Page 46

Or maybe he didn’t trust himself to speak?

Or . . . ?

He looked at them again.

The first text read: “Matty, this is seriously bad shit.” The second said: “One of my reporters was just brutally murdered.” Next: “Meet me at 3001 Powelton Ave.?

? And finally: “I need you to come ALONE.”

[ FOUR ]

4400 North Seventeenth Street, Philadelphia

Saturday, December 15, 2:31 P.M.

“Jesus, Hal, what a lousy place to die,” Homicide Detective Richard C. McCrory said as he steered the unmarked four-door—a dirty-gray eight-year-old Chevy Malibu—off Wingohocking Street onto Seventeenth. “For that matter, what a lousy place to live, if you can call it that. We’re in what now? Nicetown?”

Dick McCrory, who’d just turned thirty-nine, had been with the department eighteen years, six of those in Homicide. He’d grown up in Boston—his thick brogue over the years getting somewhat beaten into the Philadelphia dialect—and had joined the department right after slipping an engagement ring on the finger of Mary-Margaret, the nice Irish girl he’d met six months earlier at a South Philly wedding. McCrory had close-cropped dark hair that was graying at the temples, was of medium build, his lean body fit, the defined, toned muscles clear evidence that he still worked out regularly.

Thirty-six-year-old Homicide Detective Harold W. Kennedy Sr., an enormous African-American (six-two, two-eighty) whose beefy frame dwarfed the front passenger seat, grunted as he looked out his tinted window.

This section, on the northwestern side of Philly, was little more than block after block of dilapidated two- and three-story row houses with an occasional corner market. Its broken, uneven sidewalks were nearly covered in trash, some stuffed into torn black plastic bags but a great deal of it strewn along the entire block and on the empty lots cleared of crumbled houses.

“Yeah,” Kennedy said, “Nicetown-Tioga. But they oughta rename it Dumpville. Doesn’t anyone have a damn trash can—and the basic decency to use it?”

“I’d think it’s safe to say they don’t have much of anything.”

“Well, they sure got garbage. And plenty of it. Living large in ol’ Filthadelphia.” He paused and made a sniffing sound. “What is . . . ugh . . . it smells like a sewer line break?”

Then he pointed across the street in the direction of a dead-weed-choked lot, the snow dotted with discarded car tires. In front of it, by a storm drain at the curb, was a faded yellow plastic ten-gallon bucket on its side.

“Will you look at that! Don’t tell me they’re also dumping their crap down that drain . . .”

McCrory looked at the bucket, then scanned the row houses. Only one had any lights visibly burning.

“Okay, then I won’t tell you,” McCrory said drily. “But you should know, Detective, that if there’s no power in a place, there’s usually no running water, either. You can probably do the math from there.”

After a long moment Kennedy said, “It’s just un-fucking-believable.”

They rolled farther down the block. Then the right tires of the unmarked sedan—it had been impounded after a drug bust, then confiscated in a forfeiture and released to the police department’s motor pool—scrubbed the curb and bumped over it.

McCrory pulled to a stop in front of a burned-out, redbrick row house. Old dirty white vinyl siding sagged from the eaves. Entire panels were missing elsewhere on the facade. Windows, behind bent black metal burglar bars, were boarded over. Where the front door had once been, there now was a sheet of weathered plywood hanging at an angle from strap hinges and secured with a rusty chain and padlock. It had the crude rendering of a rodent—little more than a spray-painted black blob with huge whiskers and a long tail—with a large X painted over it. Written beneath it was NO RATS!!!

“You sure this is the place, Dick? Looks locked up pretty good.”

“It’s what Pookie texted,” McCrory said, then pointed down the block. “If not, we must be getting close. Wonder if they did that for him.”

Kennedy looked through the falling snow, then nodded. The two stop signs, on opposite corners, had been tagged with graffiti—silver spray paint that spelled SNITCHIN under the reflective lettering.

“Stop snitches? No rats? And you really think you can get one of these knuckleheads to talk, huh?”

He sighed as he pressed the wiper stalk to clear snow from the windshield.

“Hell, I dunno. Pookie said this guy knows who the doer is. What I do know is if you don’t try, you don’t get squat and . . .”

He stopped when an unkempt dark-skinned man came out of the house that was to the left of the burned-out red one. He had on a filthy faded black hoodie sweatshirt and dirty blue jeans with the cuffs stuffed into dull black leather lace-up boots. The sweatshirt’s hood was pulled tight over his head, leaving little more than his thick black-framed eyeglasses and whiskers visible. He rubbed his bare hands together incessantly.

Without turning his head, he glanced at the car. Then he sauntered past, headed toward the corner at Wingohocking.