The Wheelman: A Novel - Softcover

Swierczynski, Duane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312343787 ISBN 13: 9780312343781

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2006

Synopsis

Meet Lennon, a mute Irish getaway driver who has fallen in with the wrong heist team on the wrong day at the wrong bank. Betrayed, his money stolen and his battered carcass left for dead, Lennon is on a one-way mission to find out who is responsible―and to get back his loot. But the robbery has sent a violent ripple effect through the streets of Philadelphia. And now a dirty cop, the Russian and Italian mobs, the mayor's hired gun, and a keyboard player in a college rock band maneuver for position as this adrenaline-fueled novel twists and turns its way toward its explosive conclusion.
One thing's for sure: This cast of characters wakes up in a much different world by novel's end―if they wake up at all, in Duane Swierczynski's The Wheelman.

About this title

About the Author

Duane Swierczynski is editor-in-chief of the Philadelphia City Paper. A receipt for This Here's a Stick-Up, Duane's nonfiction book on American bank robbery, was found in the getaway car of a San Francisco bandit who'd hit at least thirty California banks. Duane lives in Philadelphia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One
FRIDAY
A.M.

I didn’t reform, I lost my nerve. I still think it’s sensible to want money and if you want money it has to be sensible to go where they have it and make them give you some.

—Al Nussbaum

Lennon watched people making their way up and down Seventeenth Street as the brisk March air whipped around the buildings. Had he been a smoker, Lennon would have savored the last few puffs before pressing the window button and flipping out the butt. Just one cigarette—something for the geeks in khaki pants and navy blue windbreakers to pick up with tweezers, drop into a thick Ziploc bag, tag, log, then store in their evidence cases.

Maybe someone would get around to analyzing the brand, try to pluck some DNA from the butt.

Part of Lennon would live forever, somewhere, tucked away in the case files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But Lennon didn’t smoke. He fiddled with the car radio a bit and watched strangers make their way to various duties and diversions. He used to wonder what motivated them—what made them get up every morning, brush their teeth, shower, eat breakfast, kiss a loved one and possibly a child good-bye. That wasn’t for him, and that’s probably why Lennon enjoyed these last moments before a big job. It put everything into perspective. You could either be outside, burning shoe leather, reporting to a cubicle, thinking about a report, whatever. Or you could be inside a car, waiting for your accomplices.

Then the alarm went off, and everything went to hell.
Bang
Bang
Bang

Holden was right up Bling’s ass. NO NO no you idiot. Hang back. Hang two steps back.

But it was too late. The big glass door behind Holden swung shut before Bling had a chance to push open the door in front of him. The hidden ACU—the gunpowder-sniffing gizmo—kicked in. Or maybe someone inside tripped it. Didn’t matter. Both Bling and Holden were sealed inside the bank vestibule. Even from twenty yards away you could read the expression on Bling’s face as his pistol hand smacked against glass: Motherfuck. Trapped, like two gerbils in a Habitrail.

Lennon slid the gearshift into drive, checked the rearview and side mirrors, then punched the car forward and to the left, blocking traffic on Seventeenth Street. He turned around. The strong late March sunshine blazed off the bank’s white stone so fiercely it hurt the eyes. Lennon still had a choice. He could leave them behind. Holden deserved it. Bling was another story. And this whole job was another story still.

Lennon pressed two fingers to his neck, feeling for his carotid artery. He counted quickly.

Everything was normal. His pulse hadn’t jumped much.

Good.

Hooking an arm around the seat, Lennon looked back at Bling. He was watching Lennon very carefully. Lennon gave him the universal “move to the left” sign with his hand. Bling grabbed a hunk of Holden’s windbreaker and yanked him out of the way.

Cars honked and Lennon hammered the gas pedal. He would have given them the finger, but there wasn’t time.

In the rearview, the bank came rushing forward like the view from a cockpit in a plane barreling into the ground. Lennon made tiny adjustments, keeping his gloved hands light on the wheel. A nudge to the left, a tap to the right. He had to hit the glass just right.

He had done enough reading to know that ACUs—access-control-units—were designed to be bulletproof from the inside. That way, the bank nabs a crew of stupid Holden-like bad guys, they can’t go whipping out their Sig Sauers and blasting their way out. Banks don’t like customers getting popped. They do everything in their power to avoid it. In fact, when they first started making ACUs, they forgot to make them bulletproof, and banks got shot to hell when freaked-out heisters panicked. Some models of ACUs even have these little escape holes, so the heisters can go on their merry way without plugging any of the customers.

Not this model, though. This apparently was the Scratch-Your-Nuts-Until-the-Feds-ArriveTM model. Bulletproof inside and, most likely, out.

