The Wheelman

For M.A., P.L., and S.E.—my family

FRIDAY a.m.

I didn’t reform, I lost my nerve. I still think it’s sensible to want money and if you want money it has to be sensible to go where they have it and make them give you some.

—AL NUSSBAUM

LENNON WATCHED PEOPLE MAKING THEIR WAY UP AND down Seventeenth Street as the brisk March air whipped around the buildings. Had he been a smoker, Lennon would have savored the last few puffs before pressing the window button and flipping out the butt. Just one cigarette—something for the geeks in khaki pants and navy blue windbreakers to pick up with tweezers, drop into a thick Ziploc bag, tag, log, then store in their evidence cases.

Maybe someone would get around to analyzing the brand, try to pluck some DNA from the butt.

Part of Lennon would live forever, somewhere, tucked away in the case files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But Lennon didn’t smoke. He fiddled with the car radio a bit and watched strangers make their way to various duties and diversions. He used to wonder what motivated them—what made them get up every morning, brush their teeth, shower, eat breakfast, kiss a loved one and possibly a child good-bye. That wasn’t for him, and that’s probably why Lennon enjoyed these last moments before a big job. It put everything into perspective. You could either be outside, burning shoe leather, reporting to a cubicle, thinking about a report, whatever. Or you could be inside a car, waiting for your accomplices.

Then the alarm went off, and everything went to hell.

Bang Bang Bang

HOLDEN WAS RIGHT UP BLING’S ASS. NO NO NO YOU IDIOT. Hang back. Hang two steps back. But it was too late. The big glass door behind Holden swung shut before Bling had a chance to push open the door in front of him. The hidden ACU—the gunpowder-sniffing gizmo—kicked in. Or maybe someone inside tripped it. Didn’t matter. Both Bling and Holden were sealed inside the bank vestibule. Even from twenty yards away you could read the expression on Bling’s face as his pistol hand smacked against glass: Motherfuck. Trapped, like two gerbils in a Habitrail.

Lennon slid the gearshift into drive, checked the rearview and side mirrors, then punched the car forward and to the left, blocking traffic on Seventeenth Street. He turned around. The strong late March sunshine blazed off the bank’s white stone so fiercely it hurt the eyes. Lennon still had a choice. He could leave them behind. Holden deserved it. Bling was another story. And this whole job was another story still.

Lennon pressed two fingers to his neck, feeling for his carotid artery. He counted quickly.

Everything was normal. His pulse hadn’t jumped much.

Good.

Hooking an arm around the seat, Lennon looked back at Bling. He was watching Lennon very carefully. Lennon gave him the universal “move to the left” sign with his hand. Bling grabbed a hunk of Holden’s windbreaker and yanked him out of the way.

Cars honked and Lennon hammered the gas pedal. He would have given them the finger, but there wasn’t time.

In the rearview, the bank came rushing forward like the view from a cockpit in a plane barreling into the ground. Lennon made tiny adjustments, keeping his gloved hands light on the wheel. A nudge to the left, a tap to the right. He had to hit the glass just right.

He had done enough reading to know that ACUs—access-control-units—were designed to be bulletproof from the inside. That way, the bank nabs a crew of stupid Holden-like bad guys, they can’t go whipping out their Sig Sauers and blasting their way out. Banks don’t like customers getting popped. They do everything in their power to avoid it. In fact, when they first started making ACUs, they forgot to make them bulletproof, and banks got shot to hell when freaked-out heisters panicked. Some models of ACUs even have these little escape holes, so the heisters can go on their merry way without plugging any of the customers.

Not this model, though. This apparently was the Scratch-Your-Nuts-Until-the-Feds-Arrive^TM model. Bulletproof inside and, most likely, out.

But car-proof? Speeding car-proof? Speeding, stolen-Acura-proof?

At the last minute, Lennon saw that he was going to smack into a metal support column. He cut it hard, then felt the glass panes shatter.

He shifted up and tapped forward. Bling grabbed Holden’s windbreaker again and pulled him through the gap.

Lennon reached down and popped the back trunk, then checked his watch. 9:13 A.M. They were still on track. As long as they could make the next couple of blocks, this might work out after all. The Acura rocked on its suspension as Bling climbed in shotgun and again as Holden hit the backseat.

Lennon stomped on the gas. The car rocketed forward, tires screaming on pavement, and Lennon didn’t see her until the last minute.

The woman, pushing a blue baby stroller.

$650 Large

CENTER CITY PHILADELPHIA BANKS ARE NOT HIT BY takeover teams very often, and with good reason: there are very few ways out.

You get a lot of lone-wolf crackheads doing business, but not many pros. Billy Penn designed Philadelphia to be a tightly locked grid of streets named after trees stretching from the Delaware River to the Schuylkill River. Colonial homes gave way to brownstone mansions which gave way to tightly packed office towers which gave way to a glut of office space. The streets are narrow and often blocked, especially where they lead to interstates. If you are smack-dab in the center of Center City—which Lennon’s team was—Interstates 95 and 76 are barely five minutes away. But it can take fifty minutes to reach them, if traffic is shitty enough.

Bling gave Lennon the background. Bling was a Philly boy; Lennon was not. Lennon owned a place deep in the Pocono Mountains just an hour and a half away, and he had people he knew in Philadelphia, but he would never work there. The closest he’d work was New York, and even that was a bit too close.

However, the bankroll was running thin, and Lennon and Katie were finished rolling off a nice long wasted winter, with no work for either of them. It was a nice winter: mostly cooking and reading and drinking. When Bling called Katie in late February, it was the right time to go back to work.

The setup sounded nice, too. Bling needed a wheelman for a three-man takeover. A Wachovia Bank, three blocks from city hall, was set to receive a fat shipment of cash on March 29, straight from the federal government. It was part of the mayor’s “Operation Fresh Start,” a scheme where he was planning to dump over $650,000 on the shittiest ten-block area in the shittiest part of town, just to level it flat and hope that a national developer would want to build a Barnes & Noble or Bed, Bath & Beyond in the middle of the drug-addled badlands. Most of the money was going to pay one hundred or so holdouts who wanted to stay in their crumbling row houses. Bling told Katie that the mayor was going to hand out between $40,000 and $80,000 to each holdout—in cash—in exchange for surrendering the property.

Why cash? Mayor comes from that area, Bling said. Folks there don’t trust nothing but cash. They want to get paid. Plus, somebody in the mayor’s office thought it would be a good visual for the TV crews: the mayor, launching “Operation Fresh Start” by handing out thick stacks of green to the neediest people in the city. Never mind that gangbangers would probably pounce on the recipients the moment the cameras were turned off. That wasn’t the city’s problem.

Plus, Bling planned to take the money first.

Bling had a city council snitch who told him about the cash. Bling then told Katie how he planned to pull the thing off, and it sounded like a good idea. So Lennon decided to go back to work.

Certain Death

LENNON WAS A VERY GOOD WHEELMAN. STARTING OUT, he was lucky, but then experience and real skill kicked in, and eventually, he earned a reputation.

The moment Lennon saw the woman and her baby stroller, he knew the Acura was going to hit them.

Impact was two seconds away. Lennon was faced with a choice: aim for the stroller, or aim for the woman. The woman had at least a slim chance of possessing catlike reflexes and leaping the hell out of the way. Based on an ultraquick glance, she seemed agile enough. Maybe she’d been a state champion gymnast as a teenager.

Braking and wrestling with the wheel was out of the question. The risk of fishtailing was too great, and Lennon worried that he would broadside both the lady and the stroller. Steering clear out of the way was impossible. Immediately to the right of the woman and stroller was one of those huge cement planter squares full of mulch and shrubs. The planter would total the Acura, and the team would have to escape on foot—if any of them were conscious enough to do so. And the car was pointed too far right to be suddenly wrenched to the left. No, the choice was still this: woman or stroller.

“Fuck!”

Holden. He had just returned to his originally scheduled programming.

Lennon’s hands floated to the right, and his foot tapped the brakes to ease the impact.

The Acura smacked into the woman cleanly, powerfully, directly below her left hip. The impact folded her in half, then sent her tumbling up the windshield and over the hood. Lennon looked in his side-view mirror, and saw—miraculously—the baby stroller, trembling slightly, but still upright on the sidewalk. She had let go, just in time.

Lennon blessed her, even as she skidded off the side of the roof and fell into the street. It was one less thing to explain to Katie.

Passersby screamed, but that wasn’t Lennon’s concern. Yes, he hoped the woman was still breathing. He hoped her hospital time would be minimal, and that, eventually, she’d forget all about what had happened to her. But he couldn’t get caught up in that now. He still had work to do.

The heist had been all on Bling. The getaway was all on him.

The Kennedy Assignation

FOR A GOOD TWO WEEKS, LENNON HAD STUDIED THE street maps of Philadelphia that Bling mailed him, looking for elements that other heisters had overlooked. For the first couple of days, he kept coming back to JFK Boulevard, just one block from the target bank. JFK didn’t exist thirty years ago; a huge set of train tracks—nicknamed the “Chinese Wall”—used to cover the same ground, originating from a huge terminal a few blocks to the east. The city shitcanned the trains, then built a row of office complexes and apartment buildings in its wake. They named the street after the recently assassinated U.S. president. JFK. Lennon kept coming back to it. It felt right. It felt like the gang’s ticket out of the city, out to I-76 and by extension, freedom.

The more Lennon studied, the more he fell in love with JFK. It was a fat street, unlike almost any other in Center City Philadelphia. He took a Martz bus down to study it in person one unseasonably warm day—a Tuesday. His suspicions were confirmed. Even though JFK ran from city hall right to Thirtieth Street Station—arguably the busiest strip of the city—it was wide enough to handle all manner of traffic. Cabbies were able to weave in and out of traffic from Fifteenth Street clear through to Thirtieth. JFK was it: the fat artery that would let the blood spurt away from the heart and straight to I-76.

The only problem: Bling’s target bank sat at the corner of Seventeenth and Market. Lennon discovered that Seventeenth Street ran south, away from JFK. And Market ran east, away from I-76.

He studied the maps, drank imported beer, watched DVD movies with Katie. He knew the answer would come.

It did.

The morning of the job, Bling and Lennon put on window-cleaners’ uniforms, then carried their signs and ladders and wooden horses and ropes out of a rented van with the word JENKINTOWN WINDOW MASTERS, INC. painted on the side. (Bling said that all of the decent window-washing companies were based in Jenkin-town, a suburb just north of the city.) They set up their gear along the west side of Seventeenth Street, between Market and JFK, arranging the wooden horses in a straight line almost to the end of the curb so that pedestrians would have to walk around them to get anywhere. Chances were, nobody would bother looking up for scaffolding. Besides, it would only have to work for about twenty minutes.

When they had blocked off enough of the sidewalk, Bling and Lennon climbed back into the van, then Bling changed into his second set of clothes—baggy jeans, Vans, oversized basketball jersey. Holden, driving the van, was already dressed for the job. He was wearing an Allen Iverson jersey. Big bright colors, huge fat numbers and names. You want to give them something to look at. That way, they’ll keep looking for it later, long after you’ve changed into something else. Lennon stayed in his window-cleaner uniform. It didn’t really matter what he was wearing, not until later.

Bling pulled out his cloned cell phone, dialed in the bomb threat to the U.S. Mint—clear across town—and Lennon drove them to where he’d stashed the Acura.

Easy Breakage

LENNON WRESTLED THE WHEEL TO THE LEFT AND APPLIED pressure to the brake pedal. The Acura spun forty-five degrees, give or take a degree, so that it faced the wrong way on Seventeenth Street.

“Jesus fuck yo!” yelled Holden in the back.

“Hey,” said Bling. “Brother knows what he’s doin’.”

Brother knew exactly what he was doing. He just didn’t know how he was going to do it. The trick was shooting across Market Street in one piece. Lennon knew he had a fifty-fifty shot at a green light, which would make everything easy. A red light would be tricky.

Predictably, the light was red.

Lennon rationalized it. Only sixty feet across. Just sixty measly feet of Frogger. Lennon looked at Bling and nodded, then turned back and pushed down on the accelerator. The Acura jumped forward and raced through the first thirty feet. An SUV tried to cut him off from the last thirty, but Lennon swerved to the left, then cut back to the right and sailed through a parking meter and the traffic pole, directly onto the sidewalk, smashing through the first wooden horse they’d set up. He crashed the Acura through the rest of the window-washing gear—which had been loosened to ensure easy breakage—clear through to JFK Boulevard. Better the gear than innocent people. One hit-and-run victim was enough for one morning.

“Now that’s how you do it,” Bling said.

Lennon shot him a glance, then spun left onto JFK and raced forward all the way up to Twentieth Street, weaving in and out of cabs and Mercedes and Chevy Cavaliers. He pressed two fingers to his neck, feeling for the carotid artery. This was his favorite way to gauge stress. He was doing okay, all things considered.

Another rearview check: no flashers. Five blocks away from the bank and nothing. The first five blocks were always the hardest. Lennon took a hard right onto Twentieth Street, going north, then a quick left down a tiny side street that ran parallel to JFK.

Now here’s where Philadelphia geography gets interesting. Even after ripping out the Chinese Wall, some bits of the old city remained. Tiny streets and alleys that used to run through the industrial blocks sat right next to the new thoroughfares. One of those alleys was the key to the getaway plan.

The alley Lennon took was wide enough for a car, and led downhill. Right next to it, JFK continued at a level elevation and then turned into a small bridge that ran over the Schuylkill River and directly to the front doors of Thirtieth Street Station. This side alley dipped down to river level. Nobody ever drove on this tiny street.

No sirens yet. Anywhere. A good sign.

The Acura sailed down the side street, crossed Twenty-first Street, then continued to Twenty-second. Lennon made a quick right, then a quick left, and pulled into the parking lot. By this time, Bling and Holden had stripped out of their jerseys and windbreakers and shiny pants and tucked them, along with their guns, into an oversized plastic shopping bag. All Lennon had to do was slip off the window-cleaning uniform, which he handed back to Bling, who tucked it away.

The lot was a park-it-yourself deal. They pulled into a spot, gathered up everything out of the car, then walked over to the second car: a 1998 Honda Prelude. They tucked the plastic bag with their clothes in the trunk next to the canvas bag with the $650,000, tossed the keys in, and slammed the lid shut. Then they calmly walked back to Twenty-second Street to the third car—a Subaru Forester—which was parked on the street. There were still fifteen minutes left on the meter.

Lennon took the keys from his inner suit jacket pocket and pressed the orange button. The security system disengaged with a loud thew-WEEP WEEP. He pressed the blue button, and the locks popped. They climbed in, just three business guys carpooling to a meeting in the city.

Except they weren’t headed for the city. The gang was headed for Philadelphia International Airport, where they’d take separate flights to different resort hotels in various parts of the world. Holden was headed for a place in Amsterdam. Bling was looking forward to some time on the Left Coast—Seattle. And Lennon was headed for Puerto Rico, to the El Conquistador Hotel and Casino and to Katie, who would be waiting there for him. The $650,000 would stay parked in the trunk of the Prelude. It was a long-term parking lot.

In the first meeting, Holden had had a problem with that part of the caper. “You mean we’re going to let it just sit there? What if someone boosts the car?”

“Someone boosts that shit,” Bling said, “that’s fate. We move on.”

“You got to be fucking kidding me.”

“It’s the safest thing. Trust me—you don’t want to be caught with one buck from Wachovia on you. You get nabbed, they ain’t got nothing.”

“Shit,” Holden said. “Someone’s gonna boost it.”

“Nobody’s going to boost it.”

Hopefully, nobody was going to boost it.

Lennon pulled the Forester out onto the street, drove up to the parkway, then hooked a right around the art museum and caught Kelly Drive. He had spent a lot of time mapping out this part of the getaway. Lights—only three between the art museum and I-76—were timed; curves studied; proper m.p.h. noted. This was the tiny bit of science involved in Lennon’s job. After a few trial runs, Lennon knew that when the light at Fairmount Avenue and Kelly Drive flicked green, he had three seconds to achieve a speed of 38 m.p.h., which would take him to the I-76 entrance without interruption. Lennon was impressed with the city planners; they had obviously taken time to craft this roadway. On some roads, he had to slow down/speed up for particular stretches. Not Kelly Drive. Lennon practically fell in love.

Past the art museum, past Boathouse Row, then deep into Kelly Drive, Lennon finally felt his stomach muscles unclench. The needle of the Subaru was firmly pointed at 38. The rest of the getaway was academic. There was nothing in the car to incriminate them; there were no obstacles between their car and the interstate out of town to the airport.

Lennon smoothly took a curve, looking at the geese assembled by the side of the river. They’d been here a few weeks before, when he’d been scouting the job. A few of them honked. Goozles. That’s what Katie called them. Something from her childhood. The goozles honked and suddenly fluttered their wings in near-panic.

And that’s when Black Death came racing at them.

A van, with reinforced steel crash bumpers, rocketing out of the side of the road. Smacking right into Lennon’s car. Driver’s side.

The Subaru flipped at least six times. Lennon lost count after the first two.

His first thought: Grab the gun.

His second thought: I don’t have a gun.

They were all headed for the airport. He was headed for Puerto Rico. And Katie.

Glass shattered around his head, beads grinding into his scalp. The engine whined and complained and finally settled into a low hum.

Lennon had a limited view out of his side window. Grass—some burned, some green. Shoes. Walking toward the car.

There was a dull roaring sound. Lennon could smell his own burning clothes. The last thing he heard was himself, trying to scream.

FRIDAY p.m.

You should be able to strip a man naked and throw him out with noth- ing on him. By the end of the day, the man should be clothed and fed. By the end of the week, he should own a horse. And by the end of a year he should own a business and have money in the bank.

—RICK RESCORLA

Thousand Year Funeral

ANDY STARED AT THE THREE BLACK CANVAS BAGS IN the back of the red Ford pickup truck. They looked like body bags. “That’s the garbage?”

“Yeah,” Fury said. “And it’s all gotta go down that pipe over there.”

Andy looked at the bags again, trying to discern human forms. The first two looked like bodies. He stopped himself. This was ridiculous. Just because his friend was named Fieuchevsky, and that he sometimes did favors for his mobster/gasoline-distributor father didn’t mean …

“C’mon,” Fury said, clapping him on the shoulder. “We gotta be onstage in a couple of hours. Let’s get these bags down the pipe, have a beer, then get on 73.”

Andy Whalen and Mikal “Fury” Fieuchevsky were the keyboard and bass players, respectively, for a cover band called Space Monkey Mafia. Fury had come up with the name after listening to Billy Joel’s Storm Front drunk. All through March—Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays—the band was playing a resort hotel in Wildwood, New Jersey. It was mostly dead, but some people took advantage of off-season package deals, and those people liked to have live bands in the bar; the other nights were filled with karaoke.

Fury’s father was friends with the owner and that had helped them land the gig. Occasionally, Fury had to go off and run errands for his father. Take this here, pick up this there, and tonight, dump this down here. Fury had called Andy at his dorm room at La Salle University a few hours ago, and since he had nothing better to do before the drive to Wildwood, he agreed to lend a hand.

“Which pipe?” Andy asked. There were three of them, sticking out of a long block of cement, under a blue tarp raised like a tent. They were on a construction site on the Delaware River, on the Camden, New Jersey waterfront side, right in the shadow of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. Cool March air picked up some extra chill from the water and blew hard and fast across the riverfront. Andy wanted to go back and put on his windbreaker.

“The biggest one—the one on the left.”

Andy saw it. It was roughly the diameter of a manhole cover. The other two pipes looked much smaller.

“C’mon. Grab one end of this.”

Andy walked over to the back of the Ford and grasped the end of one of the bags. Fury reached in and grabbed the other end, then nodded. Together, they lifted, and damned if it wasn’t heavy. The bag felt like it contained one big, thick piece of garbage, like a side of beef. Again, the words popped into Andy’s mind: dead body.

The two of them took baby steps across the concrete until they reached the big pipe. Fury tipped his end down first, resting it on the lip of the pipe. “Ready?” he asked Andy. Andy nodded, and they heaved. The bag disappeared from view. Andy heard black vinyl rubbing against cold steel, then a muted thud, like a sandbag hitting a mound of soft dirt.

