Step on a Crack (13 page)

THE BENNETTS STOPPED some NYC traffic again when we did our morning dash for the front doors of Holy Name half an hour later. A brunette model crawling out of a taxi in a sequined black dress, no doubt worn the night before, stopped at the curb, put her hand to her décolletage, and actually said, “
Ohhhh
!” at the cuteness of my family pageant. Even a passing metrosexual in a
GQ
camel-hair overcoat couldn’t help gaping open-mouthed at my crew as he exchanged his iPod earpiece for his ringing cell.

And far better than both of those reactions was the one I got from none other than Sister Sheilah.

“God bless you, Mr. Bennett,” she called with a smile,
an actual smile
, as she unhooked the door.

I was feeling pretty warm despite the cold when I got back into my van. I decided to sit for a minute. I lifted the
Times
I’d picked up from my doorstep to look at it for the first time.

The spark of holiday joy fizzled instantly in my chest when I looked at a picture of myself under the first lady caroline hopkins ’s funeral hijacked headline. “We Don’t Know Anything” was the cheerful caption under my picture. I looked at the byline of the hatchet job.

Cathy Calvin.

Who else?

I shook my head, and I felt my stomach filling with acid. She’d hamstrung me but good. Even the picture was bad. There was a pensive, searching expression to my face that could easily be misinterpreted as utter confusion. They must have snapped it when I was looking for the cathedral caretaker.

Thanks for my fifteen minutes of fame, Calvin, I thought. You really shouldn’t have. I couldn’t wait to see Commander Will Matthews. It was going to be such fun receiving the commendation for the top-notch PR job I had done with the
Times
.

And on that note-this case just kept getting better and better, didn’t it?-I violently hurled the paper over the seat and downshifted into drive.

Boy, oh, boy, was I glad to be in the white-hot center of this mess.

IT WAS PRECISELY eight twenty-nine when the Neat Man placed his coffee on the frosted ledge of the pay phone kiosk on the corner of 51st and Madison.

Though he’d gotten the cup from one of those Porta-Potty-like corner carts, he was heartened by its blistering temperature as he took a scalding sip.

Between the ash-colored buildings down 51st, the gray morning sky looked like a giant shard of dirty glass. The dull light did very little to illuminate the dark arched windows of St. Pat’s, kitty-corner across the barricaded street.

The Neat Man smiled for a moment, savoring the misery, the too hot, too horrible coffee, the biting cold on his face, the ear-drilling clatter of the police generators. As if on cue, a bum stirred from a rag-and-bag pile beneath a sidewalk shed halfway down the block and yawned before loudly air-blowing his nose, one nostril at a time, into the gutter.

Ah! Morning, New York-style, the Neat Man thought as he picked up the pay phone.

Learning all this raw, in-your-face grittiness was going to be a jolt, he thought. But maybe if he reached way down deep into his soon-to-be seven-figure bank account, he might have a shot of finding a way.

“What’s up?” a voice said.

“Same old, same old, Jack, my man,” the Neat Man said cheerily. “You see the new trailer out front? Hostage Rescue is in the house.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Jack said, pumped. “Everyone’s sticking right to the script.”

“How are the guests? Everyone have a pleasant night?”

“The rich really aren’t like you and me,” Jack said. “They’re a trillion times softer. The truth, a kindergarten class would be more trouble.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” the Neat Man said.

“That you did,” Jack said. “That you did. Keep your eyes open out there. Stick to the plan.”

The line went dead. The Neat Man hung up the phone and smiled as a couple of uniformed cops walked by. Despair, gray as the dawn, was in their bag-eyed faces.

When he closed his own eyes a vision of
a huge, sun-washed bathroom appeared before him, acres of gleaming marble, steam rising off a bubbling Jacuzzi, a blinding white pyramid of meticulously folded towels beneath a window filled with a blue-green sea
.

He lifted his lava-temperature coffee again as he turned toward the church. There were pigeons in the nickeled light, fluttering about the sharp spires. His stomach churned as he remembered the pigeons his father used to fly off the roof of their Brooklyn tenement.

If he never laid eyes on another flying rat, the Neat Man thought, or his low-class excuse for a father, for that matter, he would die a very happy man.

