The Vigilantes

by W. E. B Griffin

Goddamn greasy cheesesteak . . .

  The kid now looked at him with a wrinkled, soured expression.

  He went to the far side of the theater and, occasionally looking over his shoulder, began sticking the pole between the theater seats and pulling out discarded candy wrappers and paper cups.

  As carefully as he could, Will Curtis made his way down the carpeted steps of the theater, then out into the corridor. He stopped, looked to the right, then to the left, and saw a pair of restrooms two screening rooms away.

  He found the men’s room empty. After grabbing some paper towels, he entered a stall, closing and locking the door.

  He unbuttoned his denim jacket, then reached under his shirttail to pull out the Glock. He looked around the stall but could not find a flat surface to put it on. And he could not simply set it on the floor as he had done at the church earlier in the day. Here the stall walls were a foot off the tiled floor, and anyone walking into the restroom would immediately see the gun in plain view.

  And no doubt go screaming like a banshee into the corridor.

  He looked from the floor to the back side of the door. There was a standard metal hook there, and he turned the gun upside down and slipped its trigger guard over the hook.

  That works good.

  He then undid his pants to inspect the damage.

  He saw red.

  That’s a lot of blood.

  Not good . . .

  He kicked off his black athletic shoes, then slipped off the slacks and hung them by a belt loop on the hook. Then he peeled off his fouled underwear and wrapped it in paper towels.

  He was now naked from the waist down, and he suddenly felt very cold, chilled to the core.

  And then there was a rumble in his abdomen.

  A half hour later, feeling clammy and completely spent, Will managed to dress himself and exit the stall.

  Washing his hands, he looked in the mirror and truly didn’t recognize himself. He was saddened by the ashen-faced, sickly old man staring back at him. He thought he looked worse than ever.

  I know I damn sure feel worse than ever.

  And I keep passing blood.

  He dried his hands, then started for the door. Feeling dizzy, he took his steps carefully. At the door, he pulled it inward, then stopped.

  Damn! The gun!

  He retrieved the pistol from the toilet stall’s coat hook, stuck it behind his belt buckle, then made his way out of the cinema and across the complex to the car park.

  The white Ford minivan was where he’d left it, but the full-size SUVs that had been on either side were gone, as were half the vehicles in the lot.

  He got behind the wheel and started the engine. Looking at the dashboard, he saw the small stack of the four remaining FedEx envelopes. He picked them up and flipped through them.

  The first had a Last Known Address that was in far South Philly, almost to Philadelphia International Airport. The second was on Richmond, the other side of Kensington. The third was on Ontario, near Eighteenth Street. And the fourth was the Last Known Address that had been a dead end—the house that had burned to the ground.

  The Richmond one is too close to here for tonight.

  He flipped back and looked at the Ontario address.

  That’s Allegheny West, on the way home.

  What the hell . . .

  He put the minivan in gear, flicked on the headlights, and drove out into the night.

  He took Girard Avenue west to Broad Street—giving a wide berth to Jefferson and Hancock, where he’d shot LeRoi Cheatham earlier in the day—then drove north on Broad all the way to Ontario. There, he made a left.

  Just before crossing over Germantown Avenue, Will considered pulling to a stop to reapply the FedEx signs to the doors of the vehicle. But he decided that the signage really didn’t matter at night.

  The guy is going to see the new white minivan and my uniform. That’s enough.

  And I really don’t want them on the doors if the cops are still out looking for a white FedEx minivan.

  Who knows what that retard Michael told them?

  Then, after this, I’ll take Germantown home and finish the rest tomorrow.

  Then he did pull over, but only to hit the overhead light and reread the waybill on the FedEx envelope. It had:

  JOSSIAH MIFFIN

  1822 W. ONTARIO STREET

  In his research at CrimeFreePhilly.com, Will Curtis had learned that originally it had been Miffin’s girlfriend who’d turned in the thirty-year-old to the police. Miffin had been babysitting her eleven-year-old daughter at her house when she had left work early to surprise him.

