The Vigilantes

by W. E. B Griffin

  After what she went through, having The Fortress doesn’t hurt.

  If only for her peace of mind.

  Hell, mine, too.

  Nearly nine months earlier, Amanda Law had bought Loft Number 2180, a luxury one-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath condominium on the top floor of the year-old Hops Haus Tower in the Northern Liberties section of Philly. The penthouse property had met her long list of requirements, starting with a good price.

  “A really reasonable one, considering all the amenities,” she’d said.

  But, she confided in Matt, what had really sold her on the place were the incredible panoramic views.

  Even from his pillow, Payne could stare out at the lights twinkling on nearby Interstate 95 and the Delaware River and, past the far riverbank, the lights of Camden, New Jersey, and, spreading out even farther east, of the Garden State itself.

  She’d said she also liked the retro industrial design of the high-rise, which reflected the feel of the Hops Haus Brewery, the renovated four-story, hundred-year-old building adjacent to the foot of the tower. The wall surfaces were alternately exposed red brick and stained concrete, and the flooring was a rustic dark hardwood planking. The high ceilings had exposed fire sprinkler pipes, and the metal ductwork for the air-conditioning hung from straps out in the open. The floor-to-ceiling windows were of the same design as those of the original Bavarian brewhouse downstairs.

  But what Payne liked best about the residential tower—and why he privately called it The Fortress—was that, while it was meant to appear old, the place had the absolute latest in state-of-the-art security. That included, of course, being wired with high-end closed-circuit TV cameras with overlapping fields of view so that no corner went unrecorded, as well as a multifactor authentication system for anyone who wished to access the property.

  And all of it was monitored by round-the-clock private security personnel. The security chief was Andy Hardwick, a mid-forties, bald, and barrelchested sergeant from Central Detectives who’d conveniently retired from the Philadelphia Police Department right before the development was completed. He’d known Payne’s biological father and uncle, had known Matt since he’d been in diapers, and was more than happy to show him all the building’s bells and whistles and bad-guy booby traps.

  Hardwick had promised Payne there’d be a close but discreet protective eye kept on the primary resident of Loft Number 2180, as well as heightened surveillance, mostly via CCTV cameras, but also by occasional security personnel “performing routine safety-device inspections,” of the twenty-first floor.

  This place is probably tighter than a Graterford RHU, Payne thought, and then he had a mental image of the hellish super-secure Restricted Housing Units—effectively individual prisons for the worst offenders serving time in solitary confinement—at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution thirty miles west of Philly.

  All of the Hops Haus Tower’s common-area and exterior doors were on computer-controlled locks. Every resident was issued an electronic fob, smaller than a cough drop and designed to fit conveniently on a key ring, each of which had a unique electronic signature that could be turned on—and, perhaps more important, turned off—at one of the security computers. Most residents also had electronic scans of their thumbprints saved to the security computers.

  For entry, residents could unlock the common-area and exterior doors—including those on each floor of the parking garage that led to the elevators—only through a two-step authentication process: First, they used the electronic fob, and second, they submitted to a biometric thumbprint reader or manually entered a unique code on a keypad. The doors guarding each elevator bank within the building were fitted with the same certification devices.

  Finally, as a last electronic barrier, there was a fob receiver panel inside each elevator, on the wall of buttons. You had to swipe the fob in order for any of the buttons to become live and light up when pushed.

  Each fob was coded to be floor-specific, which meant two things. It was noted if the resident associated with the thumbprint or keypad code at the elevator bank door got off at a floor other than the one linked to the fob, and the anomaly was flagged and archived and available in the event anything unfortunate happened.

  And only residents of the penthouse floor had fobs that allowed access to that level. The fobs of every other resident could go only as high as the twentieth floor. Which was another reason Payne thought that Amanda’s top-floor unit was highly secure.

  Then he had an unkind thought.

  Of course, no matter how high the professional standards, including Andy Hardwick’s, the weak link in the most secure of facilities, whether it’s a luxury residence or a super-max prison, is the human factor—the gatekeepers, whoever the hell is manning the desks and machinery.

  One crooked guard on the take and the whole fucking system may as well be a bucket of rusty bolts and blown locks.

  Especially with security—and certain concierge—personnel having access to that master key to every unit, the one that that effeminate manager had said “was necessary, you know, just in case of emergency, like your washing machine’s water line ruptures while you’re gone or your bathtub overflows and starts flooding your neighbors.”

  Yeah, right. And for what he didn’t say: “Or there’s the stench of rotted flesh coming from behind your locked door.”

  Still, for what it is, and where it is, this place is as good as it gets.

  His pulse starting to calm, Payne sat up and heaved one last deep breath. He reached back over to the bedside table and picked up one of the beers, a half-empty bottle of Hops Haus India Pale Ale. After he and Amanda had eaten dinner in the pub on the first floor of the building, he’d bought a case of the IPA—the pub had its own microbrewery—and that case of twenty-four bottles was now down to twenty.

