Midnight Repo on Passyunk Avenue

• Chapter 1: Keys in the Dark
• Chapter 2: Passyunk Avenue Blues
• Chapter 3: The Heavy Rear Axle
• Chapter 4: Cargo in the Coupe de Ville
• Chapter 5: Two Jacks and a Crowbar
• Chapter 6: Blood on the White Wall Tires
• Chapter 7: The Don’t-Ask-Questions Garage
• Chapter 8: A Badge at Pat's Steaks
• Chapter 9: Cousins, Capos, and Cold Sweats
• Chapter 10: The Broad Street Hook
• Chapter 11: Stash House Shuffle
• Chapter 12: Federal Heat on Federal Street
• Chapter 13: Grease and Grudges
• Chapter 14: A Stiff in South Philly
• Chapter 15: Whispers from the Eighth Ward
• Chapter 16: The Tow Truck Ambush
• Chapter 17: Smokescreens and Tailfins
• Chapter 18: The Dead Man's Watch
• Chapter 19: Schuylkill Fog
• Chapter 20: Three Bad Options
• Chapter 21: Double-Parked with the Feds
• Chapter 22: Blood Money in the Glove Box
• Chapter 23: The Junkyard Altar
• Chapter 24: Midnight Exchange at the Navy Yard
• Chapter 25: Running the Red on Snyder
• Chapter 26: Clean Title, Dirty Hands

The rain falling on South Philadelphia in November of 1975 wasn’t the soft, cinematic kind that made the streetlights look like halos. It was greasy, fat-dropped rain that mixed with coal dust, trash fire soot, and stale diesel fumes, slicking the cobblestones of the side streets and leaving a foul-smelling film on every windshield from Washington Avenue down to the Navy Yard.

I sat in the cab of my '68 Dodge D300 tow truck, huddled into a wool car coat that smelled perpetually of damp dog and hydraulic fluid. The heater in the Dodge worked on a system of pure negotiation; if I tapped the casing with a ball-peen hammer just right, it belched out a breath of air slightly warmer than an old man’s sigh. I tapped it twice, got nothing, and pulled my collar higher around my ears.

My name is Joey Durante, but around the neighborhood, if people called me at all, they called me Joey Hooks. I was thirty-two years old, had two bad knuckles on my left hand from an argument with a rusted bumper in '71, and possessed a piece of paper in my glovebox that gave me the legal right to take back high-priced property from people who stopped paying for it.

Of course, the bank didn't give me the good leads. The bank gave their leads to guys with offices in Center City and shiny vinyl business cards. My leads came from a third-generation bail bondsman named Sal who operated out of a broom-closet office behind a dry cleaner on Tenth Street. Sal was connected just enough to know who was drowning in debt, who was dodging the local loan sharks, and which cars the Family wanted quieted down before the repo men from the big agencies started snooping around with flashlights.

It was a niche. Not a grand one, but it kept the oil in the Dodge fresh and paid for a two-room apartment above a bakery where the morning air always smelled like baked lard and anise.

The street was dark, tucked away somewhere between Ninth and Morris. The gas lamps had been replaced by high-pressure sodium lights a few years back, casting a sickly yellow glare over the wet brick facades of the three-story rowhouses. Every house looked identical: white marble steps scrubbed raw by old Italian women every Tuesday morning, iron window grates, and heavy oak doors with bronze knocker rings.

Parked halfway down the block, buried between a battered Ford Fairlane and a rusted Chevrolet Impala, was the target. A 1974 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, triple-black—black paint, black vinyl roof, black leather interior. It had the long, slab-sided profile of a small barge, chrome trim gleaming dully beneath the yellow streetlamp. The rear bumper sagged just a fraction on the driver’s side, but otherwise, the car looked like money that had been washed twice and dried on a line.

"Look at that boat," I muttered to myself, lighting a Salem with my right hand while keeping my eyes on the rowhouse steps across the street. The tobacco burned quick, the smoke thick and menthol-heavy in the cramped cab.

