“We’re not your lifestyle coaches or your Pilates instructors, and this isn’t Letterman’s greenroom.” Rooney heard Jack through his semiconsciousness. He even came up with one coherent idea when he managed to gather the scraps of his pain-ravaged thoughts: I should have let him shoot me.
“I thought you had to have some brains to be successful in this country,” Jack complained. “Which part of ‘step out of line and we’ll kill you’ are you morons not getting?”
Chapter 53
IT WAS TEN TO SEVEN in the morning when eleven-year-old Brian Bennett tapped on his sister’s door.
“Julia?” he whispered. “You up?”
Julia came out, combing her wet hair. Already showered, Brian thought with disappointment. He’d wanted to be the first one up, the leader of the family. He was the oldest boy, after all. When had Julia the Great woken up? Six?
“I was just about to get you,” Julia said. “Dad still sleeping?”
“Like a dead… I mean, like a rock,” Brian said quickly. “Who knows when he came in last night. You want me to start getting the cereal out and you wake the monsters?”
“Okay, but if you get finished before I get the girls up, go in and get Trent and Eddie and Ricky,” Julia said. “It’s going to take me a while to get the girls dressed right and do their hair.”
“Okay,” Brian said. He began to turn in the dim hall, but then stopped.
“Hey, Julia,” he said.
“What?”
“I feel bad about when Dad came in last night and busted us. I really think this will make it up to him. Great idea to get up early and get everyone ready.”
“Why thanks, Bri,” Julia said. “That’s really nice of you to say.”
Man! Brian thought, wincing. She was right. What the hell was he doing being all fuzzy and nice to his sister?
“Last one to get their team ready is a retarded loser,” Brian called over his shoulder as he left.
He threw open the door to the boys’ room after he had quickly set the kitchen table. He was shaking Ricky’s foot at the bottom bunk when Trent swung out from the top and hung upside down like a bat.
“Did he come? Did he come?” Trent asked urgently.
“Did who come?” Brian said, flipping his five-year-old brother out of his bed and onto his bare feet.
“SANTA!” Trent screamed.
“Shhhh!” Brian said. “No.”
“What?” Trent said sadly. “Santa didn’t come? Why not? Are you lying, Bri? I know I was a little naughty, but I was nice, too.”
“It’s not Christmas yet, you little maniac,” Brian said, heading toward the closet. “Wake up Ricky and go brush your teeth. Brush and flush. Now.”
Brian smiled when he opened the bedroom door five minutes later. The girls were just coming out of their room. He’d thought Ms. Perfect in Every Way Julia would have the little ladies doing calisthenics or something by this time. But no. Snag. It was a tie.
Brian laughed when he flicked on the kitchen light. Even though it was corny, he had to admit, seeing everyone with their costumes on was also hilarious.
It was dress rehearsal today at Holy Name for the Christmas pageant, and everyone had a part to play. Chrissy, Shawna, Bridget, and Fiona were garland-haloed angels. Trent and Eddie were shepherds. Ricky had scored the part of Joseph and was sporting a totally fake and funny black beard. Even Jane and Julia, who were in the choir, were wearing long silver robes. Of course he, himself, had the coolest, most uncorny costume, being one of the three wise men.
“Look at them,” Brian said, standing at the head of the table next to Julia. “They’re almost, like, cute or something.”
Julia took a camera out of her robe and snapped a picture of the little Bennetts. What was up with girls? Brian thought. How did they always know the right things to do?
Julia showed Brian the screen on her camera.
“Do you think Mom will like that one?” she said.
“Maybe,” Brian said. “How the heck should I know?”
Chapter 54
WHEN THE MUTED clunk and giggles and bangs and cries of my family getting ready woke me that morning, I sensed the absence on my wife’s side of the bed and was grateful. The workday-morning deal between Maeve and me was that she would get them dressed and I would take them to school. To let me sleep in while she did the much heavier work of getting our double-digit familia together was the type of kindness by omission only people who are long married can understand.
I tossed around and was reaching for the warmth of her body pillow when I felt the cold, stiff sheets beside me, and I remembered.
As I lay there, taking my first morning sip of personal horror, a chilling question occurred to me.
I swung my bare feet onto the cold hardwood and grabbed my tattered and holey robe off the bedpost.
If Maeve wasn’t getting the kids ready, who was?
It’s hard to describe how I felt when I stepped into the kitchen and saw my children fully dressed for their Christmas pageant. I was convinced I was dreaming, or maybe even dead, seeing the kids transformed around our breakfast table into some surreal Renaissance painting of a heavenly multitude. Then Trent knocked his SpongeBob cereal bowl off the table-and everyone turned around.
“DAD!” they said at once.
How could they have gotten themselves ready? I thought. What a bad father I was. I hadn’t even remembered about the play. I didn’t know why I started crying when I stooped to pick up Froot Loops off the linoleum. Then I did know.
The kids being able to take care of themselves felt like Maeve had done her job. Like she had tied up all the loose ends and was now ready to go.
I wiped my tears on the sleeve of my robe as Chrissy hugged me hard and gave me a butterfly kiss by fluttering her eyelashes on my neck.
A deep breath helped me pull myself together. If Maeve saw me cry in front of them, she’d kick my ass.
And so, I felt a joyful smile invade my face when I looked at them again. My kids really were angels. They were completely unreal. I nodded at Julia and Brian. Had anyone, let alone a couple of kids, risen to a horrible occasion with such selflessness? I gritted my teeth to kill another wave of sorrow; then I cleared my throat.
“I know it’s not Sunday,” I yelled with enthusiasm, “but who needs a Sunday breakfast as much as me?”
The cries of “We do” and “Me” rang off the walls as I slapped two cast-iron frying pans up on the stove.
Seamus arrived in the kitchen as I was dispensing my bacon, egg, potato, and green onion hash to my guys.
“Ock. Faith and begora,” he said, glaring wide-eyed at the costumed kids. “Halloween already?”
“NO!” the kids cried, giggling at their grandfather.
Mary Catherine came in a minute later, a quizzical look on her face. I handed her a plate.
“I warned you we were nuts,” I said, smiling.
For a few glorious seconds, I just stood at the stove, staring out at my family, listening to them eat and laugh. My bliss lasted until I spotted my cell phone and keys on the counter next to the coffee machine.
Damn world, I thought. I wished it would just lay off already.
I thought of the hostages and how the clock was ticking against them. It was the hostage-takers themselves that finally got me to uproot myself and head for the shower. I smiled bitterly as I felt the heavy, black resentment in me shift away from myself and toward them like the cannon of a tank. Jack was the one responsible for taking me away from my loved ones, I realized.
You don’t know who you’re messing with, buddy, I mentally e-mailed him. You might think you do. But you have no idea.
Chapter 55
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 cu
teness 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.
Chapter 56
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.”
Chapter 57
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.
Chapter 58
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?”
Step on a Crack Page 11