The Vigilantes

by W. E. B Griffin

“No check.”

  Will Curtis went down the unstable wooden steps into the basement. His left hand slid along the wooden handrail, and his right hand, holding the .45-caliber pistol, followed the wall of mostly busted Sheetrock.

  There was some light from the small window at the far end of the room—the one the rats had gone through—but not enough for him to make out anything but vague shapes in the pitch dark.

  There was a stench, although not like the putrid smell that had assaulted his olfactory senses at the front door. The odor here was a sickly sweet stench that became stronger the farther down the stairs he went. So far, though, it hadn’t triggered his gag reflex, and he was grateful for such small favors.

  At the foot of the stairs, Curtis stopped and listened. He could hear snoring about midway in the room.

  That’s two people snoring!

  One deep as hell.

  He felt around on the wall for a light switch. As best he could tell there wasn’t one, just busted-up drywall.

  He took another step, reaching farther down the wall, then felt his foot catch on a rope or cord or something.

  Some kind of trip wire?

  He carefully reached down with his left hand till he felt it.

  It was a vinyl-covered electrical extension cord that had been run from upstairs. When he tugged on it, something attached to its far end started sliding across the basement floor toward him.

  He pulled and pulled, and finally found at the end what had once been the guts of a lamp. All that was left from the lamp was a threaded metal rod attached to the receptacle that held a lone bare lightbulb. His thumb found the stick push-switch on the receptacle, and after positioning himself in a crouch and aiming his pistol in the direction of the snoring, Curtis pushed the switch on.

  The bare bulb burned brightly, damn near blinding him until his eyes adjusted.

  The only response from the middle of the room was another loud, deep snore.

  After his eyes adjusted, Will Curtis could not believe what he was seeing.

  The basement was the worst thing he’d ever seen in his life. It was completely trashed. The Sheetrock walls were all busted, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to them in search of whatever treasure might be hidden behind them. And then he saw why: The wiring had been ripped from the wall power outlets and light switches.

  It probably was cheap aluminum, not copper, wiring, making the effort mostly worthless. Idiots.

  Desperate idiots . . .

  Trash was strewn all across the floor. There were piles upon piles of dirty clothes that hadn’t been touched in years. Dust and dirt were everywhere. And, in a far corner by a plastic bucket, he saw the source of the sickly sweet stench: mounds of dried human waste.

  Indescribable filth!

  Animals wouldn’t live in this!

  Just then, a rat ran across his booted feet, away from the light and toward the darkness of a far corner, along the way scattering what looked like rolling waves of cockroaches.

  Jesus H. Christ!

  This place should’ve been condemned a decade ago!

  Then he looked to the middle of the room, to the source of the snoring.

  There he saw a dirty and torn mattress set up on wooden pallets—presumably to keep it safe from the sea of cockroaches below—and on the mattress were two human forms lying side by side.

  One, the deep snorer, was a black male whose coarse face made him look older than his picture in the Wanted mug shot. His hair was cut short, and he had a goatee.

  The other was a very young black girl.

  Twelve? Thirteen?

  That sonofabitch!

  Both were naked, the girl curled under a dirty bath towel she used as a makeshift blanket. Kendrik had a rolled-up jacket under his head, his right hand under it and his left hand resting on the girl’s exposed bony buttock. It looked as if they had been spooning but the girl had crawled forward, away from Kendrik.

  They look so dirty—so foul.

  Will Curtis called out: “Kendrik Mays!”

  Mays didn’t move. The girl’s left eye opened suddenly, then closed. She pretended to still be asleep.

  Curtis walked closer to Mays, then kicked the mattress. “Kendrik!”

  He saw a groggy Mays struggle to turn his head. Then he opened his right eye to look at whoever was disturbing his sleep.

  From under his jacket he suddenly pulled out a small snub-nosed revolver.

  Oh, shit! Curtis thought as he instinctively leveled the Glock at Mays.

  Then Curtis saw that Mays’s hand was shaking so severely he couldn’t keep a grip on the gun.

  Curtis kicked the hand, his heavy boot causing the pistol to fly across the basement. It landed in a pile of dirty clothes.

