James Patterson - Step On A Crack

“Please, Mary. Feel free to get out of there,” I said. “And thank you so much for picking up all the slack. When this craziness at the cathedral is over, we’ll sit down and figure out a sane schedule.”

“I’m glad I could help. You have a wonderful family,” Mary Catherine said. “Merry Christmas, Mike.”

I was speeding south past the wreath-and-holly-decked Plaza Hotel when she said it, and for a second, I wanted to believe that it could be. Then in the distance down Fifth, I spotted the harsh glow of the siege tinting the black sky.

“Talk to you later,” I said, and snapped my phone shut.

IN THE DARK CONFESSIONAL, Laura Winston lay curled on the cramped floor, sweating and shivering. The most fashionable woman on the planet , she thought, is in desperate need of a makeover .

In the twenty hours she’d been confined, she’d drifted in and out of consciousness. But ever since the dim light had retreated from the stained-glass skylight above her, six or seven hours ago, she’d been completely and atrociously awake with the fever and pain of withdrawal.

It was around noon when she had noticed her reflection in the polished brass kick plate of the door. Makeup eroded by tears and sweat, honey-blond razor cut flecked with vomit. At first Laura thought she was staring at some kind of religious carving, the image of a deranged, skeletal demon triumphantly slain by an angel. She recalled the last lines of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror ” as she lay there, unable to look away from the terrible image. In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish .

It had taken a kidnapping, a violent ordeal of historic proportions to do it, but now, finally, she realized the truth.

She was old .

And she’d actually hurt people, hadn’t she? Laura thought. Women especially. Month after month after month in her magazine she’d perpetuated the hurtful myth of eternal chicness and supposedly attainable beauty. Draped impossibly expensive clothes on fourteen-year-old genetic freaks and called it normal, then implied to her readers that if they didn’t look like them, they were worthless, or at least not living up to their potential.

When she got out of this, if she did , she was going to change, she decided. Pack it in. Go to a good rehab facility. Downsize. Instead of building an empire, she was going to establish a charitable foundation. Insane as it was, this awful experience had fundamentally changed her for the better.

Give me one last chance, Lord. The fashionista prayed for the first time since she was a little girl. At least give me the chance to change .

It felt like something tore inside her ear when the gun went off just outside the confessional door.

When the ringing subsided, she could hear people screaming. The sulfurous stench of cordite wafted under the door and mixed with the sour smell of her vomit.

Her breath jammed in her throat as she heard a muffled curse and a body being dragged past her door.

God have mercy. They’d shot somebody else!

Laura felt her heart wallop against her chest.

Who could it have been? Who? Why? She hoped it wasn’t Eugena, who had been so kind to her.

The hijacking wasn’t really about money, was it? Laura concluded with numb horror. One by one, they’d be taken off to slaughter. Made to pay for their stupid, decadent sins.

She was running out of time. I’m next , Laura thought with a dry heave.

EUGENA HUMPHREY, unfortunately, had seen dead bodies before.

Her grandmother’s was the first, and she remembered how angry the withered, sadly questioning change in the face of her beloved Gram had made her. More recently, with her philanthropy work, she’d been shown pictures of atrocities throughout the world that needed somebody’s attention, and she had tried her best to help.

But even the garish images of the hacked-up villagers in equatorial Africa couldn’t prepare her for what she had just witnessed with her own eyes.

Just shot him, Eugena thought. Stepped up to the pew and just shot him through the head.

Why? How could one human being do that to another?

Now she watched the gunmen drag the body along the marble. What a horrible sound it made, like blood being squeegeed off glass. A hijacker at each side pulled at the body’s rag-doll arms as though it were some nonsensical schoolyard game.

A shiny black loafer came off one foot. Terrible detail. The open eyes of the lolling head seemed to make eye contact with Eugena as the corpse was pulled into the shadowed gallery beside the altar.

Why me? the lifeless eyes seemed to accuse her as he was pulled out of sight. Why me and not you?

They just killed my dear friend, Eugena thought, and then she began to sob uncontrollably, and she knew she would be changed forever by this.

AS I CAME through the checkpoint, I felt a hard punch right to my heart. I could see Oakley and a couple more ESU cops running like madmen across Fifth toward the cathedral steps. That could only mean one thing, I thought, angrily racing ahead to catch up.

I checked my watch. What the hell? Jack had said midnight. It was only ten thirty .

I was already at the ambulances in Rock Center when Oakley and the other cops arrived with a suit-clad body. I couldn’t see the face as the medics scrambled desperately over the victim on the stretcher. Who the hell was it? Who had they killed now? Why do it before the deadline?

After a moment, the paramedics stopped. One of them turned away with tears in her eyes. The oxygen mask she was holding fell from her fingers unheeded. She sat down in the gutter, and the flashes from news photographers outside the cordon and in the windows of buildings overlooking the cathedral rudely invaded her grief.

I felt my heart flash-freeze when I finally saw who it was-the latest murder victim. I remembered other times I’d experienced this same awful shock… with Belushi, Lennon, River Phoenix.

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.