“One down, two to go,” Fury said.

“This looks like a construction site. Aren’t they going to find this stuff in the morning?”

Fury smiled and paused to rub imaginary pieces of lint from his black Z. Cavaricci pants. Cavariccis had been out of style for at least ten years, but Fury kept wearing them anyway. Andy thought Fury must have purchased them in bulk back in 1991.

“Next week,” Fury said, “there’s going to be another forty feet of concrete poured over this slab. That children’s museum is going here—that ‘Please Touch Me’ joint? There’s got to be a thick enough foundation to lift the museum up over river level. So whatever’s buried here stays here for at least sixty years. My dad said that’s how long the museum’s new lease runs. The city made the developer agree to it—pretty much float the bill forever.”

“Must be some garbage.”

Fury picked up the sarcasm. “It’s just garbage, Andy. Two more bags, and you can forget all about it.”

They walked back to the Ford and again grabbed another black bag. Only this time, Andy’s hands flew away, as if he had been burned.

“Hey, Fury?”

“What’s wrong?”

“This garbage is, uh, breathing.”

Fury stared at the bag, then looked up. “Go in the front of the truck, in the glove compartment, and bring me that small leather case in there. Okay?”

“Didn’t you hear me? Look at this thing.”

“I heard you, man. Just go get me that case, then grab a Rolling Rock and go for a little walk. Finish up and come back, and we’ll get the fuck out of here and go play some music.”

Andy’s blood turned to ice water. He looked at the bag again—he couldn’t help it, after all, it was fucking breathing—and then back at Fury.

“Jesus, man. Just level with me. Is that a fucking body in there? Did we just dump a human bod—”

“Shut up, Andy. Just shut up. They’re deer. My dad went hunting, and I guess he didn’t kill this one all the way. Now please, get me the bag and take a walk.”

Andy turned away. The night sky, painted behind the tops of the Society Hill Towers across the river, looked blacker than usual. What should he do now? There was not much he could do now. Andy went to the front of the truck, opened the door, popped the glove compartment, and grabbed the small leather case. It was heavy, as if there was a dense stone tucked inside. A stone. Or garbage. Or a deer, still breathing.

He took the gun—yes, he could call it that now, what the fuck, he’d walked through that door already—and then snapped up the glove compartment lid.

Behind him, Fury yelped.

Andy clutched the case to his chest and ran around the truck. A bare human arm, somewhat streaked with blood, had reached out of an opening in the black bag and was in the process of trying to strangle Fury to death.

Some deer.

For a second, Andy wondered if he should open the case and take the gun. But then he realized he wouldn’t know what to do with it—he was raised by two former hippies who didn’t allow toy water pistols in the house, let alone real firearms. He carefully put the case on the ground and looked for the nearest available weapon that didn’t require bullets.

There. A five-foot section of two-by-four.

Andy grabbed the two-by-four and ran over to Fury, who was wrestling with the bag on the ground. Hoisting the two-by-four above his head, Andy swung it down as hard as he could. The bag jolted, then jolted again as Fury managed to swing his knee up in the middle of the bag.

“Hit ’im again,” said Fury, breathless.

Andy complied, and heard the distinct sound of something cracking. He didn’t know if it was the wood or the thing inside the bag. Regardless, the bag started jolting again, almost spasmodically. Fury scrambled backward a bit, out of reach of the arm sticking out of the bag, then started launching punches into the top of the bag, spitting and cursing with each blow. Eventually, the bag stopped moving.

“Help me get this into the pipe,” Fury said, rising to his feet.

Andy just nodded.

Together, they lifted the bag and shuffled over to the open pipe. The arm hung out of the bag, pointing to the ground like a dog’s tail.

“Jesus Christ,” Andy said.

“Don’t say anything,” Fury said. “We’ll get this straightened out, go play our job, and drink beers after that until we can laugh about this.”

“I don’t think I’m going to laugh about this.”

“Yeah, well.”

Andy looked down at the bag and wondered about the guy inside. Andy was no fool. He knew that Fury’s dad was a vor in the Philadelphia branch of the Russian mafiya, with a legit front as a club owner and a gasoline distributor in the Northeast Philly area. So this dead dude in the bag must have pissed off the Russian mobsters for something. He couldn’t tell much from the arm hanging out. A white dude, thin but muscled. No needle marks. Maybe he welshed on a bet or something, or got greedy. Or maybe he was a lawyer they didn’t need anymore. Andy looked for a watch or rings, but didn’t see any. The Russian had probably stripped him of jewelry, anyway, either to hide identifying marks or pawn it. Then again, there were three bags. Unless the Russians saved up their bodies for mass disposal, these three guys were into something together. Andy hoped to God they weren’t cops. His uncle was a cop, up in the Fifteenth District. Andy had made an uneasy moral peace with playing in a band with the son of a Russian mobster, but there was no way he could stomach the thought of—

The fingers on the arm twitched.

“Shit.”

A fist was formed.

“What?”

The body in the bag jackhammered his fist into Fury’s nuts.

That end of the bag dropped, which yanked the black plastic right out of Andy’s hands. He took a few confused steps back, watching the hand reach around and grab the zipper. Andy could imagine the zipper being lowered, and seeing his cop uncle inside, bruised and bloodied. The blood in his veins chilled.

But when the zipper came down, it revealed a naked white guy Andy didn’t recognize. The guy was bruised and bloodied all to hell, but he looked both pissed and calm at the same time. He stood up out of the bag, and Andy saw that he was really naked. Not even wearing skivvies.

Fury was writhing on the cement floor. This guy had really nailed him.

“Stop,” Andy said, holding his hands out in front of him.

The naked guy staggered a bit. The punches and kicks and hits by the two-by-four seemed to have had an effect on him, after all. He fell to his hands and knees and visibly shivered. Then he looked up at Andy, hand outstretched in a hold on a minute position.

“Pound him, Andy!” yelled Fury, his voice strained and slightly higher than usual.

The naked guy was shaking his head no. He gestured with his right hand as if he were holding a pen and writing a note. What was he trying to say? Did he want to sign something?

“For fuck’s sake, hit him!”

There really wasn’t much of a choice. If Andy didn’t do something, Fury would anyway. And God knows how pissed Fury’s vor father would be if Fury told him Andy had hesitated to help. For better or worse, Andy was Fury’s guy. Andy took a few steps back, found the two-by-four, and approached the naked man.

There was no pleading in his eyes. Just waiting. Almost a dare. Maybe even a glimmer of disappointment in there, too.

Andy swung the two-by-four like a T-ball bat, imagining the naked man’s body as the T and his head as the ball. Hard.

The Cold Steel Grave

LENNON WOKE UP AGAIN WHEN THE LIP OF THE PIPE scraped his chest. The hazy memories of the last few minutes loaded themselves back into his brain. It was all pain and fuzz and white noise, and flickering images of the inside of a black vinyl bag, and beatings, and looking at some dumb college kid, and then blackness again. He reached out to grab something, anything. His fingers scraped against concrete, then slipped around cold steel.

Shit.

The pipe.

The memory came back. These two jokers were dumping bodies down a pipe. Holden’s body. Bling’s body. Now, his body. Whatever’s buried here stays here for at least sixty years.

His fingers found the edge of the pipe, and he clamped down as forcefully as he could.

“Let go fucker,” a voice hissed, and he felt a fist hammer the base of his spine. Lennon’s arms and hands went numb, but he kept holding on. The fist pounded his back again, and then his ass. Then more fists. Someone grabbed his legs and hoisted them up in the air. Then a fist smashed into his balls, and the fight was over. Lennon’s fingers released their hold on the pipe and he felt himself sliding down it.

Arms, legs, out. That was the only thing he could do. Skin slid against steel. Lennon pushed his arms and legs out farther, as hard as he could. Flakes of acned rust on the inside of the pipe caught against his skin, shredding it. But it also slowed his descent. A few panicked seconds later he stopped falling.

Lennon was naked, upside-down in a construction pipe by the Delaware River, arms and legs torn to shreds and his testicles hiding out somewhere in the vicinity of his rib cage … but he had stopped falling. He’d take victory where he could get it.

Adrenaline flooded his bloodstream. He would have loved to scream. Lennon pushed harder against the confines of the inner pipe. He wasn’t going to fall. No fucking way.

“He’s stuck,” a voice said up above.

Pause.

“Shit.”

Another pause.

“You’re dead, motherfucker, so you’d better give up now and drop. You want a bullet? That it? A nice couple rounds of hot lead up your ass, finish things off nice and quick?”

Lennon pushed harder against the pipe wall. This was no way to die.

“Get that two-by-four and see if you can push him down. I’ll get the gun.”

The slab of wood made a bonging sound against the side of the pipe. Then Lennon felt a hard jab on the back of his left thigh. Then another, more forceful this time. The rust dug deeper into his skin. The wood slammed into his butt cheek, painfully, almost causing Lennon to let go.

The next jab missed his body, rushing into the void between Lennon’s chest and the pipe wall.

This was it.

Praying that three limbs could hold him up, Lennon’s left hand whipped out and grabbed the wood. He felt it jerk upward, but Lennon held firm, then yanked back downward. The force of his pull almost dislodged him from the pipe entirely, but he held on as the rust plunged even deeper into his skin.

The two-by-four was in his hand now; the guy above had lost it.

“Shit. He just grabbed the two-by-four.”

“It don’t matter,” said the other voice. “Fucker’s going down.”

Lennon looked up past his body to the opening of the pipe. A revolver was pointed back down at him and a meaty thumb started to pull back the hammer. So he did the only thing he could.

He shoved the two-by-four upward as hard as he could.

Wood snapped the guy’s wrist. Surprised him completely. Hand popped open. Revolver tumbled out and down. Barrel caught the lip of the pipe. Weight of the gun dumped it inward. The gun fell down the pipe.

The gun landed on the underside of Lennon’s genitals. He let go of the two-by-four, then reached around for the revolver. Grasped it. Grasped it like a fifteen-year-old with his first tit.

Come on, fucker. Take a look.

Look down.

His shaking thumb pulled back the hammer.

“Aw, you son of a bitch—”

The guy looked.

Lennon squeezed once, and the guy’s head sprayed apart.

He could hear the other guy screaming, but that wasn’t his concern now. Lennon had heard the two of them talking before. The guy he’d just shot was obviously the semipro; the other guy seemed to be along for the ride and needed directions at every turn. And now he’d lost his boss, his two-by-four, and the gun. Hopefully, they didn’t have another gun. Lennon wouldn’t have to worry about him for the time being.

Now his worry was getting out of the pipe.

There seemed to be two ways out. Some smart, clever way, and some exhausting, painful, bloody way.

Lennon couldn’t think of any smart, clever ways, though he tried. He thought about slowly gliding farther down the pipe, expending precious skin real estate, but eventually hitting the bottom, where maybe he could dig until he hit water, then hold his breath and float back up to the surface like a cork. But there was no way of knowing what was below. Might be tightly packed mud; might be bedrock. This wasn’t his river—fuck, this wasn’t his city. Lennon then thought about slipping down farther until he found the two-by-four again, breaking it apart and trying to wedge pieces up in the pipe, and then using them as a makeshift ladder. But again, there were no guarantees that his strength would hold, or that the two-by-four could be broken. Most likely, it was fresh, strong wood; this was a construction site.

Upside-down, the blood continued to rush to his head. He couldn’t hang like this forever. Enough blood in the brain and some foolish idea would seem reasonable, and then he would die. And this was a stupid way to die.

So it was down to the exhausting, painful, bloody way: Push hard, shimmy upward, and hope his skin held out until the surface.

It was the only sane option.

And hey, nobody ever said crawling out of your own grave would be easy.

Fifteen minutes later, Lennon’s toes scraped the lid of the pipe. He pushed hard one last time, pressed his legs out in the air, and wrapped them around the pipe’s edge. His muscles had been worked beyond exhaustion, ripped and burned and crying out for rest to repair themselves, but he pushed them one last time, clenching his entire body up to gain the leverage to grab the lip of the pipe with his hands and finally, to pull himself out. Lennon flipped over, stumbled on his heels, then collapsed to the concrete.

The other guy was there waiting for him.

He looked like he’d been crying, but the tears were ten minutes in the past. Since then he’d been doing some thinking. Some hard thinking. The kid—Lennon saw that now; the guy was just a college kid, or something—must have thought about the many ways to resolve the evening. Dump his buddy down on top of Lennon, then clear the fuck out? Dump cinder blocks and any shit he could find down the pipe and hope that did the trick? Or just call the cops and try to explain things?

But it looked like he’d decided on something different. The kid held out a notebook and a pen.

“I know you can’t talk,” the kid said. “You were trying to tell me that before, weren’t you? So write down what we should do.”

Lennon sat up, took the pen and paper, and thought about his options. The first thing that came to mind was taking the pen, uncapping it, then jabbing the business end into the kid’s neck. But that would mean grabbing his head and hoping the arterial spray went in a different direction, and besides, Lennon wasn’t sure he had the muscle power left to do any of that. Maybe not even to uncap the pen.

Then again, he needed rest and answers. Maybe this kid could help him with the first thing.

Lennon wrote: Who are you?

The kid read the note, and a grim smile floated across his face. “My name’s Andy Whalen. I’m a senior at La Salle. Here, I’ll show you.” Andy pulled a brown leather wallet that was beat to hell from the back pocket of his black dress pants and slipped out an ID card.

Lennon looked at the student ID card. True enough. Andrew Whalen, a senior at La Salle University. There was a magnetic strip on the back of the card.

“Look, I don’t know who you are, and honestly, I don’t care. I know that Fury’s dad is involved in some gangster stuff, and you probably know more than I do, but—”

Lennon held up a finger to his lips. Then he started writing again: Where do you live?

Andy read. “Oh. I live on campus.”

Dorm or apartment?

“A dorm. I’m a senior, but I like living down on South Campus. And there are no apartments down there, so I’m in St. Neumann.”

Alone?

“Yeah, I got tired of freaky-ass roommates. I’m in a single.”

That was all Lennon needed to know.

He jammed the pen into Andy’s neck, aiming more toward the back so the blood wouldn’t spray all over him. Andy looked genuinely surprised, up until the point his eyes fluttered shut and he passed out.

Years ago, Lennon would have felt bad about something like this. During high school, he’d devoured the biographies of guys like Willie Sutton and Alvin Karpis, gentlemen bank robbers who never fired a shot unless absolutely necessary—and civilians were absolutely hands-off. And that was still the way Lennon liked to run his bank jobs. The threat, but not the kill.

However, there was a truth that had eluded Lennon in high school. Something that guys he knew called “human law.” It wasn’t God’s law, moral law, or even the government’s law. It was a law as old as mankind itself, and law number one was this: If someone fucks with you, it is imperative you fuck them back. Andy Whalen seemed like a nice college kid. But he had also taken a two-by-four and tried to stuff him, naked, down an industrial pipe.

Andy Whalen had fucked with Lennon.

That’s what he thought about as he stripped Andy of his clothes, then dumped his body down the pipe, followed by the body of his semipro buddy. First, he fished the wallet out of the black Cavariccis. Mikal Ivankov Fieuchevsky was the name, with a Philadelphia address.

About the Benjamin

THE CLOTHES WERE SNUG ON LENNON. ANDY HAD APPROXIMATELY the same height and build, but not quite the same muscle development. But it was better than being naked. Or wearing those ridiculous Cavariccis.

If Lennon had been thinking clearly, he would have stripped Fieuchevsky of his clothes first. Because even though Lennon had the guy’s wallet, he didn’t have his truck keys. They were most likely in the front pocket of the dead guy’s dress pants. And Lennon wasn’t one of those criminal types who knew how to hotwire any car—just a few select makes and models. This wasn’t one of them. Besides, he usually stuck to bank stuff, and the cars he used in getaways always had keys. So now he had to walk back into Philadelphia.

The only visible option was the big blue bridge: the Benjamin Franklin, built in 1926 to connect Camden with Philadelphia. Why they wanted to do that in the first place remained a mystery to Lennon. Camden was a bigger shithole than Philadelphia.

Lennon pressed two fingers to his neck. Not good.

He spat in the right-hand lane and walked across the bridge. Halfway across, he noticed how much the bridge swayed and bucked. He never knew bridges did that. He’d never had to walk across them before. The jittering under his feet pissed him off.

Now that he’d had some cold air in his lungs and time to think, the real pain set in. Clearly, today’s job had been sold to somebody. Guessing from the appearance of Mr. Fieuchevsky, it was Russian mob. Somebody had told them what they’d be hitting, how much, and plotted the exact getaway route. Which enabled them to stash a ram van along Kelly Drive, then rob the robbers, dispose of the bodies, and move on with life. Somebody had told them all of this.

The problem was that somebody.

Bling knew the heist details, and knew a bit of the getaway strategy. But nothing exact. No schedules, no maps, nothing.

Holden didn’t know shit. Lennon had insisted on that.

So even if Bling and/or Holden had gotten hopped up on H one night and decided to spill their guts to a hooker, they wouldn’t have been able to tell anybody shit about the Kelly Drive portion of the getaway plan. That, Lennon had kept to himself. He had told nobody else about it, not about his timing, his mapping, and his practicing.

Except for one person.

Katie.

And Lennon didn’t want to think about that.

He didn’t want to think about how weird she’d been acting lately.

Secretive.

Quiet.

No.

Rest first. Then thinking and planning. It pained him not to be able to call Katie right away, give her the code, let her know what had happened. Ordinarily, Lennon would be sick that she’d be worried sick. But he couldn’t do that now. He had to rest and heal. Then think.

The Benjamin Franklin Bridge spat Lennon out just above Old City Philadelphia, a former slum that had been rehabbed in time for the 1976 bicentennial celebrations and was now enjoying a turn-of-the-century renaissance of hip restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and art galleries. Lennon didn’t care about any of that right now. He was consulting the Philly map he’d stored in his brain. There was supposed to be a subway terminus at Second and Market, which he could take to City Hall and transfer to another subway line, which in turn would spit him out in the north part of the city, near La Salle University.

Once he found Second Street, the rest was easy. Lennon hopped the turnstile just as a steel train rocketed into the station. The Market-Frankford El. He boarded it, avoided all stares, and rode it thirteen blocks to City Hall, where there was the free transfer—exactly as the maps had said—into an even grimier subway line. The printed map on the train wall told him that the correct stop for La Salle was Olney, just a few stops from the end of the line.

He emerged from the station and saw a white and blue painted bus with a thick “L” painted on the side. Campus bus. Lennon showed Andy’s ID card to the driver, who gave him a funny look but didn’t say anything. Like he gave a shit. The bus wound its way around rough-looking streets, which quickly turned into trees and dark fields. A passing sign read ST. NEUMANN. Lennon stood up and the bus driver let him off in front of a three-story gray slab of a building.

The front entrance was guarded by two turnstiles and a sleepy-eyed student hunched over a thick literature anthology. No campus guards anywhere. Lennon slid the ID card through the turnstile; it clicked. The student didn’t look up. Past the lobby was a main hallway, and tacked to one of the bulletin boards was a directory.

A. Whalen was in Room 119. The hallways were deserted. After all, it was a Friday night in March. School was more than two months under way, and so were the parties. The room Lennon wanted had a push-button combination lock on it. Lennon lifted his foot—clad in one of Andy’s Sketcher boots—and pounded the door to the right of the lock. The door opened. Lennon didn’t bother to turn on the lights, or check the phone machine, or undress. He flopped onto the bed and closed his eyes.

The Mayor Dreams of Holmesburg

MCGLINCHEY’S WAS DRAPED IN HUGE PLUMES OF gray-tinged smoke, which was to be expected. It was 10 P.M. on a Friday.

“What’s this?”

“Take a look.” Mothers slid a sheet across the black Formica table.

Wanted by the FBI

Identification Order No. 744 565 D

Patrick Selway Lennon

With aliases: P.S. Lennon, Pat Lenin, Pete Thompson, Lawson Sel-way, Charles Banks, Ray Williams, “Len.”

