James Patterson - I, Michael Bennett

“Yeah?” Ramon said. “Deal was half later for getting the job done. I was told there was a lot of screamin’ after you left the scene. Dead don’t scream, last I heard.”

The kid waved a hand.

“Don’t mean nothing,” he said. “I shot ’em up good with my trusty. 380. Those kids are done.”

A double knock suddenly came from the door behind Ramon’s desk.

At the sound, Ramon bent and spun the dial of the floor safe beside his chair. He reached in and took out a manila envelope with what looked like two paperback books in it. He flung it at the kid. The kid took out the twenty thousand dollars that was inside and flipped through the hundreds. He sniffed at the money with relish before he put it back into the envelope and slid the envelope into his knapsack.

When Jay D was gone, the rear office door opened, and the woman, Marietta, from Manuel Perrine’s organization entered with her two bodyguards. When she stopped before him, Ramon stared at a spot on the wall just to the left of her exquisite face. Anything that had to do with Perrine or his billion-dollar organization was as touchy as a bomb defusing. Even the tiniest offense or misstep, and- ba-boom!

“I’m not sure how successful this has been,” Ramon said. “The… um, children were shot, but I don’t know how badly. Please, let me first apologize to you and then to the great Manuel, who-”

She cut him off with a look.

“That’s not necessary, Ramon. What is done is sufficient for our purposes. The policeman will get the message. You have done well. I will let Manuel know that the Latin Kings have as always proven their loyalty to him. He will be very pleased.”

Ramon looked away as she left. He didn’t even look at the bodyguards. That crowd was from a different planet. Their drugs were pure, their supply line as reliable as Walmart’s. But they really believed in all that Santa Muerte stuff. That’s why you didn’t mess around. He’d heard the rumors. Make the wrong move, and you woke up on a stone altar with some freak spouting mumbo jumbo as he raised a knife over your chest.

Ramon took a bottle of wine out of a drawer. He trimmed the foil and popped it open with a corkscrew. He knew he should probably aerate it and let it breathe, but he didn’t give a shit. He found a balloon glass and gave himself a nice pour.

It was a four-hundred-dollar bottle of ’89 Chateau d’Yquem that he was saving for a special occasion. Having pulled off his dealings with the Perrine cartel without a bullet to his head qualified as a special occasion in spades.

He sighed and finally closed his eyes and took a sip. Honey, tobacco, some vanilla notes. Happy still-alive day to me, he thought.

I woke with a start in the predawn dark of my lake cabin bedroom, bathed in a pool of cold sweat.

It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence of late, unfortunately. In fact, every night of the week since my kids had been assaulted, I kept having a terrible recurring nightmare.

In the dream, I’m running, frantically searching for Eddie and Brian through some dark city streets, and right at the moment I finally spot them in the distance, at the end of some impossibly long alleyway, I hear these awful reverberating cracks of gunfire and wake up with a stifled scream in my throat.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to interpret the dream, since I was spending much of my time feeling horrendously guilty for not being there for them, for failing to protect them when they needed me most. Mary Catherine and Seamus told me several times that I needed to stop beating myself up about it, but try as I might, I just couldn’t.

I guess if there was any consolation, it was that the boys were home from the hospital and seemed to be healing. Dr. Mary Ann Walker from St. Luke’s had been right about there not being any complications with either of my sons’ wounds, thank God, but I guess it wasn’t the physical damage I was most worried about.

Brian seemed to have come around the emotional corner, already making jokes about how the bullet left in his neck would make him a lifetime TSA target. It was Eddie who was most concerning. Normally the life of the party, he seemed to have drawn into himself like a turtle into its shell. The other kids told me he was also yelling in his sleep, no doubt reliving the horror of what had happened to him.

It just broke my heart to see him like that. Thirteen-year-old boys have enough on their plates in the growing-up department without throwing post-traumatic stress disorder into the mix.

That’s why over the last seven days, I’d been meeting up with the Newburgh police. Even though I was probably harassing Detective Bill Moss and his friendly grizzly bear of a partner, Detective Edward Emmanuel Boyanoski, with my constant inquiries, they’d been more than tolerant. In fact, as fellow cops and fathers, they couldn’t have been more understanding.

They let me ride along with them on canvasses and even let me sit in on a few interviews. So far, no one in the tightly knit Lander Street drug neighborhood was talking about the shooting, but the two veteran detectives assured me they wouldn’t stop until they got to the bottom of it.

I hoped they were right. For my boys’ sake and everyone else’s.

I finally sat up, yawning. Outside the window, over the still, dark lake, there was only the faintest light in the sky, but already the whippoorwills were whippoorwilling to beat the band.

They actually weren’t the only early birds out to get a worm this morning. I had to go back into New York City today. The Perrine trial was resuming after the shooting of Judge Baym at the federal courthouse, and there was a possibility that I might be called to testify. For my departed buddy, Hughie, I needed to go in and do whatever I could to nail the coffin shut on the evil, bloodsucking cartel king Perrine.

I was finally getting to my feet when there was a soft knock on my bedroom door, and Mary Catherine came in with a cup of coffee.

“You’re up already. Good,” she whispered, quickly handing me the chipped blue mug. “Do you want to eat a little first, or shower?”

If there was anyone worried about our gang as much as I was, it was MC. She was one of those people who, when nervous, gets busy. So from sunup to sundown, when she wasn’t directing camp activities, she was a domestic whirlwind of baking and cleaning and cutting the grass. When she went out to paint the mailbox the day before, one of the neighbors asked us if we were fixing to sell the place.

Over the rim of my coffee mug, I noticed the blue glow of the stove light in the kitchen just as I caught a heavenly aroma.

“Bacon?” I said, walking into the kitchen and setting my empty mug onto the countertop. “I thought I told you not to fuss, Mary Catherine. I’m glad you didn’t listen to me.”

“It’s not me who’s fussing. That’s Seamus manning the stove. He insisted on a hot meal for you before your trip into the city,” she said, smiling.

“Wow, I’m really touched,” I said, refilling my coffee. “The old codger really does care about me after all, huh?”

“Why? Because he woke up so early?” Mary Catherine said.

“No,” I explained. “Because frying bacon is how we stoic Irishmen say I love you.”

Forty-five minutes later, clean-shaven and wearing my best trial suit, I waved good-bye to Mary Catherine after being dropped off across the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge at the Beacon Metro-North train station.

As I got onto the Grand Central Terminal-bound 7:21 train a few minutes later, I noticed something odd. Over the tops of their Wall Street Journals and smartphones, some of the business commuters sitting near me were giving me double takes. Not warm, fuzzy ones, either. Even though I was wearing dapper attire, they kept glancing over at me suspiciously, as if they thought I was about to star in the latest YouTube subway fight video.