Step On A Crack

Chapter 97

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.