Step On A Crack

Chapter 4

IT WAS THREE FORTY-FIVE when the Neat Man stepped off Fifth Avenue, climbed stone stairs, and walked into St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

He snorted at the good folk kneeling in heavy silence and prayer. Sure, he thought, the Big Guy upstairs had to be real impressed with all this piety coming from the nerve center of the modern world’s Gomorrah.

A prim, dough-faced old gal had beaten him to the first seat in the pew beside the nearest confessional along the cathedral’s south wall. What the hell kind of sins did she have to admit? he wondered, sitting down beside her. Forgive me, Father, I bought the cheap chocolate chips for the grandkids’ cookies.

A fortyish priest with salon-trimmed hair showed up a minute later. Father Patrick Mackey did a poor job of hiding his double take when he spotted the Neat Man’s icy smile.

It took a little longer for the baggy-necked old lady to get out of the pew than to make her confession. Then the Neat Man almost knocked her down as he slid in after her through the confessional door.

“Yes, my son,” said the priest behind the screen.

“Northeast corner of Fifty-first and Madison,” the Neat Man said. “Twenty minutes, Fodder. Be there, or else there will be consequences.”

It was more like thirty minutes later when Father Mackey opened the passenger door of the Neat Man’s idling van. He had exchanged his priest duds for a bright blue ski jacket and jeans. He pulled a cardboard tube from beneath the jacket’s puffy folds.

“You got it!” the Neat Man said. “Well done, Fodder. You’re a good assistant.”

The priest nodded as he craned his neck back toward the church. “We should drive,” he said.

Ten minutes later, they parked in an empty lot beside an abandoned heliport. Out through the windshield, the East River looked like a field of trampled mud stretching before them. The Neat Man stifled a joke as he popped the lid off the cylinder the priest had brought. You could practically taste the PCBs in the air, he thought.

The prints inside were old and cracked, yellowed at the edges like parchment. The Neat Man stopped his tracing finger at the center of the second print.

There it was! It wasn’t just a rumor. It was real.

And he had it.

The final detail for his masterpiece.

“And no one knows you have these?” the Neat Man said.

“No one,” the priest said, and chuckled. “Doesn’t the paranoia of the Church boggle the mind? The institution I work for is a puzzle palace.”

The Neat Man clucked his tongue, unable to take his eyes off the architectural drawing. But finally, he lifted a silenced Colt Woodsman out from underneath the seat of the van. The double tap of the.22 was subtle to the ear, but it was as if a grenade had gone off inside Father Mackey’s head. “Go straight to hell,” the Neat Man said.

Then he did a frantic scan of his face in the rearview and threw his head back in horror. Specks of blood freckled his forehead above his right eye. It was only after he’d scoured the hateful spots with Wet-Naps and upended a bottle of rubbing alcohol onto his face that his breathing returned to normal.

Then the Neat Man whistled tunelessly as he rolled up the prints and put them back into their cylinder.

A masterpiece, he thought once again, in the making.