“We know it,” Payne said. “What’s this you just said about a Principal Bazelon being murdered?”
“We got the call from Twelfth District this morning that she’d died in her sleep,” Iglesia began. “But I just found out she really died during a home invasion by a really bad dude named Xpress Jones. ..”
“… and now part of that crowd is taking Xpress down to collect that ten-grand reward,” Iglesia finished some five minutes later. “It being a homicide and all, I thought you’d want to be the ones who grabbed him.”
“Give me this animal’s name again, Javier,” Payne said, pulling out his notepad and flipping to a clean page.
“Xpress Smith. Xavier Smith, aka Xpress. Black male, twenty-four.”
Payne wrote it down. “Okay. Got it. Any unusual features to look for to ID him?”
Javier snorted. “Other than being attached to an angry mob of wannabe gangbangers? And the ten-g price tag on his head? Don’t worry, Sergeant. You can’t miss him. Xpress is pretty messed up.”
“Thanks, Javier. We’ve already got someone down there. I’ll give him a heads-up.”
“Later,” Javier said.
Payne broke the connection, then slipped the cell phone back in the left front pocket of his pants.
Matt Payne looked at Jason Washington and said, “So we have a mother bringing in her dead son, and now we have street-justice punks cashing in a really bad guy? And those first eight pop-and-drops. Killadelphia, indeed. The vigilantes-and now we know there’s at least one-are everywhere. Worse, I’m beginning to think Operation Clean Sweep has been commandeered by Five-Eff.”
“Well, Francis Fuller’s reward system is certainly superior to ours in attracting attention,” Washington said. “To start with, he’s not a cop. And, as we well know, nobody on the street wants to talk to cops.”
Payne grunted.
He said, “Carlucci is really going to blow his cork when he hears about the street vigilantes turning in this thug and that Kendrik’s doer is still loose and, we can presume, still active. Next time you see my head, it’ll probably be on a platter.”
Payne looked at Washington a long moment, then sighed. He said, “You’re smarter than I am, Jason. What the hell do I do next?”
“Applying for the monastery ever cross your mind?”
[THREE]
Jefferson and Mascher Streets, Philadelphia Sunday, November 1, 1:55 P.M.
“Bobby, what the hell does five fucking minutes matter?” Thomas “Little Tommie” Turco glanced at his wristwatch and anxiously tapped his steel-toed work boot. “The permit says two o’clock start time. We’re wasting daylight, not to mention burning rental money. Go on and swing it.”
Puffing on a stub of a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth, the bulky, thirty-eight-year-old Turco-who was anything but little-stood on the step outside the cab of a red-and-white Link-Belt crane he’d rented two hours earlier. A weathered cardboard sign, cut somewhat square, was taped to the door of the cab. It was poorly hand- lettered with a black permanent-ink marker: TURCO DEMOLITION amp; EXCAVATION. NOT FOR HIRE. UNDER CONTRACT WITH CITY OF PHILA HUD.
“You got it, boss,” said Bobby “the Ballbuster” Bucco, who was sitting at the controls. He fired up the Link- Belt’s diesel engine.
Little Tommie then gave a thumbs-up to Jimmy “Dirtball” Turco. His cousin was at the controls of a massive Caterpillar D3K bulldozer that sat next to a pair of Bobcats with front-end loading buckets and a line of five heavy- duty dump trucks waiting to haul away debris. The bright yellow, nine-ton dozer roared to life. Then its twin tracks and giant front blade began kicking up clouds of dust as the dozer started pushing into piles the scattered, busted debris of the onetime residential neighborhood.
This was the second time in the last ten days that Turco’s beefy crew-not one of the men weighed an ounce under two-fifty-had worked this Northern Liberties job site.
The first time, during a solid week of working dawn to dusk every day but Sunday, they had taken almost the entire block down to bare earth. Little Tommie himself would have admitted that it wasn’t really all that impressive an accomplishment, if only because over the years almost half of the row houses had burned and their shells had been removed by crews from the City of Philadelphia. Turco’s equipment only had to scrape up and truck off the concrete footings, and sometimes not even those were left, just weed-choked dirt.
The reason Turco’s crew had not been able to finish the job all at once-and had to return today-could be explained in part by the signs recently posted on the property.
There were four shiny new large ones, four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood painted bright white and nailed to four-by-four-inch posts, each erected on a corner of the block. Lettered in black was: MOVING PHILLY FORWARD! COMING SOON TO NORTHERN LIBERTIES: 3,000 NEW JOBS! PROJECT COST TO TAXPAYERS: ZERO! ANOTHER FINE DEVELOPMENT FOR YOUR FUTURE FROM THE PHILADELPHIA ECONOMIC GENTRIFICATION INITIATIVE A PROJECT OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA HOUSING amp; URBAN DEVELOPMENT COUNCILMAN H. RAPP BADDE, JR., CHAIRMAN
And there were a score or more smaller signs that had been made with a stencil. They had been spray- painted on the exterior doors and walls of the last five standing row houses on the block, all of which were in a group at the southwest corner of the job site.
The stencils read: OFFICIAL NOTICE! CONDEMNED PROPERTY! CERTIFIED UNFIT FOR HUMAN HABITATION UNDER STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA URBAN REDEVELOPMENT LAW NO TRESPASSING!
Forty-five days earlier, the entire block had officially been declared a blight and then condemned.
Every owner of the individual properties had been served a notice of condemnation that week, and all-except for the five holdouts-had let expire the thirty-day period for challenging the condemnation.
They had taken their checks-most of the owners grumbling that PEGI paid them only pennies on the dollar for their properties, never mind that many of the houses had been genuine hazards and public nuisances, or damn close to it-and moved on.
They understood that they were powerless to fight the inevitable. And change was inevitable. They’d spent at least the last year looking at the looming twenty-one-story Hops Haus complex just three blocks to the south and right next to the fancy new Schmidt’s Brewery development.
The five holdouts, however, were not easily persuaded. They had protested every day, marching with signs and chanting, even as Turco’s crews and their heavy equipment created an intimidating environment while tearing down the rest of the block right up to their doorsteps.
The holdouts had even plastered home-printed handbills all over the neighborhood, including on the brand- new bright white signs at the four corners of the block. The handbills displayed a crude image of a black politician wearing a tiny black bow tie above the words: COUNCILMAN RAPP BADDE WANTED! FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE POOR amp; DISADVANTAGED OF PHILLY! LAST SEEN STEALING HOMES amp; TEARING DOWN NEIGHBORHOODS! HELP STOP HIM, OR YOURS IS NEXT!
But then Little Tommie had gotten the call that the holdouts had finally been dealt with, and that Turco Demolition and Excavation had the green light to reduce the remaining properties to rubble.
That call had come in two days earlier, after office hours on Friday afternoon, and it had been from some fellow who announced to Little Tommie that he’d been “tasked at HUD as the new expediter for PEGI projects.”
“He said we’re all good to go,” Little Tommie had told Bobby the Ballbuster after he’d hung up the phone. They were sitting in Turco’s office cutting the dust of the day with a couple glasses of Scotch whisky. “But I just turned that damn crane back in to the rental shop!”
Turco had then had to call and reserve another crane, a slightly smaller one that at least was cheaper than the one he’d just turned in. But he wasn’t overjoyed with the news that the earliest it could be available was Sunday noon.
“I hate working Sundays,” he’d said when he’d slammed down the receiver.
Now, from his seat in the cab of the rental crane, Bobby the Ballbuster could see a few of the protest signs the holdouts had carried. One that he could clearly see read: “Eminent Domain = Theft by Gov’t!” Another said “5th
