Read The Wheelman Online

Authors: Duane Swierczynski

The Wheelman (17 page)

 
“
S
O WHO’S THE FATHER?”
“Mary, Mother of God,” she said, sighing.
“You’re not gonna tell me?”
“Yes, I’m going to tell you. But this isn’t how I’d planned it.”
“Ah. Right. Puerto Rico. He supposed to meet us there?”
“He’s there right now.”
“And why aren’t you there now?”
“I got worried.”
Lennon leaned his head back against the wall and shut his eyes. Katie was a few feet away, reclining on the mattress.
He didn’t want to say it, but he’d told her a million times: no matter what, even if I’m arrested, don’t come looking for me. I can take care of myself. That was Rule Number One. That had always been Rule Number One, ever since Lennon had reunited with his sister, and confessed to her what he did for a living. But Katie wasn’t much for rules.
“Do I know him?”
“No … not really.”
“So I fookin’ do know him. What’s his name?”
“Oh, Patrick.”
“His first name, at least.”
“You know, this
really
isn’t the way I imagined this. I had Vueve Clicquot. I had reservations. I had it perfectly planned.”
“Yeah, so did I.”
They sat there in silence. Mulling things over. Waiting for the doctor to arrive. Sunlight was starting to creep around the cheap fabric window shades.
“I’m going to have to find that money,” Lennon said, at long last.
“Why?”
“You’re going to need a crib.”
“Michael has … shit.”
“Michael? Fucking Michael who?”
Lennon spun through his mental Rolodex of pro heisters, but nothing came to mind. Common enough name, Michael. But he really didn’t know any. At least, he hadn’t worked with any Michaels in the past few years. Had he? Unless it was that … nah. Couldn’t be.
“Okay. Last name.”
“Never you mind. Keep your mind on the money. You hate being distracted in the middle of a job, remember?”
“Too fookin’ late for that.”
“Come on, Patrick. Don’t be a shithead. We can just walk away. Last time I balanced the checkbook, we were doing okay. This money was for the future.”
“I have more immediate needs.”
“Like what?”
“Like I need $350,000 to pay for this house and torn-up suit I’m wearing.”
“It’s a nice suit, but I think you paid too much for the house.”
Lennon chuckled, in spite of himself. It broke the dam. He could be himself with his sister. She was the only person in the world he felt comfortable around.
So he told her everything that had happened since Friday morning—the double cross, the attempted burial at the pipe down by the river, the dorm, the car theft, the rogue cop, the gunshot wound, the threats, the black guys with guns, the burning house, the 7-Eleven heist, the parking lot, the meeting with the junior-grade Mafioso, the deal, the trip to Wilcoxson’s condo … .
Lennon lapsed into Gaelic every so often, but Katie understood enough to follow. She had grown up in the U.S., and had a faint New England accent. Lennon had spent most of his time in Listowel, and then Dublin, before emigrating to the U.S., mostly to find his sister. Their parents had died years before.
“If you want the money, there’s one thing you have to do.”
“What’s that?” Lennon asked.
“Go back to the pipe, and see who’s buried there.”
“You’re thinking of Bling.”
“I’m thinking of Bling.”
Lennon sighed. “I’m not sure what I want more—to find his body, or not to find his body.”
“I think you want to find his body.”
That’s when the doorbell rang. Dr. Bartholomew Dovaz was back for the second time in a twelve-hour period.
“I’ll get it,” Lennon said. “But as soon as he leaves, you’re telling me which Michael defiled you.”
 
W
HEN DR. DOVAZ TOOK THE WOMAN INTO THE BATHROOM, and the guy, Patrick, went downstairs to use the half bathroom, Lisa took the opportunity to split.
Things happened quickly after that.
Lisa’s dad kept trying to yell at her, trying to be the father—
What the hell were you doing in that house? Is that your house?
—but Lisa wasn’t hearing that. She kept pounding him with what she’d learned, over and over again. The guy is a murderer. He killed Andrew. He killed Mikal. He stuffed their bodies in a pipe down by the river. The guy is a murderer! He killed Andrew! He killed Mikal! He stuffed their bodies in a pipe down by the fucking river!
Eventually Lisa’s dad saw the light of reason and assembled a team. It wasn’t hard to find the pipe Lisa was talking about. There was only one major construction project down on the Delaware River. The new children’s museum. Lisa’s dad’s team took shotguns, baseball bats, and baling hooks. They didn’t need the first two items. Everybody inside the pipe was dead. They recovered six bodies before reaching mud and clay at the bottom of the pipe. Two of the faces matched a photo they were given, a black-and-white promotional photo of a band called Space Monkey Mafia. It was the bass player and the keyboard player.
The team knew the keyboard player. It was Lisa’s boyfriend, Andrew.
Andrew didn’t look too good. He had a black Bic pen sticking out of his neck. Blood had caked and dried all around it.
They called it in to Lisa’s dad, and he told them to dump all the bodies down the pipe again. No questions; just do it. So they did.
“But before you do,” Lisa’s dad said, “take the pen out of the boy’s neck. And bring it to me.”
 