The Neat Man blinked away his rare lapse into memory and moved the coffee cup up and down and side to side over the church like a priest conferring a benediction.

“For the gifts which I am about to receive,” the Neat Man said, “may the Lord make me truly thankful.”

FUNNYMAN JOHN ROONEY didn’t know what time it was when he decided to stop trying to fake sleep, but by the wan light glowing behind the stained glass above, he guessed it was somewhere near nine.

With the thin pews proving almost impossible to get comfortable in, the hijackers had allowed them to take the seat and kneeler cushions and sleep on the floor in front of the chapel’s altar. The cushions were small, though, and the body-heat-sucking marble floor made a city sidewalk seem like a Tempur-Pedic mattress in comparison.

May I have a side of exhaustion with my terror, please?
Rooney thought, rubbing his fists into his eyes as he sat up against the altar rail.
Yeah, supersize it. Thanks, abduction-dudes.

At the back of the chapel, three masked hijackers sat in folding chairs, drinking coffee from paper cups. He couldn’t see Little John or the lead gunman, Jack, anywhere. With the masks and robes, it was hard to tell how many hijackers there actually were. Eight, a dozen. Maybe more. They seemed to work in shifts, everything very organized.

Rooney watched with rising anger as one of them leaned to his side and lit a cigarette off a votive candle.

A hand fell on his shoulder as Charlie Conlan sat up next to him.

“Mornin’, kid,” Conlan said quietly without looking at him. “That was brave of you to fight back like that last night.”

“You mean stupid,” Rooney said, fingering the scab on his face.

“No,” Conlan said. “Ballsy. Thing now is to do it again, only at the right time.”

“You still want to fight them?” Rooney said.

Conlan nodded calmly, and Rooney did a double take at the star’s patented steely-eyed squint. In real life Charlie Conlan seemed to be an even bigger badass than the rock-and-roller persona that had made him famous around the world.

“Yo,” whispered a voice behind them.
Source
magazine-dubbed “Bubblegum Ho” Mercedes Freer, who’d been released from the confessional the night before, sat up from where she’d been sleeping.

“You bad boys gonna try something?” she said.

Rooney debated letting her in on it, then finally nodded. “Just being prepared.”

“Amen to that shit,” the singer said. “Check it. One of those g’s is into me. He was talking to me through the confessional door last night. Skinny one with the shotgun, sitting in the middle up there. Yo, we could use that. I could play like I want to do him or something.”

Just then, Little John arrived from the back of the chapel with a cooler and a cardboard tray of coffees.

“Rise and shine, campers,” he yelled as he came up the aisle. “Asses in the seats. It’s chow time.”

A sudden booming, sustained sound started from Reverend Solstice three rows behind Rooney. At first, he thought the black minister was having a heart attack. But the sound turned into a note and soared, and Rooney realized that the man was singing.

“ ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhmayzing grace, how sweeeeet the sound.’ ”

Reverend Sparks, sitting next to Solstice, started singing a kind of backup.

Rooney rolled his eyes. How absurd was this?

But after a while, even he could see that the impassioned voices of the two men seemed to infuse a soothing warmth into the cold church. Other people began to join in, and when Rooney saw Little John shake his head in disapproval, he began singing along, too.

It got even more shocking when Mercedes Freer stood afterward and started singing “Silent Night.” Rooney’s mouth gaped at the pure classical beauty in the girl’s voice. The foul-mouthed tart could have been a soloist in an opera.

“ ‘Sleep in heavenly pe-eace,’ ” she sang. “ ‘Slee-eep in heavenly…’ ”

The explosive, crisp
snap
of a gunshot replaced Mercedes’s last note. There was a rumbling as everyone turned back in the pews toward the larger church-where the shot had come from.

The chilling reverberation of the shot pressed some reset button in the core of Rooney’s mind. He felt his resolve go out like a hard-blown candle.

God help us,
he thought, feeling for the first time the true weight of that three-word plea.

The killing has started.

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS? How could it have happened?

With his back flat against one of the cathedral’s sequoia-thick marble columns, Jack gripped his nine millimeter and listened closely.

He’d been walking the perimeter when a figure in black had bolted out from the gift shop entrance. Thinking that the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had somehow breached the church’s interior, he’d drawn his pistol and fired.

