The Vigilantes Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  ALSO BY W.E.B. GRIFFIN

  HONOR BOUND

  BOOK I: HONOR BOUND

  BOOK II: BLOOD AND HONOR

  BOOK III: SECRET HONOR

  BOOK IV: DEATH AND HONOR

  (and William E. Butterworth IV)

  BOOK V: THE HONOR OF SPIES (and William E. Butter worth IV)

  BROTHERHOOD OF WAR

  BOOK I: THE LIEUTENANTS

  BOOK II: THE CAPTAINS

  BOOK III: THE MAJORS

  BOOK IV: THE COLONELS

  BOOK V: THE BERETS

  BOOK VI: THE GENERALS

  BOOK VII: THE NEW BREED

  BOOK VIII: THE AVIATORS

  BOOK IX: SPECIAL OPS

  THE CORPS

  BOOK I: SEMPER FI

  BOOK II: CALL TO ARMS

  BOOK III: COUNTERATTACK

  BOOK IV: BATTLEGROUND

  BOOK V: LINE OF FIRE

  BOOK VI: CLOSE COMBAT

  BOOK VII: BEHIND THE LINES

  BOOK VIII: IN DANGER’S PATH

  BOOK IX: UNDER FIRE

  BOOK X: RETREAT, HELL!

  BADGE OF HONOR

  BOOK I: MEN IN BLUE

  BOOK II: SPECIAL OPERATIONS

  BOOK III: THE VICTIM

  BOOK IV: THE WITNESS

  BOOK V: THE ASSASSIN

  BOOK VI: THE MURDERERS

  BOOK VII: THE INVESTIGATORS

  BOOK VIII: FINAL JUSTICE

  BOOK IX: THE TRAFFICKERS (and William E. Butterworth IV)

  MEN AT WAR

  BOOK I: THE LAST HEROES

  BOOK II: THE SECRET WARRIORS

  BOOK III: THE SOLDIER SPIES

  BOOK IV: THE FIGHTING AGENTS

  BOOK V: THE SABOTEURS (and William E. Butterworth IV)

  BOOK VI: THE DOUBLE AGENTS (and William E. Butterworth IV)

  PRESIDENTIAL AGENT

  BOOK I: BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT

  BOOK II: THE HOSTAGE

  BOOK III: THE HUNTERS

  BOOK IV: THE SHOOTERS

  BOOK V: BLACK OPS

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin

  Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL,

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2010 by William E. Butterworth IV

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or

  electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted

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  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Griffin, W.E.B.

  The vigilantes / W.E.B. Griffin and William E. Butterworth IV.

  p. cm.—(Badge of Honor ; v. 10)

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18794-4

  1. Payne, Matt (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Police—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—Fiction.

  3. Vigilantes—Fiction. 4. Philadelphia (Pa.)—Fiction. I. Butterworth, William E.

  (William Edmund). II. Title.

  PS3557.R489137V

  813’.54—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the authors have made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the authors assume any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  IN FOND MEMORY OF

  SERGEANT ZEBULON V. CASEY

  Internal Affairs Division

  Police Department, the City of Philadelphia, Retired

  There came a time when there were assignments that had to be done right, and they would seek Zeb out. These assignments included police shootings, civil-rights violations, and he tracked down fugitives all over the country. He was not your average cop. He was very, very professional.

  —HOWARD LEBOFSKY

  Deputy Solicitor of Philadelphia

  I

  [ONE]

  1834 Callowhill Street Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Saturday, October 31, 7:30 P.M.

  Will Curtis, a frail fifty-four-year-old, was sitting slumped against the driver’s door of his rusty Chevrolet Malibu when the thoughts suddenly hit again, causing him to wince and grunt. He quickly pulled his right hand from the .45 GAP Glock Model 37 semiautomatic pistol beside him on the seat, stabbed at the dash to turn off the radio, then smacked at the brim of his grease-smeared red-and-blue FedEx cap, knocking it from his head. With the fingers of both hands, he began rubbing his sweaty temples.

  Goddamn these flashbacks! he thought.

  The fingertips pressed harder and deeper in a futile attempt to make the mental images vanish.

  Damn them all to hell!

  Only six months earlier, Curtis had been what he’d thought of as bulky, standing at five-eleven and weighing two-ten. But now he had withered to a sickly one-sixty. His jeans, T-shirt, and denim jacket were ill-fitting, hanging on him so loosely they looked as if they belonged to someone far bigger. His close-cropped silver hair was damn near disappearing, and his formerly warm gray eyes were becoming more and more hollowed and distant in his slight if somewhat hard face.

  Curtis felt he was fast becoming a miserable shell of the man he’d been. He had gone from fearing nothing and no one to being scared shitless to, now, just not giving a good goddamn anymore.

  He wasn’t sure what was most responsible for that—the constant stress from the mental anguish that caused the flashbacks, or the aftereffects of the intense chemotherapy treatments to slow the aggressive cancer they’d first found in his prostate.

  Probably both.

  Easily one or the other—especially that fucking chemo that makes me shit my shorts like some sorry bedridden invalid—but probably both.

  The flashback scenes torturing Will Curtis were of the brutal sexual assault of his only child, Wendy. After leaving a pub late on the night of Saint Patrick’s Day almost eighteen months ago, his beautiful, bubbly, twenty-four-year-old daughter had been attacked in her apartment.

  She was just two years out of college!


  Just beginning to enjoy a full life!

  Triggered by the slightest of things—for example, hearing a song she liked, which had just happened as he sat listening to the radio in the Malibu, or driving past Geno’s and smelling her favorite cheesesteaks—the flashbacks would suddenly hammer him. They were grotesquely lit and viciously vivid, showing the attack in her bedroom again and again from damn near every possible angle.