 
 
I want you all to know that I don’t take no orders.
—“BABY FACE” NELSON
 
 
W
HEN LENNON WOKE UP AGAIN, HE WAS TIED TO A chair, and his throat was sore.
Other people were in the room. Which was not the room he’d fallen asleep in. The last thing he knew, he had been given a shot of painkillers. He didn’t want the doctor to give him something that would render him unconscious. “Don’t worry,” the doctor had said. “This’ll just take the edge off.”
Lennon’s vision focused a bit. He saw Katie in the corner of the room. Her hands were behind her back. She was wearing stark white lipstick, and her eyes looked puffed shut. Somebody held a gun to her head.
Now somebody slapped him in the face.
“Hi, Dillinger,” a male voice said. He had said it the correct way—
Dill-ING-er.
Most people thought it was
dill-IN-jer,
like the pistol. “Glad you could join us.”
Lennon tried to count the people in the room. Aside from his sister. He got up to five before somebody slapped him again.
“Stay with us,” said the same voice. “This is important. This concerns you, and your pregnant girlfriend there.”
Pregnant girlfriend my arse. Lennon wanted to shout it at the top of his lungs. He was tired of the charade. It was a handy charade—people assumed they were a couple, so let them think that. It made tracking them down all the more difficult. But that didn’t really matter now, did it? They were already tracked down.
“What the fuck did you give him, Dovaz? Horse tranks?”
“I gave him what he required.”
“Jesus. The guy’s a fucking zombie.”
“I’m not sure that’s entirely the fault of my medication.”
Another slap—harder this time. Lennon felt his teeth vibrate in his gums.
“You see this, Dillinger?”
Lennon focused. He saw a beefy hand holding a pen.
“You stuck this pen in a kid’s neck a few days ago. You remember that?”
The hand clenched the pen tighter. Lennon could make out the crimson glaze that still caked it. Holy Jesus. This guy had been down in the pipe.
“That kid was my daughter’s boyfriend.”
Who knows, Lennon thought. Maybe he was your daughter’s brother. It’s not right to jump to conclusions like that.
“Are you going to say something, you mute bastard?”
Lennon opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
He was going to say: “Fuck you, ya cunt.”
But he couldn’t.
“Trying to talk, ain’t ya? Well, you can’t. For real now. I know you were playing me—my daughter told me she heard you talking. Those days are over, fucker.”
Lennon tried again but felt razor blades churning around in his throat. What did that bastard do to me? he thought. His eyes snapped to the doctor—Dovaz—and saw a tiny smirk under his beard.
“Yeah, I had you fixed, Dillinger. The good doctor here was kind enough to help me out. He poured some acid down your throat there. So you’re just going to sit there and listen to me.”
Somebody else wheeled a tray into view. He was big and pasty-looking, with ugly tortoiseshell glasses and a bushy, greasy moustache hanging under his nose. Spread out on the top of the tray were all kinds of tools, surgical and otherwise—scalpels, hammers, wrenches, clamps, needles. There was dried blood on some of the tools. In the corner there was a folded-up set of leather stirrups.
“Nothing to retort? Good. You can listen up. I’ve got your girlfriend over there. Pretty soon, we’re going to move her to an undisclosed location—just like Dick Cheney. Then, a little while later, we’re going to set you free. I know, you’re saying, no way, but we are. What you’re going to do for me, Dillinger, is you’re going to rob some banks. I figure you’ll need to knock over at least one a day, because your girlfriend’s room and board is going to be $5,000 a day. I read in a book that the average bank robber can only expect between two and three grand for your average note job. That’s why I’m saying you’re going to have to rob
at least
one a day.”
Lennon stared at him.
“And I’ll know if you’re robbing banks or not. I read the
Daily News
every day—it’s delivered right to my doorstep. They cover everything. Some guy takes a piss on the side of a building, it’s in the paper the next day. So I’ll be looking for your work.”
What the fuck was this cunt talking about?
“You should probably get yourself a nickname. All the big bank robbers have them. The Bad Breath Bandit. The Zit-Face Bandit. The Bobby DeNiro Bandit. You can be the Oh Shit, I Got My Vocal Cords Burned Bandit. How’s that? But really, you should figure out something. You want to be distinctive. Anyway, after you pull down the heist, you’re going to deliver the money to this address, right here. You can keep a couple of bucks for yourself, just so you can get by. But a couple of my boys will be waiting for your delivery. You try anything, you’ll be the Pushing Up Daisies Bandit. Swear to fucking God. And your woman here? She’ll be the Girlfriend Who Had a Rusty Coat Hanger Abortion.”
Lennon decided right then to make this man die slowly. He wasn’t exactly sure of the details yet, but it didn’t matter. Once he had a goal fixed in his mind, the rest was academic.
“Yeah. See these tools here? Probably got you all nervous. Well, relax. They’re not for you. They’re for her. You fuck up, get arrested, try to fuck with us, or piss on the side of the wrong building, and we take it out on her. And the kid inside. We got all kinds of ways of pulling that little bastard of yours out. Don’t worry. It won’t survive long. She don’t look that pregnant.”
This bastard, Lennon decided, was going to die the slowest of slow deaths. The kind where you start out with a cheese grater and a blowtorch, and things escalate from there.
“Okay. That’s it. You work for us until you pay back what you owe, and then we let her go on her way. You fuck up, she dies. And I send somebody to hunt you down, too. Whaddya think, Dillinger?”
Just for thinking the thoughts.
“I’ll take your silence as agreement.”
And then someone hit Lennon from behind. That failed to render him unconscious, as someone else quickly noted, so the first person hit him again, which did the trick.
 
