Step on a Crack

by James Patterson

  The cops blocking the intersection at Broadway looked like stunned NASCAR spectators as the vehicles rocketed past them.

  The sedans seemed to be drag racing as they shot across Eighth. By the time they hit Ninth Avenue, they looked like they were taking a shot at the land speed record. The turbine of our chopper had to kick it up several notches just to stay on them.

  I thought this sudden need to be somewhere in a hurry a tad peculiar, since they were speeding toward a dead end. There were maybe two blocks of Manhattan left.

  Then what?

  I could feel the blood leave my face as I watched the sedans scream down the final slope of street heading directly toward the Hudson River.

  Would they try to ram one of the barricades? I didn’t know, but I was certain of one thing: A deadly crash was coming in seconds. And there was nothing I could do except watch from a front-row balcony seat.

  Chapter 95

  HOG-TIED IN THE FRONT passenger seat of the lead car heading west, rocker Charlie Conlan felt the cut on his chin reopen as the speeding vehicle bounded off a world-class pothole.

  Conlan knew that the car was going way too fast. This was it, he thought. How it would happen. The End of a Legend.

  As the sedan’s engine roared, Conlan was struck with anger at the animal sitting beside him. Then at himself. He was still breathing, which meant he could still fight, still resist. But his arms and legs were taped together. So what could he do?

  He glanced at the hijacker behind the wheel to his left. His mask was still on, but the hood was down.

  Conlan nodded to himself as he figured it out. Maybe I’ll die, but it won’t be on my knees to these bastards.

  The car had just lifted off from a steep crest along Tenth Avenue when Conlan leaned over and bit down into the driver’s ear. The horrified scream the hijacker made almost drowned out the engine.

  What this worthless vermin had put them through, Conlan thought, tasting blood. He’d killed his friend Rooney, then dragged him outside like a bag of garbage. Conlan wished he could inflict a world of pain on his sorry ass. But then the front tires shredded as the car touched down off-kilter, turned sideways-and began to flip.

  Seconds later, the plate-glass window of the BMW showroom on the northeast corner of Eleventh seemed to evaporate as the sedan’s spinning ton of steel crashed through it.

  A horrible crunching sound blasted out Conlan’s eardrums, and the world went black.

  Then gray.

  Then fluorescent white.

  Conlan came out of the fog of shock and found himself blinking up into a bright ice cube-tray light fixture. He was in an operating room, right? Or maybe he was having an acid flashback. The pile of glass in his lap made a tinkling sound as he turned around to see what was up.

  Damn, he was inside a car showroom. They had somehow landed right-side up. He gaped at the twisted metal inches away from his throat. The sedan was now a convertible, since the roof had been ripped away.

  When he looked out the hole in the shattered windshield, his first thought was that the hijacker driver, who was hunched over one of the showroom motorcycles, was trying to escape.

  Then he noticed that one of the handlebars was sticking out the middle of the hijacker’s back. “One down,” said Charlie Conlan. “That’s for John Rooney.”

  He turned toward the backseat next. The rest of the passengers looked to be all right. Todd Snow undid his seat belt, crawled across broken glass, and ripped at the tape on Conlan’s wrists. They stared as the third passenger in the backseat took off a ski mask.

  “Great job, fellas,” Mercedes Freer said with a big, bleached-out smile. “You saved us!” She grinned-just before Todd Snow punched out the two-faced diva’s front teeth.

  Chapter 96

  BLINKING CHRISTMAS LIGHTS strung on the fire escape of a brownstone tenement streaked past the copter’s window as we hurtled toward the car dealership that the lead sedan had just plowed into.

  I gawked from above at shattered glass and ripped metal, spinning police lights, running cops.

  Another day, I thought, struggling to absorb the insanity I’d just witnessed, another war zone.

  I turned to my left, away from the milling chaos at the dealership, just as the four remaining cars hit the emptied intersection of the West Side Highway near the Hudson.

  They hadn’t slowed!

