The Vigilantes

by W. E. B Griffin

  Description: Black male, age 20, 5'9", 200 lbs.

  L.K.A.: 2620 Wilder St, Phila.

  Priors Arrests: 8 total: possession of marijuana (7); possession with intent to distribute Methamphetamine (3); Conviction of and time served for Involuntary deviant sexual intercourse & rape of an unconscious or unaware person (1).

  Call Received: 01 Nov, 1230 hours.

  Cause of Death: GUNSHOT to head (99 percent probability).

  Case No.: 2010-81-039614-POP-N-DROP

  Notes: Fugitive. Shauna MAYS, mother of deceased, stated in interview that he was killed by SNU in basement of L.K.A. She described SNU as a skinny white male approximately her age (40), and suggested his motive was that someone in his family may have been robbed or raped by Kendrik Mays. Assailant left Wanted sheet with body. Body transported to Lex Talionis, Old City.

  “Well, no surprise. No SNU number yet,” Payne said. “And even if it was our doer, all we’d know is that he’s added another bad guy to his exclusive death club. We’d still be no closer to figuring out who the hell he is.”

  Then Payne glanced back at the image and saw that 2620 WILDER ST was blinking.

  “That what I think it is, Kerry?”

  Corporal Kerry Rapier said, “I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that we’re now getting a live feed coming in from the Mays crime scene.”

  Rapier typed a couple commands on the keyboard, then clicked on the blinking address with the Colt .45 Officer’s Model cursor. After the pistol fired and smoked, the big-screen image of Kendrik Mays returned to monitor eighteen. Then two new images appeared on the main bank of monitors, which Rapier had turned to split-screen mode.

  The top row of three monitors had a stationary digital image of the exterior of the Mays house. In the bottom right-hand corner was a white orb that contained the image’s numerical designation, “1a.” Next to that, a text box read: 2620 WILDER STREET—EXTERIOR.

  The middle and bottom rows of monitors—each with a black “1b” in a white orb next to the text 2620 WILDER STREET—INTERIOR—displayed the feed from a portable digital video camera. The shaky image was mostly black as the camera’s lone beam of light pierced a circle in the darkness, lighting up bits and pieces of the trashed house.

  “My God!” Payne said. “It looks as if they’re going down into some hellish black hole.”

  Harris said, “Yeah, like out of a horror movie.”

  The unseen technician who carried the camera was carefully walking down a flight of unstable wooden steps. As he went, the beam of light showed busted-up Sheetrock and exposed wooden studs on the wall. Then, when the technician was almost to the bottom of the stairs, the lens caught images of roaches and a black rat scattering.

  “Unbelievable,” Payne said.

  Then the room began to fill with more artificial light, and when the tech panned the camera back to the wooden steps, another tech could be seen slowly descending. He wore blue jeans, a light blue T-shirt with a representation of the Crime Scene Unit patch—a cartoon Sherlock Holmes and basset hound sniffing the Philly skyline—on its left chest, and transparent blue plastic booties and tan-colored synthetic polymer gloves. A white surgical mask covered his nose and mouth. He carried a pair of telescopic lightpole stands—each of which had two halogen floodlamps burning brightly at the top and a power cord snaking back up the steps—and a telescopic tripod.

  The tech reached the bottom of the steps. He then set up the stands at opposite ends of the basement, adjusting the brilliant floodlamps so that the entire room was more or less evenly lit. Next he set up the tripod, and the tech with the camera walked to it. The camera image shook, then became stabilized as it was mounted on the tripod. The camera’s lens was adjusted so that the entire room was visible.

  The brilliant halogen lights clearly showed all the incredible filth. There were clothes scattered everywhere, pile after pile of pants and shirts and more, and stacks of suitcases. The walls were mostly bare wooden studs.

  And in the middle of it all: a stack of wooden pallets with a blood-soaked, torn mattress on top. On the wall behind it, the exposed brick and the wooden studs were covered in blood and brain splatter that resembled some sort of morbid Rorschach inkblot test.

  “Well, there’s where Kendrik Mays went off to meet his maker,” Harris said.