Description

Born August 22, 1972, in Listowel, Ireland. Five feet eight inches tall, 170 pounds, with dark brown hair and blue eyes. Occupations: cook, laborer, clerk, writer. Scars and marks: one and half-inch horizontal scar on back of left hand, three-inch scar on throat, brown birthmark on right hip. Due to a throat wound suffered during a previous bank robbery attempt, Lennon is unable to speak.

Caution

Lennon is probably armed and should be considered extremely dangerous.

It was an FBI Wanted poster, freshly printed from the Internet, and Saugherty noticed that the date on it was tomorrow. The lieutenant was giving him advance copy. Saugherty read it. “This is the guy from the bank heist this morning?”

“One of them, yeah.” Mothers had a swallow of porter beer.

“I thought they were all black guys.”

“No, just one of them—Harrison Crosby. His partner was one of those Eminem wannabes, name of Holden Richards. And the getaway driver was this mick—Lennon.”

“Well, I hope the FBI catches them soon,” Saugherty said. “Golly, do I miss police work. Frankly, I don’t know how you can stand it. You want another beer? I’m thinking about one of those Memphis Dogs, too.”

“Yeah, I’ll have another. Stay away from those dogs, though. I’ve been coming here since those little colon bombs were only a quarter a piece, and I still regret every single one I ever ate. There’s something else about this guy Lennon.”

“What’s that?”

“You know that girl who got smacked by the getaway car?”

“Yeah. She okay?”

“She’ll recover.”

“And the baby?”

“Not a scratch. But the girl is somebody important.”

“To who?”

“To the mayor.”

“Who is she?”

“A political operative. Lives in Holmesburg, over on Leon Street.”

“I’m guessing he values her oral presentations.”

“To the tune of $20,000. Just for bringing this asshole down. Word went out this evening at the roundhouse. I thought you might be interested, seeing how you were looking to put a deck on the back of your house.”

“Nah, I’m past the deck thing. Now I’m thinking, feng shui. My whole house is out of spiritual alignment.”

“Costs a lot of money to realign your spirit.”

“Wait. It’s not called spirit; some other word. Chi. That’s it. My chi.”

“Chi whiz,” Mothers said. “So, Paul—can I tell the mayor you’ll be investigating this case on a freelance basis?”

“You can tell the mayor that I’m a big fan of Holmesburg, and that I’m always looking out for its residents.”

“The mayor will be pleased.”

“Patrick Lennon will not,” Saugherty said.

A swallow later: “The mayor doesn’t want him alive, does he?”

Funicular

THE CONQUISTADOR’S INTERNET ACCESS WAS DOWN. Katie had to hire a driver to take her to a nearby Internet café to check the Philly news—no mean feat. It wasn’t until late before the Inquirer posted the story. Bank robbery. Suspects still at large. $650,000 stolen. Promising leads, and the FBI promising a swift resolution. Which was complete bullshit. The FBI had no idea.

But then again, where was Patrick?

He hadn’t told her the exact flight number into Puerto Rico; instead, he said, she should enjoy the resort and casino and the swimming pool and room service until he got there. Warm sun, instead of crisp Pocono mountain air. Katie had rented one of the exclusive guest cottages down the mountain from the main hotel and casino. To get to your room, you had to ride a cable car the resort called a funicular. She must have ridden the funicular a dozen times, up and down, up and down, admiring the clear blue ocean views and lush foliage that draped the mountains, and then in the dark, the boat lights that shimmered in the distance. She kept hoping she’d see Patrick walk across the casino floor and smile at her, and she’d know everything had gone okay. And then she’d take Patrick’s hand and lead him back down the funicular—she’d probably joke about how many times she had ridden the fucking thing, and that it almost made her queasy, but that of course, hah hah hah, wasn’t the only reason she was queasy. She’d lead him into their guest cottage, then uncork the bottle of Vueve Clicquot she’d prepared for the occasion, and then when he was relaxed enough …

… and then what?

Katie didn’t know.

How do you put something like this?

She couldn’t read the novel she’d packed—some Lorene Cary book about Philadelphia during the Civil War. It was the book that the whole city of Philadelphia was supposed to be reading at the same time. But she couldn’t keep her mind on it. And she couldn’t check the Internet without having to hire a cab, and she’d already done that in the past forty-five minutes.

So instead Katie stood on a chair and reached for the leather zip pouch she’d stashed up in the room’s curtains, up out of sight, between the folds of the shears and the main curtain, tucked away in a Ziploc freezer bag and secured to the fabric with safety pins. Inside the leather pouch was her gun, a Beretta. She stripped it, cleaned it, reassembled it, re-hid it.

That didn’t help, either.

There was a knock at the door. Katie made sure the gun pouch was out of sight and then looked through the keyhole.

Michael. A day early.

Jesus, if Patrick had shown up on time …

She opened the door, and couldn’t help herself.

“I know, I know, I’m early, but—”

Katie didn’t let him finish. She slid her hands under his arms and cupped his shoulders, then leaned forward, pressing her lips to his.

The Bastard

LISA DIALED ANDREW’S CELL ONE LAST TIME, THEN GAVE up and called his dorm room number. Oh, God help that bastard if he is in his dorm room. She had driven two and a half hours all the way down to Wildwood to see Space Fucking Mafia at the Thunderbird Lounge, and guess what? No Andrew. No Fury, either—his thick-necked Russian partner-in-crime. That was half the band. The good half.

All that remained was the guitar player and the drummer, and neither of them sang. The pair joked about their bandmates finishing up on the Ozzfest tour, that they should be onstage any second. To fill the time, they played Ventures guitar-rock songs—“Walk, Don’t Run,” “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue”—pretty much the only thing you can do with just a guitar and drums and no vocals. By the end of the set, the lesser half of Space Fucking Mafia was desperate enough to play Christmas songs, Ventures guitar-surf style.

What the hell was Andrew thinking?

There she was, down there with her townhouse roommate Karyn—who she really didn’t like all that much, but couldn’t avoid inviting—and her best friend Cynthia, who had never seen the band but heard Lisa’s endless bragging. Which made it all the worse. Lisa looked like a real asshole. Add the fact that Thunderbird Lounge was a bit of a dive, full of cheap white trash who took advantage of the spring rates and took their shore vacations early. Cynthia rolled her eyes every ten minutes; Lisa could time it.

Karyn, meanwhile, had found some loser with a goatee and a Weezer T-shirt and was huddled in a corner, tongue wrestling. The loser probably didn’t know that just twenty minutes before, Karyn, a world-class bulimic, had power-vaulted her fast food drive-thru dinner into the third stall of the ladies’ room. Karyn was now drinking a vodka and cranberry, but even that didn’t have a prayer of killing the taste of vomit. Maybe the loser was too drunk to notice. Or the film of Coors Light in his own mouth canceled out the taste. Lisa shuddered.

Lisa gave it another hour, then decided to drive home, speed dialing Andrew’s cell every fifteen minutes the entire ride home. Karyn had begged them to stay longer, but nothing doing. Halfway through the trip, Lisa wished she’d left Karyn behind. She kept dialing. Nothing. Just the voice message. The fucking bastard.

Dropped Cynthia home with a lame apology, then back to the townhouse with puke breath. Tried the cell one last time, then the land line. Got his answering machine. Nothing.

This wasn’t the first time with Andrew. Just this summer, Fury had taken Andrew to an all-day drinking party with some Thunderbird waitresses they’d met—boy, don’t even get her started on that one—and they’d somehow driven back to Fury’s dad’s condo up in Egg Harbor Township, a full hour away, to crash for a couple of hours. The problem was, they were due back down in Wildwood to play a Thunderbird gig that night. Oh, Andrew and Fury showed up, but two hours late, sleepy-eyed and still reeking of Jack Daniel’s. That was the night Lisa had brought her mom down to hear the band. She swore then it was the last time.

So no, she wasn’t thinking about Andrew being in a car accident, or some other tragic situation. Because she knew better. Fury had driven him off on some side adventure, and she was done waiting. Let Andrew fuck the Russian asshole, he prefers his company to mine.

“Andrew, if you’re there, you’d better pick up the fucking phone, and while you’re doing that, you’d better be thinking up one hell of a fucking excuse.”

There was a long beep.

The Clean-Up Crew

DOWN BY THE RIVER, THEY FOUND MIKAL’S TRUCK, TWO open body bags with no bodies inside of them, and a spray of blood. They were forced to report back to Mikal’s father, by cell phone. It was supposed to be just a routine checkup, to see what the kid was up to tonight. He hadn’t shown up for his gig down in Wildwood—a buddy had called it in.

“He’s nowhere in sight?” Mikal’s father asked.

No, they said.

“Is there blood inside his truck?”

No. Just around the construction site. Some tarp and concrete and pipes sticking out of the ground.

“There anything inside these pipes?”

Not that they could tell. Not without flashlights or anything. Probably not. But they could check. They hung up, promising to call back soon.

“Fuck.”

“What do we do now?”

“Chill. Just chill the fuck out, that’s what we do.”

“I don’t want to do that. Gotta think, gotta think.”

Fifteen minutes later, they called Mikal’s father back.

Mikal’s appointment book was still in the truck, they said, and on today’s page they saw a note for a meeting. The names: Patrick Lennon, Harrison Crosby, and Holden. The exact details of the meeting were not known, but these three names happened to be the names of three bank robbers who were suspected of stealing $650,000 from a Wachovia branch in Center City that morning. It was in the paper today. Didn’t he see it?

This was bullshit. No such news story had made the papers. But Mikal’s father didn’t know that.

Mikal’s father didn’t know about any of this. This had been Mikal’s deal.

“Bank rob-bers?” said the father, through clenched teeth.

They didn’t have to see the man’s face to know his teeth were clenched.

The first matter of business was to find Mikal. (Yeah, right.) They were instructed to split up: one guy to Mikal’s townhouse in Voorhees, New Jersey and the other to his friend, this piano player named Andrew, to his house. He lived in the northeast, not far from where some of the crew made their homes.

“Let’s go, then.”

“You know we’re not going to find shit.”

“That’s not our problem. The man speaks, we go. Let’s go.”

An Unfinished Boy

MIKAL’S FATHER RETRIEVED AN ICE-COLD BOTTLE OF Stoli from his miniature office fridge. He poured a drink to his son, who’d been so eager both to please his father and pursue his art at the same time. Sitting in some recording studio in downtown Philadelphia, along the waterfront, were the tapes of Mikal’s unfinished rock album. Mikal’s father had paid $18,500 for two weekends of studio time, complete with professional engineers and mixers. It had been a late birthday present for Mikal. He had been so thrilled, and was due back in the studio the following weekend—it had to be postponed because of a performance at the shore. Mikal had just turned twenty-two.

Now, Mikal’s father considered that $18,500, and considered how he’d pay ten—no—one hundred times that amount just for the bitter pleasure of renting out a large soundproof room with concrete floors, two meat hooks, and a large industrial hose for cleanup afterward. He wanted those three bank robbers run through electric meat grinders and the remains doused in gasoline and burned.

Mikal thought about sending someone into the studio to take the tapes, just so that the robbers could listen to the music. In the spare moments when they weren’t screaming for their lives.

Forty-five minutes later, his cell phone rang. It was his employees. They had discovered that someone was sleeping in Mikal’s friend’s dormitory room. And it wasn’t Mikal’s friend.

Above and Below

LENNON HEARD THE WRENCHING OF STEEL AND HIS eyes snapped open. Once again, recent memories took their time returning. His aching hands felt the single bed beneath his body, and he knew he wasn’t in his own bed. He was in a small room. The pale light filtering through a window to his right revealed that much; there was a wooden dresser and a desk. A dormitory room. The name Andrew Whalen popped into Lennon’s head, then everything came rushing back.

The steel cried out again, and something heavy thudded to the ground outside of his window.

Lennon sat up, his deadened muscles protesting the motion, screaming for him to lie back down for another few minutes or months or years, but he had to see. He looked through the glass, which was protected by steel safety bars, and down one floor. There were three men dressed in black coats with knit black caps over their heads. One of them held a crowbar the size of an Arthurian broadsword.

They had pried the bars off the window and were preparing to enter the room below.

Andrew Whalen’s room. The Russians.

Lennon had taken a chance and picked the room directly above Whalen’s. In a building like this, singles were likely to be placed on top of other singles, doubles on doubles, and so forth, so heat ducts and plumbing lined up. Whalen’s room was too risky—somebody was going to miss him soon enough and show up looking for him. Another single room was a smarter bet. People who lived in singles were either loners who went home on weekends, or seniors who had friends or girlfriends on campus elsewhere. It wasn’t Lennon’s safest move, but it was better than wandering the streets of a strange city, looking for shelter. His crew’s “safe” apartment in West Philly should be assumed compromised. There was no place else for him to go.

Lennon watched the men enter the room. Then he heard a scream. But just for a brief second. He thought about trying to take a closer look, to see what he was up against. But he was in no condition for that. Better to stay here, regroup, rebuild, and work the problem with a fresh mind and body in the morning.

Lennon rolled back over and went to sleep, trying hard not to think of Katie.

Police Positive

SAUGHERTY STOOD AT THE CORNER OF SEVENTEENTH and Market at 4:00 A.M., drunk off his ass, his belly full of beer and whiskey, thinking about bank robbery. I’m a bank robber, he thought to himself. Whoo-hoo-heee. I’m going to jack up this jug here, a Wachovia. Breeeeee-hawww. Where do I go afterward? If I’m a clever guy, I try to find my way out of the city without getting caught in any jams. This being Center City Philadelphia, good freakin’ luck with that.

But the newspaper story Mothers had given him in the bar had explained that. The team was crafty—they’d set up phony window-washer horses all up the west side of Seventeenth Street, which allowed them easy access to JFK, and then to … to where? That was the $650,000 question. JFK led directly to Thirtieth Street Station and on-ramps for I-76, but that was one of the most congested points in the city. Smart guys like the Wachovia crew wouldn’t go there. But they were headed up JFK for a reason. Only a few streets lie between Seventeenth and Thirtieth—most of the streets in the Twenties were stopped because of train tracks and the river. Weehew, I’m a bank robber, where do I go?

Saugherty looked in his wallet. He still had over $200 cash in there. Mothers had tossed him a line of credit.

He hailed the next cab headed down Market Street. He was in no mood to sleep and no condition to drive.

The Hookup

THE PHONE RANG. LENNON’S GUMMY EYES FLICKERED open. It took a second, but everything came back to him quickly this time. Most important, the reason for the phone ringing.

The alarm he’d set had been tripped. Someone wanted back into the room.

It hadn’t taken much. Lennon had scribbled a few words on a piece of paper, then taped it to the door of room 219: “Dude—I’m hooking up. Call first. PLEASE.”

Lennon had wanted some kind of warning, just in case the occupant of room 219 were to return sometime this evening. Every male college student had an unspoken set of rules in regards to getting lucky with a member of the opposite sex. (Lennon had never graduated from college, but he’d had enough of it to glean this nugget of wisdom.) If you were a true friend, you’d always allow your buddy the use of your room for the purposes of carnal acts. Hell, you’d even allow a complete stranger who lived in your hallway the use of your room for immoral acts. Only a total dick would raise a holla over a brother gettin’ some.

The note was vague enough—Dude—to warrant at least a call. That was why the phone was ringing.

The occupant of 219 wanted to come back, and wanted to make sure it was safe.

Lennon bolted upright and his entire body screamed back at him. There was no time. He snatched up the plastic bag full of clothes he had prepared before he had lain down and exited the dorm room. He took the staircase down one flight, slowly walked down the main hallway, and went into the men’s room. There were six shower stalls inside, three on each side. Lennon chose one at random and used it to dress.

The clothes he’d picked out of the student’s closet were purposefully random. A black White Stripes T-shirt, a gray Penn State sweatshirt, and a pair of ill-fitting Vans. He kept Andrew Whalen’s black dress pants—they fit better than anything else he saw in the closet. He had also taken a Timex Indiglo watch, which was a far cry from the Swiss Army platinum watch the Russians had stolen, but at least it told the time. Which was 2:30 A.M.

Lennon felt like shit. He needed to find new shelter quick or he wasn’t going to make it. Sooner or later he’d lose consciousness, and campus security would find him, and they’d call the cops, and everything would be over.

So Lennon walked outside the St. Neumann dormitory and sat on the front steps. He wished he had a cigarette; almost wished he smoked. He watched the darkness, and the occasional student walking past him, heading into the dorm, or to the parking lot situated directly across the way. It took forty minutes, but eventually he found what he wanted: a drunk student, pausing in front of the open driver’s door of his late model Chevy Cavalier, debating whether or not to throw up now and get it over with or take his chances and start driving home before he passed out.

Lennon walked over to the lot quickly and made a big show of putting his hands out to help the student. He’d noticed the huge brown glass bubbles attached to poles dotting this part of campus—security cameras. As Lennon put his hand on the guy’s back, he also nailed him once in the kidneys, which temporarily paralyzed him, and then another time in the windpipe, which temporarily rendered him mute.

Lennon pushed the student to the passenger side, relieved him of his keys, then started the Cavalier and drove out of the parking lot and down the hill to Belfield Avenue. Once the car nosed out of campus, Lennon stopped. Wait. He couldn’t do this here—not in this neighborhood. Lennon drove back up the hill and took the loop that put him right in front of the dorms. He then reached over, opened the passenger door, and pushed the kid out. Campus security would spot him sooner or later. Besides, friends don’t let friends drive drunk.

Now, shelter again. Lennon didn’t know the neighborhoods well enough to know safe ones vs. not-so-safe ones, so he tried to find the only strip he knew: Kelly Drive. There were plenty of bridges and tree-covered canopies along the drive. One of them had to be good enough for temporary shelter. It took a while to find—the streets were hopelessly confusing in this part of the city, with burned-out warehouses and ruined shopping strips—but eventually Lennon nosed the Cavalier onto I-76, and then took the Kelly Drive exit. He found what he wanted within three minutes, then crawled into the cramped backseat to try to heal.

Sure, it was returning to the scene of the crime/betrayal, but it was also the last place the Russians would think to look for him. In a few hours Lennon would get up, steal another car, drive to the long-term lot, reclaim the money, and get the hell out of this city. Then he would figure out Katie, and the Russians, and how the two fit together. If they fit together.

Not too far down the road, Lennon’s blood—spilled almost eighteen hours ago—soaked into the grass and mud beside the Schuylkill River.

Montana Extradition

UNCONSCIOUSNESS. BLACKNESS.

Then:

Tapping on glass.

Goddamnit. He was tired of being disturbed. The way his luck was running, it was probably a cop. Maybe that drunk La Salle kid had already called in his car. He should have found somewhere else to sleep. Or at least slept outside in the cold underbrush, away from the car. But that wouldn’t have helped him heal any faster. Getting brained again and again hadn’t done much for his logical thought processes. He was working this one through a brain fog.

“Hey in there,” a voice said.

Lennon sat up and, once again, wished he’d done something differently. He wished he’d found a way to hold onto the Russian kid’s gun.

A guy in a cheap sport coat was outside the car, leveling a Glock 17 at him. Classic cop gun—seventeen rounds, but only thirty ounces fully loaded, easy-pull trigger. Classic cop two-hand stance, too.

“Unlock the door,” he said, his voice slurring a bit.

A plainclothes, out awfully late. Probably headed home from an after-hours cop bar, happened to catch sight of the car. Which was amazing—Lennon had hidden it well. But you never know what’ll catch a cop’s eye. Bastard probably smelled it.

Lennon sat up and caught sight of something odd parked down the hill on Kelly Drive. It was a Yellow Cab, headlights on, passenger door open.

“C’mon, buddy,” the cop said.

Lennon shrugged, then reached over and unlocked the back passenger door.

The cop kept the Glock trained on Lennon, but briefly turned around to wave the cabbie off. Then he opened the door and slid in next to Lennon, right there in the seat. The pistol stayed on him the whole time. This cop was drunk.

“How’s it going tonight? Me, I’m doing good. Gotta say, I keep stumbling into clover this evening. Had myself a couple of Memphis Dogs over at McGlinchey’s hours ago, and I haven’t had a single explosive diarrhea session yet. Maybe my stomach’s adapting.”

