James Patterson - Step On A Crack

I picked up the other dropped baton. Got myself ready for this.

“Kill, kill, kill, kill!” the inmates screamed in unison.

I have to admit, the suggestion was tempting. I swung the baton hard.

But I didn’t hit Jack.

I hit the tattooed hand that was very close to throttling the life out of him. The inmate yowled and he let go of Jack, who slumped unconscious to the floor.

“Hey, like, you’re welcome, bro,” said the muscular convict behind the bars in a hurt voice. He was nursing his injured hand.

“Sorry, Charlie,” I said as I started dragging Jack around the barrage of projectiles toward the sealed gym door. “I can’t arrest him if he’s dead.”

But I can give him one good kick in the teeth. For old times’ sake, Jacko. Because we’re such buddies.

And that’s what I did-one kick-and the inmates went wild.

OF COURSE IT couldn’t be quite that easy.

They found the two actual shift foremen, Rhodes and Williams, handcuffed in one of the cells on A-Block.

It turned out that “Jack” and “Little John,” whose real names were Rocco Milton and Kenny Robard, being close to the warden as shift supervisors, had heard we were coming. They’d convinced the warden that they’d had nothing to do with the siege of St. Pat’s, even though they’d taken part in the sick-out. Then they’d ambushed the two innocent foremen-who’d been in on the sick-out but not the hijacking-and hidden them inside the cell block to shift suspicion and to get us to go into the population so they could make a play. Milton and Robard had many contacts in the inmate population, the warden told us, so who knew what their next move would have been. A riot, more hostages, a mass prison break.

I Mirandaed Rocco “Jack” Milton in the parking lot of Sing Sing. For both business and pleasure, I made sure to do it right in front of Steve Reno and his men before opening the rear door of my cruiser and shoving him in.

Reno left in a paddy wagon filled with the rest of the suspected hijackers. Kenny “Little John” Robard was on the way to the hospital with a fractured skull. I couldn’t help hoping the EMTs took the long way.

I stood outside for a moment, figuring out how to play things. Then I retrieved something in the trunk of my cruiser before I climbed behind the wheel to drive Jack to New York City.

Funny as it sounds, a lot of suspects are dying to tell you what they’ve done. And the more full of themselves, the more they want to give you the dirty details. I had a feeling Jack was pretty fond of himself.

I stayed silent for the first part of our trip back to Manhattan and let his annoyance build. “Comfy back there?” was about all I asked. “Temperature okay?”

“Did you know,” Jack finally said, “that in the summer of ’ninety-five four guards were taken hostage out on Rikers? Did you know that, Bennett?”

I glanced at him through the mesh behind me.

“Is that right?” I said.

“Only two of us made it out.”

“You and Little John?” I said.

“On the money as usual, Mike,” Jack said. “You ever think about trying out for Jeopardy !? Suffice it to say that nobody gave a crap about a few corrections officers, especially the mayor.”

“So that’s why you killed him? Why you stabbed him? Burned him with cigarettes?”

Jack scratched his chin ponderously. “Between you and me?” he said.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said, smiling back at him.

“You better believe it,” he said. “The animals who’d gotten their hands on us blinded one of my buddies with a butter knife and put out cigarettes on our arms. Wouldn’t you know it, Hizzoner decided he was above negotiating with the inmates on that one. Guess some men are created a little more equal than others. You know, it’s funny. I didn’t see the mayor by my dead buddy’s widow at the funeral either. Guess you have to be a smoke eater or a flatfoot like you to get that kind of special treatment.”

I nodded neutrally. I wanted Jack to keep talking, something he liked to do anyway.

“When my posttraumatic stress disability claim was denied by the city for the third time, I decided, to hell with it, I’m done. I was going to pull off something large, or die trying. The St. Pat’s idea came to me when I moonlighted as security at the state funeral for the previous cardinal. I thought it was going to be so impenetrable, with the legendary Secret Service and all, but I found out what a joke it was. Like the rest of the security assholes, those guys were soft, all show.”

“What about the other jackers? Your coworkers?” I said. “How’d you convince them to go along?”

“Convince them?” Jack said. “I don’t know about you New York’s Finest, but being a guard chews you up. We’re inside the belly of the beast, too, and we didn’t do nothing to get there. Put shit pay on top of that, divorce and suicide rates in the stratosphere, and hassle from the bosses, you got a gourmet recipe for disaster. Ever get feces thrown in your face? Not good for a man’s general well-being.”

“Sounds heartbreaking,” I said. “But executing the First Lady, the mayor, a priest, and John Rooney because you were stressed out? That might be a hard sell to a judge.”

Jack didn’t seem to have heard me. He was staring off at the side of the road. The setting sun through the leafless trees made a bar code of shadow and light on the curving asphalt.

“We did it for each other,” he said quietly. “Go ahead and put us back in jail. Won’t matter. I’ve already been there for the last fifteen years. Guards do life just like prisoners, only we do it in eight-hour shifts.”

“If doing life is what you’re worried about, then I got good news,” I told the cop killer as I clicked off the tape recorder I had running in the pocket of my Windbreaker.

“I’ll do everything in my power to see you get the death penalty, Jack.”

IT WAS EIGHT O’CLOCK and dark when I pulled to the curb down the block from a small house on Delafield Avenue in the posh Riverdale section of the Bronx, just a few blocks from Manhattan College, where I’d learned to reason, analyze, and be a better person.

Five minutes before, we had finalized our plan at a rally point in the parking lot of a Food Emporium two blocks away. Steve Reno and his guys were already set up in the neighborhood. We had the house surrounded and wired for video and sound.

It was time to pick up the final and most putrid bag of garbage.

The inside man. The one Jack called “the Neat Man.”

According to one of our snipers perched on the backyard wall, our suspect was inside on the ground floor right now, finishing up dinner with his family. Prime rib of beef with the works-brown gravy, mashed potatoes, white asparagus, reported the sniper.

“Car coming from the south,” I said into the radio as a blue Lincoln passed my position. I saw the airport taxi placard in its side window as it slowed before our target’s house.

“Looks like our boy’s ride is here,” I said. “Where is he now in the house?”

“Just went upstairs,” said the sniper.

“What’s he doing up there?” I said.

“Washing his hands,” the sniper said after a pause. “Okay. He’s finished. Coming downstairs.”

“Heads up, Steve,” I said into my Motorola. “On me. I’m going in.” I climbed out of my car. This was going to be good. I hoped .

“Get another fare,” I told the taxi hack with a flash of my badge as I stopped in front of the neat, narrow brick steps to the house. “His flight just got canceled.”

I rang the doorbell and crouched to the side behind a meticulously clipped hedge. There was a small glazed window beside the door, and down the hall I could see a woman and three kids cleaning up the dining room table with practiced efficiency.