Step On A Crack

Chapter 90

I DON’T KNOW how gung ho I would have been to climb into a helicopter that was on the ground, never mind fifty-one stories up. If I wasn’t so pressed for time, I would have crawled to the open doors to avoid the low, heavy chop of rotors.

The pilot must have noticed the green tinge of my face, or had a healthy sadistic streak. The second I was strapped in, the aircraft dropped off the side of the building, express elevator down, leaving my stomach back on the fifty-first floor.

After we slowed and stopped to hover four hundred feet over the intersection of 50th and Fifth, and I was done congratulating myself on not throwing up, I took in the whole of the cathedral for the first time.

It really was a beautiful structure, its spires and ornamentation as delicate and intricate as a wedding cake’s, which was mind-boggling, considering the whole thing was made out of stone. Instead of being dwarfed by the Midtown glass office monoliths it was surrounded by, it seemed to shame them and somehow make it seem like the skyscrapers were out of place.

As I looked down, eleven black Chevy sedans rolled slowly in from the north. They stopped in front of the cathedral, and the uniformed cops driving them jumped out, leaving the doors open.

Squad cars were parked at every intersection to the southern horizon up Fifth, their cherry tops flashing as they blocked the side streets on both sides.

What a scene.

“Doors!” someone called over the police-band crackle.

Down below, the tall front doors of the church began slowly opening.

A figure in a head-to-toe brown hooded robe and ski mask stepped out and stopped beside the stair railing.

I stared at the lone figure, waiting for just about anything to happen next.

Despite the fact that I was one of an army of cops, I was strangely anxious. One thing these sick puppies had taught us was that they were capable of anything, at any time.

There was a frenzied spattering of police radio chatter from my headset as another subject, dressed in the same brown robe and ski mask, stepped out a moment later. Was it the hijackers? What the hell was going on?

I twisted toward a flash of movement by the church doors.

A second later, my jaw dropped harder than the helicopter had off the roof.

Spilling out of the cathedral, walking in two straight lines down toward the waiting sedans, was a group of twenty-odd people.

All dressed in brown robes.

All wearing ski masks.

There was no way to tell the hostages from the bad guys.