They’d gotten in somehow, Jack thought. There had to be some angle he and the Neat Man had missed. He waited for the sound of a boot falling against marble. For whispered orders. He scanned himself for the red dot of a laser sight, which would mean, essentially, that he was dead.

“What happened?” Little John said, arriving down the center aisle with two men at a run. A grenade was in one hand, his own nine millimeter in the other.

“Man in black just popped out of the gift shop. I don’t think it was Will Smith. Think I hit him, though.”

“Feds?” Little John whispered, glancing up at the stained-glass windows. “How?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, peeking around the column. “There’s a body down by the baptismal font. I’ll take that one. You guys check the gift shop. Shoot first.”

The men split up and rushed toward the front of the church. Jack swung his body out into the aisle, pistol trained on the figure on the marble floor. It didn’t move.

He tapped the warm barrel of his gun hard against his forehead when he saw who it was he’d shot.
What have I done
?

Jack looked down at an elderly priest. Candlelight flickered in the dark pool of blood beneath his head.
Shit
.

Little John almost ran into him.

“No one in the gift shop,” he said. He looked down at the slain cleric and his still, saucer-sized eyes.

“Holy shit!” he said.

Jack crouched down on his heels next to the body and stared at the priest’s dead face. “Look what you made me do,” he said angrily.

Little John holstered his gun.

“What are we going to do now?” he asked.

At least the boys had his back, Jack thought, looking down at the innocent he’d just murdered. He had told them that killing might be a possibility, and still they’d all agreed.

At least he’d have company in hell.

“We use it,” he said. “Didn’t want to do this the hard way-but it’s looking like we don’t have a choice anymore.”

“Use it?” Little John said, looking down at the dead priest. “How?”

“Grab the good father’s arms and legs,” Jack said. “I’m tired of all this waiting anyway. Time to speed up the clock with a little pressure. It’s hardball time.”

IT WAS JUST past nine when I arrived at the police do not cross barricade of the command center. Before I was tempted to construe that message as a standing order for me to return home to my family, I cut the Chevy’s engine and opened the door.

I shook my head at the ongoing life-and-death siege as I threaded my way through the growing media encampment, then was waved through each of three checkpoints.

Reflected in the graphlike black glass of the modern office building neighboring to the north, the spire of the cathedral looked like a stock that had spiked and was now plummeting. A couple of reporters were doing stand-ups for feeds into their stations. When there was news, the print reporters typed into their laptops, the TV folks did stand-ups, and the radio people filed-very loudly-over their phones.

I had just turned away from the media folks and their bullshit when I caught the movement of the cathedral doors across Fifth.
The doors were opening again
!

At first it seemed as if the figure that flew from the arched shadow was another person who had been released. When I noted how fast the black-suited man was moving, my pulse quickened. I thought maybe somebody was escaping.

Then I saw the body go facedown on the stone stairs without any attempt at breaking its fall, and I knew something was very wrong.

I didn’t allow myself to think too much as I skimmed the bumper of the dump-truck barricade and crossed the avenue at a run.

It was only as I was coming up the cathedral steps and kneeling beside the fallen figure when it occurred to me, coldly, that I wasn’t wearing my Kevlar vest.

The fallen body had plowed through a section of the street shrine that had been left for Caroline Hopkins the day before. The upended votive candles now looked more like tossed beer bottles than solemn offerings. A bouquet of wilted roses lay just beyond the downed man’s outstretched hand, as if he’d dropped it in his fall.

I couldn’t get a pulse out of him. A needle of ice spiked my heart when I turned the body over to perform CPR.

My eyes went from the priest’s white collar to the hole in his temple to his open, lifeless eyes.

I closed my own eyes and covered my face with one hand for a second. Then I turned and glared at the already closed bronze doors.

They’d murdered a priest!

ESU lieutenant Reno was at my side. “Mother of God,” he said quietly, his stone face faltering. “Now they’re murderers.”

“Let’s get him out of here, Steve,” I said.

Reno got the man’s legs, and I got his hands. The priest’s hands were soft and small, like a child’s. He hardly weighed anything. His scapular, hanging down from his lolling head, scraped the asphalt as we ran with the corpse to the police lines.

“How come all this job is anymore is pulling out bodies, Mike?” Reno said sadly as we rushed past the barricade.