In his research at CrimeFreePhilly.com, Will Curtis had learned that originally it had been Miffin's girlfriend who'd turned in the thirty-year-old to the police. Miffin had been babysitting her eleven-year-old daughter at her house when she had left work early to surprise him.
And surprise him she had.
She walked into the living room carrying a store-bought angel food cake in a plastic to-go bag and a long slicing knife.
She found the two of them on the sofa.
He was teaching the girl how to masturbate.
The daughter, after quickly pulling on her pants, had loudly defended Miffin, declaring it all a simple misunderstanding. Using the vernacular of the street, she explained that Miffin had been teaching her self-stimulation only because he'd told her that it was very wrong for him to continue orally stimulating her with his tongue.
Her mother had responded to that information by also drawing from the street: She lunged for Miffin and tried cutting out his tongue with the angel food knife.
She failed, but did manage to slash a nasty gash on his left cheek in the shape of, oddly, a J.
After his arrest, Jossiah Miffin had been found guilty of indecent assault and corruption of a minor. (The mother claimed it had been self-defense that had led to the cheek cut.) Miffin was sentenced to probation, which included his getting and keeping a job, obtaining intense sex-offender treatments, and maintaining absolutely no unsupervised contact with minors.
Having made no effort whatsoever to meet even one of the requirements of his probation, Miffin's Wanted sheet hit the Megan's Law list.
And it hit Will Curtis's Law of Talion pervert list. On Ontario Street, just shy of Nineteenth Street and the SEPTA train tracks, Will Curtis slowed and started looking for 1822. It was damn difficult on the dark street. Here, too, there were huge gaps where row houses had once stood. And he had to start with a known address and try to count from there to 1822, guessing how many ghost addresses there were between existing houses.
And this easily could turn out like that other address-nonexistent.
He was amazed that his decent middle-class house was only a couple miles from this run-down ruin of a neighborhood. The houses were literally falling apart. And all the cars here were older models, some very much older, including the carcasses of two that clearly had been wrecked and abandoned long before.
As the minivan rolled down the street, its headlights picked up an occasional address-and, twice, a group of young boys walking down the broken sidewalk, trying to stay in the shadows.
They look like they're up to no good.
He finally saw 1818 in the headlight beam, counted the gap next to that house as 1820, and decided the next ratty row house had to be 1822.
He stopped the minivan at what he presumed was 1824, parked, grabbed the envelope, peeled off his denim jacket, and got out.
As he looked at the darkened house-he could not see one light on inside-he now worried that this address may be deserted.
One step away from falling down and becoming a gap, too.
But when he knocked on the old wooden door's glass pane, which was covered on the inside by a dusty curtain, a dog barked loudly from deep inside the house.
He faintly heard footsteps inside, then the lone bulb of the porch light came on.
Bony fingers pulled aside the dusty curtain, and an elderly black woman with a deeply wrinkled face and thinning gray hair peered out at him. She looked half asleep, and judging by her expression, she was not expecting to find a white man in a FedEx uniform on her porch.
"Can I help you?" she squeaked out.
"Sorry to bother you so late, ma'am. It's my last delivery." He held up the envelope. "Got a special delivery from the U.S. Treasury for a Jossiah Miffin at this address."
"A what?"
"It's an envelope from the Treasury Department in Washington. Been delivering these all day. I'm guessing they're some kind of refund check."
"Check?" she repeated, taking a long moment to consider that. "Just leave it. At the door be good."
"Sorry, ma'am. Can't do that. Need for this"-he glanced at the bill of lading and pretended to read it-"Jossiah Miffin to personally sign for it. He live here?"
She nodded. "He my grandson. I sent him to the drugstore in my car. You can wait if you want."
Will Curtis felt his stomach start to knot up again.
He looked at the woman, nodded, and said, "I'm going to wait in the van."
"Suit yourself," she said, and the dusty curtain fell closed. In the fifteen minutes that Will Curtis had sat in the minivan, hoping not to experience another unfortunate personal accident, he'd again seen the group of three boys who'd been walking down the sidewalk earlier.
They simply have nothing better to do.
Or choose not to find something better to do.
No wonder they get in such trouble. You look long enough for trouble, you're damn sure going to find it.
There was still a knot in his stomach. And he still felt terribly weak and drained. The dizziness had not completely gone away.
He pulled the Glock out from under his shirt and laid it on his lap, then realized he hadn't been keeping track of how many rounds he'd fired.
More important, how many I have left.
All I know for sure is that there's one round chambered.
He pushed the magazine release on the side of the weapon and the magazine dropped out of the grip. Its capacity was ten rounds.
