Step on a Crack Page 16

  John Rooney, the movie-star comic, lay sprawled on the stretcher, eyes and mouth wide open.

  What felt like a slow electric current crept along my spine.

  Another person slaughtered for no good reason, just for show.

  I glanced back at the crowds and press straining to see past the barricades. I almost sat down next to the grieving paramedic at the curb.

  How the hell were we expected to go on with this?

  I remembered how my kids had worshipped Rooney. Maybe they were watching the live-action DVD he’d been in only last Christmas-Rudolph-right now.

  Who would be next? I thought. Eugena? Charlie Conlan? Todd Snow?

  Rooney had millions of fans, many of them children. Being such a star, he’d become part of the country and the world’s consciousness, and those bastards had just erased him and all the warm feelings he’d miraculously been able to generate.

  I glanced back again at the cathedral, the crowd stretching beyond it, the microwave towers of the news vans.

  For the first time, I wanted to pack it in. I ached to just take the phone off my belt and walk away. Find a subway. Go lie in my wife’s room, holding her hand. Maeve could always soothe me somehow.

  “My God!” Oakley cried in outrage. “How the hell are we going to deliver this bombshell? First we drop the ball with the mayor. Now we let poor John Rooney get killed?”

  Then it dawned on me.

  There it was.

  That was the whole point.

  I suddenly understood why the hijackers were wiping out celebrities, one grueling murder at a time.

  They wanted things to go slow, methodically slow. That way, the crowds would gather. That way, the media, along with the rest of the world watching at home, would come together to put the pressure on so that this thing would be resolved. But the pressure wasn’t on them, I realized.

  It was on us.

  Someone had finally done it. Someone had devised law enforcement’s worst nightmare. As time went by and the bodies piled up, we looked worse and worse. It made any decision to breach the cathedral in a rescue attempt almost impossible. If we screwed up, and boom, the place went up, people wouldn’t blame the hijackers, they’d blame us.

  I let the crisis phone ring four times before I answered it.

  “Hi. It’s Jack,” he said, and actually sounded gleeful. “Hi-Jack. Get it? Sure, it’s not as funny as Rooney, but I’m thinking his stand-up days are over. Time’s up, Mike. No more excuses. No more delays. If all the money isn’t in my account by nine o’clock tomorrow morning, there’ll be so many dead rich and famous people under the ol’ tree this Christmas, Santa’ll have to leave all the presents in the fireplace.”

  Chapter 84

  IT WAS COMING on two in the morning when I slowly, painfully, lifted my head off the laptop keyboard I’d been using for a pillow. I was aware of the earring Maeve had given me. Also, that for the first time in hours, the activity in the makeshift Rockefeller command center had died down to a murmur.

  Our work was almost done here. It had taken every ounce of finagling and begging and negotiating, but we’d somehow gotten all but four of the seventy-three million dollars together.

  Delta Force had arrived around midnight and was working with the FBI and NYPD tactical people, trying to find some weakness, some helpful detail that had been overlooked. I’d heard that a mock-up of the cathedral was being built at an army base in Westchester to assist the commandos to plan for a breach.

  As a kid, the thought of ever seeing soldiers patrolling the streets of New York was ridiculous, a scene from a B science-fiction movie. Seeing the soldiers on the perimeter of Ground Zero and watching the F-14s buzzing the Midtown skyscrapers as they flew air cover after 9/11 still didn’t seem real to me, but it was.

  I sat up as an army general came past my desk. Seeing combat boots on NYC ground twice in one lifetime, I thought as I watched the officer and his entourage enter the command boardroom, seemed unfair.

  “Why don’t you take a breather, Mike?” Paul Martelli told me with a yawn. He’d just come back from catching some sleep. “Nothing going on here for a little while.”

  “We’re coming down to the end of this thing,” I said. “I don’t want to be missing if I’m needed.”

  Martelli patted me on the shoulder.

  “Listen, Mike,” he said, “we all know about your wife, your family situation. I can’t even imagine the stress you’re under. We’ll call you the second something develops. Now get out of here. Go be with your family. Mason and I have you covered.”

