“Did Gladstone and Erica ever come here?” I said.

I could tell from his face that he wasn’t happy about answering this one, but he looked down at the gleaming marble chessboard lobby tile and nodded.

“One Thanksgiving. I don’t know, maybe three years ago. Them and the daughters showed up, dressed to kill – bottles of champagne, big smiles. I figured they’d been invited and I sent them on up. But five minutes later, they came back down again, and the girls were crying like babies. Then that old witch actually tried to get me written up because I didn’t call first. Yeah, sorry. My bad for thinking you’d maybe want to see your only daughter and grandchildren on Thanksgiving.”

I nodded. “Thanks, Petie,” I said. “You just told me what I wanted to know.”

This was the next place that Gladstone would hit, I could feel it. He’d been saving the Blanchettes, especially the mother. He was going to pay her back, make damn sure she realized he existed.

I was nervous about even having the thought, for fear of a jinx, but I was pretty sure I’d finally done it – finally gotten one step ahead of our shooter.

Outside, I called Beth Peters on my cell.

“Good news,” I said. “Get hold of the ESU, and everybody haul ass over here to Eleven-seventeen Fifth. It’s stakeout time.”

As the Teacher walked along Tenth Avenue looking for a taxi, he passed a bar that had a fake wagon wheel out front and a row of Harleys parked beside it. The sad old Irish song “The Streets of New York” was spilling out from its doorway into the street. Still feeling his own grief after the “funeral,” he decided to step inside.

Maybe that was just what he needed – a drink.

The young woman behind the scarred pinewood bar had the arms of a football player and metal rings piercing various parts of her face.

The Teacher ordered a Bud with a shot of Canadian Club, and nodded to a group of ironworkers having a retirement party in the shadowed backroom.

When his whiskey came, he knocked it back. Here’s to you, buddy, he thought, fighting another round of tears.

He was on his second shot and Bud when news of the spree killer came on the TV. He thought about asking the bartender to turn it up, but then decided no. Attracting unneeded attention was a bad idea.

“Fucking cops,” a gruff voice suddenly said beside him. The Teacher turned to see a monstrous ironworker, with eyes as red as his long, Viking hair. “Here’s an idea, flatfoots. How ‘bout taking your heads out of your fat, doughnut-padded asses and just catch the sick son of a bitch already.”

“Sick?” the Teacher said. “Ballsy, is what I say. He’s only offing rich, yuppie assholes. He’s like a vigilante. Doing this city a favor. What’s the big deal?”

“Vigilante? What are you? His PR guy?” the tattooed welder said, glaring malevolently. “Friggin’ goddamned freak. I’ll rearrange your face. I swear to God, I will. You must be as sick as he is.”

“Jesus, what the hell am I saying?” the Teacher said, clapping his hands to his face in chagrin. “I just came from a funeral. I guess I’m still all fucked up about it. You’re right. I’m really sorry. It’s wrong to even joke about the tragedy that’s going on. Let me buy you a beer.”

“A funeral, huh? That’s tough,” the big guy said, softening.

The Teacher motioned to the Lordess of the Rings for two more. When the drinks arrived and he set one in front of the welder, he seemed to trip clumsily and sent a barstool crashing to the floor.

“Oh, no,” the Teacher moaned. “Sorry. I guess I’ve had a couple too many.”

“Yeah, you better start taking it easy, pal,” the welder said, and bent down to pick up the fallen stool.

The Teacher broke one bottle over the back of his head, driving him to the floor, and the second across his stunned face. The bleeding man hardly had time to groan as the Teacher stretched his forearm across the tarnished brass footrail and broke it with a ferocious stomp. It sounded like two pool balls knocking together.

So much for not attracting attention, he thought as he backed for the exit.

“Repeat after me, carrottop,” he called from the doorway. “Not sick, just ballsy.”

It took five minutes for the Emergency Service Unit guys to get to the Blanchettes’ building. After Steve Reno and I walked through the exits and entrances, we decided to suit up a cop as a doorman, put another in the lobby’s coatroom, and station a team of commandos in an unmarked surveillance van across the street beside the park.

After triple-checking that our trap was set, I put Reno in charge and decided to quickly do something I’d been needing to do for a long time.

The sun was going down over Jersey when I pulled up my unmarked car beside Riverside Park, behind my building. I walked along a path, crossed a desolate ball field, and crouched down beside an oak sapling in a clearing that faced the Hudson. I cleaned up some cigarette butts and an Aquafina bottle at the base of the tree, tossed them into the bag I’d brought, and then sat down.

The fledgling tree was the one my kids and I had planted after my wife, Maeve, had died. She was actually buried in the Gates of Heaven Cemetery up in Westchester, but whenever I needed to speak to her, which was pretty often, I usually ended up here. Most of the time, I’d just sit, and after a while it would almost be like she was there with me – just out of sight behind me, the way she’d been on the countless picnics we’d had here with our incredibly motley crew.

When I glanced back over my shoulder at my apartment house, I could see two of my kids in the kitchen window. Fiona and Bridget, was my guess. Maybe they were missing their mom as much as I was. Wishing she was still around to take care of them, cheer them up, make things right again.

I waved up at them. They waved back.

“We’re hanging in there, babe,” I said to the wind. “By a toenail, maybe, but what can we do? I love you, though, if that’s any consolation.”

When I went up to my apartment, Mary Catherine met me at the door. Something was wrong. I could see a troubled look wavering there in her usually stoic blue eyes.

“What is it, MC?” I said.

“Seamus,” she said gravely.

I followed her into my bedroom. Seamus was beached on top of the covers. His eyes were closed and he looked even paler than usual. For a second, I honest-to-God thought he was dead. Then he let out a string of gasping coughs, his thin chest shaking beneath his Roman collar.

Oh, Lord, I thought. Really not good. He’d finally caught our flu. Which, for an eighty-plus-year-old like him, was extremely dangerous. It suddenly hit me how stupid I’d been to even let him come around. I panicked for a second. What would I do if I lost him, too?

But I would lose him anyway, one of these days, an evil little voice whispered in my ear. Wouldn’t I?

I shook off the thought, went to the kitchen, and got the bottle of Jameson’s from the cupboard. I poured a couple of fingers into a Waterford crystal tumbler and added some heated milk and sugar.

“God love ya, boy,” Seamus said to me, after taking a couple of sips. “Now give me a hand out of bed, and I’ll be on my way back to the rectory.”

“Just try to get out of here, old man,” I said. “I dare you. Lay there and finish your medicine before I call an ambulance on you.”