But car-proof? Speeding car-proof? Speeding, stolen-Acura-proof?

At the last minute, Lennon saw that he was going to smack into a metal support column. He cut it hard, then felt the glass panes shatter.

He shifted up and tapped forward. Bling grabbed Holden’s windbreaker again and pulled him through the gap.

Lennon reached down and popped the back trunk, then checked his watch. 9:13 a.m. They were still on track. As long as they could make the next couple of blocks, this might work out after all. The Acura rocked on its suspension as Bling climbed in shotgun and again as Holden hit the backseat.

Lennon stomped on the gas. The car rocketed forward, tires screaming on pavement, and Lennon didn’t see her until the last minute.

The woman, pushing a blue baby stroller.
$650
Large

Center City Philadelphia banks are not hit by takeover teams very often, and with good reason: there are very few ways out.

You get a lot of lone-wolf crackheads doing business, but not many pros. Billy Penn designed Philadelphia to be a tightly locked grid of streets named after trees stretching from the Delaware River to the Schuylkill River. Colonial homes gave way to brownstone mansions which gave way to tightly packed office towers which gave way to a glut of office space. The streets are narrow and often blocked, especially where they lead to interstates. If you are smack-dab in the center of Center City—which Lennon’s team was—Interstates 95 and 76 are barely five minutes away. But it can take fifty minutes to reach them, if traffic is shitty enough.

Bling gave Lennon the background. Bling was a Philly boy; Lennon was not. Lennon owned a place deep in the Pocono Mountains just an hour and a half away, and he had people he knew in Philadelphia, but he would never work there. The closest he’d work was New York, and even that was a bit too close.

However, the bankroll was running thin, and Lennon and Katie were finished rolling off a nice long wasted winter, with no work for either of them. It was a nice winter: mostly cooking and reading and drinking. When Bling called Katie in late February, it was the right time to go back to work.

The setup sounded nice, too. Bling needed a wheelman for a three-man takeover. A Wachovia Bank, three blocks from city hall, was set to receive a fat shipment of cash on March 29, straight from the federal government. It was part of the mayor’s “Operation Fresh Start,” a scheme where he was planning to dump over $650,000 on the shittiest ten-block area in the shittiest part of town, just to level it flat and hope that a national developer would want to build a Barnes & Noble or Bed, Bath & Beyond in the middle of the drug-addled badlands. Most of the money was going to pay one hundred or so holdouts who wanted to stay in their crumbling row houses. Bling told Katie that the mayor was going to hand out between $40,000 and $80,000 to each holdout—in cash—in exchange for surrendering the property.

Why cash? Mayor comes from that area, Bling said. Folks there don’t trust nothing but cash. They want to get paid. Plus, somebody in the mayor’s office thought it would be a good visual for the TV crews: the mayor, launching “Operation Fresh Start” by handing out thick stacks of green to the neediest people in the city. Never mind that gangbangers would probably pounce on the recipients the moment the cameras were turned off. That wasn’t the city’s problem.

Plus, Bling planned to take the money first.

Bling had a city council snitch who told him about the cash. Bling then told Katie how he planned to pull the thing off, and it sounded like a good idea. So Lennon decided to go back to work.
Certain
Death

Lennon was a very good wheelman. starting out, he was lucky, but then experience and real skill kicked in, and eventually, he earned a reputation.

The moment Lennon saw the woman and her baby stroller, he knew the Acura was going to hit them.

Impact was two seconds away. Lennon was faced with a choice: aim for the stroller, or aim for the woman. The woman had at least a slim chance of possessing catlike reflexes and leaping the hell out of the way. Based on an ultraquick glance, she seemed agile enough. Maybe she’d been a state champion gymnast as a teenager.

Braking and wrestling with the wheel was out of the question. The risk of fishtailing was too great, and Lennon worried that he would broadside both the lady and the stroller. Steering clear out of the way was impossible. Immediately to the right of the woman and stroller was one of those huge cement planter squares full of mulch and shrubs. The planter would total the Acura, and the team would have to escape on foot—if any of them were conscious enough to do so. And the car was pointed too far right to be suddenly wrenched to the left. No, the choice was still this: woman or stroller.

“Fuck!”

Holden. He had just returned to his originally scheduled programming.

Lennon’s hands floated to the right, and his foot tapped the brakes to ease the impact.

The Acura smacked into the woman cleanly, powerfully, directly below her left hip. The impact folded her in half, then sent her tumbling up the windshield and over the hood. Lennon looked in his side-view mirror, and saw—miraculously—the baby stroller, trembling slightly, but still upright on the sidewalk. She had let go, just in time.

Lennon blessed her, even as she skidded off the side o...

About this edition

• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0312343787
• ISBN 13: 9780312343781
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 247