Contents
About the Book
About the Authors
Also by James Patterson
Have You Read Them All?
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: The Old Sod
One
Two
Three
Part One: Off the Rails
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part Two: The City Sleeps
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Part Three: All Work and no Play
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Part Four: Please Stand By
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Who is Detective Michael Bennett?
Read on
Copyright
The most powerful people in the world have gathered for a funeral in New York City. They don’t know it’s a trap devised by a ruthless mastermind. Despite battling his own tragedies, it’s up to Detective Michael Bennett to save every last hostage.
The Teacher is giving New York a lesson it will never forget, slaughtering the powerful and the arrogant. Michael Bennett discovers a vital pattern, but has only a few hours to save the city before things get too close to home.
Children from wealthy families are being abducted. But the captor isn’t demanding money. He’s quizzing his hostages on the price others pay for their luxurious lives, and one wrong answer is fatal.
New York is in chaos as a rash of horrifying copycat crimes tears through the city. Michael Bennett cuts his family holiday short to investigate, but not even he could predict the earth-shattering enormity of this killer’s plan.
Bennett arrests infamous South American crime lord Manuel Perrine in a deadly chase that leaves Michael’s lifelong friend dead. From jail, Perrine vows to rain terror down upon New York City – and to get revenge on Michael Bennett.
Perrine is back and deadlier than ever. Bennett must make an impossible decision: stay and protect his family, or hunt down the man who is their biggest threat.
A group of well-dressed men enter a condemned building. Later, a charred body is found. Michael Bennett is about to enter a secret underground world of terrifying depravity.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Epub ISBN 9781473505476
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Century
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Century is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © James Patterson 2015
Excerpt from Murder House copyright © James Patterson 2015
James Patterson has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published by Century in 2015
www.randomhouse.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN 9781780892702
Trade paperback ISBN 9781780892719
For Sister Sheila
“MIKE, MARY CATHERINE here said you’re NYPD. So you’ve gunned down a lot of people, then, have ya?”
I raised an eyebrow over the rim of my glossy waiting-room magazine at Billy, the slim, scruffy law-office receptionist typing at his computer.
Like many of the Irish folk I’d come into contact with in southern Ireland over the last week, Billy had a distinctive, mischievous twinkle in his Irish eyes. Akin to hurling and Gaelic football, pulling the legs of dumb Yanks like me seemed to be an Emerald Isle national pastime.
“The land of saints, scholars, and sarcasm,” I whispered to Mary Catherine, who was sitting on the leather couch next to me.
“Well, that depends, Billy,” I said as I went back to reading about what Camilla was up to in my OK! London celeb mag.
“Oh? On what, pray tell, Detective?” the receptionist said, finally turning from his screen.
I casually put down the magazine and lifted the floral-patterned china cup of Gevalia coffee he’d fetched us when we came in.
“On what you consider ‘a lot,’” I said.
The law office was in the city of Limerick, around ninety minutes west of Mary Catherine’s family’s tiny farmhouse outside Clonmel, in Tipperary. It was in a new modern brick-and-glass building on a bustling street called Howley’s Quay that ran along the rippled slate ribbon of the River Shannon. Outside the floor-to-ceiling window behind the wise-guy receptionist was a high-rise apartment building and a ten-story silver glass office tower.
Not exactly midtown Manhattan, but definitely not the traditional thatch-roof rural Ireland I remembered from the last time I had been here with my family to visit relatives when I was fourteen.
The office belonged to a real estate lawyer, and we were there to close on the sale of the small hotel and golf course Mary Catherine’s mother had run before she’d passed away. Since it was a quick sale, money was being left on the table, but Mary Catherine hadn’t minded because they’d found a buyer who would keep the place running. Twenty-three people worked there, old family friends and cousins, and Mary Catherine needed to be sure that they would be taken care of before we went back to New York.
“Mary Catherine, sorry to keep you waiting,” said the real estate agent and lawyer, Miranda O’Toole, as she poked her head out of her office a few minutes later.
I took my coffee with me as she waved us into her bright office. Miranda was a tall, milky-complexioned woman in her forties with dark-red hair. She unbuttoned her elegant tailored navy blazer, slipping it on the back of her chair before turning down the Haydn playing softly from the Bose speaker on her desk. She smiled as she rolled up the sleeves of her cream-colored blouse.
“I hope your writing hand is limber, Mary Catherine,” she said, pointing at a high stack of papers on a small conference table by the window. “We have a lot of documents to sign.”
