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Chapter 109
IT STARTED TO SNOW as we crossed over the city line, racing north on the Saw Mill River Parkway. Myself and an eight-vehicle convoy of FBI sedans and NYPD ESU trucks had already passed over the Harlem River and were now speeding through the Westchester woods, but it wasn’t to grandma’s house we were going.
We took the exit for Pleasantville and rolled west down toward the Hudson. At the very bottom, alongside the wind-scoured river, we stopped before high, harsh gray concrete walls decorated with razor wire. A barely legible sun-faded sign was bolted to the rock.
sing sing correctional facility, it said.
Nope, not grandma’s house, I thought. The Big House.
Infamous Sing Sing.
Up the River.
There was a distinct chill in the air as I got out and stood next to the prison walls. It was as if cold emanated from the place itself. I felt it get even chillier when an armed guard, in what looked like a miniature airport control tower above the wire, swung his sunglasses in my direction. The barrel of the M16 he carried across his chest seemed the only gleaming object for miles.
All this time we were ru
The print of the deceased hijacker in the car dealership had belonged to Jose Alvarez, a corrections officer who’d worked at Sing Sing prison until six months ago.
A call to the warden’s office revealed that a dozen men on the prison’s three-to-eleven tour had staged a sick-out the week of the hijacking.
Suddenly, so many things made sense to me. The tear gas, rubber bullets, and handcuffs, the street lingo mixed with quasimilitary terminology. The answer was right there in front of us, but it had taken Reverend Solstice’s suspicions and the memory of a prisoner at Rikers named Tremaine Jefferson, who had previously served time at Sing Sing, to set it free.
Prison guards, as well as cops, were capable of handling crowds and containing people professionally, and capable of being efficiently violent.
“Ready, Mike?” Steve Reno asked as he stepped in front of a dozen ESU SWAT cops.
“I’ve been ready since the minute I got to St. Pat’s that morning.”
Our suspects were inside the prison, on duty. To arrest them, we were going to have to go in, enter the belly of the beast. Though jail is one of the least favorite places cops like to find themselves, I was looking forward to this. I was especially looking forward to matching Jack’s face to his wise mouth. I was psyched, completely fired up.
Though the wind cutting off the choppy water was like a Mach 3, I was actually smiling. “Let’s go meet Jack,” I said.
Chapter 110
WE HAD TO CROSS a footbridge bo
“The men who staged the sick-out have already been summoned into the lineup room,” Warden Clark said as we arrived in the drab hallway outside his office.
An urgent-sounding squall ripped from Warden Clark’s radio as we were coming down a flight of stairs on our way to the muster room. The warden listened closely.
“What is it?” I said.
“A-Block,” the warden said. “Something’s happening. A lot of screaming and yelling anyway. Probably nothing. Our guests are always complaining about the service.”
“Are you sure all the men from the shift are there?” I said as we arrived at the mesh-windowed door of the muster room.
The warden looked intently through the wired glass at the nervous-looking uniformed corrections officers.
“I think so. Wait. No,” the warden said. “Sergeant Rhodes and Sergeant Williams. The two shift foremen. They’re not here yet. Where the hell are they?”
The shift foremen, I thought. Sure sounded like ringleaders to me. I thought about the message the warden had just gotten on his radio.
“Let me guess,” I said. “The shift foremen are stationed to A-Block?”
Clark nodded. “Our largest maximum-security building,” he said.
“We have to go in there,” I told him. “Now.”
Chapter 111
LIKE THE INVESTIGATION itself, everything seemed to be moving uphill in Sing Sing. Trailing behind Warden Clark and a half dozen of his most trusted corrections officers, I climbed countless concrete stairs and several graded, paint-chipped corridors before we came to a steel door leading to a barred gate.
The gate buzzed open harshly, and there was a metallic snap like the hammer of a gun on an empty chamber. Then the door swung wide.
I could feel the sound of the prison knock against my chest as we passed through the enormous chamber of the multitiered cell block. Radios, inmates yelling, the constant hard and booming echo upon echo of steel on steel. It sounded like some form of torture, coming up from a bottomless metal well.
The prisoners in the closest cells rose immediately, screaming obscenities from behind double-thick bars as we passed. All along the double-football-field length of the building, I could see the glint of mirrors held out between the steel forest of cell bars. I hoped to hell we didn’t get “gassed,” a nasty soup of urine and feces hurled down by an inmate.
“Let’s check the gym before we go upstairs to the different galleries,” the warden yelled above the racket surrounding us.
We were buzzed through another locked door at the block’s opposite end. There was no one at any of the weight-room benches or pull-up stations. No one on the basketball court. No one hiding behind the stands. Where the hell were they? Had Jack and Little John gotten away again? How did they stay a step ahead of us?
I was leading our group back out onto the bottom level of A-Block when I was shoved from behind. I went down! The weight room’s steel door boomed to a close as I skidded my palms and knees against the concrete floor.
I turned to see two of the warden’s most trusted corrections officers smiling above me as the warden and Steve Reno and the other cops, sealed in the gym behind, began pounding on the steel door.
I noticed that one CO was gargantuan, the other short and stocky. Way to go, Professor Be
The one and only Jack had a black riot baton in his hand. He spun it easily between his fingers. He had close-cropped curly brown hair and a permanent sneer. A tough guy for a tough job, right?
“Hey, Mikey,” he said. “Long time no talk.”
How could I not recognize that voice? No wonder Tremaine Jefferson had.
“So how come you never call anymore?” Jack said. “I thought we were buddies.”
“Hey, Jack,” I said, feigning courage I wasn’t really feeling. “Fu
Jack chuckled at that one. Still a cool customer. If he was worried about whether help was on its way, he was hiding it well.
“You made another mistake, Mike,” he said. “Only this one’s kind of fatal. Coming into a man’s house uninvited. You thought I wouldn’t anticipate you might find us? Shit, even a broken clock is right twice a day. You think that fat bastard Clark is in charge here? This is my prison. My turf, my people.”
“It’s over, Jack,” I said.
“I really don’t think so, Mike,” Jack said. “Think about it. We got out of one fortress. We can get out of another. Especially now that we have hostages. Hell, Mike, maybe I’ll even let you negotiate your own release. How does that sound?”