  And surprise him she had.

  She walked into the living room carrying a store-bought angel food cake in a plastic to-go bag and a long slicing knife.

  She found the two of them on the sofa.

  He was teaching the girl how to masturbate.

  The daughter, after quickly pulling on her pants, had loudly defended Miffin, declaring it all a simple misunderstanding. Using the vernacular of the street, she explained that Miffin had been teaching her self-stimulation only because he’d told her that it was very wrong for him to continue orally stimulating her with his tongue.

  Her mother had responded to that information by also drawing from the street: She lunged for Miffin and tried cutting out his tongue with the angel food knife.

  She failed, but did manage to slash a nasty gash on his left cheek in the shape of, oddly, a J.

  After his arrest, Jossiah Miffin had been found guilty of indecent assault and corruption of a minor. (The mother claimed it had been self-defense that had led to the cheek cut.) Miffin was sentenced to probation, which included his getting and keeping a job, obtaining intense sex-offender treatments, and maintaining absolutely no unsupervised contact with minors.

  Having made no effort whatsoever to meet even one of the requirements of his probation, Miffin’s Wanted sheet hit the Megan’s Law list.

  And it hit Will Curtis’s Law of Talion pervert list.

  On Ontario Street, just shy of Nineteenth Street and the SEPTA train tracks, Will Curtis slowed and started looking for 1822. It was damn difficult on the dark street. Here, too, there were huge gaps where row houses had once stood. And he had to start with a known address and try to count from there to 1822, guessing how many ghost addresses there were between existing houses.

  And this easily could turn out like that other address—nonexistent.

  He was amazed that his decent middle-class house was only a couple miles from this run-down ruin of a neighborhood. The houses were literally falling apart. And all the cars here were older models, some very much older, including the carcasses of two that clearly had been wrecked and abandoned long before.

  As the minivan rolled down the street, its headlights picked up an occasional address—and, twice, a group of young boys walking down the broken sidewalk, trying to stay in the shadows.

  They look like they’re up to no good.

  He finally saw 1818 in the headlight beam, counted the gap next to that house as 1820, and decided the next ratty row house had to be 1822.

  He stopped the minivan at what he presumed was 1824, parked, grabbed the envelope, peeled off his denim jacket, and got out.

  As he looked at the darkened house—he could not see one light on inside—he now worried that this address may be deserted.

  One step away from falling down and becoming a gap, too.

  But when he knocked on the old wooden door’s glass pane, which was covered on the inside by a dusty curtain, a dog barked loudly from deep inside the house.

  He faintly heard footsteps inside, then the lone bulb of the porch light came on.

  Bony fingers pulled aside the dusty curtain, and an elderly black woman with a deeply wrinkled face and thinning gray hair peered out at him. She looked half asleep, and judging by her expression, she was not expecting to find a white man in a FedEx uniform on her porch.

  “Can I help you?” she squeaked
out.

  “Sorry to bother you so late, ma’am. It’s my last delivery.” He held up the envelope. “Got a special delivery from the U.S. Treasury for a Jossiah Miffin at this address.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s an envelope from the Treasury Department in Washington. Been delivering these all day. I’m guessing they’re some kind of refund check.”

  “Check?” she repeated, taking a long moment to consider that. “Just leave it. At the door be good.”

  “Sorry, ma’am. Can’t do that. Need for this”—he glanced at the bill of lading and pretended to read it—“Jossiah Miffin to personally sign for it. He live here?”

  She nodded. “He my grandson. I sent him to the drugstore in my car. You can wait if you want.”

  Will Curtis felt his stomach start to knot up again.

  He looked at the woman, nodded, and said, “I’m going to wait in the van.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said, and the dusty curtain fell closed.

  In the fifteen minutes that Will Curtis had sat in the minivan, hoping not to experience another unfortunate personal accident, he’d again seen the group of three boys who’d been walking down the sidewalk earlier.

  They simply have nothing better to do.

