Relaxing with the Paper - The Wheelman

SUNDAY A.M.

“I am spending your money to have you and your family killed. Nice, eh?”
—GEORGE “MACHINE GUN” KELLY

* * *

SAUGHERTY 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.