  Martelli didn’t have to tell me twice. Anyway, I felt the negotiations were over-they’d won. We still had to negotiate the hostages’ release and whatever kind of transportation the hijackers thought they would need to get them to safety. But all that could wait.

  Maeve was sleeping when I came in. I wasn’t about to wake her from such a peaceful state. On her bedside table, Jimmy Stewart was reluctantly receiving a cigar from Potter on the screen of the portable DVD player. I shut it off.

  I stood there staring at my dear, sweet wife, the treasure of my life.

  I smiled as I remembered our first date. I had just taken my finger off the bell to her apartment when she threw open the door and kissed me. There was a flash of her honey-brown eyes, the spiced sweetness of her perfume, and without preamble, soft lips hit me, and my heart smacked against the back of my chest like a handball.

  “Thought I’d save us a little awkwardness later,” she’d said, her smile beaming as I stammered a bit, reeling against her threshold.

  “Sweet Maeve,” I whispered now from the foot of her bed. “There’ll never be a man as lucky as me. I love you so much, my queen.” I touched a finger to my lips, then to hers.

  Minutes later, I swung crosstown again. There wasn’t a soul on the windswept streets. Even the homeless had gone home for Christmas, I guessed.

  I went into the kids’ rooms and checked on them. There were probably visions of PlayStation and XBox dancing in their heads instead of sugarplums, but at least they were snug in their beds as required. Seamus was snoring to beat the band on top of the chaise in my bedroom, cookie crumbs on his cheeks. My eleventh kid. I tossed a throw on him and turned out the light.

  My biggest shock came when I stepped into the living room. Not only was there a grand tree, but it had been decorated to the nines. The kids’ gifts had been pulled from the back of my closet, expertly wrapped, and stacked in ten piles under it.

  There was a note on the DVD remote sitting on the sectional. hit play, it said. merry christmas! mary catherine.

  I did as instructed. A video shot of Chrissy, dressed as an angel and proceeding up the aisle in Holy Name’s gym, filled the screen.

  I teared up, but not angrily this time. What an awesome job Mary Catherine and my grandfather had done. What could be more beautiful than this?

  Duh, how about Maeve there, healthy, beside you? a voice inside me said.

  I didn’t have the strength to listen to voices right now. It would all be over soon. I wiped my eyes to watch as my boys, now shepherds, came wandering from afar toward the stage. God save the Bennetts.

  Chapter 85

  I DON’T KNOW what I appreciated more when I woke up early on Christmas morning. The unmatchably wonderful smell of coffee and bacon wafting through my open door or the barely stifled giggling coming from the other side of my bed.

  “Oh, no,” I said, sitting up after a particularly loud titter. “All my children are sound asleep… and there’s Irish ghosts in my room!”

  There was an explosion of laughter as Shawna, Chrissy, and Trent tackled me back onto my pillow.

  “It’s not ghosts,” Trent said, kangaroo-bouncing up and down beside my head. “It’s Christmas!”

  Tugging one hand apiece, Chrissy and Shawna got me to my feet and pulled me out into the sweetly pine-scented living room.

  I got my Christmas present right there and then when I looked down at my two litt
le ones. Norman Rockwell couldn’t have painted it any better. Christmas-tree lights softly illuminating the breathless, saucer-eyed wonder of two little girls on this special day of days.

  “You were right, Daddy!” Chrissy said, letting me go as she clapped her hands over her head. “I left the kitchen window open, and Santa made it!”

  I saw Trent shaking a box.

  “How about you little guys wake up the big ones first,” I said. “Then we’ll open presents together, okay?”

  Three little comets rocketed out of the room simultaneously. I headed for the kitchen, following that wonderful smell. Mary Catherine smiled at me as she poured pancake batter into a skillet.

  “Merry Christmas, Mike,” she said. “Do you like your fried egg on top of the pancake or on the side?”

