Burn (Michael Bennett 7) (5 page)

This is real
, the Brit thought, making eye contact with the bound, wide-awake, nude young woman Alberto easily lifted above his head.

Dear me, this is so very, very real
.

CHAPTER
3

IT WAS LIKE SLIPPING
into a favorite old pair of shoes that first Monday morning back in New York.

As I woke in our West End Avenue apartment, I smiled at everything, the ceiling that needed painting, the traffic sounds out the window, the tick of Mary Catherine’s teakettle from the kitchen. Even the sound of the kids fighting and teasing and slamming bathroom doors and clomping around on our big old apartment’s worn oak floors was like music to my ears.

Mary Catherine had the troops lined up and ready for inspection as I came into the dining room. I scanned all the happy, scrubbed, bright-eyed faces. I’d never seen my guys so happy to be geared up with backpacks and lunch bags in their plaid Holy Name uniforms.

“Hey, everybody. Did Mary Catherine tell you the good news?” I said to them. “Homeschooling went so well in California, we’re going to continue it here. Only with uniforms. So sit down, children, and take out your math workbooks.”

“No! Ughhh! Wrong, so wrong! Never! Please, no!” they cried with accompanying Bronx cheers.

Ricky dropped and lay on his back with his eyes closed and his tongue stuck out. “Can’t homeschool!” he gasped. “No friends. Need teacher. School. Need school!”

“Oh, well. If that’s the way you feel about it, I guess we could try regular school on a day-to-day basis. But if there are any problems, you know you always have a place here all day with Teacher Daddy.”

“Daddy!” Chrissy said, laughing as she tugged on one of my pockets. “Stop teasing and being so silly!”

“Yes, Daddy, please do,” said Seamus, appearing in the doorway of the kitchen with my favorite
DAD: THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE
coffee mug in his fist. “I mean, bad enough you have ’em traipsing off to the ends of the earth like a pack of tinkers. Do you have to make them late on their first day back?”

“Good morning to you, too, Father,” I said merrily as Mary Catherine finally got the Bennett train rolling out the door.

“And you’re welcome for the coffee,” I said. “And my mug.”

CHAPTER
4

AFTER WAVING EVERYONE GOOD-BYE
in the lobby and getting into the unmarked Chevy the department had dropped off for me on the corner the day before, my first stop was a no-brainer.

I rolled down West End Avenue to Ninety-Sixth and double-parked and went into the no-name deli-grocery on the corner. I could have hugged the Middle Eastern gentleman behind the counter when he gave me his regular gruff “Hey, boss,” along with my too-hot, probably-not-fair-trade coffee and my buttered roll.

As I sat in the double-parked cop car eating my breakfast, I stared out, fascinated at the passing crosstown buses and Verizon vans and town cars and taxis. It was overcast, the September wind wafting the few trees West End still had lining the block to the south. I guess absence really does make the heart grow fonder, because all of it—the awnings on the buildings, the handymen hosing the sidewalks, the Sanitation Department street sweeper scraping the curb—seemed fresher, somehow more vibrant, more there.

The kids aren’t the only ones excited about their first day back
, I thought as I tightened my tie in the rearview. I had a morning meeting with the police commissioner down at One Police Plaza. After my western adventures, I was more than eager to go back to my desk at Major Crimes, but my old boss, Miriam, had explained that the commish wanted to talk to me about a brand-new position opening up.

Is it a new homicide squad?
I wondered as I drink-holdered my coffee and dropped the tranny into drive.
An antiterror assignment?
I didn’t care what it was as long as it was something juicy, something I could sink my teeth into.

After half an hour of threading my way around delivery trucks and suicidal bike messengers on the narrow downtown Manhattan streets, I pulled around a bomb barrier and up to the security booth at NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza.

Only VIPs got to park in the front lot, but since I was meeting with the commissioner, I thought, what the hey? I’d give it a shot.

“Yeah?” the old cop in the booth said, thoroughly ignoring my shield.

“Got a meeting with the big guy,” I said. “The commissioner.”

“Yeah, right,” the craggy-faced lifer said, trading his
Post
for a clipboard. “Name?”