Lennon just stared at him. What did this guy want? This wasn’t a vagrant roust. This was something else.

“You ever had a Memphis Dog? Only a quarter. Paired with a pint of Yuengling Black and Tan, it’s the closest a Philly working stiff will ever get to nirvana.”

Lennon slowly raised his hands, holding an invisible pen with one, and using it to scribble an imaginary note on the other. Then he made a slicing motion across his throat.

“Oh yeah, that’s right. You can’t talk, can you, Pat?”

Oh no. This cop. He was working the Wachovia job.

Fuck.

“Why is that, anyway? Your I.O. didn’t elaborate. A bank job’d be my guess. Catch a bullet under the chin? Or did somebody try to double-cross you, slice you up like lunch meat, leave you for dead? Bank robbery can be such a dangerous profession. Frankly, I don’t know how you can derive any real satisfaction from it.”

Lennon didn’t move. He just stared. Sooner or later, this guy would get to the point. And then he’d decide how much of a risk it would be to try to take the gun away from him.

“I’ll bet you’re wondering quite a few things, aren’t you, Pat? You’re probably wondering how I know your name, and how I found you so quickly. Well rest easy, brother. Your questions pale in comparison to the list of questions I have in my own head. Such as: Why did I find you so easily? Aren’t you clever heist guys supposed to know how to get out of town quickly and quietly? I thought I’d be reading about your extradition from Montana at some point. But the fact that you’re still here makes me think the job didn’t come off as ducky as everybody thinks. Which raises even more questions.”

The guy—Lennon wasn’t exactly sure he was a cop anymore; he definitely used to be, but something about him said early retirement—paused to adjust the crotch of his pants. The pistol remained on target.

“Where are your partners? There were three of you. You’re the wheelman, and the black guy and the wigger were the heavies. Maybe they’re back waiting at the hideout up there in jiga-bootown, and you’re staked out here for some reason. That’s it, isn’t it? The money’s still here. You’re waiting until it’s safe.”

The guy paused, waiting Lennon out. After about a minute of silence, Lennon simply shrugged his shoulders.

“Strong silent type, aren’t ya? Well let me get to the point.”

At long last.

“I could shoot you in the face right now, in the next very second, and make $20,000. Which is very nice money.”

Definitely not a cop anymore. Not that cops didn’t do shit like that, but he wouldn’t be yapping about it. Of course, the fact that he was yapping about it also meant that this guy was going to shoot Lennon in the face, no matter what. Next, he was going to ask about the money.

“Or, we could go recover that bank money, when it’s safe, and arrange a deal. Nod once if you understand me.”

Lennon nodded once.

“Goody. So here’s how we’re going to—”

Lennon swatted his right arm outward, his wrist catching the guy’s wrist and deflecting the Glock away, pointing it at the back windshield.

But not before the guy managed to squeeze the trigger. He was fast. He must have been prepared for Lennon to try something like this.

The shot felt like a hammer slamming his left shoulder. The area exploded into numbness as his blood tried to circulate itself anywhere but there. The blood failed, and started geysering out of his shoulder, soaking the Penn State sweatshirt. It looked black in the darkness.

“Now see that,” the guy said, calmly pulling his gun hand away from Lennon’s weakening right arm. “We’re not going to get anywhere like this. And I’m not ready to let you make your decision so hastily. A man should be able to think about these kinds of things in peace and quiet. Where’s the keys to this car?”

Lennon shut his eyes, trying both to block the pain and plan his next move. There would be no point in trying the same stunt twice. He had to think.

The guy tapped him in the face with the still-hot barrel of the pistol. “Hey. Come on now. Simple question. Keys.”

Keys. Above the driver’s seat visor. Keys meant the guy wanted to drive him somewhere. It was a chance to think, to plan something. He couldn’t drive with a gun on Lennon the whole time.

Lennon gestured to the visor. The guy smiled. “Well thankee greatly.” He stepped out of the car, walked around to the driver’s side door, opened it, and snatched the keys up. Then he walked around the back again and used the keyless button to pop the trunk. “Damn, Pat, you should see the shit back here,” he called from the outside. “Sorry to say, this ain’t going to be very comfortable.”

It wasn’t.

SATURDAY a.m.

Do I look like a bank robber to you?

—WILLIE SUTTON

Sickness and Wealth

KATIE LEFT MICHAEL IN THE COTTAGE AT 1:55 A.M. AND asked him to stay there until she called. He said it was okay; he had some loose ends he had to tie up anyway. He told her to be safe, and call him if anything got out of hand. He’d be there in a heartbeat. Katie said she’d be fine. She really didn’t want to involve him in this.

At 6:10, Katie’s flight from San Juan landed at Philadelphia International Airport. By 6:40, she was in a rented car, a black Buick Regal, her one piece of luggage stowed in the trunk. By 7:05, she was at Rittenhouse Square. By 7:08, she was knocking on the door of room 910 in the Rittenhouse Towers, a combination luxury hotel/condominium complex. At 7:10, the door opened.

“Katie?”

“Morning, Henry.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be on vacation?”

Katie pushed past him. The door led to a $1,275,000 three-bedroom apartment: ceiling-to-floor windows, revealing views of both rivers, parquet floors. Nice, but by no means the best apartment in the building. Henry Wilcoxson didn’t like to live too ostentatiously. He was a semiretired jugmarker, a man who plotted bank robberies for other teams in exchange for a percentage of the profits. Wilcoxson had worked with Lennon years ago, which was how Katie had met him. The man had taught them both a great deal; he was the closest thing either of them had to a mentor.

Wilcoxson had settled in Philadelphia, despite the fact that he had once escaped two different prisons here—Eastern State and Holmesburg—back in the 1950s under a different name. Now he owned a number of restaurants and coffee shops in the city and suburbs, and except for rare occasions, was out of the business. Wilcoxson liked to dabble, offer advice, but not much else.

“Coffee? I was just making a pot.”

“No you weren’t. There’s still sleep in your eyes. Have you heard anything?”

“No,” Wilcoxson said. “Nothing that wasn’t in the news. All signs of a successful conclusion. But I take it that Patrick didn’t make it to your predetermined meeting place.”

Katie didn’t seem to hear him. She put down her luggage, then paced, gray-faced, around the apartment, idly looking out the window at the two gleaming blue Liberty Place towers. “Can I use your bathroom?”

Wilcoxson smiled confusedly at first, then looked at Katie again and remembered. “Of course.”

The Bible’s Hell

LENNON SHOULD HAVE PASSED OUT BY NOW. A GUNSHOT wound and a pistol-whipping in the trunk of the car—“Gotta keep you humble,” the ex-cop explained—should have sent vital instructions to his brain to shut down already. But no. Lennon stayed painfully conscious, albeit in a thick brain fog, the entire time: across the city’s bumpy streets, into a garage, out of the trunk, and onto a thick wooden door which rested on two short metal cabinets.

He was strapped down by chains and thick elastic bungee-type bands, the kind you use to strap furniture to a roof. The ex-cop was careful to steer clear of Lennon’s shoulder and lower right arm, but managed to strap him down every other way.

He had no idea where in the city he was—if he was even in the city. Or who this guy really was, and what was next.

Lennon did know one thing: this fucker was not getting the money. If he was going to die, it would be with $650,000 to his name.

“You know, I was just standing here all worried about trying to find a gag for you,” said the ex-cop. “But that’s not really a worry now, is it?”

The garage was a two-car model. The stolen Chevy Cavalier sat in one slot; Lennon was strapped to the table in the other. This guy—if he even lived here—used the garage as storage for tools and random junk. An ergonomic shovel. A wet/dry vac. A bike frame. A rusted gas grill with tank. Shelves lined every available wall, and they were packed to the point of being swaybacked.

“We’ve got a ticking clock here. If you don’t see a doctor soon, you’re going to bleed to death. Believe me, I know. I’ve seen guys take a dozen slugs and live. But just one GSW, left untreated, will kill you. Even if the bullet passed all the way through—which I think it did, because there’s a nice hole in the backseat. Still, that shoulder of yours is going to be trouble in a couple of hours. And let me say, it doesn’t look all that great now. It’s starting to stink.”

His captor placed a Bic ballpoint pen in Lennon’s right hand and slid a legal pad beneath it.

“Just write down where I can find the money. I go check it out and make sure, then come back with a doctor.”

Lennon just stared at him.

“Now I’ve got to come clean with you—there’s no deal to be made. That was just some shit I said to get you to cooperate. Now you’ve got a stronger incentive: staying alive. You do want to stay alive, don’t you?”

Honestly, at this point, Lennon wasn’t exactly sure.

“Of course you do. And being alive in federal custody is a lot better than being buried in the middle of Pennypack Park.” The guy wrapped his meaty hand around Lennon’s writing hand and squeezed. “Do you know what ‘Pennypack’ means? ‘Deep dead water.’ I never knew that until recently, and I’ve lived up here my whole life.”

A pause.

Lennon started scribbling on the legal pad.

“There we go,” the guy said, leaning over to take a look.

He frowned.

“Oh. Fuck me, is that it? Okay, pal. Have it your way.” He disappeared, and Lennon heard a door slam.

Immediately Lennon knew he’d made a mistake. He should have swallowed his rage and scribbled down a plausible location—hell, point him to any parking lot downtown and give him a phony make, model, and license number. That would at least take him out of the picture for a while; from his guesstimates, it was about a thirty-minute drive between where he was now and downtown Philly.

Lennon thought about that name—Pennypack Park. That rang a bell. Lennon consulted the map of Philly he’d stored in his brain for the job. Nothing downtown. Nothing in South or West Philly, either; he’d scoped those areas for possible getaway routes. Maybe it was near suburbs.

Pennypack, Pennypack. The name bugged him. In for over six hundred thousand, out for a pennypack. But where did that fit into the map of Philly? The biggest park in the city was Fairmount, and Kelly Drive shot up right through the middle of that. The guy had driven too far to be near Center City still, unless he had doubled back to be clever.

Lennon heard the guy’s weight creaking on the floorboards above. Probably his kitchen, right above the garage. Water and gas pipes snaked around and up into the ceiling. He could hear his voice above, murmuring. Talking on the phone to somebody.

A short while later, Lennon found out who.

Nightmare in Red

“I HAVE NEWS,” WILCOXSON SAID OVER THE CELL PHONE.

“I’m not going to like this news, am I?” Katie asked. She was walking around Rittenhouse Square, sipping a paper cup of decaffeinated tea, trying hard not to lose her cool. It was getting harder and harder every day—emotions, body temperature, everything out of whack. She was tempted to call Michael, but that was weak. She just got here. She could figure this out by herself.

“No. The latest deal fell through.”

She knew the code, but didn’t understand what Henry was saying. The Wachovia bank had been robbed. It was in all of the local papers.

“According to the business section,” she said, “the deal went through.”

“Indeed. Initially. But it fell through during the financing, and someone else stepped in.”

“Someone on the inside?”

“No, an outside company.”

“Who?”

There was a pause. “I don’t know if I should reveal that kind of information, since it hasn’t been reported anywhere. In fact, not even the SEC has receiving filings yet.”

SEC = FBI.

“Fucking tell me,” Katie said.

“Look, let’s have lunch and talk about this in greater detail. There are other options for you. And your family.”

“Who the fuck was it, Henry?”

He sighed. “Your husband wouldn’t like me discussing his business with you like this, but all things considered, maybe it’s better you hear it from me. It was a foreign company, with increasing financial interests in this part of the state.”

“Do you mean the company based in Milan?”

“No. Uh … St. Petersburg.”

Katie was silent. Russians?

What were the Russians doing involved in this? Think, think. The hijacked funding was meant for urban renewal. Maybe the Russian mob had their hand on the building and trades folks, or were on tap to do the demolitions. Shit. Katie knew little about Philadelphia—just the physical layout and a few rudimentary historical facts, such as the fact that the Italian mob had been decimated in this town over the past twenty years. Katie had no idea the Russians were such a force. Think. What was their interest here? How did they find out about the heist?

And what did they do with Patrick?

“Do you have a PR contact for that company?”

“Oh Jesus,” Wilcoxson said. “Katie, no.”

Say Hello To Mothers

A HALF HOUR MUST HAVE PASSED. LENNON COULD feel the blood spurting out of his shoulder in slow, steady waves. He grew bored with making an inventory of the items in his captor’s garage—channel locks, hammers, picture frames, band saw, power screwdriver … but at least it kept his mind off Katie. For a few moments. Until he started thinking about Katie again.

Lennon had to rethink this. There was some other leak—not Katie.

Why, then, did she pop into his head the first moment he realized there’d been a double cross?

Her behavior over the past month. Weird. Katie was not a secretive girl—not to him, anyway. It wasn’t one huge thing, just a series of small, seemingly inconsequential things. Sudden errands to run. Phone calls that suddenly turned polite after he returned home. The “history” on their Internet browser routinely erased.

Stop it, Lennon. Think about who else could have sold you out. Not Bling. Bling was dead.

But you didn’t open the body bag, did you? You don’t even know both body bags went down the pipe. Where were Holden and Bling during the crash? The backseat. Where did the van hit? Pretty much Lennon’s driver’s side door. Did the crash knock Holden and Bling out? Or did Holden and Bling owe the Russian mob money, and decide to cash in their getaway driver to settle the debt?

No, not Bling. Bling was almost as ridiculous as Katie.

Unless it was Bling and Katie.

No.

Think about the bleeding first. How to stop the bleeding. How to get unstrapped from this table. How to get the hell out of this garage.

Then answers.

A door opened behind him. “I can’t believe it,” a voice said. “Pat, are you still awake?”

Lennon stared at the ceiling.

Someone slapped him in the face. “Hey, come on. Don’t be rude. I’ve brought along a friend. Patrick Selway Lennon, bank robber and fugitive, meet the man who’s going to get a few answers out of you.”

The other guy walked around the table, eyeing Lennon up and down. He was a big guy. Not fat or especially strong-looking, just big and wide and tall. He had a thick black moustache tucked under his nose, a sleepy-eyed expression on his face, and a Borsalino hat on his head. The man looked tired, mean, and permanently rumpled.

“Say hi, Pat,” the ex-cop said. “Oh, that’s right, I forgot. Sorry.”

The big guy turned away and started looking around the garage. “You got a drop cloth or something?”

“Hmmm. I don’t know. Wait—I painted the back bedroom a few months ago, and the set came with a plastic drop cloth. Never use ’em, because they’re for shit. Will that do?”

“Yeah. Unfold it and put it over here, to his right, on the floor and over anything you don’t want splattered.”

His captor found the plastic drop cloth and unwrapped it. His big pal unholstered a Sig Sauer pistol from under his right arm and yanked back, popping one into the chamber. His captor dropped out of Lennon’s sight. There was the sound of crinkling plastic.

“Hey, Saugherty.”

The captor’s head popped up. “Huh?”

The big guy aimed and shot Saugherty in the chest. The man’s fingers tensed on the table, scraping at the surface, and then his head flopped forward, as if on a hinge that suddenly decided to unfold the wrong way. Then a gurgle, fingers slipping from the table, then a thud on the floor.

Lennon looked up at the big guy.

The big guy stared back at him. “What, you waiting for an explanation ?”

Lennon stared at him.

“Well, this is gonna be an extremely disappointing day for you.”

The big guy disappeared and walked up the steps. The floorboards above creaked. He started making a phone call.

Disappointment City

“NEVER SHOULD’VE TRUSTED THAT PRICK,” MUMBLED A voice from the floor.

The ex-cop, Saugherty, was still among the living.

“Christ, does this hurt. Least he had the courtesy to have me put down some plastic. That way, my shit won’t get messed up.” He started to chuckle, then groaned. “Ah, don’t make me laugh.”

Lennon listened. Waited.

“You still with me up there? I know you can’t talk or nothing, but how about a little cough? Maybe a grunt? A whistle? You don’t need vocal cords to whistle. Or do you?”

After some consideration, Lennon coughed.

“At long last. Real conversation. I feel like Helen Keller’s teacher.”

Lennon coughed again.

“You know, you’re one of the last great raconteurs, Pat. Brief, and to the point, but engaging nonetheless.”

Lennon coughed—impatiently this time.

“Okay, okay. I don’t know if I’m going to remain conscious much longer. I’m seeing gray splotches as it is. So, here’s the deal. I’m going to hand you my piece, and you’re going to try to shoot that double-crossing prick in the face.”

Well, now. Looks like it was going to be a disappointing day for someone else.

“You understand me? Knock on the table with your free hand. I forget which one it is from down here.”

Lennon tapped lightly with his right hand.

“Goody. Now I’m not going to try to bargain with you. I’m no fool. Just do me a favor. Man to man. You get out of this, you kill that prick, how about you let me live. Just leave me be, and I’ll forget about you.”

Whatever, Lennon thought.

“Honest. Cough if you understand. Hell, I don’t care if you lie. I just need to know you understand me. And I’m going to count on the fact that you’re a human being beneath all that.”

Lennon waited a moment or two—he sensed that Saugherty wouldn’t be satisfied unless Lennon appeared to be giving this some serious thought—then coughed.

“Enough said.”

After some grunting and mutterings, Lennon felt a smooth polymer Glock slide against his fingers. The piece thumped on the table. He reached out with his fingers and turned it around, then wrapped his hand around the grip. There.

Welcome to Disappointment City. Population: the Gobshite Bastard Upstairs.

“You got it?”

Lennon coughed.

“Okay. Good. I’m going to kiss floor for a while. Wake me up when the fun starts.”

Moments passed.

“Ah, Jesus,” Saugherty muttered. “Ah, motherfucker.”

It was a long wait. Whatever the big guy upstairs was doing, he was taking his time. Lennon badly wanted to ask Saugherty a few questions. Who was the guy? Another cop? He had the aura of cop about him. What were he and Saugherty planning to do? Probably torture the location of the $650,000 out of Lennon, split it, then get rid of him. This guy, Saugherty, didn’t have the stomach for the torture thing himself, so he called in a heavy-hitter buddy of his. Someone he thought he could trust. Someone he’d misjudged.

Now the Big Guy. What was going through his head? Maybe the Big Guy wanted the $650,000 for himself. But that seemed to be too low a figure to risk killing a former partner. Either Big Guy was stupid and greedy, or there was something else going on. Lennon leaned toward the latter. He thought about what the Big Guy said. This is going to be an extremely disappointing day for you. That meant he had other plans for Lennon. If it was just about the money, Big Guy would have commenced torture proceedings immediately. He didn’t. He went upstairs to call somebody. Who?

When the front door upstairs squealed and sets of heavy feet trampled into what Lennon imagined to be the kitchen, the answer came to him.

Shit.

Big Guy was in bed with the Russian mob.

Russian mob wanted the money.

Russian mob also probably wanted to talk to him about the dead boys in the pipe down by the river.

That’s why he was still alive. To be tortured later.

Lennon remembered the pistol in his hand. He squeezed the grip.

“Christ on a cracker,” Saugherty mumbled from the floor. “Sounds like a platoon up there.”

Lennon tried to count footsteps, figure out how many he was dealing with, but lost track. He looked around the garage, hoping for an answer. A way out. Anything.

“I don’t mean to be a downer, Pat, but I think you’re a dead man.”

Speed Loader

PATRICK SELWAY LENNON MIGHT BE A DEAD MAN, thought Saugherty, but I’m not.

They keep underestimating you. They underestimated you right off the force, and they’re still underestimating you now. Mothers, too, of all people. Shooting him in the chest. Mothers worked with him in the Fifteenth District back in the day. Mothers always teased him about not wearing his armor. Saugherty wanted it that way—the guy who said fuck you to Level II. Saugherty secretly wore it anyway.

He had noticed an interesting side effect to a steady diet of Jack Daniel’s and pounds of bacon and beef burgers with no bun: rapid weight loss. Fucking Atkins. Amazing. Saugherty lost the fat, kept the muscle, and wore the armor without anyone knowing. Saugherty wore it all the time. It was his second skin. It was damn near a fetish, if Saugherty wanted to be honest about it. One more secret. One more way they kept underestimating him.

Mothers popped him in the chest, just like a good cop is taught to do. Center of gravity. And yeah, the blow knocked the living shit out of him. But no permanent damage. Skin badly bruised, not broken.