“BUT WAIT,” MARY Catherine said as we sat. “Where’s the buyer? I thought Mr. Hart would be here with us. There was a lot I wanted to go over with him. You know—details about the place, the employee roles, and all the different shifts and such.”
“Oh, yes. Mr. Hart,” Miranda said, smiling pleasantly as she sat down beside us. “Unfortunately, he had a business thing today up in Dublin, so he came in and signed yesterday evening. I hope that’s not a problem.”
Mary Catherine looked at her, still a little confused.
“I…suppose not,” she finally said.
“Perhaps you could call him this afternoon,” Miranda said, uncapping a red-and-gold Montblanc pen and offering it to Mary Catherine. “Go over everything then.”
“Perhaps,” Mary Catherine said, finally taking the pen as Miranda deftly turned over the first sheaf of documents and opened it to the signature page.
“Um, Mary Catherine, before you get started, I’d like to ask Miranda a question,” I said as Mary Catherine was about to sign the first line. “If that’s okay.”
“Yes?” Miranda said a tad curtly as she darted her intelligent gray eyes at me. “I’m sorry, what’s your name again?”
“I’m Mike Bennett,” I said, smiling the most vacant, stupid Yank smile I could muster. “From New York City.”
“Oh, yes. Great city, that. Tell me your concern, Mike. I’m all ears,” Miranda said impatiently.
“I know it’s probably nothing, but what’s all this here?” I said as I pointed at the document. “Under Mr. Hart’s name. What exactly is Red Rover Services, LLC?”
“Oh, that’s just one of Mr. Hart’s companies,” Miranda said with a shrug. “He wanted to purchase the property through his LLC for tax purposes. It’s nothing to worry about. Happens on contracts all the time.”
“Oh, good,” I said brightly. “I wouldn’t want there to be anything out of the ordinary.”
“Completely normal,” Miranda said, nodding gently. “Any other questions? Shall we get started?”
“Well, actually, just one,” I said as she frowned again. “What does Red Rover Services do?”
“You know, I’m not completely sure,” Miranda said, biting on a knuckle.
I grinned some more as I slowly took out my iPhone and placed it on her desk with a click.
“Before we continue, why don’t I look it up? These smartphones are just incredible, aren’t they? Curiosity would have never killed that darn cat if only he’d had a smartphone,” I said.
“What is it, Mike?” Mary Catherine said, frowning over at me.
“Red Rover is a construction company, okay?” Miranda was starting to sound impatient. “They build housing complexes. Mostly in Northern Ireland, but they also had a few developments up in Westmeath.” Miranda paused, folded her arms. “But you heard Mr. Hart’s assurances that he’s going to keep the hotel running. You’ll not find another buyer, at any rate. Not in this market.”
She turned to Mary Catherine.
“You’re going back to America, Mary Catherine, right? So go ahead and sign. Take the money for your family. It’ll all work out, I’m sure.”
Mary Catherine stared at the lawyer. The Montblanc made a screech as she flicked it across the glass tabletop at Ms. Miranda O’Toole.
“No developers. I told you that at the very beginning. Several times. You’re a dishonest person, Ms. O’Toole. Putting my friends and relatives out on the street in order to make a few euro isn’t the kind of thing I do. Unlike you.”
“And you’re a very naive young woman, Ms. Flynn,” the lawyer said sharply. “That old place is on its last legs. Has been for a decade, and everyone from around here knows it. That ratty course has more rabbit holes on the fairways than the ones on the ragged greens. Take the money.”
“Mike, it’s time to leave,” Mary Catherine said, standing.
“Thanks for the Gevalia,” I said to the grim-faced lawyer as I clicked my china cup on the glass and retrieved my phone. “It was really awesome. Just like the good ol’ USA. And smartphones. Bye-bye, now.”
“WHY DON’T WE just bring the kids here?” I said for the hundredth time as Mary Catherine and I lay on the guest-room bed staring up at the ceiling.
Instead of answering me, Mary Catherine’s warm hand found mine. She lifted my hand to her lips. Her lips soft and warm on my palm. Her soft cheek on my shoulder, warm and wet with silent tears.
I listened to the low murmur of rain against the roof. I knew what Mary Catherine wasn’t saying. She wanted me to stay. Or she wanted to come with me. One or the other. It didn’t matter. As long as we were together. As we’d always wanted to be. Only we couldn’t.
The dreaded morning of my flight was here. The real world was back and getting in the way, as usual. There was no way around it. No matter how we adjusted things. We’d have to be apart again.
