The Vigilantes

by W. E. B. Griffin

  As Payne approached, O’Hara said, “What the hell took you so long?”

  Discretion being the better part of valor, I believe I’ll dodge that one.

  “I had to walk her dog,” Matt said.

  “Oh?” O’Hara smiled. As he motioned suggestively with his right hand, the middle finger rubbing the top of the index finger, he said, “Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

  Harris chuckled.

  “Screw you, Mickey,” Payne said, but he smiled. He changed the subject. “Nice shirt. But wrong holiday.”

  “It’s the closest to a costume I’ve got,” Mickey said. “But don’t be so damned sure of yourself, Matty.”

  “What do you mean?” Payne asked.

  Tony Harris had a bottle of Hops Haus lager beer to his lips, about to sip, when he nodded and said, “He’s already gotten six kisses, including two long ones from an incredibly cute, quote, angel, unquote, in all white. She rubbed Mickey’s head and said he was her lucky charm.”

  Matt laughed, and the bartender walked up and slid two glasses on the bar before him, one with ice cubes in a clear liquid and one with just a dark liquid, both half-filled.

  “First round tonight’s on me,” said the bartender, John Sullivan—a hefty forty-year-old, second-generation Irish-American with an ample belly, friendly bright eyes, and a full white beard. “Happy Halloween, Matt.”

  “I guess I should’ve said ‘Trick or treat’ to earn my single-malt, huh?” Payne replied, reaching for the glass that he knew held the ice water. He poured it into the glass that contained the dark brown liquor, mixing it fifty-fifty. “Thanks, John.”

  The bartender grinned as Payne held up his drink and said, “Cheers, gents,” clinked the glasses and bottle of John the bartender, Tony, and Mickey, then took a healthy sip.

  He turned to looked at Harris. “So tell me what the hell that was all about tonight in Old City.”

  Harris glanced at Mickey O’Hara. “You want to start?”

  O’Hara gestured grandly, After you.

  Harris shrugged, then nodded and said, “All off the record, right?”

  O’Hara sighed. “You know you’ll see what I put together before I post it online.”

  From the look on Tony Harris’s face, it was evident that he was genuinely embarrassed for the slip of tongue. “Sorry, Mickey. Old habits and all.”

  [FOUR]

  As a rule, cops didn’t much like reporters, and, accordingly, didn’t share with them more than they absolutely had to—and a good deal of the time not even that.

  Those who made up the Thin Blue Line were a guarded group. Outsiders simply didn’t understand what it was that they did, what their brotherhood meant, and apparently no amount of education changed that.

  You either were a cop—and understood—or you weren’t.

  Mickey O’Hara wasn’t a cop. “I couldn’t get on with the police department,” he joked with his cop friends, “because I knew both of my parents and knew that they were married.”

  But—as, invariably, rules had exceptions—O’Hara did indeed understand.

  He had long ago earned the respect—and in cases like Matt Payne, the friendship—of many on the police department, including more than a few of the white shirts, some of whom even wore stars on their uniforms.

  It was said of Mickey O’Hara that he knew more people on the police force than most of the cops did themselves, and certainly more cops recognized him than could identify in a crowd the top cop himself, Police Commissioner Ralph J. Mariana.

  O’Hara’s history with the police was almost, but not quite, as long as his history with the Bulletin. He’d begun with a paper route at age twelve, throwing the afternoon edition from his bike at the stoops of West Philadelphia row houses every day after school for four years.

  By the time he turned sixteen, a series of events had served to dramatically change his career in newspapers.

  The series was triggered by his being expelled from West Catholic High School.

  Monsignor Dooley had made it clear that gambling would not be tolerated. When he found out that the O’Hara boy had illegal numbers slips that could be traced back to Francesco “Frankie the Gut” Guttermo, and that Mickey would not rat out his co-conspirator—no matter how immoral the Monsignor declared it all to be—the Monsignor said that left him with no choice but to throw Mickey out of school.

  Before being caught by the Monsignor and being shown the door, Mickey had heard that the Bulletin had a copyboy position open. He’d never had the time to pursue it—until now. And now he really wanted it, because it offered far more money than throwing papers from a bike, and it was indoor work, so no more riding in the rain or racing away from the snapping maws of those goddamn rabid street dogs.

