Page 14

And he’d really been boozing it up at the motel when he jumped off the roof.

Or, maybe, when he fell.

But his biggest problem was that he couldn’t stick with anything. First they blamed it on his trust fund taking away any motivation. Then they found out he had some slight mental imbalance that pills would fix-if he just took the damned meds and stopped self-medicating with booze and whatever else.

And Chad, for whatever reason, maybe because they were the hotshots on the academy squash team, was always bailing him out.

Always.

Like after that time Skipper drove into the reservoir with that really nice Audi-and that gorgeous Becca Benjamin.

Dad said he’d heard Skipper’s lawyer say that it’d cost a small fortune to make that go away.

An absolutely gorgeous girl.

Still hurts to remember the day I heard they were dating…

Matthew Mark Payne had known Rebecca Stockton Benjamin longer than J. Warren Olde had, though certainly not as intimately. The Paynes and Benjamins had worshipped at the same small Episcopal Church in Wallingford. Its sanctuary physically was more chapel-like than church-size, and its parishioners numbered no more than five hundred. Thus, while growing up, Matt and Becca had seen each other practically every Sunday. They often were in the same youth group meetings, retreats, camps, and the like. Matt had always liked the spunky, outgoing girl-few didn’t-and even thought that there had been some sort of mutual interest.

A crush?

Then, when Skipper took up with the blossoming sixteen-year-old, Matt had been really pissed. Especially when he saw the direction Skipper was taking her… and she was blindly following.

At Cecil Moore Avenue, Matt hung a right, skirting Temple University, then about a mile later he picked up Frankford and followed it north another mile or so-until he saw the flashing emergency lights.

Jesus! Look at all the fire trucks.

Even a HazMat unit.

To the side of that heavy-duty red Ford truck, a fireman was using a fire hose to wash down two men wearing bright orange HazMat “moonwalker” bodysuits, rubber boots, and full-face hoods. Another was respooling smaller HazMat hoses onto the roof of the truck’s equipment box.

What HazMats are at a motel?

And judging by all the cruisers, there can’t be a cop left at the Roundhouse.

His pulse quickened at the sight.

Is my heart beating faster because I want to rush in?

Or because it wants me to run away as fast as my feckless rental Ford can go?

A pair of police cruisers, their roof light bars flashing, was parked at an angle across the nor

thbound lanes of Frankford just south of the Philly Inn. A cop stood in the street beside them directing traffic to detour onto a side street.

Payne looked ahead and saw the neon sign for the All-Nite Diner, then the diner itself and the crowd gathered in front of it. He hit his turn signal to go into the diner parking lot, and when the cop saw it blinking, he motioned approval for the nondescript Ford sedan to take its turn.

TWO

1344 W. Susquehanna Avenue, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 5:35 A.M.

Paco “El Nariz” Esteban, a heavyset, five-foot-two twenty-seven-year-old with coffee-colored skin and a flat face whose most prominent feature was a fat nose twice as wide as it was long, stood in the middle of the brightly lit, newly renovated laundromat. He had his stubby fingers splayed on his ample hips as he surveyed his midnight-to-eight work crew feeding motel bedsheets and towels to the machines.

Built into one long white wall were twenty stainless-steel commercial-quality washing machines. Another interior wall held a line of twenty-five commercial-quality clothes dryers. Waist-high four-foot-square thick-wire baskets on heavy-duty casters either were waiting in front of a washer or dryer, or were full and being wheeled by Latina women in jeans and T-shirts from the wall of dryers to a long tan linoleum counter at the back of the room. There, an assembly line of more Latinas folded and stacked freshly laundered sheets and towels before sliding them down the tan counter to be sorted and packed for transport back to the various motels. The large windows and front door to the street were papered over, and milky paint-splattered plastic sheeting sealed off a side room that was still under construction.

Paco “The Nose” Esteban soaked up the atmosphere of the laundry at this early hour-the soft conversations in Spanish of the workers, the Latin music station playing on a clock radio in the back corner, the hum of washers and dryers. It created an almost peaceful sound, the kind of rhythm that came when good people were accomplishing honest work.

El Nariz took a quiet pride in his crews-he also had ones working as housekeepers at the motels-and what he thought of as his role as their mentor and protector-indeed, their paterfamilias, as he could trace his relationship by blood to a majority of his workers.