The paper on the dash said the car belonged to a fellow named Arthur "Artie Nuts" Moretti. Artie was a second-tier earner who spent his afternoons hanging around a social club on Passyunk, drinking espresso that tasted like battery acid and betting on horse races in Maryland that had already been run an hour before he put his money down. He owed six months on the Caddy to a finance company that didn't exist on paper, which meant he actually owed it to Frankie "The Lip" Luchesio. Frankie didn't like waiting for his money, but more than that, Frankie didn't like his cars sitting out in the rain where the city cops might run the plates and find out they were registered to a dead grandmother in New Jersey.

My instructions were clean: pick up the Caddy, pull it back to the yard off Washington, lock the gate, and hand the keys to Sal by nine o'clock tomorrow morning. No drama, no noise, no smashed glass. A ghost job.

I flicked the cigarette butt out the vent window, watching it hiss out in a puddle. I checked the rear-view mirror. The street was dead. It was two thirty in the morning on a Thursday. Even the drunks at the corner taproom had been swept out into the rain an hour ago.

I pushed the Dodge’s heavy door open, stepping out into the cold drizzle. The wet asphalt crunched beneath the heels of my work boots. I didn't turn on a flashlight; lights drew eyes, and eyes in this neighborhood usually came attached to heavy ash walking sticks or snub-nosed .38s tucked into waistband belts. You learned to work by the yellow streetlamps and the moon if you wanted to keep all your teeth.

I reached the Cadillac’s driver-side door. The window glass was dark, tinted heavy from the factory. I leaned my forehead against the wet glass, shielding my eyes with my hands to look inside. The dashboard was clean, no clutter, no forgotten dry-cleaning receipts or empty cigarette packs. The steering column was thick and covered in high-impact plastic.

Reaching into my heavy coat pocket, I pulled out my key ring. It wasn't a standard ring; it held forty-five different cut keys, hardened steel blanks shaped for the standard ignition cylinders GM, Ford, and Chrysler had been pumping out of Detroit for the last decade. A good repo man didn't pick locks with a wire pick like in the movies; that took too long and made your hands shake. You used a jiggler key, a little fluid weight, and a smooth wrist.

I slid the first GM key into the door lock. I worked it back and forth, feeling the pins spring up and down inside the tumbler. Nothing. I pulled it out, wiped the rain off the blade against my trousers, and selected the third key on the brass loop.

Click.

The heavy steel latch gave way with a sound like a small pistol cocking. I didn't pull the door open wide. I just cracked it an inch to break the seal, letting the scent of the interior spill out into the damp night air.

It smelled like expensive leather, hair tonic, and a faint, sharp trace of cheap lemon air freshener. But beneath all that, sitting heavy at the back of the throat like bad cream, was something else. A dense, sweetish smell that hit you right in the back of the mouth. It was the kind of smell you got if you left a bushel of peaches in the sun inside a closed trunk for three days too long.

I paused, my hand frozen on the chrome door handle. My stomach did a tight little flip, the kind of instinctual twitch you get when you step on a stair that isn't there.

"Don't look, Joey," I whispered to myself, the rain trickling down the back of my neck and slipping under my collar. "It ain't your car, it ain't your business. Just hook the snout and haul it."

I pulled the driver’s door open just far enough to reach the lower dash. On the '74 Coupe de Ville, the trunk release button was tucked neatly inside the glove compartment, a little yellow plastic lever that operated on a vacuum line.

I leaned into the cab, keeping my boots planted firmly on the wet street. The leather seat was cold. I reached across the wide bench, my fingers reaching for the glove box latch. The box dropped open with a soft thud. I felt around in the dark, my fingertips brushing past a manual, a tire gauge, and a small, heavy metal cylinder that felt distinctly like a box of .32 caliber ammunitions.

My index finger found the yellow trunk button. I pressed it down firmly.

Thump-pop.

From the back of the long black car, the heavy steel trunk lid lifted a quarter of an inch, the rubber weather stripping unsealing with a wet, sticky sound.

