Wheelman, The

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.