Blasts.
Bullets.
Smoke.
Screams.
Guns.
You try to figure out what the hell happened.
The only solid facts Will could trust were the end results, which was all he ever had when compiling his crime boxes for the City Press. Fat lot of good it did being an on-the-scene reporter. Which is when Will decided that maybe he had been wrong all of these years. Maybe he didn’t love crime reporting so much. Maybe what he really liked were the end results, neatly compiled in the police logbooks, or in legal briefs. Those were solid, understandable, safe, distant. A writer could wrap his brain around things like that.
Live, on-the-scene reporting? That was bullshit. Schroedinger and his dead cat were right. You can’t observe something without changing it.
Or it changing you.
This is what Will Issenberg thought about as his lungs collapsed, and he started to lose consciousness for real.
Free
“RELAX, SWEETIE,” HE SAID. “JUST KEEP BREATHING.” They were temporarily stopped at a red light deep in Southwest Philly. Lennon’s left hand was on the wheel of the stolen car; his right held a torn scrap of his jacket to Katie’s stomach.
SUNDAY a.m.
I am spending your money to have you and your family killed. Nice, eh?
—GEORGE “MACHINE GUN” KELLY
Relaxing with the Paper
SAUGHERTY READ ABOUT HIMSELF EARLY SUNDAY morning, not long after his ex-colleagues from the Philadelphia Police Department showed up for the third time to hear his story.
You know the story. The one about how his house got invaded and torched by niggers as well as his ex-boss, Lt. Earl Mothers, all of whom just so happened to perish in the blaze, leaving Saugherty alive to pursue another black gangster into South Philly, where he was brutally assaulted by—are you getting all of this?—a hanger-on of what remained of the Italian mob, and left broken and bleeding in an alley behind a restaurant.
Three cracked ribs, broken wrist, broken blood vessels up and down his face, two snapped fingers, internal bruising, and covered in gasoline. Saugherty thought that the gasoline was just gratuitous. As if to scare him. As if the broken parts weren’t scary enough.
By the third visit, Saugherty was getting the idea that he was the number one suspect in the mysterious death of Lt. Earl Mothers. Internal Affairs was all over this like white on rice. They sniffed a shady deal gone wrong, somewhere. Mothers was not without splotches of mud on his record. Neither was Saugherty.
Amazingly, that wasn’t the first article to catch Saugherty’s attention Sunday morning.
It was another one: “Ex-Cop, Reporter, Killed in Shoot-out with Robbers.”
Saugherty had almost skipped it at first, but the word robber nagged at him. He skimmed the first paragraph and the name practically jumped off the page and smacked him in the face.
Patrick Selway Lennon.
And an “unidentified female accomplice.”
Saugherty couldn’t believe what he was reading. The cops had somehow cornered two of the Wachovia heisters—Lennon, and this fuckup named Holden Richards—at the Rittenhouse Towers, one of the glitziest condos in Philly. Police found Richards upstairs, handcuffed to a pole.
But Lennon and his mysterious female accomplice crashed a party, then tried to sneak out with one of the guests, a two-bit crime hack named Will Issenberg. An ex-cop named Johnny Kotkiewicz made the ID and tried to arrest Lennon, but his accomplice took another cop hostage, and tried to make for the door. That’s when the shooting started.
Lennon shot first, the paper said.
In the end, Issenberg bought it when a bullet hit his back and collapsed a lung. Kotkiewicz was shot in the throat, and died at the scene. No other officers or civilians were wounded.
Police believed that either Lennon, his accomplice, or possibly both were injured as they fled the scene in a stolen squad car. Pursuing officers lost the pair in a chase that extended from Rittenhouse Square deep into West Philly.
The third Wachovia suspect, Harrison Crosby, was also still at large.
Saugherty lowered the paper, and for the first time all night and morning, was filled with a gleeful kind of hope. The kind of hope that made the runny eggs and industrial-rubber sausage on his hospital tray seem edible.
The money was still out there.
Lennon wouldn’t be going through all this shit if the money wasn’t still out there, somewhere. Richards obviously didn’t know where it was, because his dumb white ass was now in the Gray Bar Hotel. This Crosby guy might be holding the loot bag, but even so, he still had to be in the city. Because Lennon was still in the city.
And the money was still in the city.
Saugherty decided maybe it was worth getting out of bed after all.
The Closet and the Mattress
THE DOOR SLAMMED. LISA JOLTED AWAKE IN THE CLOSET. Somebody else was here. Probably the doctor they had called a few hours ago.
At long fucking last.
Lisa had heard the whole thing.
She had been asleep on the mattress the night before when they came back in the early hours, the mystery guy and his girlfriend. Lisa thought she would just be confronting the guy, asking him what the hell he was doing here, but it didn’t turn out that way. Besides, it sounded like both of them were hurt; she could hear it in their quiet gasps and moans.
When Lisa heard them walking up the carpeted staircase, the wooden floor beneath them creaking from the weight, she came to her senses and scrambled across the floor and into the bedroom closet.
They entered the room just as she was easing the closet door shut.
“Take it easy,” someone said. The mystery guy.
“I’ll be okay.” His female companion. “Where are you hit?”
“It doesn’t matter. Wait … there’s a mattress here on the floor. Ease down onto it. Keep pressure on your belly.”
“It’s just grazed,” she said.
“You have an M.D. now? Lie back.”
“Don’t worry. The baby is fine. I can feel that much.”
“It’s not the baby I’m worried about.”
Lisa cracked open the closet door a fraction of an inch. The room was dark, but she saw the outline of a man lowering a woman onto the mattress on the floor.
She could tell they were a couple—aside from the fact that the woman was apparently pregnant—because they bickered so much. Neither wanted to admit they were hurting, and both wanted to attend to the other’s wounds. The mystery guy seemed to have the upper hand, though, because he had the number of a doctor scribbled on a napkin. The tide turned when Lisa heard that the woman was the one with the cell phone, and she insisted on making the call.
“He won’t know you,” the guy said.
“Who is he, anyway?” she asked.
“He came with the house.”
“And where did the house come from?”
When Lisa heard the mystery guy tell the abbreviated story, she almost put a foot through the drywall in the closet.
The mystery guy didn’t mention names, but he said that an Italian gentleman had agreed to let him use the house in exchange for half of “the take.” The house came with guns, a set of clothes, and an unlicensed doctor to take care of injuries.
“Wait—you needed a doctor before tonight?” the woman asked.