Step on a Crack (23 page)

THE PHONE WAS RINGING on my desk when I came in the next morning.

I heard a familiar voice when I picked up, and certainly not one I was expecting.

“This is Cathy Calvin from the
Times
. May I speak to Detective Bennett?”

I debated between telling the hatchet-wielding scribe,
No hablo inglés
, or just hanging up.

“It concerns the hijacking,” she said.

“This is Bennett. I’m really tired of playing games, Calvin,” I finally answered gruffly. “Especially with you.”

“Mike,” the reporter said brightly. “Please let me apologize for that piece I did. You know how crazy it was. My editor was breathing fire down my neck and… What am I saying? No excuses. I screwed up, and I’m sorry, and I owe you one. I do. Make that
ten
, okay? I heard about the loss of your wife. My sincerest condolences to you and your children.”

I paused, wondering if the
Times
reporter was just playing up to me. She certainly sounded sincere, but I was wary, and I ought to be. She’d made me and the department look like fools. But then again, having a
Times
reporter owe me a favor could certainly come in handy.

“Accept my apology, Mike,” Calvin tried again. “I feel like a jerk.”

“Well, at least you’re self-aware,” I said.

“I knew we were going to be friends eventually,” Calvin said quickly. “The reason I called was I’m doing interviews with the celebrity victims. Well, I should say, failing miserably because I can’t get past most of their lawyers and agents. But I did speak to the civil rights activist, Reverend Solstice, and do you know what he told me?”

The race-baiting quasipolitician Solstice was famous for basically one thing, I knew. Hating cops.

“I’m holding my breath,” I said.

“He said he thinks the hijackers were cops,” Calvin went on. “I just wanted to call and let you hear. Also to tell you that I refuse to print such bullshit. Okay? See, I’m not all bad.”

“Okay,” I said. “I appreciate the call.”

After I hung up, I leaned back in my chair, thinking about Solstice’s accusations. Though he was known to court controversy, the man was savvy enough to realize he needed something-however outrageous-to back it up and get some attention. So what did Solstice know? Was it anything important? Was he involved somehow?

I called back Calvin and got the reverend’s number.

Solstice answered on the first ring.

“Hello, Reverend. This is Detective Michael Bennett of the NYPD. I’m investigating the cathedral hijacking. I hear you have an insight into the case. I’d like to hear it.”

“Ha!” Solstice said forcefully. “Insight my butt. I know what you’re doing. What you’re trying to pull. It’s starting already.”

“What is it you think I’m starting exactly, Reverend?”

“What you punks are best at. The coverup. Sweeping the truth under the rug. Listen, man, I
know
. I been inside. I know cops. Only pros like you could handle us the way you did. Oh, yeah, and then everybody just conveniently gets away. Just missed ’em, I bet. You cops pulled this off, and now you’re covering it up. Same as it’s always been.”

Could that be true? I sure doubted it.

But Solstice had raised two serious questions: How did the hijackers know so much about siege tactics? And how did they always seem to know what we were going to try next?

THERE ARE ACTUALLY ten prisons on Rikers Island in the Bronx, housing as many as seventeen thousand inmates. Rikers is almost a small town, with its schools, clinics, athletic fields, chapels
and
mosques, grocers, barbershops, a bus depot, even a car wash.

As I arrived there early the next morning, I was hopeful again. I’d had an idea during the night, and now I had the opportunity to execute it.

At a little past eight, I walked by the Amnesty Box, where prison visitors are allowed to deposit drugs or weapons without fear. I had neither, so I proceeded inside and was escorted to a small meeting room inside Rikers’ Central Punitive Segregation Unit, also known as “the Bing.”

About a quarter of the inmates at Rikers are poor people who can’t afford to post bails of five hundred dollars or less, but I was more interested in the hard cases. For the next four hours, I sat in the room and met dozens of inmates.

I played them a tape of excerpts with Jack’s voice from the negotiations. Maybe somebody would recognize “Jack” from a previous stay at Rikers or one of the other prison facilities around New York.

But not Angelo, a burglar with an exaggerated shoulder curl, like a boxer always ready to fight.

Not Hector, a gang player with two tear tattoos at the corner of his right eye, signifying he’d killed two people so far in his twenty-one years.

Not J.T. either-a white thug from Westchester with a serious drug habit who was a walking
Merck Manual
on pills and meds.