  I thought that they were going to try to turn at the last second and smash their way through the roadblock. The cops manning the barricade must have thought the same thing because three or four of them dove out of the way.

  But we were all wrong.

  The world seemed to gray out as I watched helplessly. The adrenaline and sleep deprivation, the caffeine overdose and stress, finally took their toll. I thought I was hallucinating.

  The black sedans didn’t swerve left or right. It was like they were on rails as they rocketed dead straight for the fence bordering the Hudson River.

  Even from inside the chopper, I heard the front tires of the cars explode like pipe bombs as they struck the high concrete curb before the fence. The sedans seemed to crouch down and coil; then they bounced high and hit the fence.

  Chain links parted like wet tissue paper, and suddenly the cars were in the air above the icy river. It sounded like sheet metal landing on concrete when they hit the water simultaneously, upside down.

  I don’t know what I had been expecting before that.

  But it wasn’t mass suicide.

  “They’re in the water!” I heard on the radio then. “All six cars are in the East River! It’s totally insane. This can’t be happening. But it just did!”

  I thought the report was from a cop watching on the ground beneath me-until I realized they were talking about the other cars. The ones that had headed east.

  The hijackers had crashed all the remaining cars into two rivers!

  The helicopter was already swinging down toward the water as I pointed. We got there just in time to see brake lights disappear under the surface.

  “As low as you can go,” I yelled to the pilot as I popped my harness and the latch of the helicopter door. Frigid wind howled into the cabin as I leaned out above choppy, gray water.

  “And radio the Harbor Unit,” I said.

  Then I was free-falling.

  Chapter 97

  THE WATER WASN’T SO BAD.

  If you were one of those Coney Island polar bear people, maybe.

  The temperature, or lack thereof, went through me all at once like an electric shock. Then I bobbed in the ice water. But my feet finally found something like a bumper, and I turned myself down into the all but lightless polluted water, reaching forward with my hands.

  I don’t know how I found the door handle in the opaque water, but I did. I pulled hard, and the door swung open and a form brushed by me, then another.

  I was out of breath, and heat, by the time a third and fourth shadow bobbed past me toward the surface, so I kicked up off the sunken car’s roof.

  My clothes felt like they were made of lead, frozen lead, as I dog-paddled. I counted twelve people floating in the water. They’d taken their masks off, and I recognized most of them as the VIP hostages. How many had gotten into each car? Were they all safe now?

  “Is there anybody else stuck in the cars?” I yelled to Kenneth Rubenstein, who was flailing in the water beside me.

  He stared at me as if I were speaking Chinese. He was in shock. I decided I could do no more, except try to get everyone on the surface out of the water.

  That’s where the helicopter pilot came in. She was amazing, the best. Using the skid like a gaff, she managed to lift our gasping, hypothermic butts out of the drink and pop us on a nearby dock.

  An army of burly sanitation workers had arrived from their truck depot beside the river, and they dragged us inside a thankfully warm building. A blanket was thrown over my back. A hulking sanitation worker gave mouth-to-mouth to a pale middle-aged woman for a moment before she stiff-arm
ed him in his hairy chest.

  I realized it was the fashion magazine editor, Laura Winston. A young woman beside her started vomiting all over herself. The reality TV wild child, Linda London.

  It was maybe half an hour later when I received a call from Commander Will Matthews. All the remaining celebrities who’d gone into the East River had been plucked out of the water and were accounted for. The VIPs were bruised and wet and still in shock, but it seemed as if everyone would survive.

  The hijackers, though, were glaringly unaccounted for at both crash sites. Whether they were drowned in the cars or still back at the cathedral had yet to be determined. Before I hung up, Will Matthews ordered me to go to the crash site at the car dealership up the block to see what the hell was going on.

  Why not? I thought, my wet hand shaking as I gave a task force sergeant his cell phone back. I needed a little excitement this morning.

  At least everyone had made it, I thought, heading back outside to the edge of the dock. Except for the people who’d been murdered at the church, of course.

