Step on a Crack (Michael Bennett 1)

I stayed silent for the first part of our trip back to Manhattan and let his annoyance build. “Comfy back there?” was about all I asked. “Temperature okay?”

“Did you know,” Jack finally said, “that in the summer of ’ninety-five four guards were taken hostage out on Rikers? Did you know that, Bennett?”

I glanced at him through the mesh behind me.

“Is that right?” I said.

“Only two of us made it out.”

“You and Little John?” I said.

“On the money as usual, Mike,” Jack said. “You ever think about trying out for Jeopardy!? Suffice it to say that nobody gave a crap about a few corrections officers, especially the mayor.”

“So that’s why you killed him? Why you stabbed him? Burned him with cigarettes?”

Jack scratched his chin ponderously. “Between you and me?” he said.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said, smiling back at him.

“You better believe it,” he said. “The animals who’d gotten their hands on us blinded one of my buddies with a butter knife and put out cigarettes on our arms. Wouldn’t you know it, Hizzoner decided he was above negotiating with the inmates on that one. Guess some men are created a little more equal than others. You know, it’s funny. I didn’t see the mayor by my dead buddy’s widow at the funeral either. Guess you have to be a smoke eater or a flatfoot like you to get that kind of special treatment.”

I nodded neutrally. I wanted Jack to keep talking, something he liked to do anyway.

“When my posttraumatic stress disability claim was denied by the city for the third time, I decided, to hell with it, I’m done. I was going to pull off something large, or die trying. The St. Pat’s idea came to me when I moonlighted as security at the state funeral for the previous cardinal. I thought it was going to be so impenetrable, with the legendary Secret Service and all, but I found out what a joke it was. Like the rest of the security assholes, those guys were soft, all show.”

“What about the other jackers? Your coworkers?” I said. “How’d you convince them to go along?”

“Convince them?” Jack said. “I don’t know about you New York’s Finest, but being a guard chews you up. We’re inside the belly of the beast, too, and we didn’t do nothing to get there. Put shit pay on top of that, divorce and suicide rates in the stratosphere, and hassle from the bosses, you got a gourmet recipe for disaster. Ever get feces thrown in your face? Not good for a man’s general well-being.”

“Sounds heartbreaking,” I said. “But executing the First Lady, the mayor, a priest, and John Rooney because you were stressed out? That might be a hard sell to a judge.”

Jack didn’t seem to have heard me. He was staring off at the side of the road. The setting sun through the leafless trees made a bar code of shadow and light on the curving asphalt.

“We did it for each other,” he said quietly. “Go ahead and put us back in jail. Won’t matter. I’ve already been there for the last fifteen years. Guards do life just like prisoners, only we do it in eight-hour shifts.”

“If doing life is what you’re worried about, then I got good news,” I told the cop killer as I clicked off the tape recorder I had running in the pocket of my Windbreaker.

“I’ll do everything in my power to see you get the death penalty, Jack.”

Chapter 114

IT WAS EIGHT O’CLOCK and dark when I pulled to the curb down the block from a small house on Delafield Avenue in the posh Riverdale section of the Bronx, just a few blocks from Manhattan College, where I’d learned to reason, analyze, and be a better person.

Five minutes before, we had finalized our plan at a rally point in the parking lot of a Food Emporium two blocks away. Steve Reno and his guys were already set up in the neighborhood. We had the house surrounded and wired for video and sound.

It was time to pick up the final and most putrid bag of garbage.

The inside man. The one Jack called “the Neat Man.”

According to one of our snipers perched on the backyard wall, our suspect was inside on the ground floor right now, finishing up dinner with his family. Prime rib of beef with the works—brown gravy, mashed potatoes, white asparagus, reported the sniper.

“Car coming from the south,” I said into the radio as a blue Lincoln passed my position. I saw the airport taxi placard in its side window as it slowed before our target’s house.

“Looks like our boy’s ride is here,” I said. “Where is he now in the house?”

“Just went upstairs,” said the sniper.

“What’s he doing up there?” I said.