Burn (Michael Bennett 7) (25 page)

When I’d gotten out of bed, I’d wisely decided to do as MC would occasionally do and drop a surprise Sunday breakfast on everyone in the middle of the week to shake things up. It seemed to be working. There was no fighting and even an occasional giggle as I stood sipping a cup of coffee, watching the gang eat.

Seamus arrived five minutes later, startled and seemingly impressed to see the kids gathered around the dining room table in relative quiet.

“I see you’ve woken up on the right side of the bed this morning,” he said as he poured himself some joe. “I thought I’d have to pry you out of bed with a crowbar with that long face you had on last night, but here you are, running the Bennett Diner.”

I winked as we clinked mugs.

“Carpe diem, Padre,” I said.

Then something great happened. Something really great and even more unexpected. It was a text on my phone. A suggestion, along with some instructions.

“What is it? What’s up?” Seamus said.

“Stay right there,” I said, running into my bedroom.

When I came back to the dining room, I was holding my laptop. I cleared away some dishes and laid it on the corner of the table and turned it on.

“What are you doing, Daddy?” Chrissy said, trying to peek.

“It’s a surprise,” I said. “You can’t look. Just wait one sec.”

I clicked some more buttons, changing screens.

“Ta-da!” I said as I held up the laptop to show Mary Catherine smiling ear-to-ear on Skype.

“Mary Catherine!” everyone cried at once.

Chairs scraped loudly as the kids rushed over beside me. Chrissy and Shawna jumped into my lap as Seamus practically jumped on my back. A dozen heads bonked together as everyone tried to get a look at our long-lost nanny.

“Now would you look at all the happy faces,” Mary Catherine said. “On a Tuesday morning before school, no less. I guess I’m not that missed after all, seeing you so happy.”

“Noooo!” Shawna cried. “We miss you! We really, really miss you!”

“I miss you, too, Shawna. Like you wouldn’t believe,” Mary Catherine said. “I feel like I’ve been gone a year. How long has it been?”

“Ten years,” I said.

“Guess what we named the puppy, Mary Catherine?” Fiona said, holding him up to the screen.

“Tell me,” Mary Catherine said, smiling widely.

“Jasper!” the kids cried out together.

“And don’t forget that the hamster’s name is now Puddles. That suggestion was me own, actually, on account of his reaction each time I pick up the nervous little fella,” Seamus said as the little ones giggled.

“I love you all. That includes Jasper and Puddles. I’ll be home to you as soon as I can. Bye now,” Mary Catherine said as she clicked off the connection.

“Not soon enough, Mary Catherine,” I mumbled to the blank gray screen.

CHAPTER
83

AFTER DROPPING THE KIDS
off at school, I drove up on a loud commotion by the Harlem squad’s office building on 125th Street.

As I parked behind a donut cart near the corner of Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, I could see a one-legged homeless guy on the plaza in front of the building. He was putting on some kind of a show. Jumping around energetically like a middle-aged black pogo stick, he was shaking a coin-filled coffee cup while singing the Marvin Gaye classic “Let’s Get It On” at the top of his lungs.

Was he harmless? Dangerous? Bath-salted? I wondered as I stepped toward him. Entertaining? Definitely.

“Well, hello there, sir. Tucker Johnson’s the name,” the man said, jingling the change in his coffee cup like a tambourine as he hopped toward me with a surprising athletic alacrity. “You have a request? What can ol’ Tucker sing for you? You like the Platters? I do a real nice ‘Twilight Time.’”

I shook my head. I could smell the cheap wine off him from ten feet. Handicapped people are able to accomplish a lot of amazing things that deserve applause. But drinking oneself into oblivion by eight-thirty in the morning isn’t one of them.

“I don’t mind you hanging out, Tucker. You just can’t hang out here making so much noise, bothering the good people of the world trying to go to work. No singing until noon. At least. Also, getting sober first might be nice.”

“Ah, man. I ain’t hurtin’ no one,” he said. “I’m just tryin’ to spread a little sonic joy out here this morning. Plus this is my work, man. You gonna put an artist outta work?”

“Fine,” I said. “How does ten bucks sound to go away?” I reached into my wallet.

“Twenty sounds better,” Tucker said, getting surly.