  “More like to meet Satan,” Payne said, shaking his head out of disgust. “Though this place looks like hell on earth. No wonder Shauna Mays looked and smelled so damn awful.”

  “Someone busted all the Sheetrock off the walls,” Rapier said.

  “Probably to pull out the electrical wiring,” Harris said. “Pretty common if it’s copper wiring. And they also rip the copper from air-conditioning units to sell it as scrap.”

  Payne then remembered thinking, after Shauna Mays had said crack houses didn’t have clocks, that everything not nailed down got sold for drug money.

  And here’s proof that even things that are nailed down get hocked.

  Unbelievable. . . .

  “And all the suitcases and clothes?” Rapier asked.

  “From home invasions,” Harris said. “Those wheeled suitcases make it easier to haul off all the loot. The clothes cover up whatever they stole, and they’re easy to sell, too.”

  “They don’t sell the suitcases?”

  “Some are sold, some reused. Who knows about the rest. Maybe it’s hard to hock them if they have someone’s name written on them in Magic Marker.” Harris shrugged. “Hell if I know. Hard to say what dopeheads think—or don’t think, as the case may be.”

  Harris then pointed to a far corner of the basement. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “A shit bucket,” Payne said disgustedly.

  The first tech, who had carried the video camera down, came into the frame. He held a professional Nikon digital camera with a squat zoom lens and an enormous flash strobe.

  They watched as he began putting out the four-inch-high inverted-V evidence markers. The first yellow plastic marker bore the black numeral “01.” It was placed in the middle of the bloody mattress, next to a pair of torn women’s panties. He then raised the Nikon to his eye and took a series of four photographs of the panties and marker, overlapping the angles of the shots so that later a computer could create a three-dimensional rendering of the evidence.

  A couple minutes later, after repeating the process with three other markers, the tech bent over in a corner of the basement. He placed an inverted-V marker bearing the numeral “05” next to a shiny black metal object that was on a dirt-encrusted, sweat-stained T-shirt.

  “It’s a pistol,” Kerry Rapier said.

  The tech raised the camera and popped four overlapping images of the pistol.

  Then he reached down with his gloved hand and carefully picked it up.

  Now they had a better view of it on the TV monitor.

  “A snub-nosed revolver,” Rapier added. “Looks like maybe an S&W Model 49?”

  “Uh-uh,” Payne said, shaking his head. “The Bodyguard has a hammer shroud. And that hammer is not only exposed, it’s cocked back.”

  “Then it’s a Chief’s Special,” Rapier said with more conviction. “At least both are .38 caliber.”

  “Yeah,” Payne said absently.

  They watched as the tech, with what obviously was practiced skill, put the thumb of his gloved right hand on the knurled back of the hammer and, keeping a steady pressure with the thumb, squeezed the trigger with his index finger. The released hammer rotated forward—but slowly, the pressure from the thumb preventing it from falling fast enough to fire off a possible live round.

  Then he thumbed the release that allowed the cylinder to swing open and carefully removed the round that had been under the hammer. It was a live one. He shot another series of four photographs of the pistol in that position. Then he extracted all the bullets from the cylinder—three spent rounds and two live ones—and photographed them. He threaded a plastic zip tie through the barrel and clasped it in such a way
that it was visually obvious that the gun could not be fired, either accidentally or on purpose. Finally, he put the fired and live rounds in a clear plastic evidence bag, put the pistol in a separate clear bag, and labeled both bags.

  Payne sighed.

  “Okay, I’ve seen enough,” he said. “It will take some time for them to process all of that hellhole.”

  “And then even more time to begin updating these master case files with the information and images,” Rapier said.

  After a moment, Rapier added, “What do you think are the odds of that being the doer’s weapon?”

  Payne shrugged.

