Two blocks later, after turning onto Hayworth Street and rolling past a yellow NO OUTLET sign, he came to the dead end of the street. Twenty yards ahead was the tall chain-link fence that ran along the Amtrak rails. He pulled to the broken curb in front of an abandoned row house and turned off the car.
He looked in the rearview mirror and then out the windshield. There was no one around. He leaned over and picked up the cans off the floorboard. He opened the one labeled TOLUENE. It felt a little more than half-full. He emptied it on the fabric of the backseat, then tossed the can to the floor.
The harsh odor of the chemical quickly filled the car, and he started to get a headache.
He opened the door and stepped out. He deeply inhaled the fresh air, then reached back inside the car for the acetone. The can was almost full, and he poured about half of that can onto the front seats and floorboard. Then he took two of the shop towels and soaked them with the acetone. He put the now half-full can on the driver’s seat and threaded all but a third of one of the shop towels in its mouth. He moved the can to the floorboard of the backseat, then reached for the second chemical-soaked shop towel.
Again, the fumes started to overwhelm him, and he quickly stood and took another deep breath of fresh air.
He glanced around the immediate area as he did. He thought he saw movement, and froze just as a stray dog, a short-legged brown mutt with a drooping spine, ran across Hayworth. Far beyond it, on Torresdale, a taxicab flashed past the intersection.
He quickly turned back to the car and pulled from his pants pocket the disposable butane lighter, then grabbed the shop towel he’d wetted with acetone. When he thumbed the lighter, its flame immediately found the fumes-a soft Poof! sound coming from the rag as it was set ablaze. The heat instantly became intense, and he reacted by slinging the lighter and the rag inside the automobile.
They landed on the driver’s seat, which immediately flashed up in flames.
He smelled burned hair, and suddenly saw that when the flames had flared they burned his left hand. The cuff of his sweatshirt had also caught on fire and he immediately realized that acetone must have somehow splashed on it.
Frantically, he waved his hand faster and faster, trying to extinguish the fire. But that served only to make the flames worse.
Then, in the back of his mind came a faint chant-and he remembered the firemen who visited his class at Harding Middle School a decade ago and taught the students Stop! Drop! Roll! to starve a clothing fire of oxygen.
He stuffed the burning cuff under his right armpit.
The pain to the raw skin of his burned hand was intense. But the flames finally died.
A minute later, Ruben Mora, feeling light-headed, glanced at the blackened sleeve and hand. Then he looked at the fire growing inside the car.
Mesmerized, it took him a moment before he decided that he had to get away before he burned his whole body.
He kicked the door shut and, pulling his stocking cap tight on his head with his uninjured hand, ran down Hayworth Street.
When he reached the corner, at Hayworth Street, he glanced back. The windows of the Volkswagen were filled with a roiling dark black smoke and bright red flames. He heard a small Boom! and saw a flash of bright white flame, and guessed that that had been the acetone can exploding.
He snugged at his black stocking cap, winced as he stuffed his hands in his sweatshirt pocket, and then jaywalked across Hayworth Street.
Two blocks up, at Torresdale, he saw a police cruiser speed past, then a couple minutes later another one quickly followed it.
Then, behind him, he heard and felt the concussion of an explosion, and when he looked back he saw a huge plume of black smoke soaring above the roofline of the row houses.
Then he heard the wail of police sirens.
He glanced around the neighborhood, trying to figure out the easiest way to get back down to the corner in Kensington without walking what he guessed had to be three or four miles. He remembered the money he had taken from the VW’s ashtray, and decided SEPTA was it.
He pulled out his injured hand and looked at it. It felt as if it was still on fire, even exposed to the frigid air.
And it had begun to throb.
Dammit that hurts! he thought as he went to cut across the middle school playground, headed for the El station that was six blocks away.
[THREE]
Monmouth and Hancock Streets
Fairhill, Philadelphia
Saturday, December 15, 3:32 P.M.
“Is your momma gonna come down here and surprise us?” seventeen-year-old Carmelita Martinez teased Tyrone Hooks, who was sitting naked on the edge of his bed while watching her pull her shirt off over her head.
The cluttered basement bedroom, a crowded space of fifteen by twenty feet, also held a brown couch that faced a flat-screen television against one wall and, against the opposite wall, a wooden desk on top of which was a MacBook computer with a pair of high-end studio headphones and a chromed-mesh Shure professional musician’s microphone plugged into it. Also next to the computer was a ruby-red crushed velvet pouch with a string closure and a small, six-inch glass pipe. A wisp of smoke twisted upward from the pipe, the pungent aroma of marijuana hanging in the air.
Carmelita, a petite, dark-eyed, coffee-skinned Dominican with large breasts and full hips that had begun to spread, playfully tossed her top at Tyrone. Smiling widely, she ran her finger along the thin silver necklace that he had minutes earlier taken from the crushed velvet pouch and presented to her.
“She knows to stay in her room upstairs,” Hooks said, reaching out to unbutton Carmelita’s blue jeans. “Here, let me help you, baby girl.”
In the years that Tyrone’s grandparents had lived in the row house-his mother’s parents, who helped raise him; he never knew his father-the blue-collar neighborhood had begun to fall on hard times as its middle-class jobs slowly disappeared with the closure of the nearby factories.
By the time the grandparents had died, and his mother had inherited the home, a great deal had really changed in the area.
There now was widespread blight, for example, pockets of it severe. Calling the Hooks property a row house was something of a misnomer, as there were no other houses along its row. Twenty years earlier, when Tyrone had been five, a fire had ravaged all the others on that side of the street. Their blackened masonry shells had been demolished by the city, leaving the Hookses’ two-story structure standing alone near the corner, with only raw empty lots where the other row houses had once stood.
Over time the demographics of the neighborhood had dramatically changed, too.
Now the vast majority-eighty percent-of Fairhill’s residents were Hispanic. While these were mostly Puerto Ricans, there were also many who had emigrated from Cuba and Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. Family-owned businesses in what they called their El Centro de Oro-Center of Gold-catered to them, the markets painted in the same bright yellows and greens and blues as those in the islands. Remarkably, on all four corners at Lehigh and Fifth there were even palm trees-leaning ones made of metal installed to further create a tropical feel.
Carmelita-who had been born at Temple University Hospital’s Episcopal Campus, on the outer edge of Fairhill-wiggled her hips as Tyrone tugged down her skintight jeans.
Just as she jumped onto the bed, Tyrone’s cell phone-which he had tossed on the couch next to his black Ruger 9-millimeter semiauto pistol when he had undressed-began ringing.
Or, perhaps more correctly, it began rapping.
Hooks had recorded songs he had written on the computer, and from those digital files had created ring tones, then transferred the rings to his cell phone, where he had linked them to the telephone numbers of select members of his crew.