  “Sit up, you sonofabitch!” Curtis barked at Mays.

  It took Mays forever to comply.

  When he had finally done so, the girl turned to look at Curtis.

  And Will Curtis ached.

  She was as badly bruised as Kendrik’s mother. She wasn’t as young as he’d thought—she can’t be over seventeen, eighteen—and she was terribly skinny from the drug abuse. Her skin sagged from her small frame, and Curtis could see her bones clearly delineated under the loose flesh.

  When Kendrik moved his hand to scratch his head, the girl flinched.

  She’s conditioned to getting hit for the slightest thing. . . .

  “You,” Curtis said to her, kicking a ratty dress toward her. “Get dressed and get the hell out of here!”

  She looked back wordlessly, her sunken eyes wide.

  Then she looked to Mays, seemingly for permission.

  Mays, his head cocked, stared belligerently at Curtis, his look saying, Who the fuck does this honky think he is, aiming a fucking Glock at Kendrik Fucking Mays?

  Curtis motioned with the pistol toward the female. “Go! Now!”

  Kendrik said, “Go on, bitch. I deal with you later.”

  She slid the dress over her head, not bothering to put on any panties, and then moved to the wooden stairs. She looked back over her shoulder, then turned and went upstairs as fast as she could.

  Curtis, the pistol aimed at Mays’s face, handed him the Wanted poster.

  “This you?” Will asked.

  Mays looked at it, then at Curtis. Then he smiled.

  Will Curtis thought: Jesus! What rotted teeth!

  At least the ones he still has.

  He must be living on crystal meth.

  Kendrik then said: “Fuck you! What if it is, old man?”

  He spat on the floor.

  “You do what it says you did?”

  “Fuck you!” he repeated.

  He tried to stare down Curtis. But then he suddenly started to shake uncontrollably.

  After a moment, he said, “Maybe. What’s it to you?” He shook again, then tried to puff out his chest. “Yeah. I done it. All that and more. Two years ago. Why you here now?”

  “I’d say, ‘May God have pity on you,’ but I think you’re past that point.”

  Kendrik barked: “Fuck you, motherfucker!”

  Will Curtis nodded.

  And he squeezed the trigger of the Glock.

  The .45-caliber round entered Kendrik’s right cheek, making an entrance wound just below the eye that looked like a pulpy crimson hole.

  Kendrik LeShawn Mays’s eyes rolled back as he suddenly slumped onto the filthy torn mattress.

  When he got to the top of the stairs, Will Curtis found Kendrik’s mother standing solemnly in the middle of the shabby living room. She had her head down, her face expressionless. Her arms were tightly crossed over her chest, her hands squeezing her biceps. The girl was nowhere in sight.

  “I’d like to say I’m sorry for your loss,” Will Curtis said evenly. “But you lost your boy a long time ago. That wasn’t him down there.”

  She shook her head. “No, it wasn’t. You right. It ain’t no good. Ain’t none of it no good.”

  She looked up and met his eyes. He sa
w that hers were stone cold.

  “Had it coming to him,” she said. “He hurt a lot of folk, good folk, not just me. That girl? He abuse her a long time. Months. Now he won’t. And I won’t be beat up no more for his meth and shit.”

  Will nodded.

  He walked toward the door, then paused.

  What the hell. I can’t take it with me. And Linda’s set for life.

  He reached in his pants pocket and came up with a wad of cash folded over and held together with a rubber band. He peeled off five twenties and a one-dollar bill.

  “This is for you,” he said, handing her the twenty-dollar bills.

  Then he pulled a FedEx ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and on the one-dollar bill wrote, “Lex Talionis, Third & Arch, Old City.”

  “You find someone to help you get Kendrik down to here. There’s a ten-thousand-dollar reward”—he paused to let that sink in—“for criminals like him. You won’t go to jail; if I have to, I’ll call and say I did it. But you make sure you get the reward money. Maybe it will help you start a new life.”

  Then Will Curtis turned and went through the front door.

