The Vigilantes boh-10

by W. E. B Griffin

  A lot of memories for Linda to recall as she lay there. And, ever more the recluse, she spent more and more time in Wendy’s old bed. (They’d told Wendy that a new life required a new bed, and among the apartment-warming gifts they’d given her had been a queen-size bed-the one she’d been attacked on.)

  I don’t know who’s going to take care of Linda when I’m gone, but I do know she won’t want for anything.

  Especially with the house being paid off and the fat payout from my life insurance policy coming.

  Which is damn convenient, because she’s barely holding on to her teller job.

  And I’m feeling worse every day.

  As the coffee brewed, Will Curtis went down into the basement.

  Shortly after moving into the house, he’d begun converting the basement into a recreation room. It had a pair of soft, deep sofas that faced a monster flat-screen plasma TV. In the corner was a freestanding bar he’d built himself. And just about every nook and cranny was filled with Philadelphia Eagles memorabilia-he’d started the collection in his youth and later had help from Wendy, who’d grown into a genuine fan, too.

  And, in the corner of the rec room, his desk held a desktop computer.

  Every morning, by the time he’d finished checking his e-mail, the pot of coffee would have finished brewing. He’d then go up and pour a big cup to bring back down and drink while catching up on e-mails and then reading phillybulletin. com, the online edition of the Philadelphia Bulletin. Up until a couple years ago, he would go out to the front stoop and pick up the paper version that he’d subscribed to forever. But, as it had never arrived until at least six in the morning-and, on rainy days, arrived wet-he’d let the subscription lapse after getting in the habit of reading the news online.

  And not just news.

  Lately, he’d started following a new website, the name of which he really liked: CrimeFreePhilly. com. It had news articles, but also a lot of information about crime and criminals. And so, in the last month, it had become an indispensable tool for Curtis.

  Now, a cup of freshly brewed coffee in his left hand, he used his right hand to click onto CrimeFreePhilly.

  The morning’s lead headline was: THREE DEAD IN OLD CITY POLICE HUNT GUNMAN IN “POP-AND-DROP” MURDERS

  Three dead? had been Curtis’s first thought as he sipped from his coffee cup.

  Then: Pop-and-drop? That’s an interesting way to put it.

  He noticed that Michael J. O’Hara had written the news article. Curtis had seen the byline in the Bulletin for a long time, and he liked the articles the O’Hara guy wrote. But he hadn’t seen O’Hara’s name in some time, and he’d wondered if something had happened to the reporter. But now, here was his name appearing on this new website.

  Curtis read O’Hara’s news story. It was short, only six brief paragraphs stating the basic information that three men had been left dead in Old City at Lex Talionis. It didn’t list the victims’ names or how they’d been killed.

  And it mentioned absolutely nothing about the pop-and-drops at the police stations.

  Curtis saw that the article referenced both the reward offered by Lex Talionis and the speech made by Francis Fuller. Both references were underlined, meaning they were links to other pages with more information. When Curtis clicked on Francis Fuller, the page with the pop-and-drop article was replaced with a much longer piece on Fuller’s speech on the “evildoers,” written by someone named Dick Collier. He skimmed it, then went back and read it in its entirety.

  Then he went back and clicked on the underlined Lex Talionis, and the link took him to the page at LexTalionis. com announcing the ten-thousand-dollar-reward program for information leading to the arrest and conviction of an evildoer. He knew about the program, but he read the page anyway to see if there was anything new.

  There wasn’t, and Curtis again clicked back to O’Hara’s article on “Three Dead in Old City.”

  Where the hell did the third body come from?

  A coincidence? Oh, sure. Someone just happened to have one lying around, and dropped it off on Halloween!

  Is some asshole copying me?

  Except they’re not dumping bad guys at the police stations. Not that I know of, anyway. There haven’t been any stories about those, mine or anyone else’s.

  In deep thought, he drained his coffee cup. Then he slammed the cup on the desk.

  Some asshole has to be copying me!

  What does that mean?

  Well, for starters, it means more dead perverts.

  Not that I have a problem with that.

  But there’s gonna be cops on every corner looking for me and whoever else is dumping bodies.

  And that means, if I’m going to enforce the law of talion in whatever time I have left, I’m going to need to do something different.