  I tried to let that small victory calm me, but it was a stretch.

  Jack’s promise from the beginning of the ordeal galled the hell out of me as I gazed out at the helicopters searching the fuzzy gray surface of the frigid water.

  He said he’d get away with this, and he had.

  Chapter 98

  AT AN ABANDONED DOCK just north of the new Hell’s Kitchen Sports Pier, twenty blocks south of where half of the cars had driven into the water, a black shape bobbed up from among the rotting piles.

  With his eyes just above the surface of the water, Jack carefully scanned the choppy gray Hudson behind him for the NYPD Harbor Unit, but there was nothing. And just as important, no one along the shoreline beside the sports complex.

  From inside his lightweight Scubapro wet suit, he took out a Ziploc bag. He removed the cell phone inside it and hit redial as he took out his air tank mouthpiece.

  “Where?” he said.

  “They’re still concentrating on the crash sites, still looking to save hostages,” the Neat Man said. “They haven’t started looking for you yet. Window’s open, m’boy, but closing. Move now!”

  Jack didn’t have to be told twice. He slipped the cell phone back into its bag and himself back under the briny water and tugged on the tow rope.

  Five minutes later, Jack and the other four hijackers with him were up on a concrete ledge beneath a walkway on the south side of the sports complex, peeling off the wet suits they’d worn under their brown robes, dumping the air tanks they’d hidden under the water at the crash site. The tanks were small, only thirty cubic feet of air, but enough for the ten to fifteen minutes they had to be under water.

  The most hazardous part, he thought, had been the actual crash itself into the river. But the rest-their extraction from the cars and finding the tanks-had gone off like clockwork. Not only was it probably the greatest hijacking of all time, now they were about to pull off the greatest escape!

  And not just him, he thought.

  His sweet knuckleheads had managed not to screw it all up, and he was proud of them. But this was no time to celebrate. They had to go to Queens to pick up the rest of the gang who’d dumped into the East River. Hopefully, they had fared as well.

  Jack glanced up at the busy West Side Highway. He smiled as he noticed his pulse racing. He’d seen his share of action, but none of it compared with the razor’s-edge euphoria he was feeling now. Nothing even came close. If they hadn’t lost Fontaine and Jose, this job would have been perfect.

  He turned and looked back as the last member of his crew shed his wet suit, revealing a track outfit beneath. “Just do it,” right? Now they looked just like everybody else coming off of the sports pier. Yuppie office mates who’d decided to spend Christmas playing and partying instead of with their corny-ass families.

  “Okay, ladies,” Jack said to his men with a wink. “Let’s move ’ em out. We ’re almost home. We won the Super Bowl.”

  They had to keep themselves from sprinting as they climbed the short fence and came out alongside the main building, waiting at a light to cross.

  Jack swallowed hard, his blood going as cold as the water they’d just climbed out of as a police car, with its siren screaming, approached from the south. He started breathing again when it blew right past them, speeding uptown. No doubt heading back to 57th, where they’d started their little Dukes of Hazzard stunt.

  It was thirty-five minutes later when they were in a van picking up the rest of the hijackers by the dock of an abandoned bottling plant in Long Island City. Little John grinned triumphantly as he and the other five men threw themselves in through the sliding door to back slaps and high fives.

  “What the hell took you so long?” the big man said, accepting an ice-cold Heineken that Jack handed him from a cooler. “Where’s Jose?”

  “He lost it as we were coming across Eleventh Avenue,” Jack said, punching a hand into his fist. “Jose’s gone.”

  Little John looked down at the van floor, ruminating. “What about his prints?” he said after a moment.

  Jack smiled.

  “Remember we told him about the need to not leave any evidence?” he said. “Well, the crazy mother said he wasn’t taking any chances. So he spent the last month and a half burning off his fingertips with a Zippo.”

  “To Jose!” Little John said, lifting his beer bottle, happy again. “That gato had some balls.”

