Bennett 06 - Gone (3 page)

Licata sat and stared, mesmerized, at the screen. The handsome, light-skinned black man was wearing a white silk shirt, seersucker shorts, a pair of Cartier aviator sunglasses. He was sitting Indian-style on a rattan chaise longue, drinking what looked like a mojito. There was a long, lean woman in a white bikini on the chaise beside him, but Licata couldn’t see her face, just the tan, oiled line of her leg and hip, the toss of white-blond hair on her cinnamon shoulder. They were both barefoot. It looked like they were on a boat.

Licata groaned as his scrambling thoughts began catching traction. About a year ago, Licata had met Perrine in the fed lockup in Lower Manhattan, and for the princely sum of $10 million cash, he had helped the Mexican cartel head escape from federal custody.
But does he go away and leave me alone?
Licata thought.
Of course not.
The multilingual maniac calls him up a mere two months after his world-famous escape and insists on working together. Like he needed that kind of heat.

As Licata watched, a beautiful four- or five-year-old dusky girl with light-blue eyes filled the screen. Her cornrowed hair was wet, the sequins of her bright-teal bathing suit twinkling.

“Who’s the funny man, Daddy?” the little girl said as she squatted, peering curiously at Licata.

“Back in the pool now, Bianca. I want you to do two laps of backstroke now,” Perrine said lovingly from behind her. “Daddy’s just watching a grown-up show.”

Licata watched the girl shrug and walk offscreen.

“What do you think of this TV setup? Amazing clarity, yes?” Perrine said, removing his sunglasses to show his sparkling light-blue eyes. “It’s called TelePresence, the latest thing from Cisco Systems. It’s costing me a small fortune, but I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see and speak with you one last time.”

Licata opened his mouth to say something, then suddenly found himself weeping.

“Tears, Mr. Licata? Seriously? You of all people know perfectly well that men in this world fall into two categories, tools or enemies. You refused to work with me. What did you think was going to happen?”

Perrine took a sip of his drink and wiped his lips daintily with a napkin before he continued.

“It’s not like I didn’t give you a chance. I offered friendship, remember?” he said. “A mutually beneficial partnership. I explained to you how the world was changing. How I could help you and the American Mafia to weather that transition. In earnest I said these things.

“Do you remember what you said before you hung up on me? It was rather humorous. You said that instead of working with your organization, my Mexican friends and I ought to, and I quote, ‘go back and do what you’re good at: washing dishes and cutting grass.’ ”

He brushed an imaginary speck from the shoulder of his pristine silk shirt.

“Mr. Licata, as you see now, my people aren’t the type that do dishes, and instead of grass, the only things we cut are heads.”

“You’re right,” Licata said, blood from his wrecked mouth flecking the cement floor. “I was wrong, Manuel. Way, way off base to disrespect you like that. I see how serious a player you are. We can help each other. I can help you. We can work it out.”

Perrine laughed as he slipped his shades on and leaned back.

“ ‘We can work it out’?” he said as he put his hands behind his head. “You mean like the famous Beatles song, Mr. Licata? That’s precisely the problem. There’s no time, my friend.”

“But —” Licata said as the downward-flowing gas finally touched the candle flame.

Then Licata, his basement, and most of his obnoxious Connecticut McMansion were instantly vaporized as five thousand cubic feet of natural gas went up all at once in a ripping, reverberating, ground-shuddering blast.

AWAKE AT FIVE O’CLOCK
in the morning and unable to sleep with all the incessant peace and quiet, I pushed out through the creaky screen door onto the darkened porch, clutching my morning’s first coffee.

Dr. Seuss was right on the money
, I thought with a frown as I sat myself beside a rusting tractor hay rake.

“Oh, the places you’ll go,” I mumbled to the tumbleweeds.

The porch rail I put my feet up on was connected to a ramshackle Victorian farmhouse a few miles south of Susanville, California. Susanville, as absolutely no one knows, is the county seat of Northern California’s Lassen County. The county itself is named after Peter Lassen, a famous frontiersman and Indian fighter, who, I’d learned from my daughter Jane, was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1859.

