Wheelman, The

by Duane Swierczynski

  Lennon was naked, upside-down in a construction pipe by the Delaware River, arms and legs torn to shreds and his testicles hiding out somewhere in the vicinity of his rib cage … but he had stopped falling. He’d take victory where he could get it.

  Adrenaline flooded his bloodstream. He would have loved to scream. Lennon pushed harder against the confines of the inner pipe. He wasn’t going to fall. No fucking way.

  “He’s stuck,” a voice said up above.

  Pause.

  “Shit.”

  Another pause.

  “You’re dead, motherfucker, so you’d better give up now and drop. You want a bullet? That it? A nice couple rounds of hot lead up your ass, finish things off nice and quick?”

  Lennon pushed harder against the pipe wall. This was no way to die.

  “Get that two-by-four and see if you can push him down. I’ll get the gun.”

  The slab of wood made a bonging sound against the side of the pipe. Then Lennon felt a hard jab on the back of his left thigh. Then another, more forceful this time. The rust dug deeper into his skin. The wood slammed into his butt cheek, painfully, almost causing Lennon to let go.

  The next jab missed his body, rushing into the void between Lennon’s chest and the pipe wall.

  This was it.

  Praying that three limbs could hold him up, Lennon’s left hand whipped out and grabbed the wood. He felt it jerk upward, but Lennon held firm, then yanked back downward. The force of his pull almost dislodged him from the pipe entirely, but he held on as the rust plunged even deeper into his skin.

  The two-by-four was in his hand now; the guy above had lost it.

  “Shit. He just grabbed the two-by-four.”

  “It don’t matter,” said the other voice. “Fucker’s going down.”

  Lennon looked up past his body to the opening of the pipe. A revolver was pointed back down at him and a meaty thumb started to pull back the hammer. So he did the only thing he could.

  He shoved the two-by-four upward as hard as he could.

  Wood snapped the guy’s wrist. Surprised him completely. Hand popped open. Revolver tumbled out and down. Barrel caught the lip of the pipe. Weight of the gun dumped it inward. The gun fell down the pipe.

  The gun landed on the underside of Lennon’s genitals. He let go of the two-by-four, then reached around for the revolver. Grasped it. Grasped it like a fifteen-year-old with his first tit.

  Come on, fucker. Take a look.

  Look down.

  His shaking thumb pulled back the hammer.

  “Aw, you son of a bitch—”

  The guy looked.

  Lennon squeezed once, and the guy’s head sprayed apart.

  He could hear the other guy screaming, but that wasn’t his concern now. Lennon had heard the two of them talking before. The guy he’d just shot was obviously the semipro; the other guy seemed to be along for the ride and needed directions at every turn. And now he’d lost his boss, his two-by-four, and the gun. Hopefully, they didn’t have another gun. Lennon wouldn’t have to worry about him for the time being.

  Now his worry was getting out of the pipe.

  There seemed to be two ways out. Some smart, clever way, and some exhausting, painful, bloody way.

  Lennon couldn’t think of any smart, clever ways, though he tried. He thought about slowly gliding farther down the pipe, expending precious skin real estate, but eventually hitting the bottom, where maybe he could dig until he hit water, then hold his breath and float back up to the surface like a cork. But there was no way of knowing what was below. Might be tightly packed mud; might be bedrock. This wasn’t his river—fuck, this wasn’t his city. Lennon then thought about slipping down farther until he found the two-by-four again, breaking it apart and trying to wedge pieces up in the pipe, and then using them as a makeshift ladder. But again, there were no guarantees that his strength would hold, or that the two-by-four could be broken. Most likely, it was fresh, strong wood; this was a construction site.

  Upside-down, the blood continued to rush to his head. He couldn’t hang like this forever. Enough blood in the brain and some foolish idea would seem reasonable, and then he would die. And this was a stupid way to die.

  So it was down to the exhausting, painful, bloody way: Push hard, shimmy upward, and hope his skin held out until the surface.

  It was the only sane option.

  And hey, nobody ever said crawling out of your own grave would be easy.