 
 
This bank, my sister could have robbed.
—PATRICK MICHAEL MITCHELL
 
 
T
HE SAD TRUTH WAS THIS: LENNON WASN’T REALLY A bank robber. Sure, he’d taken part in countless bank heists. If you had handed him an application with a box that requested previous experience, and if you could somehow persuade Lennon to fill it out, he’d write “bank robber” in that box. But technically, Lennon had never robbed a single bank. He had merely transported bank robbers from one point (right outside the bank) to another point (another vehicle, or a safe house, or an airport, or a cave in the woods) in exchange for a cut of the money. Lennon was a master getaway driver. He’d read a ton about bank robberies. But still: he was not a bank robber.
So for his first solo robbery, Lennon picked the easiest target he could think of: a bank inside a supermarket. He’d read they were the easiest. Nobody wants to shop for doughnuts and cold cuts inside something that resembles Fort Knox.
His target: a SuperFresh on South Street, a long walk from the mob’s safe house in South Philly. Lennon had stolen a car from a few blocks away, then simply driven up Ninth Street until he saw the supermarket. It was a start.
But Lennon had no intention of robbing banks for that fat Italian gobshite bastard. He just knew he had to put his hands on enough money to appease the goons left behind at the safe house, spend two dollars of it on a screwdriver, then use it to get some answers. Then collect Katie and finally get the fuck out of Philadelphia forever.
He didn’t remember anything else useful from the previous night; the second blow had knocked him out cold. The next morning, Lennon had woken up alone in the same house, in the same bedroom, on the same mattress. He had tried out his voice; he still couldn’t use it. He wondered if those drops Dovaz had used were permanent. Wouldn’t that be a scream.
On the floor next to him was a typed note that read, “Eat breakfast and get going.” There were three Nutri-Grain bars and a liter bottle of spring water. The note continued: Make your daily deposit through the mail slot at 1810 Washington Ave.”
So the bastard had been serious, after all. Rob banks, hand him the money.
That’s when he saw that the note had been resting on something else—a piece of fabric.
No, not fabric—underwear.
Katie’s.
Lennon drank some of the water—which burned the living shit out of his throat—then put the bars in his jacket pockets and left the house. He stole a car, then saw the SuperFresh a short while later. Let’s get this over with already.
 
