And I keep passing blood.
He dried his hands, then started for the door. Feeling dizzy, he took his steps carefully. At the door, he pulled it inward, then stopped.
Damn! The gun!
He retrieved the pistol from the toilet stall’s coat hook, stuck it behind his belt buckle, then made his way out of the cinema and across the complex to the car park.
The white Ford minivan was where he’d left it, but the full-size SUVs that had been on either side were gone, as were half the vehicles in the lot.
He got behind the wheel and started the engine. Looking at the dashboard, he saw the small stack of the four remaining FedEx envelopes. He picked them up and flipped through them.
The first had a Last Known Address that was in far South Philly, almost to Philadelphia International Airport. The second was on Richmond, the other side of Kensington. The third was on Ontario, near Eighteenth Street. And the fourth was the Last Known Address that had been a dead end-the house that had burned to the ground.
The Richmond one is too close to here for tonight.
He flipped back and looked at the Ontario address.
That’s Allegheny West, on the way home.
What the hell…
He put the minivan in gear, flicked on the headlights, and drove out into the night.
He took Girard Avenue west to Broad Street-giving a wide berth to Jefferson and Hancock, where he’d shot LeRoi Cheatham earlier in the day-then drove north on Broad all the way to Ontario. There, he made a left.
Just before crossing over Germantown Avenue, Will considered pulling to a stop to reapply the FedEx signs to the doors of the vehicle. But he decided that the signage really didn’t matter at night.
The guy is going to see the new white minivan and my uniform. That’s enough.
And I really don’t want them on the doors if the cops are still out looking for a white FedEx minivan.
Who knows what that retard Michael told them?
Then, after this, I’ll take Germantown home and finish the rest tomorrow.
Then he did pull over, but only to hit the overhead light and reread the waybill on the FedEx envelope. It had: JOSSIAH MIFFIN 1822 W. ONTARIO STREET
In his research at CrimeFreePhilly. com, Will Curtis had learned that originally it had been Miffin’s girlfriend who’d turned in the thirty-year-old to the police. Miffin had been babysitting her eleven-year-old daughter at her house when she had left work early to surprise him.
And surprise him she had.
She walked into the living room carrying a store-bought angel food cake in a plastic to-go bag and a long slicing knife.
She found the two of them on the sofa.
He was teaching the girl how to masturbate.
The daughter, after quickly pulling on her pants, had loudly defended Miffin, declaring it all a simple misunderstanding. Using the vernacular of the street, she explained that Miffin had been teaching her self- stimulation only because he’d told her that it was very wrong for him to continue orally stimulating her with his tongue.
Her mother had responded to that information by also drawing from the street: She lunged for Miffin and tried cutting out his tongue with the angel food knife.
She failed, but did manage to slash a nasty gash on his left cheek in the shape of, oddly, a J.
After his arrest, Jossiah Miffin had been found guilty of indecent assault and corruption of a minor. (The mother claimed it had been self-defense that had led to the cheek cut.) Miffin was sentenced to probation, which included his getting and keeping a job, obtaining intense sex-offender treatments, and maintaining absolutely no unsupervised contact with minors.
Having made no effort whatsoever to meet even one of the requirements of his probation, Miffin’s Wanted sheet hit the Megan’s Law list.
And it hit Will Curtis’s Law of Talion pervert list.
On Ontario Street, just shy of Nineteenth Street and the SEPTA train tracks, Will Curtis slowed and started looking for 1822. It was damn difficult on the dark street. Here, too, there were huge gaps where row houses had once stood. And he had to start with a known address and try to count from there to 1822, guessing how many ghost addresses there were between existing houses.
And this easily could turn out like that other address-nonexistent.
He was amazed that his decent middle-class house was only a couple miles from this run-down ruin of a neighborhood. The houses were literally falling apart. And all the cars here were older models, some very much older, including the carcasses of two that clearly had been wrecked and abandoned long before.
As the minivan rolled down the street, its headlights picked up an occasional address-and, twice, a group of young boys walking down the broken sidewalk, trying to stay in the shadows.
They look like they’re up to no good.
He finally saw 1818 in the headlight beam, counted the gap next to that house as 1820, and decided the next ratty row house had to be 1822.
He stopped the minivan at what he presumed was 1824, parked, grabbed the envelope, peeled off his denim jacket, and got out.
As he looked at the darkened house-he could not see one light on inside-he now worried that this address may be deserted.
One step away from falling down and becoming a gap, too.
But when he knocked on the old wooden door’s glass pane, which was covered on the inside by a dusty curtain, a dog barked loudly from deep inside the house.
He faintly heard footsteps inside, then the lone bulb of the porch light came on.
Bony fingers pulled aside the dusty curtain, and an elderly black woman with a deeply wrinkled face and thinning gray hair peered out at him. She looked half asleep, and judging by her expression, she was not expecting to find a white man in a FedEx uniform on her porch.
“Can I help you?” she squeaked out.
“Sorry to bother you so late, ma’am. It’s my last delivery.” He held up the envelope. “Got a special delivery from the U.S. Treasury for a Jossiah Miffin at this address.”
“A what?”
“It’s an envelope from the Treasury Department in Washington. Been delivering these all day. I’m guessing they’re some kind of refund check.”
“Check?” she repeated, taking a long moment to consider that. “Just leave it. At the door be good.”
“Sorry, ma’am. Can’t do that. Need for this”-he glanced at the bill of lading and pretended to read it-“Jossiah Miffin to personally sign for it. He live here?”
She nodded. “He my grandson. I sent him to the drugstore in my car. You can wait if you want.”
Will Curtis felt his stomach start to knot up again.
He looked at the woman, nodded, and said, “I’m going to wait in the van.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, and the dusty curtain fell closed.
In the fifteen minutes that Will Curtis had sat in the minivan, hoping not to experience another unfortunate personal accident, he’d again seen the group of three boys who’d been walking down the sidewalk earlier.
They simply have nothing better to do.
Or choose not to find something better to do.
No wonder they get in such trouble. You look long enough for trouble, you’re damn sure going to find it.
There was still a knot in his stomach. And he still felt terribly weak and drained. The dizziness had not completely gone away.
He pulled the Glock out from under his shirt and laid it on his lap, then realized he hadn’t been keeping track of how many rounds he’d fired.
More important, how many I have left.
All I know for sure is that there’s one round chambered.
He pushed the magazine release on the side of the weapon and the magazine dropped out of the grip. Its
