by John Etzil
URGENT Justice
Vigilante Justice Thriller Series 2.5 with Jack Lamburt
John Etzil
To my Dad. Thanks for always being so proud of me.
You would have loved Jack Lamburt ;-)
Copyright © 2018 by John Etzil
All rights reserved.
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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Contents
1. Meeting His Maker
2. Cecile’s Orphanage
3. HFS
4. Bobby
5. Frances Comes Through
6. Barry White
7. Road Trip
8. It’s Recon Only
9. Fore!
10. Feisty Frances
11. Mega Trunk
12. Centralia, PA
13. The Little Rat
14. I Take Frances to Church
15. Roach Motel
16. The Prophet
17. Visitors
18. Caught with My Pants Down
19. Taken
20. Faking It
21. Man Up and Muff-Dive
22. And It’s…
23. Three Simple Steps
24. Railroad Ride
25. Time to Go!
26. Where’s a Map When You Need One?
27. I’m Back
28. Torturing Mullet Joe
29. That’s MY BMW!
30. Birdshot Sucks
31. I’m Going to Miss Her
32. The Prophet
33. He Got What Was Coming to Him
34. The Senator
Epilogue
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Acknowledgements
About the Author
1
Meeting His Maker
I pressed the tip of my Glock 17 against his forehead. He was sprawled flat on his back on the plush white carpet of his office. I pinned him down with my knee across his belly, forcing his old and out-of-shape gut to support most of my two hundred and twenty pounds. He struggled to catch his breath and wheezed like a four-pack-a-day smoker who’d just sprinted up a few flights of stairs.
He was in his mid-sixties and had short white hair combed to one side. A nice button-up shirt along with navy slacks and expensive shoes completed his appearance of a man well-respected in the community. His clean-shaven face was drained of color, an odd mixture of pasty white with shades of gray, and I could see a bluish tint forming around his dried-up lips from lack of oxygen.
“Well? What’s it going to be?” I asked in a pleasant voice, as if I were a waiter taking his food order down at the diner, or a non-pushy salesman helping him select the interior color of his new Chevy Volt.
No answer.
I pressed the pistol harder against him, transferring some of my weight from his stomach to his forehead, where a little red ring formed on the indented skin that surrounded my gun barrel. He cried out and turned his head to one side to try and alleviate the pressure.
“I don’t have all night. Tell me what I want to know, or die.”
“Please…”
I ran out of patience. “Please nothing. Close your eyes.”
He squeezed them shut, forcing out tears. They ran down the side of his face and pooled in his ear before overflowing and dripping onto the carpet.
I didn’t want to do this, but he left me no choice. Damn him.
I usually took better care of my hearing, knowing full well that once the tiny hair follicles that line the inner ear were damaged, they couldn’t be repaired. My ears were already ringing from multiple gunshots today, and I had a terrible headache, maybe even concussed, from being knocked out twice in the last twenty-four hours. The non-silenced 9mm blast that I was about to fire off was only going to make things worse. When I got my hands on that thief who’d stolen my Glock silencer…
I adjusted the gun and pressed my free hand over my ear in an attempt to lessen the damage from the blast. I squeezed the trigger.
That was loud. Bowel evacuation. Him, not me. I held my breath and said a silent prayer of thanks that I didn’t have to clean any of this mess up.
White carpets are a bitch.
2
Cecile’s Orphanage
The Friday Before
As sheriff, I’d witnessed a long list of things that would be upsetting to most people: senseless violence, human beings decimated by drugs, domestic abuse, and the granddaddy of them all, death. That didn’t bother me, though. As long as there wasn’t a child or other helpless person involved, I was fine with it. Like most rational adults, I had a soft spot in my otherwise hardened soul for kids, and as I sat at the kitchen table of the Happy Home Orphanage and interviewed the owner, Cecile, a gut feeling of sadness crept over me.
Cecile took off her glasses and dabbed at her moist eyes with a ratty old embroidered handkerchief she had in one hand, while holding her husband’s hand on her lap with the other. Thanks to a bad diet, I calculated that she was eighty pounds overweight and had adult-onset diabetes. The silver-haired lady looked twenty years older than her sixty-two years. I glanced down at the floor and realized with a shudder that she had small half-open scabs running up and down her calves and ankles. Whooff.
In between tears and sniffles, Cecile explained in great detail how she’d tried to make troubled little Wendy Connor’s life perfect. Or as perfect as it could be when your parents abandoned you on the front steps of the church rectory a few days after you were born. Poor Wendy had bounced around from orphanage to foster home to orphanage for over fourteen years. What a terrible start to life. Not many kids could handle that kind of abandonment, and Cecile made it sound like Wendy wasn’t one of them.