  [TWO]

  Will Curtis had his balled fist inside the iron burglar bars and was again banging on the filthy metal door.

  “FedEx delivery!”

  Now he could hear footsteps inside. They were moving toward the door.

  Then came the sound of a chain rattling against the back side of the door, then a deadbolt unlocking, then the doorknob turning.

  The door cracked open, just barely.

  Judging by the sliver of a gaunt face that Curtis saw through the crack, it was a woman old enough to be Kendrik Mays’s mother. She stared at him with only her left eye, and she looked absolutely awful.

  Well, what the hell did you expect to find here? Miss America?

  Curtis held up the envelope so she could see the bill of lading.

  “Got an express delivery for a Kendrik Mays.”

  The lone visible eyeball darted between Curtis and the envelope.

  “Ain’t today Sunday?” she asked.

  “Look, I don’t like working weekends any more than the next guy.”

  She nodded as she considered his answer.

  After a moment, the woman said with a shaky voice, “He down at his cousin’s. Don’t know when he come back. You leave it with me.”

  She pulled the door open wider to where the chain became taut and stuck out a badly bruised hand, fingers clawing for the envelope.

  Now Curtis could see more of the woman. The entire right side of her face, including all around the right eye, was deeply bruised. She stood, her feet bare, at maybe five-two. She was clearly malnourished, and couldn’t weigh a hundred pounds. Torn and dirty black jeans and a ratty T-shirt hung on her.

  Curtis, trying to get over his initial shock, pulled back the envelope.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but it’s gotta be signed for by the person it’s addressed to.”

  She squinted her sunken eyes and looked harder at the envelope. “Who it from?”

  Will Curtis turned over the envelope, pretending to read from the bill of lading. “Says the U.S. Treasury in Washington.”

  “Treasury? You sure you got the right address?”

  He read it off the envelope, then said, “Kendrik Mays, right?”

  She said, “Think that may be a check?”

  In a tone he hoped showed he was uninterested, he replied: “Yeah, that’d be my guess. Pension check, IRS refund, maybe some of that stimulus money the government’s been giving away. That’d be a good reason they want it delivered to the right person.”

  Will Curtis looked her in the eyes and could see she was considering her options.

  She said, “I sign for it. Kendrik my boy. I see he gets it.”

  Curtis shook his head. “Sorry, ma’am. I’m just a delivery guy. And I got to follow rules. I guess I’ll come back-”

  She slammed the door shut in his face.

  What the hell? he thought.

  Then he could hear the chain clanking against the inside. The door swung all the way open.

  “Hurry up,” she said shakily. “Maybe he got money, he don’t beat me no more. Maybe he move out for good.”

  Curtis looked around the inside of the house. It was a shambles.
The only furniture was a threadbare sofa with torn cushions and two white plastic patio chairs.

  “You know that’s not right. No one should beat you.”

  She said, “I knows. I do. But he don’t mean to. It’s drugs. They make him mean. Different, you know?”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t know. I can’t begin to understand it. Where is he?”

  She pointed to the floor, indicating the basement, and started to cry. “He was such a sweet little boy. The street turned him bad…”

  “That, I know.”

  “What?”

  He held up the envelope, then grabbed the tab at the top, peeling it open. He reached in and pulled out a sheet. It was a Wanted poster from the listing of Megan’s Law fugitives at CrimeFreePhilly. com, one he’d downloaded and printed in his basement.

  Next to a color mug shot of an angry-looking young black man with a full beard and dreadlocks was:

  Name (First, Middle, LAST):

  Kendrik LeShawn MAYS

  Description:

  Black Male, 5'9", 200 lbs.

  Date of Birth:

  10/19/1988

  Last Known Address:

  2620 Wilder Street

  City, State, ZIP:

  Philadelphia, PA 19147

  Convicted of:

  3123 Involuntary deviantsexual intercourse amp; rapeof an unconscious orunaware person

  Phila Police Dept Case No.: 2008-18-063914

  Kendrik LeShawn Mays’s mother raised her eyebrows. But she did not appear at all surprised. Nor at all concerned that Will Curtis had her son’s Wanted sheet.

  She sighed.

  “Yeah,” she said, “that him. Guess he lied. Said he took care of that.”

  She looked at Curtis. “No check, huh?”

  More like a reality check, Curtis thought.

  He shook his head.

  “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 saw 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.”