  Behind the wheel of the rented Ford minivan, Will Curtis pulled the next envelope from the top of the stack on the dashboard. He read its bill of lading. Under “Recipient” was:

  LeRoi Cheatham

  2408 N. Mutter Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19133

  Kensington—what a lovely part of town!

  As least when the damn drug dealers aren’t having shoot-outs on the street corners. . . .

  He put the rented Ford minivan in gear and accelerated off the busted sidewalk.

  [THREE]

  Executive Command Center The Roundhouse Eighth and Race Streets, Philadelphia Sunday, November 1, 12:04:01 P.M.

  “You’re on in fifty-nine seconds, Mr. Mayor,” Kerry Rapier said.

  The master technician was seated in a wheeled nylon-mesh-fabric chair behind a black four-foot-wide control bank, also on wheels, that had a series of panels with buttons and dials, its main feature a keyboard with a joystick and a color video monitor. A fat bundle of cables ran from the control bank to the wall and, ultimately, to a rack of video recording and broadcasting equipment, including the soda-can-size digital video camera that, suspended at the end of a motorized boom, seemed to float overhead.

  Rapier, a police department blue shirt whose soft features and impossibly small frame made him look much younger than his twenty-five years, had shoulder patches on his uniform bearing two silver outlined blue chevrons. He manipulated the joystick and the camera overhead zoomed in to tightly frame the face of the Honorable Jerome H. “Jerry” Carlucci, who stood at a dark-stained oak lectern.

  Carlucci, his brown eyes smiling, said, “Son, are you sure you’re even old enough to be a policeman, let alone a corporal?”

  Corporal Rapier grinned.

  “With respect, Mr. Mayor, that’s not the first I’ve heard that.”

  Carlucci’s brown eyes, depending on his mood, could be warm and thoughtful or intense and piercing. Large-boned and heavyset, he was a massive fifty-one-year-old with dark brown hair. He wore an impeccably tailored dark gray woolen two-piece suit with a light blue, freshly pressed dress shirt and a navy blue silk necktie that matched the silk pocket square tucked into his coat.

  Standing shoulder to shoulder behind Mayor Carlucci was a veritable wall of white shirts: Police Commissioner Ralph Mariana, wearing his uniform with four stars, and Denny Coughlin, with the three stars of the first deputy police commissioner, were directly behind the mayor. And standing on opposite ends of them were Homicide Commander Henry Quaire, whose uniform bore the captain’s rank insignia of two gold-colored bars, and Homicide Lieutenant Jason Washington, with the insignia of one butter bar on his uniform.

  Looming on the wall behind all of them was a grid of flat-screen TVs. The screens alternately displayed either an official seal of the City of Philadelphia—the newly designed one, a golden Liberty Bell ringed by CITY OF PHILADELPHIA LIFE LIBERTY AND YOU in blue lettering—or the blue Philadelphia Police Department shield, which bore the older seal of the city and HONOR INTEGRITY SERVICE in gold lettering.

  (Earlier official city phrases had been “The City of Brotherly Love” and “The Place That Loves You Back,” the latter falling into disfavor after some wits in the populace reworded the slogan to read “The Place That Shoots Your Back”—and worse variants thereof.)

  Carlucci was about to give a prepared statement concerning the previous night’s triple murders and the first five pop-and-drops. In order to lend weight to his speech, the mayor of the City of Philadelphia was borrowing from the playbook of the police commissioner by using the Executive Command Center.

  Ralph Mariana held almost all of his press conferences in the ECC, a state-of-the-art facility that held an impressive display of the latest high-tech equipment. The electronics made for terrific photo opportunities—and more important, as Mariana said, helped give the public a sure sense of confidence that the police department had the best tools to safeguard its citizens.

  During a crisis, the ECC’s main objective was to collect, assimilate, and analyze during a crisis a mind-boggling amount of wide-ranging raw information—people and places and events and more—in a highly efficient manner.

  And then to act on it—instantly, if not sooner.

  “And that’s exactly what the hell we’re doing this morning,” Carlucci had bluntly told Mariana when he’d asked for everyone to gather in the ECC. “If this goddamn situation escalates, it has the potential to turn the city into something out of the Wild West.”