What a week it had been. Like something out of a dream. We’d never spent so much time together—alone. For three days, we’d tooled around in my little Ford rental hitting bed-and-breakfasts. We’d seen the Ring of Kerry, the Lakes of Killarney. The best was the fabulous sunny day we’d spent at the Cliffs of Moher, enjoying a windy picnic of Champagne and Irish soda bread as we held each other, staring out at the sea and listening to the crash of the surf five hundred feet below.
I’d never laughed so hard in my life as I had in the previous few days. Or allowed myself to be quite so recklessly happy. It had been an unplanned, unexpected bubble of paradise. One we didn’t want to end. Ever.
Yet it was ending. Mary Catherine had to stay and sell the hotel to someone who would keep it open. I had to go back to the kids and my job. There was nothing either of us could do. At least not now.
Or maybe…
“What if…,” I said as Mary Catherine suddenly sat bolt upright in bed.
“What?” I said.
“Shh!” she said.
I shushed.
“No! It’s a car! What time is it?” she said as she leaped onto her feet and ran to the window. “Oh, no. She’s here! I knew she’d be early!”
“She” was Mary Catherine’s great-aunt, Sister Terese, come to take me to the stupid airport for my stupid flight.
“Get up and dressed! Now!” Mary Catherine said as I continued to lie there. “We can’t have this! If she sees you come down these stairs, we’ll need the coroner!”
“Oh, please, Mary Catherine. It’s the twenty-first century,” I said. “She’s a grown woman.”
“A grown woman? She’s an eighty-year-old Tipperary nun! It’s the thirteenth century to her every day! And the coroner won’t be for her! Out the window and into the backyard. Now!”
“Out the what? It’s the second floor!” I cried.
“Hang-jump it. I’ve done it before. You’ll be fine. Do it now!”
We heard a door come open downstairs.
“Mary Catherine? Are ye here?” came a voice.
Mary Catherine shoved me toward the window.
“I’m not going out that window in my boxers, Mary Catherine. That’s nuts.”
“Get!” she scream-whispered at me, and then suddenly I was hanging off the windowsill, letting just about everything hang out in the rainy breeze. For a moment. My hand slipped, and I landed on my bare feet with a squish in a muddy lettuce garden. I was barely able to catch the pair of jeans that flew out the window after me, followed a second later by my shirt, Top-Siders, and bag.
“Close your eyes, ladies,” I said as I ran into the clucking henhouse at the other side of the garden with my bundled clothes.
I’d just gotten my jeans buttoned and my muddy feet into my shoes when I heard Mary Catherine open the back door.
“Oh, yes, Sister. The hotel was nice enough to drop him off about ten minutes ago,” I heard Mary Catherine say. “He said he was going to take a little walk. He has to be around here somewhere.”
“Hey, everybody!” I said as I finally tucked in my shirt and stepped out of the henhouse. “Wow, you’re right, Mary Catherine. Those are some real nice chickens in there. Shiny…eh…coats on them and impressive…beaks.”
I turned to Mary Catherine’s aunt. She was about five one and stocky. The expression on her face seemed to indicate that she didn’t suffer fools well. Which was unfortunate, because she was about to be spending some time with me.
“Hi—I’m Mike,” I said. “You must be Sister Terese.”
The little old woman, wearing a plain, light-blue dress that matched her eyes, looked even more skeptical as we shook hands. Nothing new there. Skepticism was pretty much par for the course with me.
“Mr. Bennett,” she said sternly. “If yer all done with the…chickens, I’ll be waiting fer ye in the car.”
Mary Catherine grabbed me and kissed me as soon as the nun was out of sight. I kissed her back even harder, if that were possible.
“I’m not getting on that plane, Mary Catherine,” I said, finally letting go. “I don’t care. I’ll quit my job. I’m staying here.”
But it was too late. Mary Catherine was already running back to the house. The door slammed, and it was just me, the stupid Yank, standing in the rain in the lonely gravel farmyard.
UP, UP, AND reluctantly away four hours later, I sat mid-cabin in my Aer Lingus flight’s Airbus A330 feeling pretty darn sorry for myself.
Forgoing the movie on the little TV in the seat back in front of me, I leaned my forehead against the cold plastic window, staring at the rags of dirty clouds and the gray North Atlantic sailing away beneath the long, slender wing.
What I had said to Mary Catherine still held very much true. I did not want to be on this plane. Not without her. Not after the previous week. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the wind in her hair atop that white-rock cliff. The moonlight on the curve of her back in those cold farmhouse rooms night after night.
I mean, was my brain broken? No matter the complications, parting just didn’t make sense. You flew toward a woman like that. Not away.
