Step on a Crack

by James Patterson

  He shook his head, remembering her from outside the hospital where Caroline Hopkins had breathed her last.

  Of all the sieges in all the cathedrals in all the world, she had to drive her meat wagon into mine.

  The Neat Man smiled as he tilted his coffee at her.

  Here’s looking at you, bitch. Six degrees of separation and all that crapola.

  He watched her rush across the plaza, pushing a wheeled stretcher. The tactical team emerged from the revolving door just as she got to the entrance.

  The Neat Man counted heads quickly. Thirteen had gone down. Now there were nine standing. His boys inside had taken care of business! Against Hostage Rescue, too! And Hostage Rescue was supposed to be the best of the best.

  Thank God he’d been able to tip Jack off.

  He winced a little when he saw asshole hotshot detective Mike Bennett was still among the living. Yolanda was pulling up his pant leg and wiping at a cut on his shin.

  What happened, Mikey? Got a boo-boo?

  He watched as Bennett shrugged her off and hobbled, shell-shocked, toward the trailer. Cops and FBI agents patted him on the shoulder as he passed.

  “Not your fault,” the Neat Man called from the crowd at Bennett’s back as he passed. “It’s those bastards inside. This is all on them.”

  Chapter 66

  THIS WAS A TRAGEDY. The first one for the good guys, thought Jack as he looked down on a fallen pal.

  The bleeding hijacker rested his head against the false stone casket and moaned as Jack violently slammed the concrete lid to the bomb shelter shut.

  Learning of the existence of the secret escape tunnel from the cathedral’s crypt was one of the major factors that had swayed him and the Neat Man to finally go through with the hijacking. It was how most of them had snuck in, and the way they were thinking of getting out.

  Jack rubbed at the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes as panic began to bulge in his chest.

  Had to calm down. He wasn’t allowed to panic. He’d allowed for this, remember? Practically expected it. It would still work out.

  He took a breath, and let it out.

  Thank God he had come up with a plan B.

  He opened his eyes as his dying comrade moaned again.

  Fontaine, he thought. You unlucky son of a bitch.

  “Calm down now,” Jack said as he unseamed the man’s brown robe with a Ka-Bar knife, then freed the Velcro straps of his bulletproof vest with a loud rip.

  “You’re going to make it,” he lied without hesitation or request.

  One of the return-fire rounds shot up from the bomb shelter had ricocheted off the lead-lined lid of the hatch. Fontaine had caught the bullet in the back just above the collar of his Kevlar vest, to the left of his spine. That wasn’t even his worst problem, Jack thought. Because either he’d just spilled a couple of gallons of Benjamin Moore high-gloss red over the front of his pants, or he was rapidly bleeding to death from where the round had left his body.

  When Jack peeled the heavy vest off Fontaine’s chest, he spotted the blood-gushing exit wound above his friend’s right nipple. Jack looked at the dying man with a wondrous respect. The fact that Fontaine was still breathing seemed to defy logic.

  “Don’t lie to me,” Fontaine said. “I’m all sliced to shit inside. I can feel it. I can feel the blood.”

  “We’ll put you outside,” Jack offered. “You’ll be caught, but at least you’ll be breathing.”

  “Yeah, right,” Fontaine said. “They’ll patch me up so I can be good and healthy when they put the needle in me. Besides, they ID me, we’re all screwed. Just do me a favor, will you, when you get out?”

  “Anything,” Jack said.

  “Give my share to my girl, Emily. Hell, not even a full share. Just something.”

  The hijacker sobbed suddenly.

  “It ain’t the dying that hurts so much as the dying for nothing.”

  Jack sat in the man’s blood as he got behind him, cradling him.

  “You have my word, dog,” Jack said in his ear. “She gets a full share. She’ll go to college, Fontaine. Just like you always wanted. Ivy, right?”

  “For sure,” Fontaine said with a soft nod. “She got fifteen hundred on her boards. I ever tell you that?”

  “Only about a thousand times,” Jack said, chuckling into his buddy’s ear.

