Step on a Crack (Michael Bennett 1)
/> They stopped!
Were they going somewhere for breakfast? Maybe Jack planned to rob the famous jewelry store as a parting gesture. Anything was possible at this point. The helicopter’s rotors thumped in time with my pulse as I waited and watched.
After a pause of a full minute, the lead car finally inched out from the curb and made a left—heading west on 57th Street. As the next four cars began to follow, I thought maybe the whole strange procession was going to take a slow rolling tour of the West Side. But the sixth car surprised me by turning east on 57th. The remaining cars behind it followed east as well.
I reported the bizarre new twist over the radio.
East Side, West Side, all around the town, I thought, watching the black sedans split away from one another.
Was one group the celebrities and the other the hijackers? There was no way to know from up here.
“Is there any way for you to distinguish who’s who?” Will Matthews asked in an anguished voice.
I stared at the two lines of cars, struggling to figure it out. The combination of diesel fuel, vertigo, and the constant pounding of the helicopter wasn’t exactly helping things in the focusing department. I gave up for the moment.
If there was any clue at all, I couldn’t see it right now.
“There’s no difference I can make out,” I finally called into the radio.
“Which way?” the pilot asked, annoyed, as we just sat there over the intersection at 57th.
“West,” I decided. “Hang a left.”
At least if I was wrong, and I got fired, I thought as Bergdorf’s swung under my right shoulder, it would be a shorter subway ride back to my apartment.
Chapter 93
STRAIGHTENING THE WHEEL of the lead sedan heading east on 57th Street, Eugena Humphrey sucked in a deep breath. The heat of the cramped car was making her sweat, and the gamy stench of the ski mask the hijackers had made her wear was another distraction. Just what she didn’t need right now.
She glanced at two uniformed cops, just standing there on the sidewalk, gaping at the passing sedans from in front of an art gallery on the north side of the street.
Nobody was doing anything! How could they?
Frightened as she was, sick and tired, she knew she couldn’t break down now. She couldn’t crack. And she wouldn’t.
When was the last time she’d actually driven herself around? she thought. Ten years ago? She remembered a red Mustang she’d bought herself after her transfer out of the Wheeling, West Virginia, affiliate to LA. What a wild ride she’d been on since then.
And this was how it would end? Unwashed on Christmas Day at the mercy of some degenerate criminals. After all she’d done. All the hard work and astute decisions, pulling herself up out of nothing. She not only had risen above what the world tried to enforce as the limits of her race and class, but had tapped in to the higher limits of human potential. Become a force for good in the world, a strong force.
But at least she’d lived a full life, hadn’t she? Done just about everything there was to do.
Eugena gasped as the gunman in the front seat jabbed her violently with the pipe of a sawed-off shotgun.
“Speed it up,” he yelled at her.
At that moment, Eugena felt her despair pop and her adrenaline surge.
Speed it up? No problemo. I can certainly do that.
She hit the gas, and the V-8 engine seemed to cry as buildings and windows began to blur past. The sedan briefly left asphalt as it hit the hump of Park Avenue.
“That’s it, momma. Punch it!” the hijacker howled as they landed, showering sparks.
As they hurtled toward Lexington, Eugena’s eye caught the gleam of one of those steel telephone company nitrogen tanks on the corner. She fantasized hitting it head-on.
Outside the windshield, it was as if New York City—the world itself—was coming at her now at warp speed. An unstoppable force at an immovable object.
Chapter 94