Wheelman, The

by Duane Swierczynski

  “Again with the suit?”

  “It’s awfully impressive,” she said, drying her hair. “And here I thought you were lying dead in a ditch all this time.”

  “It was a pipe, but I’ll save the wild stories for another night. We have three priorities: getting the fuck out of this building, getting our money, and getting the fuck out of this city.”

  “Don’t you want to see the Liberty Bell?”

  “Right. Almost forgot about that.”

  Forensics

  LISA WOKE UP AND STARED AT THE BLOODIED SWEATSHIRT again.

  It had been balled up and pitched into a corner, along with a pair of wrinkled dress slacks, socks, and underwear. The underwear was definitely not Andrew’s. When they’d first started dating, Andrew had worn tighty-whiteys—Fruit of the Loom. Gross! Old-man underwear. No matter how tough the guy, it made his legs look like little froggy legs poking out of a diaper.

  Andrew loathed boxers; they were too baggy to wear under jeans, he said. So Lisa promptly escorted her American Express Gold card and Andrew to Boscov’s, at the Franklin Mills Mall, where they settled on the next best thing: Fruit of the Loom boxer briefs. Lisa vetoed anything close to white; Andrew went home with a half-dozen three-packs of navy blue, black, and dark gray. The tighty-whiteys went into the weekly garbage.

  The underwear balled up in the corner was a pair of blue-green plaid boxer shorts. Definitely not something Andrew would wear.

  So whose were they?

  The sweatshirt was a gray deal with navy blue letters: FATHER JUDGE HIGH SCHOOL emblazoned on the front. That wasn’t Andrew’s either—he was a St. Joe’s Prep boy. Even more disturbing were the bloodstains, which were more black than red, and still wet to the touch (gross!), near the left shoulder. The sweatshirt reeked.

  Lisa took another look at the dress slacks, at the label. Slates, size 34L, 30W. Andrew’s size exactly. And Andrew’s preferred label. He had two pair, which he wore Friday and Saturday nights alternately when he had gigs. Were these Andrew’s pants?

  And if so, why were they rolled up in a ball along with somebody else’s clothes?

  Off Gardai

  THE MOST INTERESTING PEOPLE AT THE PARTY WERE the drunk crime writer and the drunker chief of detectives. It was a writers’ party. The host was new to Rittenhouse Towers, and new to money. Apparently he had written a surprise bestselling coffee-table book called Barbers. Page after page of black-and-white photographs of old South Philly barbers, posing with their customers, with tiny write-ups under each photograph telling each barber’s life story in about 175 words.

  For a reason known only to the American public, it was a runaway smash hit, spawning a calendar, date books, posters, an ABC television special, even a line of home hair-care tools. (Which seemed to negate the very job of the old-fashioned barber, but what the hell.) The forty-something writer sat back and watched the Brinks truck pull up and shovel bales of money into his living room. He traded in his dumpy Bella Vista one-bedroom for this five-bedroom spread in one of the city’s most prestigious condos. Now he was preparing to compile a sort-of sequel, Bartenders, and had decided to show off to the rest of his old writer pals, many of whom were scraping by with $25,000-a-year gigs—if they were lucky—at one of the two competing weeklies.

  All of this Lennon gathered in about twenty minutes of cocktail-conversation eavesdropping. The only thing flowing more freely than booze was the jealousy. The condo was absolutely lousy with it.

  “You believe that? Six figures just for the calendar rights,” said one guy in a threadbare jacket and brand-new jeans.

  “It’s a fucking racket,” Lennon replied, laying on the thickest brogue he could muster. He sipped his drink, which was Sprite.

  “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Ah, me?” Lennon asked. “Donal. Donal Stark.”

  Donald Westlake was one of Lennon’s favorite crime writers, but he enjoyed Westlake’s pseudonym, Richard Stark, even more.

  “What happened … if you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Auto wreck. My face took the worst of it.”

  “It looks painful.”

  “You know, after a few of these motherfookers, it feels just fine.”

  “That accent … you from Galway?” Trying to sound all worldly-like.

