the back with him, wisely leaving me in the front passenger seat, where I couldn’t get my hands around his neck.
“This is total bullshit, man,” the punk cried as he rocked back and forth violently against the seat. “You only doin’ this because those kids shot over on Lander were white kids.”
“Now, James, we’re not out of the driveway yet, and already you’re dropping the race card,” Ed Boyanoski said with a tsk. “Didn’t we investigate your shooting last year, James? I’m sorry, I mean shootings?”
“Bullshit, man,” Jay D repeated. He stomped on the floor of the cruiser. “You don’t think I know that the only reason you bugging everybody like this is because those white boys were the kids of a cop?”
Bill Moss and I exchanged a surprised glance before I turned around and stared the punk in his eye.
“You’re actually right about that,” I said, showing him my shield. “We cops do tend to get a little upset when you shoot up our children. See, I’m in a gang, too. It’s called the NYPD. They don’t issue us those ratty dishrags you guys like to sport, but we do have some pretty cool hats.”
The kid smirked and looked at me sideways. “You him, ain’t you?” he said.
He nodded with a sudden smile.
“Bennett, right? Knew it. This ain’t just racist-ass bullshit. This is some racist-ass cop bullshit.”
“Quick question, James,” Ed said. “How do you know who the kids were? I mean that stuff about them being the kids of a cop was deliberately left out of the paper.”
“How much did the Latin Kings pay you?” I yelled. “I hope it was worth it, punk, because if you think I’m pulling strings now, this is nothing compared to the favors I’m going to call in to make sure you earn every single goddamn penny of it.”
Jay D looked at us one by one. He started biting his lower lip like it was a chew toy. The punk suddenly squeezed himself into the rear seat’s corner as if it contained an escape hatch.
“That’s it. I want my lawyer,” he mumbled. “I ain’t talkin’ no more.”
“You’re shutting up?” Detective Bill Moss said as he finally put the unmarked into drive. “Is that a promise, James? Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!”
WE HAD A cookout to end all cookouts that night. The three-burner grill out on the dock was completely covered with burgers, dogs, corn on the cob, peppers, lamb shish kebabs. I even had an Italian sausage wheel that I’d found in a terrific deli not too far from the lake house, where I also scored some real New York-style Italian bread to wrap around the sausage and peppers. Tony Soprano would have been impressed.
“Hey, Father. How do you say ‘fuhgeddaboudit’ in Gaelic?” I asked Seamus over the smoke.
Of course we were having a feast. That’s what your friendly neighborhood heroes did when they bagged the beast: got the grill going and broke out the mead, like Beowulf and his men after offing Grendel.
But Beowulf actually had to go and fight Grendel’s mother next, didn’t he? I thought, remembering how Perrine still needed to be deep-sixed. He certainly was a mother, wasn’t he?
Whatever, I thought, pulling on the frosty beer at my elbow and wiping sweat off my brow with my grill mitt. Line ’em up, and I’ll put ’em down one at a time. No, wait. That was Hughie’s policy on shots. Poor Hughie. Man, I missed him.
Half the Newburgh PD showed up. Ed Boyanoski was there with his wife, Celia, and three kids as well as Bill Moss and his wife, Cordelia, and their two daughters. Even the gang-unit cops, Walrond and Groover, showed up with their respective clans.
Walrond’s clan included his new wife and beautiful four-month-old baby girl, Iris. My girls-including Mary Catherine, for some strange reason-surrounded Iris’s car seat and could not be peeled away during the entire party.
All’s well that was ending well, at least for the current moment.
Even the kids’ surgeon, Dr. Mary Ann Walker, showed up for a quick ale. It turned out that she and Ed were already friends because they both served on the board of the Newburgh Historical Society. I learned that Ed, a former marine, was also a deacon at downtown Newburgh’s Saint Patrick’s Church and spent much of his free time coaching basketball at the Boys and Girls Club.
“So many people have written off this town to the gangs, Mike, but I know we can turn it around,” Ed said. “This place is my home. I’m never leaving.”
Ed was a top-notch guy. They all were. Good people who truly cared about their community and were trying to do their best in a bad situation.
“Man, you know how to toss a soiree here, Mike,” a swim-trunk-clad Groover called from a floating inner tube off the dock. He had a sausage-and-peppers hero in one hand and a beer in the other.
“I haven’t had too much to celebrate in a while, so I’m pulling out all the stops, my man. You guys deserve it. Now my family can put all this nonsense in the rearview.”
“How many kids do you have, anyway?” Groover wanted to know.
I shook my head. “Dude, I lost count a long time ago.”
Groover looked down into his beer thoughtfully before raising his plastic cup.
“The more the merrier,” he called.
I looked over at my son Eddie, talking and laughing with one of Ed Boyanoski’s kids, and raised my own.
“The more the merrier,” I agreed with a smile.
Damn right.
It was the Bennett family motto, after all.
CHAPTER 66
AT AROUND NINE, the party wrapped up pretty much the way all cop parties do-with some beery high fives and fist bumps and promises to do it again real soon.
It had really been a fun time, even for all our cop kids, who had broken into teams and had wrapped up the night playing an epic game of ring-a-levio. Eddie had been the last one caught as he made a heroic attempt to free his team from jail.
Hearing his squealing laughter again as he was tackled was by far the best part of the night. Hell, the best part of the month.
“These Newburgh guys are all right in my book,” I said to Mary Catherine as we waved good-bye to the last set of retreating headlights from the porch.
“Is that just the beer talking?” Mary Catherine asked, eyeing the half-full Heineken in my hand.
“Well, maybe not
Even though the house and backyard and especially the dock looked like they’d been attacked by a host of marauding barbarians, Mary Catherine and I turned our backs on the paper plates. We left all our sleeping, sunburned charges in Seamus’s care and decided to take a long walk around the lake.
We ended up taking the secluded forest path I’d frantically scoured the week before when I’d searched for Eddie and Brian. At the top of the hill, Mary Catherine suddenly stopped and turned around.
“Look. It’s beautiful,” she said.
I followed her pointing finger just above the treetops to a bright, glowing sliver of quarter moon, tinged with pink. All around it, stars-too many to count-sparkled against the seemingly endless navy-blue sky. We could have been the only people in the world, in the universe.
We sat, and I broke out the midnight picnic I’d packed. An old flannel blanket, some Cheddar and grapes, a cold bottle of sauvignon blanc that I had to laboriously work open with the Leatherman tool on my key chain, since I’d forgotten to bring a corkscrew.
I laid out the blanket in the middle of the forest clearing and poured wine into a couple of plastic glasses.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to mix beer and wine,” Mary Catherine said, leaning back with the cup on her