B
LING HAD ALWAYS BEEN THE BANK HEIST MASTERMIND, but he didn’t talk shop too much. Just concrete details, like this joint here’s got an ACU that sniffs gunpowder. Lennon would nod and file it away. All Lennon really had to know was that Bling knew his shit enough to be outside, with the money, no worries. Most of what Lennon knew about bank heists came from books he read as a kid in Ireland—stuff brought over by his American dad in a duffel bag. They were musty paperbacks with titles like
How the FBI Gets Its Man
and
The Bad Ones
and
We Are the Public Enemies
and
I, Mobster
and
New York: Confidential.
They sparked his adolescent imagination and led him to crime encyclopedias and lurid biographies and yellowed men’s magazines he nicked from bookshops in Listowel.
Lennon always knew his father was a bad guy, but Lennon’s mum never shared the details. She’d only spent a couple of weeks with him while on holiday in New York City in 1971. Freddy Selway made a few visits to see his boy later on, but only when he needed a place to hide overseas. It was during one of these visits, in 1979, that he’d brought along the duffel bag full of paperbacks. Freddy had to split, so he left the bag behind. Or maybe he’d left the bag behind on purpose. Lennon never knew. In late December 1980, Freddy Selway was killed trying to kill somebody else. Lennon’s daddy was a hit man.
Lennon kept his father’s paperbacks in a safe-deposit box in a small federal bank in Champaign, Illinois, along with $54,000 in emergency funds. The books were among his most prized possessions; he didn’t dare leave them somewhere that might be compromised.
Right now, his mind kept coming back to
How the FBI Gets Its Man.
It was one of the many books produced by the FBI, under the watchful eye of J. Edgar Hoover, meant to glorify the agency. The bad guys were punished; the G-men were always smarter and sharper and quicker to their guns. But Lennon, even at a young age, identified with the heisters and killers, who had cool names and led interesting lives. Lives he imagined his father leading.
He knew all about bank robbery from
How the FBI Gets Its Man.
There were lone-wolf note jobs, and multiple-man takeover teams. Since Lennon lacked a team and a voice, a takeover was out. It had to be a note job. Quick and clean. He also knew that bank tellers were instructed to cooperate with bank robbers no matter what, lest the bank robber go crazy and start pumping the clientele full of lead. So the key was the note. The note had to be fucking
scary.
So scary, the teller had to think twice about an alarm, or a dye pack, or any other bullshit.
This is why Lennon thought a bank inside a supermarket was his best bet. There were moms and kids and old people and all kinds of innocent bystanders, there to buy milk and bread and juice and cereal. No teller was going to argue with a scary man with a gun.
Fuck. A gun.
He’d have to fake that … .
No. Wait.
This was America, post–9/11. He’d only have to fake a bomb.
 
L
ENNON STOPPED INSIDE A MCDONALD’S AND BOUGHT A nine-pack of Chicken McNuggets—easy protein—with change he’d found in the stolen car. He sat down and wrote his note, using a pen ripped from the “Give Us Your Suggestions!” box and the back of a McDonald’s job application. When he finished eating his chicken, Lennon borrowed the gold token that would unlock the bathroom, where he used water to pat down his hair and straighten his tie and lapels and try to look as respectable as possible. Which was tough, seeing that his face bore the bruises and scrapes of a rough beating.
What the hell. Maybe that added to his scary factor.
Before stopping at MDonald’s, Lennon had walked into a junk shop and pocketed a plastic beeper toy meant for a toddler. God knows why toddlers needed to play with beepers, but that was something for Katie to figure out later. With Michael. Whoever the fuck Michael was.
Next stop: a Mailboxes, Etc., where he nicked a package in a metal bin meant for Herman Wolf in Warminster, Pennsylvania. Sorry, Herman. It was the right size.
On to SuperFresh.
Lennon flashed back to his favorite chapter from
How the FBI Gets Its Man
—chapter 7, which was a short history of Al Nussbaum, genius bank robber. Nussbaum kept a farm in upstate New York full of high-powered weaponry and bomb-making materials. He was the man who, in the mid-1960s, pioneered the idea that a mad bomber epidemic could distract police from bank heists going down.
Nussbaum probably never had to worry about stealing toy beepers or packages from mail services.
SuperFresh was like every other American supermarket he’d visited—bright, cool, crisp, white, frigid, and overstuffed with food neatly packed into every conceivable shelf, corner, and aisle.
Lennon placed the bomb on top of a stack of Fruity Pebbles—on sale for $3.99 this week—then walked over to the bank teller. He waited his turn, then slid the note across the Formica countertop.
 