When Cecile had gone to Wendy’s room this morning for the usual wake-up, the troubled teen was gone. Picked up and left in the middle of the night. No note. No nothing. She’d taken a backpack and some clothes, and that was it.
Cecile and her husband, Hardy, had owned and managed the Happy Home Orphanage for decades, and on initial appearances, they ran a nice home. A large yet simple two-story colonial surrounded by twenty-one acres on a quiet side street in the bucolic Cobleskill, New York. It had a little stream that ran along the back of the hilly Sound of Music–like landscape. Plenty of room for the little tykes, all seventeen of them—well, sixteen now—to run around and burn off all of their youthful energy.
There was one problem. Runaways. In the last nineteen months, the Happy Home Orphanage had had three times the national average for runaways from an orphanage. Wendy was the latest of four. All of the runaways were female, and all were fourteen or fifteen years old. Hmm…
I sat and listened to Cecile pour her heart out, trying not to look at her scab-covered ankles. While I should have been paying attention to her ramblings,
my mind drifted to why anyone with legs that hideous would wear a dress.
I had to say something to get my mind back on task. “Did Wendy have any money saved up that you know about?”
“No.”
“Any friends outside of the orphanage? Someone who might be helping her?”
“Not that I know of.”
“What about online friends?”
“We don’t allow the internet here.”
“Boyfriends?”
“No.”
“How about friends from school? Did she ever mention anybody?”
“No, she pretty much stayed to herself. Her therapist says that she has trust issues.”
“Do you have any recent photos of her?”
“Yeah, I figured that you’d want one.” She reached into her apron pocket and handed me a coffee-stained manila envelope. I opened it. Inside was an old Polaroid, of all things, of a cute little dark-haired girl who looked to be about ten or eleven.
“A Polaroid?” I asked. “How old is she here? Is this the only photo that you have of her?”
“Yeah. Hardy’s our photographer. He’s a good man, but he’s not big on technology.” She squeezed his hand and looked at him with a small smile. “She was eleven when that photo was taken.”
“By state law, you are supposed to have current photos of every child. Please make that happen with the rest of them.” I stood up and stuck my hand out to shake hers, trying not to look at her cankles. Even in my peripheral vision, they demanded my attention, jumping up and down and arm-waving like the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders.
“Thank you for your time. We’ll let you know as soon as we find her.” I shook Hardy’s hand. It was damp and limp. I’d interviewed him earlier in the day, and he’d been of no help. He didn’t interact with the kids. He spent his day doing handyman jobs around the house, taking care of the few sheep and goats that they had, and keeping up with the wide expanse of grass via his bright red Farmall tractor with mowing attachment. After a long day in the field, he’d fill his beer belly up during dinner, which he chowed down while couched out in front of his TV.
I didn’t trust him.
I put on my hat and left.
Orphanages are not a lucrative business, but that’s the point. You’re supposed to get into the orphanage business because you have a strong desire to help kids. Not for the money. And although Cecile and Hardy might have started out the right way when they’d hung the Happy Home sign on their house over twenty years ago, the last couple of years had been too strange to ignore.
New York orphanages go through rigorous inspections on a regular basis, some unannounced, to try and catch things that shouldn’t be going on. The Happy Home Orphanage had, up until the last nineteen months, done very well. They still did well during inspections; they just didn’t do very well in keeping children. Don’t get me wrong, children run away from orphanages all the time. But almost every single one comes back after a day or two on their own, especially if they were located in the middle of a huge forest, like the one that surrounds Cobleskill. They’d quickly realize after a night of sleeping in the woods and getting feasted on by mosquitoes that they were much better off in the orphanage. Even if they weren’t happy.
But every single one of Cecile’s runaways in the past nineteen months was still missing…
3
HFS
I’d taken this job as sheriff in a sleepy little upstate New York town because I needed a cover for my life’s mission. Ever since Flight 2262, I’d been on the warpath. Gleefully killing evildoers who, through a combination of their skill and our government’s incompetence, had managed to stay out of jail and continue to ply their vicious trade across the land of the free.
