James Patterson: I, Michael Bennett

“There’s a picture of Candelerio’s family on my desk. Text it to me pronto,” I said to the detective manning the shop.

Less than a minute later, my phone vibrated, and Hughie and I looked at the photo, which was tagged with the family members’ names. I looked more closely at the oldest daughter’s face and smiled.

“I knew it. Look at the oldest one. She has darker skin than the others. And her eyes-she has blue eyes. Both Candelerio and his wife have brown eyes, and she has light blue eyes. That’s impossible. How did we miss it?” I said.

“You’re right. She even looks like Perrine!” Hughie yelled. “Shit! That’s it! That’s goddamn it. You’re a genius. Daisy must be Perrine’s daughter.”

“That FBI lifer was right,” I said. “Perrine isn’t risking his ass coming to the States for money. It’s to see his daughter graduate.”

Hughie answered his ringing phone.

“Candelerio just passed the exit for Washington Heights and is continuing downtown,” he said. “Aerial is staying on him. SWAT wants to know what’s what.”

“Tell them to saddle up and move ’em out,” I said excitedly as I started down the stairs. “We’re jumping to plan B now. Looks like we have a graduation to attend.”

Ten minutes later, our four-car task force caravan was gunning it south, sirens ripping, down the West Side Highway.

Hughie was at the wheel as I worked the phone and radio, coordinating with my bosses and the other arrest teams. I don’t know which was flying faster, the frazzled cop-radio traffic or the highway’s guardrail, zipping an inch past my face at around ninety.

“Thank God you added that ass-covering rider to your arrest report, huh?” Hughie shouted as he tried to set a new land speed record. He gave a rebel yell as the traffic cone we clipped sailed over the guardrail into the Hudson River.

My partner seemed to be enjoying himself, but I wasn’t feeling it. Not even close. I’d called NYU law school and learned that graduation was to take place at 12:30 today, but not at the law school.

It was taking place at Madison Square Garden!

Thousands of people were supposed to be there, and we were somehow supposed to pluck Perrine from the crowd? Safely? The towers of midtown began to loom on my left. I didn’t know how or even if that could be done.

We killed the sirens when we got off the West Side Highway at Thirty-Fourth Street. It took a few minutes to weave through the heavy Manhattan gridlock to the Garden, on Seventh Avenue at Thirty-Second Street. As we turned the corner, we could see that people were already pouring into the famed arena-smiling, well-dressed families holding balloons and video cameras, surrounding twentysomethings in black-and-purple gowns.

Even if we spotted Perrine at this thing, there had to be a million ways in and out of the Garden, I thought, rapidly scanning faces. It was way too porous. We needed a way to box in the cartel head. But how?

I still hadn’t figured it out as we circled the block and pulled in behind the disguised FBI SWAT van onto the apron of a fire station driveway on Thirty-First.

“Bad news, Mike. We don’t have the go-ahead to do this. Not even a little,” Hughie said after he got back from a quick powwow with the SWAT guys. “The bosses are going nuts because there are thousands of potential lawyers and lawsuits in there, not to mention the mayor, who’s actually the keynote speaker. What do you think?”

I took a long moment to do just that, given that this was the biggest arrest in my career. Taking down a suspect in the middle of a graduation would certainly make a lot of waves. Especially at the notoriously uber liberal NYU law school, where they probably had courses called Cops: Friend or Enemy? and The Art and Science of Claiming Police Brutality.

But NYU or no NYU, if Perrine was in there, the time to strike was in the middle of the ceremony. Safe in the crowd, he’d only be thinking about his daughter and how proud he was. We’d need to use that. Use his vulnerability. Because afterward, he’d only be thinking about one thing. Getting away.

“So what’s up? You want to wait?” Hughie said.

“Hell, no!” I finally said.

“Good,” said McDonough, rubbing his hands together, his Irish eyes a-smiling. “Me, neither, Church Boy. What do we do?”

I thought about it for another minute. Then I had it. It was a crazy idea, but this was a crazy time. Not to mention a crazy, extremely violent criminal we were up against. We needed to grab this guy. Badly. It had been a while since the good guys had put one up on the board.

“We have all the phones for all the Candelerios, right? The wife and the kids?” I said.

“Control does,” Hughie said, scrolling through his phone.

“Get me Daisy Candelerio’s number, then,” I said, giving one of my own smiling Irish eyes a wink as I took out my phone. “Least I could do is send the graduate a congratulatory text.”

After rising from the dregs of a third-world hellhole called Kourou, French Guiana, Manuel Perrine, a.k.a. the Sun King, vowed to never again go anywhere near its poverty, its filth, its putrid stink.

Promises, promises, Perrine thought as he vigorously washed his hands inside a crowded Madison Square Garden men’s room.

Too many mimosas and cappuccinos on his chartered Global Express jet into Teterboro Airport was the reason for this unfortunate pit stop. Or is it an enlarged prostate? he wondered with a stab of depression as he remembered his upcoming forty-eighth birthday.

Like many men of means, Perrine obsessed over germs, disease, his general health. With more money in accounts scattered throughout the world than even he could possibly spend, the only thing that could curtail the full, well-deserved enjoyment of his accumulated riches was illness. Which was why he and his personal physician were constantly on guard.

To dispel his morbid thoughts, and take himself away from his even more morbid current surroundings, Perrine closed his eyes and envisioned his luxury penthouse suite in the Fairmont Le Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City, where he had been staying since fleeing Mexico. In his mind, he saw white everywhere. White furniture, white towels, white bubbles in the pristine white marble bathtub.

Hearing the clamor of coughs and wall-mounted dryers and flushing toilets all around him, he truly couldn’t return soon enough.

The Sun King winced as he glanced at himself in the mirror. He was completely bald now. He’d had some work done on his eyes to change their shape, and was wearing brown contact lenses to disguise their color. To further alter his appearance on this trip-which he hoped was his last ever to the U.S.-he’d intentionally put on an unhealthy thirty pounds, which gave him a disgusting double chin.

But, because he was known for his style, the greatest offense to his sensibilities was that he could wear no Prada, no Yves, no Caraceni hand-tailored suits today. The suit he wore now was an ill-fitting, off-the-rack, green gabardine atrocity from a New Jersey Kohl’s department store that made him look like he drove something for a living. He needed to not stand out for once, and in his puke-colored American rags, he’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Coming back out into the buzzing Madison Square Garden concourse, Perrine exchanged a glance with Marietta, who was leaning against the wall, watching his flank and rear. In Mexico, he rode with a rolling armada of men and trucks, but that might look a little conspicuous here in the country where he was wanted for double murder, so today he had Marietta, and a few handpicked men, with him.

Thankfully, Marietta was as good as a small army. She was deadly with a gun, a knife-even her hands, if it came down to it. The tall, thin brunette looked about as dangerous as a kindergarten teacher, and yet she was an expert in the Brazilian martial art capoeira, and had the strongest and quickest hands of any woman he’d ever come across. He’d seen more than once the surprise and pain in an unmannerly cartel soldier’s eyes after she was forced to show him who was truly boss. His lovely Marietta never hesitated to give new meaning to the term “bitch slap.”