  He looked out the tall windows again as he took a swig of beer. While he could appreciate the view, being a cop he couldn’t help but look past the twinkling lights and think of all the criminals hiding out there in the shadows, masked by darkness.

  His eyes followed the Delaware River up to the Betsy Ross Bridge, then beyond that. Though too far to see clearly, he knew that a few miles beyond the bridge, on State Road in the Holmesburg section of Northeast Philadelphia, some of those lights were from the Philadelphia Prison System. Its Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, the largest in the system, alone processed some thirty thousand inmates, all adult males, each year, every year. The intake center operated around the clock.

  But not damn near enough.

  What was that figure on fugitives from the courts? Almost fifty thousand who’ve jumped bail and run?

  Now they’re in the wind . . . out there, somewhere.

  They’re damn sure not in church confessing their sins and praying for absolution.

  Hell no. They’re roaming the streets, committing more robberies, rapes, murders, whatever, at will.

  They know the court system is so clogged that they can just ignore it, thumb their nose at it.

  Jesus, what a mess. . . .

  [FOUR]

  It was no secret to the one and a half million residents of the sixth-most-populated city in America that the City of Brotherly Love was among the deadliest in America.

  Philadelphia—“Killadelphia,” Payne heard it called at least once every damn day—averaged a murder daily—down from, incredibly, a two-a-day average only a decade ago—which of course kept the police department’s Homicide Unit plenty busy.

  What politicians wished was more of a secret, if only because of bureaucratic bungling and intergovernmental finger-pointing, was the fact that there were tens of thousands of fugitives loose on the streets. Nearly fifty thousand miscreants—from pimps to pedophiles to robbers to rapists to junkies to every other lawless sonofabitch—who had skipped out on their bail and were on the run from facing their day in court.

  As a general rule of thumb, the main purpose of a court’s bail system was more or less a noble one:
to let certain of those charged with crimes to remain productive family members and citizens in their community until their court date, which could be months away. This “pretrial release” reinforced the presumption that those charged with crimes were “innocent until proven guilty.”

  It also, conveniently, helped ease the burden on the overcrowded jails. And that, in turn, eased the financial burden on a cash-strapped city to provide three square meals a day, armed guards for supervision, and sundry other services.

  The vast majority of America’s biggest cities used the bail bond system, a private-sector enterprise administered by for-profit companies. In contrast, the City of Philadelphia (and the City of Chicago, Illinois, which had a similar number of fugitives from justice) used a system of deposit bail, which was government-funded and government-run.

  In Philly, it was overseen by judges from the Municipal Court and from the Court of Common Pleas.

  Using a worksheet titled “Pretrial Release Guidelines,” an arraignment magistrate determined the severity of the crime and the risk factor of the person charged with the crime to set the bail. The guidelines would, in theory, set a bail high enough to ensure that the person charged with the crime would appear in court so as not to lose the security fee.

  Once the bail fee had been set, both the bail bond and the deposit bond worked essentially the same way. Generally, depending on various factors, the person charged with the crime had to pay only ten percent of the whole security fee to get out of jail.

  The main differences between the two models arose if the offender missed or skipped out on his court date. Under the bail bond model, the court went after the bail bondsman for the deadbeat’s forfeited fee—the company then had a financial incentive to find the deadbeat and deliver him to the court. There was no similar financial incentive, however, with a deposit bond. The government already owned the deadbeat’s IOU. It was funny money, more or less worthless unless they hunted down the deadbeat and collected the remaining fee—if they could find him, and if he had the funds to pay.

  And so, not surprisingly, those who’d blown their deposit bail numbered around fifty thousand—no one knew the exact number because, due to more bureaucratic blundering, a master listing was never kept.

  These fugitives collectively owed hundreds of millions of dollars for their unpaid IOUs.

  Worse, in the meantime they remained at large on the streets, acting with impunity—effectively telling the City of Philadelphia and its judicial system to go fuck itself.

  All kinds of craziness going on down there, Payne thought, while I’m up here enjoying the company of this incredible goddess.

  And God knows I do love her.

  But do I love being out there chasing some murderer more?

  He sighed.

  The answer—right here, right now—is not no, but hell no!

  And Amanda’s not complaining that they pulled me back off the street and stuck me at a desk in Homicide. There’s absolutely no question that deep down, all things being equal, she’d rather I do something other than be a cop, anything that didn’t risk me getting shot in the line of duty, like her father, or killed, like my father and uncle.

  And that obit damn sure spelled it out.

  [FIVE]

  While Amanda Law had been in her first week of recovery, under the shrink’s orders simply to rest at home and to reconsider taking the anti-anxiety meds that he’d prescribed and that she’d steadfastly refused—“I don’t need to be popping Prozacs and I damn sure don’t need them turning my mind to putty so I just sit there and drool all over myself ”—her type A personality had her brain working overtime.

  Dealing mentally with the abduction and the attempt at extortion had been bad enough. But then came the knowledge that the bastards who’d kidnapped her had made a regular habit of committing sexual assaults and, worse, their leader had just killed one teenage Honduran girl—an illegal immigrant whom he’d forced into prostitution.