A lifetime ago, I was involved in the start-up of Home Front Security, HFS for short, a black ops US government–funded domestic spying agency that pretty much knows everything about every single person in the US. My area of expertise is in archiving and securing massive amounts of data, the kind of data that’s generated by using hundreds of millions of standard household and electronic devices like cell phones, microwaves, thermostats, smoke detectors, etc., as recording instruments. We even have facial recognition software specifically designed for the video cameras that are in your wall switch occupancy sensors, computers, and cell phones. And don’t forget about those pesky red light cameras. We’re so brilliant that we even came up with a way to make money on issuing tickets!
Free Wi-Fi? Yeah, our idea. With that gem of a setup, HFS made its first widespread penetration into your soul, recording all of your keystrokes, and every website you’ve visited. Don’t bother clearing your cache after your latest porn party, because we’ve recorded it. And don’t think that your laptop video camera can’t record you without a red warning light going on. We do it all the time. And here’s another little tip for you—don’t bother putting tape over your video camera. We have a backup camera hidden in the black outline that surrounds your screen. That one was my idea.
Home Front Security is tasked with catching domestic terrorists, and they pretty much let all the other lawbreakers off the hook. Seeing all those bad guys getting away bothered me. A lot. But I was convinced that once the HFS brass saw all the data being gathered on our non-terrorist evildoers, we’d act on it and have a positive impact on the crimes that affected the everyday person. We’d clean up the world. Mobsters, drug kingpins, and crooked politicians would be falling left and right thanks to HFS, and our budget dollars would triple every year.
Nope.
HFS’s strict adherence to maintaining mission discipline resulted in lots of bad guys getting away with dirty deeds. Again, and again. Frustrated and burnt out, I’d decided to resign. But I couldn’t bring myself to part with the information on evildoers that HFS’s top secret clearance gave me, so I decided to stay on part-time as an outside contractor. I kept my clearance, worked remotely about eight hours a week, and even started my own little club for the aforementioned bad guys. I called it the Dead Man’s Club. Yeah, I know, simple, but I liked DMC, and it wasn’t like I needed to come up with some trendy name to impress the pretty ladies that I met in the bar scene.
Dead Man’s Club had two separate lists of members, each in a continual state of updating. The A-list—yeah, I know, more simpletonian thinking here—was comprised of high-level douchebags who deserved my attention right away. Those who had the honor of B-list membership had a little more time on this earth before their violent departure from it.
So instead of fine-tuning and reorganizing my A-list this weekend, a task that I tackled with the enthusiasm of a child on Christmas morning, I’d be digging through Cecile’s and Hardy’s background. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was a vibe about Hardy that screamed “dirtbag” in my gut. I wondered if he would be joining DMC.
I got a bad vibe from Cecile too, but since I don’t kill women I couldn’t add her to DMC. I know that’s sexist, and that you bra burners of the world are going to light me up on Twitter for my old fashioned views, but, too bad.
#DealWithIt
But all that would have to wait. I hopped into my new pickup and headed over to the Red Barn, a nice little local bar in Summit, New York. In fifteen minutes, I pulled into the Red Barn parking lot, a grin on my face as wide as the Grand Canyon. My honey, Debbie, was tending bar tonight, and I had a birthday surprise for her. On Tuesday, we were heading down to our favorite vacation spot, Key West. We’d been planning this trip for months, and Debbie thought we were flying down in my Cessna 206. I love flying my Cessna all over the place, but my Debbie’s not a fan of small aircraft. She gets airsick as soon as we take off, and depending on how rough the turbulence is, she’s under the weather for a day or so after we land.
So I’d splurged on a private jet.
4
Bobby
My entrance into the Red Barn was greeted with muffled laughter from the barstool occupants who were flirting with my Debbie. The smacking of balls on the beer-stain
ed pool table and the jukebox belting out tunes and energizing the two couples dancing rounded out the picture.
Frances, Max, and Gus were sitting on their usual stools at the far end of the bar. Frances was in her mid-nineties and weighed in at about ninety-five pounds. She loved her whiskey and Lucky Strike cigarettes. Her bony frame barely held up her long calico dress that she always wore.
Max and Gus were about ten years her junior, and the three of them shared a house a stone’s throw from the Red Barn. They all smiled and waved over to me. I noticed that Frances had her teeth in tonight, which made me smile, and I returned the wave while taking my usual stool by the door.
My honey Debbie came over with a fresh Molson XXX and a big smile. A genuine one, not the Hollywood one that she breaks out for her male fans to increase her tips.
“Hey, Sheriff, you’re late. Everything okay?”
As usual, she looked fantastic. Tight jeans and a one-size-too-small black V-neck T-shirt with the Harley wings was her outfit of choice tonight. A glance at her overflowing tip jar proved that she’d made the correct wardrobe selection.