  Fifteen minutes later, Lennon’s toes scraped the lid of the pipe. He pushed hard one last time, pressed his legs out in the air, and wrapped them around the pipe’s edge. His muscles had been worked beyond exhaustion, ripped and burned and crying out for rest to repair themselves, but he pushed them one last time, clenching his entire body up to gain the leverage to grab the lip of the pipe with his hands and finally, to pull himself out. Lennon flipped over, stumbled on his heels, then collapsed to the concrete.

  The other guy was there waiting for him.

  He looked like he’d been crying, but the tears were ten minutes in the past. Since then he’d been doing some thinking. Some hard thinking. The kid—Lennon saw that now; the guy was just a college kid, or something—must have thought about the many ways to resolve the evening. Dump his buddy down on top of Lennon, then clear the fuck out? Dump cinder blocks and any shit he could find down the pipe and hope that did the trick? Or just call the cops and try to explain things?

  But it looked like he’d decided on something different. The kid held out a notebook and a pen.

  “I know you can’t talk,” the kid said. “You were trying to tell me that before, weren’t you? So write down what we should do.”

  Lennon sat up, took the pen and paper, and thought about his options. The first thing that came to mind was taking the pen, uncapping it, then jabbing the business end into the kid’s neck. But that would mean grabbing his head and hoping the arterial spray went in a different direction, and besides, Lennon wasn’t sure he had the muscle power left to do any of that. Maybe not even to uncap the pen.

  Then again, he needed rest and answers. Maybe this kid could help him with the first thing.

  Lennon wrote: Who are you?

  The kid read the note, and a grim smile floated across his face. “My name’s Andy Whalen. I’m a senior at La Salle. Here, I’ll show you.” Andy pulled a brown leather wallet that was beat to hell from the back pocket of his black dress pants and slipped out an ID card.

  Lennon looked at the student ID card. True enough. Andrew Whalen, a senior at La Salle University. There was a magnetic strip on the back of the card.

  “Look, I don’t know who you are, and honestly, I don’t care. I know that Fury’s dad is involved in some gangster stuff, and you probably know more than I do, but—”

  Lennon held up a finger to his lips. Then he started writing again: Where do you live?

  Andy read. “Oh. I live on campus.”

  Dorm or apartment?

  “A dorm. I’m a senior, but I like living down on South Campus. And there are no apartments down there, so I’m in St. Neumann.”

  Alone?

  “Yeah, I got tired of freaky-ass roommates. I’m in a single.”

  That was all Lennon needed to know.

  He jammed the pen into Andy’s neck, aiming more toward the back so the blood wouldn’t spray all over him. Andy looked genuinely surprised, up until the point his eyes fluttered shut and he passed out.

  Years ago, Lennon would have felt bad about something like this. During high school, he’d devoured the biographies of guys like Willie Sutton and Alvin Karpis, gentlemen bank robbers who never fired a shot unless absolutely necessary—and civilians were absolutely hands-off. And that was still the way Lennon liked to run his bank jobs. The threat, but not the kill.

  However, there was a truth that had eluded Lennon in high school. Something that guys he knew called “human law.” It wasn’t God’s law, moral law, or even the government’s law. It was a law as o
ld as mankind itself, and law number one was this: If someone fucks with you, it is imperative you fuck them back. Andy Whalen seemed like a nice college kid. But he had also taken a two-by-four and tried to stuff him, naked, down an industrial pipe.

  Andy Whalen had fucked with Lennon.

  That’s what he thought about as he stripped Andy of his clothes, then dumped his body down the pipe, followed by the body of his semipro buddy. First, he fished the wallet out of the black Cavariccis. Mikal Ivankov Fieuchevsky was the name, with a Philadelphia address.

  About the Benjamin

  THE CLOTHES WERE SNUG ON LENNON. ANDY HAD APPROXIMATELY the same height and build, but not quite the same muscle development. But it was better than being naked. Or wearing those ridiculous Cavariccis.

  If Lennon had been thinking clearly, he would have stripped Fieuchevsky of his clothes first. Because even though Lennon had the guy’s wallet, he didn’t have his truck keys. They were most likely in the front pocket of the dead guy’s dress pants. And Lennon wasn’t one of those criminal types who knew how to hotwire any car—just a few select makes and models. This wasn’t one of them. Besides, he usually stuck to bank stuff, and the cars he used in getaways always had keys. So now he had to walk back into Philadelphia.

