Step on a Crack

by James Patterson

  There was a line of Manhattan Task Force beat cops scattered about the front of the church with the press, and an NYPD Emergency Service Unit truck blocking the side streets at each corner.

  The baseball-hat-wearing ESU police commandos had intimidating Colt Commando submachine guns strapped across their chests, but there were coffee cups in their hands, and cigarettes. Instead of being vigilant, they were standing around goofing on one another, telling lies about what they would do with all the overtime they were raking in.

  Question: Were they that stupid? the Neat Man thought. Answer: Yes, they were.

  His cell phone went off when the bagpiper’s screech started winding down. The Neat Man lowered the binoculars and raised the phone to his ear.

  The excitement of what was about to go down hissed along his nerve endings.

  “All clear, Jack,” the Neat Man said. “It’s a go. Now make us proud.”

  Chapter 13

  IN THE NAVE of the cathedral, “Jack” bit the antenna of his just-closed cell phone nervously as he gazed out at the dozens of Secret Service agents and private security and cops stationed around the church.

  Would this scheme actually work? he thought for the thousandth, no, make that the hundred thousandth time. Well, no time like the present to find out. He holstered the phone and headed for the 51st Street exit.

  Seconds later, he hustled down the marble stairs and unhooked the latch that was holding open the two-foot-thick wooden door. A female uniformed NYPD cop smoking a cigarette in the threshold glanced at him. She looked irritated.

  “In or out?” Jack said with a smile. Though he was on the short side, he was capable of turning on the charm when he wanted. “Service is starting. We got to close ’em up.”

  In the predawn security meeting, law enforcement personnel had been told to give the church security force deference in all matters concerning the ceremony.

  “Out, I guess,” the cop said.

  Good choice, flatfoot, Jack thought, pulling the heavy doors shut and snapping the key off in the lock. Choose life.

  He hurried up the stairs and around the ambulatory along the back of the altar.

  It was packed-standing room only-with white-frocked priests.

  The organ started and the casket appeared from under the choir loft just as he arrived at the south transept.

  Jack jogged down the stairs to the 50th Street side entrance and closed and locked the thick door there, too. He refrained from breaking the key in the lock because they’d need this exit in about a minute.

  Next order of business. Jack took a deep breath.

  Half of Hollywood, Wall Street, and Washington was now boxed inside the cathedral.

  Quickly, he went back along the ambulatory. Beyond one of the massive columns, there was a leather bank rope. It blocked off a small, narrow marble stairwell at the rear of the altar. He stepped over the rope and descended.

  At the bottom of the marble stairs was an ornate green copper door. The sign above it read: crypt of the archbishops of new york.

  Jack stepped in quickly and yanked the door closed. He moved inside the crypt, then tightly shut the door behind him. In the dimness, he could make out the stone sarcophaguses of the interred archbishops arrayed in a semicircle around the rough-hewn stone walls of the chamber.

  “It’s me, idiots,” he said in a low voice after another second. “Hit the light.”

  There was a click, and the wall sconces came on.

  Behind the stone caskets were a dozen men. Most were wearing T-shirts and sweatpants. They were big, muscular, and not very friendly-looking.

  There were rips of Velcro as the men strapped on bulletproof Kevlar vests. Smith amp; Wesson nine-millimeter handguns in underarm holsters went on next. The black, fingerless gloves they put on were known as “sappers” and had cushioned lead shot over the knuckles.

  Then the mysterious cadre pulled brown-hooded Franciscan monk robes over the Kevlar vests. Into the pockets of these were placed what looked like remote controls but were actually the latest in electric shock weaponry.

  They slipped big-bored riot guns up the billowing sleeves of their robes. Half of the guns were loaded with rubber bullets; the other half with canisters of extremely caustic CS tear gas.

  Last, the men pulled black ski masks over their faces. It was as if they were made of shadow when they flipped up the hoods.

  Jack smiled approvingly as he threw on his own vest, robe, and black ski mask, then pulled up his hood.