This plane is heading in the wrong damn direction, I thought, shaking my head as I squinted down at the gray sea and sky.
I was going into my pocket for some gum I’d bought at the Shannon duty-free shop to ease the ratcheting pressure in my ears when I found the folded note.
MICHAEL it said on the outside in Mary Catherine’s perfect script.
She must have slipped it in my jeans pocket before she chucked the pants out the window. I quickly unfolded it.
Dear Michael,
From the very moment our eyes met in your apartment foyer all those years ago, I felt it in my heart. That you were mine. And I was yours. Which makes no sense. And yet it is the truest thing I know. I saw you and suddenly knew. That I was somehow finally done with all my silly wanderings. I saw you, Michael, and I was suddenly home. This last week with you has been the best week of my life. You will always be my home.
MC
“Dear God, woman,” I whispered as I reread the note.
Dear God, I thought as I turned and looked out at the world rushing by through my tears.
PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING was gray as we made our final approach to New York City. The city skyline, the raining sky, the depths of my soul. I mean, I guess it was possible that things could have been more depressing as the plane touched down on the puddled tarmac.
But I doubt it.
I hadn’t slept a wink, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Mary Catherine still wasn’t with me. What else was there to say? Or think? Or do? Not much. In fact, nothing at all.
“Jet lag and a broken heart,” I mumbled as the flight attendant spouted some peppy “Welcome to New York” crap over the plane’s intercom. “Winning combination.”
Half an hour later, finally having escaped from the happy people over at customs, I was at a grim JFK-concourse fast-food joint trying to keep down a lukewarm burrito when I remembered to power my phone back on.
I yawned as the message bell went off like a slot-machine win. Then I stopped yawning. There were six text messages and five missed calls, all from HOME.
A dark swirl of panic ripped immediately through my jet lag. Because of the egregious cell-phone charges, I’d left explicit instructions for my family to call only if there was a true emergency. Something was up. I thumbed the Return Call button. Whatever the hell it was, it couldn’t be good.
“Hello?!” came Juliana’s panicked voice on the first ring.
“Juliana, it’s Dad. I just got off the plane at JFK. What is it?”
“Thank God you’re home. It’s Gramps, Dad. He’s missing. He was supposed to come over here last night to babysit around ten, but when we called the rectory at eleven, they said he’d left at nine thirty. He never made it back last night, Dad. Seamus is missing. We don’t know where he is!”
“Is the rectory housekeeper, Anita, still with you?” I said, grabbing my bag and hustling immediately back onto the concourse.
“No. I told her to go home last night, Dad. Don’t worry: I’m watching everybody.”
“I know you are, Juliana. You’re a good girl,” I said as calmly as I could as I tried to read the impossible terminal signs to find the exit. “What am I saying? I mean young woman. Don’t worry about Gramps. I’m sure he’s okay. Probably met an old friend and stayed over with him. I’m going to find him right now. I’ll call you the first I hear from him.”
“Okay, good. I’m so glad you and Mary Catherine are home,” she said.
I decided to leave out the fact that Mary Catherine was still stuck in Ireland for the time being. One catastrophe at a time.
“And don’t worry. Things are under control on this end. I love you so much, Dad,” Juliana said.
“I love you, too,” I said before I hung up.
My next call, as I finally spotted an actual exit sign, was to my buddies at the Ombudsman Outreach Squad on 125th Street.
“Brooklyn, hi. It’s Mike Bennett,” I said when Detective Kale answered. “I need a favor. You ever do a missing persons case?”
“Sure, plenty of them. Why? What’s up?”
“I just got off a plane out at Kennedy. My grandfather, Seamus Bennett, has been missing since around ten last night. He’s eighty-one, white male, white hair, five seven, around a hundred and seventy-five pounds, probably wearing black priest’s clothes. He left the Holy Name rectory on West Ninety-Sixth and Amsterdam last night around nine thirty, probably heading west for my building on West End and Ninety-Fifth. We’re especially worried about him because he recently had a stroke.”
“Seamus?” Brooklyn said. “Oh, no. I remember meeting him at Naomi Chast’s wake. I’m on it, Mike. I’ll check all the local hospitals and precincts.”
I finally went through some sliding doors into the cold, grim predawn street. Above the curbside taxi stand, rain pelted off a fading rusted sign from maybe the eighties-era Koch administration.
WELCOME TO NY. HOW YA DOIN’? it said.
Luckily, I didn’t have my service weapon with me because I might have emptied a magazine into it in reply.
“I’m stressed-out, New York,” I mumbled. “As usual. Fuhgeddaboudit!”