Instantly, that sweetish, heavy smell rolled out of the gap like a cloud of invisible gas. It caught the wind, hit me square in the face, and made my nostrils flare. It wasn't peaches. I’d worked in a rendering plant outside Wilmington for three months when I was nineteen, back before I got into the hook business. I knew that smell. You never forgot it once it got into the lining of your jacket.

I backed out of the front seat and pushed the driver's door shut until it clicked on the safety catch. I stood there in the rain for five long seconds, watching the exhaust of my tow truck idling down the street, its yellow warning beacon spinning silently, casting long, rhythmic sweeps of amber light across the brick walls.

"Just shut the trunk," I told the dark street. "Shut the trunk, get in the Dodge, and drive back to the yard. Call Sal and tell him the rear end is locked up."

It was good advice. It was the kind of advice that let a guy live to be sixty-and-a-half in South Philly.

Instead, my boots carried me around the long, sloping flank of the Coupe de Ville. The chrome tailfins caught the yellow glow of the sodium lights, sharp as razor blades. I reached the back bumper, my fingers numb from the cold rain, and hooked my thumb under the lip of the trunk lid.

I lifted it up.

The trunk light was burnt out, or maybe somebody had pulled the fuse. But the streetlamp thirty feet away was high enough that its sickening yellow light fell straight down into the carpeted well of the Cadillac’s oversized trunk.

The car was meant to hold four sets of golf clubs, three oversized suitcases, and a spare tire. Right now, it held none of those things.

Lying sideways in the deep well, bent double at the waist with his knees tucked high against his chest like a sleeper who couldn't quite get warm, was a man in a navy blue pinstripe suit. The suit was tailor-made, the kind with wide lapels that were popular down on Chestnut Street, but the silk tie was twisted around his neck like an old piece of rope.

His face was turned upward toward the wet night sky. His eyes were half-open, milky and dull beneath the yellow light, reflecting nothing. His mouth was slack, jammed slightly open by the position of his jaw against the spare tire wheel-well.

On the left side of his crisp white shirt collar, right below the earlobe, was a small, neat black hole, no bigger than a dime, rimmed with dark, crusted rust.

I didn't scream. You don't scream on Ninth Street at three in the morning unless you want four different bedroom windows coming open and three different kinds of iron hitting the pavement.

I just let go of the trunk lid.

It slammed down with a hollow, echoing THUD that sounded like a bass drum going off in an empty alleyway.

I stood there in the freezing rain, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. The smell was still on my hands, on my coatsleeves, in my nose. I stared at the chrome Cadillac logo on the lock housing, my mind racing through every mistake I’d made since I woke up at noon.

The car wasn't just late on payments. The car was a coffin. And I was standing on a public street in South Philadelphia, holding a master key, with my tow truck running sixty feet away and a corpse in the back that somebody had taken a lot of trouble to put there.

A door down the block clicked. A porch light flickered on, throwing a weak square of white light across the wet pavement.

I didn't think. I didn't stop to look at the house. I grabbed my key ring, sprinted back to the front door of the Cadillac, jammed the key into the ignition, and twisted it hard.

The big V8 engine roared to life with a quiet, powerful purr, the dual exhausts spitting a cloud of white condensation into the rain. I threw the heavy automatic column shifter into drive, stomped my boot down on the gas pedal, and hauled Artie Nuts' Cadillac away from the curb, leaving my own tow truck idling alone in the dark.

The tires of the Cadillac didn’t spin; they just gripped the wet asphalt of Ninth Street and propelled the two-ton barge forward with the smooth, terrifying momentum of a falling boulder. I didn't look in the rearview mirror to see if the porch light owner had come out to investigate. I just drove. My hands were clamped onto the thin plastic steering wheel so hard my bad knuckles throbbed, the white leather of my work gloves squeaking against the faux-wood grain.

