Step On A Crack

Chapter 69

I HAD ALREADY arrived back in the command center bus and was sitting calmly with the phone in my hand when it rang, and I almost dropped the damn thing. I was still boiling, but I knew how useless that emotion was now. Anger felt good, but it wasn’t working. What I had to do now, I knew, was to repair things, salvage the bloody mess somehow.

And most of all, I had to keep Jack talking instead of shooting.

“Mike here,” I said.

“YOU LYING SON OF A BITCH!” Jack screamed.

“Now, now, Jack,” I said. “There was a mix-up. A communication flub. I wasn’t told about the raid until after it happened.”

I wanted to be as honest as possible in order to reach some middle ground, but under the circumstances, it was impossible. Truth was, I’d just tried to kill Jack and his accomplices and was pissed that we’d failed.

But I had to distance myself from all that. Act like I was just a cog in a large wheel that I couldn’t control.

“And please, Jack,” I said. “You were the one who was asking for straight talk a little while ago. What did you expect? Blowing away a priest, tossing him out on the steps like a Hefty garbage sack, wasn’t going to have any consequences?”

“That was an accident! I told you!” Jack said. “One of you pricks killed my friend. He died in my arms.”

“And one of you guys killed two cops,” I said. “This is a dead-end game we’re playing, Jack. I thought you wanted money. Killing people isn’t going to get it for you. It’s only going to get my trigger-happy, now completely pissed-off fellow cops to come in there shooting. I mean, let’s face facts. If you force us to raid the church, in the end, you’re not going to make it. You made a mistake with the priest. I can see that now. And we made a mistake, too. Let’s put what’s happened behind us and get this thing back on track.”

I waited. Though I’d made it up on the spot, it was a decent argument. Anyway, we needed more time to regroup, think up a new strategy. The secret tunnel had seemed like our one good shot, but maybe there was another way. What we needed now was for the clock to kick back into slow.

“Only part of the track I’m putting this on from here is the third rail, you lying sack of shit,” Jack just about spat in my ear. “You screwed up, Mike, and now I’m going to punish you for it. Come to the front door and pick up the trash.”