A Fond Memory of Hardship - The Wheelman

SAUGHERTY PURCHASED HIS TWIN ON COLONY DRIVE IN 1988, with his then-wife Clarissa and five-year-old boy. The price then was $65,000, which made for slightly uncomfortable mortgage payments on a cop’s salary. In the fifteen years since, the value of the house had doubled as the real estate market boomed. In the fifteen years since, Clarissa had gone, his five-year-old boy was now a twenty-year-old Ecstasy-popper on seizure medication, and the cop’s salary had given way to other forms of support. Clarissa and the kid had picked up and moved to Warminster; Saugherty kept the house out of sheer inertia. He kept meaning to rent a place closer to the city where he did most of his work, but never got around to it.

But as he sat on his back lawn in the spring air and watched his $135,000 (current market value) twin burn, Saugherty thought about none of this. Instead, his mind was still trying to wrap around something else.

No, not the fact that his former confidant and best friend, Earl Mothers, was a burnt piece of North Philly brisket inside his smoldering garage.

No, not the fact that three other heavily armed guys—sounded like Junior Black Mafia—were also in the Colony Drive BBQ pit.

Nor the fact that Saugherty, sooner or later, was going to have to come up with a story to explain his dead friend and dead niggers inside his burning home.

It was the mute.

He spoke.

All this time, the guy could talk. He’d been fooling people for months, maybe years. Saugherty didn’t know how old the info on the I.O. was, but it wasn’t as if the mute detail cropped up yesterday. Patrick Selway Lennon had been fooling people for a long time. It probably made him attractive as a getaway driver—what better accomplice than one who can’t sing to the cops?

Even when it came down to it, when his life was on the line and any other person would have been pleading for it, the guy kept quiet.

Then why did he bother with that final spoken jab? Irish brogue and everything?

Remove this, ya fuckin’ arseholes.

An anger limit. The guy had a boiling point, and the lid had blown off the pot just then. This would be useful.

Now Saugherty had to find the guy. He assumed he’d survived the blast, just as Saugherty had. That door had probably shielded him. Saugherty had barely cleared the garage door leading into the basement when the tank went up. When he saw the aim line, from gun to tank, Saugherty decided to screw the charade. He jumped up and ran for it. Two of the four guys—including Mothers—spun their heads around to watch Saugherty run. The others were focused on Lennon, and that gun poking out from beneath the door. Within seconds, the room was full of fire, and Saugherty was diving behind a love seat. A fireball whipped through the air above him, and everything in his basement went up. He had to hurl a chair through the basement bay window to make it out to the lawn.

Lennon hadn’t come out that way. Saugherty had sat there on his lawn, holding his pistol, waiting for him.

He must have gone out the front.

Saugherty walked around the side of the house toward the street. His next-door neighbor, a Home Depot manager named Jimmy Hadder, grabbed him by the arm. “Jesus, are you okay?”

“Home invasion,” muttered Saugherty. “Bunch of black guys knocked me out, robbed me, set the place on fire.” He was spinning off the top of his head. He realized he should stop before he talked himself into a corner he couldn’t explain later. “One guy got out—you see him, Jim?”

“Yeah—he went up toward Axe Factory. But he looked white.”

“You never can tell these days. Thanks, Jimbo.”

Axe Factory Road, which Colony Drive spilled into. From there, it was two choices: east or west. Saugherty thanked him and started jogging toward the end of the cul-de-sac.

Down toward the park: nada. Up toward Welsh Road: a glimpse of his guy, turning a corner.

Got you.

Saugherty ran back for the car he’d taken from Lennon, then realized it had been parked in the garage.