Step on a Crack (21 page)

AT AN ABANDONED DOCK just north of the new Hell’s Kitchen Sports Pier, twenty blocks south of where half of the cars had driven into the water, a black shape bobbed up from among the rotting piles.

With his eyes just above the surface of the water, Jack carefully scanned the choppy gray Hudson behind him for the NYPD Harbor Unit, but there was nothing. And just as important, no one along the shoreline beside the sports complex.

From inside his lightweight Scubapro wet suit, he took out a Ziploc bag. He removed the cell phone inside it and hit redial as he took out his air tank mouthpiece.

“Where?” he said.

“They’re still concentrating on the crash sites, still looking to save hostages,” the Neat Man said. “They haven’t started looking for you yet. Window’s open, m’boy, but closing. Move now!”

Jack didn’t have to be told twice. He slipped the cell phone back into its bag and himself back under the briny water and tugged on the tow rope.

Five minutes later, Jack and the other four hijackers with him were up on a concrete ledge beneath a walkway on the south side of the sports complex, peeling off the wet suits they’d worn under their brown robes, dumping the air tanks they’d hidden under the water at the crash site. The tanks were small, only thirty cubic feet of air, but enough for the ten to fifteen minutes they had to be under water.

The most hazardous part, he thought, had been the actual crash itself into the river. But the rest-their extraction from the cars and finding the tanks-had gone off like clockwork. Not only was it probably the greatest hijacking of all time, now they were about to pull off the greatest escape!

And not just him, he thought.

His sweet knuckleheads had managed not to screw it all up, and he was proud of them. But this was no time to celebrate. They had to go to Queens to pick up the rest of the gang who’d dumped into the East River. Hopefully, they had fared as well.

Jack glanced up at the busy West Side Highway. He smiled as he noticed his pulse racing. He’d seen his share of action, but none of it compared with the razor’s-edge euphoria he was feeling now. Nothing even came close. If they hadn’t lost Fontaine and Jose, this job would have been perfect.

He turned and looked back as the last member of his crew shed his wet suit, revealing a track outfit beneath. “
Just do it,” right
? Now they looked just like everybody else coming off of the sports pier. Yuppie office mates who’d decided to spend Christmas playing and partying instead of with their corny-ass families.

“Okay, ladies,” Jack said to his men with a wink. “Let’s move ’ em out. We ’re almost home. We won the Super Bowl.”

They had to keep themselves from sprinting as they climbed the short fence and came out alongside the main building, waiting at a light to cross.

Jack swallowed hard, his blood going as cold as the water they’d just climbed out of as a police car, with its siren screaming, approached from the south. He started breathing again when it blew right past them, speeding uptown. No doubt heading back to 57th, where they’d started their little
Dukes of Hazzard
stunt.

It was thirty-five minutes later when they were in a van picking up the rest of the hijackers by the dock of an abandoned bottling plant in Long Island City. Little John grinned triumphantly as he and the other five men threw themselves in through the sliding door to back slaps and high fives.

“What the hell took you so long?” the big man said, accepting an ice-cold Heineken that Jack handed him from a cooler. “Where’s Jose?”

“He lost it as we were coming across Eleventh Avenue,” Jack said, punching a hand into his fist. “Jose’s gone.”

Little John looked down at the van floor, ruminating. “What about his prints?” he said after a moment.

Jack smiled.

“Remember we told him about the need to not leave any evidence?” he said. “Well, the crazy mother said he wasn’t taking any chances. So he spent the last month and a half burning off his fingertips with a Zippo.”

“To Jose!” Little John said, lifting his beer bottle, happy again. “That
gato
had some balls.”

“And Fontaine,” Jack said, remembering his friend who’d been downed in the firefight in the crypt. He glanced at the man’s hands in the Ziploc, sitting on ice beside the beers. Kind of looked like chicken wings.

“What do we do now?” Little John said.

“I don’t know about you, but after three days wearing the same drawers and that little dip in one of the most polluted rivers on Earth,” Jack said, “I could go for a hot shower.”

“And some hot you-know-what, too,” one of his compadres called to howls as the van slipped onto the BQE.

“I meant after that,” Little John said.

“We stick with the plan. Two, three months of waiting to make things look good, and then it’s a one-way first-class trip to Costa Rica.”

So they’d really done it, Jack thought, grinning at the sound of the
Arriba! Arriba! Ándale
! calls in the van. It was hard to believe. They’d held the world off. The next part was a joke. Incredibly easy. They just had to sit back and wait, and not spend their millions.

I HAD TO BORROW some clothes, so I was decked out in a spiffy green sanitation worker’s uniform when I arrived back at the car dealership on Eleventh.