  “Listowel, actually.” Fucking Galway?

  “Yeah, I thought so. You must be new at the Welcomat.”

  Lennon nodded. “Ah, yeah.”

  “I’ve been at the City Press for two years. They still got me stuck fact-checking restaurant listings. You know, if I had graduated five years earlier, dot coms would have been lining up to suck my dick.”

  “Terrible times, these are.”

  Despite the accent, Lennon tried to be boring enough to make his new friend seek conversation with someone else. Someone with ovaries, presumably. Women seemed to be at a premium at this gathering.

  Speaking of which.

  Lennon strolled over to check on Katie’s progress.

  Katie had spotted the drunk kid in the kitchen right away, and a plan was formed. She had gone over, made nice, helped him fill up his tumbler with ice cubes—slippery little suckers were sliding all over the place. Then she located an elusive bottle of Johnnie Walker Black that was tucked away, deep in a cabinet, where the party’s hosts assumed the guests wouldn’t dare venture. The kid, a real boyish-looking guy with curly black hair and delicate features, wore a wrinkled seersucker suit, and kept his line of sight on Katie’s breasts, then hips, then eyes, thinking all the time that he was artfully stealing glances at the first two. His name was Will.

  “What d’you do?” Will asked.

  “You, later,” Katie whispered, pouring more Johnnie Walker into his glass.

  “No, I meant for a liv—,” he started, then stopped himself. “Come again?”

  Good God. This was going to take all night.

  The plan: find some drunk blaggard, get him drunker, then usher him out, draped over their shoulders. The cops were looking for one or two male bandits, not a threesome.

  The plan became trickier when Lennon overheard someone say, “Hey, chief. What’s with the lights outside?”

  Fucking hell.

  “Seems we have some escaped bank robbers in the building,” the chief said.

  This was un-fucking-believable. About as un-fucking-believable as the rest of Lennon’s weekend. This shit did not happen to professionals—this was fodder for those America’s Dumbest Criminals books.

  “Say what?”

  “Yo—somebody get Will. We’ve got his next crime box, right here.”

  “Yes,” the chief continued. “I got a call twenty minutes ago—one of our retired badges works the security detail downstairs. He thinks he spotted two of the guys who pulled that 211 at Wachovia yesterday.”

  “That two-what?” someone asked.

  This was really un-fucking-believable.

  “Police code for bank robbery, Ben.”

  “Yo, Will! Come on, man, get out here!”

  Will.

  Will was the drunk guy Katie was trying to sauce up. Their escape hatch. The compiler of a “crime box.”

  “What did the robbers get away with yesterday, anyway?”

  “The bank president told me himself that it was $650,000. Probably the biggest pinch around here in a while. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “Shit. That’s almost as much as Feldman paid for this place.”

  There were nervous titters of laughter.

  “Fuck that—you know how much these Rittenhouse condos run? Don’t you keep up with Metropolitan magazine? You’d have to pull two of those Wachovia jobs to snag a pad like this.”

  Lennon walked by Katie close enough to whisper one word.

  Gardai.

  Police.

  Fugitive or Prisoner

  NO ONE NOTICED THEM LEAVE—THE PARTY WAS ALL the hell over the place, especially after the news spread that the John Dillinger gang was loose i
n the building. The elevator ride down was uneventful, too. There were uniforms everywhere, but no one seemed to want to bother with a man dressed in a clearly expensive Italian suit and a woman in a Vera Wang dress.

  Two cops did, however, want to check the identity of the man slumped between them. Yeah, him. The unconscious one.

  “We found this boy in the elevator,” Katie said, her eyes crinkled up. “I didn’t know that our building hosted frat parties from time to time.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “His name?” asked Katie. “Officer, I don’t even know his eye color—he’s out cold.”

  Will was out cold because after Katie had lured him into the hallway, Lennon had punched him twice in the head.

  “Okay, ma’am, relax.”

  “Jesus—what happened to your face?” asked the other cop, who was staring at Lennon.

  Lennon ignored him.

  “Sarkissian—check the kid’s ID.”

