Wheelman, The

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