  Mickey actually got the position, but with a ninety-day probation period.

  He took his new job seriously, probation or not. And that did not go unnoticed.

  After his probation period expired, he came to be mentored by the ink-stained assistant city desk editor, who dumped on Mickey more and more of the research assignments—drudge work that no one else wanted to do. Before Mickey knew it, the research he was turning in was becoming actual articles, albeit short ones, printed under the credit “Staff Roundup.”

  Then, late one Friday afternoon—he clearly remembered it as if it had happened yesterday, not nearly two decades earlier—he’d been summoned to the managing editor’s office. The office had a huge glass window overlooking the entire newsroom, and as Mickey approached he saw that the managing editor was looking at a copy of that afternoon’s front page. The assistant city desk editor was in there, too, looking his usual deeply introspective self.

  Mickey O’Hara, days shy of turning eighteen, was convinced that this was the end of his newspaper days. Clearly, his mentor had been caught abusing his official duties by helping develop the questionable skills of a lowly copyboy.

  And now said copyboy was about to lose his job and be sent back to the streets.

  O’Hara figured that if he was lucky they might let him pedal around town slinging papers at stoops again.

  But, of course, that had not happened.

  After an initial awkward exchange of pleasantries, the managing editor had tossed the afternoon paper that he was holding to Mickey. Mickey had glanced at it, recognized the headline he’d written, then under that seen his name—his byline there on the front page.

  As Mickey O’Hara, speechless, looked between the two men, the managing editor said, “Congratulations, Mickey. Nice work. This is usually the part of the interview process when I ask, ‘When can you start?’ but it would appear that you already have.”

  O’Hara rose rapidly in the hierarchy of the Bulletin city room, eventually writing “Follow the Money,” the hard-hitting series of articles on graft and gross incompetence in the city’s Child Protective Services. It was the series that won him a Pulitzer Prize for public service.

  O’Hara had thought that he was on top of the world, particularly considering how far he’d come from the day Monsignor Dooley had shown him the door. He was being paid, he’d thought, damned decently for something he enjoyed doing. And, he believed, the stories that helped better the lot of kids trapped in the hell that was CPS was alone worth it all.

  But then his childhood buddy, Casimir Bolinski, showed up in town and told him he was a fool. His exact words: “Face it, Mickey, those bastards are screwing you.”

  “Those bastards” being the Bulletin’s management.

  O’Hara was told that they were not paying him his due. Mickey listened to his buddy, especially when Bolinski offered to represent him as a small token of appreciation—“I can never adequately repay you”—for taking the fall at West Catholic High.

  “If you’d ratted me out to Dooley the Drooler as your fellow numbers runner,” Casimir said, “I’d have been out on my ass, too. There’d have been no ‘The Bull’ Bolinski, no all-American trophy, no scholarship to Notre Dame, no caree
r with the Green Bay Packers. And without the cushion from the Packers, both the pay and off-season time, I’d probably never have considered law school, and certainly not become a sports agent after retirement.”

  And as an agent, The Bull proved every bit as effective off the field as he’d been on it.

  Players liked The Bull personally, but the athletes really liked what he could do for them financially. And The Bull wound up making more money by repping the sports world’s top players—football, basketball, golf, et cetera—than he had earned actually playing the game.

  Negotiating Mickey O’Hara’s new contract with the Bulletin had been no challenge compared to the high-pressure worlds of sports and product endorsements.

  And as happy as O’Hara had been with his new benefits—from more pay and holiday time to a new lease car every year—The Bull showed his brilliance by including an exit clause in the contract. It was brilliant because the Bulletin signed off on it, and because everyone believed Mickey, happy with the contract terms, would write for the paper forever.

  Everyone including Mickey.

  But then came the newsroom brawl, in which Mickey punched the city editor. Roscoe G. Kennedy was no great fan of O’Hara—though he did grudgingly admit that Mickey could be a helluva writer despite not having attended the glorified University of Missouri School of Journalism, as Kennedy had. And there was no question that Kennedy resented the money and perks that the unschooled O’Hara enjoyed thanks to his buddy, The Bull, squeezing the newspaper management.