My mind was a roaring engine of its own, firing off panic-stricken thoughts in eight different directions. I had just left my own tow truck—the Dodge D300 with "Durante Towing & Recovery" painted on the doors in fading yellow script—parked in the middle of a South Philly street, idling, with the keys in the ignition and the amber beacon spinning. That was a calling card. By sunrise, every beat cop from the First District to the Seventh would know Joey Hooks had been in the neighborhood. And worse, whoever had parked this rolling casket on Ninth Street would know exactly who had taken it.

I hit Washington Avenue and swung the Cadillac left. The wide, commercial strip was mostly dark, the hulking brick shapes of warehouses and wholesale food distributors sitting like sleeping giants in the rain. I checked the dash. The fuel gauge was sitting comfortable at three-quarters of a face-value tank, which was the only piece of good news I had. I adjusted the rear-view mirror. It was tilted too high, showing only the rain-spattered rear window and the faint, terrible silhouette of the trunk lid through the glass. I reached up with a trembling hand and slapped the mirror upward, aiming it at the ceiling. I didn’t want to look back there. I didn’t want to think about the man in the navy blue pinstripes, or the way his mouth had been propped open like he was trying to whisper something through the steel floorboards.

I needed a place to put the car. My yard on Washington was out of the question. The yard was a chain-link rectangle behind an abandoned coal silo; anyone with a pair of bolt cutters could get in, and Sal had a duplicate key to the gate. If Sal went looking for me—or if Frankie the Lip came by to inspect his recovered collateral—they’d find the Cadillac, find the trunk, and then they’d find me.

I decided to head toward Passyunk Avenue, but not the busy, brightly lit stretch where the bakeries and the butcher shops kept the sidewalks clean. I headed down toward the lower end, where the avenue began to fray at the edges near the oil refineries and the marshy, forgotten banks of the Schuylkill. Down there, the city smelled like sulfur and old grease, and the only people awake at three in the morning were night-shift dockworkers and guys who had very specific reasons for not wanting to be seen under the sodium lights.

The Cadillac handled the slick streets with a sickeningly smooth ride. It was like driving a living room sofa. Every bump on the trolley tracks of Passyunk was swallowed up by the heavy coil springs, resulting in a gentle, rolling bounce that made my stomach heave. Every time the rear end dipped, I could hear a soft, dull thump from the trunk. It was a heavy, sliding sound. The man in the pinstripe suit was moving around back there, shifting with the inertia of the turns, his expensive shoes sliding against the gray carpet.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," I muttered, my voice sounding thin and hollow in the quiet luxury of the cabin. "Just let me get through the next ten minutes. Just ten minutes."

I pulled into a dark alleyway behind a closed auto radiator repair shop off Twenty-Third and Passyunk. The alley was littered with discarded oil drums and wooden pallets, the ground a soup of black mud and coal slag. I killed the headlights first, plunging the Cadillac into the deep shadows of the brick wall, then slipped the transmission into park and turned the key.

The silence that followed was absolute, save for the steady, rhythmic tink-tink-tink of the cooling exhaust pipe and the rain drumming on the vinyl roof.

I sat there in the dark, my breath coming in short, ragged plumes that fogged up the side windows. I had to think. If I went back for my truck, I’d be walking right into whatever trap had been laid on Ninth Street. If I left the truck, the cops would have it towed by dawn, and my name would be on the ledger by breakfast. But if I stayed in this car, I was a driving crime scene.

I reached over and popped the glove box again. My hand shook as I reached past the owner's manual and the tire gauge. I grabbed the heavy metal cylinder I had felt earlier. It was a box of Remington .32 centerfire cartridges, half-empty. Beside it sat a small, flat leather wallet. I pulled the wallet out, clicked the glove box shut, and switched on the tiny map light above the rearview mirror.

The wallet was made of dark alligator skin, worn smooth at the corners. I opened it up. There was no driver’s license, no pictures of kids, no union cards. There was only a thick fold of hundred-dollar bills—at least twenty of them, bound by a silver money clip shaped like a horse's head—and a single white business card.

