Step on a Crack (Michael Bennett 1)

I screamed and pushed off the floor with all my might.

I thought about my kids. I couldn’t leave them now. I couldn’t allow them to have no one. I wouldn’t let it happen. I was almost on my knees when Little John rolled off me and started booting me in the ribs.

I dropped back down, my breath gone; then his steel toe kissed my solar plexus. I wondered idly if Jack, pulling back the baton above me, might be the last sight I’d ever see on the earth.

That’s when something completely unexpected happened—an arm snaked through the bars behind Jack.

It was so huge, it barely squeezed through, and so covered in tattoos, it looked like its owner wore a paisley sleeve. A massive hand wrapped itself around the back of Jack’s uniform shirt collar. It sounded like a gong when Jack’s head was slammed back into the bars again and again.

“How you like it, CO?” the convict inquired as he slammed and reslammed Jack’s skull into the bars of his cell. “How you like it, you vicious prick? How you like that one?”

When Little John got off me to help out Jack, I managed, wheezing, to gain my feet. The riot baton Jack had dropped was on the concrete. I stooped, lifted it, brought it to my shoulder.

It had been a while since I’d had a nightstick in my hand, walking my first beat in the Hunt’s Point section of the South Bronx. On those cold, long nights I’d kept myself awake practicing with it, swinging it over and over until it whistled in cold air.

The nightstick whistled now, and I guess it was like riding a bike, because Little John’s left knee shattered like balsa wood with my first two-handed swing.

I had to backpedal immediately as the big man howled and hopped around surprisingly fast on one foot and came toward me. There was rage in his wide, bulging eyes, spit spraying out of his twisted, screaming mouth.

I swung from my toes at his jaw. He ducked, but too little, too late. I broke the baton across his temple. He hit the concrete a half second before the splintered wood.

The inmates were cheering something wicked as I stumbled around the big guard’s bleeding, unconscious hulk. Their rage-filled voices met in a violent mantra as I stepped toward the inmate who was choking Jack with both monstrous hands. Jack’s face was turning blue.

I picked up the other dropped baton. Got myself ready for this.

“Kill, kill, kill, kill!” the inmates screamed in unison.

I have to admit, the suggestion was tempting. I swung the baton hard.

But I didn’t hit Jack.

I hit the tattooed hand that was very close to throttling the life out of him. The inmate yowled and he let go of Jack, who slumped unconscious to the floor.

“Hey, like, you’re welcome, bro,” said the muscular convict behind the bars in a hurt voice. He was nursing his injured hand.

“Sorry, Charlie,” I said as I started dragging Jack around the barrage of projectiles toward the sealed gym door. “I can’t arrest him if he’s dead.”

But I can give him one good kick in the teeth. For old times’ sake, Jacko. Because we’re such buddies.

And that’s what I did—one kick—and the inmates went wild.

Chapter 113

OF COURSE IT couldn’t be quite that easy.

They found the two actual shift foremen, Rhodes and Williams, handcuffed in one of the cells on A-Block.

It turned out that “Jack” and “Little John,” whose real names were Rocco Milton and Kenny Robard, being close to the warden as shift supervisors, had heard we were coming. They’d convinced the warden that they’d had nothing to do with

the siege of St. Pat’s, even though they’d taken part in the sick-out. Then they’d ambushed the two innocent foremen—who’d been in on the sick-out but not the hijacking—and hidden them inside the cell block to shift suspicion and to get us to go into the population so they could make a play. Milton and Robard had many contacts in the inmate population, the warden told us, so who knew what their next move would have been. A riot, more hostages, a mass prison break.

I Mirandaed Rocco “Jack” Milton in the parking lot of Sing Sing. For both business and pleasure, I made sure to do it right in front of Steve Reno and his men before opening the rear door of my cruiser and shoving him in.

Reno left in a paddy wagon filled with the rest of the suspected hijackers. Kenny “Little John” Robard was on the way to the hospital with a fractured skull. I couldn’t help hoping the EMTs took the long way.

I stood outside for a moment, figuring out how to play things. Then I retrieved something in the trunk of my cruiser before I climbed behind the wheel to drive Jack to New York City.

Funny as it sounds, a lot of suspects are dying to tell you what they’ve done. And the more full of themselves, the more they want to give you the dirty details. I had a feeling Jack was pretty fond of himself.