Wheelman, The

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 just 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.

The third Wachovia suspect, Harrison Crosby, was also still at large.

Saugherty lowered the paper, and for the first time all night and morning, was filled with a gleeful kind of hope. The kind of hope that made the runny eggs and industrial-rubber sausage on his hospital tray seem edible.

The money was still out there.

Lennon wouldn’t be going through all this shit if the money wasn’t still out there, somewhere. Richards obviously didn’t know where it was, because his dumb white ass was now in the Gray Bar Hotel. This Crosby guy might be holding the loot bag, but even so, he still had to be in the city. Because Lennon was still in the city.