So did the night-vision-enhanced crosshairs of the sniper rifle trained on Sergeant McDonald’s right temple.
The rifle that the scope was attached to was a CheyTac M200. The almost thirty-pound big bastard of a weapon had an effective range of nearly 1.2 miles and was made in the good ol’ USA. The big bastard of a sniper at its huge night-vision eyepiece happened to be an Englishman, a fifty-seven-year-old SAS-trained mercenary named Gabler.
Dressed in black fatigues, Gabler was sitting on a camp chair on the forward deck of the five-hundred-thousand-dollar pleasure craft. Beside him, the massive gun was propped on a shooting bench, as though Gabler were a contestant in a competition.
He’d already zoned in the distance-to-target at 826.23 yards, according to the range finder in his bag, and made his windage adjustments. He’d even checked the barometric pressure, 1011 millibars per hectopascal, which would have negligible effect at the range he was looking at. Except for the sway of the boat, it was simple enough.
So easy a caveman could do it, Gabler thought, slipping his finger into the trigger guard.
Gabler turned his signature tweed cap around on his head as he made a minor adjustment to the scope’s eye rest. With his pale scrunched fist of a middle-aged Celtic face, he could have been a soccer analyst or a kindly Scottish sheep farmer, a look that was quite useful considering that he was, in fact, one of the most ruthless and sought-after assassin snipers on planet Earth.
Even before the cop car drove into the kill zone, Gabler knew he was working for some serious-as-cancer Mexican dope dealers. Duh, as a thick Yank would say. Wasn’t like a knitting circle could fly him in on a private aircraft from his vacation house in Portugal and come up with his four-hundred-thousand-dollar fee.
It didn’t matter in the slightest. Like the man he was about to erase from existence, Gabler, too, was in it for numero uno.
The customer is always right, he thought.
“You ready?” Gabler finally asked with a thick Glasgow burr.
At his elbow stood the client, a sexy, light-skinned Latina in a skintight black pantsuit. Gabler didn’t like looking at her. There was something terrible and fierce in her pale, striking eyes, something scary, something that said the lass wasn’t quite all there. Throughout his preparations, she’d kept unconsciously licking her lower lip, as if she were turned on by what was about to occur.
The wacko, beautiful bitch held up a restraining hand as she thumbed a smartphone.
“The mark is where we were informed he would be, as planned,” Marietta said. “We have a clear shot. Shall we take it?”
“Yes,” Perrine said on the line from his downtown Manhattan prison cell. “By all means. Kill the son of a bitch.”
Marietta raised a pair of night-vision goggles and trained them on the Newburgh shore. Then she tapped the mercenary gently on the shoulder.
“Do it now!” she said enthusiastically. “Blow the cop’s fucking head off!”
Gabler waited and waited, and then just as the boat rose up from a dip, he squeezed the trigger. The shot, even suppressed to the maximum, made a crisp firecracker pop as the big gun hopped up off the bench rest.
In his sight, Gabler watched the satisfying red explosion of the .408-caliber bullet striking home. It was a direct hit. The huge round entered the cop’s right temple and came out his left, cleanly shearing off the top of his head.
Gabler let out a proud breath as he ejected the warm casing. It was a nice shot, considering all the factors. A tidy little piece of work, if he did say so himself. Even those Navy SEAL wankers who had snipered those Somali pirates would have been impressed.
“I wish you could see this, darling,” Marietta said into her phone. She was still gazing through her night-vision goggles at the carnage as Gabler went below deck with his gear.
“I’m there in spirit, Marietta,” Perrine said as one of the bodyguards winched up the anchor and the streamlined yacht’s engine softly rumbled to life.
CHAPTER 71
IT WAS DARK that Sunday night when Seamus and I pulled into the almost-full parking lot of Saint Patrick’s Church on Grand Street in downtown Newburgh.
No sultry moonlight or romance in sight on this particular summer night, I thought as I got out. Not even close.
