Step On A Crack

Chapter 95

HOG-TIED IN THE FRONT passenger seat of the lead car heading west, rocker Charlie Conlan felt the cut on his chin reopen as the speeding vehicle bounded off a world-class pothole.

Conlan knew that the car was going way too fast. This was it, he thought. How it would happen. The End of a Legend.

As the sedan’s engine roared, Conlan was struck with anger at the animal sitting beside him. Then at himself. He was still breathing, which meant he could still fight, still resist. But his arms and legs were taped together. So what could he do?

He glanced at the hijacker behind the wheel to his left. His mask was still on, but the hood was down.

Conlan nodded to himself as he figured it out. Maybe I’ll die, but it won’t be on my knees to these bastards.

The car had just lifted off from a steep crest along Tenth Avenue when Conlan leaned over and bit down into the driver’s ear. The horrified scream the hijacker made almost drowned out the engine.

What this worthless vermin had put them through, Conlan thought, tasting blood. He’d killed his friend Rooney, then dragged him outside like a bag of garbage. Conlan wished he could inflict a world of pain on his sorry ass. But then the front tires shredded as the car touched down off-kilter, turned sideways-and began to flip.

Seconds later, the plate-glass window of the BMW showroom on the northeast corner of Eleventh seemed to evaporate as the sedan’s spinning ton of steel crashed through it.

A horrible crunching sound blasted out Conlan’s eardrums, and the world went black.

Then gray.

Then fluorescent white.

Conlan came out of the fog of shock and found himself blinking up into a bright ice cube-tray light fixture. He was in an operating room, right? Or maybe he was having an acid flashback. The pile of glass in his lap made a tinkling sound as he turned around to see what was up.

Damn, he was inside a car showroom. They had somehow landed right-side up. He gaped at the twisted metal inches away from his throat. The sedan was now a convertible, since the roof had been ripped away.

When he looked out the hole in the shattered windshield, his first thought was that the hijacker driver, who was hunched over one of the showroom motorcycles, was trying to escape.

Then he noticed that one of the handlebars was sticking out the middle of the hijacker’s back. “One down,” said Charlie Conlan. “That’s for John Rooney.”

He turned toward the backseat next. The rest of the passengers looked to be all right. Todd Snow undid his seat belt, crawled across broken glass, and ripped at the tape on Conlan’s wrists. They stared as the third passenger in the backseat took off a ski mask.

“Great job, fellas,” Mercedes Freer said with a big, bleached-out smile. “You saved us!” She grinned-just before Todd Snow punched out the two-faced diva’s front teeth.