“Bennett,” I said.

He flicked up a sheet, flicked it back down, and then re-lifted his
Post
.

“Sorry, Charlie. You need to park on the street because I guess you ain’t on the A-list this morning.”

CHAPTER
5

AS IT TURNED OUT,
the old cop in the parking lot was righter than rain about me not being on the A-list. The only list I was on that morning, I was about to learn, was one of those four-letter ones that start with the letter
s
.

My not-so-warm welcome back into the bosom of the department family continued in the marble HQ lobby after I told one of the cops at the formidable security desk that I was there to see the commissioner.

“Are you sure?” said a tall, gray-haired black cop beside the security turnstile. “I was told the commissioner was on his way down to Washington this morning to testify before Congress about gun violence.”

“Well,” I said, “my boss told me to come down for a nine-o’clock meeting with him.”

“Maybe I’m wrong,” the congenial cop said, lifting his phone with a smile. “Wouldn’t be the first time. What’s your name? I’ll check with his secretary.”

The veteran cop hung up a minute later.

“The secretary said the commissioner apologizes about the last-minute change of plans, but your meeting has been shuffled over to Chief of Detectives Starkie. He’s on the tenth floor.”

“Chief of Detectives Starkie? Raymond Starkie?” I said.

“That’s the man,” the cop said with a nod.

“What happened to Ronnie Child?” I asked.

“Child retired three months ago,” he said.

I nodded as I headed for the elevators, trying to think.

Dealing with any COD, the NYPD’s second-in-command, was notoriously hazardous. The Chief of Detectives was usually the commissioner’s hatchet man, the court strangler, the guy who assigned the kinds of unpleasant tasks that the commissioner didn’t want to dirty his hands with.

But the fact that the new one was Raymond Starkie was particularly worrisome, since he and I had some history. Back when we were rookies, we had been friendly rivals of sorts, working the same evening shift at the Bronx precinct where I started my career. Both of us ambitious and gung-ho, we’d competed to see who could come up with the most collars.

But that wasn’t our only competition. Starkie had been first to meet my wife, Maeve. Long before Maeve lost her courageous battle against ovarian cancer, she had been an emergency room nurse at the Bronx hospital near the precinct. In fact, Maeve had agreed to go out with Starkie before she met me, and I made her cancel on him.

Starkie never forgave me for that or for the fact that I was named Bronx rookie of the year over him, and our rivalry became a lot less than friendly. It got physical once at a retirement party at a bar on Norwood Avenue, where he gave me a cauliflower ear and I gave him a chipped tooth.

After that painful parting of ways, Starkie had gone the administrative route in the department. He attended NYU law school and had risen quickly through the ranks. He was an effective and efficient manager, they said, if a tad heavy-handed.

As I stepped into the elevator and hit ten, it suddenly occurred to me how out of touch I’d been. The power structures and politics in the department could change in a New York minute, to borrow a cliché, and here I’d been away for nine months.

After all my morning’s enthusiasm at being back, it suddenly occurred to me that I was a man without a country, with no turf, no rabbi, and maybe no immediate prospects.

CHAPTER
6

EVEN AFTER ALL THESE
years, Starkie was a still a tall, strapping, good-looking guy. He had short-cropped white-blond hair and twinkly blue eyes. When I spotted his friendly, open smile at his office door, I was actually hopeful, for a beat, that maybe Starkie was ready to let bygones be bygones.

But then his smile soured as he elaborately checked his watch. It was a Rolex, gold and shiny as the four spit-shined brass stars winking from his tailored dress uniform’s shoulder.

“Late, huh, Bennett?” he said, shaking his head instead of my hand. “But I guess, what’s a few more minutes after nine months, right? This way.”

Bennett?
I thought, following him into his spacious office. By using my last name, Starkie was immediately letting me know that history or no history, he was my superior.
Uh-oh
.