Saugherty had faked his writhing on the floor, but only to a degree. The shit hurt. Thankfully, Mothers didn’t go for the insurance shot. Thought one bullet was all it would take. Now Saugherty was going to find out what was really going on.

Saugherty knew the mayor-porking-the-Leon-Street-chick thing was bullshit. The mayor was straighter than a grizzly’s dick: a proud Baptist from North Philly, goo-goo eyes in love with his wife of thirty-five years. He had other shit he was involved in—namely, this cash disbursement in the neighborhood, which was a cover for some debt he owed old friends. White trim simply wasn’t one of his vices.

At the time, Saugherty hadn’t really cared. Mothers was offering decent money for a quick job, and that was that.

But now it was suddenly something else. Something worth more than $325,000.

Something that involved a large number of accomplices.

Saugherty was doubly glad he had given his gun to the mute bank robber. Originally, he had thought it was over-insurance: distract Mothers long enough to get off a clean shot of his own. That’s right. Mothers hadn’t even checked him for a weapon. His belt piece had gone to the mute guy, but Saugherty had kept a snub-nosed pistol in a short holster perched at the small of his back. Mute bank robber squeezes off a few rounds; Mothers takes one or two but returns fire, and Saugherty clips him from below. Perfect.

Now, Saugherty realized, giving up his gun to the mute was going to be essential. Let him make the first move, take the first hits. Saugherty tried to concentrate on how many footfalls he heard, how many guys were with Mothers.

If he were forced to guesstimate, he’d say three.

Hopefully, the mute could take out one, maybe two, before getting clipped himself. That left at least two for Saugherty. Not a problem, if he could surprise them. Mothers first—he was probably the most dangerous—then the others.

Saugherty reached down and wrapped his fingers around the hidden pistol.

“Hey,” he called up to the mute. “Aim for the center of gravity.”

The $650 Insult

THE TWO FATHERS SAT TOGETHER AT A BOOTH IN THE Dining Car on Frankford Avenue, near the Academy Road exit of I-95. It was early, early—nearly 8:00 A.M. It had been a long night. A flurry of phone calls that had roused them both from their beds. Another round of phone calls to get the facts straight. And finally, two more phone calls to arrange this breakfast.

“How is your Lisa?” Evsei Fieuchevsky asked.

“Fine, fine,” said his guest, Raymond Perelli. “Your boys treated her fine.”

“That’s nice to hear.”

“And … your boy?”

Fieuchevsky grimaced. “Still missing.”

“Motherfuck.”

“Yes. Mother. Fuck.”

Lisa.

Mikal.

The fathers hadn’t known about the connection between the two.

Lisa Perelli had been dating La Salle University senior Andrew Whalen for three months—ever since the end of winter break, when one of Lisa’s friends had dumped Whalen and she was there to pick up the pieces. They got along famously. Lisa already knew Andrew’s ticks; she’d heard Kimberly complain enough about them. She knew how to circumvent them, use them, fashion him into what she wanted. Mostly.

By sheer coincidence, Andrew Whalen played in a rock band with Mikal Fieuchevsky, the son of a suspected Russian mafiya vor based in Northeast Philadelphia.

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Crime Commission did not see this as sheer coincidence. They had been wiretapping Andrew Whalen’s dorm and home phone lines since January 10, 2003, when news of the Whalen-Perelli affair first made it back to headquarters. The Crime Commission saw it as a direct link between the dying Italian mob and the leaner, younger, tougher Russian mob. The relationship was a ruse, they reasoned; Whalen got his dick sucked at least three times a week (according to surveillance tapes and photos), and in exchange, acted as an intermediary between Evsei Fieuchevsky, suspected mafiya vor, and Ray Perelli, a capo with what remained of the pathetic Philly mob, passing messages and instructions and sometimes cash. Ray “Chardonnay” Perelli treated his young messenger well, the Crime Commission discovered. Aside from the cock-worship courtesy of his daughter, Whalen was treated to a vintage Yahama DX7-II to use during gigs. A birthday present.

The Crime Commission was dead wrong. Andrew Whalen was aware of Mikal’s father’s somewhat dubious background, but had no idea about Lisa. All he knew was that she was a bit possessive, yeah, but she was also the most sensual woman he’d ever been with. High maintenance, but with excellent performance. It was worth it. It kept him coming back to her. The DX7-II hadn’t hurt, either.

“Here,” Fieuchevsky said, sliding an envelope across the maroon Formica table. “This is to make up for damage we might have caused.”

Perelli smiled. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I insist.”

Perelli made a show of refusing the envelope, but took it after a few moments and slid it into his jacket pocket.

“There anything I can do for you?”

Now it was Fieuchevsky’s turn to lay on the fake warm smile. “No, no. Our business is done. Enjoy your chipped beef.”

“Hey, I wanna help.”

This dance continued throughout Perelli’s chipped beef—or, as he liked to call it, “shit on a shingle”—and Fieuchevsky’s tomato omelet and three orders of bacon and Stoli on the rocks. It was awkward and ingratiating and cautious. It finally wound down to a graceful conclusion when Fieuchevsky slid an FBI Wanted poster, folded in threes, across the table.

“If you, or any of your people, have occasion to see this man,” he explained, “I would be most appreciative to have a word with him first.”

Perelli took the poster and slid it into his pocket. “I’d be delighted.”

Fieuchevsky thought, Slovenly dago bastard couldn’t find his cock under rolls of his meatball fat.

Perelli thought, Russian pricks are losing it. Time to get back into the game.

A cell phone chirped. It was Fieuchevsky’s. He listened, then told Perelli that he had to be going. Perelli suddenly had to be going, too, and thanked Fieuchevsky profusely for the $8.95 breakfast.

Outside, in his silver BMW, Perelli ripped open the envelope. His jaw dropped. It contained a personal check for $650. In the memo line were the words: “College window bars.”

The fucking bars on the dorm window.

Three thick-necked Russkie goons come pouncing in on his daughter, and all the commie bastard has to offer is $650?

Perelli wanted to puke up his chipped beef. All over that Fieufuck-sky’s car windshield.

And then he had the nerve to ask for a favor.

Find this guy. Patrick Selway Lennon. A bank robber.

Ah, fuck you, you Russian prick. Find your own asshole, then finger it a few times for good luck. Those Russian bastards, sweeping into town, acting as if they’ve run things since forever. Smirking over the flurry of indictments in the crazy summer of 2001. Then there were the goofy antics, like the cops finding that one-legged bag man under the bed of the boss’s wife while the boss was on trial for his life. The Russians, picking over the spoils of a once-great empire.

Perelli drove away mad. Really fucking mad.

The Third Crew

WHEN THE BLACK GUYS WITH THE GUNS ENTERED the garage, Saugherty saw right away he had guessed right. There was Mothers, plus three other guys. Not that it made him feel any better.

Maybe the mute would get lucky and clip two of these guys. Leaving only two for Saugherty. Not great odds, but it could be done.

“Cut him out,” said a voice.

Two dudes with blades started snipping the bungee cords off the mute. The mute had obviously hidden the gun somewhere for the time being. Come on now, Saugherty thought. Start spraying. Pop pop. One guy, two guys down. Leaving two for Saugherty. His gun hand was already getting sweaty. It was hard playing dead while steeling yourself up for action at the same time. His chest hurt, bad. He hoped he wouldn’t have a muscle spasm at an inopportune moment.

Then, something unexpected happened.

The mute bolted from the table—an old thick wooden door Saugherty had found trash-picking in Mt. Airy years ago—and pulled it over on himself at the same time. He scuttled across the floor of the garage, the door on his back, looking like a crab trying desperately to hang onto his shell. The mute was trying to use the door as a shield.

The three guys with the guns laughed. They catcalled, “Hey, white boy. Where you going?” Who could blame them? It looked pathetic.

“That door ain’t going to help you, Mr. Lennon,” Mothers said, a smile on his lips.

The guys removed submachine guns from their puffy coats. Loaded clips. Switched off trigger guards. The two others had black semiautomatic pistols, which they yanked on to pump bullets into the chambers. The garage was full of the sound of clean sharp metal clicks. Just one submachine gun would be enough to cut Saugherty and the mute in half. Hell, these guys had enough heavy firepower to launch an assault on a police precinct.

“All we need is one arm,” Mothers continued. “The rest don’t matter. These guys here can surgically remove your limbs through that fucking door in seconds. You won’t live long, but you’ll live long enough to be useful to them.”

The door wobbled. Was the mute finally going for his gun?

And if he was, what the fuck was he hoping to accomplish with it?

The situation had gone from fucked to cluster-fucked. The only tactical advantage Saugherty had was that all four men now had their backs to him. He could try to stand up and get off six rapid, clean shots into each … no, that was ridiculous. He couldn’t possibly take down more than two without the others spinning around and spraying him into pieces.

The door lifted a few inches from the floor of the garage. The business end of Saugherty’s Glock poked out.

The guys laughed even harder and readied themselves to take aim.

What the fuck was the mute thinking?

“Okay. Will somebody kindly remove this bastard’s leg?”

Saugherty traced the barrel’s aim. Across the floor of the garage, above Saugherty’s head, behind him, and into what? He stole a glance.

The tank of his gas grill.

Oh no.

“Remove this, ya fuckin’ arseholes,” the mute said. He fired the Glock.

Out the Door

THE EXPLOSION POUNDED HIM BACK INTO THE WALL OF the garage, but the door held. Lennon could feel the heat trying to blast through the wood. It wasn’t going to hold up much longer. It was probably already on fire. He slowly climbed to his feet with Saugherty’s gun in his hand. He looked over the wooden door.

Saugherty’s garage was an inferno. Pretty much everything inside was either blackened or ablaze, including the black guys with the guns. (Guess they weren’t Russian mob after all.) One of them squirmed on the floor, and Lennon pumped a bullet into him. He scanned for other stragglers through the smoke. This was no time to be uncertain. He was neck-deep in murder. He might as well make the most of it.

But the fire was out of control. He had to get out now. He wasn’t sure if he was going to make it much longer without losing consciousness. His body screamed, and his shoulder screamed louder.

The easiest way out: use the door.

The aluminum garage doors were already buckling. Lennon could hear it. So he hoisted the wooden door—it was a heavy son of a bitch—and used it as a battering ram. The door went through the aluminum, and Lennon followed behind. He released his grip on the door before it brought him down with it, and tumbled off to the side.

Fresh pain spiked through every nerve. Get up, get up, he told himself. His hair felt like it had been crisping over a barbecue pit.

He climbed to his feet and quickly assessed his surroundings. It was madly disorienting. Jesus, this looked like a suburban cul-de-sac. A yellow plastic Big Wheel was perched on a lawn across the way. It was a bright, sunny spring day. The sun burned his skin.

And behind him were five barbecued men—three of them probably gangbangers and the other two probably cops, or excops. Lennon had a bullet in the arm, bruises and contusions all over his body. He also had a gun in his hand and $650,000 waiting for him in the trunk of a car in downtown Philadelphia.

Lennon started walking. He had to get away from the burning house, and away from eyewitnesses. Probably way too late for that. He already saw faces peeking from behind curtains, fathers stepping outside their screen doors.

Enough was enough. Nearly twenty-four hours had elapsed since the Wachovia heist. Now it was time to bring the getaway to a close.

The warm air sharpened his senses, or at least gave that illusion.

Orders of business:

Find a car.

Find a convenience store. Snag a long-distance calling card and a map of Philadelphia.

Dump some rubbing alcohol over his shoulder wound.

Wrap a tourniquet around it.

Pray to Christ nothing got infected.

Figure out where the fuck he was.

Call Katie’s cell. Enough dancing around it. Thirty seconds on the phone would tell him what he needed to know.

Meet up with her. Or cut free, and worry about her later.

Arrange a way out of town, with the cash.

Never, ever visit Philadelphia again.

A Fond Memory of Hardship

SAUGHERTY PURCHASED HIS TWIN ON COLONY DRIVE IN 1988, with his then-wife Clarissa and five-year-old boy. The price then was $65,000, which made for slightly uncomfortable mortgage payments on a cop’s salary. In the fifteen years since, the value of the house had doubled as the real estate market boomed. In the fifteen years since, Clarissa had gone, his five-year-old boy was now a twenty-year-old Ecstasy-popper on seizure medication, and the cop’s salary had given way to other forms of support. Clarissa and the kid had picked up and moved to Warminster; Saugherty kept the house out of sheer inertia. He kept meaning to rent a place closer to the city where he did most of his work, but never got around to it.

But as he sat on his back lawn in the spring air and watched his $135,000 (current market value) twin burn, Saugherty thought about none of this. Instead, his mind was still trying to wrap around something else.

No, not the fact that his former confidant and best friend, Earl Mothers, was a burnt piece of North Philly brisket inside his smoldering garage.

No, not the fact that three other heavily armed guys—sounded like Junior Black Mafia—were also in the Colony Drive BBQ pit.

Nor the fact that Saugherty, sooner or later, was going to have to come up with a story to explain his dead friend and dead niggers inside his burning home.

It was the mute.

He spoke.

All this time, the guy could talk. He’d been fooling people for months, maybe years. Saugherty didn’t know how old the info on the I.O. was, but it wasn’t as if the mute detail cropped up yesterday. Patrick Selway Lennon had been fooling people for a long time. It probably made him attractive as a getaway driver—what better accomplice than one who can’t sing to the cops?

Even when it came down to it, when his life was on the line and any other person would have been pleading for it, the guy kept quiet.

Then why did he bother with that final spoken jab? Irish brogue and everything?

Remove this, ya fuckin’ arseholes.

An anger limit. The guy had a boiling point, and the lid had blown off the pot just then. This would be useful.

Now Saugherty had to find the guy. He assumed he’d survived the blast, just as Saugherty had. That door had probably shielded him. Saugherty had barely cleared the garage door leading into the basement when the tank went up. When he saw the aim line, from gun to tank, Saugherty decided to screw the charade. He jumped up and ran for it. Two of the four guys—including Mothers—spun their heads around to watch Saugherty run. The others were focused on Lennon, and that gun poking out from beneath the door. Within seconds, the room was full of fire, and Saugherty was diving behind a love seat. A fireball whipped through the air above him, and everything in his basement went up. He had to hurl a chair through the basement bay window to make it out to the lawn.

Lennon hadn’t come out that way. Saugherty had sat there on his lawn, holding his pistol, waiting for him.

He must have gone out the front.

Saugherty walked around the side of the house toward the street. His next-door neighbor, a Home Depot manager named Jimmy Hadder, grabbed him by the arm. “Jesus, are you okay?”

“Home invasion,” muttered Saugherty. “Bunch of black guys knocked me out, robbed me, set the place on fire.” He was spinning off the top of his head. He realized he should stop before he talked himself into a corner he couldn’t explain later. “One guy got out—you see him, Jim?”

“Yeah—he went up toward Axe Factory. But he looked white.”

“You never can tell these days. Thanks, Jimbo.”

Axe Factory Road, which Colony Drive spilled into. From there, it was two choices: east or west. Saugherty thanked him and started jogging toward the end of the cul-de-sac.

Down toward the park: nada. Up toward Welsh Road: a glimpse of his guy, turning a corner.

Got you.

Saugherty ran back for the car he’d taken from Lennon, then realized it had been parked in the garage.

Convenience

LENNON STOLE A HUNTER GREEN 1997 CHEVY CAVALIER parked on the side of a street named Tolbut. Now a Chevy: that was easy pickings. He’d learned how to hot-wire a car on a Chevy. Plus, no alarm, and the Club attached to the steering wheel wasn’t locked. People never locked them. But what made the car even more attractive was the sweatshirt rolled up in a ball in the backseat. Lennon drove two blocks, pulled over, removed his bloodied, ripped sweatshirt, and put on the new one. It was emblazoned with the words Father Judge High School. He’d regressed from college to high school overnight.

A few turns, and he found himself on what looked like a main drag—Welsh Road. Ten minutes up the road, across from a main artery road, Roosevelt Boulevard, was a 7-Eleven. Lennon pulled in and entered the store. His shoulder ached; his skin burned. And Saugherty was right. He was beginning to smell a little ripe. When he put some miles between himself and that burning house, he’d have to do a little rudimentary first aid. Even if that just meant dumping some vodka over it, slapping a bandage on it.

The occupant of room 219 hadn’t kept any money lying around; college kids never did. So Lennon had to pull a little stickup. He was loathe to do it, since it was just the kind of thing to attract attention to himself. But the prepaid calling cards were behind the counter, and there was no easy way to do the five-finger discount.

Besides, he could use a little dough to hold him over until he reached the money in the car. And compared to the murders he’d just racked up, a 7-Eleven heist wasn’t shit.

Lennon selected a detailed map of Philadelphia streets from a spinner rack. He had a better fix on where he was when he crossed Roosevelt Boulevard, but a quick glance at the map confirmed it. He was up in Northeast Philadelphia, about twenty-five minutes away from downtown. Saugherty had taken him home. From the looks of the map, the quickest way back down was to take the boulevard, also known as Route 1, down to where it merged with I-76 headed into downtown. He replaced the map on the spinner rack.

He picked up a copy of the Philadelphia Daily News, a packet of precooked chicken strips—easy protein—and a bottle of water. As an afterthought, he grabbed a chunky white stick of Old Spice deodorant. He placed them on the counter.

The counter kid looked at him funny as he bagged the stuff. Chances were, he attended Father Judge High School. Lennon picked up the bottom of the sweatshirt and showed him the Glock tucked into the waist of his jeans. He pointed to the cash register, and then to the bag. The kid understood. He opened the register, scooped out bills, and shoved them in the bag. Next, Lennon pointed to the prepaid calling cards.

“How many?” the kid asked.

Lennon just curled his fingers into his hand. Give them to me.

“Okay.” The kid grabbed a stack and slid them into the bag.

Lennon took the bag.

“See you in class,” he said, smirking. From the looks of it, the kid looked completely thrilled. Lennon had probably just fulfilled a long-term work fantasy/running gag. Dude, I was totally robbed!

There was a security camera in the place, but at this point, Lennon reasoned, it was beside the point.

After fifteen minutes on Roosevelt Boulevard, Lennon fought his way to the outer lanes and turned into a large mall parking lot. He found a pay phone bank inside a Strawbridge’s department store and used one of the prepaid calling cards to dial Katie’s disposable cell phone. The emergency one.

Prepaid calling cards were the best thing to happen to planning heists since the invention of the road map. Absolutely untraceable—these rip-off companies bought long-distance minutes in bulk and sold them to people too poor to have home phones or with shitty enough credit to be turned down by long-distance phone companies or criminals who didn’t want their calls traced. There were no bargains to be had, even though the cards claimed significant savings per minute. But when you used a prepaid card to call a cell phone that would only be used once, then tossed away, you had a next-to-perfectly secure means of communication.

Katie’s disposable rang five times, and then an automated voice-mail message picked up.

Incoming

KATIE’S CELL PHONE CHIRPED. SHIT. SHE COULDN’T stop to pick it up now. Not with the business end of a Beretta in this Russian gangster’s mouth.

Wait.

Only two people had this disposable number. One of them was Patrick. Which would make it pointless to continue negotiations with this tight-lipped Russian prick.

“Hold on a second, okay? Of course you will.” Katie fumbled in her bag, found the phone, and flicked it open one-handed, but it was too late. The call was gone. Fuck.

She removed the gun from the guy’s mouth and then proceeded to pistol-whip him into unconsciousness. He wasn’t going to help, anyway. Claimed he knew nothing. Katie dialed in to check her messages, wiping the pistol clean on the guy’s sofa.

The Russian hadn’t been difficult to find. Henry refused to name names, and begged her to come over to his apartment to think things through. But eventually, he relented, and gave her one: Evsei Fieuchevsky. “I don’t know that he’s involved, but he might know some people who might know.”

Fieuchevsky had claimed to know nothing, and it didn’t matter. A search of his desk drawer revealed an old-fashioned address book. Somebody down the line would know what had happened to Patrick.

