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I
[ ONE ]
West Rittenhouse Square
Center City
Philadelphia
Thursday, January 5, 1:55 P.M.
“Target is moving,” the man behind the wheel of a white Chevrolet panel van called back through the partition after reading the burner phone’s text message. “Get ready.”
The driver—a short, small-framed, skinny male in his mid-thirties who wore faded blue overalls and a black woolen knit cap—had parked almost an hour earlier at the curb in front of the iconic Smith & Wollensky steak house. After walking around the van and placing two reflective orange safety cones at the front and rear bumpers, he had returned to the driver’s seat and waited for the signal on the throwaway mobile telephone.
The position gave him an unobstructed view twenty yards up the red-bricked drive to the valet kiosk and the entrance of The Rittenhouse, a high-rise that housed a five-star hotel and ultra-luxury condominiums.
If Center City was considered the wealthiest section of America’s fifth-largest city—and it unequivocally was—then The Rittenhouse, overlooking the heavily treed and expensively landscaped Rittenhouse Square Park, which William Penn first designed in the seventeenth century, was without question one of the city’s
classiest addresses.
The white panel van had magnetic three-foot-square signage on its front doors that read KEYCOM CABLE TV INSTALL CONTRACTOR, PENNA. LICENSE 3-246. Just to the left of the passenger door signage, midway up the body of the van, was a chromed, twelve-inch-square door, above which was a sticker with red lettering: A/C POWER 110 VOLTS ONLY!
Inside the back of the van, behind the chromed door, sat an obese, olive-skinned forty-year-old with a puffy, pockmarked face and thinning, greased-back hair. He wore a gray hooded sweatshirt and heavy denim workman’s overalls and was slumped in a heavy chair that had been salvaged from an Italian restaurant’s dumpster. The wooden chair was bolted to the metal floor of the van directly behind the passenger seat, the chair’s back to the partition.
Across his lap he held a black Remington twelve-gauge pump shotgun that had a short polymer pistol grip mounted in place of the longer standard shoulder stock.
“What’s he doing?” the obese man said.
“It’s they,” the driver said. “Target’s got some jagoff with him.”
Approaching the kiosk were two well-built, clean-cut men in their early thirties, one blond and the other dark-haired, both over six feet tall and dressed somewhat identically in sweaters, blue jeans, and pointed-toe Western boots.
The man in the back chuckled.
“Sucks to be that guy,” he said.
He fought the urge to crack open the chromed door, from which they had removed the original plug receptacle, and have a quick look.
“They’re getting their car at the valet stand,” the driver said.
“About damn time,” the obese man replied, then inhaled deeply. “This smell of grilled steak is making me starved.”
“Tell me about it,” the driver said, nervously drumming his gloved fingers on the steering wheel. “We’re gonna eat like kings after this job.”
The driver watched as one of the three valets—That really is one fine-looking bitch to be parking cars, he thought—trotted to the far leg of the A-shaped drive, where more than a dozen vehicles were neatly backed into a row of parking slots along the drive’s exit.
She passed a silver Bentley Mulsanne sedan, which was at the far end, and a red Aston Martin Vanquish coupe before getting into a glistening black Cadillac SUV.
“It’s an Escalade,” the driver said. “And that Caddy’s brand-fucking-new. Still got the window sticker on it.”
She quickly maneuvered the enormous SUV around the fountain in the center of the drive and brought it to a stop in front of the two tall men at the kiosk.
The valet hopped down from the driver’s seat and stood erect, putting her right hand, palm out, against her lower back as she held open the door with her left. One of the male valets went to the front passenger door, opened it, and assumed the same erect stance.
The dark-haired male came around the SUV, handed the valet what looked like a tip, then got in behind the wheel.
“Target is getting in the passenger seat,” the van’s driver said, starting the engine and pulling the gearshift down into low.
“Got it,” the obese male replied, then, after a moment, grunted and added, “Not that it’s gonna matter much where the bastard sits.”
The man in back then began shuffling his feet in order to sit up in the chair.
He racked the action of the shotgun, loading a round of double-aught buckshot into the breech with a solid, metallic Ka-Chunk-Chunk! He then rotated the weapon onto its side, dug his gloved hand into a pocket, came out with another round of double-aught, and shoved it through the slot in the bottom, topping off the magazine tube.
The van driver saw the brake lights of the Escalade illuminate, then the backup lights briefly flash once, indicating the vehicle was being shifted into drive. The SUV started rolling—then, twenty feet later, its brake lights lit up again and it came to a stop.
“What the hell?” the driver said.
“What?” the man in back said.