Or Jesse from 131st Street in Harlem, placid face with one lazy eye, soul patch under his lip, inside Rikers for alleged felonious assault.

In fact, not any of the seventy-nine inmates who came to see me in the cramped meeting room space had anything for me. How depressing was that?

Until my eightieth visitor, Tremaine, a skinny “older” guy, maybe forty, though he looked fifty, at least that. He said he thought maybe he’d heard that voice before-Jack’s voice. “Don’t know for sure, but
maybe
.”

On the way back from Rikers, I called One Police Plaza and told Lonnie to run the prints from the dead hijacker through the city, state, and national law enforcement employee records.

It was an hour later when the fax rang back at my office. The cover sheet told me it was Lonnie with the results.

It seemed like a month before the second sheet hummed out of the machine.

I lifted it up slowly, careful not to smudge the ink.

It wasn’t the smiling
ID picture
of the dead hijacker that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from so much as the captioned information underneath it.

Surprise mixed with a sick, guilty feeling that washed through my stomach like battery acid.

Unbelievable
, I thought.

I took out my cell and speed-dialed Commander Will Matthews’s office. “This is Bennett,” I said when I had him on the line. “I think we got ’em.”

IT STARTED TO SNOW as we crossed over the city line, racing north on the Saw Mill River Parkway. Myself and an eight-vehicle convoy of FBI sedans and NYPD ESU trucks had already passed over the Harlem River and were now speeding through the Westchester woods, but it wasn’t to grandma’s house we were going.

We took the exit for Pleasantville and rolled west down toward the Hudson. At the very bottom, alongside the wind-scoured river, we stopped before high, harsh gray concrete walls decorated with razor wire. A barely legible sun-faded sign was bolted to the rock.

sing sing correctional facility, it said.

Nope, not grandma’s house, I thought.
The Big House
.

Infamous
Sing Sing
.

Up the River.

There was a distinct chill in the air as I got out and stood next to the prison walls. It was as if cold emanated from the place itself. I felt it get even chillier when an armed guard, in what looked like a miniature airport control tower above the wire, swung his sunglasses in my direction. The barrel of the M16 he carried across his chest seemed the only gleaming object for miles.

All this time we were running around trying to send the hijackers to the slammer, I thought, staring across the gravel parking lot at the maximum-security facility. And wouldn’t you know it, they were already here.

The print of the deceased hijacker in the car dealership had belonged to Jose Alvarez, a corrections officer who’d worked at Sing Sing prison until six months ago.

A call to the warden’s office revealed that a dozen men on the prison’s three-to-eleven tour had staged a sick-out the week of the hijacking.

Suddenly, so many things made sense to me. The tear gas, rubber bullets, and handcuffs, the street lingo mixed with quasimilitary terminology. The answer was right there in front of us, but it had taken Reverend Solstice’s suspicions and the memory of a prisoner at Rikers named Tremaine Jefferson, who had previously served time at Sing Sing, to set it free.

Prison guards, as well as cops, were capable of handling crowds and containing people professionally, and capable of being efficiently violent.

“Ready, Mike?” Steve Reno asked as he stepped in front of a dozen ESU SWAT cops.

“I’ve been ready since the minute I got to St. Pat’s that morning.”

Our suspects were
inside
the prison, on duty. To arrest them, we were going to have to go in, enter the belly of the beast. Though jail is one of the least favorite places cops like to find themselves, I was looking forward to this. I was especially looking forward to matching Jack’s face to his wise mouth. I was psyched, completely fired up.

Though the wind cutting off the choppy water was like a Mach 3, I was actually smiling. “Let’s go meet Jack,” I said.

WE HAD TO CROSS a footbridge bonneted in razor ribbon just to get to Sing Sing’s main gate. Though none of us was too happy about it, because firearms are under no circumstances permitted in maximum-security facilities, the dozen of us cops and Bureau agents had to check our weapons at the window of the arsenal before being buzzed inside.

“The men who staged the sick-out have already been summoned into the lineup room,” Warden Clark said as we arrived in the drab hallway outside his office.

An urgent-sounding squall ripped from Warden Clark’s radio as we were coming down a flight of stairs on our way to the muster room. The warden listened closely.

“What is it?” I said.

“A-Block,” the warden said. “Something’s happening. A lot of screaming and yelling anyway. Probably nothing. Our guests are always complaining about the service.”