  “Knocking up her worthless mother was the only thing I ever did right,” Fontaine said, smiling. He seemed peaceful now, as if he were drifting off to sleep after a hard day’s work. Jack saw a final tension jolt through the dying man, followed by a palpable slackening. Fontaine was gone. They had lost a good man.

  Jack was dry-eyed as he stood and handed his Ka-Bar to one of the hijackers who had watched it all.

  “Cut his hands and his head, and bag ’em,” he said. “We take them with us. We can’t take the chance they’ll identify him.”

  Chapter 67

  “BUT I WANT to be the car. I have to be the car!” five-year-old Trent Bennett whined across the Monopoly board. Nine-year-old Ricky, sensing trouble, immediately snatched the piece off the GO square and clutched it to his chest. Trent started to cry.

  Brian Bennett rolled his eyes. Here he was, doing his job, keeping the squirts busy. He’d busted out an actual board game, and would they cooperate? No way, Jose.

  Mary Catherine, their new nanny or whoever the heck she was, had told him she needed to run out and get something from the store. Grandfather was at church. So that left Brian pretty much in charge.

  He got up from the dining room table when he heard the front door open. He could see a massive Christmas tree being pushed in through the door when he stepped into the hall. Mary Catherine took off her hat and wiped her hand across her red, sweating, though kind of pretty, face.

  Brian gaped at her. She’d gone out and gotten them a tree for Christmas.

  That was, like, nice.

  “Brian, there you are,” she said in her funny Irish accent. “Do you know where your mom and dad keep the decorations? We’ve got work to do.”

  Twenty minutes later, all of the kids were in the living room, assembly-lining ornaments up to Mary Catherine on the shaky painting ladder. It wasn’t the same as their mom, Brian thought. Mom did a tree nicer than the ones in the window at Macy’s. But he had to admit, Mary Catherine’s was a lot better than nothing at all.

  Chrissy, still dressed as an angel, passed by in the kitchen doorway, struggling to hold up a sloshing Brita water pitcher.

  “What are you doing?” Brian asked.

  “Hel-lo, my job,” she said matter-of-factly. “Socky needs his water.”

  Brian laughed. With the influence of her sisters, sometimes Chrissy acted more like she was thirteen instead of three. He watched the littlest angel come back into the living room and turn on the TV.

  “Ahhhh! Look! Look!”

  “What is it?” Brian said, rushing over to his sister.

  On the screen, their father stepped onto an outdoor podium between a cluster of microphones. Just like Derek Jeter after a baseball game, Brian thought excitedly.

  Concern replaced his pride when Brian looked closer. His father was smiling, but it was his bad smile. The one he made when he was pretending not to be sad or angry.

  His dad looked like Jeter all right, Brian thought.

  After a big loss.

  Chapter 68

  IT WASN’T JUST the biting cold of the day that made me feel numb as I stopped before the checkpoint media podium. Usually, making a routine statement before the local news outlets filled me with butterflies. But when Will Matthews said that the commissioner had ordered an immediate press conference, I actually volunteered.

  I knew those murdering bastards inside were watching-and I wanted them to see me, to hear what I had to say.

  I looked out over the avenue-filling clutter of national network and worldwide press cameras and gazed dead ahead into the black lens of the camera in front of me.

  “Withi
n the past hour,” I said, “a rescue attempt was made to free the hostages. Gunfire was exchanged, and two men, an FBI agent and an NYPD ESU officer, were slain. Two other officers were wounded. Names will not be released until the families are notified.”

  A concentrated wave of motion and sound swept through the newsies, starving wolves just tossed prime rib.

  “Why was such a rash move authorized?” a male network reporter with chief-executive hair called out from the front ranks.

  “The decisions of the on-scene command cannot be commented on in light of the ongoing situation,” I told him.

  “In what part of the cathedral did the rescue attempt take place?” asked a pretty middle-aged female reporter behind him. She had a microphone in one hand and an open cell phone in the other.