It looked as if two medical examiners in white Tyvek suits were playing a game of tug-of-war as they attempted to remove a brown-robed hijacker from the handlebars of a motorcycle. Only after an ESU cop arrived with some bolt cutters did they finally manage to pull the motorcycle out of the dead man’s chest.

Over by a pulverized soda machine, one of my favorite rock singers of all time, Charlie Conlan, and Giants quarterback Todd Snow were being interviewed by detectives from the Major Crimes Unit. They didn’t look like they were much in the mood for autographs. From the look of the shredded car, I was surprised the only injury I saw was a black eye and fat lip on the pissed-off-looking pop star, Mercedes, who stormed by with an EMS medic, and not a word of thanks to anybody.

I knelt beside what was left of the hijacker as the assistant MEs laid him onto the showroom carpet. I borrowed a pair of rubber gloves and slowly pulled off his mask. The back of my fist flew against my forehead when I uncovered a second black rubber mask beneath it.

A skin-diving mask.

That’s how they did it! How they had gotten away. They’d used scuba-diving equipment to escape under the water.

I borrowed a phone and told Will Matthews about my discovery. After some choice expletives, he called in more harbor units from Jersey and the Coast Guard.

After I hung up, I pulled off the hijacker’s rubber mask. The deceased was a Hispanic man in his late thirties, early forties. Nothing in his pockets. A nine-millimeter Beretta pistol in an underarm holster, but the serial number had been filed away. I groaned when I looked at his hands and saw his fingerprints were gone, too. I’d seen similar prints on the hands of crackheads, ridges melted down to a nub from holding too many hot pipes.

No! I thought, these bastards weren’t going to disappear without leaving me at least one lead. I found Lonnie Jacob, a crime scene investigator I’d worked with several times. I showed him the jacker’s hands.

“Think you can get anything?” I said.

“Maybe a partial,” Lonnie said skeptically. “I’ll have to work on him back at the morgue. I really doubt we’ll get anything, though. This dude
did not
want to be identified.”

“What’s up, Mike?” Commander Will Matthews said moments later as he came across the broken glass toward me. “You transferring to Sanitation on me?”

“Thought I’d put out some feelers after this home run,” I said.

“We did all we could, Mike,” Will Matthews said, staring at the carnage all around us. “That’s the truth, and it’s the story I’m sticking to. I advise you to repeat after me during the impending shit storm.”

“Will do,” I said. “
We did all we could
. Happens to be the truth.”

“Now get out of here and see your family. My driver’s outside waiting for you,” Will Matthews said. “That’s an order.”

A cold wind was whipping down 57th when I stepped outside. I had hardly noticed it before, but this Christmas had turned out to be one of those stainless-steel-colored December days when you have the feeling winter will never end. As I got into the back of the cruiser and my thoughts shifted toward my wife, I decided I didn’t want it to.

If Maeve wasn’t going to see another spring, why the hell should anybody else?

SOME SAY NOTHING compares to Christmas in New York, but I’d never seen the city look grimmer. After I got home and changed, I drove my brood to the hospital. I couldn’t see the wreaths and lights anymore, only the endless gray corridors of blank windows, the grimy concrete, the steam rising from the broken streets. Some Irish writer once referred to Manhattan as a “cathedral,” but as I stopped our van in front of the hospital, it looked more like a sad construction site to me, cluttered and cold and pitiless.

I had to hold myself up against the van’s door frame in order not to fall over from exhaustion as Mary Catherine fed my kids out in their good clothes, clutching their brightly wrapped presents.

Even the stern nurses, stuck there on Christmas, seemed teary-eyed as our cosmically sad procession passed through the lobby to good ol’ Five.

“Wait a second,” I said, patting my pockets as we approached Maeve’s corridor. “
The pageant tape
. I forgot to…”

“It’s right here, Mike,” Mary Catherine said, handing me the small plastic case.

I was about to thank her yet again for being such a lifesaver. Au pair, I thought. Was that Gaelic for fairy godmother? She would have had a cheerier Christmas in Afghanistan than here with my crew, but she’d jumped right in up to her neck.

“Give my love to Maeve,” the amazing young woman said quietly. “I’ll be in the lounge if you need me. Go.”

I could see Seamus kneeling beside Maeve in her wheelchair when we turned into her corridor.

A lump formed in my throat when I saw the open Bible in his hand. I stopped when I watched him make the sign of the cross on her forehead.
Last rites
? I thought.

How was I going to get through this? Today of all days?

Somehow Maeve was smiling when I knocked on the door frame. She was all dressed up as usual, this time a red Santa hat replacing her Yankees one.

