In a tone he hoped showed he was uninterested, he replied: “Yeah, that’d be my guess. Pension check, IRS refund, maybe some of that stimulus money the government’s been giving away. That’d be a good reason they want it delivered to the right person.”
Will Curtis looked her in the eyes and could see she was considering her options.
She said, “I sign for it. Kendrik my boy. I see he gets it.”
Curtis shook his head. “Sorry, ma’am. I’m just a delivery guy. And I got to follow rules. I guess I’ll come back-”
She slammed the door shut in his face.
What the hell? he thought.
Then he could hear the chain clanking against the inside. The door swung all the way open.
“Hurry up,” she said shakily. “Maybe he got money, he don’t beat me no more. Maybe he move out for good.”
Curtis looked around the inside of the house. It was a shambles. The only furniture was a threadbare sofa with torn cushions and two white plastic patio chairs.
“You know that’s not right. No one should beat you.”
She said, “I knows. I do. But he don’t mean to. It’s drugs. They make him mean. Different, you know?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t know. I can’t begin to understand it. Where is he?”
She pointed to the floor, indicating the basement, and started to cry. “He was such a sweet little boy. The street turned him bad…”
“That, I know.”
“What?”
He held up the envelope, then grabbed the tab at the top, peeling it open. He reached in and pulled out a sheet. It was a Wanted poster from the listing of Megan’s Law fugitives at CrimeFreePhilly. com, one he’d downloaded and printed in his basement.
Next to a color mug shot of an angry-looking young black man with a full beard and dreadlocks was:
Name (First, Middle, LAST):
Kendrik LeShawn MAYS
Description:
Black Male, 5'9', 200 lbs.
Date of Birth:
10/19/1988
Last Known Address:
2620 Wilder Street
City, State, ZIP:
Philadelphia, PA 19147
Convicted of:
3123 Involuntary deviantsexual intercourse amp; rapeof an unconscious orunaware person
Phila Police Dept Case No.: 2008-18-063914
Kendrik LeShawn Mays’s mother raised her eyebrows. But she did not appear at all surprised. Nor at all concerned that Will Curtis had her son’s Wanted sheet.
She sighed.
“Yeah,” she said, “that him. Guess he lied. Said he took care of that.”
She looked at Curtis. “No check, huh?”
More like a reality check, Curtis thought.
He shook his head.
“No check.”
Will Curtis went down the unstable wooden steps into the basement. His left hand slid along the wooden handrail, and his right hand, holding the. 45-caliber pistol, followed the wall of mostly busted Sheetrock.
There was some light from the small window at the far end of the room-the one the rats had gone through- but not enough for him to make out anything but vague shapes in the pitch dark.
There was a stench, although not like the putrid smell that had assaulted his olfactory senses at the front door. The odor here was a sickly sweet stench that became stronger the farther down the stairs he went. So far, though, it hadn’t triggered his gag reflex, and he was grateful for such small favors.
At the foot of the stairs, Curtis stopped and listened. He could hear snoring about midway in the room.
That’s two people snoring!
One deep as hell.
He felt around on the wall for a light switch. As best he could tell there wasn’t one, just busted-up drywall.
He took another step, reaching farther down the wall, then felt his foot catch on a rope or cord or something.
Some kind of trip wire?
He carefully reached down with his left hand till he felt it.
It was a vinyl-covered electrical extension cord that had been run from upstairs. When he tugged on it, something attached to its far end started sliding across the basement floor toward him.
He pulled and pulled, and finally found at the end what had once been the guts of a lamp. All that was left from the lamp was a threaded metal rod attached to the receptacle that held a lone bare lightbulb. His thumb found the stick push-switch on the receptacle, and after positioning himself in a crouch and aiming his pistol in the direction of the snoring, Curtis pushed the switch on.
The bare bulb burned brightly, damn near blinding him until his eyes adjusted.
The only response from the middle of the room was another loud, deep snore.
After his eyes adjusted, Will Curtis could not believe what he was seeing.
The basement was the worst thing he’d ever seen in his life. It was completely trashed. The Sheetrock walls were all busted, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to them in search of whatever treasure might be hidden behind them. And then he saw why: The wiring had been ripped from the wall power outlets and light switches.
It probably was cheap aluminum, not copper, wiring, making the effort mostly worthless. Idiots.
Desperate idiots…
Trash was strewn all across the floor. There were piles upon piles of dirty clothes that hadn’t been touched in years. Dust and dirt were everywhere. And, in a far corner by a plastic bucket, he saw the source of the sickly sweet stench: mounds of dried human waste.
Indescribable filth!
Animals wouldn’t live in this!
Just then, a rat ran across his booted feet, away from the light and toward the darkness of a far corner, along the way scattering what looked like rolling waves of cockroaches.
Jesus H. Christ!
This place should’ve been condemned a decade ago!
Then he looked to the middle of the room, to the source of the snoring.
There he saw a dirty and torn mattress set up on wooden pallets-presumably to keep it safe from the sea of cockroaches below-and on the mattress were two human forms lying side by side.
One, the deep snorer, was a black male whose coarse face made him look older than his picture in the Wanted mug shot. His hair was cut short, and he had a goatee.
The other was a very young black girl.
Twelve? Thirteen?
That sonofabitch!
Both were naked, the girl curled under a dirty bath towel she used as a makeshift blanket. Kendrik had a rolled-up jacket under his head, his right hand under it and his left hand resting on the girl’s exposed bony buttock. It looked as if they had been spooning but the girl had crawled forward, away from Kendrik.
They look so dirty-so foul.
Will Curtis called out: “Kendrik Mays!”
