybe you could shed a little light on that skull chick you guys keep drawing on yourselves. She’s what? A cartoon? Like SpongeBob SquarePants?”

He looked at me hard, with a funny smile on his face.

“I would not take La Santa Muerte, or, more properly La Santisima Muerte, so lightly, my friend. Some say the old gods of Mexico are still alive. Who is anyone to dispute it? La Santisima Muerte may seem repulsive to your stale, modern mind, but she and her message and her protections are sound. Death is the only truth in life. Even Catholics believe this.”