As a New York cop forced into exile out here in the exact middle of nowhere for the past eight months, I was seriously thinking about asking someone if I could take a crack at solving Lassen’s cold case. That should give you some indication of how bored I was.

But what are you going to do?

Bored is better than dead, all things considered.

I was sitting on an old wooden chair that we called an Adirondack chair when I was a kid, but that I guess out here was called a Sierra chair, since I could actually see the northern, snow-tipped rim of the Sierra Nevada from my porch. It was cold, and I was sporting, of all things, a Carhartt work coat, worn jeans, and a pair of Wellington boots.

The wellies, knee-high green rubber boots, were perfectly ridiculous-looking but quite necessary. We were living on a cattle ranch now, and no matter how hard you tried not to, you often stepped in things that needed hosing off.

Yeah, I’d stepped in it, all right.

Mere months ago, I’d been your typical happy-go-lucky Irish American NYPD detective with ten adopted kids. Then I arrested Manuel Perrine, a Mexican drug-cartel head. Which would have been fine. Putting drug-dealing murderers into cages, where they belonged, happened to be an avid hobby of mine.

The problem was, the billionaire scumbag escaped custody and put a multimillion-dollar hit out on me and my family.

So there you have it. The feds put us in witness protection, and I’d gone from
NYPD Blue
to
Little House on the Prairie
in no time flat. I’d always suspected that “luck of the Irish” was a sarcastic phrase.

If I said I was settling in, I’d be lying. If anything, I was more amazed now at our bizarre new surroundings than on the day we arrived.

When people think of California, they think of surfboards, the Beach Boys, Valley girls. That’s certainly what I and the rest of the Bennett clan all thought we were in for when the feds told us that was where we were headed.

But what we actually ended up getting from the witness protection folks was the other California, the one no one ever talks about. The northern, high-desert boondocks California, with log cabins left behind by settlers turned cannibals, and cow pies left behind by our new, bovine neighbors.

But it wasn’t all bad. The eight-hundred-acre ranch we were now living on was surrounded by devastatingly majestic mountains. And our landlord, Aaron Cody, fifth-generation cattle rancher, couldn’t have been nicer to us. He raised grass-fed cattle and organic you-name-it: eggs, milk, veggies, which he constantly left on our doorstep like some rangy, seventy-five-year-old cowboy Santa Claus. We’d never eaten better.

From my kids’ perspective, there was a definite mix of emotions. The older guys were depressed, still missing their friends and former Facebook profiles. With the younger crowd, it was the opposite. They had fallen in love with farm life and all the animals. And, boy, were there a lot of them. Cody had a veritable zoo half a mile back off the road: horses, dogs, goats, llamas, pigs, chickens.

Our nanny, Mary Catherine, who had grown up on a cattle farm back in Ireland, had hit the ground running. She was in her element, always busy either with the children or helping out our landlord. Cody, a widower, who was obviously head over heels in love with Mary Catherine, said he’d never had a better or prettier hired hand.

And we were safe up here. One thing it’s hard to do to someone who lives half a mile off a main road in the middle of the wilderness is sneak up on them.

At times, I probably could have committed a felony for a real slice of pizza or a bagel, but I was trying to look on the bright side: though the nineteenth-century lifestyle certainly took some getting used to, at least when the dollar collapsed, we’d be good.

So here I was, up early, out on the porch drinking coffee like your classic western men of yore, looking around for my horse so I could ride the range. Actually, I didn’t have a horse or know what “the range” was, so I decided to just read the news on my iPhone.

Beavis and Butt-Head were coming back, I read on the Yahoo! news page. Wasn’t that nice? It was a real comfort to know that the world out beyond the confines of my eight-hundred-acre sanctuary was still going to hell in a gasoline-filled recyclable shopping bag.

It was what I spotted when I thumbed over to the
Drudge Report
that made me sit up and spill coffee all over my wellies.

MOB WAR!!? 20-Plus Dead! Manuel Perrine Suspected in Multiple Bloodbaths!