  Or choose not to find something better to do.

  No wonder they get in such trouble. You look long enough for trouble, you’re damn sure going to find it.

  There was still a knot in his stomach. And he still felt terribly weak and drained. The dizziness had not completely gone away.

  He pulled the Glock out from under his shirt and laid it on his lap, then realized he hadn’t been keeping track of how many rounds he’d fired.

  More important, how many I have left.

  All I know for sure is that there’s one round chambered.

  He pushed the magazine release on the side of the weapon and the magazine dropped out of the grip. Its capacity was ten rounds.

  He held the magazine up to the overhead light. Numbered holes up its back side allowed for a visual count of the bullets, but in the poor lighting he had trouble seeing exactly how many were there.

  With some effort, he started thumbing the rounds out the top of the magazine and into his lap. He counted a total of five left.

  Six, including the one in the throat.

  He reloaded the magazine with some effort, slipped it into the pistol, and, using the heel of his left hand, slammed it home.

  Okay, now where the hell are you, Jossiah?

  A minute or so later, his eyes were slightly blinded by lights reflected in his rearview mirrors.

  He blinked, then looked. He saw a yellowish pair of big, round headlight beams bouncing up and down the street toward him. Then he heard the sound of the engine valves knocking noisily as the driver accelerated.

  That’s one old damn car.

  The shocks are shot. And it sounds like the engine is just about to go, too.

  The car rattled to a stop at the weed-choked curb in front of the row house at 1822 Ontario Street. The air became heavy with the smell of raw gasoline and half-burned exhaust.

  Will Curtis pulled on his grease-smeared FedEx cap and swung open the minivan’s door. He stepped out, swaying a bit, then walked back and stood in the beam of the car’s left headlight so that the FedEx logos on his hat, shirt, and the envelope were clearly visible to the driver.

  He held the envelope in front of his crotch, concealing his hand holding the pistol.

  As Will Curtis carefully continued stepping toward the car—which he now could see was a mid-1970s AMC Gremlin, in his opinion one of the ugliest and most worthless vehicles that had ever been produced—there came the sound of tortured metal as the driver pushed open the rusted-out door.

  “You stay there, girl,” the driver, a black man with shoulder-length hair, said to someone in the passenger seat.

  Curtis could barely make out what he thought was a thin young teenage girl sitting there. She wore a white sleeveless jacket.

  So he’s still got a taste for the young ones. . . .

  The black male turned to Will Curtis and aggressively said: “What the hell you want?”

  “Your grandmother said I should wait for you to deliver this envelope,” Curtis said. “You’re Jossiah Miffin, right?”

  As Curtis stepped closer, he saw the black man’s attention turn to the envelope. Then, despite the now-long black hair, Will saw the face from the mug shot, including the J-shaped scar.

  “What up with the envelope? What’s in it?”

  Unexpectedly, a delirious Will Curtis heard in his head Stan Colt’s voice. Colt, playing an over-the-top tough-cop character, was saying one of the lines in the shoot-’em-up movie that Curtis had just sat through twice.

  Curtis tossed the envelope at Miffin’s feet.

  Miffin instinctively tried to catch it.

  Will Curtis then leveled the Glock at Miffin’s head and, in his best deep gravelly Stan Colt voice, recited the line “A heavy diet of lead, with a side order of penance.”

  Curtis squeezed the trigger twice.

  The first round pierced the hook of the J-shaped scar, causing Miffin’s head to jerk backward. The second round then went into the roof of his open mouth and exited through the top of his skull.

  Miffin collapsed to the asphalt street.

  The teenage girl in the car began screaming hysterically.

  And suddenly, feeling very dizzy, Will Curtis saw nothing but black. He collapsed beside Miffin, dropping the Glock as he went down.

  Will Curtis didn’t know how long he’d been passed out, only that he’d definitely been out cold. He had a lump on his forehead from where it had hit the pavement.

  He figured that he couldn’t have been out too long, because the teenage girl was still screaming in the passenger seat.