  Kennedy thought that Mickey O’Hara had become a prima donna in his expensively furnished office, someone who had the audacity to demand more space in the newspaper for his articles and photographs than the boss—J-school grad Kennedy—felt he deserved.

  O’Hara, who’d been at the Italian restaurant La Famiglia the night that Matt Payne put down the two robbers who’d beaten up a couple in the parking lot, had written a long article for Page 1A. He’d also delivered the photograph he’d taken of Payne in his tuxedo standing over one robber lying on the ground. Payne had his cell phone in his left hand and his Colt .45 Officer’s Model in his right.

  What had set Mickey O’Hara off—and it happened in the presence of The Bull and his wife, Antoinette Bolinski—was Kennedy wanting to put a smart-ass headline on the photograph: MAIN LINE WYATT EARP 2, BAD GUYS O IN SHOOT-OUT AT THE LA FAMIGLIA CORRAL. Kennedy justified it by saying that Payne looked like a goddamn gunslinger who obviously liked shooting people.

  O’Hara put up his dukes, then dodged Kennedy’s swinging fists, putting him down with a left punch to the nose followed by a right jab to the abdomen. Casimir J. Bolinski, Esq., then grabbed his client and—with Kennedy disparaging O’Hara before the entire newsroom staff, then declaring him fired—dragged him out of the city room, never to return.

  The Bull that day pulled out O’Hara’s contract—the signatures barely dry—and easily negotiated with the Bulletin management a thirty-day cooling-off period with pay for Mickey, plus public apologies from Kennedy for the city editor’s treatment of a Pulitzer Prize winner before newsroom colleagues.

  O’Hara decided to use his downtime to research a book on Fort Festung—a despicable shit from Philly who had been found guilty of murdering his girlfriend and stuffing her body in a steamer trunk, where she’d been found mummified.

  Mickey convinced Matt to accompany him to France in hopes of finding the fugitive—if only for a current photograph for the book.

  And, toward the end of their time in France, they finally tracked down the arrogant Festung, long-haired and goateed, living comfortably on wine and cheese with a new girlfriend in a French village.

  Mickey got his photograph—and it was of Philadelphia Police Department Sergeant Matthew M. Payne collaring the fugitive.

  And only weeks after their return to Philadelphia, Casimir J. Bolinski, Esq., ever diligent in delivering for his clients, presented Michael J. O’Hara with the contract for his new position as chief executive officer and publisher of CrimeFreePhilly.com.

  Mickey, after signing the contract in mid-September, called Matt’s cell and told Matt to meet him at Liberties Bar for some good news.

  As O’Hara slid in the booth across the table from Payne, he said, “You may kiss my ring, Matty, as I’m now a triple-dipper. Say, ‘Congrats, Mick.’”

  Matt looked at the blue T-shirt Mickey wore. In white, it bore a representation of a pair of dangling handcuffs and lettering that read MAKE HIS DAY: KISS A COP AT CRIMEFREEPHILLY.COM.

  “Okay, congrats. But what the hell is a triple-dipper? And what the hell’s up with that shirt?”

  Mickey’s animated face lit up and he said: “Two weeks ago, The Bull told the Bulletin’s management that his client—me—was unhappy with the tepid apology, et cetera, of their city editor, and that at the expiration of the thirty-day cooling-off period, I planned immediately to execute the exit clause of my employment contract. That happened the following day, and triggered a lump payment equal to a month’s pay for every year that I’d been employed by the newspaper, dating back to when I threw the rag from my bike in West Philly. So that’s one deep dip into the moneymaking machine. And I just got the check, less The Bull’s five percent commission, for the publisher’s acceptance of my book on Fort Festung. That check makes for a double-dip.”

  “And the third?”

  He pointed to his shirt and said, “I’m now running CrimeFreePhilly! I have a five-year contract, renewable annually, which means every year I know if I have another five to go. If I ever get canned, I walk with the equivalent of four years’ pay. And I have stock options that vest if certain goals are accomplished, which gives me both incentive and a nice nest egg on top of what I walked away with from the Bulletin. Thus making me a triple-dipper.”