  “Who the hell knows, Kerry. You heard Kendrik’s mother say in the interview that the gunshot made a big ‘boom.’ Arguably, a .45 is a helluva lot more of a ‘boom’ than a .38—a .38’s more like a ‘bang.’ But what does she know? A damned cork popgun would probably sound like a boom to her.” He looked at the video feed of the basement. “Maybe there’s a .38 embedded in the wall there with Kendrik’s blood splatter. Or maybe it’s a .45-cal. round, which could bring us back to our mystery shooter”—he looked at his notes—“good ol’ SNU 2010-56-9280, who now has, at last known count, seven notches on his gun. But, if there is a .38 in the wall, maybe there’s another doer’s fingerprints on that snub-nosed Smith and Wesson. Which means another candidate for Task Force Operation Clean Sweep. And on and on. Until we get lab results, we’re basically in hurry-up-and-wait mode.”

  “And we’re at least an hour away from getting a response from IAFIS on the two prints taken off Reggie Jones.”

  As Payne looked at him and nodded, he felt his cell phone vibrating. He pulled it from his pants pocket, read the caller ID on the screen, and said aloud, “Wonder what’s on the Black Buddha’s mind?”

  He put the phone to his head and said, “Boss, I sure as hell hope you’re not calling for a progress report on Task Force Operation Clean Sweep. Because we’ve yet to make any ground.”

  “Matthew,” Jason Washington said, “we just got a call from the Twenty-sixth District. More bodies were found a little over an hour ago. Three dead.”

  “Jesus! More pop-and-drops? Wait—the Twenty-sixth? That’s north of here, not Old City.”

  That news caused Harris and Rapier to look at Payne curiously.

  “No, they’re not pop-and-drops in Old City,” Washington said. “In fact, quite interestingly, there’s no obvious cause of death at all with two of them. They say the third looks like he succumbed to blunt trauma. May or may not be a connection with your doer, but because Carlucci says your Op Clean Sweep gets priority, you are hereby officially in the loop.”

  “Where’s the scene, Jason?”

  Payne pulled out his notepad, flipped to a clean page, and wrote “Jefferson & Mascher” on it.

  “On our way,” he said. “Thanks.”

  [THREE]

  2408 N. Mutter Street, Philadelphia Sunday, November 1, 4:35 P.M.

  Michael Floyd, sitting up in the front passenger seat of the Ford Freestar, was grinning from ear to ear under the brim of Will Curtis’s grease-smeared FedEx cap.

  Curtis steered the minivan off the curb. Because Mutter was a one-way street northbound, he headed for the next street up, Cumberland.

  “No! No!” Michael began shouting.

  Will slammed on the brakes, forcing them both against the shoulder straps of their seat belts. The FedEx cap flew off Michael’s head and landed on the dashboard.

  Michael pointed over his shoulder and said, “That way.”

  Curtis pointed out the windshield. “This street is one-way.”

  Michael looked at him with an expression that suggested the statement was meaningless to him.

  “He live that way!” Michael then said, pointing south again.

  Well, Curtis thought, he probably only knows how to get there by walking.

  If I drive around until I find a street that has southbound traffic, he may not have the first idea where he is.

  Oh, hell. “This is a one-way street, Officer? But I was only going one way.”

  Will Curtis drove up on the sidewalk, checked his mirror for traffic, then cut the steering wheel hard left to make a U-turn. He had to back up once to make the turn on the narrow street.

  Curtis was somewhat surprised that they’d had no trouble driving the wrong way down Mutter, then the wrong way down Colona Street. And at Mascher Street, he was relieved to find that it was a one-way going the right direction, south. But then, a block later, at Susquehanna Avenue, they reached a dead end.

  They were looking at a park.

  Curtis turned to his navigator, who was pointing straight.

  “There,” Michael said.

  “Through the park?” Curtis said, incredulous. “Oh, for chrissake!”

  “That way!” Michael said.

  Well, hell, that’s the way he walks.

  Then that’s the way we’ll drive.

  Curtis checked for traffic, then drove across Susquehanna Avenue and hopped the curb. There was a concrete walkway crisscrossing the park, and he followed it.

  Michael Floyd seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the drive. He scanned the park as they cut across it. About three-quarters through, he suddenly pointed to a small stand of maple trees.

  “Gangstas,” he said.

  Curtis looked. There in the maples’ shadows were four or five tough-looking teenage boys, hoodlums in baggy jeans and hoodie sweatshirts and sneakers.

  Those must be the ones who beat him.