  “Lock, load, and strap your nuts on, ladies,” Jack said, smiling as he slowly pulled back the heavy door of the crypt. “It’s time to put the fun back into funeral.”

  Chapter 14

  MOVIE STAR and comedian John Rooney felt the breath rush out of him as the honor guard finally arrived at the front of the church with the flag-draped coffin.

  Throughout the procession up the center aisle, they had stopped for a long, motionless moment after each step, the organ thundering from above. It was as if the casket weighed so much they needed to pause in order to carry it, Rooney thought sadly.

  As the pallbearers laid down the coffin, Rooney remembered his own father’s burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Say what you want about the military, he thought, choking up. Flat out, no one knew better how to honor the dead.

  He turned to his right when he saw the line of cowled, brown-robed monks appear. They walked with the same solemnity of the honor guard as they approached the altar. He could see another line of them walking down the aisle to his left.

  In the dimness of the church, you couldn’t see faces beneath the hoods. He knew there was going to be a lot of ritual and ceremony today, but this was a new one on him. If the military knew how to honor the dead, leave it to the Catholics to put the fear of God into the living.

  The organ was reaching a crescendo when the monks spaced themselves out and stopped suddenly in the side aisles.

  Rooney jumped when he heard a series of muffled blasts under the rumble of the organ. Then smoke, white and enveloping, came billowing from all sides.

  What had been the austere VIP section looked like a mosh pit as the people in there panicked, clawing at one another to get out of the pews.

  Rooney thought he saw one of the monks setting off a shotgun into the crowd.

  No, he thought, blinking hard in disbelief. He must have banged his head. That couldn’t be right.

  He opened his eyes as a uniformed cop stumbled up the center aisle with blood pouring out of his nose and ears.

  Beside Rooney, his bodyguard, Big Dan, had a handkerchief to his mouth as he cleared the.380 from his belt holster. It looked like Dan was trying to decide which direction to point it when one of the monks appeared like an apparition from the smoke and jabbed the bodyguard in the neck with a square of black plastic. There was an ominous clacking sound, and Big Dan dropped his weapon and was down on the seat, shaking like some huge spirit-struck worshipper.

  Then the organ died!

  Fear slapped through John Rooney. With the music gone, he could hear the screaming, the panicked shrieks of thousands soaring off the high stone vaults.

  Someone had just taken over St. Patrick’s!

  Chapter 15

  I HAD NO IDEA what was going on yet, which was my usual state lately, since Maeve had gotten sick. I was still groggy when I took a quick head count and pulled our van away from the hunter-green awning of my building. It was eight forty-one, and I had exactly four minutes to get us to Holy Name on Amsterdam. Or there was going to be at least one kid from every grade in detention.

  From the top of my building, you could probably “roof” my kids’ school on 97th with a Spalding, but anyone who’s familiar with morning rush hour in Manhattan will tell you that if you planned on going two blocks in four minutes, you were taking your chances.

  I knew I could have let them walk. Julia and Brian and the older kids had proved themselves more than capable of looking out for the pip-squeaks. But I wanted to
spend as much time as possible with them right now, wanted them to know they weren’t on their own.

  That and the fact that recently I had a terrible need to have them with me at all times.

  In fact, the only thing that had stopped me from writing out ten bogus sick notes to share my day off with them was Holy Name’s principal, Sister Sheilah. My butt already had enough memories of the principal’s bench to last it a lifetime.

  I got them to the school’s corner on Amsterdam Avenue with seconds to spare. I hopped out and threw open the door of our family vehicle, a twelve-passenger Ford Super Duty van I had bought at a police auction. Minivans were for 2.2-kid-toting suburban soccer moms. My NYC Bennett Nation required heavy troop transport.

  “Run!” I yelled as I pulled out children with both hands and deposited them on the sidewalk.

  Shawna just made it in as Sister Sheilah was taking the hook off the oak door to shut and lock it. I could see the withered old nun scanning the street for me, her stern look cocked and ready to fire.