“Twenty what?” I said, staring at him sternly. “Days in jail for disturbing the peace?”

“On second thought, ten’ll do just fine,” Tucker said, brightening.

The crowd waiting at the donut cart on the corner of 125th gave me a cheer as I escorted Tucker Johnson on his way. I took a modest bow before heading back toward the building. And why not? Not even in the office yet and I’d already solved my first civil disturbance of the day.

But before I got even halfway to the building’s front door, my phone rang. It was Arturo.

“Mike, I just picked up the office phone. A cop stationed over at Harlem Hospital said Rachel Wecht just came in, in terrible shape.”

I stopped in my tracks. Rachel Wecht was Roger’s new punk rock girlfriend, I remembered.

“Apparently, Roger really did a job on her last night,” Arturo continued. “They were smoking crack, and he went nuts and threw her out a second-story window face-first. She broke both her arms and cheekbones and knocked out her front teeth. The good news is she spilled the beans on Roger’s location. He stays at the Charles H. Gay shelter for men out on Wards Island.”

“Come down on the double, Arturo,” I cried as I headed back for the car. “I’ll meet you in the lot. We can’t let this guy get away again.”

CHAPTER
84

A SEEMINGLY ENDLESS CSX
freight train was slowly making its way from Queens to the Bronx across the Hell Gate Bridge as we came through the Triborough Bridge toll for the island made up of Randall’s and Wards islands.

In the middle of the East River between the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens, Randall’s and Wards was a weird area. It housed the FDNY Fire Academy and a New York State Police facility, but its most infamous institution was the Manhattan Psychiatric Center, a dizzying network of massive tan brick buildings with barred windows that had once been the largest mental asylum in the entire world.

Beside the municipal buildings were open fields that had been converted into recreational facilities, baseball and soccer fields, tennis courts, picnic areas. There was even a driving range.

Our destination, the Charles H. Gay Men’s Shelter, was at the bottom of the off-ramp, a large, wide four-story redbrick building behind a black iron fence. It almost looked like a private school until we got closer and saw the broken beer bottles and piles of vomit peppering the curb by its gate. We parked just beyond the M35 bus stop out front, where a white-bearded old Hispanic man lay splayed flat on his back on a bench, sleeping.

We told the security guard inside the door what we wanted, and he buzzed us in to see the facility’s day director, Nolan Washington, in his office just off the lobby.

“There must be some mistake,” said Washington, a well-dressed XXL black man and former air force medic. “You’re looking for a criminal? Here?”

He rolled his eyes as he sat us down on his office sofa with some coffee.

“That’s a joke, in case you were wondering,” he said, accepting the photo of Roger that Arturo handed him. “We got plenty of people with serious criminal histories here, especially sexual assaults. They commit offenses, go upstate to jail, and then when the jails dump them back out, they come back home to nothing and we get to deal with the mess.”

“This place looks pretty empty,” I said. “How does the shelter work?”

“We open at eight p.m. and close the doors at the ten p.m. curfew. Everybody has to be out by eight the next morning. They’re supposed to look for work, make some attempt to try to become self-sufficient. But they don’t. They mostly drink and drug and lie around all day like oversize alley cats until we open the doors back up at eight p.m. It’s pretty frustrating.”

“So have you seen Roger?” I said, redirecting his attention to the photo.

“Let me grab my glasses,” he said, lifting a pair off his desk.

He slipped on bifocals and stared at the sheet thoughtfully.

“Wait a second,” he said, his eyes suddenly brightening. “I think we just hired this guy in the kitchen. But his name isn’t Roger, it’s Simon. Simon Ritt? No, Britt. That’s it. Simon Britt.”

He blinked up at us.

“He should be here right now.”

CHAPTER
85

WASHINGTON TOOK OFF HIS
bifocals as he lifted a phone.

“Hey, Sam, is that new guy, Simon, in?” he said.

He listened.

“Uh-huh. OK. Thanks.”

“He’s on his morning break,” Washington said as he hung up. “They said he just took one of the maintenance carts to go to the snack bar by the driving range.”

We rushed back outside with a trailing Washington, who hopped into the backseat. We were coming along the concrete columns of the Triborough about a quarter mile north on one of the island’s access roads when Washington pointed forward through the windshield.

