Step on a Crack (20 page)

WE STAYED AT a low hover over the convoy of black sedans. The whirling edges of the rotor couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from the smooth glass and ornate stone building facades on either side of the avenue. I swallowed hard. Driving a car in this city was nerve-racking enough for me.

The hard, constant vibration of the helicopter made the cars below appear to tremble through the windshield when they finally pulled away from the cathedral. Now where the hell were they going?

The seat harness bit hard into my chest as we tilted forward and began to pursue.

We inched along in the air behind the convoy as it passed tony Fifth Avenue shops-Cartier, Gucci, Trump Tower. What, were they getting in a little last-minute window shopping?

An even stranger thing happened when the cars arrived at Tiffany’s on the corner of 57th Street.

They stopped!

Were they going somewhere for breakfast? Maybe Jack planned to rob the famous jewelry store as a parting gesture. Anything was possible at this point. The helicopter’s rotors thumped in time with my pulse as I waited and watched.

After a pause of a full minute, the lead car finally inched out from the curb and made a left-heading west on 57th Street. As the next four cars began to follow, I thought maybe the whole strange procession was going to take a slow rolling tour of the West Side. But the sixth car surprised me by turning east on 57th. The remaining cars behind it followed east as well.

I reported the bizarre new twist over the radio.

East Side, West Side, all around the town,
I thought, watching the black sedans split away from one another.

Was one group the celebrities and the other the hijackers? There was no way to know from up here.

“Is there any way for you to distinguish who’s who?” Will Matthews asked in an anguished voice.

I stared at the two lines of cars, struggling to figure it out. The combination of diesel fuel, vertigo, and the constant pounding of the helicopter wasn’t exactly helping things in the focusing department. I gave up for the moment.

If there was any clue at all, I couldn’t see it right now.

“There’s no difference I can make out,” I finally called into the radio.

“Which way?” the pilot asked, annoyed, as we just sat there over the intersection at 57th.

“West,” I decided. “Hang a left.”

At least if I was wrong, and I got fired, I thought as Bergdorf’s swung under my right shoulder, it would be a shorter subway ride back to my apartment.

STRAIGHTENING THE WHEEL of the lead sedan heading east on 57th Street, Eugena Humphrey sucked in a deep breath. The heat of the cramped car was making her sweat, and the gamy stench of the ski mask the hijackers had made her wear was another distraction. Just what she didn’t need right now.

She glanced at two uniformed cops, just standing there on the sidewalk, gaping at the passing sedans from in front of an art gallery on the north side of the street.

Nobody was doing anything! How could they?

Frightened as she was, sick and tired, she knew she couldn’t break down now. She couldn’t crack. And she wouldn’t.

When was the last time she’d actually driven herself around? she thought. Ten years ago? She remembered a red Mustang she’d bought herself after her transfer out of the Wheeling, West Virginia, affiliate to LA. What a wild ride she’d been on since then.

And this was how it would end? Unwashed on Christmas Day at the mercy of some degenerate criminals. After all she’d done. All the hard work and astute decisions, pulling herself up out of nothing. She not only had risen above what the world tried to enforce as the limits of her race and class, but had tapped in to the higher limits of human potential. Become a force for good in the world, a strong force.

But at least she’d lived a full life, hadn’t she? Done just about everything there was to do.

Eugena gasped as the gunman in the front seat jabbed her violently with the pipe of a sawed-off shotgun.

“Speed it up,” he yelled at her.

At that moment, Eugena felt her despair pop and her adrenaline surge.

Speed it up? No problemo. I can certainly do that.

She hit the gas, and the V-8 engine seemed to cry as buildings and windows began to blur past. The sedan briefly left asphalt as it hit the hump of Park Avenue.

“That’s it, momma. Punch it!” the hijacker howled as they landed, showering sparks.

As they hurtled toward Lexington, Eugena’s eye caught the gleam of one of those steel telephone company nitrogen tanks on the corner. She fantasized hitting it head-on.

Outside the windshield, it was as if New York City-the world itself-was coming at her now at warp speed. An unstoppable force at an immovable object.

THE LINEUP OF SEDANS was still doing a slow crawl west on 57th Street. Through the gap of sky up and down Seventh Avenue, I spotted at least half a dozen news helicopters shadowing us. There hadn’t been this much attention on slow-moving vehicles since OJ’s white Bronco.

I watched with more intensity as the convoy of cars seemed to slow by the subway entrance on Sixth Avenue. All we would need was for them to bail out into the labyrinth that is the New York City subway system.

But then the cars passed through the intersection, returning to parade speed.

Why wouldn’t they do something, make their move?

It was as if the hijacker convoy was reading my mind as it came parallel to the Hard Rock Cafe a minute later.

There was a scream of engines and a bark of spinning tire rubber, and the five cars suddenly peeled out.

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.

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.

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.

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-armed 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.