"Now," the peddler replied.
Pratt reacted with surprise and delight. He had not expected this. "She is here?"
The peddler nodded.
"Where?" asked Pratt.
"Nearby."
Gideon Pratt straightened his tie, adjusted the vest over his bulging stomach, smoothed what little hair he had. He took a deep breath, finding his axis, then gestured to the door. "Shall we?"
The peddler nodded again, then looked to Diablo for permission. Diablo waited a moment, further cementing his status, then stepped to the side.
The three men exited the club, walked across South Street to Ori- anna Street. They continued down Orianna, emerging into a small parking lot between the buildings. In the lot were two vehicles: a rusted van with smoked-glass windows and a late-model Chrysler. Diablo put a hand up, strode forward, and looked into the windows of the Chrysler. He turned, nodded, and Pratt and the peddler stepped up to the van.
"You have the payment?" the peddler asked.
Gideon Pratt tapped his pocket.
The peddler looked briefly between the two men, then reached into the pocket of his coat and retrieved a set of keys. Before he could insert the key into the van's passenger door, he dropped them to the ground.
Both Pratt and Diablo instinctively looked down, momentarily distracted.
In the following, carefully considered instant, the peddler bent down to retrieve the keys. Instead of picking them up, he closed his hand around the crowbar he had placed behind the right front tire earlier in the evening. When he arose, he spun on his heels and slammed the steel bar into the center of Diablo's face, exploding the man's nose into a thick scarlet vapor of blood and ruined cartilage. It was a surgically delivered blow, perfectly leveraged, one designed to cripple and incapacitate but not kill. With his left hand the peddler removed the Smith amp; Wesson revolver from Diablo's waistband.
Dazed, momentarily bewildered, operating on animal instinct instead of reason, Diablo charged the peddler, his field of vision now clouded with blood and involuntary tears. His forward motion was met with the butt of the Smith amp; Wesson, swung with the full force of the peddler's considerable strength. The blow sent six of Diablo's teeth into the cool night air, then clacking to the ground like so many spilled pearls.
Diablo folded to the pitted asphalt, howling in agony.
A warrior, he rolled onto his knees, hesitated, then looked up, anticipating the deathblow.
"Run," the peddler said.
Diablo paused for a moment, his breath now coming in staggered, sodden gasps. He spit a mouthful of blood and mucus. When the peddler cocked the hammer of the weapon and placed the tip of the barrel to his forehead, Diablo saw the wisdom of obeying the man's order.
With great effort, he arose, staggered down the road toward South Street, and disappeared, never once taking his eyes from the peddler.
The peddler then turned to Gideon Pratt.
Pratt tried to strike a pose of menace, but this was not his gift. He was facing a moment all murderers fear, a brutal computation of his crimes against man, against God.
"Wh-who are you?" Pratt asked.
The peddler opened the back door of the van. He calmly deposited the gun and the crowbar, and removed a thick, cowhide belt. He wrapped his knuckles in the hard leather.
"Do you dream?" the peddler asked.
"What?"
"Do… you… dream?"
Gideon Pratt fell speechless.
For Detective Kevin Francis Byrne of the Philadelphia Police Department's Homicide Unit, the answer was a moot point. He had tracked Gideon Pratt for a long time, and had lured him into this moment with precision and care, a scenario that had invaded his dreams.
Gideon Pratt had raped and murdered a fifteen-year-old girl named Deirdre Pettigrew in Fairmount Park, and the department had all but given up on solving the case. It was the first time Pratt had killed one of his victims, and Byrne had known that it would not be easy to draw him out. Byrne had invested a few hundred hours of his own time and many a night's sleep in anticipation of this very second.
And now, as dawn remained a dim rumor in the City of Brotherly Love, as Kevin Byrne stepped forward and landed the first blow, came his receipt. Twenty minutes later they were in a curtained emergency room at Jefferson Hospital. Gideon Pratt stood dead center, Byrne to one side, a staff intern named Avram Hirsch on the other.
Pratt had a knot on his forehead the size and shape of a rotted plum, a bloodied lip, a deep purple bruise on his right cheek, and what might have been a broken nose. His right eye was nearly swollen shut. The front of his formerly white shirt was a deep brown, caked with blood.
As Byrne looked at the man-humiliated, demeaned, disgraced, caught-he thought about his own partner in the Homicide Unit, a daunting piece of ironwork named Jimmy Purify. Jimmy would have loved this, Byrne thought. Jimmy loved the characters, of which Philly seemed to have an endless supply. The street professors, the junkie prophets, the hookers with hearts of marble.
But most of all, Detective Jimmy Purify loved catching the bad guys. The worse the man, the more Jimmy savored the hunt.
There was no one worse than Gideon Pratt.
They had tracked Pratt through an extensive labyrinth of informants, had followed him through the darkest veins of Philadelphia's netherworld of sex clubs and child pornography rings. They had pursued him with the same sense of purpose, the same focus and rabid intent with which they had stepped out of the academy so many years earlier.
Which was just the way Jimmy Purify liked it.
It made him feel like a kid again, he said.
In his day Jimmy had been shot twice, run over once, beaten far too many times to calculate, but it was a triple bypass that finally took him out. While Kevin Byrne was so pleasantly engaged with Gideon Pratt, James "Clutch" Purify was resting in a post-op room in Mercy Hospital, tubes and drip lines snaking out of his body like Medusa's snakes.
The good news was that Jimmy's prognosis looked good. The sad news was that Jimmy thought he was coming back to the job. He wasn't. No one ever did from a triple. Not at fifty. Not in Homicide. Not in Philly.
I miss you, Clutch, Byrne thought, knowing that he was going to meet his new partner later that day. It just ain't the same without you, man.
It never will be.
Byrne had been there when Jimmy went down, not ten, powerless feet away. They had been standing near the register at Malik's, a hole-in- the-bricks hoagie shop at Tenth and Washington. Byrne had been loading their coffees with sugar while Jimmy had been macking the waitress, Desiree, a young, cinnamon-skinned beauty at least three musical styles Jimmy's junior and five miles out of his league. Desiree was the only real reason they ever stopped at Malik's. It sure as hell wasn't the food.
One minute Jimmy had been leaning against the counter, his young- girl rap firing on all eight, his smile on high beam. The next minute he was on the floor, his face contorted in pain, his body rigid, the fingers of his huge hands curling into claws.
Byrne had frozen that instant in his mind, the way he had stilled few others in his life. Over his twenty years on the force, he had found it almost routine to accept the moments of blind heroism and reckless courage in the people he loved and admired. He had even come to accept the senseless, random acts of savagery delivered by and unto strangers. These things came with the job: the steep premium to justice sought. It was the moments of naked humanity and weakness of flesh, however, he could not elude, the images of body and spirit betrayed that burrowed beneath the surface of his heart.
When he saw the big man on the muddied tile of the diner, his body skirmishing with death, the silent scream slashed into his jaw, he knew that he would never look at Jimmy Purify the same way again. Oh, he would love him, as he had come to over the years, and he would listen to his preposterous stories, and he would, by the grace of God, once again marvel at Jimmy's lithe and fluid abilities behind a gas grill on those sweltering Philly summer Sundays, and he would, without a moment's thought or hesitation, take a bullet to the heart for the man, but he knew immediately that this thing they did-the unflinching descent into the maw of violence and insanity, night after night-was over.