The night before, a uniformed on-duty cop had been shot to death in his cruiser. Actually, I guess “assassinated” would be a better term, since it seemed to have been done with a very high-powered rifle. As if that weren’t bad enough, beside the veteran cop was a bag with three kilos of cocaine inside of it.
That’s why Seamus and I were here. Ed Boyanoski had told us about a special emergency meeting of several law enforcement, church, and civic groups who wanted to discuss the latest atrocities and see what could be done about them.
As we crossed the parking lot, I looked out on the lights of Newburgh and thought of the big rip theory in physics. Scientists speculate that the ever-expanding universe will reach a point where forces like gravity can’t hold things together anymore, and everything in the entire universe will tear apart at the same time.
Maybe that’s what was going on, because this killing wasn’t just a hard blow to this small city already on the ropes with drugs and gangs and so many young people shooting each other. It was really starting to look like the knockout punch.
After we passed through a battered metal door, we descended some steps into the church’s dank basement, where the meeting hall was. The people there were a mix of Spanish-speaking businessmen and laborers, concerned-looking black moms and grandmoms, and blue- and white-collar Caucasians. The Newburgh PD was well represented, too. Ed and Bill were in the center of the front row, with Walrond and Groover and most of the guys from the gang unit. I passed trauma surgeon Dr. Mary Ann Walker sitting in a chair by the front, staring at the floor as she shredded a napkin.
If there was a common thread among them, it seemed to be devastation. There was also some shock, and even more fear.
I walked over to Ed, who was standing beside a plate of cinnamon churros.
“Is this the part where I say, ‘Hi, my name’s Mike, and I’m an alcoholic’?” I said as I grabbed a coffee.
“I feel like becoming an alcoholic with the way things are looking around here,” Ed said dourly.
Okay, then, I thought as I found a metal folding chair. So much for the witty banter.
An older Hispanic woman with brightly dyed blond hair spoke first.
“I have a seventeen-year-old nephew in jail for murder,” she said. “My son isn’t even in a gang, but he’s been shot. It’s like the Wild West out there, or Iraq. Please, won’t someone help us?”
After she sat back down, a regal young black woman wearing business clothes and carrying an infant in a baby carrier stepped to the front of the room.
“Hi, everyone. I’m Tasha Jennings. I’m nobody, just a citizen of Newburgh like you. I came tonight to tell everyone that this situation is not hopeless. Things were just this bad when I was a kid in Brooklyn in the early nineties. Actually, they were even worse. We used to get like a hundred murders a year in my neighborhood. But they turned it around. I’m not sure how, but they did it. Someone needs to look into those methods. We need to find out what those cops did there and do it here. Thank you.”
As she sat, a mustached white guy in an Orange County Choppers T-shirt and dusty jeans stood up.
“She’s right,” he said angrily. “That’s exactly what we need. We need a Giuliani. Some hard-ass who will make the cops do their goddamn jobs instead of stealing drugs!”
That got some hearty applause from the let’s-make-the-cops-put-down-the-doughnuts crowd. I looked over at Ed and Bill, who paid informants out of their own pockets and didn’t look like they had gotten a good night’s sleep in years, let alone taken a vacation.
“Giuliani?” someone called out. “That guy was a Nazi!”
“Damn straight he was a Nazi,” Mustache said. “The Nazi who saved New York City.”
r /> The rest of the meeting wasn’t very effective. There was a lot of yelling, people venting their frustration. You couldn’t blame them. The Newburgh residents wanted their city back. They wanted to do the right thing for their town and for their families.
But how?
CHAPTER 72
THE FIRST TIME Seamus spoke was when we got back into the minibus.
“I was thinking about what that nice young woman said,” he said after he clicked his seat belt in place. “About turning around New York. Did you know that Giuliani wasn’t the first crusader to clean up New York?”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“It happened in the late eighteen hundreds. The plight of the Irish in New York City after the 1849 potato famine was far worse than that of the poor people here in Newburgh. The Irish were considered a menace to society, and the run-down parts of the city where they lived were rife with crime and drugs, prostitution and gangs, and deplorable conditions.”