  My tires barked as I dropped the Super D’s tranny into drive, punched the gas, and fled the scene.

  Chapter 16

  I COULDN’T BELIEVE my nose when I finally got back to the apartment. It smelled like coffee. Good coffee. Strong coffee.

  And that other smell. I didn’t want to jinx it, but I had a deep hunch that something was baking.

  Mary Catherine was just pulling out a tray of muffins when I entered the kitchen. Blueberry muffins. I like blueberry muffins the way Homer Simpson likes doughnuts. A young lady like her couldn’t possibly have six muffins for breakfast, could she? Would she share one with me?

  And the kitchen. It was sparkling. Every surface gleaming, every cereal bowl put away. Where was the Clean Sweep team?

  “Mary Catherine?”

  “Mr. Bennett,” Mary Catherine said, blowing a wisp of blond hair out of her face as she put the muffins on top of the stove. “Where is everyone? I thought I was Snow White entering the dwarves’ cottage when I came down this morning. Lots of little beds, but no sign of anyone.”

  “The dwarves are at school,” I said.

  Mary Catherine gave me a questioning look, similar to the one I’d just seen on Sister Sheilah.

  “What time do they leave?” she asked.

  “Around eight,” I said, unable to take my eyes off the steaming muffins on the stove.

  “Then I start at seven, Mr. Bennett. Not nine. There’s no sense in me coming all this way to help out if you won’t let me.”

  “I apologize. And the name is Mike, remember?” I said. “Are those…”

  “For after breakfast. How do you like your eggs?” she said. “Mike.”

  After breakfast? I thought. I’d assumed they were breakfast. Maybe this au pair thing would work out.

  “Over easy?” I said.

  “Bacon or sausage?” she said.

  No maybe about it, I thought with a smile and a shake of my head.

  I was contemplating that win-win decision when I felt my cell phone vibrate. I looked at the caller ID. My boss. I closed my eyes and mentally willed his number off the screen. So much for my telepathic powers, I thought, feeling the phone jump in my hand like a freshly caught trout.

  I was sorry it wasn’t a real fish.

  I would have thrown it back.

  Chapter 17

  I SHOOK MY HEAD again as I finally unfolded my phone and brought it up to my ear.

  Calls at home from my boss, on my day off, meant one sure thing, I knew.

  An express delivery of ill tidings was about to land in my lap.

  “Bennett,” I said.

  “Thank God,” my boss, Harry Grissom, said. Harry is the lieutenant detective in charge of my unit, the Manhattan North Homicide Squad. Being able to say you’re the go-to guy on the elite Manhattan North Homicide will get you a lot of respectful nods at most cop parties. Right then, though, I was more than willing to trade in every last one of them for a couple of fried eggs. And a nice fat blueberry muffin.

  “You heard what just happened?” my boss said.

  “Where? What?” I said, already thinking the worst. There must have been a distinct note of urgency in my voice because Mary Catherine turned from the sink. Post 9/11, for a lot of New Yorkers- New York cops, firemen, and EMTs especially-the next terror hit wasn’t a question of if but when.

  “What the hell’s happened? What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Slow down, Mike,” Harry said. “No explosions. Not yet at least. All I was told was, about ten minutes ago, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, shots were fired. First Lady Caroline’s funeral was going on at the time, so it doesn’t sound too good.”

  What felt like a door breach hit me full in the stomach. Shots fired at a state funeral? Inside St. Patrick’s? A short while ago? This morning?

  “Terrorists?” I said. “From where?”

  “I don’t think we know yet,” my boss said. “I do know that Manhattan South borough commander Will Matthews is on the scene, and he wants you down there ASAP.”

  In what capacity? I wondered. I had been on the NYPD’s Hostage Negotiation Team before making the switch to Homicide.

  And wasn’t I too fried already with my family crisis to take on a much larger one?