I WAS STUCK in my taxi on the 59th Street Bridge staring at the towers of Manhattan in the honking suicide evening rush-hour traffic when Brooklyn called me back.
The good news was that she thought she’d found Seamus, but the bad news was where she’d found him. I had the cabbie take me straight to West 106th between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. Brooklyn was actually waiting for me on the sidewalk twenty-five minutes later, when my cab finally made it to the Jewish Home Lifecare facility.
“He’s fine, Mike. I was just in there. He’s up on eight, and he’s fine,” Brooklyn said in greeting as I flew from the taxi to the facility’s front door.
“He’s in a nursing home, Brooklyn!” I snapped at her as I went inside and showed the security guard my shield. “I don’t call this fine. What the hell happened?”
“Twenty-Fourth Precinct was called at around ten fifteen,” Brooklyn said as we maneuvered around an old lady in a wheelchair and another one lying on a bed in the hallway. “Somebody reported a confused old man on the uptown platform of the Ninety-Sixth Street number one subway line.”
I shook my head picturing it. Seamus helpless on a subway platform, wandering around as the trains blew past. Dear Lord, did that hurt. No, please, I thought, not wanting it to be true.
“He wasn’t wearing his priest’s clothes, Mike. He was in sweats, and he didn’t have any ID on him. When police questioned him, he got emotional, so they brought him here. It’s the biggest old-age home in the area, so they thought he might have wandered away from here. They also have an Alzheimer’s special care unit, so it was actually a smart move,” she said as we arrived at the elevator.
“Alzheimer’s?” I said, panicking some more as I pushed the elevator’s call button about eighty-six times. “Seamus does not have Alzheimer’s.”
“I know, Mike,” Brooklyn said. “I just spoke to him. He just woke up. They sedated him when he came in, but he’s lucid now. You’ll see.”
Brooklyn surprised me by squeezing my hand.
“Listen, Mike. My grandmother is ninety-one. She’s usually fine, but every once in a while, she forgets things. Stuff like this is going to happen going forward. It’s natural.”
“Dad?” called a voice.
I turned around and saw Juliana coming in through the doorway of the facility with her siblings in their school uniforms. Behind her were Ricky, Eddie, Trent, Jane, Fiona, and Bridget, holding Chrissy and Shawna’s hands.
“Look! Daddy really is home!” Chrissy said, grabbing Shawna as she jumped up and down.
“Juliana, what are you doing?” I said as I hurried toward the children and convinced the utterly confused guard that they were all with me.
“I thought everybody was supposed to be in school,” I said to Juliana.
“They are, but then when you texted me about Seamus being here, I went and got everyone out. Brian just left from Fordham Prep, too. He’s on the train now. We all need to be here for Gramps. Is he sick?”
“Is Gramps going to die?” Shawna said, tears springing up in her eyes.
“No, no. He’s okay, honey. He just got a little confused, and they brought him here. He’s upstairs on eight,” I said as I lifted up Shawna and gave her a kiss.
“Where’s Mary Catherine? Upstairs with Gramps?” Juliana said after I thanked Brooklyn profusely and convinced her that I had things under control so she could go back to work.
“Wait,” I said, changing the subject. “How did you get everybody out of school?”
“I cannot tell a lie, Dad. I had to forge a note with your signature. Well, actually two of them. One for me and one for all the munchkins. You have to call Sister Sheilah, by the way. She didn’t want to release them to me, but I was kind of pushy, I guess, and she finally relented.”
Under normal circumstances such chicanery would, of course, be a no-no, but this was a four-alarm Bennett family emergency. Juliana knew as we all did that rule-bending was allowable when it came to being there for a family member in need. Especially Seamus.
I gave my oldest daughter a hug and a quick fist bump as we walked toward the elevator.
“Forgery and lying to nuns?” I whispered to her. “Right out of the old Bennett playbook. I admire your technique.”
“MICHAEL SEAN ALOYSIUS Bennett!” Seamus said as we came through his eighth-floor room’s open doorway to find him sitting in a chair laughing with a pretty young black woman in Tiffany-blue hospital scrubs.
“And the whole squad! The Lord save us all, you’re all a sight for sore eyes! You’ll not believe what’s happened to me, gang. I headed to your apartment house yesterday evening and lost my way, and now here I’ve woken up Jewish!”
We all laughed as we surrounded him in a group hug.
“Well, it’s nice to see you, too, Father. Believe me,” I said, choking back tears as I hugged this old man whom I loved as dearly as anyone on earth. I could admit to myself now that I was convinced that he was dead. Bonked on the head by a mugger or fallen down into a Con Edison manhole. To see him in one piece was truly a miracle.