“There he is! That’s him in the green cart.”

Instead of the golf cart I thought he’d be driving, Roger, wearing kitchen whites, was on a green John Deere quad-like off-road vehicle. He turned his head as we were coming alongside him. I smiled as our eyes met.

Then Roger disappeared.

I almost ran him over as he suddenly cut savagely to the left in front of the Chevy, up over a curb under the Triborough Bridge overpass.

I immediately slammed on the brakes and wheeled left, the Chevy’s tires throwing dirt and gravel as we bumped up off the road into a construction site under the bridge.

“Aw, c’mon, man,” I heard Washington say in the back as he clicked on a seat belt.

When we came back out on the other side of the overpass, we saw Roger. He was back near the shelter, tearing away on the deceptively fast little vehicle across some baseball fields toward the shore of the island, where there was a footbridge back to Manhattan.

I couldn’t let him get away. Not again. Arturo and Washington and I almost hit the roof of the Chevy twice as I sailed down and up over the access road’s two curbs. The Hispanic man sleeping at the bus stop got a rude awakening as I raced past the shelter into the baseball field at about sixty and climbing.

I’d been on a few car pursuits in NYC in my time, but never an off-road one!

Roger looked surprised when he turned around and saw me right on his quad’s bumper. He tried to turn again, but I was waiting for him. He and his vehicle went flying as the right front bumper of the Chevy tapped the rear of the quad, sending it into a fishtail that soon turned into a barrel roll over the diamond’s infield dirt.

I screeched to a stop about a millimeter from home plate just in front of the fenced-in backstop, turning to see if Roger was still alive. Of course he was. Off the toppled quad and on foot now, he slipped through a gap beside the backstop and ran for the footbridge about a football field away.

“I got this,” Arturo said, already out of the car and up-righting the still-running quad.

I could hardly believe my eyes as my chunky partner pinned it after Roger through the gap in the fence.

Roger was twenty yards from the base of the footbridge when Washington and I, watching through the chain-link, saw a fired-up Arturo leap from behind the wheel of the speeding quad. Like a three-hundred-pound Puerto Rican cannonball, he sailed through the air toward Roger’s sprinting back.

It was a direct hit, center mass. Roger and Arturo went facedown in a plume of dust.

When I finally got the car around the fence and screeched up, Arturo had already cuffed him. Still amped on adrenaline, Arturo leaped to his feet, dancing around, arms raised over his head like Rocky.

“How’s that for fast, Mike?” Arturo yelled as Roger lay there gasping. “Oh, yeah! Uh-huh! Done!
Finito!
Over!”

“Not bad, Lopez,” I said, laughing, as I finally got out of the car and gave him a high five. “Your form could use some work, but I have to hand it to you. You definitely nailed the landing.”

CHAPTER
86

A WINDOW-SHAKING RUMBLE
of thunder woke me without preamble that next Monday morning. Sitting up on the edge of the bed, I remembered the meeting I had to be at in a couple of hours.

How could I forget it?

We’d been subpoenaed to appear at a preliminary custody hearing for Chrissy at ten a.m. at the Manhattan Family Court House downtown.

I’d been going crazy on the phone with Gunny Chung all weekend. We’d been working hard on a pretty good game plan to nip this in the bud ever since Bieth had come uninvited to my house. We’d uncovered some very interesting information about Robert Bieth and his relationship to Chrissy’s birth mother that definitely threw this whole matter into question.

But now, with the hearing staring me in the face, I wasn’t so sure.

I clamped a hand over my stubbled chin as I stared out through the blinds at the rain pouring down from the glum, dirty-gray sky.

Why the hell is this happening?

I was still sitting there frozen with worry a minute or two later when my phone hummed on the nightstand.

Michael God bless you and God bless Chrissy
said the text from Mary Catherine. I let out a breath. Despite the fact that my nanny was an ocean away dealing with her own heartbreaking problems, she’d insisted that I keep her in the loop on Chrissy.

What time was it in Tipperary? I wondered.
Noon? And how did Mary Catherine even know I was awake?

Because she was Mary Catherine, of course. Nothing was hidden from the angels and saints.