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Carlucci stabbed the SPEAKERPHONE button, breaking the connection.

[ FOUR ]

The Roundhouse

Eighth and Race Streets, Philadelphia

Saturday, December 15, 6:20 P.M.

Matt Payne, holding his hand up to shield his face, was slumped in the front passenger seat of Tony Harris’s Ford Crown Vic, the unmarked Police Interceptor coated in layers of gray grime. Payne tried not to make eye contact with any of the protesters on the sidewalk as Harris turned out of the parking lot. The black smoke from the fires in Strawberry Mansion was visible in the sky in the distance, and Payne believed that there was a very real possibility these protesters were angry enough to overturn the car—and worse.

Harris accelerated hard as he headed for North Broad Street, then Ridge Avenue, which would take them northwest to North Twenty-ninth Street. Payne sat back up in his seat, then began scrolling through messages on his smartphone.

The female dispatcher on the police radio was rapidly, but professionally, broadcasting updates on the unrest in Strawberry Mansion. There came a long pause, which she broke by automatically adding a filler safety message: “When exiting your cruiser, always turn off the engine and take the keys.”

Payne and Harris exchanged glances.

“Might want to keep that in mind, Detective. I understand there might be a criminal element where we’re headed,” Payne said drily, turning back to his phone.

Harris snorted. He then felt his cellular phone vibrating. When he checked the caller ID, it read NUMBER BLOCKED.

He reached over and opened the glove box, where the unmarked car’s radio was concealed, and turned down the volume as the dispatcher announced, “Safety is a full-time job. Don’t have a part-time attitude. The time is . . .”

“Yeah?” Harris then answered the call, his tone annoyed.

Matt Payne, picking up on that, looked at him out of the corner of his eye.

“Hey, Sully,” Harris said. “What’s up?”

Now Payne turned his head to look at Harris. Harris shrugged his shoulders at him as he nodded.

“Tell him I want to talk to him,” Payne said.

Harris raised his index finger in a Hold one gesture.

“All right, Sully. Get back to me if you hear anything.” He paused, then added, “If I can. No promises.”

Harris met Payne’s eyes as he broke off the call.

“I said I wanted to talk to him,” Payne repeated. “What’d he want?”

“Sully says the rally shooting was not his guys in the crowd.”

“His guys? In the crowd? I thought he said he had nothing to do with the hypothetical whacking of Hooks and Company.”

“He still maintains that. These guys, he says, were doing recon work. He had two there. One was actually Lynda Webber, who used to work for him in Vice. After she got back from two tours in Iraq with army intel—she’s a captain in the reserves—Sully hired her away. Really razor-sharp mind. I actually saw her in the crowd on the video feed.”

Harris chuckled as he honked the horn to pass a slow-moving pickup.

“What?” Payne said.

“Shouldn’t tell you this, but what initially drew my eye to her was that there was a group of young white women in a clump, all with their politically correct looks of moral outrage, and furiously pumping those posters of the murder victims over their heads. One, projecting the angriest outrage and loudly leading that ‘Yo, Yo, Yo! Payne Must Go!’ chant, held a poster of Public Enemy Number One.”

Payne grunted. “So she was carrying mine.”

Harris chuckled again. “Guess Lynda felt that gave her a really solid cover.”

“Glad I could help in some small way.”