Mays didn’t move. The girl’s left eye opened suddenly, then closed. She pretended to still be asleep.
Curtis walked closer to Mays, then kicked the mattress. “Kendrik!”
He saw a groggy Mays struggle to turn his head. Then he opened his right eye to look at whoever was disturbing his sleep.
From under his jacket he suddenly pulled out a small snub-nosed revolver.
Oh, shit! Curtis thought as he instinctively leveled the Glock at Mays.
Then Curtis saw that Mays’s hand was shaking so severely he couldn’t keep a grip on the gun.
Curtis kicked the hand, his heavy boot causing the pistol to fly across the basement. It landed in a pile of dirty clothes.
“Sit up, you sonofabitch!” Curtis barked at Mays.
It took Mays forever to comply.
When he had finally done so, the girl turned to look at Curtis.
And Will Curtis ached.
She was as badly bruised as Kendrik’s mother. She wasn’t as young as he’d thought-she can’t be over seventeen, eighteen-and she was terribly skinny from the drug abuse. Her skin sagged from her small frame, and Curtis could see her bones clearly delineated under the loose flesh.
When Kendrik moved his hand to scratch his head, the girl flinched.
She’s conditioned to getting hit for the slightest thing…
“You,” Curtis said to her, kicking a ratty dress toward her. “Get dressed and get the hell out of here!”
She looked back wordlessly, her sunken eyes wide.
Then she looked to Mays, seemingly for permission.
Mays, his head cocked, stared belligerently at Curtis, his look saying, Who the fuck does this honky think he is, aiming a fucking Glock at Kendrik Fucking Mays?
Curtis motioned with the pistol toward the female. “Go! Now!”
Kendrik said, “Go on, bitch. I deal with you later.”
She slid the dress over her head, not bothering to put on any panties, and then moved to the wooden stairs. She looked back over her shoulder, then turned and went upstairs as fast as she could.
Curtis, the pistol aimed at Mays’s face, handed him the Wanted poster.
“This you?” Will asked.
Mays looked at it, then at Curtis. Then he smiled.
Will Curtis thought: Jesus! What rotted teeth!
At least the ones he still has.
He must be living on crystal meth.
Kendrik then said: “Fuck you! What if it is, old man?”
He spat on the floor.
“You do what it says you did?”
“Fuck you!” he repeated.
He tried to stare down Curtis. But then he suddenly started to shake uncontrollably.
After a moment, he said, “Maybe. What’s it to you?” He shook again, then tried to puff out his chest. “Yeah. I done it. All that and more. Two years ago. Why you here now?”
“I’d say, ‘May God have pity on you,’ but I think you’re past that point.”
Kendrik barked: “Fuck you, motherfucker!”
Will Curtis nodded.
And he squeezed the trigger of the Glock.
The. 45-caliber round entered Kendrik’s right cheek, making an entrance wound just below the eye that looked like a pulpy crimson hole.
Kendrik LeShawn Mays’s eyes rolled back as he suddenly slumped onto the filthy torn mattress.
When he got to the top of the stairs, Will Curtis found Kendrik’s mother standing solemnly in the middle of the shabby living room. She had her head down, her face expressionless. Her arms were tightly crossed over her chest, her hands squeezing her biceps. The girl was nowhere in sight.
“I’d like to say I’m sorry for your loss,” Will Curtis said evenly. “But you lost your boy a long time ago. That wasn’t him down there.”
She shook her head. “No, it wasn’t. You right. It ain’t no good. Ain’t none of it no good.”
She looked up and met his eyes. He saw that hers were stone cold.
“Had it coming to him,” she said. “He hurt a lot of folk, good folk, not just me. That girl? He abuse her a long time. Months. Now he won’t. And I won’t be beat up no more for his meth and shit.”
Will nodded.
He walked toward the door, then paused.
What the hell. I can’t take it with me. And Linda’s set for life.
He reached in his pants pocket and came up with a wad of cash folded over and held together with a rubber band. He peeled off five twenties and a one-dollar bill.
“This is for you,” he said, handing her the twenty-dollar bills.
Then he pulled a FedEx ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and on the one-dollar bill wrote, “Lex Talionis, Third amp; Arch, Old City.”
“You find someone to help you get Kendrik down to here. There’s a ten-thousand-dollar reward”-he paused to let that sink in-“for criminals like him. You won’t go to jail; if I have to, I’ll call and say I did it. But you make sure you get the reward money. Maybe it will help you start a new life.”
Then Will Curtis turned and went through the front door.
Behind the wheel of the rented Ford minivan, Will Curtis pulled the next envelope from the top of the stack on the dashboard. He read its bill of lading. Under “Recipient” was:
LeRoi Cheatham 2408 N. Mutter Street Philadelphia, PA 19133
Kensington-what a lovely part of town!
As least when the damn drug dealers aren’t having shoot-outs on the street corners…
He put the rented Ford minivan in gear and accelerated off the busted sidewalk.
[THREE]
Executive Command Center The Roundhouse Eighth and Race Streets, Philadelphia Sunday, November 1, 12:04:01 P.M.
“You’re on in fifty-nine seconds, Mr. Mayor,” Kerry Rapier said.
The master technician was seated in a wheeled nylon-mesh-fabric chair behind a black four-foot-wide control bank, also on wheels, that had a series of panels with buttons and dials, its main feature a keyboard with a joystick and a color video monitor. A fat bundle of cables ran from the control bank to the wall and, ultimately, to a rack of video recording and broadcasting equipment, including the soda-can-size digital video camera that, suspended at the end of a motorized boom, seemed to float overhead.
Rapier, a police department blue shirt whose soft features and impossibly small frame made him look much younger than his twenty-five years, had shoulder patches on his uniform bearing two silver outlined blue chevrons. He manipulated the joystick and the camera overhead zoomed in to tightly frame the face of the Honorable Jerome H. “Jerry” Carlucci, who stood at a dark-stained oak lectern.
Carlucci, his brown eyes smiling, said, “Son, are you sure you’re even old enough to be a policeman, let alone a corporal?”
Corporal Rapier grinned.
“With respect, Mr. Mayor, that’s not the first I’ve heard that.”
Carlucci’s brown eyes, depending on his mood, could be warm and thoughtful or intense and piercing. Large- boned and heavyset, he was a massive fifty-one-year-old with dark brown hair. He wore an impeccably tailored dark gray woolen two-piece suit with a light blue, freshly pressed dress shirt and a navy blue silk necktie that matched the silk pocket square tucked into his coat.