He held the magazine up to the overhead light. Numbered holes up its back side allowed for a visual count of the bullets, but in the poor lighting he had trouble seeing exactly how many were there.
With some effort, he started thumbing the rounds out the top of the magazine and into his lap. He counted a total of five left.
Six, including the one in the throat.
He reloaded the magazine with some effort, slipped it into the pistol, and, using the heel of his left hand, slammed it home.
Okay, now where the hell are you, Jossiah?
A minute or so later, his eyes were slightly blinded by lights reflected in his rearview mirrors.
He blinked, then looked. He saw a yellowish pair of big, round headlight beams bouncing up and down the street toward him. Then he heard the sound of the engine valves knocking noisily as the driver accelerated.
That's one old damn car.
The shocks are shot. And it sounds like the engine is just about to go, too.
The car rattled to a stop at the weed-choked curb in front of the row house at 1822 Ontario Street. The air became heavy with the smell of raw gasoline and half-burned exhaust.
Will Curtis pulled on his grease-smeared FedEx cap and swung open the minivan's door. He stepped out, swaying a bit, then walked back and stood in the beam of the car's left headlight so that the FedEx logos on his hat, shirt, and the envelope were clearly visible to the driver.
He held the envelope in front of his crotch, concealing his hand holding the pistol.
As Will Curtis carefully continued stepping toward the car-which he now could see was a mid-1970s AMC Gremlin, in his opinion one of the ugliest and most worthless vehicles that had ever been produced-there came the sound of tortured metal as the driver pushed open the rusted-out door.
"You stay there, girl," the driver, a black man with shoulder-length hair, said to someone in the passenger seat.
Curtis could barely make out what he thought was a thin young teenage girl sitting there. She wore a white sleeveless jacket.
So he's still got a taste for the young ones…
The black male turned to Will Curtis and aggressively said: "What the hell you want?"
"Your grandmother said I should wait for you to deliver this envelope," Curtis said. "You're Jossiah Miffin, right?"
As Curtis stepped closer, he saw the black man's attention turn to the envelope. Then, despite the now-long black hair, Will saw the face from the mug shot, including the J-shaped scar.
"What up with the envelope? What's in it?"
Unexpectedly, a delirious Will Curtis heard in his head Stan Colt's voice. Colt, playing an over-the-top tough-cop character, was saying one of the lines in the shoot-'em-up movie that Curtis had just sat through twice.
Curtis tossed the envelope at Miffin's feet.
Miffin instinctively tried to catch it.
Will Curtis then leveled the Glock at Miffin's head and, in his best deep gravelly Stan Colt voice, recited the line "A heavy diet of lead, with a side order of penance."
Curtis squeezed the trigger twice.
The first round pierced the hook of the J-shaped scar, causing Miffin's head to jerk backward. The second round then went into the roof of his open mouth and exited through the top of his skull.
Miffin collapsed to the asphalt street.
The teenage girl in the car began screaming hysterically.
And suddenly, feeling very dizzy, Will Curtis saw nothing but black. He collapsed beside Miffin, dropping the Glock as he went down. Will Curtis didn't know how long he'd been passed out, only that he'd definitely been out cold. He had a lump on his forehead from where it had hit the pavement.
He figured that he couldn't have been out too long, because the teenage girl was still screaming in the passenger seat.
And Jossiah Miffin, of course, was still where he'd fallen dead.
As Will Curtis tried to stand, he quickly discovered that he had almost no energy whatever.
He made it up to his hands and knees and began crawling back to the Ford minivan.
It took an eternity to pull himself up into the driver's seat, then get the door closed.
With a lot of effort, he started the engine, put the shifter in drive, and rolled forward.
He looked in the mirror and saw three young black teens rush out to the Gremlin. He watched as one reached under the car and pulled something out.
What was… oh, the envelope!
Those savages will steal anything they think is worth something.
Won't they be surprised when they find the Wanted sheet.
Then again, maybe they'll turn him in for the reward.
The kid shoved it inside his sweatshirt, then took off running.
Will Curtis turned at the corner and headed for Germantown Avenue. [THREE] Hops Haus Tower, Unit 2180 1100 N. Lee Street, Philadelphia Sunday, November 1, 9:58 P.M. In the middle of the plush king-size bed facing a panoramic view of the lights along the Delaware River and beyond, Matt Payne and Amanda Law were lying on their left sides, spoon fashion, resting in the glow of the carnally exhausted. Matt had his arms wrapped around Amanda and across her slowly rising and falling bosoms. His right leg was draped over her right hip, his toes tucked back in just above her ankles. When he inhaled, he marveled at her soft warm scent-at once sweet and, from the perspiration, lightly salty-that felt rich in pheromones.
