Step On A Crack

Part Two. SINNERS
Chapter 18

A LOW WHISTLE escaped through my teeth as I pulled my department-issued blue Impala up to the barricade thrown across Fifth Avenue at 52nd Street. I hadn’t seen so many cops out in front of the landmark church since the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

Only instead of goofy tam-o’-shanters, shamrocks, and smiles, they were wearing black steel ballistic helmets, automatic weapons, and deadly serious frowns.

I showed my shield to a sergeant by one of the blue-and-white sawhorses. She directed me to the mobile command center, a long white bus parked across the street from the cathedral. The sergeant told me to park in front of the Sanitation Department dump trucks that blocked up Fifth next to the 51st Street barricade.

Two barricades, I thought. Mobile command centers. This was no single homicide for sure. This was a disaster in the making.

As I got out of my car, a jackhammer throbbing sounded, and I looked up as a police helicopter swung out from behind Rockefeller Center and hovered low over the cathedral. Dust and coffee cups and newspaper pages spiraled up in the rotor wash as a sniper in the helicopter’s open door scanned the stained glass and stone spires over the barrel of a rifle.

I took my eyes off the helicopter when I almost walked into a famous, controversial radio host who, for some reason, was holding court on the street in front of the inner barricade. “What in the hell did those friggin’ priests do this time?” I heard him say as I passed.

As I entered the staging area between the grilles of the parked dump trucks, I stopped and stared in disbelief. A half dozen Emergency Service Unit cops were crossing the avenue with their heads down. They stopped and pressed their bulletproof backs against the side of the long black hearse parked at the curb.

How could this be happening at Caroline Hopkins’s funeral?