“I hope everyone wasn’t worried. I must have given you all quite a scare. I tried to call the house when I woke up, but it just kept kicking into voice mail.”
“It’s fine, Seamus. It’s all going to be fine. First let’s get you out of here, okay?”
“Mr. Bennett?” the nice young black woman said to me. “I’m Dr. Blair Greenhalgh, head of the special care unit. Can I speak to you in the hall?”
“Sure,” I said. “Kids, keep Seamus company while I talk to the doctor.”
“Mike, wait. Come here,” Seamus said, embracing me again. “I knew you’d come and get me.”
A scared look came over his face. I hated seeing it.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I don’t know what happened to me. I just got confused. It won’t happen again. Please don’t stick me in this place or any other place, okay? I’m fine.”
“I’ve got you covered, Gramps,” I said, giving him another hug. “I promise.”
I finally got out into the hallway with the doc.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bennett. I know this all must be quite a shock,” Dr. Greenhalgh said. “I saw from your grandfather’s preliminary medical history that he recently had a stroke in the right hemisphere of the brain. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” I said. “About three weeks ago.”
“Stroke survivors often experience multiple types of memory loss—verbal, visual, informational. They sometimes wander and get lost even in familiar places. Is Mr. Bennett on any medications?”
“Just cholesterol stuff.”
“Okay,” Dr. Greenhalgh said, nodding. “This could have been an anomaly. Sometimes memory problems just go away as part of the healing process, but in the meantime, you should try to really help your grandfather with establishing routines. Perhaps you could draw up a small notebook with emergency numbers in it to keep on his person in case he gets confused again. Exercise is great, as is keeping him engaged. That’s about it. I’ll get the nurse to give you my contact info and get you guys out of here.”
Oh, he’s engaged, all right, I thought, watching him through the glass in the door after the kind doctor left. He and all the kids were standing in a circle holding hands, heads down, their lips moving in prayer. I smiled as I stood there watching them. You can’t keep a good man down.
Thank you, God, I prayed along with them as I closed my own eyes. For all of us being safe and back together again.
Almost all of us, I thought, patting the note in my pocket.
That’s when it happened. Right then and there in the corridor, jet-lagged out of my mind.
I opened my eyes and was suddenly home.
THE FORTY-FOOT-LONG utility truck called a Supervac gave off a low grumble as it weaved slowly through the Broadway traffic in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights around noon.
The size and appearance of a high-tech garbage truck, with a huge hose attached to one side, the fifty-thousand-pound industrial vehicle was used to clean manholes and construction sites. Fully loaded, it was tricky to maneuver in the congested city traffic, especially in terms of braking, which was why the driver was keeping it at a slow and steady twenty-five miles per hour.
The truck itself was about ten years old and on its last legs from wear and use. The newest thing about it was the fake decal on its cab door that said it was from Con Edison, the New York City–area gas and electric company.
The driver was a doughy, vaguely Italian-looking guy in his forties wearing a blue Con Ed hard hat with matching baggy blue Con Ed coveralls. The con was definitely on, he thought, raising his stubbled jowls with a quick grin.
Then, as the truck finally approached its destination at the southeast corner of bustling 168th Street, he suddenly pointed ahead through the windshield.
“Uh-oh. Problem, Mr. Joyce,” he said to the man in the passenger seat beside him. “There’s a cop car parked right over our manhole. What do I do? Keep going?”
Mr. Joyce glanced up from the cluttered clipboard in his lap. Like the driver, he also wore bogus baggy Con Ed–blue coveralls and a matching hard hat. With the Oakley Sport sunglasses he wore under his hard hat, all you could tell about him was that he was pale and had a dark, reddish-brown goatee.
“Of course not. We’re on a tight schedule, Tony. Just pull alongside,” Mr. Joyce said calmly.
“Pull alongside?” the driver, Tony, said nervously. “Are you sure we shouldn’t just come back a little later? It’s the cops!”
“Listen to orders, Tony. Just pull alongside and let me handle it,” Mr. Joyce said as he rolled down his window.
There was only one cop in the cruiser. He was a lanky middle-aged black officer, and he looked up none too happily as Mr. Joyce gave him a friendly wave from the truck window. The cop had his hat off and a sandwich unwrapped in his lap.
“Sorry to bother you, Officer, but you’re parked over a manhole we need to gain access to,” Mr. Joyce explained, trying to make his voice sound as American as possible.
