Step on a Crack (Michael Bennett 1)

Chapter 96

BLINKING CHRISTMAS LIGHTS strung on the fire escape of a brownstone tenement streaked past the copter’s window as we hurtled toward the car dealership that the lead sedan had just plowed into.

I gawked from above at shattered glass and ripped metal, spinning police lights, running cops.

Another day, I thought, struggling to absorb the insanity I’d just witnessed, another war zone.

I turned to my left, away from the milling chaos at the dealership, just as the four remaining cars hit the emptied intersection of the West Side Highway near the Hudson.

They hadn’t slowed!

I thought that they were going to try to turn at the last second and smash their way through the roadblock. The cops manning the barricade must have thought the same thing because three or four of them dove out of the way.

But we were all wrong.

The world seemed to gray out as I watched helplessly. The adrenaline and sleep deprivation, the caffeine overdose and stress, finally took their toll. I thought I was hallucinating.

The black sedans didn’t swerve left or right. It was like they were on rails as they rocketed dead straight for the fence bordering the Hudson River.

Even from inside the chopper, I heard the front tires of the cars explode like pipe bombs as they struck the high concrete curb before the fence. The sedans seemed to crouch down and coil; then they bounced high and hit the fence.

Chain links parted like wet tissue paper, and suddenly the cars were in the air above the icy river. It sounded like sheet metal landing on concrete when

they hit the water simultaneously, upside down.

I don’t know what I had been expecting before that.

But it wasn’t mass suicide.

“They’re in the water!” I heard on the radio then. “All six cars are in the East River! It’s totally insane. This can’t be happening. But it just did!”

I thought the report was from a cop watching on the ground beneath me—until I realized they were talking about the other cars. The ones that had headed east.

The hijackers had crashed all the remaining cars into two rivers!

The helicopter was already swinging down toward the water as I pointed. We got there just in time to see brake lights disappear under the surface.

“As low as you can go,” I yelled to the pilot as I popped my harness and the latch of the helicopter door. Frigid wind howled into the cabin as I leaned out above choppy, gray water.

“And radio the Harbor Unit,” I said.

Then I was free-falling.

Chapter 97

THE WATER WASN’T SO BAD.

If you were one of those Coney Island polar bear people, maybe.

The temperature, or lack thereof, went through me all at once like an electric shock. Then I bobbed in the ice water. But my feet finally found something like a bumper, and I turned myself down into the all but lightless polluted water, reaching forward with my hands.

I don’t know how I found the door handle in the opaque water, but I did. I pulled hard, and the door swung open and a form brushed by me, then another.

I was out of breath, and heat, by the time a third and fourth shadow bobbed past me toward the surface, so I kicked up off the sunken car’s roof.

My clothes felt like they were made of lead, frozen lead, as I dog-paddled. I counted twelve people floating in the water. They’d taken their masks off, and I recognized most of them as the VIP hostages. How many had gotten into each car? Were they all safe now?

“Is there anybody else stuck in the cars?” I yelled to Kenneth Rubenstein, who was flailing in the water beside me.