I turned the card over in my fingers. The front was blank except for a phone number written in blue ballpoint ink, using the old "HOward" exchange that most of South Philly had phased out five years ago. On the back, written in the same neat, cramped hand, were three words: Thursday. Nine. Pat’s.

Pat's Steaks. The twenty-four-hour tourist trap on Ninth and Passyunk where the bright fluorescent lights hummed all night and the grease from the griddles could clog a man’s arteries from ten feet away. It was a neutral territory of sorts, a place where cops, politicians, and numbers runners stood shoulder-to-shoulder at three in the morning, their mouths stuffed with ribeye and Cheez Whiz so they didn't have to talk to each other.

I looked at the money clip. The silver horse's head was distinctive. It had a small red stone—a ruby, maybe—set into the eye. I had seen that clip before. Or rather, I’d seen the man who owned it.

It belonged to "Artie Nuts" Moretti. But Artie wasn't the man in the trunk. I knew Artie. Artie was a short, round man with a mustache that looked like a greasy caterpillar and a habit of wearing silk tracksuits even when he was going to church. The man in the trunk was tall, lean, and wore a suit that cost more than my tow truck was worth. Which meant Artie had either lent his car to the wrong guy, or Artie had been the one who put the wrong guy in the trunk before running for the state line.

A cold sweat broke out along my collarbone. If the dead man wasn't Artie, then who was he? And why did the police, the Family, and Sal all want this specific Cadillac picked up tonight without any noise?

The yellow light of a passing car flickered through the mouth of the alley, casting long, crawling shadows across the Cadillac’s hood. I ducked my head below the level of the dashboard, my heart leaping into my throat. The car passed by without slowing, its tires splashing through the deep puddles on Passyunk.

I couldn't stay here. The radiator shop owner arrived at six to open up, and he was the kind of guy who called the cops if a stray dog pissed on his grease traps. I had to move the car to a place where it could sit for a few hours while I figured out how to get my truck back and how to get myself out of this box.

I knew a spot. It was a three-sided corrugated tin shed behind an abandoned coal yard near the Delaware River, just off Federal Street. My cousin, Frankie "The Hook" Durante, used to store stolen copper pipe there before he got five-to-ten at Graterford for a payroll heist in Cherry Hill. The roof leaked and the weeds were high enough to hide a garbage truck, but it was private, and the only people who went down there were rats and kids looking for a place to drink cheap wine.

I started the Cadillac again, the engine catching instantly with that same whispered purr. I backed out of the alley slowly, keeping my foot light on the brake pedal so the bright red taillights wouldn't flash too bright against the wet bricks.

As I turned back onto Passyunk, heading east toward the river, the radio suddenly crackled to life. I hadn't noticed the volume knob was turned up, but now a low, static-choked voice hummed through the dashboard speakers. It wasn't a music station. It was the low, rhythmic drone of a police band scanner, modified and tucked into the underside of the steering column.

"...all units in the First, be advised of a disabled tow truck blocking the three-hundred block of Ninth Street. Plates registered to Durante Towing. No operator on scene. Also be on the lookout for a late-model Cadillac, black, Jersey tags. Operator may be armed and should be approached with caution..."

I reached down and ripped the wire out of the back of the scanner, plunging the cabin back into silence.

My hands were shaking so hard I could barely keep the Cadillac in the center of the lane. They were already looking for the car. Not just Sal, and not just the guys who put the body in the trunk. The cops were on it too, and they were on it fast. In South Philly, a double-parked tow truck usually got you a ticket and a curse from the street sweeper. For the dispatcher to broadcast it over the air within twenty minutes meant somebody had placed a very important phone call to the roundhouse on Race Street.

The rain kept falling, turning the windshield into a blurred smear of yellow and red lights as I drove deeper into the industrial wasteland of the waterfront, the heavy rear axle of the Cadillac bouncing behind me, carrying its quiet, expensive secret through the Philadelphia night.