THE BOYS WERE on the third floor, asleep in the recovery room. Dr. Walker wouldn’t let us go inside, so we crowded around the window in the door.
Standing there staring at them, it occurred to me how insane it is to be a parent. You go through this life, and it’s hard enough to keep yourself safe. When you have a kid, it’s like you take your heart and you just cross your fingers and hand it to each of your kids. I really, really felt like punching a hole through the glass in the door.
I knew I had to be strong, but memories of the death of Maeve, my late wife, flooded back. Still, to this day, I had nightmares about hospitals and waiting rooms. In addition to being ripped up, I was angry. This wasn’t fair. Our family had had enough pain. Why couldn’t this bullshit happen to someone else? Anyone else but us.
“Oh, they look pale, Mary Catherine. Look at them. Especially Eddie.”
She grabbed my hand.
“They’re going to be okay, Mike,” she said. “The doctor said so.”
“I don’t know. Look at them. Doctors lie all the time. Look at them.”
I teared up then, and when Mary Catherine saw it, she did the same. I don’t know how long we stood there like that, holding hands, while the boys slept.
I called Seamus at the lake house maybe an hour later.
“They’re going to be okay?” Seamus said. “But they were shot!”
“In the right places,” I assured him. “No organs or bones were hit. At least that’s what the doctor said.”
“Don’t listen to these quacks up here in Hicktown, Michael,” Seamus said angrily. “You need to figure out what’s really going on.”
My patience was wearing thin, but I knew the old man, like me, was just sick with worry.
“Seamus, what do you want me to do? Interrogate the hospital staff?”
“That would be a fine start,” he said. “And on that note, what did the police say? Who shot them? And how did they end up in Newburgh, miles from the lake house?”
When I looked up, a thin, middle-aged black man wearing a Newburgh PD jacket was standing in the hallway.
“I’m about to find out, Seamus. I’ll call you back.”
“Mr. Bennett, I’m Detective Moss,” the friendly cop said as he shook my hand. My first impression was that he looked and even sounded a little like the old Yankees player Willie Randolph. “So sorry about your kids. Someone told me you guys are up at Orange Lake on vacation. Is that right?”
I showed him my gold NYPD detective shield.
“I thought I was on vacation, Detective, but it seems like I’m back at work after all,” I said.
“Oh, wow. A cop. That’s just terrible. I have two girls your sons’ age myself. Please call me Bill. You must be going through hell, Mike. Can you walk me through what happened?”
“I was about to ask you the same question, Bill,” I said.
Moss twirled the pen in his fingers as he took out his notes.
“Around six this evening, we received a call of shots fired on Lander Street,” he said. “That’s actually not a rare occurrence. We get so many shootings there that the locals call it Blood Alley. After the shots-fired call, some nine-one-one calls came in about someone shot on the sidewalk. Our guys got there a minute before the EMTs. Both your boys were down on the sidewalk, bleeding.”
I shook my head in terrified disbelief. One second, my kids are splashing in the lake, the next, they’re shot down in the middle of some dangerous ’hood. How could that happen?
“It’s a drug area, I take it?” I said after another stunned moment.
“Yep. Crack and powder coke and heroin. Gangs run it. Lander is run by the Bloods.”
“The Bloods?” I said. “Like the L.A. Bloods gang?”
“One and the same,” DT Moss said with a nod. “The Bloods run the west side. We also have a heavy contingent of the Latin Kings gang to the east. They’re at war with each other right now.”
“A gang drug war? I vacation up here at my lake house every once in a while, but I had no idea. It’s that bad?”
Moss rubbed at his mustache as he nodded.
“Outside of New York City, Newburgh has the highest murder rate per capita in New York State. They’re starting to call us the Sixth Borough and the Little Apple, thanks to the heavyweight big-city crime stats. Too bad we don’t have thirty thousand cops to keep a lid on it. Anyway, can you think of any reason why your kids were there? I don’t even want to ask, but do either of them use drugs?”
“Drugs?! Over their dead bodies,” I said.
I saw Mary Catherine wince beside me.
“Sorry. Poor choice of words,” I said. “They met some girls is all I know. But how they got from Orange Lake to Newburgh, I don’t know. You’ve probably heard it as many times as I have, but they’re actually good kids. My whole family has been worried sick. We thought they’d gotten lost in the woods.”
“Well,” Detective Moss said, handing me his card. “The doc says they won’t be up for questioning until the morning. I’ll come back then. If you hear anything in the meantime, please give me a call. As a fellow service member, I’m going to go full press, Mike. Be with your family. We’ll find out who did this.”
MARY CATHERINE AND I stayed over at the hospital. I would have said “slept over,” except we didn’t do any sleeping. We were still too shocked about the whole bizarre, horrible situation. Despite Dr. Walker’s assurances, we couldn’t help but worry that some horrendous complication would pop up unexpectedly.
As my late wife, Maeve, slowly died of cancer, I remember actually aching with worry-physically aching-as my entire self, body and soul, went around from moment to agonizing moment clenched like a fist. I felt that same full-body ache again as I paced the dim halls of the hospital. Of course I did. Old habits die hard. Just like riding a bike.
Around 6:00 a.m., after the morning shift nurse told me the boys were doing fine, I decided to go out and get some breakfast and coffee. After I picked up some takeout from a twenty-four-hour diner on Broadway, instead of heading back to the hospital, I decided to drive around.
Newburgh really had seen better days, I thought, shaking my head at the blighted streets. I cruised past whole blocks of abandoned two- and three-story row houses-decrepit blocks where the only thing functional on the listing structures seemed to be the jury-rigged satellite-TV dishes.
On one corner, I spotted rows of rum bottles and candles, a faded Mylar balloon tied to a Virgin Mary statue. It was a street shrine to someone who’d been murdered, I realized. There was even a picture of the victim, a handsome young Hispanic man, taped to the telephone pole above a stuffed hippo and a Happy Meal Pokemon toy.
I stopped at the address where Moss had told me my boys had been assaulted. I stared down the alleyway between two dilapidated Victorian row houses. The peeling, weather-battered clapboard on both houses made them look scoured and beaten, punished for some horrible crime. Bent and twisted metal poles from an old missing fence stuck up from the concrete in front of the old houses, as if the area had taken a direct artillery hit.
I turned off the bus and got out. Reluctantly. It was deserted and desolate this early, but it was definitely a scary-looking place. The only comfort I took as I headed down the alley was the Glock on my ankle.
I hadn’t taken more than a dozen steps when I saw it. The stain on the concrete. From my sons’ blood. Then I wasn’t afraid anymore. Just extremely pissed.
Who the hell would shoot two unarmed kids?
When I looked up, I saw someone on the back porch of the Victorian to my left. He was a cute six- or seven- year-old black child, standing there shirtless in his underwear, sucking his thumb as he watched me.
I smiled at him. His happy brown eyes lit up as he smiled back. I’d been a cop for a long time, but it never