  One of the two uniforms reached around and fished a wallet out of Will’s back pocket. He flipped it open, rolled his eyes, and whistled. “Shit. You’re not going to believe this.”

  “What, already?”

  “This frat boy is Will Issenberg.”

  “The crime box guy? The asshole who wrote about Murph—”

  The first uniform—Sarkissian—turned back to Lennon and Katie. “Ma’am, we’re sorry for the inconvenience. We’ll take care of Mr. Issenberg from here. Just check in with Mr. Kotkiewicz at the front desk before you go, okay?”

  Mr. Kotkiewicz at the front desk was a kindly-looking guy in his fifties. “I’m really sorry about all of this,” he said, sliding a piece of paper and a pen toward them. “I just need you to write your names and apartment number on this log sheet.”

  “This really is turning into a terrorist state, isn’t it?” Katie asked.

  “I’ll also need you both to put your hands flat on the counter and spread your legs.”

  Mr. Kotkiewicz was leveling a pistol at them.

  “What is this?” Katie asked. She was also reaching up under Lennon’s jacket to grab his Sig Sauer.

  “Now!” Kotkiewicz shouted, stepping back. “Hands on the counter!”

  The entire lobby—about a half-dozen cops, and a half-dozen citizens—jolted. Guns were drawn, safeties clicked off. A uniform ran up behind Katie, hand on his holster.

  But he was too slow.

  Katie reached back and shoved the Sig Sauer up under his chin. He didn’t look surprised, more resigned.

  “We’re walking out of here,” Katie said. “You’re going to let us go, and then we’re going to let him go.” With the word “him,” she poked her hostage with the gun.

  “No,” said Kotkiewicz. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “I think this man here would disagree with you.”

  Lennon tried to process everything at once. The variables, the possible outcomes. Katie had done the right thing. If Lennon had reached for the gun, Kotkiewicz would have blasted first. But taking another cop hostage had taken things up a notch. Granted, it was a sound strategic move. That was Katie’s strength—planning—but in the abstract. Never in the moment. She’d never been along for any jobs. She’d never been tagged for a crime. Ever. They’d had two very different childhoods.

  Five seconds, and already she was staring at only two possible outcomes: fugitive or prisoner.

  His sister. Mother of his unborn nephew/niece.

  Push that shite away, Lennon thought. There were piles of problems in the world, but they could only be dealt with one at a time. Solve this one now.

  Getting out the door wasn’t the problem. The cops knew to stand down in a hostage situation—or at the very least, wait for a clean shot. Well, Lennon would be fucked if he was going to give them one. He walked behind Katie, reached around, and grabbed the hostage cop’s gun. The two men formed a Katie sandwich, one in front, one behind. They slowly moved toward the front doors.

  Revolving.

  Fuck.

  Move to the side. Hit the handicapped exit doors.

  “Don’t make a move, Patrick,” Kotkiewicz said.

  Fucker knew his name.

  Probably tagged him from his I.O. on the way in here.

  Think. Solve.

  I just need a car, Lennon thought. I’m not good with armed stickups, or note jobs, or escapes from banks, or pipes, or with hostages, or any of that shite. I’m good with a car. If I can just get Katie into a car, and me behind the wheel, we have a chance.

  The car was around the block.

  Crime Box Guy

  WILL ISSENBERG WAS NEVER RENDERED COMPLETELY unconscious. Shock had put him into a slightly vegetative state. With the first blow to the head, everything took on a numb, dreamlike quality, which reminded him of the first time he smoked pot. His IQ instantly lowered at least twenty-five points. And then with the second blow, another twenty-five points.

  But he never lost consciousness.

  So he heard everything, felt everything, and tried to keep reminding himself: remember this stuff. This is going to be great for the crime box. Remember what was said, and how it was said. Who did what and when.

  Who, what, when, where, why. The basics.

  This was going to be great. Just stay awake, and keep recording.

  The only problem was that, lying there on the carpet in the moments after the shooting, Will couldn’t remember one key detail:

  Who fired first?