Outgoing

LENNON DIDN ’T LEAVE A MESSAGE. HE NEVER DID—IT wasn’t worth it. He’d just try later. He tried not to read too much into the fact that Katie didn’t pick up their emergency line. He was the only one who had the number. Either she was showering, or temporarily away from her phone. Or she expected him to be dead. And now she knew he was alive.

No time to think about it now.

On to the next item on the agenda.

He was very anxious to leave Philadelphia.

Manhunt

SAUGHERTY WATCHED LENNON USE THE PHONES. THE guy didn’t move his mouth at all. Was he retrieving a message, or listening to instructions? Saugherty almost wished he were a cop again. He could put someone on the Strawbridge’s phones, try to get a fix on the call. But he was a loner. Working this solo. In a car—a royal blue Kia—borrowed from his neighbor Jimmy.

Calling Mothers had been the mistake of the year. He wasn’t going to repeat that mistake.

He was going to follow Lennon to the money, then pop Lennon and take the money. Call a tip in to the FBI. Let them pick up their man, deal with the mess. Saugherty would still need a story, but that could come later.

Lennon left Strawbridge’s, but didn’t return to his stolen car. He simply strolled the length of the store, on the side away from the main bustle of the mall, and selected another vehicle—some early model Chevy. He was inside within seconds. Saugherty couldn’t even see how he did it. Amazing. It reminded him of a video game his son loved called Grand Theft Auto III. “You’ll dig this, Dad,” his kid had said, but the game appalled Saugherty. It was all about a guy who went around carjacking and heisting and killing; your score was measured in dollars you either stole or earned via underworld activity. According to his son, it was also a badge of honor to rack up as many “wanted” stars as you could—the maximum was six—and the easiest way to do that was kill cops. His son loved this game. It apparently didn’t dawn on him that his father used to earn their daily bread putting his life on the line as a cop, facing off against real-life scumbags who also considered it a badge of honor to snuff a pig.

Anyway, the protagonist of the game had no trouble at all stealing cars, parked or otherwise occupied. You simply moved your man close to the car, then pressed the button. This guy, it was like he was pressing that button. Boom. He was in the car.

Saugherty followed him out of the parking lot and back onto Roosevelt Boulevard.

He wished he’d had more time to read up on this guy. Everyone underestimated Saugherty, and Saugherty kept underestimating the fake mute.

What was his story? Where were his two partners, and why weren’t they sitting on the money? Or were they? And Lennon was fighting to collect his third?

No. Something had gone wrong. Pro heisters never hung around the target city. They struck hard, struck fast, and got the hell out. There was a wrinkle somewhere, which kept Lennon here.

But what was the wrinkle?

Damn it, Saugherty. Before you started pickling your brains on a daily basis, you were a pretty good investigator. Figure it out. Keep thinking ahead. This could be the difference between the life you’ve always wanted to lead and life in a (now) burned-up twin over in Pennypack Park.

The dash clock in his neighbor’s car read 9:34 A.M. He hadn’t been up this early in years.

Had he been up all night? He had.

Lennon followed Roosevelt Boulevard all the way down, through lower Northeast Philly and past crappy areas like Logan and Hunting Park and Feltonville and other neighborhoods that had been vibrant at some distant point in the past—full of factories and jobs and neighborhood delicatessens and candy shops and people who swept their front stoops every day. Now they rotted. Some people still tried to believe the neighborhoods were worth saving. You could see them every now and again, along the boulevard. A house with a new paint job and crisp awning. But the problem was, it was usually right next to a gaping hole in the row where Licenses & Inspections had finally ordered a home’s destruction. Nobody wanted to move into places like these anymore—certainly not anybody who could potentially save a neighborhood.

Saugherty wondered what Lennon thought of the view—if he noticed it at all. According to the guy’s I.O., he had been born in Listowel, Ireland, but who knows where he had spent his formative years. Maybe it was here. Maybe he grew up in a shithole like Feltonville, and pulled jobs to ensure that he’d never have to live in a shithole ever again.

If so, it was a reason Saugherty could understand. He’d done the same thing. Hell, it was why he was doing this now.

The boulevard trimmed itself down from twelve lanes to four—two in each direction. Lennon kept driving. He passed the sign marked KELLY DRIVE. Up ahead, the boulevard ended and offered two choices: I-76 West, into the suburbs, and I-76 East, which swung past downtown Philly, then South Philly, then finally the Philly International Airport. There was nothing for Lennon out west—unless he had a hankering to see Valley Forge, where George Washington and his posse wrapped their bleeding feet in rags and prepared to duke it out with the British.

No, Lennon headed east. Big surprise. The question now was: downtown Philly, near the scene of the crime, or right to the airport and up and out of here?

Well, Lennon wasn’t headed out of town on what he had on him, unless he had stashed a getaway bag in an airport locker. Saugherty had given him a thorough field stripping, and the guy didn’t have a dime on him. His little convenience store stickup couldn’t have netted him more than fifty dollars. Read the signs on the door. They’re telling the truth. Yeah, the only thing he stole from that 7-Eleven, as far as Saugherty could tell, was a bunch of calling cards and beef jerky.

Breakfast of champions. Although Saugherty wouldn’t have passed up a few sticks of beef right now. He was starving—the last thing he’d eaten were those fucking Memphis Dogs.

As predicted, Lennon took an exit that spat him out downtown. Saugherty almost lost him—Lennon took another sudden exit on the right, to Twenty-third Street.

Damn. The guy was returning to the scene of the crime.

The Bitter Taste of Blood

EVSEI FIEUCHEVSKY WAS NOT HAVING A GOOD MORNING. First, the news of his son. Involved with bank robbers, and now dead? How could his son do this? What had Mikal been thinking? Then the embarrassing mistake with the daughter of the fat Italian. Then finally, the arrival of the crazy bitch with a pistol, breaking into his home in Morrell Park and threatening his life unless he told her what they did with the bank robber.

The bank robber who had probably murdered his son.

Thank God his Dimitra wasn’t alive to see his shame.

During the assault, Fieuchevsky had merely held his tongue. He had decided to show patience with the crazy bitch. Let her rant and rave and spit and threaten. It did not matter. Soon, his employees—the ones who found Mikal’s truck—would arrive. Within thirty minutes, the crazy bitch would be dangling from the end of a meat hook in his garage, begging for a merciful conclusion to the proceedings.

But then the bitch actually paused to answer her cell phone, and without warning, beat Fieuchevsky into unconsciousness.

This was madness.

Madness, too, that his tan Naugahyde couch was streaked with his own blood. The crazy bitch had beaten him about the face, then wiped the blood clean on his furniture. His $4,000 set. Like it was Kleenex.

Fieuchevsky couldn’t decide who he’d enjoy seeing tortured more—the bank robber, or his crazy bitch.

He’d savor both.

Then, a name popped into his head. An outsider, who knew this sort of thing. A friend his son had once mentioned. “This finance guy I met, Dad? He used to rob banks. Just keep that bit on the Q.T.—he don’t like anybody knowing.”

Fieuchevsky picked up the phone.

Prelude

LENNON PARKED ON ARCH STREET, TWO BLOCKS AWAY from the lot. This Chevy sucked—he was glad to be ditching it. It could stay in Philadelphia and the two could rot together. From what he’d seen on the drive down, the city was already halfway there.

Call him bitter.

The moment he saw the Honda Prelude he could breathe again. Not that he was worried he wouldn’t—the only other two people who knew about the location and make and model of the car were both dead, decomposing in a tube down by the river. No, it was about reassurance on a cosmic level. That everything he touched didn’t necessarily have to turn to shit.

His shoulder was really worrying him now. It smelled funny, like Chinese food left on a kitchen counter too long. That meant infection. That meant trouble, unless he found a doctor who could prescribe antibiotics soon. The wound had pretty much closed and caked on itself; his shoulder would never be perfect, but at least he wasn’t bleeding out. On his personal pyramid of woes, the shoulder was the apex. That was followed by existential worries, of double crosses and bad luck and everything else mental. Below that was a thick base of bruises and contusions and cuts and sprains and everything else. Lennon had a feeling that if you were to remove every broken/ailing part of his body, all he’d have left would be two eyeballs and a spleen. Maybe not even the spleen.

But everything would heal. Money would help. Money and a plane ticket and a room at a resort hotel and a friendly doctor and good food and rest and music. That was it. And still a half a million left to live on. Spent frugally, that money could last Lennon until he was forty years old. Katie, too.

If Katie was still in the picture.

Lennon turned the corner, spied the lot. There was an attendant in the booth, but he was too engrossed in something perched in his lap. Not many cars were parked here on a Saturday morning, despite this being a long-term lot. This vaguely worried Lennon. He’d imagined more cars, burying the Prelude in a sea of pricier, sleeker cars with a higher street value.

He walked down the second row, where they’d left it. Nothing yet. It was probably down farther.

The row ended. Nothing.

Had to be the third row.

Halfway down the third row, the attendant took an interest in Lennon.

Lennon pressed two fingers to his neck, feeling for the carotid artery.

Steady now.

Steady.

On.

An Interlude in Nausea

KATIE THOUGHT BACK ON HER VISIT TO MORRELL PARK. It could have been handled better. Michael would definitely not have approved. Neither would Patrick.

Then again, Patrick was probably no longer alive, so what did it matter?

Unless that was him calling. And he was hiding out somewhere.

There was only one way to find out. Katie pulled her rented car over to the side of Grant Avenue and dialed Henry. On her public cell, not the emergency one. Her stomach did flip-flops, but she kept it together by breathing oxygen. Oxygen dispelled the nausea, if she tried hard enough.

“Hello?”

“Did you call me about twenty minutes ago?”

“No. But wait—don’t go. Let me get rid of this other line.”

Click.

Shit. Katie didn’t know what she was hoping to hear. That Henry had called, or that he hadn’t. If he really hadn’t, Patrick was somewhere. But then why didn’t he leave a message?

Because the stubborn bastard never left a message. It was against his religion.

Katie felt her stomach roil again, and she concentrated on breathing.

The line clicked back.

“Katie, where are you?”

She ignored the question. “Someone called me twenty minutes ago. On the other line. Only two people have that number. You and Patrick.”

“So then he’s fine. Tell me where you are, and I’ll send a car for you.”

“No. Help me think. Where would Patrick be?”

“I’m no good thinking over the phone,” he said. “You know that.”

“What good are you at all?”

Damnit, Patrick. Call again. Let me know what’s going on. Tell me I just didn’t pistol-whip a Russian gangster for no good reason.

“Look, girlie. I’ve had enough abuse for one morning. You know where I am. You want me to help you figure this out, stop by. And let me just add that since you’ve gotten knocked up, you’ve been nothing but moody.”

“Fuck you,” Katie said.

The line was silent.

“I’ll see you in twenty minutes,” she added.

The Outsider Pays Off

HENRY WILCOXSON CLICKED BACK TO THE OTHER line. “Evsei? Thanks for waiting. I think I can help you after all.”

Void

LENNON FELT A TAP ON HIS SHOULDER. IT WAS THE parking attendant.

“Can I help you?” he said, but his tone was just the opposite. Can I get rid of you quick, so I can go back to my booth?

Lennon shook his head. But the attendant persisted.

“What kind of car you looking for?”

Lennon ignored him and scanned the last row of cars, near the edge of the lot. He knew they hadn’t parked the Prelude here, but maybe some parking attendant moved the cars around somehow. They did that sometimes, especially to clear a street for a work crew; they just loaded the cars on flatbeds and moved them where they wanted. Although that seemed highly unlikely, Lennon searched anyway.

The attendant seemed to give up, and walked back to his booth. He kept giving Lennon strange looks.

Fuck him. Where the hell was the car?

Only two possibilities.

One—and this was another highly unlikely event—somebody decided to boost the Honda Prelude, and got a nice surprise when they looked in the trunk. In this case, Holden would have been correct to be nervous, and the fates were working against them all.

That was bullshit.

The more likely possibility was that one of his partners, Bling or Holden, had double-crossed him. Of course, that brought up two additional possibilities: one, the betrayer was either working with the Russians, in which case he knew the battering van was coming, and braced himself for impact, then led them to the Prelude. Two, the betrayer survived the Russian ambush just as Lennon had, but beat him to the Prelude and sped away, assuming the others were dead. Lennon hadn’t rushed back to the Prelude, thinking it was better to heal first and let the heat die down.

But now he saw that hesitation was just one of a long series of mistakes he’d made in the past twenty-four hours. If Lennon had gone right for the Prelude, that Saugherty prick wouldn’t have caught him napping on Kelly Drive, and he would have only two deaths on his tab, instead of at least … how many was it? Two, three (Saugherty), four (his big friend), five, six, seven strangers with guns? For a decidedly nonviolent heister, Lennon had racked up an uncomfortably large body count.

Sort it out later. Solve the problem now.

“Dude.”

It was the parking attendant again.

“Phone. It’s for you.”

He held out a cell phone.

I.P.B.

THE MOMENT RAY “CHARDONNAY” PERELLI LEFT THE Dining Car, he called his lawyer, Donovan Platt.

“How do I find somebody?”

“It would help if you could be a little more specific, Ray.”

“I need to find a bank robber.”

“A specific one, or any old bank robber?”

“Specific one.”

Pause. “This guy do the Wachovia job yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

Platt whistled. “What, are you trying to earn your Boy Scout merit badge thirty years too late?”

“Fuck you, you bagadonuts.”

“Hey, calm down. You know what—don’t tell me why. Who am I to ask why, right? You want to find this guy, try the usual places.”

“Like where?”

“These pro heist guys are predictable. If he’s still in the city, it’s because the money is still in the city. Try long-term parking lots, bus station lockers, storage joints. If he’s trying to get out of the city, he’ll be at the airport—which makes him a bit easier to track—or driving, which makes it impossible. While these guys are predictable, they’re not easy to track down. The whole point is to blend into the background and slip out as quickly as possible.”

“Wait, wait. Parking lots, bus stations, you said?”

“Yeah, Ray. Anyplace where you can hide stuff without raising eyebrows.”

“Okay. Thanks, Don.”

“Can I ask … geez, should I even ask?”

“Ask what?”

“Ask what you need a bank robber for.”

“Don’t ask, Don. Catch ya later.”

The Italian mob in Philadelphia was dealt a series of death blows in the early 1980s, but hung on through that decade and most of the decade after. Then right before 9/11, a blistering series of federal indictments destroyed the remaining leadership.

Within months, nine players and associates were shipped off to various federal lockups across the country to eat shitty food and work menial jobs that paid thirty-five cents an hour.

Within a few years, all that remained of the Philly mob was a motley collection of mid-level capos who wanted to rule what remained and small-time hoods who fancied themselves gangsters. They had the suits, but none of the muscle to fill them out. They had the small-time scams, but none of the brains to make them mean anything.

All that remained of the Philadelphia mob, actually, was a fairly efficient communication system, older and more secure than Ma Bell. The old guys, the new guys, the mid-level guys, they all talked. That’s all there was to do. Talk.

So when Ray Perelli decided to put out an APB on the bank robber the Russians wanted so badly, it didn’t take long for the word to get out. Especially because it involved the Russians. And shoving it up their vodka-drinking asses.

Within fifty minutes, Perelli received word that a strange guy was poking around a long-term parking lot down beneath the JFK overpass near Twenty-second Street. Perelli called the attendant, who was a cousin of a friend of his next-door neighbor, working his way through his sophomore year at Tyler Art School. What tipped the attendant off was the fact that the guy didn’t talk—didn’t the heister lose his voice? Perelli promised the guy next semester’s art books if he could keep the guy there in the lot. “How am I supposed to do that?” the attendant asked.

Jesus, Perelli thought. Kids don’t want to work for shit these days. “Put him on the phone,” he said.

Which is how Perelli found the bank robber that the Russians couldn’t. The Russians didn’t know the city. They hadn’t been here long enough.

Fuck those Russians, Perelli thought. Fuck them up their stupid asses.

Let’s Have a Drink

“HEY THERE.”

Lennon listened. “You’re the guy I’m looking for, aren’t you? The bank heister?”

Lennon listened.

“Now I know you can’t answer. Poster says you’re a mute. So what we’re going to do is this. You listen up, and then hand the phone back to my guy there. If you agree, nod your head and he’ll tell me. Okay? If not, just don’t do anything, and he’ll tell me that.”

The attendant looked bored.

Lennon listened. What the hell was this about, anyway? This wasn’t the Russian mob. At least he didn’t think it was the Russian mob. The Russians would be more pissed. The guy sounded too casual. Too relaxed. Was this an associate of the big cop?

“Okay. Here’s what I’m offering. I’ve got what you’re looking for. You let my guy there drive you out to see me, we’ll talk, and see what we can work out.”

Lennon thought about this and quickly decided that it didn’t make sense. He was looking for a Honda Prelude with $650,000 in the trunk. If the guy on the line had the car and the money, why would he be trying to work out a deal? No, he was offering something else.

“All I want is a little conversation. I’ll get you some medical attention, too—my guys say you look pretty fucked up. Get you a glass of wine, some good food, and you listen to my proposal. You don’t like it, you walk right out. I’m being straight with ya. Whaddya think?”

Lennon knew this was bullshit, but he didn’t have much choice. He was standing in a parking lot with no Honda Prelude, and no $650,000. He had nowhere to go, except a prison or a Russian mafiya torture chamber or that steel pipe down by the river. He wasn’t about to flee town screaming yet. Not without that money. There was the off chance that this dipshit knew something. And he had to know something, because he knew where to find Lennon.

“Okay. If it’s a yes, you mind handing the phone back to my guy?”

Lennon gave the phone back.

The guy on the other end said something.

“Uh, no.”

Something else.

“No, man, I don’t carry that shit.”

And something else.

“Mace, man. That’s it. I got some Mace.”

Jesus Christ, Lennon thought. How was it that, all of a sudden, his dim future seemed to lie in the hands of a Philly gangster on the phone and one desperately retarded man? Not that there was much difference between the two.

Lennon tapped the guy on the shoulder.

“Hold on,” the guy said.

Lennon lifted his Father Judge sweatshirt.

“Oh shit,” the guy said. “This guy is packing. Seriously. Like … oh man. What the fuck am I supposed … Hold on. He wants to go. So we’re like, going. See you in a few. Wait, wait, wait. Where do you live again?”

Power 100 Party

THERE WAS A SMALL KNOCK. BEFORE WILCOXSON could stand, Fieuchevsky was up and answering the door.

Katie’s face appeared in the doorway. She registered surprise when she saw Fieuchevsky, even more so when the Russian punched her in the face. Katie’s body flopped against the wall, then slid sideways down to the carpet. Fieuchevsky slammed the door shut, then grabbed Katie by the wrists and dragged her into the living room.

“Jesus, Evsei. What are you doing?”

“This bitch pistol-whipped me in my own home. I’m giving her a taste.”

“You can’t do that.”

Fieuchevsky looked at Wilcoxson. “Oh, I can’t?”

“She’s pregnant,” Wilcoxson said. “A fall like that, she could lose the baby.” Not that Wilcoxson really cared, one way or the other.

“Fuck her. She pistol-whipped me. And her husband killed my son. You think I give a shit about her baby?”

“She’s not married. Besides, you don’t want her. You want Lennon.”

“I want their entire families dead.”

Crazy Russian bastard. Wilcoxson looked at Katie, sprawled on his carpet, blood streaming from her nose. Even unconscious, she looked beautiful.

Wilcoxson had been in love with her since the first day Lennon had introduced them. Lennon had called her his “sister,” but Wilcoxson knew better. He’d met plenty of heisters over the years who had introduced him to many “sisters.”

He had never met anyone like Katie before. Her smile set his soul at ease. She was shorter than he preferred. Her hair was a dirty reddish-brown, a far cry from the blondes he’d enjoyed over the years. And her body wasn’t quite the proportions he usually desired—thin, wide, thin, then wider. But somehow, Katie managed to look perfect.

From the beginning, this had all been about Katie. Wilcoxson had mentored Lennon—come to think of him as something of a son—though he’d never wanted children, and still didn’t. Still, it had been nice to be able to brag about some of the jobs he’d pulled over the years. Lennon was a quick study, and loved to listen. What else could he do? Wilcoxson had recommended him to a few teams here and there, and the kid had worked out well as a wheelman.

