Page 3

Curtis glanced down at the Glock. The matte-black gun reminded him of the semiautomatic Colt Model 1911 .45 ACP with which he’d first learned to shoot. That had been during his short stint—two years, ten months, and twenty-two days during the 1970s, discharged honorably during a postwar Reduction in Force—in the Pennsylvania National Guard.

And that caused him to shake his head in disgust.

I joined up to fight for freedom—but damn sure not so our legal system would allow these worthless shits to do what they want to innocent girls.

No one is going to miss him.

And there’s not a damn thing that’s going to happen to me for taking him out—that is, if I get caught.

Then he chuckled.

Like that saying goes, “You can’t kill a man born to hang.”

Or, in my case, hang dead at the end of a chemo IV drip. . . .

He slipped the Glock into the right pocket of his denim jacket and opened the driver’s door. As he shuffled his feet to get out, he accidentally kicked the full canteen across the floorboard. He looked down at it and made a face.

Oh, what the hell. May as well dump it out now.

Then he smirked.

And I know exactly how.

He looked over at the cracked frosted plate-glass window with LAW OFFICE OF DANIEL O. GARTNER, ESQ. He saw a couple of overhead white lights go off behind it, then there began a pulsing of different-colored lights. He’d seen that happen on the other nights he’d sat watching the office, and decided that Gartner liked to watch a little television, maybe a movie, after the help had left.

He picked up the canteen and swung open the door.

[TWO]

Will Curtis, staying in the shadows, walked up the sidewalk on the far side of the street. As he approached a parallel-parked filthy old Ford panel van—one that apparently hadn’t been moved in a month of Sundays, judging by the parking tickets and fast-food restaurant flyers stacked thick under its windshield wipers—he stepped off the curb to cross the street. He turned his head left and checked for any traffic, and just as he saw that there wasn’t anything coming, there came from the opposite direction the sound of a roaring motorcycle engine.

He stopped in his tracks, keeping behind the filthy Ford van, and carefully peered out to look to the right.

And there he saw it: one of those high-end racing-style motorcycles designed to look at once sleek and aggressive.

He saw plenty of them while driving his truck routes—and he hated them.

The idiots on those crotch rockets are always street racing or running in packs like marauding dogs, reckless as hell, causing wrecks in their wake.

Even worse, every now and then splattering themselves on the bumper of some car, making that innocent driver carry that damn memory the rest of his life.

The motorcycle had just turned the corner at Nineteenth, but then suddenly made a fast U-turn, which explained the roaring sound he’d heard.

And then Curtis saw why the rider—Jesus, he’s small for that big bike—had changed direction: Near the end of the block, a group of four girls wearing their parochial-school outfits of dark woolen skirts and white cotton blouses were approaching the corner of Nineteenth and Callowhill. They looked to be about age fifteen or sixteen.

As the motorcycle closed on the group, the girls were lit by the bike’s bright headlight—and they froze there in the beam, staring at the fast-approaching machine.

Scared like damned deer.

One of the girls wore a zippered hoodie athletic jacket, in blue and white, and when she turned away from the beam it lit her back. There Curtis saw the representation of Mickey Mouse stitched on the jacket, the cartoon character’s head partially obscured by the hood.

Curtis had figured—and the jacket confirmed—that the group was from John W. Hallahan Catholic Girls’ High School. A private institution run by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Hallahan was just around the corner, between Callowhill and Vine. Blue and white were its school colors, the Disney icon its school mascot.

The motorcyclist slowed, then passed the girls and did another quick U-turn.

He may be small, but the prick can ride.

That’s the “little man syndrome”—insecure guys getting a hot bike or car to help them look tougher.