Step on a Crack (Michael Bennett 1)

IT WAS PRECISELY eight twenty-nine when the Neat Man placed his coffee on the frosted ledge of the pay phone kiosk on the corner of 51st and Madison.

Though he’d gotten the cup from one of those Porta-Potty-like corner carts, he was heartened by its blistering temperature as he took a scalding sip.

Between the ash-colored buildings down 51st, the gray morning sky looked like a giant shard of dirty glass. The dull light did very little to illuminate the dark arched windows of St. Pat’s, kitty-corner across the barricaded street.

The Neat Man smiled for a moment, savoring the misery, the too hot, too horrible coffee, the biting cold on his face, the ear-drilling clatter of the police generators. As if on cue, a bum stirred from a rag-and-bag pile beneath a sidewalk shed halfway down the block and yawned before loudly air-blowing his nose, one nostril at a time, into the gutter.

Ah! Morning, New York–style, the Neat Man thought as he picked up the pay phone.

Learning all this raw, in-your-face grittiness was going to be a jolt, he thought. But maybe if he reached way down deep into his soon-to-be seven-figure bank account, he might have a shot of finding a way.

“What’s up?” a voice said.

“Same old, same old, Jack, my man,” the Neat Man said cheerily. “You see the new trailer out front? Hostage Rescue is in the house.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Jack said, pumped. “Everyone’s sticking right to the script.”

“How are the guests? Everyone have a pleasant night?”

“The rich really aren’t like you and me,” Jack said. “They’re a trillion times softer. The truth, a kindergarten class would be more trouble.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” the Neat Man said.

“That you did,” Jack said. “That you did. Keep your eyes open out there. Stick to the plan.”

The line went dead. The Neat Man hung up the phone and smiled as a couple of uniformed cops walked by. Despair, gray as the dawn, was in their bag-eyed faces.

When he closed his own eyes a vision of a huge, sun-washed bathroom appeared before him, acres of gleaming marble, steam rising off a bubbling Jacuzzi, a blinding white pyramid of meticulously folded towels beneath a window filled with a blue-green sea.

He lifted his lava-temperature coffee again as he turned toward the church. There were pigeons in the nickeled light, fluttering about the sharp spires. His stomach churned as he remembered the pigeons his father used to fly off the roof of their Brooklyn tenement.

If he never laid eyes on another flying rat, the Neat Man thought, or his low-class excuse for a father, for that matter, he would die a very happy man.

The Neat Man blinked away his rare lapse into memory and moved the coffee cup up and down and side to side over the church like a priest conferring a benediction.

“For the gifts which I am about to receive,” the Neat Man said, “may the Lord make me truly thankful.”

Chapter 57

FUNNYMAN JOHN ROONEY didn’t know what time it was when he decided to stop tryi

ng 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.”