  “Whatever’s easiest,” I said, stunned to learn that having both pancakes and eggs at once was within the realm of the possible. “I don’t know how I’m ever going to thank you for all you’ve done for my family. The tree, taping the pageant, wrapping the gifts. Heck, I’m starting to think maybe Santa is real. You sure you’re not from Tipperary by way of the North Pole?”

  “Please,” Mary said with a wink. “Father Seamus did most of it. Wait, I hear the children. Take that tray out. I poured the hot chocolate, and your coffee is there on the island.”

  I did as I was told and headed back to the living room. I thought everyone would be tearing into the gifts like wolves on a heifer by this point, but they were just standing there. What was up?

  “You didn’t have to wait for me, guys,” I said. “Merry Christmas. Let the wrapping paper fly!”

  “Well, Dad,” Brian started. “We had a kids’ meeting and…”

  “What Brian is trying to say,” Julia said, “is that we decided that we don’t want to open our gifts until we see Mom. We know you have to go back to work, but we’re willing to wait until you get home so we can all go over and see Mom together.”

  I stepped over and wrapped as many of my kids into my arms as I could.

  “Game over,” I said, closing my eyes tight in the center of the scrum. “You guys are the best kids who ever lived.”

  After I ate my egg pancakes, I reluctantly hopped in the shower and got changed. The last thing I saw after I hugged my way to the front door of my apartment was Mary Catherine charging the video camera battery. How I was ever going to repay this girl, I couldn’t begin to fathom.

  I almost knocked down Seamus, who’d gone home early to shower and change, as he stepped out of the elevator. He was dressed all in black, with his Roman collar tight at the neck. Damn if he didn’t look holy and pious and very nice.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said. “Off to work, are we? That’s a fine, fine job you have for yourself there. Real conducive to family life, it is.”

  “Oh, ’tis, ’tis,” I said in my grandfather’s brogue.

  Right. As if I wanted to go to work. I almost laughed after I took a breath. It wouldn’t have been a holiday without my grandfather busting my chops about something.

  “Hey, thanks for what you did for the kids, you nasty old bat,” I said with a smile. I stopped the door as it started to slide closed. “Oh, and bah humbug to you, too.”

  Chapter 86

  INSIDE THE semidarkened cathedral, Eugena Humphrey woke on a hard wooden pew. She sat up, rubbing the cold out of her arms. She widened her eyes reluctantly and let out a breath of disappointment as she eyed the cathedral’s all-too-familiar stark stone. Finally, she turned her head toward the votive candles that had given her a sense of peace and hope over the last forty-eight hours.

  The rows of golden light were gone, she saw immediately. Every flame completely snuffed out.

  She’d had some pretty bad Christmases before, she thought, closing her eyes again. But this was worse than getting regifted.

  Though she knew it would be painful, she couldn’t help thinking about what she would have been doing back home at this very moment.

  She could almost see her husband, Mitchell, coming into the bedroom of her cozy penthouse apartment above Wilshire Avenue with a heaping breakfast tray just for the two of them. Because of the occasion, the chef and nutritionist would have the day off, and Mitch’s diet be damned. Blueberry pancakes, apple-smoked sausage, pecan bacon, oversized mugs of Kona coffee. After they ate heartily, they’d do their exchange. Because they had unlimited resources, it had come to pass over the years that even very expensive gifts, such as diamonds and new cars, had become-impossible to believe as it was-well, boring. She and Mitchell had come up with a new strategy that had proved to be joyful and meaningful for them both. They were each allowed to spend up to one hundred dollars, and the idea was to purchase the most beautiful or meaningful objects they could find.

  It stressed simplicity. Got them back down to the basics. Plus, it was just fun.

  One year, he had bought her a dozen perfect red roses. The effect was to make her really look at the flowers. Actually see their elegance and richness and fleeting beauty in a way that she hadn’t since she had received her first bouquet.

  This year, she’d gotten him a twenty-one-dollar watch she’d found at a pharmacy she’d done some stealth shopping in. It was a retro design. Quite simple. A circular white face with regular black numerals. She thought that it was simple in an eternal way, though. The kind of watch God might wear if he needed to, and it seemed to her, at least in a profoundly understated way, to represent the preciousness of time, of life, of love with someone like Mitchell.