“We were the original gangsters?” I said with a grin.
“Exactly,” Seamus said in his brogue. “What turned it around was a moral and cultural revolution. A bishop named John Hughes went into the slums and took the people to task, condemning their criminality on the one hand and offering a sense of self-respect and hope through God on the other. Hughes was actually the one who started the Catholic school system. With his efforts, in a generation, all the criminals were cops and the Irish were solid citizens.”
“You think that might work, Father?” I said skeptically. “Me and you should walk down Lander Street thumping a Bible? I mean, really? Could I hollow mine out for my Glock?”
My grandfather looked very old as he shrugged and looked out the window.
“It’s in the DNA of young male human beings to enjoy acting like hooligans,” he said. “Everyone knows that. Nothing will ever stop that. The only effective curb to that unacceptable behavior is the presence of a larger male human being known as a father who will kick the young man’s keister when he acts up. Where are the fathers here?”
“So that’s it? Fatherlessness is the root of the gang problem?”
“It’s not rocket science, Mick,” Seamus said. “I don’t need to tell you how much hands-on help a teenage boy needs to become a self-reliant, law-abiding man.”
“You have a point there,” I said.
“Exactly. A mother can’t control a fifteen-year-old young man by herself. School can’t. So these kids run wilder and wilder until they get killed or the police have to step in.”
“They are wild,” I said.
“See, the Church emphasizes the family and frowns on premarital sex and divorce, and people laugh and call us killjoys and plug their ears,” Seamus said. “There are many ways to raise children and none is perfect, but anyone who says a traditional nuclear family isn’t the best way is flat-out fooling himself.”
He sighed.
“People say it’s society’s fault, and they’re right. In our society, fatherlessness is considered a lifestyle choice. But it’s not. To have a child and not be its father is criminal abandonment. You might as well leave your baby in his stroller on the corner and run away, because that’s basically what you’re doing. Without a father, these kids have been abandoned to the street, and hence the situation here in Newburgh. Lord of the Flies with drugs and guns.”
“So all of a sudden these gangbangers are going to put away their nine-millimeters and drugs and settle down with formula and diapers? How’s that going to happen? And why didn’t you say all this at the meeting?” I said. “Put the message out there?”
“They don’t want to hear it from an old Irish priest,” Seamus said. “They’d shut me out as an interloper before I got to the podium.”
“Who should be the messenger, then?”
“I don’t know. Jay-Z might be a start, or that P. Diddy fella. The message has to come from someone prominent, someone who already has their respect. Bill Cosby tried to say some sensible things a few years back, but the secular crowd shouted him down. It has to be someone who won’t be shouted down by anyone. Someone with fire in his belly.”
“Jay-Z, Seamus? C’mon. That’s just not going to happen.”
“In that case, we need to start building more prisons and graveyards,” Seamus said. “Because if someone doesn’t come along and somehow convince these young men to live their lives in a different way, they’re going to go right on killing each other. Generation after generation after generation.”
“As much as I hate to say this, old man,” I said as I finally put the bus into drive, “I think you’re actually right.”
BOOK FOUR
ALL THE KING’S MEN
CHAPTER 73
IN THE MIDDLE of the night—3:00 a.m. on Monday, to be exact—I got a call from DEA chief Patrick Zaretski. It was big news. Good big news, for a change.
A tip had come in on a group linked to Manuel Perrine. Apparently, a team of killers was holed up in a house in Staten Island. It was being speculated that they were there to plot another brazen assault at Perrine’s trial. The house was currently under surveillance while an arrest team was put together.
“There’s word that there’s an attractive brunette at the location,” Patrick said. “We think it’s that bitch Marietta, Mike. Hughie’s killer. We might have finally caught a break on this.”