  The bulk of the ECC was given over to a massive pair of T-shaped conference tables. Each dark gray Formica-topped table seated twenty-six. And each of these fifty-two seats had its own multiline telephone, outlets for laptop computers, and access to secure networks for on-demand communications with other law-enforcement agencies—from local to federal to the international police agency, Interpol—as necessary.

  Along the back walls were more chairs to accommodate another forty staff members.

  The focal point of the room, however, were three banks of sixty-inch, high-definition LCD flat-screen TVs. There were nine TVs per bank on the ten-foot-high walls. Mounted edge to edge, the frameless TVs could create a single supersize image, or could display individual pictures—each TV could even be used in split-screen mode.

  Usually, when the screens were not showing live feeds from cameras mounted in emergency vehicles at the scene of an accident or crime, they showed continuously cycling images from closed-circuit TV cameras that were mounted all over the city—in subways, public buildings, and main and secondary roadways—and the broadcasts from local and cable TV news stations. Images could be pulled from almost any source, even a cell phone camera, as long as the signals were digitized.

  The ECC fell under the purview of the Science & Technology arm of the Philadelphia Police Department, which included the Forensic Sciences, Information Systems, and Communications Divisions. Its two-star commander, Deputy Police Commissioner Howard Walker, reported to Denny Coughlin.

  Acting on an order issued that morning by the mayor, Walker had alerted the local news media that a live feed of Mayor Carlucci would begin at precisely 12:05 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. The timing gave the TV news programs the opportunity to start their noon newscasts with the announcement that an important statement by the mayor of Philadelphia concerning the rash of recent murders was coming up in five minutes.

  “Stay tuned. We’re back with that breaking news right after this commercial break.”

  “Thirty seconds, gentlemen . . . ,” Corporal Rapier said.

  Four hours earlier, when Coughlin had led his group into the Executive Command Center, he’d found the mayor and the police commissioner already seated at Conference Table One. They had heavy china mugs steaming with fresh coffee before them on the table. Mariana’s mug read SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVE COMMAND CENTER. The
mayor’s mug read GENO’S STEAKS SOUTH PHILLY, PENNA.

  Everyone in the ECC was casually dressed. Even the usually stiffly buttoned-down Carlucci wasn’t wearing a necktie, and he had his shirt collar open. And Matt Payne and Tony Harris still looked rumpled and messy, the result of having been up most of the night running down leads in the death of Reggie Jones.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Carlucci said in a solemn tone suggesting he meant that it was anything but a good morning. He did not move from his chair except to grab his coffee mug handle.

  There was a chorus of “good morning”s in reply.

  Mariana added, “Fresh coffee in there.” He waved with his mug across the room, indicating a door that led to a kitchenette.

  Carlucci then said, “Sergeant Payne, no offense, but you and Detective Harris look like hell.”

  “Considering what we’ve been through, Mr. Mayor,” Payne said dryly, “hell sounds like an absolute utopian paradise. I enjoy the thrill of the chase as much as the next guy, but this one’s a real challenge. Right now we don’t know if we’re dealing with a single shooter-slash-strangler, or if there are others—that is, as someone put it earlier, Halloween Homicide Copycats.”

  Ordinarily, a lowly police sergeant speaking so bluntly to the highest elected official of a major city would be cause for disciplinary—if not more drastic—measures.

  But Carlucci’s relationship with Payne, and most everyone else in the group, was anything but ordinary.

  Back when he’d been a cop, Carlucci had known and liked Matt’s biological father. And that went way back, to when Sergeant John F. X. Moffitt had been the best friend of a young Denny Coughlin before being killed in the line of duty.

  Mayor Carlucci was also well acquainted with Matt Payne’s adoptive father, whom he also liked very much, and not only because Brewster Cortland Payne II was a founding partner of Philadelphia’s most prestigious law firm.

  And there was another connection between Matt and Hizzonor.

  Carlucci had been Coughlin’s “rabbi”—his mentor—and had groomed the young police officer with great potential for the larger responsibilities that would come as he rose in the ranks of the department.