  Eugena opened her eyes as something hard speared into the back of her neck.

  “Hey, lucky you, Eugena. Santa got you a cheeseburger this year,” Little John said as he dropped a greasy paper-wrapped bundle in her lap.

  Maybe the other hijackers were doing this for money, but that son of a bitch, Eugena thought, glaring at the back of the gunman’s hood, got off on inflicting pain. He was the one who had walked up and killed John Rooney in cold blood.

  An overwhelming sense of despair threatened to overtake her.

  Who was she kidding? How in the name of God could she take another hour of this? Another minute?

  She moved her “Christmas breakfast” to the bench beside her and tried to start up her yoga again to calm herself down, lift her spirits. A growl came out of her with the first exhale.

  No! she thought, searching around hatefully for the gunman. Enough damn tolerance. It was time to get pissed off.

  But didn’t other people feel this way all the time? came an errant thought. Cold, angry, depressed, dirty, in need of just about everything. So many around the world suffered so much harder on a day-to-day basis. Who was she to complain?

  Even if she was a celebrity, she was a goddamn person, too! And one who wasn’t going to take it anymore.

  There’s no use talking to these evil bastards, Eugena could see now. No way to resolve this thing peacefully. She sat up, clenching and unclenching her fists. She finally decided that if she got the opportunity, she was going to fight for her life.

  Chapter 87

  ACROSS THE AISLE from Eugena, Charlie Conlan checked his watch, then checked it again. He looked up as the skinny hijacker who liked Mercedes Freer came strolling past, doing his rounds.

  Conlan turned and saw a lone hijacker sitting on the rear rail. He watched as the punk put his shotgun in his lap and took something out of the pocket of his robe. It was a jeweled cell phone he’d grabbed from one of the celebrities. Was he making a call? Who would he be calling now?

  No, Conlan realized as the hijacker stared at the screen and started pressing buttons with his thumbs. He was playing a video game.

  Conlan coughed twice. His signal. Todd Snow at the front pew sat up and shot him a look. Conlan nodded as Mercedes, sitting at the end of one of the middle pews, tugged the passing hijacker’s robe.

  Let’s roll.

  When the hijacker turned, Snow bolted over the front pew, hopped silently over the rail, and disappeared under the skirt
of the altar.

  Conlan swiveled his head to see if the hijacker at the rear had noticed. Nope, still into his game.

  Conlan could hear Mercedes chatting up the other punk.

  “I’m going a little crazy,” Mercedes hissed. “C’mon, you and me. I’m serious. Give me a kiss at least.”

  The hijacker’s Adam’s apple bulged. He glanced back at his partner, then leaned down and started tongue kissing the pop singer through his mask. His hands were all over her chest.

  “Not here in front of everybody. Behind the altar,” Mercedes whispered breathlessly.

  The hijacker squinted back at his partner.

  “What? I’m not worth it?” Mercedes said. She walked her fingers down the gunman’s robe. Stopped right above his crotch. “Believe me, I’m worth it.”

  “Behind the altar?” he said. “You’re even dirtier than your videos. All right, let’s go.”

  Conlan exhaled as Mercedes rose in her pew. This was it.

  Two things would happen now. Snow would stomp the hijacker behind the altar, and Conlan would rush the gunman at the back rail. Then they would have two guns, and maybe they’d have a chance to get out of this alive.

  Charlie Conlan wiped the sweat from his palms. He knew how risky this was. But it was either fight or wait to be shot like Rooney.

  He glanced up at the altar again. Mercedes and the hijacker were glued together as they hurried up the steps.

  Now.

  Conlan stood in his pew. Suddenly there was an unexpected explosion. What felt like a steel fist slammed into the small of his back.

  There was another explosion, and an iron blow caught him in the chin. Without knowing how it had happened, he was down on his back, numb and bleeding, struggling to stay conscious.

  He heard Todd Snow yell out. Snow had been rushing toward the gangly hijacker when three others suddenly appeared. They fired on him-rubber bullets!