Seamus closed his Bible and hugged me hard. “God give you the strength, Michael,” he said in my ear. “Your girl is a saint. You are too.” Seamus paused. “I’ll be back; I need to get some air.”

I guess my heart wasn’t already broken because I felt something snap like a guitar string in my chest when Maeve scooped Chrissy and Shawna into her withered lap.

I glanced up at the ceiling. My family’s story could become a new holiday classic, couldn’t it? I thought ruefully.
Christmas in the Terminal Ward
.

It wasn’t fair. Maeve had always exercised regularly, ate right, didn’t smoke. I bit my lip as a searing pressure built in my chest. I wanted to, needed to, scream my guts out.

But something strange happened when my son Brian helped her back onto her bed and put the pageant on the TV. Maeve started laughing. Not polite little giggles either, but gasping-for-breath belly laughs. I moved next to her, and her hand found mine behind the wall of our kids.

For the next ten minutes, the hospital room disappeared, and we could have been on our beat-up couch at home, watching the Yanks or one of our favorite old movies.

My useless anger exploded into guffaws as Shepherd Eddie tripped over his staff halfway up to the gym’s stage.

“What a great job you did!” Maeve said, throwing high fives all around after the tape had ended. “Bennetts bringing the house down. I’m so proud of all you guys.”

“Would you listen to the shameful amount of ruckus coming from this room?” Seamus said to giggles as he came back.

Maeve beamed as he gently took her hand and kissed it. “Merry Christmas,” he said, smuggling a gold box of Godiva chocolates behind her back with a wink.

It looked like someone had rolled a hospital bed into a Hallmark store after the handmade gifts and Christmas cards were handed out. Julia and Brian stepped forward with a black velvet box. Maeve’s smile, when she opened it, seemed powerful enough to banish the illness from her body forever. It was a thin gold necklace. The attached pendant said #1 mom.

“We all chipped in,” Brian said. “All of us, even the little ones.”

She kissed him on the cheek as he did the necklace’s clasp for her.

“I want you to keep on chipping in, guys,” Maeve said, leaning back, struggling to keep her eyes open. “Many hands lighten the load, and if it’s one thing we have a lot of, it’s hands. Little hands and big hearts. You couldn’t have made me prouder. Dad will show you what I got for you later, kids. Merry Christmas. Never forget, I love you all.”

I STAYED BEHIND after Seamus took Mary Catherine and the kids back home. For some reason, I felt strong all of a sudden, calm, completely alert, not even tired. I closed the door to the room and sat behind Maeve in the cold bed, hugging her. After a while, I held her hand, staring at where our wedding rings touched.

When I closed my eyes, I pictured Maeve from my first days of courting her in the hospital emergency room. She had always been holding someone’s hand then, too, I remembered. Black, white, yellow, brown, young, old, mad, maimed, broken, bloody. I thought about all the human hearts she’d lifted in her life. Mine most of all. And our ten children.

As I stood up to stretch around midnight, Maeve opened her eyes wide and crushed my hand in hers.

“I love you, Mike,” she said urgently.

Oh God
! I thought.
Not now. Please, not now
!

My hand went for the nurse’s button, but Maeve batted it away. A tear rolled down her taut face as she shook her head.

Then she smiled.

Stop!

She looked into my eyes. It was as if she could see some distant place within them. Some new land she was about to travel to.

“Be happy,” she said.

Then she let go of my hand.

As her fingertips left the surface of my palm, I felt as though somewhere deep inside me something shattered and a hole opened.

I caught Maeve as she tipped back. She was so light. Her chest was already still. My hand lowered the back of her head toward the pillow as gently as it did on our honeymoon night.

This is it
, I kept thinking.
This is really it
.

The room spun as I stood there gasping. It felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me, all of my air, my spirit gone.

Everything I had ever felt happy about, every laugh, every sunset, every hope, every good thing there was or ever would be shook loose and tottered and plummeted out of my heart.

I looked up suddenly when I heard the singing.

The pageant tape had come on again somehow, and on the TV screen above, Chrissy was making her way across the Holy Name gym stage in her silver angel costume as the whole school sang “Silent Night.”

I shut it off, along with the light, and lay down beside my wife. Snow was falling lightly in the dark outside the window.

How can I still be alive?
I thought, feeling my heart beat on and on selfishly in my chest.

When I found Maeve’s hand, I felt the cold of her wedding ring. I remembered the happy tears in her eyes, in the small church we were married in, as I slid it on her finger. The rice that mixed with spits of snow as we came hand in hand outside and down the old wooden steps.

As I closed my eyes, I could no longer hear anything. The sounds of the hospital faded in the dark, and so did the sounds of the world outside. All that was left in the universe was my wife’s cold hand in mine and a nothingness that hummed through me like high voltage.