The Wheelman (16 page)

Read The Wheelman Online

Authors: Duane Swierczynski

BOOK: The Wheelman
8.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
“
R
ELAX, 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.
 
 
 
I am spending your money to have you and your family killed. Nice, eh?
—GEORGE “MACHINE GUN” KELLY
 
 
S
AUGHERTY 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.
 
T
HE 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.
“Not really.”
“What do you mean, not really?”
“We were ambushed in the getaway car, then stripped and thrown into body bags. I woke up as two assholes were trying to shove me down a pipe, down by the river. Later I was shot. But I’m feeling much better.”
“You were shot? By the Russians?”
“No. But the guys from earlier … one of them was Russian. The other was a college kid. Not Russian. American.”
“Are they still out there?” the woman asked. “Will they be coming after us?”
“No,” the guy said, quietly.
Lisa turned this over in her brain. A Russian. And a college kid.
Mikal. And Andrew.
This is why she almost kicked the wall in.
“So let me call the doctor. Have him look at us both. And then we can get the fuck out of this city. We need to regroup.”
“We need to talk,” the woman said. “I have a lot to explain.”
There was no torture greater than Lisa’s hours in that closet, trapped, enveloped with rage. Right out of her closet door was the man who had killed her boyfriend. And the salt on that particular wound was the fact that her own father was this guy’s partner in crime. Her dad had given them the use of this house! Her house! Her and Andrew’s house! And guns. And clothes. And a doctor.
Lisa seethed as she listened to the phone call. She even knew the doctor they were calling. It was Dr. Bartholomew Dovaz, her own pediatrician. She had grown up afraid of Dr. Dovaz—he had an awful bedside manner, sticking you with needles when you weren’t ready—until his wife got sick, and he started doing drugs. Lisa had assumed her family had severed all contact with Dr. Dovaz after a messy arrest in Lower Merion back in 1993, but apparently, her father had kept in touch with the man.
Her father had kept him on hand for special occasions. Like treating murderers he was hiding.
Had Lisa a weapon of any kind, she would have bolted from the closet and used it. Repeatedly. A gun. A baseball bat. A knife. A chainsaw. A nail gun. And then she’d confront her father later.
But she had nothing, and she had no idea what this couple was packing. They were professional criminals of some kind, and most likely had guns. Which made sense. They were talking about gunshot wounds. It would do no good to pop out of the closet and get shot in the head.
Lisa decided to wait for Dr. Dovaz to arrive, and then she’d figure out her move from there. There would be time to sneak away, to run back to her house and talk to her father.
She repeated things to herself, in her mind, so she could remember them later. They were important.
Getaway car.
Stripped, and thrown into body bags.
A pipe, down by the river.
A while later, Lisa fell asleep.
 
S
AUGHERTY FELT WOEFULLY UNDERDRESSED TO BE calling on the Rittenhouse Towers on a Sunday morning.
He’d scraped together what he could. The clothes on his back from yesterday were ripped and blood-soaked; his house—and his pitiful wardrobe inside it—had probably burned to the ground. That left one choice. Doctor’s lounge. Saugherty knew his way around hospitals from his cop days, especially this one: Pennsylvania Hospital. He knew the ER. He knew the ER lounge, and how nobody really paid any attention to people popping in and out of it.
He found a pair of khakis and a nice black Eddie Bauer mock turtleneck in one of the lockers. He kept his own shoes, but glommed a shabby-looking black blazer from another locker. Didn’t they pay these docs anything?
The Rittenhouse Towers were only twelve or so blocks away, across town, but since Saugherty had a busted arm, a sack full of broken ribs, and various other oochies and ouchies, he opted for a cab.
Getting in was not a problem; he knew the acting chief of security, Al Buchan, from his working the Fifteenth District. Saugherty fed him some line of bull about working a freelance bank robbery consulting thing for Lt. Earl Mothers, which Al swallowed without complaint. Let him up to 910, where a couple of uniforms told him he should check out 1809, where they hid out for a while.
“They” = Patrick Selway Lennon plus an unidentified female companion.
Saugherty got what he could from the guys on the scene; eyewitnesses weren’t much use coming up with a name. The description was hazy, too. “Hot as balls,” one guy had said, describing the unidentified female companion. “But an ice queen.” Yeah, that helped. Saugherty poked around the condo, marveling at the appliances and utensils. The owner of the place, some guy named Feldman, even had a set of Tenmijurakus sitting on the counter. Swank.
It was getting to be that time, and the Percocets he got at the hospital were starting to lose their luster, so Saugherty found the appropriate cabinet, appropriated the appropriate bottle, then sequestered himself in the guest bathroom, near the entrance. Nothing fancy—just a bottle of Johnnie Walker. But when he closed the door behind him, Saugherty realized he’d hit the fucking lottery. It was Johnnie Walker
Blue.
He’d never tasted it; only read about it in the storybooks and musty volumes of Greek and Roman fables. Saugherty took this surprise as a good omen. With $650,000, he’d be able to enjoy J.W. Blue on a regular basis.
He unscrewed the cap and breathed in the smoky aroma through his nose. It was almost a contact high.
There was a dispenser of small plastic Dixie cups on the bathroom sink. Saugherty plucked one off the stack and poured himself a tall one, almost to the brim. This was not something to be sucked from the bottle, nor cut with tap water. Presentation was one thing.
The taste was everything else.
Saugherty sat on the closed toilet, in a frayed blazer not his own, drinking some incredibly fine Scotch that was not his own, either. For having woken up in a hospital bed and been grilled by humorless jackasses from Internal Affairs, he thought he was doing all right.
He let the liquid pleasantly burn down into his stomach, and felt the attitude-adjustment mechanisms turning in his brain. He lifted his face to heaven, by way of thanking God.
As his head returned to its usual forward-facing position, Saugherty spotted it.
The bathroom closet door, slightly ajar.
Saugherty didn’t go to it right away. He wanted to finish the Scotch in his Dixie cup first, because he knew what he was going to find in there. The lead he needed. And once he found it, he would be leaving the bathroom, and tracking down more leads, and eventually, tracking down his money.
The morning had been so charmed, how could it be otherwise?
Ten minutes later, the bathroom closet yielded a small black suitcase. Which yielded a set of women’s clothing and toiletries. And beneath that, identification and a passport.
Hiya, Katie Elizabeth Selway.

Other books

Awake the Cullers (History of Ondar) by Young, Amanda, Young Jr., Raymond
Mission to Mars by Aldrin, Buzz
The Flyer by Marjorie Jones
Crescent Dawn by Cussler, Clive; Dirk Cussler
Children of the Old Star by David Lee Summers
Home to You by Cheryl Wolverton