“Are you sure all the men from the shift are there?” I said as we arrived at the mesh-windowed door of the muster room.

The warden looked intently through the wired glass at the nervous-looking uniformed corrections officers.

“I think so. Wait. No,” the warden said. “Sergeant Rhodes and Sergeant Williams. The two shift foremen. They’re not here yet.
Where the hell are they
?”

The shift foremen, I thought. Sure sounded like ringleaders to me. I thought about the message the warden had just gotten on his radio.

“Let me guess,” I said. “The shift foremen are stationed to A-Block?”

Clark nodded. “Our largest maximum-security building,” he said.

“We have to go in there,” I told him. “Now.”

LIKE THE INVESTIGATION itself, everything seemed to be moving
uphill
in Sing Sing. Trailing behind Warden Clark and a half dozen of his most trusted corrections officers, I climbed countless concrete stairs and several graded, paint-chipped corridors before we came to a steel door leading to a barred gate.

The gate buzzed open harshly, and there was a metallic
snap
like the hammer of a gun on an empty chamber. Then the door swung wide.

I could
feel
the sound of the prison knock against my chest as we passed through the enormous chamber of the multitiered cell block. Radios, inmates yelling, the constant hard and booming echo upon echo of steel on steel. It sounded like some form of torture, coming up from a bottomless metal well.

The prisoners in the closest cells rose immediately, screaming obscenities from behind double-thick bars as we passed. All along the double-football-field length of the building, I could see the glint of mirrors held out between the steel forest of cell bars. I hoped to hell we didn’t get “gassed,” a nasty soup of urine and feces hurled down by an inmate.

“Let’s check the gym before we go upstairs to the different galleries,” the warden yelled above the racket surrounding us.

We were buzzed through another locked door at the block’s opposite end. There was no one at any of the weight-room benches or pull-up stations. No one on the basketball court. No one hiding behind the stands. Where the hell were they? Had Jack and Little John gotten away again? How
did
they stay a step ahead of us?

I was leading our group back out onto the bottom level of A-Block when I was shoved from behind.
I went down
! The weight room’s steel door boomed to a close as I skidded my palms and knees against the concrete floor.

I turned to see two of the warden’s most trusted corrections officers smiling above me as the warden and Steve Reno and the other cops, sealed in the gym behind, began pounding on the steel door.

I noticed that one CO was gargantuan, the other short and stocky. Way to go, Professor Bennett. They fit the physical description of Jack and Little John. That’s because they
were
Jack and Little John.

The one and only Jack had a black riot baton in his hand. He spun it easily between his fingers. He had close-cropped curly brown hair and a permanent sneer. A tough guy for a tough job, right?

“Hey, Mikey,” he said. “Long time no talk.”

How could I not recognize that voice? No wonder Tremaine Jefferson had.

“So how come you never call anymore?” Jack said. “I thought we were buddies.”

“Hey, Jack,” I said, feigning courage I wasn’t really feeling. “Funny, you didn’t sound like a midget on the phone.”

Jack chuckled at that one. Still a cool customer. If he was worried about whether help was on its way, he was hiding it well.

“You made
another
mistake, Mike,” he said. “Only this one’s kind of fatal. Coming into a man’s house uninvited. You thought I wouldn’t anticipate you might find us? Shit, even a broken clock is right twice a day. You think that fat bastard Clark is in charge here? This is my prison. My turf, my people.”

“It’s over, Jack,” I said.

“I really don’t think so, Mike,” Jack said. “Think about it. We got out of one fortress. We can get out of another. Especially now that we have
hostages
. Hell, Mike, maybe I’ll even let you negotiate your own release. How does that sound?”

“Sounds great,” I said, taking a half step back. My heel struck the flat, hard steel of the door. There was nowhere to run.

The heavy radio I’d been given by the warden was the only thing remotely resembling a weapon. I hefted it as Little John pulled his baton out with a sickening smile. The bastard had a face as repellent as a stinkbug’s.

“Why don’t we just talk about this for a second?” I said as I reared back, then hurled the radio. Roger Clemens would have been proud. The radio and Little John’s nose exploded simultaneously. He screamed; then he and Jack lit into me and I was lifted right off the floor.

“Upsy-daisy, Mike!” Jack yelled in my face. Then they both threw me down on my face.