“Gimme a break, would you?” the cop said, flicking some five-dollar-foot-long lettuce off his chin. “Why don’t you go and take a nap somewhere for half an hour? When you come back, I’ll be gone.”
“I wish I could, Officer, honestly. But this one’s a real red ball. Apparently there’s some kind of power problem at the hospital,” said Mr. Joyce as he gestured at the multibuilding NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center complex across Broadway.
The cop gave him a savage look, mumbling something about red and balls, as he lowered his lunch and finally pulled out.
After Mr. Joyce hopped out of the cab, it took them less than a minute to maneuver the massive truck into position. As Tony got the manhole open with the hook, Mr. Joyce removed a blueprint from his clipboard and knelt with Tony at the rim of the hole.
“Start jackhammering right there,” he said, pointing into the manhole, a little left of the center of its south wall. “Should be about six feet in. It’ll look like square aluminum ducting, the same you would see in an HVAC system. Text me immediately when you see it. Oh, and watch those electrical cables at your back while you’re working, if you don’t wish to get fried. Half of them are uninsulated, and all of them are quite live.”
“You got it, Mr. Joyce. I’m, uh…on it,” said Tony, repeating an advertising expression that Con Edison had used in their commercials a few years before.
“This is no time for joking, Tony. Just get to work,” Mr. Joyce said.
WHEN MR. JOYCE got to his feet, the other Supervac truck they had stolen was just pulling up to the curb. His partner, Mr. Beckett, climbed down from the cab in the baggy nondescript Con Ed getup with sunglasses. He could almost have been Mr. Joyce’s double, except his goatee was jackrabbit white instead of reddish-brown.
Without speaking, both men crossed the sidewalk and descended the steps into the 168th Street subway station. MetroCarding through the turnstile, they bypassed a sign directing them to the A train and found the concrete corridor for the number 1 line elevator.
“This station is one of the deepest in the entire system, Mr. Beckett,” Mr. Joyce said as they stepped off the elevator onto the bridge that connects the uptown and downtown sides of the massive arched number 1 line’s underground station. “We’re presently ten stories below street level.”
Mr. Beckett nodded. He was pleased with his partner’s automatic use of their code names now that they were finally operational. All the exhaustive lessons he’d given his young partner about tradecraft had definitely sunk in.
“Why does it say ‘IRT’ here while upstairs, on the A line, it says ‘IND’? What do the initials mean?” Mr. Beckett wanted to know.
“It doesn’t matter for our purposes,” Mr. Joyce said, frowning. “You will find it boring.”
“No, I won’t. I promise. We have time to kill before that fool Tony gets to the air shaft. I’m curious. You don’t think I enjoy your little history lessons, Mr. Joyce, but I actually do.”
Mr. Beckett was right. Science was Mr. Joyce’s forte, but history was his true passion. Since he had arrived in the country years before, he had found the history of America, and especially New York City, surprisingly rich and fascinating. He was looking forward to delving into it more deeply at his leisure once all was said and done.
Especially, he thought, since he was about to make a great deal of the city’s history himself in the coming days.
“The abbreviations actually mean nothing anymore,” Mr. Joyce explained. “They’re just old subway nomenclature, remnants of the time when the city subway system was divided into lines run by separate companies instead of the current unified Metropolitan Transportation Authority. IRT stands for Inter-borough Rapid Transit, while IND stands for a company called the Independent Subway System. You may have noticed the abbreviation BMT on other lines, which stands for the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation. I could go into detail about the three lines and how they fit into the subway system’s famous color-coded numerical and alphabetical signage if you wish.”
“No, that’s okay. I need to stay awake,” Mr. Beckett said and laughed.
“I told you that you would find it boring,” Mr. Joyce replied with a sigh.
“On that, as on most things,” Mr. Beckett said as he clapped his protégé playfully on the shoulder, “you were annoyingly correct, my friend. How does it finally feel to be out of the lab and into the field?”
Mr. Joyce watched as a pigeon suddenly flapped out and down from a tunnel ledge above them and started pecking at some garbage between the uptown rails. Then he shrugged.
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t feel. I think.”
Mr. Beckett smiled widely.
“That is why you are so valuable. Now, give me damage estimates again in tangible human terms.”
“At the minimum, we’re looking at massive damage to the tunnel, shutting down service for months, and obviously terrifying this city like nothing since nine eleven.”
“And at the maximum?” said Mr. Beckett, hope in his bright-blue eyes behind the shades.
Mr. Joyce folded his hands together as he closed his eyes. Mr. Beckett thought he looked almost Asian for a moment, like a pale, goateed Buddha.