But from the day Lennon brought Katie by to meet Wilcoxson, everything changed. He knew it’d just be a matter of time before he could take her off Lennon’s hands. Lennon was making decent coin, but he really didn’t have all that much to offer her. Not compared to what Wilcoxson had glommed over the years. He could give her the life she deserved. And frankly, Wilcoxson deserved a young woman like Katie. He had experienced enough of the chase, the drama. He wanted to take Katie and settle down. Or at least give it a run.

A few weeks ago, Katie had called him. Confided in him. Asked him what Lennon would think. She didn’t want to tell him right away; he was in the middle of planning a job in Philadelphia, and she never liked to disturb him while his brain was embroiled in a job. Wilcoxson invited Katie to dinner, and they spoke warmly, Katie confiding in Wilcoxson like a daughter would confide in her father. (Her own father, a minor armed robber, had been killed in a shoot-out in 1978.)

But as much as Wilcoxson loved that she trusted him implicitly, his heart sank.

A child.

A child would tie her to Lennon, at least for the foreseeable future.

That night, he decided that Lennon would have to be eliminated.

Around the same time, Wilcoxson had made the acquaintance of an ambitious young musician named Mikal Fieuchevsky, who also happened to be the son of a Russian mafiya vor. It was at a December “Power 100” party thrown by a local magazine, and Mikal had approached him about fund-raising. (For all the movers and shakers in the city knew, Wilcoxson was a moderately successful “financial consultant.”) Mikal was trying to complete his first album, and although his father had kicked in some money, it was nowhere near enough to do the project the way Mikal had wanted. Mikal wanted name producers, top-shelf recording gear and session players. This was going to be his statement, Mikal said, his eyes wide. No more South Jersey dives and resorts; he was going to break out huge like Springsteen or Bon Jovi, but with a modern sound. Blues, hip-hop, electronica, he went on, with Wilcoxson only half-listening. He wasn’t much of a music fan.

But later, when Katie came to him and the Lennon problem emerged, and he thought back on Mikal’s need for money, and a connection was made.

That was what Wilcoxson did best. Make connections. He’d always believed that genius was measured by the connections you could make, either in terms of information or people or financial assets.

Wilcoxson decided to sell out Lennon’s job to Mikal.

During phone calls over the next week, Wilcoxson pried small details out of Katie, and they were enough to piece together the heist. A small article in the Philadelphia Inquirer clinched it—a large amount of cash was going to be delivered to the Wachovia Bank at Seventeenth and Market in October. From there, Wilcoxson was able to figure out exactly what Lennon planned to do. (After all, he’d taught him how to do it.) He also fingered Lennon’s partners. Only a handful of pros were working the Philly scene. He approached the likely candidate, and that candidate agreed to betray his partners.

Wilcoxson told Mikal to tell his team where to be, and boom, they’d be $650,000 richer. Minus Wilcoxson’s $65,000 fee, of course. Mikal was more than happy to agree to the conditions of the deal, which included the removal of the bank robbers from the face of the earth.

Exit Patrick Selway Lennon.

Enter Wilcoxson, to pick up the pieces. He would deal with a baby just fine, if it meant having Katie. But if it were to disappear like its father, that would be just as well.

Wilcoxson watched her on the floor, bleeding.

Now to calm the crazy Russian asshole. He didn’t feel bad about Mikal getting snuffed—hey, the guy didn’t follow through on his end of the deal. The young Russian had let one of the bank robbers live, and if it was Lennon, there was more work to be done.

Besides, there was $650,000 out there waiting to be claimed.

SATURDAY p.m.

Here’s our credentials.

—HARRY PIERPONT, MEMBER OF THE DILLINGER

GANG, SHOWING A PRISON WARDEN A GUN

Smell the Roses

RAY PERELLI WAS PLEASED WITH HIMSELF. WITH ONLY word of mouth and a quick phone conversation, this bank robber guy was coming to him. Russian pricks were looking all over the city for him, and nothing. Perelli had him. Or was going to have him, in a manner of minutes.

Now. What the hell was he going to do with him?

Perelli had told the bank robber, “I’ve got what you’re looking for.” He knew the guy had to be looking for something. Otherwise, he would have lammed out of here long ago. Was it money from a recent heist? Is that what the Russians were holding over his head? Nah. Couldn’t be. Smart bank robber wouldn’t hang around for that, would he? What were the odds of recovering money from the Reds? Something else. C’mon, Ray, let’s pull an answer out of our ass.

After ninety seconds of deep thought, Perelli decided to make a phone call.

“Hello?”

“Hey, yeah, Evsei?” Perelli pronounced it evsee. This was not the correct pronunciation.

“Who is this?”

“Ray Perelli.”

“Who?”

Perelli wanted to say, Hey, fuck you, you vodka-slurping Russian cocksucker. But this was an information-gathering phone call. Insults would get him nowhere.

“We had breakfast, just a little while ago.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Perelli. Forgive me. I’ve been distracted, this business with my son.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. I can only imagine.”

“What do you want?”

“I seem to have somebody you’re looking for.”

“What did you say?”

“That bank robber guy. One of my men rounded him up. I’m going to be seeing him soon.”

A pause.

“That is very good news, Mr. Perelli. I cannot tell you how much this pleases me.”

“Yeah, it’s great. Only problem is, I need a little something from you.”

“Ahhh,” the Russian said. “Cash.”

“No,” said Perelli, insulted for the second time this morning. “Just some info. See, I lured this guy here under what you might call false pretenses. I told him I had something he wanted. Only, I don’t know what he wants. Can you tell me?”

The Russian chuckled. “Oh, I have something he wants.”

“What’s that?”

“His pregnant girlfriend. You tell the bank robber I have a loaded gun to his girlfriend’s belly.”

Jesus Christ, Perelli thought. These Red bastards don’t fuck around.

“I guess that’ll work,” he said quietly. “But how do I prove it to him?”

“Hmmm. Hold on a minute.”

Perelli held. He had waved off the cash thing, but only temporarily. Yeah, this thing was going to come down to cash. He wanted to see how far the Russian prick would go, how high a price he would affix to the forehead of his son’s murderer. It wasn’t going to be $650, Perelli knew that much.

“Okay. I have something. If the bank robber doesn’t believe you, tell him, ‘Smell the roses.’”

“Say what?”

“It will mean something to him. Between him and his girlfriend.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve got a source here.”

Weird. But Evsei had no reason to lie about this. It would give Perelli something to work with.

“Great. And since you brought it up, what kind of price is on this guy’s head, anyway?”

“We can discuss that later.”

“Yeah. Well, you see, I kind of wanted to get that ironed out now.”

“When I see the bank robber, you will be amply rewarded.”

Amply. What the fuck did “amply” mean? What, was he going to kick in another $650?

Hose Down the White Tile

SAUGHERTY FOLLOWED LENNON AND THE PARKING GUY all the way down Broad Street into the depths of South Philadelphia. Saugherty noticed that Lennon had pulled a gun—the very Glock 19 he’d given him early this morning—on the parking attendant before they climbed into the car, and he could only assume that it was pointed at the guy the entire ride. Despite this, he obeyed all traffic laws, which was impressive, considering.

They pulled up to Ninth and Catherine, near a one-hundred-year-old South Philly restaurant called Dominick’s Little Italy. The place was very familiar to Saugherty. Famous for 1960s-era gangland powwows and grisly 1980s-era gangland hits, Dominick’s also served up some amazing Italian food. Saugherty had taken his ex-wife here for their fifth anniversary. He had enjoyed pointing out the local capos and wannabes sitting at each table. His wife had been too nervous to enjoy herself. “Will you stop pointing,” she’d hushed him, under her breath.

The thing that stuck most in his memory about Dominick’s Little Italy: all the white tile. It was everywhere—the floor, the walls … maybe even the ceiling, for all he remembered. White tile, bordered by black tiles. The main dining room looked like one big high school shower. Saugherty joked at the time that the white tiles just made it easier to hose down the blood after a mob hit. His ex didn’t think that was funny, either.

What was Lennon doing down here? Was he forcing the parking attendant to buy him a plate of raviolis?

There was a small dive bar catty-corner to Dominick’s. Saugherty parked the car. He was relieved to find that it was one of those old-man bars he loved—no fancy bar menu, no karaoke, no microbrews. Just wood paneling and two beers on tap. Coasters were about the fanciest thing in the joint. Squared white tile covered the floor. The ceiling was stamped tin, painted over. The stool seats were covered with puffy vinyl, and there were peanuts in black plastic bowls on the bar top. Best of all, there was a huge greasy window, partially obscured by a set of 1950s-era blinds, that gave Saugherty a front and side view of Dominick’s. When Lennon left the premises, Saugherty would know about it.

Which left only one thing to do: order a fucking drink already.

Saugherty asked for a boilermaker—a shot of whiskey dropped into a mug of beer. The bartender didn’t ask what kind of whiskey, what kind of beer. Saugherty liked that. The glass sank and tapped the bottom of the mug with a dull thud, like two submarines tapping each other underwater. Saugherty downed it, then asked for a shot of Jack Daniel’s and another beer. Jack and beer. That had been his drink of choice ten years ago, when shit with his ex had gotten out of control. He’d finish his shift, then head to the Ashton Tavern just down the road a piece from his house on Colony Drive.

The house that was burning.

Saugherty saluted it, and enjoyed the trip down memory lane. Every so often, he’d look across the street to see what was going on at Dominick’s.

Two Guns

LENNON WAS LED THROUGH THE RESTAURANT AND hallway and kitchen to a back office. A heavyset man wearing a crisp white button-down shirt was sitting behind an empty desk. This wasn’t the man’s usual desk. He was just borrowing it. “You’re Lennon,” he said. “I can tell by the face. Man, you look bad. Have a seat. You want something to drink? There’s a pen and paper there. Write down what you want.” The parking attendant left without a word.

Lennon sat down, but he didn’t pick up the pen. He waited.

“Really. Go ahead. Anything you want. They’ve got a fully stocked bar here.”

He picked up the pen and the legal pad beneath it. He scribbled a few words on the surface, then flipped the pad to show his host: THE MONEY?

The guy smiled. “I’ll tell you right now, I don’t have your money. Did I give you the impression I had your money? I don’t think I did.”

In some ways, this was a relief. The $650,000 was still out there somewhere. Lennon scribbled some more. He turned the pad over.

ICE WATER. CHICKEN BREAST.

“That’s more like it. Get some food in your belly. If you don’t mind me saying, I’m assuming you don’t always look like a bum. Or smell like one.”

The guy picked up a phone, punched in three buttons, said “Come here,” then gave a teenaged boy in a white coat Lennon’s order. The guy specified Boar’s Head chicken breast, then turned his attention back to Lennon.

“You know, my daughter gave me a book last Christmas. What the hell was it called? Something like Outlaw Heroes of the 1930s. Guys in there were Dillinger, Baby Face, Pretty Boy, the Barkers, Al Karpis, all those guys. I like how it was titled ‘Heroes.’ Ever see it?”

Lennon had. He was a voracious reader of true crime and history—that’s how he had spent his wasted winter. Catching up on his reading, both crime stuff and a stack of science fiction novels. (Katie liked the sci-fi, too—Dick, Bester, Sturgeon—so they traded paperbacks back and forth at a feverish pace.) Outlaw Heroes was okay; nothing special. He remembered flipping through it on a lazy December afternoon. The guy clearly cribbed most of his stuff from other histories.

Lennon didn’t write anything on the pad. He preferred to listen. Sooner or later, this guy was going to get to the point.

“Okay. Maybe you don’t read much. You’re busy. I’ll get to the point. The Russian mob has your girlfriend. Intes Studios, down on Delaware Avenue. Suite 117.”

Lennon stared at him. Girlfriend?

“I can tell by your look that you might doubt me. Well, they told me to tell you to smell the roses. That make any sense? That’s supposed to be proof.”

Fucking hell.

These bastards had Katie.

“Smell the roses” was one of their in-jokes from years ago. One Christmas, Lennnon found himself at one of Katie’s girlfriend’s houses for a holiday party. There was a big guy there. Named Joe. Joe was a bit of an idiot. Physical trainer from Florida. He spotted Lennon in a corner and took it upon himself to bring Lennon out of his shell. (Lennon was actually embroiled in a getaway plan, spinning the details and arrangements around in his head. He always did his best thinking in large groups, while nobody paid attention to him.) After a few awkward attempts at small talk, the guy grabbed Lennon by his shoulders and shook him. “C’mon, man, open up and live! You gotta smell the roses, dude!” From that point on, “smell the roses” had cropped up in countless conversations. It became shorthand for people who didn’t understand The Life. It became shorthand for pretty much anybody who annoyed Katie and Lennon.

That meant Katie was here, in Philadelphia. And with some associates of the man behind this desk. Against her will, or perhaps otherwise. This didn’t make sense yet.

Then again, nothing from the past twenty-four hours made sense.

The guy opened a desk drawer and pulled out a revolver. A black .38 with rubber handgrips. He popped open the chamber, placed it on the desk, then slid it across to Lennon. A box of bullets followed.

“They’re expecting me to hand-deliver you,” the guy said. “But I figure you can deliver yourself. Am I right?”

Lennon took the gun and bullets, waiting for the punch line. There had to be something else.

“Drink your ice water, eat your chicken, then go do what you have to. When it’s done, feel free to come back here. I might have something else for you.”

Lennon balanced the gun and box in his lap, then scribbled a hasty question. YOUR PROPOSAL?

The guy read it and smirked. “Nah, no proposal. I changed my mind.”

Lennon stood up, gun and box in his hands.

“Don’t you want to wait for your food? No, I guess you wouldn’t. Tell you what. I’ll have ’em save it for you. Come on back later. Bring your woman. We’ll have dinner. Then we can talk. Maybe there’s some business opportunities for you in Philadelphia.”

Lennon left the office, but he still heard the guy talking behind him.

“Hey—you might want to use the back entrance. My guy said somebody followed you from the parking lot.”

Preservation Mode

FOR CLOSE TO THIRTY MINUTES, WILCOXSON TAP-DANCED like a motherfucker. No, Evsei. Don’t kill the girl. Killing the girl will do nothing. No, Evsei, trust me. Put her on my bed. She’s better as bait, and Lennon will only go for it if she’s alive. You want Lennon, remember? The guy who killed your son. The only way you’re going to lure him out into the open is to use his girlfriend, and that only works if she’s alive.

Evsei, the crazy fucker, wanted to gut Katie with a steak knife right there in the apartment, then dump both bodies in front of Lennon before hoisting him onto a meat hook. A regular family reunion. The Russian was absolutely blood crazy. No wonder young Mikal had been so eager to strike out on his own.

Wilcoxson needed Katie alive. That was the only thing that mattered. He also needed to figure out a way to let Evsei take his revenge on Lennon—a walking dead man, anyway—and extricate Katie and himself from the situation. And then allow both of them to take an extended vacation without having to worry about looking over his shoulder the whole time. Unlike the pathetic Italian mob, the Russian mafiya had tentacles.

But Wilcoxson also needed that $650,000 recovered. Fieuchevksy knew nothing about his son’s plan to rob the bank robbers; in fact, he was still waiting for an explanation as to why his son was meeting with bank robbers in the first place.

So Wilcoxson whipped up a little speech.

“I made a few calls,” he told the Russian. “Your son was not involved in that bank robbery.”

Fieuchevsky’s eyes closed and his lips tightened.

“He was approached by one of the robbers—this Patrick Lennon—who presented your son with an investment opportunity. Lennon needed seed money to bankroll his next job, and your son gave him $10,000. In return, your son was promised six and a half times that amount—$65,000.”

“But,” Fieuchevsky started, “I gave him money.”

“The important thing to remember is that your son, Mikal, approached this as a business deal. He didn’t know he was dealing with a bank heister.”

“What did he need the money for?”

“Your son is the victim here. Remember that.”

“Didn’t I give him enough?”

“Evsei,” said Wilcoxson. “Listen to me. How would you like to kill this bank robber guy, and also make a lot of money in the process?”

This stopped the Mad Russian. He listened intently to Wilcoxson’s plan—the details spinning out on the spot.

To Wilcoxson’s surprise, he nodded.

“Good,” Wilcoxson said. “Let me get the tape recorder.”

Flagged

BY HIS THIRD BOILERMAKER, THE WORLD SEEMED TO make more sense. Sure, his house was burning … burnt … extinguished … but so what? That’s why God made insurance. Saugherty watched Dominick’s, looking for his boy, the bank robber. Sooner or later, he had to come back out the front. Sooner or later, he had to go for his $650,000. Sooner or later, Saugherty would get to finish the job he started late last night.

Somebody tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey, buddy—what you lookin’ at over there?”

Saugherty turned to face the guy standing to his right. The man was big and pasty, with oversized tortoiseshell glasses and a bushy black moustache.

Saugherty opened his mouth to speak, but he didn’t have the chance to answer the question. A fist smashed his nose, and then another hit the back of his head as he slid off of the stool. Saugherty held up a hand to protest, but somebody grabbed it by the wrist, then snapped his forearm in half.

After that, he lost track of the fists and shoes.

A Killing in the Sun

THE CONVERTED WAREHOUSE SEEMED DESERTED—NO lights on in the windows, no cars in the small parking lot to the left. But Lennon knew the place had to be lousy with Russians. Especially after this morning. They were probably lined up, waiting to take turns. Russian brothers, friends, fathers. With guns. Knives. Probably chainsaws and rabid attack dogs, too.

And Katie.

How did they find her so quickly? Or put the two of them together, for that matter? Next to no one knew anything about Lennon’s family. Bling knew, but Bling was dead. The Russians had worked the network fast. That, or Katie had somehow heard the heist had gone wrong, and somehow figured out that the Russians were behind it, and went looking for payback, and now this. But that was a lot of somehows and maybes.

The other troubling possibility, of course, was that Katie was part of this whole setup, and was using herself as bait to lure Lennon out in the open so that he could be killed.

Either way, not cheery thoughts.

Neither was the fact that the Italian gangster back there had pretty much handed him a gun and told him to go kill a bunch of Russians. Likely, enemies in some Philadelphia turf war. Lennon didn’t want to be in the middle of that shit.

Now, standing in the bright sun that baked Delaware Avenue, Lennon had nothing but these thoughts … and two loaded guns. If this were an action thriller, Lennon supposed he would also happen to be a master burglar, and would know how to sneak into virtually any building. But Lennon was not a burglar—he was a getaway driver. The studio looked huge, and probably had a dozen side entrances, but Lennon had no idea how to navigate any of them. He didn’t know any Vietnam-style diversionary tactics.

Lennon pressed two fingers to his neck.

Ah, fuck it, he thought.

He pressed the buzzer next to the tag marked INTES STUDIOS.

The intercom crackled. “Yes?”

“Yo,” Lennon said, in his best Philly accent. “We gotcher guy out heah.”

“Yes, bring him in, please. Down the hall, to your right.” There was a sharp buzz, and a lock mechanism opened.

Okay then.

Plastic signs directed Lennon through a lobby, down a slender hallway, to the right, and to another right. The doors marked INTES were already propped open with wooden shims. Inside was a lounge, and beyond that, a window-paneled recording studio.

Lennon had both guns in his hands and was ready to start blasting at will. But he wasn’t ready for what awaited him inside the studio.

There was only one guy, standing inside a glass recording booth. A tall, swarthy man with gray hair slicked back on his thick skull, pointing a shotgun at him.

There was a tiny static pop, and a voice came over the speakers.

“Hello, Mr. Lennon.”

It wasn’t the guy standing there. The voice was distorted, warped. Its owner was nowhere in sight.

Lennon aimed his guns at the man in front of him anyway. Even though it was an awful shot, going through glass. These Russians probably planned it that way. He didn’t have much of a chance of hitting him, not with shattering glass knocking his bullets out of line. And long before that, the man could easily pull his trigger and spray Lennon with a cone-shaped burst. Not to mention there were probably other gunmen hidden around the room, keeping their sights trained on him. It was a turkey shoot. Lennon was the turkey.

