James Patterson - Step On A Crack

“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.

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?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, peeking around the column. “There’s a body down by the baptismal font. I’ll take that one. You guys check the gift shop. Shoot first.”

The men split up and rushed toward the front of the church. Jack swung his body out into the aisle, pistol trained on the figure on the marble floor. It didn’t move.

He tapped the warm barrel of his gun hard against his forehead when he saw who it was he’d shot. What have I done ?

Jack looked down at an elderly priest. Candlelight flickered in the dark pool of blood beneath his head. Shit .

Little John almost ran into him.

“No one in the gift shop,” he said. He looked down at the slain cleric and his still, saucer-sized eyes.

“Holy shit!” he said.

Jack crouched down on his heels next to the body and stared at the priest’s dead face. “Look what you made me do,” he said angrily.

Little John holstered his gun.

“What are we going to do now?” he asked.

At least the boys had his back, Jack thought, looking down at the innocent he’d just murdered. He had told them that killing might be a possibility, and still they’d all agreed.

At least he’d have company in hell.

“We use it,” he said. “Didn’t want to do this the hard way-but it’s looking like we don’t have a choice anymore.”

“Use it?” Little John said, looking down at the dead priest. “How?”

“Grab the good father’s arms and legs,” Jack said. “I’m tired of all this waiting anyway. Time to speed up the clock with a little pressure. It’s hardball time.”

IT WAS JUST past nine when I arrived at the police do not cross barricade of the command center. Before I was tempted to construe that message as a standing order for me to return home to my family, I cut the Chevy’s engine and opened the door.

I shook my head at the ongoing life-and-death siege as I threaded my way through the growing media encampment, then was waved through each of three checkpoints.

Reflected in the graphlike black glass of the modern office building neighboring to the north, the spire of the cathedral looked like a stock that had spiked and was now plummeting. A couple of reporters were doing stand-ups for feeds into their stations. When there was news, the print reporters typed into their laptops, the TV folks did stand-ups, and the radio people filed-very loudly-over their phones.

I had just turned away from the media folks and their bullshit when I caught the movement of the cathedral doors across Fifth. The doors were opening again !

At first it seemed as if the figure that flew from the arched shadow was another person who had been released. When I noted how fast the black-suited man was moving, my pulse quickened. I thought maybe somebody was escaping.

Then I saw the body go facedown on the stone stairs without any attempt at breaking its fall, and I knew something was very wrong.

I didn’t allow myself to think too much as I skimmed the bumper of the dump-truck barricade and crossed the avenue at a run.

It was only as I was coming up the cathedral steps and kneeling beside the fallen figure when it occurred to me, coldly, that I wasn’t wearing my Kevlar vest.

The fallen body had plowed through a section of the street shrine that had been left for Caroline Hopkins the day before. The upended votive candles now looked more like tossed beer bottles than solemn offerings. A bouquet of wilted roses lay just beyond the downed man’s outstretched hand, as if he’d dropped it in his fall.

I couldn’t get a pulse out of him. A needle of ice spiked my heart when I turned the body over to perform CPR.