  When the shooting started, Will’s eyes snapped open. Ostensibly, he saw the whole thing. But he couldn’t get the action straight in his head. In the moment, the sound of bullets and snicks and pops and shattering glass and nicks seemed to fill the lobby, immediately followed by screams and a lone, hollow moan. Who fired at whom? In what order? Who was struck first? When did the windows shatter?

  Blasts.

  Bullets.

  Smoke.

  Screams.

  Guns.

  You try to figure out what the hell happened.

  The only solid facts Will could trust were the end results, which was all he ever had when compiling his crime boxes for the City Press. Fat lot of good it did being an on-the-scene reporter. Which is when Will decided that maybe he had been wrong all of these years. Maybe he didn’t love crime reporting so much. Maybe what he really liked were the end results, neatly compiled in the police logbooks, or in legal briefs. Those were solid, understandable, safe, distant. A writer could wrap his brain around things like that.

  Live, on-the-scene reporting? That was bullshit. Schroedinger and his dead cat were right. You can’t observe something without changing it.

  Or it changing you.

  This is what Will Issenberg thought about as his lungs collapsed, and he started to lose consciousness for real.

  Free

  “RELAX, SWEETIE,” HE SAID. “JUST KEEP BREATHING.” They were temporarily stopped at a red light deep in Southwest Philly. Lennon’s left hand was on the wheel of the stolen car; his right held a torn scrap of his jacket to Katie’s stomach.

  SUNDAY a.m.

  I am spending your money to have you and your family killed. Nice, eh?

  —GEORGE “MACHINE GUN” KELLY

  Relaxing with the Paper

  SAUGHERTY READ ABOUT HIMSELF EARLY SUNDAY morning, not long after his ex-colleagues from the Philadelphia Police Department showed up for the third time to hear his story.

  You know the story. The one about how his house got invaded and torched by niggers as well as his ex-boss, Lt. Earl Mothers, all of whom just so happened to perish in the blaze, leaving Saugherty alive to pursue another black gangster into South Philly, where he was brutally assaulted by—are you getting all of this?—a hanger-on of what remained of the Italian mob, and left broken and bleeding in an alley behind a restaurant.

  Three cracked ribs, broken wrist, broken blood vessels up and down his face, two snapped fingers, internal bruising, and covered in gasoline. Saugherty thought that the gasoline was jus
t gratuitous. As if to scare him. As if the broken parts weren’t scary enough.

  By the third visit, Saugherty was getting the idea that he was the number one suspect in the mysterious death of Lt. Earl Mothers. Internal Affairs was all over this like white on rice. They sniffed a shady deal gone wrong, somewhere. Mothers was not without splotches of mud on his record. Neither was Saugherty.

  Amazingly, that wasn’t the first article to catch Saugherty’s attention Sunday morning.

  It was another one: “Ex-Cop, Reporter, Killed in Shoot-out with Robbers.”

  Saugherty had almost skipped it at first, but the word robber nagged at him. He skimmed the first paragraph and the name practically jumped off the page and smacked him in the face.

  Patrick Selway Lennon.

  And an “unidentified female accomplice.”

  Saugherty couldn’t believe what he was reading. The cops had somehow cornered two of the Wachovia heisters—Lennon, and this fuckup named Holden Richards—at the Rittenhouse Towers, one of the glitziest condos in Philly. Police found Richards upstairs, handcuffed to a pole.

  But Lennon and his mysterious female accomplice crashed a party, then tried to sneak out with one of the guests, a two-bit crime hack named Will Issenberg. An ex-cop named Johnny Kotkiewicz made the ID and tried to arrest Lennon, but his accomplice took another cop hostage, and tried to make for the door. That’s when the shooting started.

  Lennon shot first, the paper said.

  In the end, Issenberg bought it when a bullet hit his back and collapsed a lung. Kotkiewicz was shot in the throat, and died at the scene. No other officers or civilians were wounded.

  Police believed that either Lennon, his accomplice, or possibly both were injured as they fled the scene in a stolen squad car. Pursuing officers lost the pair in a chase that extended from Rittenhouse Square deep into West Philly.