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That’s Allegheny West, on the way home.
What the hell . . .
He put the minivan in gear, flicked on the headlights, and drove out into the night.
He took Girard Avenue west to Broad Street—giving a wide berth to Jefferson and Hancock, where he’d shot LeRoi Cheatham earlier in the day—then drove north on Broad all the way to Ontario. There, he made a left.
Just before crossing over Germantown Avenue, Will considered pulling to a stop to reapply the FedEx signs to the doors of the vehicle. But he decided that the signage really didn’t matter at night.
The guy is going to see the new white minivan and my uniform. That’s enough.
And I really don’t want them on the doors if the cops are still out looking for a white FedEx minivan.
Who knows what that retard Michael told them?
Then, after this, I’ll take Germantown home and finish the rest tomorrow.
Then he did pull over, but only to hit the overhead light and reread the waybill on the FedEx envelope. It had: JOSSIAH MIFFIN
1822 W. ONTARIO STREET
In his research at CrimeFreePhilly.com, Will Curtis had learned that originally it had been Miffin’s girlfriend who’d turned in the thirty-year-old to the police. Miffin had been babysitting her eleven-year-old daughter at her house when she had left work early to surprise him.
And surprise him she had.
She walked into the living room carrying a store-bought angel food cake in a plastic to-go bag and a long slicing knife.
She found the two of them on the sofa.
He was teaching the girl how to masturbate.
The daughter, after quickly pulling on her pants, had loudly defended Miffin, declaring it all a simple misunderstanding. Using the vernacular of the street, she explained that Miffin had been teaching her self-stimulation only because he’d told her that it was very wrong for him to continue orally stimulating her with his tongue.
Her mother had responded to that information by also drawing from the street: She lunged for Miffin and tried cutting out his tongue with the angel food knife.
She failed, but did manage to slash a nasty gash on his left cheek in the shape of, oddly, a J.
After his arrest, Jossiah Miffin had been found guilty of indecent assault and corruption of a minor. (The mother claimed it had been self-defense that had led to the cheek cut.) Miffin was sentenced to probation, which included his getting and keeping a job, obtaining intense sex-offender treatments, and maintaining absolutely no unsupervised contact with minors.
Having made no effort whatsoever to meet even one of the requirements of his probation, Miffin’s Wanted sheet hit the Megan’s Law list.
And it hit Will Curtis’s Law of Talion pervert list.
On Ontario Street, just shy of Nineteenth Street and the SEPTA train tracks, Will Curtis slowed and started looking for 1822. It was damn difficult on the dark street. Here, too, there were huge gaps where row houses had once stood. And he had to start with a known address and try to count from there to 1822, guessing how many ghost addresses there were between existing houses.
And this easily could turn out like that other address—nonexistent.
He was amazed that his decent middle-class house was only a couple miles from this run-down ruin of a neighborhood. The houses were literally falling apart. And all the cars here were older models, some very much older, including the carcasses of two that clearly had been wrecked and abandoned long before.
As the minivan rolled down the street, its headlights picked up an occasional address—and, twice, a group of young boys walking down the broken sidewalk, trying to stay in the shadows.
They look like they’re up to no good.
He finally saw 1818 in the headlight beam, counted the gap next to that house as 1820, and decided the next ratty row house had to be 1822.
He stopped the minivan at what he presumed was 1824, parked, grabbed the envelope, peeled off his denim jacket, and got out.
As he looked at the darkened house—he could not see one light on inside—he now worried that this address may be deserted.
