He typed PHILLYBULLETIN.COM and hit the RETURN key.

A second later, the screen was awash with articles and photos, updated on the quarter hour, of the day’s news.

The biggest and brightest image was that of a motel in glorious flames. It was surrounded by various emergency vehicles, their lights flashing. Delgado grinned. Then his eye caught the red text of a ticker across the top of the page, the words crawling from right to left: Breaking News… 2 Dead amp; 4 Injured in Shooting at Reading Terminal Market. Police Said to Release More Details Shortly…

Delgado nodded knowingly.

Don’t fuck with me, he thought, and these things won’t happen.

Assholes. They all think they can rip me off and get away with it…

His cellular phone vibrated for a second, indicating a received text message. He picked it up. The tiny LCD screen, beginning with the sender’s cellular phone number, read:

Delgado picked up the phone. Using his thumbs on the tiny keypad, he punched out:

Delgado grinned at the mental image that came with “tigertails.” It had been a tigertail that had got him sent for his brief first and only visit to the Dallas County Jail in Texas.

He’d just turned eighteen years old and had started to move a lot more product on his own. He needed some help. In order to trust the help, he put the guys through some tests. And one of those tests was torching the cars of some of their East Dallas neighbors. The damn picky people were making louder and louder noises about traffic-both foot traffic and the lawn care trucks and trailers-in and out of Delgado’s house and property.

The term “tigertail” came from a gasoline company and its cartoon tiger mascot. One of the company’s giveaway promotions was a foot-long fake furry black-striped orange tail to tie to the gas tanks.

For a while, judging by all the tails flapping from gas caps, it seemed cars everywhere had “a tiger in their tank.”

Delgado had stolen that idea, but there were a couple of critical differences with his. He had taken a wire coat hanger, straightened it out, then wrapped it with a gas-soaked strip of bedsheeting, bending a hook in the wire’s end to secure the fabric. The sheet-covered wire was then stuck down a target vehicle’s gas tank. Then the “fuse” was set afire.

The neighbors’ cars became blackened hulks in minutes.

As a message sender, the tigertail had been an effective tool. Too much of one, in fact, because Delgado’s boys began torching enough vehicles that the Dallas Police Department had decided it necessary to put together a small task force. And the first night out, the cops caught one of Delgado’s boys-a fifteen-year-old who shit his pants the moment the cuffs were slapped on.

And he quickly fingered Delgado.

Delgado’s lawyer had been able to convince the prosecutor that discrediting the kid’s word would be effortless-“He shit his pants, for chrissake! He’d roll over on his own grandmother if it got him out of this. No one’s going to believe him!”-and that resulted in the charges against Delgado being dismissed.

Delgado never saw that kid again. That, of course, did not stop the unfortunate event that followed-the car belonging to the fifteen-year-old’s mother being tigertailed.

Delgado’s cellular phone vibrated again, and he read the screen:

Delgado then thumbed: amp; U GO 2 TEMPLE LIKE WE TALKED… DO IT NOW A second later, the incoming reply vibrated Delgado’s phone:

Delgado put down the phone and turned to the computer monitor.

Going to the website for Southwest Airlines, he punched in PHL and DAL, checking for flights out of Philadelphia International Airport going into Dallas Love Field.

“Shit!” he said, seeing he’d missed the nine-thirty departure that morning.

He clicked on the next-most-direct routing, Southwest Flight 55, and booked it, paying for the ticket with a Visa credit card. The bill would go to a post office mail drop in a shopping strip center in East Dallas.

Then he picked up the cellular phone and sent another text to a different cellular phone number:

PLAN 2 PICK ME UP @ 730PM @ LOVE, SW#55

As he went to put down his phone, he saw a kid enter the coffee shop.

Delgado guessed that the short boy, who was black and overweight, could not be more than fifteen and was very likely closer to twelve. And that extra weight was probably baby fat. He had on very baggy blue jeans that were hanging loosely, a white T-shirt with a silk-screened image of a hip-hop singer, white sneakers, and a solid white ball cap with the bill turned sideways.

He looked awkward-and not exactly what Delgado would have considered a regular coffee drinker.

After entering the caf? slowly, the boy made a beeline for the register at the counter. He kept his head down as he went, looking mostly at his feet with an occasional glance around the room.

The short fat kid dug deep into his jeans pocket and produced a folded paper bill. He slapped the money on the counter. The bony male clerk then pulled two coffee cups from a tall stack upside down on the counter, and quickly but casually reached under the counter. It was near where he had put Delgado’s FedEx envelope. He came back up with the cups, but now one was inserted in the other. The clerk turned to the sink behind him, then filled the top cup with tap water and snapped a lid on it.

Delgado glanced at his own coffee sitting beside the computer monitor. The steam-hot double espresso had been given to him in only a single cup.

Delgado looked back to the counter as the clerk was handing the stacked cups to the kid. The boy took them, then, without waiting for change, turned and went out the door somewhat quicker than he’d entered.

Once outside the door, the boy pulled the top cup out and tossed it in the trash receptacle next to the outside seating, then took off down the sidewalk in a trot.

Delgado made eye contact with the clerk, who smiled knowingly back.

The phone vibrated in his hand, and he read the incoming reply:

Delgado thumbed back:

His screen then read:

Delgado thumbed:

He put the phone back down, then looked back at the computer monitor.

A link under the photograph of the burning Philly Inn went to the article. He clicked on it and waded through screen ads for a King of Prussia Chevy automobile dealer, casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and a Center City brew pub.