S
OMETHING ON THE SCANNER CAUGHT SAUGHERTY’S ear—a bit about a dead woman. A bunch of kids found her in an abandoned lot in Southwest Philly where neighborhood residents dump old furniture and trash.
Saugherty had holed himself up in the Comfort Inn up in Bensalem, right off Route 1, just out of the city limits. He took a corner room so he could see the highway. He didn’t want the flashing cherries and blueberries to come screaming out of nowhere. He was still under investigation, as far as he knew. He hadn’t made himself reachable.
The room was packed with the necessary supplies: the police scanner, of course, to see if his Irish bank-robber buddy had emerged. Two sixes of Yuengling Lager in a hard-case cooler. Three bottles of Early Times. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Two bottles of Ketel One—a buddy of his had turned him on to that stuff. Sipping vodka. Go figure. Six bottles of water. Two sticks of pepperoni; one block of sharp white cheese. Box of Ritz. Rye bread, liverwurst, mustard, fat red onion. He stuck the liverwurst and sharp cheese in the cooler with the beer. The rest could stay out.
He’d also paid a visit to his private armory over in Tacony, along the river. There was a bunch of stuff in a black canvas bag under the bed.
Saugherty had been listening for key words like “bank robber” or “heist” or “Wachovia” or “Lennon,” but then caught the police code for body dump. He called a friend on the force and asked for the skinny, which was: woman, late twenties, found naked at Forty-ninth and Grays Ferry, her wrists and ankles bound with brown extension cords and her body smeared with peanut butter. She was three months pregnant.
Wait, back up, said Saugherty. Peanut butter.
Yeah, confirmed the source. Peanut butter. People on the scene thought the killer—or dumper—smeared it on so rats from the area would eat the evidence.
You got a photo? asked Saugherty. Something nagged him about this.
After some back and forth, the source agreed to fax a photo of the woman’s face over to the Comfort Inn’s business center. Saugherty took another three sips of Early Times, then wandered down there.
He got the faxed photo.
Holy fucking shit.
 
I
HAVE A BOMB IN A PACKAGE IN ONE OF THE AISLES. GIVE me all your money—no dye packs, no alarms—or people will die.
No sense fucking around with it, Lennon thought. This wasn’t an essay for a cash prize; this was a bank robbery demand note. He’d never written one before, but he surmised the most successful were direct and to the point.
The girl across the counter looked down at the note. She was pretty, in a geeky kind of way. Her brown hair was cut unflatteringly and she wore chunky glasses that her Goth friends probably thought were cool. But Lennon liked her look. He didn’t like that he was going to cause her some major grief this morning. This is why he enjoyed getaway driving: no personal interaction, no countermeasures, none of this at all.
She looked up at him questioningly. Are you serious?
Lennon froze his face, deadpan. Yes, I’m fucking serious. He let her see the toy beeper in his hand.
The girl nodded, then started to busy herself under the counter.
Lennon waited.
“We’re supposed to put a security packet in here,” she said, quietly. “But I’m not going to do that. I want you to know that, okay?”
Lennon nodded.
“It’s not much, either. Just a little over a thousand. But I’m not holding back.”
Lennon blinked at her. Come on, love.
“Just don’t hurt anybody, okay?”
Enough was enough already. He raised the toy beeper.
The girl slid him the money, tucked in a white plastic bag. She hadn’t asked if he’d wanted paper.
Lennon took the bag and walked toward the exit. There was a little boy trying to rattle a prize out of a small red machine in the aisle and a young couple pushing a cart full of bagged groceries. He stepped around them and through the automatic doors, which whooshed open at his approach. Through the vestibule, to the other set of doors.
Which refused to open.
As did the ones behind him, when he backed up. The young couple looked at him through the glass. What did you do?
Oh, fuck me, he thought.
Trapped.
Like a gerbil in a Habitrail.
At that moment, for the first time all weekend, Lennon was glad Bling had been killed. He wasn’t sure how he would have explained this to him.
A short while later, after the police had arrived and Lennon was in cuffs and ready to be led to the nearest squad car, the girl from the grocery store approached him. She looked at him through those clunky glasses like a curious schoolgirl at a science exhibit.
“Next time,” she said, “pick a toy beeper that doesn’t say Fisher-Price on the side.”
She didn’t actually say that. Lennon imagined her saying that. Because that’s how this story was going to end, when it was written up for the newspapers in a couple of hours. The bomb angle, the toy. Guaranteed coverage. And the early editions would wrap up a little after midnight, and sooner or later, a copy would wind up in that Italian bastard’s hands, and Katie would be killed.

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