  And Jossiah Miffin, of course, was still where he’d fallen dead.

  As Will Curtis tried to stand, he quickly discovered that he had almost no energy whatever.

  He made it up to his hands and knees and began crawling back to the Ford minivan.

  It took an eternity to pull himself up into the driver’s seat, then get the door closed.

  With a lot of effort, he started the engine, put the shifter in drive, and rolled forward.

  He looked in the mirror and saw three young black teens rush out to the Gremlin. He watched as one reached under the car and pulled something out.

  What was . . . oh, the envelope!

  Those savages will steal anything they think is worth something.

  Won’t they be surprised when they find the Wanted sheet.

  Then again, maybe they’ll turn him in for the reward.

  The kid shoved it inside his sweatshirt, then took off running.

  Will Curtis turned at the corner and headed for Germantown Avenue.

  [THREE]

  Hops Haus Tower, Unit 2180 1100 N. Lee Street, Philadelphia Sunday, November 1, 9:58 P.M.

  In the middle of the plush king-size bed facing a panoramic view of the lights along the Delaware River and beyond, Matt Payne and Amanda Law were lying on their left sides, spoon fashion, resting in the glow of the carnally exhausted. Matt had his arms wrapped around Amanda and across her slowly rising and falling bosoms. His right leg was draped over her right hip, his toes tucked back in just above her ankles. When he inhaled, he marveled at her soft warm scent—at once sweet and, from the perspiration, lightly salty—that felt rich in pheromones.

  This is as good as it gets, he thought, and he gently kissed the back of her neck.

  She grunted softly, appreciatively.

  Then, even though his cell phone was in the pocket of his khaki pants that had been unceremoniously dropped on the floor at the far side of the bed and were now under a curled-up Luna, he heard the phone’s distinctive ping! that announced he had an incoming text message.

  Okay, we’ve been lying here like this for at least ten minutes, neither of us saying a word. Or moving an inch.


  Just intimately intertwined.

  And it’s been nice. Incredibly nice.

  So would I really ruin everything by checking that message?

  I really really really don’t want to fuck up the moment, because—wow!—what a helluva romp that was.

  Where does she get the energy? And the deep passion?

  Incredible.

  Then he heard another ping!

  In his arms, Amanda moved a little.

  “You’re not,” she softly said. But it was more of a question.

  He didn’t reply.

  “Are you?” she then said, her tone somewhat incredulous.

  He thought: You probably would if it was yours going off.

  He said: “Of course not, baby.”

  And then there was another: Ping!

  Then two others in a row: Ping! Ping!

  What the hell?

  “What’s going on, Matt?”

  “I don’t know, baby. I told you I’m not going to check those.”

  But I should. What the hell?

  Ping!

  She moved again, then suddenly squirmed out from under him.

  “Well,” she said, “if you’re not, I sure as hell am.”

  She reached down the side of the bed and grabbed the waistband of the khakis, tugging hard when she felt the weight of Luna on them.

  “Sorry, girl,” Amanda said as she dug in the pocket and pulled out the phone.

  Luna slinked across the room and went into her crate in the master bath. It sounded as if she threw herself down onto the hard plastic liner. Then Luna gave a heavy sigh.

  Amanda looked at the phone’s screen.

  She said, “Three from Tony—”

  “What the hell?” he said, sitting up and adjusting the pillow to lean back on.

  “—one from Kerry, and the last one’s from Denny.”

  “Denny?” he said.

  She held the phone out to him.

  “That can’t be good,” Matt said. “He doesn’t like texting and only does it out of necessity. Wonder why he didn’t just call.”

  He glanced at them, then saw that the time stamps of the various messages were not all from the last few minutes, as the multiple ping-pings would have suggested. Instead, the first one, from Harris, went back almost an hour. That suggested the messages had been stacked up somewhere, unable to get through. He then looked at his signal-strength icon, and it was flickering from the weakest signal to the icon that read: NO SIGNAL.