stomach and staring up at the sky.
“Midnight picnics are the exception,” I said, sitting cross-legged across from her.
Mary Catherine yawned and closed her eyes.
“You know what would be really great, Mike?”
“What’s that?” I said.
“If we could really go on vacation. You know, one where you’re not working and actually here?”
I laughed.
“That’s quite a concept,” I said. “A nonworking vacation, is it?”
Mary Catherine sighed.
“Or how about for once we could go on a real date, Mike? Three or four hours of just me and you. No kids, no phones. Just two adults together alone, enjoying each other’s company. I would like that so much. Wouldn’t you?”
“You’re right, Mary Catherine,” I said feeling suddenly very guilty.
How could I be such an insensitive clod? I had to stop taking this wonderful woman for granted or I was going to be very sorry.
“Enough of squeezing in a moment here and there,” I said. “You’re absolutely right. I’ll arrange the whole thing. We’ll put Seamus on duty and go wherever you want. Down into the city. We’ll paint the town red. Where do you want to go?”
I waited for a few moments. But even after a full minute, she was still silent. I turned and glanced at her, laughing to myself as I watched her sleep.
“Oh, Sleeping Beauty,” I said as I gathered up the remnants of our picnic. “What did I do to deserve someone as lovely as you?”
IT WAS STILL dark when I heard the doorbell ring the next morning. Hungover and bleary-eyed, I went ass over teakettle into a beanbag chair as I tripped over an inner tube in the unlit family room. I was still in my boxer shorts, dusting myself off, as I peeked out the window and saw a Newburgh police cruiser in the driveway and a uniformed cop on the porch.
“Good morning,” I said, opening the door.
The young, attractive, black female cop smiled and blushed a little when she saw my bamboozled face and skimpy attire.
“Detective Bennett, sorry to bother you so early,” she said, quickly recovering. “Detective Boyanoski sent me. He tried your phone, but you didn’t pick up. Something’s come up. It’s about the assailant who shot your boys. The gang member, Jay D-James Glaser?”
“What about him?” I said, rubbing my eyes.
“He was murdered in jail last night,” she said.
That got me moving. I threw on a pair of jeans and a polo shirt, grabbed my gun, and took a ride into town with the good-looking rookie cop, whose name was Belinda Saxon. Bill and Ed were already outside waiting for me in the Newburgh PD parking lot. Behind them, the sun was just coming up over the Hudson.
“Let me guess. The party’s over?” I said as I got out of the cruiser.
“So’s our friend James Glaser,” Bill Moss said, opening the unmarked Ford’s back door as though he were a chauffeur.
After some coffee and a quick breakfast at the diner out by I-84, we headed to the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in nearby Wallkill, New York, where Glaser had been transferred. The sunny green farm fields we passed had horses in them, rows of corn. I thought about the eighteen-year-old kid we’d picked up the day before and shook my head. How could he be dead on this beautiful summer morning? And how could this bucolic area have a gang problem?
After being processed just inside the steel gate of the maximum-security prison, we were brought into a formidable building to meet with the assistant warden, Kenneth Bozman, in his ground-floor office.
“Twenty inmates from B block went to B yard for evening rec around seven,” the well-groomed, round-faced bureaucrat explained as he drummed his chewed-to-the-nub fingernails on a metal file cabinet next to his desk. “Come seven thirty, James Glaser was seen in a scuffle with another black male. Glaser was dead as a doornail upon arrival of staff. His attacker was still hovering over him. The assailant’s name is Gary McKay, a lifer. He’s been segregated in our special housing unit since the incident.”
“How’d he kill him?” Ed Boyanoski asked.
Bozman stopped drumming and pointed to the hollow of his throat above his tie.
“He buried the sharpened end of a broken mop handle into Glaser’s clavicle,” Bozman said, shaking his head. “Stabbed it all the way down into his heart like a skewer. Unbelievable. What a shitstorm. We’re max security, but we run a tight ship. We haven’t had a murder here since oh three.”
“What’s McKay’s story?” Bill asked.
“I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him,” Bozman said. “He’s old-school. Drug dealer who used to run the Newburgh drug scene back in the eighties. He’s in for a triple homicide and attempted murder of a cop. Now he heads the Bloods here in the prison. I take it this is a Bloods thing, some kind of street beef?”
“You take it correctly,” Ed told him.
“I figured,” Bozman said. “I mean, McKay’s a homicidal maniac, but skewering a son of a bitch is a little excessive for having a newbie look at you funny.”
“We’d like to talk to him, if that’s okay,” Bill Moss said.
“Wait here,” Bozman said. “I’ll go into the warden and ask.”
Bozman came back less than a minute later.
“Shit. Sorry, fellas. They actually just took him to the courthouse in Shawangunk for his arraignment. Maybe you can catch him there.”
CHAPTER 68
WE PULLED OUT of the prison and went into the town of Shawangunk, which, I was told, was pronounced “Shawn-gum” by the locals. Go figure.
It was a neat and tidy town-hedgerows and farmland, white picket fences. The main drag, as far as I could tell, consisted of a pizza parlor, an industrial building, a water tower, and a fieldstone library. The court was in the new town hall at the outskirts of town, a handsome brick building with a recently cut patch of manicured green grass in front.
Inside, we found McKay with his nine-man entourage of corrections officers and state police sitting inside the courtroom. McKay was a rough-looking character, an extra-large tattooed black man with a beard who looked a little like Rasheed Wallace when he played for the Detroit Pistons. Since everyone was still waiting for the judge and McKay’s public defender to arrive, we asked the staties to let us interview him. They readily agreed.
We proceeded into a large meeting room adjacent to the courtroom. The room, which smelled as though it had just been painted, was filled with folding chairs and a podium bookended by the American and New York State flags. McKay, in wrist and ankle shackles, shuffled in, escorted by two state troopers. He parked his ass in one of the folding chairs with a clink of chains and sat, scowling, with his eyes closed.
Without missing a beat, Bill Moss opened a folding chair and placed it down in front of the large prisoner. When the cop sat and opened his notebook, he was almost knee-to-knee with McKay.
The differences between the two black men were stark. Bill was a teddy bear, one of the friendliest, most approachable-looking people I’d ever met. McKay was more like a starving grizzly. Even sitting, he was easily a head taller than Bill, who looked uncharacteristically tired, almost depressed. I felt bad for the thirty-year Newburgh PD vet. He’d actually grown up in the now-rough part of Newburgh, near Lander Street, and you could tell that its