  Naturally, logically, all that had caused her to consider her own mortality—How close had he been to killing again? He certainly threatened me—and then that of Matt.

  And in the process of working through what-if scenarios—What happens if we continue seeing each other? What happens if we get married and move into that vine-covered cottage with the white picket fence that Matt loves to mention? And then what happens if he stays on with the department?—she’d come up with, as her father the cop had taught her to do, a worst-case scenario.

  Amanda explained all this—and more—to Matt in great detail. And then handed him the absolute worst case as it had manifested itself to her: as an obituary.

  Amanda had written the obit as if she were Mickey O’Hara, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who was well respected by both police rank and file and brass. Over the years, Matt and the wiry Irishman ten years his senior had even become fairly close friends.

  Amanda had gotten a great deal of the details for the obit from searches on the Internet, mostly from the Bulletin’s online archive of articles, many of which had been articles written by O’Hara. The rest of the details had been provided by Matt’s sister. Amy Payne had never liked that her brother was a cop, and had been more than happy to fill in any gaps for her old college dorm suitemate.

  Payne thought that Amanda had done a helluva job putting together the obit. He hadn’t been able to shake it from his mind, which was no surprise, considering the subject:

  The Wyatt Earp of the Main Line:

  KILLED IN THE LINE OF DUTY

  Homicide Sergeant Matthew M. Payne, 31, Faithfully Served

  Family and Philly—and Paid the Ultimate Price

  By Michael J. O’Hara

  Staff Writer, The Philadelphia Bulletin

  Photographs Courtesy of the Family and Michael J. O’Hara

  PHILADELPHIA—The City of Brotherly Love grieves today at the loss of one of its finest citizens and police officers. Sergeant Matthew Mark Payne, a nine-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department and well known as the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line, was gunned down last week in a Kensington alleyway as he dragged out a fellow officer who’d been wounded in an ambush.

  Payne’s heroic act amid a barrage of bullets sealed, right up until his last breath, his long-held reputation as a brave, loyal, and honorable officer and gentleman.

  Friends and family say that part of what made Payne such an outstanding civil servant, one that personified the department’s motto of Honor, Integrity, Sacrifice, was that he didn’t have to do it.

  He chose to do so.

  A Family That Served—and Sacrificed

  When, almost a decade ago, Payne graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, he could have followed practically any professional path other than law enforcement.

  He’d enjoyed a privileged background, brought up in upscale Wallingford, in all the comfort that a Main Line life afforded. After attending prep school at Episcopal Academy, then completing his studies at U of P, he was expected to pursue a law degree and, perhaps, join his adoptive father’s law practice, the prestigious firm of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester.

  Instead, Matt Payne chose something else: He decided that he should defend his country.

  He signed recruitment papers with the United States Marine Corps, only to discover that a minor condition with his vision barred him from joining the Corps.

  Determined to serve in some other capacity, Payne joined the Philadelphia Police Department.

  Again, he didn’t have to. If anything, Matt Payne had a pass. But, again, he chose to.

  A pass, because his biological father, Sergeant John F. X. Moffitt, known as Jack, was killed in the line of duty, too—shot dead while responding to a silent burglar alarm at a gasoline station. And Jack Moffitt’s brother, Captain Richard C. “Dutch” Moffitt, commanding officer of the department’s elite Highway Patrol, had been killed as well while trying to stop a robbery at the Waikiki Diner on Roosevelt Avenue.

 
Payne’s decision to join the police department came only months after his Uncle Dutch was killed. Many believed he joined in order to avenge the deaths of his father and uncle, and to prove that the condition that kept him out of the Corps would not keep him from being a good cop.

  “Frankly, all that scared the hell out of us,” said Dennis V. “Denny” Coughlin, who recently retired as first deputy commissioner of police, but who was a chief inspector at the time Payne joined the department.

  Coughlin had been best friends with Jack Moffitt at his death, and took upon himself the sad duty of delivering the tragic news to Matt’s mother—then pregnant with Matt—that she’d been widowed.

  “I can confess now that when Matty came to the department,” a visibly upset Coughlin added, “I tried to protect him. I sure as hell didn’t want to have to knock on his mother’s door with the news that now Jack’s son had been killed on the job, too. Unfortunately, that duty fell last week to First Deputy Commissioner of Police Peter Wohl.”

  New Cop, Hero Cop

  After graduating from the Police Academy, there was no question that Matt Payne was becoming both a good cop and a respected one.

  “But no matter how hard we tried throughout his career,” said Peter Wohl, to whom Payne was first assigned as an administrative assistant when Wohl ran Special Operations, “Matt wound up in the thick of things, bullets flying. That said, all his shootings were found to be righteous ones.”

  Before Payne had even put in six months on the job, he had already drawn his pistol. It had happened when he was off duty and had come across a van that fit the description of the one used by the criminal the newspapers had labeled the Northwest Serial Rapist. When the driver tried to run him down, Payne shot him in the head. A young woman, trussed up and naked in the back of the vehicle, was saved from becoming the rapist’s next victim. And headlines hailed Matt Payne as a hero.