This is as good as it gets, he thought, and he gently kissed the back of her neck.
She grunted softly, appreciatively.
Then, even though his cell phone was in the pocket of his khaki pants that had been unceremoniously dropped on the floor at the far side of the bed and were now under a curled-up Luna, he heard the phone's distinctive ping! that announced he had an incoming text message.
Okay, we've been lying here like this for at least ten minutes, neither of us saying a word. Or moving an inch.
Just intimately intertwined.
And it's been nice. Incredibly nice.
So would I really ruin everything by checking that message?
I really really really don't want to fuck up the moment, because-wow!-what a helluva romp that was.
Where does she get the energy? And the deep passion?
Incredible.
Then he heard another ping!
In his arms, Amanda moved a little.
"You're not," she softly said. But it was more of a question.
He didn't reply.
"Are you?" she then said, her tone somewhat incredulous.
He thought: You probably would if it was yours going off.
He said: "Of course not, baby."
And then there was another: Ping!
Then two others in a row: Ping! Ping!
What the hell?
"What's going on, Matt?"
"I don't know, baby. I told you I'm not going to check those."
But I should. What the hell?
Ping!
She moved again, then suddenly squirmed out from under him.
"Well," she said, "if you're not, I sure as hell am."
She reached down the side of the bed and grabbed the waistband of the khakis, tugging hard when she felt the weight of Luna on them.
"Sorry, girl," Amanda said as she dug in the pocket and pulled out the phone.
Luna slinked across the room and went into her crate in the master bath. It sounded as if she threw herself down onto the hard plastic liner. Then Luna gave a heavy sigh.
Amanda looked at the phone's screen.
She said, "Three from Tony-"
"What the hell?" he said, sitting up and adjusting the pillow to lean back on.
"-one from Kerry, and the last one's from Denny."
"Denny?" he said.
She held the phone out to him.
"That can't be good," Matt said. "He doesn't like texting and only does it out of necessity. Wonder why he didn't just call."
He glanced at them, then saw that the time stamps of the various messages were not all from the last few minutes, as the multiple ping-pings would have suggested. Instead, the first one, from Harris, went back almost an hour. That suggested the messages had been stacked up somewhere, unable to get through. He then looked at his signal-strength icon, and it was flickering from the weakest signal to the icon that read: NO SIGNAL.
Payne shook his head, then read the first message from Tony Harris: -ANTHONY HARRIS- YO, MATTY. TURN ON KEYCOM CABLE CHANNEL 555 amp; BACK IT UP TO THE TOP OF THE HOUR. TROUBLE BREWING…
When Hops Haus Tower had been built, the entire property had been wired, so to speak, with super-high-speed KeyCom plastic fiber-optic digital transmission cables. The lines allowed for the advanced technology of KeyCom's various communications packages-telephone, Internet, television-to be exclusively provided by KeyCom to the residents and the retailers.
There was a simple reason for this select relationship: KeyProperties was heavily invested financially in the complex. And while some complained that such a noncompetitive environment effectively violated at least a dozen antitrust laws in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania alone, the man who controlled both companies argued differently.
Frances Franklin Fuller the Fifth said that everyone did indeed have other options: "They are free to choose to live anywhere else and purchase the inferior communications packages offered there."
Matt looked at Amanda and said, "Tony says I need to see something on channel 555 real quick."
She nodded. "But be aware: If you run out the door on me two nights in a row…"
Matt smiled, then picked up the remote control, turned on the sixty-inch flat-screen television mounted on the wall, and hit the 5 button on the keypad three times.
Because the high-speed system was all digital, the control box for the television had a function that allowed any recorded program to be replayed or fast-forwarded for up to two hours. The fast-forward mode did not, of course, work for anything that was airing live. ("Now, that'd be revolutionary," Payne had said when an installation tech was showing him all the system's bells and whistles, "because if it could do that, it'd be tantamount to looking into the future.") But a live newscast, once recorded on Key-Com's massive servers, could be replayed.
"Hey," Matt said, "this is the cable channel for the live streaming news from Mickey O'Hara's CrimeFreePhilly website."
The news live stream looked exactly like any conventional television network newscast. It had a slick "News Center," a studio set that consisted of a brightly lit anchor desk, behind which sat a pair of young, perky, and polished talking heads. On the wall behind them, CRIMEFREEPHILLY.COM NEWSCAST was spelled out in gleaming chrome letters that were splashed with various colors from filters on unseen klieg carbon arc lamps that hung from the studio ceiling. Below the chrome letters, the wall held a bank of four giant flat-screen studio monitors, each showing some working news story.
Matt hit the button on the remote control that restarted the newscast at its beginning.