By 4:00 a.m., I was on the New York State Thruway, flying at nearly a hundred miles an hour, with Jimmy Sanchez, a DEA agent from the joint task force who lived in Orange County. His car was an undercover vehicle, a souped-up Dodge Charger, and the bubbling roar of its 6.4-liter HEMI V8 was the perfect sound track to my mounting adrenaline and anticipation. My foot was aching to kick a door down—and even more aching to finally kick some scumbag, drug-dealer ass—as we headed toward New York City like bats out of hell.
We toned it down considerably by the time we got to the rallying point. We rolled up to the wagon train of DEA and NYPD unmarked cars already waiting in the deserted parking lot of a Chili’s on Richmond Avenue near the College of Staten Island.
All stops had been thoroughly pulled. There were almost three dozen detectives, DEA agents, and Emergency Service Unit cops helping each other into Kevlar and prepping guns on the trunks of their cruisers. They looked like a pro football defensive squad getting their game faces on, just about ready to mix it up. I know I was ready to trade some helmet paint with Perrine’s people. Raring to go, in fact.
It was a strange and sort of wonderful moment there, getting prepared with those men. Though no one said anything, we knew that this was bigger than just a drug raid. The audacious violence of Perrine’s men had turned his trial into an international event. The man hadn’t just broken American laws, he’d gleefully spat in the face of everything we stood for.
And the rest of the planet was waiting to see what we were going to do about it.
The dedicated cops around me were aching to show the world exactly what we were going to do about it. Because they were tired of the evil and the drugs, tired of the terrorists tearing at the fabric of our great country. We were completely freaking sick of it.
After we divided up the raid duties, a quick prayer was said as the sun came up over the restaurant’s giant red plastic chili. I don’t know who started it, but mostly everyone joined in. We probably flew in the face of several Supreme Court decisions by actually having the unbridled audacity to bring God into government proceedings, but we just went ahead and did it anyway. I guess we were feeling really wild and crazy that morning as we prepared to stare death in its ugly face. Just completely off the hook.
Jimmy gunned the engine of the muscle car as I got in, the air around me vibrating with every surge of its deep, rumbling thunder. Who needed coffee?
“It’s ass-clobberin’ time,” Jimmy said as he dropped it into drive.
“Amen to that, brother,” I said, shucking a round into my tactical shotgun as we peeled out.
CHAPTER 74
&
nbsp; THE TARGET WAS a cruddy stucco two-family house on Hillman Avenue. If it stood out at all on the worn suburban street, it was because of the just-off-the-lot black Chevy Tahoe in its concrete driveway. There were five entrances, including the one to the basement apartment, and the plan was to hit all of them at once, very, very hard, with everything in our arsenal—battering rams, flashbang grenades, tactical ballistic shields.
The word was that the people inside weren’t your run-of-the-mill dopers, but highly trained killers and mercenaries. We weren’t taking any chances. We parked a block away, and a moment later, thirty armed-to-the-teeth cops were jogging quickly and quietly down the dim, narrow street.
When we arrived at the address, Jimmy and I and our five-man team split off through the house’s short alley to the backyard. It was a hot summer morning, and under my body armor I was sweating quite profusely as I knelt in the dirt of a small vegetable garden by the house’s rear sliding glass door. I had to wipe my hand on my pants several times to keep the shotgun from slipping.
From a house on the other side of the backyard, I could hear an a.m. news station rising in volume as a clock radio’s alarm went off. Don’t bother slapping it this morning, buddy, I thought. This whole street is about to hear one hell of a wake-up call.
It happened right before we got the go-ahead. We were crouching there like runners at the starting line when all of a sudden we heard the metallic, clacking plah-plah-plah of a machine gun. Our team stared at each other. It was coming from the front of the house, along with a lot of hollering over the tactical microphone.
“What do we do?” Jimmy said. “Go in or go out front?”
I answered him by shattering the sliding glass door with the butt of my Mossberg and tossing in a flashbang. It went off like a stick of dynamite, and then we were inside.