There was a bank of computers behind Starkie’s walnut desk, a flashing six-screen array like an investment banker’s. Staring at the monitors, I suddenly remembered that Starkie was a vocal champion of CompStat, the computer- and statistics-based method of policing that the NYPD had first spearheaded in the ’90s. Because of this, his nicknames included Numbers, Compstarkie, and HAL 9000 for his sometimes emotionless, single-minded devotion to the computer-driven stats.

There were stacks of paper on another desk in the corner, obscuring a commanding view of the Brooklyn Bridge. There was a chair opposite his desk, but he didn’t offer me a seat, so I just stood there.

As Starkie sat, he lifted a white file folder off his desk and leaned back in his big tufted leather chair, licking a thumb as he leisurely went through it. It was my file, I realized. It wasn’t too hard to pick up on his ham-handed theatrics. My career was literally in his hands.

“So, how was California? Did you enjoy your leave of absence?” Starkie said, glancing at me over the edge of the file after a long minute.

Leave of absence?
I thought, perplexed. Why did he somehow make my being forced into witness protection with my family seem frivolous, like I was trying to take a stab at landscape painting?

“Busy,” I said.

Between tanning sessions, I teamed up with the feds and helped bring down the cop-killing Mexican drug cartel kingpin Manuel Perrine
, I thought but didn’t say.
Maybe you heard about it?

“Well, since you haven’t been around,” he said, finally setting down the file, “you’ll find that there are a lot of new things happening here in the department. I know in the past you’ve benefited from loosened departmental guidelines, from superiors looking the other way. So let me be the first to inform you that those days are over.

“This is the new NYPD, Bennett,” he said, gesturing at the computers behind him. “That’s why I’m here. To shake things up, to usher in a new era of accountability and a new emphasis on chain of command.”

He knocked twice on my file with his chunky NYU law school ring before smiling again.

“That’s why, in the spirit of shaking things up, I’ve ordered your transfer. Let me congratulate you on your new assignment, running the NYPD’s brand-new Ombudsman Outreach Squad at a Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street in Harlem.”

CHAPTER
7

I STOOD THERE BLINKING,
trying not to topple, as I sifted through the rubble of the ten-story building that had just collapsed on top of me.

I’d thought I would be getting a plum assignment after my hard work of bringing down Manuel Perrine. At the very least, I thought I’d be returning to my desk with the Major Crimes Division. What the heck was an Ombudsman Outreach Squad? I didn’t know. And definitely didn’t want to find out.

“The ombudsman squad is the mayor’s idea,” Starkie said, reading my mind. “Its mission is simple: to help the city’s most vulnerable victims. It’s a second chance for the department to laser-focus on victims whose concerns have fallen through the bureaucratic cracks. It’s up and running, but there are still some glitches that need ironing out.”

Starkie blinked at me elaborately to show how badly I was being screwed. “But nothing that a veteran investigator like yourself can’t handle,” he said, smiling. “When I heard about the fledgling squad’s challenges, and the fact that you’d just come back, I couldn’t think of a better match.”

I stood there staring at Starkie. We both knew what was going on. This wasn’t a promotion. If anything, my new assignment, some mayoral pet project that sounded like a disaster in the making, was a massive demotion, a bald, backhanded slap right across my face.

I’d put in over twenty years on the job racking up collars, crushing case after complicated case. I’d risked my life, the lives of my family, and now, as a reward, I was being ramrodded to some backwater political pet project?

Over what? A silly twenty-year-old rivalry? One little chipped tooth?

I kept staring at him across the desk. Starkie stared back serenely with his cold, twinkly blue eyes. He wasn’t smiling now, but I could tell he wanted to. I could also tell he wanted me to freak out and scream bloody murder about my transfer. I definitely wanted to. I would have loved nothing better than to chip another tooth for Starkie, or maybe resign.

Instead, I took a deep breath. I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction. It took everything I had to cool my engines, to keep my powder dry, but I managed it. Barely.

“So, any questions?” he said in a pleasant voice as he reached across the desk and handed me my transfer papers.

“None, Chief,” I said, accepting the sheets.

I folded them neatly and tucked them into my jacket pocket before I extended my hand. I even put a happy salesmanlike ear-to-ear grin on my face that hopefully masked the fantasy of crashing a chair over his head that I was having.