  He expected Michael to recoil, or at least hide, but the next thing he knew the kid was rolling down his window and throwing the bird with both fists at the punks.

  Then Michael Floyd yelled at the top of his lungs, “Fuck you, gangsta muthafuckas!”

  Now what the hell else is going to happen? Will Curtis thought.

  That Tourette’s, if that’s what it is, is going to get him killed. . . .

  He accelerated, not waiting to find out if there would be any gunshots from the gangsta muthafuckas.

  At the far end of the park he picked up Mascher again and, following Michael’s pointing, drove south another nine blocks. Crossing Oxford, Curtis noticed that the block on his left, south of Oxford, was somewhat like the 2400 block of Mutter Street—basically barren but for a clump of the last remaining row houses.

  “There,” Michael said, pointing to the end of the block.

  Will Curtis followed the direction of Michael’s finger and saw that there were five houses altogether on the southwest corner of the block.

  He also saw that there were police squad cars everywhere.

  “There?” Will Curtis repeated.

  He stood on the brakes and studied the scene.

  He saw other emergency vehicles, including a big van with CRIME SCENE UNIT lettered on its side, and a bunch of heavy equipment—a tall demolition crane, a big Caterpillar bulldozer, and heavy-duty dump trucks.

  “Wow!” Michael said, pointing at them.

  “What the hell?” Will said aloud.

  Ahead at the next intersection, Jefferson Street, was a squad car, its every exterior light flashing white or red or blue. It was parked at an angle to force traffic onto Jefferson and away from the other emergency vehicles. A policeman in uniform was beside it directing traffic. He signaled for the FedEx van to keep moving down the street toward him.

  “Don’t like no cop,” Michael said. “LeRoi say cop bad news.”

  Curtis looked at him.

  No surprise there.

  And no surprise that generation after generation in the ghetto grows up hating cops—it’s all they know, all they’re taught.

  Then Will realized he hadn’t considered what he would do with Michael if they actually caught up with LeRoi.

  I can’t let him see me take LeRoi out. Michael’s done nothing to deserve that.

  The only lesson he needs to learn from this is: You do bad, you pay a bad price.

  Shit. I’ll have to figure that out.

&n
bsp; Will Curtis reached over, grabbed the FedEx cap from the dashboard, and put it on the boy’s head.

  “That’ll keep you hidden from the cop, Michael.”

  Michael considered that, then nodded once.

  As they rolled up to the intersection, the traffic cop waved for the van to take the turn. Curtis did so, and avoided making any eye contact.

  Michael suddenly yelled: “Don’t like no cop, muthafucka!”

  “Michael!” Curtis barked.

  He checked his mirror and saw the cop look at the van, but only for a second before he turned back to directing traffic.

  If the cop heard that, probably wasn’t the first time.

  At least the kid didn’t throw him the bird, too.

  Curtis, his heart beating fast, shook his head.

  That was close. . . .

  He looked over at Michael, who now was pointing down Jefferson to the next intersection, Hancock Street.

  “There LeRoi house!” he said, indicating the boarded-up row house on the corner. “Got wood window.”

  And just beyond the house, Curtis saw someone peer out from around the corner.

  He drove on, and as they came to the corner, Curtis saw that there was more than one person. Standing in an alleyway behind the boarded-up row house were three young black men, including a great big one with droopy eyes and a trimmed goatee.

  “And there LeRoi!” Michael said excitedly.

  Well, I’ll be damned.

  He’s been standing and watching those cops work that scene back there. Just hiding in plain sight.

  And the cops don’t have any idea that there’s a fugitive living just fifty yards away.

  But then, how could they? So damned many punks in this city, there’s no way to keep track of them all.

  Michael suddenly moved quickly, rolling down his window again. He stuck out his head, the hat hitting the top of the car’s frame and falling to the floorboard.

  “Lookit me, LeRoi!” Michael shouted, pumping his right fist. “I be riding, muthafucka!”

  LeRoi Cheatham was momentarily caught completely off guard. He did not immediately know how to react to the sight of his twelve-year-old nephew hanging out of a FedEx delivery vehicle and yelling his name at the top of his lungs. Especially with who the hell knew how many cops only a block or so away.