Step On A Crack

Chapter 57

FUNNYMAN JOHN ROONEY didn’t know what time it was when he decided to stop trying to fake sleep, but by the wan light glowing behind the stained glass above, he guessed it was somewhere near nine.

With the thin pews proving almost impossible to get comfortable in, the hijackers had allowed them to take the seat and kneeler cushions and sleep on the floor in front of the chapel’s altar. The cushions were small, though, and the body-heat-sucking marble floor made a city sidewalk seem like a Tempur-Pedic mattress in comparison.

May I have a side of exhaustion with my terror, please? Rooney thought, rubbing his fists into his eyes as he sat up against the altar rail. Yeah, supersize it. Thanks, abduction-dudes.

At the back of the chapel, three masked hijackers sat in folding chairs, drinking coffee from paper cups. He couldn’t see Little John or the lead gunman, Jack, anywhere. With the masks and robes, it was hard to tell how many hijackers there actually were. Eight, a dozen. Maybe more. They seemed to work in shifts, everything very organized.

Rooney watched with rising anger as one of them leaned to his side and lit a cigarette off a votive candle.

A hand fell on his shoulder as Charlie Conlan sat up next to him.

“Mornin’, kid,” Conlan said quietly without looking at him. “That was brave of you to fight back like that last night.”

“You mean stupid,” Rooney said, fingering the scab on his face.

“No,” Conlan said. “Ballsy. Thing now is to do it again, only at the right time.”

“You still want to fight them?” Rooney said.

Conlan nodded calmly, and Rooney did a double take at the star’s patented steely-eyed squint. In real life Charlie Conlan seemed to be an even bigger badass than the rock-and-roller persona that had made him famous around the world.

“Yo,” whispered a voice behind them. Source magazine-dubbed “Bubblegum Ho” Mercedes Freer, who’d been released from the confessional the night before, sat up from where she’d been sleeping.

“You bad boys gonna try something?” she said.

Rooney debated letting her in on it, then finally nodded. “Just being prepared.”

“Amen to that shit,” the singer said. “Check it. One of those g’s is into me. He was talking to me through the confessional door last night. Skinny one with the shotgun, sitting in the middle up there. Yo, we could use that. I could play like I want to do him or something.”

Just then, Little John arrived from the back of the chapel with a cooler and a cardboard tray of coffees.

“Rise and shine, campers,” he yelled as he came up the aisle. “Asses in the seats. It’s chow time.”

A sudden booming, sustained sound started from Reverend Solstice three rows behind Rooney. At first, he thought the black minister was having a heart attack. But the sound turned into a note and soared, and Rooney realized that the man was singing.

“ ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhmayzing grace, how sweeeeet the sound.’ ”

Reverend Sparks, sitting next to Solstice, started singing a kind of backup.

Rooney rolled his eyes. How absurd was this?

But after a while, even he could see that the impassioned voices of the two men seemed to infuse a soothing warmth into the cold church. Other people began to join in, and when Rooney saw Little John shake his head in disapproval, he began singing along, too.

It got even more shocking when Mercedes Freer stood afterward and started singing “Silent Night.” Rooney’s mouth gaped at the pure classical beauty in the girl’s voice. The foul-mouthed tart could have been a soloist in an opera.

“ ‘Sleep in heavenly pe-eace,’ ” she sang. “ ‘Slee-eep in heavenly…’ ”

The explosive, crisp snap of a gunshot replaced Mercedes’s last note. There was a rumbling as everyone turned back in the pews toward the larger church-where the shot had come from.

The chilling reverberation of the shot pressed some reset button in the core of Rooney’s mind. He felt his resolve go out like a hard-blown candle.

God help us, he thought, feeling for the first time the true weight of that three-word plea.

The killing has started.