“We work for Evsei Fieuchevsky. His son, Mikal, is missing. You were one of the last people to see him.”

That voice. Even with the distortion, Lennon could tell it wasn’t Russian. The diction was too clean. It also had a nagging familiarity. Lennon recognized not the tone, but the way this guy put words together. He couldn’t quite place it.

“Mr. Fieuchevsky has your girlfriend at another location. He very badly wants his son back.”

Lennon darted his eyes around the studio, looking for a mirror that could be two-way. The speaker was watching him. Waiting for reactions.

“Before we discuss terms, Mr. Fieuchevksy would like to play something for you. A love song.”

A what?

There was a click, a slight hiss over the speakers, and then a man coughing. “Okay,” the voice, presumably on a tape, said. “‘Life,’ take five.” A run of guitar notes, then silence, then loud strumming at a march tempo, almost like a funeral dirge. A minor chord. After two bars, a fuzzy bass and a muted drum machine kicked in. Then vocals:

I can see the writing on the wall

When I hear you coming down the hall

Have you finished all that you’ve begun?

I can feel my life coming undone

The song continued, but the volume dropped low, so that it played over the background.

“That song, ‘Life Come Undone,’ was written and performed by Mikal Fieuchevsky. It was one of many tracks from the album he had been recording during the past few weeks.”

The song continued beneath the speaker’s voice, almost as if a bizarre spoken-word segment had been appended to the middle of the recording.

“You see, Mr. Lennon, Mikal isn’t just this man’s son. He’s the future of rock music. And you’d better pray to God he is alive and well.”

Lennon stared at the quiet Russian through the glass. From the sound of that piece of shite, he thought, it’s probably better he stays missing.

Living Expenses

EVSEI HAD INSISTED ON THAT LAST BIT. PLAYING HIS son’s lame-ass song. Wilcoxson had tried to explain that Lennon wouldn’t give a shit, that Evsei should stick to the plan and make his demands as quickly as possible.

But the Mad Russian refused to bend. He had sent one of his guys into Intes Studios in the early morning hours to recover the unfinished digital recordings, and had spent some time listening through the rough tracks at home, crying and drinking Stoli and listening to portions again. This was my son, he’d said. That bank robber will hear what he destroyed. Evsei had tried to play some songs for Wilcoxson, but he had demurred, insisting that they’d better stick to their schedule, otherwise they risked losing Lennon.

Whatever.

“Let us get down to it,” Wilcoxson said from a master control booth equipped with a video monitor overlooking both the lounge and studio. “You committed a particular crime yesterday, one that resulted in the exchange of $650,000. To spare your girlfriend, you will bring that money here, and give it to Mr. Fieuchevsky.”

Wilcoxson watched Lennon’s face on the monitor carefully. He didn’t react, but he knew that inside, the guy had to be reeling. Wilcoxson badly wanted to make him flinch. Just once. Make him speak. Plead. Beg.

Instead, Lennon just stared at them.

Wilcoxson exhaled, then started speaking again. “Mr. Lennon, you don’t know—

Cigar Time

“—ABOUT YOUR GIRLFRIEND’S CONDITION, DO YOU?”

Condition. Hmmm.

“We’ve left you something on the couch. Go ahead. Take a look.”

Lennon lowered his left pistol slightly, then looked. There was a white plastic wand resting on top of a pillow. Careful to keep his right hand aimed at the Russian—useless gesture as it was—Lennon tucked his other pistol in his waistband and slowly walked to the couch. He picked up the object. It looked like a thermometer case, with a little plastic window. The space inside the window was white, except for a thin blue line that bisected it.

“It’s not easy, getting a urine sample from an unwilling woman. We had to bring her around again, force her to submit, then render her unconscious for our own safety. Chloroform is a nasty, sloppy chemical. Crude.”

Lennon stared at the blue line, finally realizing.

“Not good for the baby.”

Realizing how stupid he had been.

That explained the secrecy, the weird moods. Of course. She hadn’t wanted to distract him from the bank plans. That was Katie. Anything important always waited until after a job. More connections formed in Lennon’s head. That was why she had insisted on somewhere nice—a resort—even though they had spent most of the winter lazing around. She had wanted the day to be special. An infusion of cash, a beautiful view, sunshine, an announcement.

Pregnant.

But who … ?

Lennon felt the room tip slightly on its axis.

Three For Flinching

WILCOXSON SAW IT: LENNON’S FACE TWITCHED. HIS knees even appeared to buckle for an instant. He had gotten to him. Hit him in the space between the plates of armor. Lennon was going to do anything he wanted. The rest was academic.

“So listen carefully, Mr. Lennon. Listen to mommy.”

Wilcoxson pressed PLAY, and the tape he’d prepared started spinning.

“Patrick, it’s me. The time is 11:43, Saturday, March 30th. I am here in Philadelphia, not elsewhere as previously arranged. I came back. They tell me you’re alive, and that you are supposed to bring them what they want, otherwise they’re going to kill me. This is what they told me to say. I’ll be unharmed and released if you do what they say.” A pause; some murmuring. “See you soon.”

Wilcoxson pressed STOP, then looked at Lennon on the video screen. The poor guy was working hard, trying to keep the emotions about Katie stuffed out of the way. After all, Wilcoxson had taught him years ago that the secret to any successful heist was taking human failure out of the equation. That meant taking humanity out of the equation. Hunger, lust, anger, joy had no place in a bank robbery. Somebody pops your partner, the guy you’ve been pulling heists with since fifth grade? Forget about it. Cry later; make your getaway now.

But this was easier said than done. Wilcoxson was sure that Lennon could think of nothing but Katie, and what might be happening to her. Russian fuckers, doping her and forcing her to pee into a cup. Rough hands over her. Tying her up. Stripping her. Probably smirking. Yes, Wilcoxson was sure it was eating Lennon up alive. It would eat him up, too, if the roles were reversed.

“I want you to drop those guns.”

And Lennon instantly lowered them. The man had a strange, blank look on his face, as if the only way to keep emotion in check was to completely unplug from reality.

“Drop them. On the ground.”

He did, like a zombie.

“Good. You’re on your way to saving the lives of your girlfriend and your unborn child. And by the way, congratulations. Now Mr. Fieuchevsky has a few parting words for you, before you go to recover the money.”

The Russian needed no prodding. He emerged from the booth, shotgun in hand, with a wicked smile like a Doberman bearing its teeth.

Wilcoxson had to watch this very carefully. Fieuchevsky had insisted on something, anything, to calm the raging forces inside. They had spent fifteen minutes up in Wilcoxson’s Rittenhouse Square apartment negotiating how much punishment Lennon should receive this afternoon. The Russian wanted carte blanche; as long as the bank robber could walk, he could recover the money. Wilcoxson said no, absolutely not. You can’t demoralize him right away. You have to give him some shred of hope, get what you want, then crush him like a bug. Save some for later, Evsei, he’d pleaded. You’ll get your chance.

The negotiations got down to specifics: after a heated exchange, Wilcoxson finally agreed to allow the Russian three body blows with the butt of the shotgun. No head, no chest, no groin. Then let Lennon walk away, and go bring back the money.

Personally, Wilcoxson thought the internal pain—wondering what was happening to Katie this afternoon—was punishment enough. But the Russian thought differently.

And as it turned out, Fieuchevsky threw all their negotiations out the window. The first blow was a rifle-butt hit to the face. Lennon’s head snapped in the opposite direction, and a geyser of crimson fluid sprayed out of his mouth. He staggered backward, hands flailing out, reaching for something to steady himself.

Christ, this Russian was a cocksucker.

Second blow: right to the chest, while Lennon was recovering from the first. A jackhammer shot to the ribs and protective sack around the heart. Jesus. Lennon was powerless to fight back. Fighting back would mean disaster for Katie.

Wilcoxson could have announced the third blow ahead of time. Of course. Groin. Now Lennon was on the floor, clawing at the industrial carpet, presumably trying to dig his way out of the studio. The man had better pray Katie carried this baby to term; it didn’t look like Lennon was going to have much luck reproducing in the future. Not with a shot like that.

Wilcoxson had to intervene when it looked like Fieuchevsky was going for a fourth, a fifth, and maybe even a seventeenth shot. He pressed the mike button and said: “Go now, Mr. Lennon. Save your family’s life. Report here tomorrow. Noon.”

Fieuchevsky stood there, shotgun hoisted up in the air with both hands, looking confused. Then he remembered himself and lowered the gun. He looked as disappointed as a man could.

Lennon crawled out of the studio.

Wilcoxson flicked off the mike and breathed. This might actually work.

“Shit,” said Holden Richards, standing up from behind the partition. “Remind me never to be on the other side of that gun.”

Anatomy of a Double Cross

HOLDEN HAD BEEN HIDING BEHIND THAT FUCKING partition for an hour now, waiting for Lennon to show up. It wasn’t comfortable, and his neck and back ached like a mother-fucker after that crazy shit yesterday.

Yesterday.

Fifteen minutes after the Wachovia job.

Wilcoxson had said, No sweat. The Russians are gonna pull their van out in front of you guys, surround you, put hoods over your heads, take you somewhere, pop the other guys, let you go.

Yeah, they pulled their van out all right.

Best Holden could figure it, Lennon was going too fast, and the Russians didn’t have time to get out in front like they had planned. So they just gunned it, and smashed right into the Subaru.

Sure, Holden had been bracing for a sudden stop, but not that fucking kind of stop. The Forester achieved liftoff, spun in the air a couple of times, landed top-first on the wet mud next to the Schuylkill River, then slid a while, so long that Holden was starting to think they were going to end up in the river, and that would be it. But no. The car skidded to a halt, the Russians got their act together and finally—finally—surrounded them with those crazy black submachine guns they got, but it didn’t matter. Lennon was gone, convulsing and spitting before he passed out. Bling was still awake, so Holden started hammering his face with his elbow. Who cares? Nigger was going down a tube anyway.

Truth be told, Holden felt a little bad about Bling. He was the guy who’d introduced him to Wilcoxson in the first place, vouched for him. Holden had no idea there was a loose network of dudes in his profession, scattered across the country. It was like the Mafia, but not, at the same time. Just guys who knew other guys, vouching for each other. So Bling vouched for Holden, and met Wilcoxson one night for dinner at that steak joint, Smith and Wollensky, had himself a fat Montana prime rib. Wilcoxson told him he had a future. He could always spot talent, he said.

And that was it. Then nothing, for months. Bling used him for a couple of jobs, nothing big. Wilcoxson didn’t call him for shit.

Which bugged Holden.

Bling was fine, but he never tapped him for the big heists, the kind that Wilcoxson said he was ready to pull. He wanted Wilcoxson to give him something that would set him up. He was tired of kicking around his same old West Philly apartment. You didn’t see Bling around the neighborhood—Negro was out kickin’ it in resort hotels.

So when the call finally came from Wilcoxson a few weeks back, Holden said yes, not even a thought to it.

The call from Bling came the next day. Wilcoxson had vouched for him, instead of Bling doin’ it the other way around. A nice fat score, Bling told him. “Don’t fuck it up,” he said. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep flapping your gums there, Bling. Holden knew what Wilcoxson was really up to, and Bling didn’t. Fuck Bling. This was his ticket in. No more West Philly decaying mansion shit—hello, resort hotel circuit.

Wilcoxson told him, “Holden, I need somebody I can trust.” The implication: Bling was somebody he couldn’t trust. All Holden had to do, Wilcoxson said, was keep him posted, and then have a little patience right after the job.

A little patience, yeah. And a motherfucking neck brace.

After the Russians took Bling and Lennon away—they stripped them naked and put their corpses in body bags and everything—Holden wanted to go right after the money. His gut told him to grab it and run. Forget Wilcoxson, who had promised half of the proceeds instead of the third Bling had promised. Half, third. Why not take it all?

No. That wasn’t thinking big picture. Wilcoxson could set him up. $650,000 was nothing compared to what was in the future.

Cops watch parking lots right after, Wilcoxson explained. You don’t want to go anywhere near that car. It’ll be there. Don’t worry. Holden couldn’t help worrying. Is this how the pros really did it? Bling and Lennon didn’t seem worried. Wilcoxson didn’t seem worried. But it bugged the living shit out of Holden, leaving that kind of money behind, just sitting in a parking lot in the middle of the city.

Holden spent the rest of Friday laying low, trying to keep his mind off the car and the money. Watched a few DVDs, had some take-out sushi and some Ketel One vodka, in honor of the Russians, who were down by the river that night putting Bling and Lennon down the tube. Holden looked around his cluttered apartment—the one they had used to plan the heist—and thought about packing up his shit. Actually packed up some shit, then stopped to have some more Ketel One.

Saturday morning, hungover, he got the call from Wilcoxson. There were some “complications.”

Lennon was still alive.

“Go get the car,” Wilcoxson said. “Then call me back.”

The car meaning the money. Holden had a really bad feeling about this. They couldn’t have listened to him yesterday? Listened to how motherfucking stupid it was to leave that much money just sittin’ around in a parking lot?

Holden hopped a SEPTA green-line trolley out to Nineteenth and Market, then walked the few blocks to the lot. He walked up and down the rows, looking. He looked some more, then went back over everything again.

No car.

No car, no money.

He called Wilcoxson, who was in the middle of some weird shit, it sounded like, and told him the bad news.

“Fucking Lennon,” he said. “Okay, hang tight. I’m going to call you back.”

Twenty minutes went by before Wilcoxson called him back. “I want you to meet me at my apartment. We’re going to get our money back. Bring somebody you can trust.”

Sounded good to Holden. He just hadn’t counted on crouching down behind a sound partition for close to an hour waiting for that mute bastard.

Finally, Lennon arrived and there was some back and forth, with Wilcoxson talking to him over a speaker, his voice all modified and shit. Holden was impressed; Wilcoxson had pulled together a plan fairly quickly, even with the Russian involved. “Don’t worry about the Russian being there,” Wilcoxson had told Holden over the phone. “We’re going to take care of him today. Let him join his son.”

And now, there Lennon went, broken and gushing, out the door again, off to recover the $650,000 from wherever he’d stashed it. If he wanted to see his knocked-up ho again, he would be bringing it back here tomorrow, high noon.

Holden stood up from his hiding spot and his knees cracked. Shit. He was stiff as hell, and his neck and back still hurt from that car wreck yesterday.

He felt the pistol in the right pocket of his starter jacket. The plan was, wait for the Russian to come out of the booth, along with Wilcoxson. Then, when Wilcoxson gave the signal, he was supposed to shoot the Russian in the head. “The studio is soundproof—nobody’s going to hear a thing,” Wilcoxson had reassured him.

Here came the Russian, holding his own gun in his hands. The Russian smiled uncomfortably at Holden. Holden nodded back, careful to show no expression on his face.

“That went fairly well, didn’t it?” said Wilcoxson, who popped out of a small door to the right. “Tomorrow, Evsei, you will have your revenge, and some money to ease the pain.”

The Russian nodded. He didn’t look happy about the arrangements. Not at all. He certainly wasn’t going to be happy about what Wilcoxson had planned, either.

Then again, neither was Holden.

Why settle for $325,000? He already knew the whole deal. Lennon was bringing the cash from the Wachovia job here tomorrow, in exchange for his woman.

Holden shot the Russian in the head first.

Wilcoxson looked surprised—he hadn’t given the signal yet. But not half as surprised as when Holden pointed the gun at him.

There was nothing to worry about. The studio was soundproof.

SATURDAY P.M. [LATER]

I can imagine them hitting the sack after one of those robberies, just laughing their heads off and having fun.

—PSYCHOLOGIST FRANK FARLEY, ON

BANK ROBBERS CRAIG PRITCHERT

AND NOVA GUTHRIE

The House on Oregon Avenue

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, IT WAS QUITE A BARGAIN: An empty row house in South Philly.

A doctor, with malpractice insurance problems and a suspended license, to attend to his multiple wounds.

Bottle of Jameson. Stack of frozen dinners and a small microwave.

Bottle of aspirin.

Plastic digital alarm clock.

Two pistols—both .38 Sig Sauers.

Six boxes of ammunition.

Price tag: $325,000.

Lennon had returned to Dominick’s restaurant that afternoon and put forth a straightforward business proposition, in writing: He needed food, shelter, and medical attention. In return, Perelli would receive $325,000, half of the proceeds from the Wachovia job, upon its recovery. He wrote that the Russians had his girlfriend, and that they demanded the money from the Wachovia heist or they were going to execute her. And their unborn child. Perelli was a father; Lennon didn’t think it would hurt to play on the man’s familial sympathies. He added that he had a plan to recover the bank loot, as well as bury the Russians. All he needed was time to recover and heal.

And think about his familial sympathies later.

Perelli agreed.

Perelli not only agreed, but had insisted on the suit, too. He got off on the whole idea of Lennon as a heister under his employ.

“A bank robber can’t be running around in a Father fuckin’ Judge sweatshirt, for fuck’s sake,” he’d said. “Did Machine Gun Kelly wear a sweatshirt? Did Johnny Dillinger?”

So when Perelli dispatched the unlicensed sawbones, he also sent along a guy to take Lennon’s measurements. The suit would be ready in a couple of hours, Perelli promised.

Lennon didn’t really care about the suit. He cared about getting Katie back, getting the money back, and getting the fuck out of Philadelphia. Then he would think about this baby thing. It was too much right now. In the meantime, he ate, he drank enough to dull the pain, he rested. He woke up when the doctor arrived, and tried not to cry out when the doc mauled sensitive parts. Listened to him tsk-tsk, then resume work. Cautioned Lennon against drinking. Whatever. Then the doctor scribbled his pager number on a blue napkin and left. Lennon drank more Jameson’s and fell back asleep.

The doorbell rang. It was a young kid, delivering the suit. A black Ermenegildo Zegna, from a shop called Boyd’s on Chestnut Street. Included was a dark blue Stacy Adams dress shirt, black socks with dark blue clocks on them, and a pair of black Giorgio Brutini shoes with a single strap buckle. Perelli had also thrown in a pair of sunglasses—Dior Homme by Hedi Slimane. The only items not plucked directly from the pages of British GQ were some undergarments by Hanes. Jesus fuck, tighty-whiteys. They must have been a personal favorite of Perelli’s.

Lennon took a slow, wince-inducing shower. His face was tragic-looking; in places, it had the pattern of a tie-dyed shirt in blacks and purples and blues. But he was pleasantly surprised to find that all of the clothes fit perfectly. Even the tighty-whiteys. He dressed himself, even putting on the Giorgio Brutinis. He loaded the Sig Sauers, then put one in each jacket pocket. He pressed two fingers against his carotid artery.

Then he lay down on top of the single mattress sitting in the middle of the empty master bedroom, and closed his eyes.

A few fevered hours later, his eyes popped open.

Three seconds later, the alarm went off. He was already dressed.

It was time to go.

The Grave By the River

HOLDEN RICHARDS FOUND THE PIPE, NO SWEAT. Mikal, the Russian’s kid, had told him about it. Over on the Camden side, not too far from the bridge. That narrowed it down. There wasn’t too much new construction over here near the bridge—with the aquarium, and the Tweeter Center, and the rest of the tourist crap—tourists in Camden, if you can believe it—hardly enough room for a cockroach with a hard-on to squeeze through.

But here they were, trying to fit another tourist attraction along the cramped waterfront. A children’s museum.

Boy, would the kids be surprised to discover what Uncle Holden was dumping down their drainage pipe.

First down, the Russian. Let him and his kid have a happy reunion together. The Russian’s head remained remarkably intact, despite the point-blank shot to his face. The bullet entered his forehead, then exploded on its way out of the skull. The back of his head was shit, but his sturdy good looks would be preserved for the ages. As he let go of the Russian’s ankles, Holden wondered if he and his boy would end up cheek to cheek in the pipe, and what future archeologists would make of that.

Next up: Wilcoxson. Bank robber extraordinaire. His face hadn’t fared as well. Holden had popped a cap straight on, and Wilcoxson’s face was pretty much ripped off, leaving a mess of pulp behind. He screamed for a while, his legs flailing around like he was riding an invisible bicycle. Thank God for the soundproofing, huh? Eventually, the fury died, and so did Wilcoxson.