  “Again, tactics can’t be divulged at this juncture,” I said. It was scary, even to me, how calm I sounded. A few minutes before, I was in a firefight. Now I was as collected as Colin Powell doing a troop assessment. Whatever the reason, I was proud of myself. To let the scum inside see that they had gotten to us in the slightest degree would have been an insult to the fallen men.

  “This is a difficult situation, ladies and gentlemen,” I continued. “I know everyone wants to know what’s going on, but now’s not the time for full disclosure. It runs contrary to our purpose. We want to extract the thirty-two hostages safely.”

  “And the hostage-takers as well?” someone called from the back. “What about them?”

  I looked steadily into the camera again. I could almost feel my eyes making contact with Jack’s inside.

  “Of course,” I said. “Of course we do. We want this to be resolved peacefully.”

  I ignored the barrage of shouted questions as I stepped down from behind the wheeled podium. I almost knocked down a tall brunette reporter as I tripped over a taped-down media cable alongside the curb.

  “C’mon, Mike,” Cathy Calvin said. “Who are these guys? You have to tell us what they want. What’s their angle?”

  “Why are you asking me?” I said, putting an almost cross-eyed, confused look on my face. “Don’t you read your own paper, Ms. Calvin? I don’t know nuttin’, remember?”

  Chapter 69

  I HAD ALREADY arrived back in the command center bus and was sitting calmly with the phone in my hand when it rang, and I almost dropped the damn thing. I was still boiling, but I knew how useless that emotion was now. Anger felt good, but it wasn’t working. What I had to do now, I knew, was to repair things, salvage the bloody mess somehow.

  And most of all, I had to keep Jack talking instead of shooting.

  “Mike here,” I said.

  “YOU LYING SON OF A BITCH!” Jack screamed.

  “Now, now, Jack,” I said. “There was a mix-up. A communication flub. I wasn’t told about the raid until after it happened.”

  I wanted to be as honest as possible in order to reach some middle ground, but under the circumstances, it was impossible. Truth was, I’d just tried to kill Jack and his accomplices and was pissed that we’d failed.

  But I had to distance myself from all that. Act like I was just a cog in a large wheel that I couldn’t control.

  “And please, Jack,” I said. “You were the one who was asking for straight talk a little while ago. What did you expect? Blowing away a priest, tossing him out on the steps like a Hefty garbage sack, wasn’t going to have any consequences?”

  “That was an accident! I told you!” Jack said. “One of you pricks killed my friend. He died in my arms.”

  “And one of you guys killed two cops,” I said. “This is a dead-end game we’re playing, Jack. I thought you wanted money. Killing people isn’t going to get it for you. It’s only going to get my trigger-happy, now completely pissed-off fellow cops to come in there shooting. I mean, let’s face facts. If you force us to raid the church, in the end, you’re not going to make it. You made a mistake with the priest. I can see that now. And we made a mistake, too. Let’s put what’s happened behind us and get this thing back on track.”

  I waited. Though I’d made it up on the spot, it was a decent argument. Anyway, we needed more time to regroup, think up a new strategy. The secret tunnel had seemed like our one good shot, but maybe there was another way. What we needed now was for the clock to kick back into slow.

  “Only part of the track I’m putting this on from here is the third rail, you lying sack of shit,” Jack just about spat in my ear. “You screwed up, Mike, and now I’m going to punish you for it. Come to the front door and pick up the trash.”

  Chapter 70

  I HAD CLEARED the entrance of the bus and was running flat out across the street when the immense cathedral door began inching open again. I knew another victim was about to be ejected from the cathedral. Part of me wanted to believe I could save a life if I acted fast enough, but I knew better.

  I was crossing the wide sidewalk when a human form suddenly flew out the black space of the open door. I couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman.

  The body skidded across the flagstone paving and landed facedown on top of a wilted flower arrangement. Male, I registered. Dark suit. Which hostage had been killed?

  Breath scorching in my chest, I fell to my knees in front of the victim. I didn’t even bother looking for a pulse when I saw the torso. The lower back had been ripped apart and was horribly torn and bloody.