"Good evening," said the good-looking male talking head with dark hair and a bright smile. "Welcome to the nine-o'clock edition of tonight's newscast at CrimeFreePhilly-dot-com. I'm Dusty Meyers."
"And I'm Jessi Sabatini," said the attractive redhead with a dazzling display of teeth who was sitting beside him. "Tonight's top news: This weekend's Halloween Homicides continue to mount in Philadelphia."
Matt saw that the image behind her on the upper-right flat-screen studio monitor was of Francis Fuller standing at a lectern.
Matt hit the FAST FORWARD button, causing the audio to go temporarily silent and the two talking heads to begin bobbing as if on coil springs. They made very fast gestures.
Then the camera zoomed in on Jessi Sabatini. As she jabbered, a box popped up beside her bobbing head. In the box appeared a progression of photographs, mostly mug shots, of all the pop-and-drops with their names shown beneath them. Then there was a picture of Francis Fuller with his name underneath, and Payne hit the NORMAL PLAY button on the remote.
Jessi Sabatini was saying: "Corporate titan Frances Fuller, whose Lex Talionis has been very busy this weekend, gave a press conference earlier at which he presented ten-thousand-dollar rewards to some heroic citizens of Philadelphia. Our own Michael J. O'Hara was there and has the story."
The image of Fuller filled the entire television screen.
"And so the circus continues," Matt said to Amanda. "Hell, it was inevitable Five-Eff, my favorite Puritan, would make an appearance."
There was a text box to the right of Fuller's head reading: FRANCIS FULLER, C.E.O. LEX TALIONIS, DISTRIBUTES $10,000 REWARDS.
Along the bottom of the screen was a line of text that moved from right to left reading: BREAKING NEWS… MAYOR CARLUCCI ANNOUNCES POLICE DEPARTMENT EMERGENCY TASK FORCE AS HALLOWEEN HOMICIDES CONTINUE TO RISE… BODY COUNT IN OLD CITY NOW UP TO FIVE…
The voice of O'Hara, who was off-screen, came from the television speakers: "This is Michael J. O'Hara reporting from Lex Talionis in Old City, where Frank Fuller has just made some Philly residents much richer for having helped make the city much safer."
The camera pulled back and showed more of the room.
Francis Franklin Fuller the Fifth was in what appeared to be a conference room of his Richard Saunders Holdings office building. The short, portly forty-four-year-old, wearing his customary Benjamin Franklin outfit, stood behind a solid black lectern, both hands gripping its top. The front of the black lectern had a bronze plaque bearing the Lex Talionis logotype with the stylized-eyeball "o."
The camera then pulled farther back and showed a line of people standing to the side. Between them they held three ceremonial bank checks fashioned from heavy white plastic sheeting three feet high and six feet long. Each had in the upper left-hand corner a large red representation of the Lex Talionis logotype. And each had been filled out in handwritten lettering with a fat-tipped black permanent marker.
Payne immediately recognized one of the women who held the reward checks. She was the first on the left, closest to the lectern.
"And look who he's with," Matt said. "That's the mother of one of the dead pop-and-drops."
It was confirmed by the name written in her check's payee field: Shauna Mays.
Matt added: "We think that my mystery shooter popped her son, and then she and a gypsy cabbie dropped the body at Five-Eff's."
Matt thought: Women really can be the more ruthless of our species.
Despite her face and hand being deeply bruised, and still looking malnourished and dirty in the torn clothing she'd been wearing when Payne interviewed her earlier in the day, Shauna Mays stood there beaming.
She held-barely, as it was bigger than she was-a ceremonial check made out in the amount of ten thousand dollars. To her right-behind another ten-thousand-dollar ceremonial check that was written out to: Paco Ramirez, Yvette Iglesia, et alii, for Sasha Bazelon-stood a small pack of teenagers. Holding the check at each end were a tough-looking Latin male wearing baggy jeans and an oversize jacket, and a pretty, petite Latina with fiery eyes.
Matt said, "Those in the middle must be the crowd Javier told me about. The ones who caught the punk responsible for Principal Bazelon's death. And that pretty teen girl looks like she is probably Javier's baby sister."
Matt did not recognize the woman holding the third oversize reward check, but like Shauna Mays, she appeared rough-looking and underfed. Judging by the name on the check, it was most likely Michael Floyd's mother.
Then Matt noticed the two extra legs standing beside her, and when the check moved, Michael's head appeared around its right end.
Matt turned to Amanda and said, "That's the kid I was going to tell you about. Very strange."
Hanging on the wall behind them was a white banner emblazoned with:
YOUR HOME FOR HELPING CLEAN UP YOUR HOMETOWN: