Step On A Crack

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 begi

He said he’d get away with this, and he had.

Chapter 98

AT AN ABANDONED DOCK just north of the new Hell’s Kitchen Sports Pier, twenty blocks south of where half of the cars had driven into the water, a black shape bobbed up from among the rotting piles.

With his eyes just above the surface of the water, Jack carefully sca

From inside his lightweight Scubapro wet suit, he took out a Ziploc bag. He removed the cell phone inside it and hit redial as he took out his air tank mouthpiece.

“Where?” he said.

“They’re still concentrating on the crash sites, still looking to save hostages,” the Neat Man said. “They haven’t started looking for you yet. Window’s open, m’boy, but closing. Move now!”

Jack didn’t have to be told twice. He slipped the cell phone back into its bag and himself back under the briny water and tugged on the tow rope.

Five minutes later, Jack and the other four hijackers with him were up on a concrete ledge beneath a walkway on the south side of the sports complex, peeling off the wet suits they’d worn under their brown robes, dumping the air tanks they’d hidden under the water at the crash site. The tanks were small, only thirty cubic feet of air, but enough for the ten to fifteen minutes they had to be under water.

The most hazardous part, he thought, had been the actual crash itself into the river. But the rest-their extraction from the cars and finding the tanks-had gone off like clockwork. Not only was it probably the greatest hijacking of all time, now they were about to pull off the greatest escape!

And not just him, he thought.

His sweet knuckleheads had managed not to screw it all up, and he was proud of them. But this was no time to celebrate. They had to go to Queens to pick up the rest of the gang who’d dumped into the East River. Hopefully, they had fared as well.

Jack glanced up at the busy West Side Highway. He smiled as he noticed his pulse racing. He’d seen his share of action, but none of it compared with the razor’s-edge euphoria he was feeling now. Nothing even came close. If they hadn’t lost Fontaine and Jose, this job would have been perfect.

He turned and looked back as the last member of his crew shed his wet suit, revealing a track outfit beneath. “Just do it,” right? Now they looked just like everybody else coming off of the sports pier. Yuppie office mates who’d decided to spend Christmas playing and partying instead of with their corny-ass families.

“Okay, ladies,” Jack said to his men with a wink. “Let’s move ’ em out. We ’re almost home. We won the Super Bowl.”

They had to keep themselves from sprinting as they climbed the short fence and came out alongside the main building, waiting at a light to cross.

Jack swallowed hard, his blood going as cold as the water they’d just climbed out of as a police car, with its siren screaming, approached from the south. He started breathing again when it blew right past them, speeding uptown. No doubt heading back to 57th, where they’d started their little Dukes of Hazzard stunt.

It was thirty-five minutes later when they were in a van picking up the rest of the hijackers by the dock of an abandoned bottling plant in Long Island City. Little John gri

“What the hell took you so long?” the big man said, accepting an ice-cold Heineken that Jack handed him from a cooler. “Where’s Jose?”

“He lost it as we were coming across Eleventh Avenue,” Jack said, punching a hand into his fist. “Jose’s gone.”

Little John looked down at the van floor, ruminating. “What about his prints?” he said after a moment.

Jack smiled.

“Remember we told him about the need to not leave any evidence?” he said. “Well, the crazy mother said he wasn’t taking any chances. So he spent the last month and a half burning off his fingertips with a Zippo.”

“To Jose!” Little John said, lifting his beer bottle, happy again. “That gato had some balls.”

“And Fontaine,” Jack said, remembering his friend who’d been downed in the firefight in the crypt. He glanced at the man’s hands in the Ziploc, sitting on ice beside the beers. Kind of looked like chicken wings.

“What do we do now?” Little John said.

“I don’t know about you, but after three days wearing the same drawers and that little dip in one of the most polluted rivers on Earth,” Jack said, “I could go for a hot shower.”

“And some hot you-know-what, too,” one of his compadres called to howls as the van slipped onto the BQE.

“I meant after that,” Little John said.

“We stick with the plan. Two, three months of waiting to make things look good, and then it’s a one-way first-class trip to Costa Rica.”

So they’d really done it, Jack thought, gri

Chapter 99

I HAD TO BORROW some clothes, so I was decked out in a spiffy green sanitation worker’s uniform when I arrived back at the car dealership on Eleventh.

It looked as if two medical examiners in white Tyvek suits were playing a game of tug-of-war as they attempted to remove a brown-robed hijacker from the handlebars of a motorcycle. Only after an ESU cop arrived with some bolt cutters did they finally manage to pull the motorcycle out of the dead man’s chest.

Over by a pulverized soda machine, one of my favorite rock singers of all time, Charlie Conlan, and Giants quarterback Todd Snow were being interviewed by detectives from the Major Crimes Unit. They didn’t look like they were much in the mood for autographs. From the look of the shredded car, I was surprised the only injury I saw was a black eye and fat lip on the pissed-off-looking pop star, Mercedes, who stormed by with an EMS medic, and not a word of thanks to anybody.

I knelt beside what was left of the hijacker as the assistant MEs laid him onto the showroom carpet. I borrowed a pair of rubber gloves and slowly pulled off his mask. The back of my fist flew against my forehead when I uncovered a second black rubber mask beneath it.

A skin-diving mask.

That’s how they did it! How they had gotten away. They’d used scuba-diving equipment to escape under the water.

I borrowed a phone and told Will Matthews about my discovery. After some choice expletives, he called in more harbor units from Jersey and the Coast Guard.

After I hung up, I pulled off the hijacker’s rubber mask. The deceased was a Hispanic man in his late thirties, early forties. Nothing in his pockets. A nine-millimeter Beretta pistol in an underarm holster, but the serial number had been filed away. I groaned when I looked at his hands and saw his fingerprints were gone, too. I’d seen similar prints on the hands of crackheads, ridges melted down to a nub from holding too many hot pipes.