“We collapse a dozen city blocks, destroying the hospital complex, much of Washington Heights, and killing thousands,” Mr. Joyce finally said.
Mr. Beckett nodded at this pensively.
“And we go when, again?” he said.
“Tomorrow night.”
“So many decisions,” Mr. Beckett said, gazing north as a downtown-bound 1 train pulled, clattering, into the station. “So very little time.”
“DAD, DO I really have to wear this?”
Sunday morning around ten thirty, I waited until I heard the question repeated two more times before I looked up from an open old tin of black Kiwi shoe polish that I was using to teach Eddie how to shine his shoes.
The question was posed by Jane, who stood there in her lavender flower-print Easter dress. Her Easter dress from the previous year. Considering she’d grown about two inches in the meantime, she looked a little like Alice in Wonderland, suddenly enormous after consuming the “eat me” cake—or was it the “drink me” drink?
“It is a tad formal, I guess,” I said as I buffed at Eddie’s school shoes, “and, um, weird-fitting.”
“Gee, Dad. That’s really what a girl wants to hear. ‘What a weird-fitting dress you’re wearing.’ You really know how to pay a compliment.”
“Give me a break, Jane, will you, please? I’m up to my neck here. Do you have another nice dress?”
“Um, no. Mary Catherine was supposed to take all us girls shopping before she left, remember? Or maybe you forgot. Like the way you forgot to bring Mary Catherine home.”
I winced. I probably deserved that one. In fact, I knew I did. The fact that Mary Catherine hadn’t come home with me was still stinging to everyone. To me most of all.
“Figure it out, Jane, okay? Please? You can wear jeans, I guess, if they’re nice. We have to look really good, remember? That’s the point here. That’s the theme. Sweet and presentable and appropriate, okay?”
“Hey, everyone! Dad said we can wear jeans!” Jane shouted as she took off down the hallway.
“Dad, can I borrow your razor?” someone else asked a minute later.
This new query came from a groggy-looking Brian, still in his pj’s. I looked at his smooth, pale, sixteen-year-old cheeks. There was no hair to speak of. I didn’t say this, of course. Not passing on my observation was a no-brainer. Dad 101. Maybe his eyesight was better than mine. Make that definitely.
“In my medicine cabinet,” I said. “But hurry up. Please. We need to do this for Seamus. We need to pull together, or we’re all going to be late.”
Ten minutes later, I had everyone ready and gathered in the living room. Jane had actually found another dress and was looking quite spiffy, as was everyone else. Even I was wearing a tie for the special occasion. Everyone was present and accounted for except Seamus and Ricky and Juliana.
Which reminds me, I thought as I checked my watch. I nodded to Fiona, and at my signal she hit the stereo as the clock struck eleven precisely.
The door to the back bedroom opened just as the first strains of “Immaculate Mary” filled the room. Out the door came Juliana, holding a bookmarked Bible, followed by Ricky, wearing his altar-boy robe and holding a lit candle, then lastly, Seamus, wearing a surplice and clasping his hands in prayer.
As they arrived at the front of the room, I elbowed a daydreaming Trent to up the volume or, better yet, actually start singing from the lyric sheet I had printed out.
Since Seamus needed to take it easy after his stroke, I’d decided to turn the apartment into Saint Bennett’s Cathedral this Sunday and do Mass at home. He seemed to be fine enough since we brought him home, but I was still quite worried about him, of course. Not having Mary Catherine here to help me keep an eye on him, I decided to err on the side of caution.
The good news was that Gramps really seemed blown away when he saw the furniture rearranged in the living room and all the kids in their Sunday best.
“Good morning, parishioners,” he said, winking, as he stood smiling at the front of the room.
“Good morning, Father,” everyone said, smiling back.
Seamus stood there, then suddenly brought a finger to his open mouth as a vacant look glazed his eyes.
“Now, what’s next?” he said, looking down at the carpet, confused.
“Seamus?” I said as I stepped forward.
“Psych!” he said to me, snapping out of it after another moment as everyone laughed.
“Don’t worry: I’m not ready for the glue factory yet, Detective. Still a marble or two rolling around in this old gray head.”
“Very funny, Father,” I said, stepping back. “I’ll be the one with the stroke next if you keep it up.”
“Nonsense,” Seamus said. “Now, where was I? I know. Let us begin today as we begin every day. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
THAT EVENING, I was minding my own business, sheltering in place on the couch with a pint of Smithwick’s, about to watch the Yanks at Boston—ESPN’s game of the week—with Seamus and the rest of the boys, when I made the mistake of checking my phone for messages.