  The only visible option was the big blue bridge: the Benjamin Franklin, built in 1926 to connect Camden with Philadelphia. Why they wanted to do that in the first place remained a mystery to Lennon. Camden was a bigger shithole than Philadelphia.

  Lennon pressed two fingers to his neck. Not good.

  He spat in the right-hand lane and walked across the bridge. Halfway across, he noticed how much the bridge swayed and bucked. He never knew bridges did that. He’d never had to walk across them before. The jittering under his feet pissed him off.

  Now that he’d had some cold air in his lungs and time to think, the real pain set in. Clearly, today’s job had been sold to somebody. Guessing from the appearance of Mr. Fieuchevsky, it was Russian mob. Somebody had told them what they’d be hitting, how much, and plotted the exact getaway route. Which enabled them to stash a ram van along Kelly Drive, then rob the robbers, dispose of the bodies, and move on with life. Somebody had told them all of this.

  The problem was that somebody.

  Bling knew the heist details, and knew a bit of the getaway strategy. But nothing exact. No schedules, no maps, nothing.

  Holden didn’t know shit. Lennon had insisted on that.

  So even if Bling and/or Holden had gotten hopped up on H one night and decided to spill their guts to a hooker, they wouldn’t have been able to tell anybody shit about the Kelly Drive portion of the getaway plan. That, Lennon had kept to himself. He had told nobody else about it, not about his timing, his mapping, and his practicing.

  Except for one person.

  Katie.

  And Lennon didn’t want to think about that.

  He didn’t want to think about how weird she’d been acting lately.

  Secretive.

  Quiet.

  No.

  Rest first. Then thinking and planning. It pained him not to be able to call Katie right away, give her the code, let her know what had happened. Ordinarily, Lennon would be sick that she’d be worried sick. But he couldn’t do that now. He had to rest and heal. Then think.

  The Benjamin Franklin Bridge spat Lennon out just above Old City Philadelphia, a former slum that had been rehabbed in time for the 1976 bicentennial celebrations and was now enjoying a turn-of-the-century renaissance of hip restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and art galleries. Lennon didn’t care about any of that right now. He was consulting the Philly map he’d stored in his brain. There was supposed to be a subway terminus at Second and Market, which he could take to City Hall and transfer to another subway line, which in turn would spit him out in the north part of the city, near La Salle University.

  Once he found Second Street, the rest was easy. Lennon hopped the turnstile just as a steel train rocketed into the station. The Market-Frankford El. He boarded it, avoided all stares, and rode it thirteen blocks to City Hall, where there was the free transfer—exactly as the maps had said—into an even grimier subway line. The printed map on the train wall told him that the correct stop for La Salle was Olney, just a few stops from the end of the line.

  He emerged from the station and saw a white and blue painted bus with a thick “L” painted on the side. Campus bus. Lennon showed Andy’s ID card to the driver, who gave him a funny look but didn’t say anything. Like he gave a shit. The bus wound its way around rough-looking streets, which quickly turned into trees and dark fields. A passing sign read ST. NEUMANN. Lennon stood up and the bus driver let him off in front of a three-story gray slab of a building.

  The front entrance was guarded by two turnstiles and a sleepy-eyed student hunched over a thick literature anthology. No campus guards anywhere. Lennon slid the ID card through the turnstile; it clicked. The student didn’t look up. Past the lobby was a main hallway, and tacked to one of the bulletin boards was a directory.

  A. Whalen was in Room 119. The hallways were deserted. After all, it was a Friday night in March. School was more than two months under way, and so were the parties. The room Lennon wanted had a push-button combination lock on it. Lennon lifted his foot—clad in one of Andy’s Sketcher boots—and pounded the door to the right of the lock. The door opened. Lennon didn’t bother to turn on the lights, or check the phone machine, or undress. He flopped onto the bed and closed his eyes.

  The Mayor Dreams of Holmesburg

  MCGLINCHEY’S WAS DRAPED IN HUGE PLUMES OF gray-tinged smoke, which was to be expected. It was 10 P.M. on a Friday.

  “What’s this?”

  “Take a look.” Mothers slid a sheet across the black Formica table.