  “And Fontaine,” Jack said, remembering his friend who’d been downed in the firefight in the crypt. He glanced at the man’s hands in the Ziploc, sitting on ice beside the beers. Kind of looked like chicken wings.

  “What do we do now?” Little John said.

  “I don’t know about you, but after three days wearing the same drawers and that little dip in one of the most polluted rivers on Earth,” Jack said, “I could go for a hot shower.”

  “And some hot you-know-what, too,” one of his compadres called to howls as the van slipped onto the BQE.

  “I meant after that,” Little John said.

  “We stick with the plan. Two, three months of waiting to make things look good, and then it’s a one-way first-class trip to Costa Rica.”

  So they’d really done it, Jack thought, grinning at the sound of the Arriba! Arriba! Ándale! calls in the van. It was hard to believe. They’d held the world off. The next part was a joke. Incredibly easy. They just had to sit back and wait, and not spend their millions.

  Chapter 99

  I HAD TO BORROW some clothes, so I was decked out in a spiffy green sanitation worker’s uniform when I arrived back at the car dealership on Eleventh.

  It looked as if two medical examiners in white Tyvek suits were playing a game of tug-of-war as they attempted to remove a brown-robed hijacker from the handlebars of a motorcycle. Only after an ESU cop arrived with some bolt cutters did they finally manage to pull the motorcycle out of the dead man’s chest.

  Over by a pulverized soda machine, one of my favorite rock singers of all time, Charlie Conlan, and Giants quarterback Todd Snow were being interviewed by detectives from the Major Crimes Unit. They didn’t look like they were much in the mood for autographs. From the look of the shredded car, I was surprised the only injury I saw was a black eye and fat lip on the pissed-off-looking pop star, Mercedes, who stormed by with an EMS medic, and not a word of thanks to anybody.

  I knelt beside what was left of the hijacker as the assistant MEs laid him onto the showroom carpet. I borrowed a pair of rubber gloves and slowly pulled off his mask. The back of my fist flew against my forehead when I uncovered a second black rubber mask beneath it.

  A skin-diving mask.

  That’s how they did it! How they had gotten away. They’d used scuba-diving equipment to escape under the water.

  I borrowed a phone and told Will Matthews about my discovery. After some choice expletives, he called in more harbor units from Jersey and the Coast Guard.

  A
fter I hung up, I pulled off the hijacker’s rubber mask. The deceased was a Hispanic man in his late thirties, early forties. Nothing in his pockets. A nine-millimeter Beretta pistol in an underarm holster, but the serial number had been filed away. I groaned when I looked at his hands and saw his fingerprints were gone, too. I’d seen similar prints on the hands of crackheads, ridges melted down to a nub from holding too many hot pipes.

  No! I thought, these bastards weren’t going to disappear without leaving me at least one lead. I found Lonnie Jacob, a crime scene investigator I’d worked with several times. I showed him the jacker’s hands.

  “Think you can get anything?” I said.

  “Maybe a partial,” Lonnie said skeptically. “I’ll have to work on him back at the morgue. I really doubt we’ll get anything, though. This dude did not want to be identified.”

  “What’s up, Mike?” Commander Will Matthews said moments later as he came across the broken glass toward me. “You transferring to Sanitation on me?”

  “Thought I’d put out some feelers after this home run,” I said.

  “We did all we could, Mike,” Will Matthews said, staring at the carnage all around us. “That’s the truth, and it’s the story I’m sticking to. I advise you to repeat after me during the impending shit storm.”

  “Will do,” I said. “We did all we could. Happens to be the truth.”

  “Now get out of here and see your family. My driver’s outside waiting for you,” Will Matthews said. “That’s an order.”

  A cold wind was whipping down 57th when I stepped outside. I had hardly noticed it before, but this Christmas had turned out to be one of those stainless-steel-colored December days when you have the feeling winter will never end. As I got into the back of the cruiser and my thoughts shifted toward my wife, I decided I didn’t want it to.

  If Maeve wasn’t going to see another spring, why the hell should anybody else?