  “Impressive. But aren’t you going to miss newspapers?”

  Mickey shook his head. “Hell no, Matty. Forget that. Haven’t you been paying attention? Newspapers are deader than a double-crossing gangbanger in South Philly. Just like the TV nightly news killed afternoon papers, there’s this thing now called the World Wide Web that’s killing all newspapers. You really should try to keep up.”

  Payne flashed him the middle finger of his right hand, then changed to his index finger and pointed at the T-shirt.

  “I’ve heard about that but never looked it up.”

  “You should. Here’s the deal. It’s basically brand new. It was originally quietly funded by a philanthropist, a good citizen who’s simply fed up with Philly sinking in a cesspool of crime. The idea is pretty damned simple: support the good guys and get rid of the bad guys.”

  “Maybe too simple, Mick. There’s already a lot of money being thrown at crime. And speaking of a lot of money, I didn’t think newsy websites made money.”

  “Most don’t. Most are losing money. But profit isn’t the point. Cleaning up the city is. People are fucking fed up—”

  “Amen to that,” Payne interrupted. “Count me among the disenchanted.”

  Mick went on: “—and when The Bull heard about it, he put money in. A number of his clients did, too, some of them guys who broke out of the ghetto and want to help those still stuck there. Even though CrimeFreePhilly-dot-com doesn’t have to make money, I think it will. There’s also the sweetheart deal it has with KeyCom.”

  “The cable-TV-slash-Internet-slash-phone conglomerate based here? That’s Five-Eff’s! Which means Francis Fulton is your secret moneyman?”

  O’Hara shrugged. “Some questions don’t need to be asked. All I know is I have both the funding and the moral backing of some heavy hitters to help this city. No pun intended concerning The Bull’s clients.”

  He paused, then his infectious energy kicked in: “Get this, Matty, I can run live, breaking news on CrimeFreePhilly, and then KeyCom’s massive computer servers send it—for free—out to any TV, computer, and even better, to any cell phone. Worldwide! I could never do anything like that at the Bulletin, where I fought for inches of
copy. Anyway, with criminals infesting every city, we plan eventually to roll out a CrimeFree-dot-com everywhere—CrimeFreeNYC, CrimeFreeLA, et cetera, et cetera. All overseen by yours truly. Why would I ever work at a newspaper again?”

  Payne nodded, then said, “You think it’ll make a difference? I’m beginning to think it might be time to get off this sinking ship of a city.”

  O’Hara grinned widely. “Oh, yeah, Matty. It’s already working. People love those cops-and-robbers TV shows. You know, like Most Wanted in America, Homicide 9-1-1. We’re taking that a step—steps—further. We’re a one-stop shop for fans of those kinds of shows, plus have news articles on crime and crime prevention and profiles of the bad guys. We list who’s offering rewards for which criminals and for how much, and show how to search databases for criminals and submit tips on where they might be—new ones, old ones, fugitives like violators of Megan’s Law—and on and on.”

  Megan’s Law was the catchall name for any number of federal and state statutes concerning sexual predators. It was named after a seven-year-old New Jersey girl who had been abducted by a neighbor right after the pervert had gotten out of the slam where he’d been serving time for sex crimes. He raped and killed the little girl.

  Outraged citizens demanded that they had the right to know when dangerous people moved into their neighborhoods, leading to the passage of sex offender registry laws, first in Jersey, then across the nation.

  Payne said, “Aren’t you worried that that’s essentially encouraging people to take the law into their own hands, like Fuller’s Lex Talionis is doing? Not that I’m surprised, considering your secret benefactor.”

  “Uh-uh,” Mickey quickly said, shaking his head vigorously, making the red curls bounce like tiny coiled springs. “In that area, we’re simply a clearinghouse of sorts for a lot of things that are already available all over on the Internet. The key to any good source of information, Matt, is making it easy on the person looking for that information, whether it’s where to get the cheapest ground sirloin or how to finger a bad guy. You ever hear of a company called Google?”