IT TOOK ME ABOUT
half an hour of reading through the just-breaking news reports to wrap my blown mind around what was happening.

There had been seven attacks in all. Three in the New York area, and one each in Providence, Detroit, Philly, and Los Angeles. Reports were preliminary, but it was looking like the heads of all five Mafia families involved had been among those massacred in their homes last night by unknown assailants.

Wives were dead, it said. Children. A mobster’s house in Westport, Connecticut, had actually been blown to smithereens.

“ ‘Twenty-three bodies and counting,’ ” I read out loud off the
Los Angeles Times
website.

Twenty-three dead wasn’t a crime, I thought in utter disbelief. Twenty-three dead was the body count of a land war.

The scope and sophistication of the attacks were daunting. Alarms had been disabled, security tapes removed. It was still early, but there didn’t seem to be any witnesses. In the space of seven hours, several mobsters and their families had been quickly and quietly wiped off the face of the earth.

An unmentioned source tipped off law enforcement that it might be Perrine. The anonymous tipster said that Perrine had offered the American Mafia some sort of partnership a few months back, a deal that was turned down. Not only that, but the article was saying that today was actually Perrine’s forty-fifth birthday.

It definitely could have been Perrine, I knew. The attacks actually made sense when you realized how the cartels worked. The cartels’ brutally simple and efficient negotiating tactic was called
plata o plomo
on the street. Silver or lead. Take the money or a bullet. Do business with us or die.

It was one thing to strong-arm a bodega owner, I thought, shaking my head. But Perrine apparently had just done it to the entire Mob!

You would need how many men for something like that? I wondered. Fifty? Probably closer to a hundred. I thought about that, about Perrine, out there somewhere, free as a bird, coordinating a hundred highly trained hit men in five cities, like markers on a board. Then I stopped thinking about it. It was way too depressing.

Because it really was an unprecedented power play. The American Mafia had been running the underworld show since—when? Prohibition? Perrine, obviously, was out to change that. He was upping his cartel’s influence and operation, branching out from Mexico and into the good ol’ US of A.

It was truly very scary news that Perrine was on the scene again. Coming from a penniless ghetto in French Guiana, he’d somehow made his way to France, where he joined the army and worked his way into the French special forces. His fellow squad members in the French naval commandos described him as incredibly intelligent and competent, extremely competitive yet witty at times, a talented, natural leader.

What Perrine decided to do with his charismatic talent and elite commando military experience was to return to South America and hire himself out as a mercenary and military consultant to the highest-bidding criminal enterprises he could find. Two bloody decades later, he had risen to become the billionaire head of the largest and most violent cartel in Mexico.

You would have thought that his career was over when I bagged him in New York about a year ago. It wasn’t. He’d had the judge at his own trial murdered and actually managed to escape from the fourteenth floor of the Foley Square Federal Courthouse via helicopter. I should know, because I was there at the time and actually emptied my Glock into the chopper to no avail as it whirlybirded elegant, intelligent Manuel Perrine away.

So you can see why I was concerned as I sat there. Wanted international fugitives usually try to spend their time hiding, not expanding their criminal enterprises. Reports were saying that in the past few months, he had actually joined together his cartel with that of one of his rivals. Los Salvajes, they were calling this new supercartel. The Wild Ones.

And Perrine, at its head, was fast becoming a popular folk hero. Which was a head-scratcher for me, since this Robin Hood, instead of robbing the rich and giving to the poor, smuggled drugs in metric-ton loads and decapitated people.

I began to get extremely pissed off after a bit more reading. So much so that I turned off my phone and just sat there, fuming.

It wasn’t the loss of five Mafia kingpins that I cared so much about. Despite the sweeping, romantic Francis Ford Coppola and HBO portrayals, real mobsters were truly evil, bullying individuals who, when they weren’t ripping everybody off, loved nothing more than to demean and destroy people at every opportunity.

For example, I knew that one of the dearly departed godfathers, Michael Licata, had once pistol-whipped a Bronxville restaurant waiter into a coma for not bringing his mussels marinara fast enough. The fact that last night Licata had been blown up in his own house was something I could learn to live with.