James Patterson - Step On A Crack

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 manning the barricade must have thought the same thing because three or four of them dove out of the way.

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.

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 Kenneth Rubenstein, who was flailing in the water beside me.

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.

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 beginning of the ordeal galled the hell out of me as I gazed out at the helicopters searching the fuzzy gray surface of the frigid water.

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

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 scanned the choppy gray Hudson behind him for the NYPD Harbor Unit, but there was nothing. And just as important, no one along the shoreline beside the sports complex.

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.