The Cold Steel Grave - The Wheelman

LENNON WOKE UP AGAIN WHEN THE LIP OF THE PIPE scraped his chest. The hazy memories of the last few minutes loaded themselves back into his brain. It was all pain and fuzz and white noise, and flickering images of the inside of a black vinyl bag, and beatings, and looking at some dumb college kid, and then blackness again. He reached out to grab something, anything. His fingers scraped against concrete, then slipped around cold steel.

Shit.

The pipe.

The memory came back. These two jokers were dumping bodies down a pipe. Holden’s body. Bling’s body. Now, his body. Whatever’s buried here stays here for at least sixty years.

His fingers found the edge of the pipe, and he clamped down as forcefully as he could.

“Let go fucker,” a voice hissed, and he felt a fist hammer the base of his spine. Lennon’s arms and hands went numb, but he kept holding on. The fist pounded his back again, and then his ass. Then more fists. Someone grabbed his legs and hoisted them up in the air. Then a fist smashed into his balls, and the fight was over. Lennon’s fingers released their hold on the pipe and he felt himself sliding down it.

Arms, legs, out. That was the only thing he could do. Skin slid against steel. Lennon pushed his arms and legs out farther, as hard as he could. Flakes of acned rust on the inside of the pipe caught against his skin, shredding it. But it also slowed his descent. A few panicked seconds later he stopped falling.

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 old 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.