Wheelman, The

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