“Run!” I yelled as I pulled out children with both hands and deposited them on the sidewalk.

Shawna just made it in as Sister Sheilah was taking the hook off the oak door to shut and lock it. I could see the withered old nun scanning the street for me, her stern look cocked and ready to fire.

My tires barked as I dropped the Super D’s tranny into drive, punched the gas, and fled the scene.

I COULDN’T BELIEVE my nose when I finally got back to the apartment. It smelled like coffee. Good coffee. Strong coffee.

And that other smell. I didn’t want to jinx it, but I had a deep hunch that something was baking.

Mary Catherine was just pulling out a tray of muffins when I entered the kitchen. Blueberry muffins. I like blueberry muffins the way Homer Simpson likes doughnuts. A young lady like her couldn’t possibly have six muffins for breakfast, could she? Would she share one with me?

And the kitchen. It was sparkling. Every surface gleaming, every cereal bowl put away. Where was the Clean Sweep team?

“Mary Catherine?”

“Mr. Bennett,” Mary Catherine said, blowing a wisp of blond hair out of her face as she put the muffins on top of the stove. “Where is everyone? I thought I was Snow White entering the dwarves’ cottage when I came down this morning. Lots of little beds, but no sign of anyone.”

“The dwarves are at school,” I said.

Mary Catherine gave me a questioning look, similar to the one I’d just seen on Sister Sheilah.

“What time do they leave?” she asked.

“Around eight,” I said, unable to take my eyes off the steaming muffins on the stove.

“Then I start at seven, Mr. Bennett. Not nine. There’s no sense in me coming all this way to help out if you won’t let me.”

“I apologize. And the name is Mike, remember?” I said. “Are those…”

“For after breakfast. How do you like your eggs?” she said. “Mike.”

After breakfast? I thought. I’d assumed they were breakfast. Maybe this au pair thing would work out.

“Over easy?” I said.

“Bacon or sausage?” she said.

No maybe about it, I thought with a smile and a shake of my head.

I was contemplating that win-win decision when I felt my cell phone vibrate. I looked at the caller ID. My boss. I closed my eyes and mentally willed his number off the screen. So much for my telepathic powers, I thought, feeling the phone jump in my hand like a freshly caught trout.

I was sorry it wasn’t a real fish.

I would have thrown it back.

I SHOOK MY HEAD again as I finally unfolded my phone and brought it up to my ear.

Calls at home from my boss, on my day off, meant one sure thing, I knew.

An express delivery of ill tidings was about to land in my lap.

“Bennett,” I said.

“Thank God,” my boss, Harry Grissom, said. Harry is the lieutenant detective in charge of my unit, the Manhattan North Homicide Squad. Being able to say you’re the go-to guy on the elite Manhattan North Homicide will get you a lot of respectful nods at most cop parties. Right then, though, I was more than willing to trade in every last one of them for a couple of fried eggs. And a nice fat blueberry muffin.

“You heard what just happened?” my boss said.

“Where? What?” I said, already thinking the worst. There must have been a distinct note of urgency in my voice because Mary Catherine turned from the sink. Post 9/11, for a lot of New Yorkers- New York cops, firemen, and EMTs especially-the next terror hit wasn’t a question of if but when.

“What the hell’s happened? What’s going on?” I asked.

“Slow down, Mike,” Harry said. “No explosions. Not yet at least. All I was told was, about ten minutes ago, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, shots were fired. First Lady Caroline’s funeral was going on at the time, so it doesn’t sound too good.”

What felt like a door breach hit me full in the stomach. Shots fired at a state funeral? Inside St. Patrick’s? A short while ago? This morning?

“Terrorists?” I said. “From where?”

“I don’t think we know yet,” my boss said. “I do know that Manhattan South borough commander Will Matthews is on the scene, and he wants you down there ASAP.”

In what capacity? I wondered. I had been on the NYPD’s Hostage Negotiation Team before making the switch to Homicide.

And wasn’t I too fried already with my family crisis to take on a much larger one?

When it rains cats, it pours kittens too, I thought. Story of my life. I hoped this was just a run-of-the-mill barricade incident. Or better yet, maybe the borough commander needed me for a simple single murder. I could do barricades and murders. It was the “weapons of mass destruction” thing that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“Does he need me for negotiating?” I asked my boss. “Or was there a homicide at the cathedral? Help me out here, Harry.”

“I was too busy getting screamed at to get a chance to ask,” my boss said. “I don’t think it’s because they ran out of altar boys, though. Just get your ass down there and find out everything you can. Then let me know what the hell is going on.”

“On my way,” I said, and hung up.

I went into my bedroom and threw on jeans, a sweatshirt, and my NYPD Windbreaker. The Homicide one.

I splashed cold water on my face and retrieved my service Glock from the closet safe.

Mary Catherine was waiting in the front hall with my travel coffee mug and a brown bag of muffins. Even with my mind and adrenaline racing, I noticed that Socky, who hates everyone except Maeve, Chrissy, and Shawna, was rubbing his whiskers on her ankles. Talk about hitting the ground running.

I was struggling to come up with appropriate words of thanks and pertinent household-running instructions, when she just opened the front door and said, “Go, Mike.”

A LOW WHISTLE escaped through my teeth as I pulled my department-issued blue Impala up to the barricade thrown across Fifth Avenue at 52nd Street. I hadn’t seen so many cops out in front of the landmark church since the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

Only instead of goofy tam-o’-shanters, shamrocks, and smiles, they were wearing black steel ballistic helmets, automatic weapons, and deadly serious frowns.

I showed my shield to a sergeant by one of the blue-and-white sawhorses. She directed me to the mobile command center, a long white bus parked across the street from the cathedral. The sergeant told me to park in front of the Sanitation Department dump trucks that blocked up Fifth next to the 51st Street barricade.

Two barricades, I thought. Mobile command centers. This was no single homicide for sure. This was a disaster in the making.

As I got out of my car, a jackhammer throbbing sounded, and I looked up as a police helicopter swung out from behind Rockefeller Center and hovered low over the cathedral. Dust and coffee cups and newspaper pages spiraled up in the rotor wash as a sniper in the helicopter’s open door scanned the stained glass and stone spires over the barrel of a rifle.

I took my eyes off the helicopter when I almost walked into a famous, controversial radio host who, for some reason, was holding court on the street in front of the inner barricade. “What in the hell did those friggin’ priests do this time?” I heard him say as I passed.

As I entered the staging area between the grilles of the parked dump trucks, I stopped and stared in disbelief. A half dozen Emergency Service Unit cops were crossing the avenue with their heads down. They stopped and pressed their bulletproof backs against the side of the long black hearse parked at the curb.