  Wanted by the FBI

  Identification Order No. 744 565 D

  Patrick Selway Lennon

  With aliases: P.S. Lennon, Pat Lenin, Pete Thompson, Lawson Sel-way, Charles Banks, Ray Williams, “Len.”

  Description

  Born August 22, 1972, in Listowel, Ireland. Five feet eight inches tall, 170 pounds, with dark brown hair and blue eyes. Occupations: cook, laborer, clerk, writer. Scars and marks: one and half-inch horizontal scar on back of left hand, three-inch scar on throat, brown birthmark on right hip. Due to a throat wound suffered during a previous bank robbery attempt, Lennon is unable to speak.

  Caution

  Lennon is probably armed and should be considered extremely dangerous.

  It was an FBI Wanted poster, freshly printed from the Internet, and Saugherty noticed that the date on it was tomorrow. The lieutenant was giving him advance copy. Saugherty read it. “This is the guy from the bank heist this morning?”

  “One of them, yeah.” Mothers had a swallow of porter beer.

  “I thought they were all black guys.”

  “No, just one of them—Harrison Crosby. His partner was one of those Eminem wannabes, name of Holden Richards. And the getaway driver was this mick—Lennon.”

  “Well, I hope the FBI catches them soon,” Saugherty said. “Golly, do I miss police work. Frankly, I don’t know how you can stand it. You want another beer? I’m thinking about one of those Memphis Dogs, too.”

  “Yeah, I’ll have another. Stay away from those dogs, though. I’ve been coming here since those little colon bombs were only a quarter a piece, and I still regret every single one I ever ate. There’s something else about this guy Lennon.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know that girl who got smacked by the getaway car?”

  “Yeah. She okay?”

  “She’ll recover.”

  “And the baby?”

  “Not a scratch. But the girl is somebody important.”

  “To who?”

  “To the mayor.”

  “Who is she?”

  “A political operative. Lives in Holmesburg, over on Leon Street.”

  “I’m guessing he values her oral presentations.”

/>   “To the tune of $20,000. Just for bringing this asshole down. Word went out this evening at the roundhouse. I thought you might be interested, seeing how you were looking to put a deck on the back of your house.”

  “Nah, I’m past the deck thing. Now I’m thinking, feng shui. My whole house is out of spiritual alignment.”

  “Costs a lot of money to realign your spirit.”

  “Wait. It’s not called spirit; some other word. Chi. That’s it. My chi.”

  “Chi whiz,” Mothers said. “So, Paul—can I tell the mayor you’ll be investigating this case on a freelance basis?”

  “You can tell the mayor that I’m a big fan of Holmesburg, and that I’m always looking out for its residents.”

  “The mayor will be pleased.”

  “Patrick Lennon will not,” Saugherty said.

  A swallow later: “The mayor doesn’t want him alive, does he?”

  Funicular

  THE CONQUISTADOR’S INTERNET ACCESS WAS DOWN. Katie had to hire a driver to take her to a nearby Internet café to check the Philly news—no mean feat. It wasn’t until late before the Inquirer posted the story. Bank robbery. Suspects still at large. $650,000 stolen. Promising leads, and the FBI promising a swift resolution. Which was complete bullshit. The FBI had no idea.

  But then again, where was Patrick?

  He hadn’t told her the exact flight number into Puerto Rico; instead, he said, she should enjoy the resort and casino and the swimming pool and room service until he got there. Warm sun, instead of crisp Pocono mountain air. Katie had rented one of the exclusive guest cottages down the mountain from the main hotel and casino. To get to your room, you had to ride a cable car the resort called a funicular. She must have ridden the funicular a dozen times, up and down, up and down, admiring the clear blue ocean views and lush foliage that draped the mountains, and then in the dark, the boat lights that shimmered in the distance. She kept hoping she’d see Patrick walk across the casino floor and smile at her, and she’d know everything had gone okay. And then she’d take Patrick’s hand and lead him back down the funicular—she’d probably joke about how many times she had ridden the fucking thing, and that it almost made her queasy, but that of course, hah hah hah, wasn’t the only reason she was queasy. She’d lead him into their guest cottage, then uncork the bottle of Vueve Clicquot she’d prepared for the occasion, and then when he was relaxed enough …