Step On A Crack

Chapter 83

AS I CAME through the checkpoint, I felt a hard punch right to my heart. I could see Oakley and a couple more ESU cops running like madmen across Fifth toward the cathedral steps. That could only mean one thing, I thought, angrily racing ahead to catch up.

I checked my watch. What the hell? Jack had said midnight. It was only ten thirty.

I was already at the ambulances in Rock Center when Oakley and the other cops arrived with a suit-clad body. I couldn’t see the face as the medics scrambled desperately over the victim on the stretcher. Who the hell was it? Who had they killed now? Why do it before the deadline?

After a moment, the paramedics stopped. One of them turned away with tears in her eyes. The oxygen mask she was holding fell from her fingers unheeded. She sat down in the gutter, and the flashes from news photographers outside the cordon and in the windows of buildings overlooking the cathedral rudely invaded her grief.

I felt my heart flash-freeze when I finally saw who it was-the latest murder victim. I remembered other times I’d experienced this same awful shock… with Belushi, Lennon, River Phoenix.

John Rooney, the movie-star comic, lay sprawled on the stretcher, eyes and mouth wide open.

What felt like a slow electric current crept along my spine.

Another person slaughtered for no good reason, just for show.

I glanced back at the crowds and press straining to see past the barricades. I almost sat down next to the grieving paramedic at the curb.

How the hell were we expected to go on with this?

I remembered how my kids had worshipped Rooney. Maybe they were watching the live-action DVD he’d been in only last Christmas-Rudolph-right now.

Who would be next? I thought. Eugena? Charlie Conlan? Todd Snow?

Rooney had millions of fans, many of them children. Being such a star, he’d become part of the country and the world’s consciousness, and those bastards had just erased him and all the warm feelings he’d miraculously been able to generate.

I glanced back again at the cathedral, the crowd stretching beyond it, the microwave towers of the news vans.

For the first time, I wanted to pack it in. I ached to just take the phone off my belt and walk away. Find a subway. Go lie in my wife’s room, holding her hand. Maeve could always soothe me somehow.

“My God!” Oakley cried in outrage. “How the hell are we going to deliver this bombshell? First we drop the ball with the mayor. Now we let poor John Rooney get killed?”

Then it dawned on me.

There it was.

That was the whole point.

I suddenly understood why the hijackers were wiping out celebrities, one grueling murder at a time.

They wanted things to go slow, methodically slow. That way, the crowds would gather. That way, the media, along with the rest of the world watching at home, would come together to put the pressure on so that this thing would be resolved. But the pressure wasn’t on them, I realized.

It was on us.

Someone had finally done it. Someone had devised law enforcement’s worst nightmare. As time went by and the bodies piled up, we looked worse and worse. It made any decision to breach the cathedral in a rescue attempt almost impossible. If we screwed up, and boom, the place went up, people wouldn’t blame the hijackers, they’d blame us.

I let the crisis phone ring four times before I answered it.

“Hi. It’s Jack,” he said, and actually sounded gleeful. “Hi-Jack. Get it? Sure, it’s not as funny as Rooney, but I’m thinking his stand-up days are over. Time’s up, Mike. No more excuses. No more delays. If all the money isn’t in my account by nine o’clock tomorrow morning, there’ll be so many dead rich and famous people under the ol’ tree this Christmas, Santa’ll have to leave all the presents in the fireplace.”