  When it rains cats, it pours kittens too, I thought. Story of my life. I hoped this was just a run-of-the-mill barricade incident. Or better yet, maybe the borough commander needed me for a simple single murder. I could do barricades and murders. It was the “weapons of mass destruction” thing that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

  “Does he need me for negotiating?” I asked my boss. “Or was there a homicide at the cathedral? Help me out here, Harry.”

  “I was too busy getting screamed at to get a chance to ask,” my boss said. “I don’t think it’s because they ran out of altar boys, though. Just get your ass down there and find out everything you can. Then let me know what the hell is going on.”

  “On my way,” I said, and hung up.

  I went into my bedroom and threw on jeans, a sweatshirt, and my NYPD Windbreaker. The Homicide one.

  I splashed cold water on my face and retrieved my service Glock from the closet safe.

  Mary Catherine was waiting in the front hall with my travel coffee mug and a brown bag of muffins. Even with my mind and adrenaline racing, I noticed that Socky, who hates everyone except Maeve, Chrissy, and Shawna, was rubbing his whiskers on her ankles. Talk about hitting the ground running.

  I was struggling to come up with appropriate words of thanks and pertinent household-running instructions, when she just opened the front door and said, “Go, Mike.”

  Part Two. SINNERS

  Chapter 18

  A LOW WHISTLE escaped through my teeth as I pulled my department-issued blue Impala up to the barricade thrown across Fifth Avenue at 52nd Street. I hadn’t seen so many cops out in front of the landmark church since the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

  Only instead of goofy tam-o’-shanters, shamrocks, and smiles, they were wearing black steel ballistic helmets, automatic weapons, and deadly serious frowns.

  I showed my shield to a sergeant by one of the blue-and-white sawhorses. She directed me to the mobile command center, a long white bus parked across the street from the cathedral. The sergeant told me to park in front of the Sanitation Department dump trucks that blocked up Fifth next to the 51st Street barricade.

  Two barricades, I thought. Mobile command centers. This was no single homicide for sure. This was a disaster in the making.

  As I got out of my car, a jackhammer throbbing sounded, and I looked up as a police helicopter swung out from behind Rockefeller Center and hovered low over the cathedral. Dust and coffee cups and newspaper pages spiraled up in the rotor wash as a sniper in the helicopter’s open door scanned the stained glass and stone spires over the barrel of a rifle.

  I took my eyes off the helicopter when I almost walked into a famous, controversial radio host who, for so
me reason, was holding court on the street in front of the inner barricade. “What in the hell did those friggin’ priests do this time?” I heard him say as I passed.

  As I entered the staging area between the grilles of the parked dump trucks, I stopped and stared in disbelief. A half dozen Emergency Service Unit cops were crossing the avenue with their heads down. They stopped and pressed their bulletproof backs against the side of the long black hearse parked at the curb.

  How could this be happening at Caroline Hopkins’s funeral?

  Chapter 19

  THOUGH ONLY FIVE SEVEN, with his broken nose and violently frank way of looking at everybody, except maybe his mother, borough commander Will Matthews was about as pugnacious-looking an Irish cop as you could still find on the force. He looked like he’d just gone fourteen and a half bare-knuckle rounds when I found him standing on the sidewalk smack in front of the command center bus.

  “Glad you could join us, Bennett,” he said.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “I hadn’t had a chance to see the tree yet anyway.”

  Instead of chuckling, Matthews looked like he wanted to hit me with a billy club. So much for trying to lighten things up.

  “I’m in no mood for stand-up, Bennett,” he said. “The mayor, the former president, the cardinal, several movie, music, and sports stars… who else? Eugena Humphrey, and about three thousand other VIPs are being held hostage inside by a dozen or more heavily armed, masked men. You follow me so far?”

  It was hard to register what Will Matthews had just said to me. The mayor and the former president alone would have been mind-boggling, but all the rest?

  The borough commander stared at me belligerently, waiting for me to pick my jaw up off the sidewalk before he continued his rant.