  I was too late.

  The victim was a middle-aged man. His shirt had been removed, and dozens of large, ragged stab wounds covered his back. What looked like cigarette burns went up and down his forearms. I’d seen my share of bodies, and I recognized that someone with a sharp knife, maybe even a box cutter, had taken out a lot of anger on this one.

  The first thing I saw when ESU lieutenant Steve Reno helped me flip the victim was that the poor man’s throat had been slit.

  My heart seized hard in my chest as I looked at the victim’s beaten and bloody face.

  I turned to Reno beside me. “This is so wrong,” the big man said, staring at the corpse. Reno ’s voice was small and wounded, as if he was speaking to himself. “As wrong as it gets.”

  I nodded my head as I continued to stare down, unable to take my eyes away.

  Andrew Thurman, the mayor of New York City, peered up lifelessly into the leaden sky. A pulse of cold shuddered through me as I glanced up into the dark, towering arches where he seemed to be looking for some answer as to why this could have happened.

  Steve Reno pulled off his Windbreaker and wrapped it around Mayor Thurman like a blanket. He crossed himself silently before he closed the mayor’s eyes with his thumbs.

  “Grab his legs, Mike,” Reno said. “Let’s get him out of here. Don’t let the press get any shots.”

  Chapter 71

  THE NOON ANGELUS bells started tolling from the cathedral as we carried the mayor of New York down the front steps. Everything that had happened up until now paled in comparison to this brutal, horrifying, and unnecessary murder.

  There was an instant hush in the crowd of law enforcement. The bell continued its ominous pealing as the police and emergency personnel we passed in the cordoned-off street either gaped, goggle-eyed, or stiffened in ramrod postures of respect.

  Cold violently kneaded my stomach as I remembered how police and firemen stopped and stood in the same reverential way in the WTC rubble whenever a service member was brought out of the pile. I looked up at Rock Center ’s glorious seventy-foot Christmas tree right after we laid the slain mayor on an EMS stretcher.

  The hits just kept on coming, didn’t they?

  Enough, I thought. What the hijackers had done was precedent-setting in the savage department, but I had to get myself beyond shock. It was time to put up the wall and focus. Get out ahead of this thing. Figure Jack out somehow.

  Why the mayor? I thought, staring again at his badly tortured body.

  Was Jack so overwrought by the death of one of his fellow hijackers that he’d chosen the mayor as the one
victim who would make us the angriest? Or was the whole thing another ploy to push our buttons, to get us to react in a certain way? Was this murder actually a clue for us? Our first? Why did they pick Andrew Thurman as the one to die?

  As I was trying to figure it out, a captain from Midtown North came down between the white wicker angels and rows of poinsettias and grabbed me. Borough Commander Will Matthews had moved the command center to an office in 630 Fifth, the Rockefeller Center building to the west, directly across from the cathedral. He wanted me to report there immediately.

  I ran all the way, and I don’t know what I expected when I stepped into the boardroom of the second-floor office-but it wasn’t that Commander Will Matthews would be the lowest-ranking cop in the room.

  Normally, I would have been a little rattled to receive NYPD Police Commissioner Daly’s curt nod of hello a second before Bill Gant’s, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New York office. But my shock reserve was bone-dry that afternoon. I just nodded back at both of them.

  “Afternoon, Detective,” the commissioner said.

  He was tall, aristocratically handsome, and seemed more like a banker than a cop in his broad pinstripe navy suit. Some said, with his tailored clothes and his Columbia MBA, he was just another glory hound, far removed from the rank and file. This was the first time I’d gotten close enough to make any kind of judgment.

  “We just heard about the… my God, I can’t believe I’m saying this… Andy’s… I mean, the mayor’s murder,” Daly stammered. He seemed genuinely upset, and that touched me. “You’ve been speaking to the individuals responsible. What do you think this is all about?”

  “Frankly, sir,” I said, “I can’t get a bead on them. It looked like a straight-up money deal, at first. A group of professional criminals trying to pull off an audacious mass kidnapping.