Step On A Crack

Chapter 95

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 spi

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 gri

Chapter 96

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, spi

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 ma

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.

Chapter 97

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 Ke

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.