  And they haunted him all the more because he hadn’t actually witnessed the attack—rather, his imagination ran with possibilities of what had happened to her.

  And what had happened to her was what the legal system termed “involuntary deviant sexual intercourse.”

  “Involuntary”? he thought, putting his hand back on the pistol.

  Fucking-A it was involuntary!

  Which of course meant rape. There’d been absolutely no question of that. The exam given by the doctors at Hahnemann University Hospital—not a dozen blocks from where he now sat parked, waiting—had determined unequivocally that that had happened. And not only vaginally, which was without doubt bad enough to have happened to his baby girl, but also what was termed in the legalese as “sexual intercourse per os and per anus.”

  The pervert drugged her so she passed out, then abused her body—even gave her the goddamned clap!

  The revelation of all that had driven the normally levelheaded Curtis to a point of desperation he’d never believed possible.

  And—boom!—his mind hammered with the garish image of the bastard on top of Wendy in her bed.

  “Dammit!” Will Curtis said as he sat up in the dark and slammed the pistol against the dashboard.

  His left hand rubbed his temples more vigorously. He shook his head.

  What kind of miserable fucking animal does that?

  Who takes advantage of an innocent girl like that?

  He glanced out the window and looked across Callowhill Street at the office with the frosted plate-glass window. More or less centered on the window—which had a crack that ran jagged across its upper-right corner—were faded black vinyl peel-and-stick letters that spelled out LAW OFFICE OF DANIEL O. GARTNER, ESQ.

  And I’ll never understand why that bastard defends perverts.

  Just for a lousy dollar?

  But that assistant district attorney had said, “Only a matter of time before Gartner gets busted himself and goes down just like one of his clients.”

  So, yeah, some kind of payout, or payoff, that’s for sure, because there’s no shortage of scumbag lawyers like him.

  He squeezed the Glock’s grip.

  That DA was close to right. Gartner may never have got busted, but he is about to go down. . . .

  Before their world went to hell, Will Curtis and his wife, Linda, were more or less comfortably middle class. Will had driven package-delivery trucks all his career, first for the U.S. Postal Service, the last eleven years for FedEx, and Linda was a teller at First National Bank. Their idea of an exciting weekend night usually meant taking a BYOB of cheap California red wine to the $9.99 all-you-can-eat pasta and salad at Luigi’s Little Italy, around the corner from their row house of twenty years on Mount Pleasant Avenue in Philly’s West Mount Airy section.

  They had known little about what went on in the nightclubs of Philadelphia, and damn sure absolutely nothing about any illegal activities. That was, until the toxicology tests taken on Wendy Curtis at Hahnemann had come back and Will and his wife had gotten an immediate and in-depth education into what the doctors called club drugs—Rohypnol (known on the street as “roofies” or “Mind Erasers”), Ketamin (“K-Hole,” “Special K”), and GHB.

  Wendy’s blood had tested positive for far more than a trace of GHB, which was shorthand for gamma hydroxybutyric, and called the “date-rape drug” and “easy lay,” among other street names. It was a powerful pharmaceutical widely prescribed as a sleep aid and a local anesthetic. The doctors told Will and Linda that when consumed with alcohol, GHB became even more powerful. It came in the form of a quick-dissolving pill, liquid, or powder, and was odorless and colorless, sometimes with a slightly salty taste. Commonly it was slipped into the drink of a young woman at some bar—though the illicit drug was no stranger among males in the homosexual community—or even at her apartment if she made the mistake of letting a date “come up for a drink, just one only.”

  And just one was all it took.

  Within fifteen minutes of entering the bloodstream, GHB could leave the victim completely powerless for up to four hours, during which time they had no conscious knowledge of what was happening to them. In most cases, for better or worse, it also left them afterward with no memory of what had been done to them.

  Almost, the doctors explained, as if they’d had a very vague, very tragic dream.

  Which, Will had tried to console himself and his wife, explained why Wendy would not talk about the attack.

  She couldn’t remember.

  Or maybe—probably?—didn’t want to. . . .

  But that doctor’s exam sure as hell found the physical damage.

  And that’s what really put her momma over the edge, screaming hysterically at the news of her baby girl hurt so badly.

  Not even the damned priest could talk to her, calm her down. . . .

  And then this scumbag lawyer turned it all the worse. Getting the case tossed on a technicality with the rape-kit evidence—a goddamn broken “chain of custody” in the property room.

  The pervert was guilty as hell . . . then he just walked.

  Sonofabitch!

  Tonight made the third time in a week that Will Curtis had been parked in the 1800 block of Callowhill Street. Each time he’d been in a different car and in a different spot, but all with a clear view of LAW OFFICE OF DANIEL O. GARTNER, ESQ.

  Callowhill was two blocks north of the Vine Street Expressway. To the south of Vine spread the great wealth of modern skyscrapers and well-preserved historic buildings that was the bustling Center City. Here, however, on this block of Callowhill, the majority of addresses were deserted. Signs in the dirty vacant windows of the decaying strips of storefronts—mostly three-story offices sharing a common brick façade—announced to the occasional passersby that they were for sale or lease.

  Of the few that were occupied, not one was particularly noteworthy. Five addresses to the right of Gartner’s law office, almost up to North Nineteenth Street, stood a soul food restaurant and bar—Curtis thought of it as “that soulless restaurant,” complete with vagrants loitering nearby—and a couple addresses to his left were two other low-rent law offices, one of which had lettering on its window stating that the firm offered immigration-law services. And finally, across the street, next to a large grassy lot surrounded by chain-link fencing, was a struggling establishment named Tattoo U.

  That, Curtis had thought with a morbid chuckle, was probably where Gartner’s clients went to acquire “I’m a Loser Gangbanger” body art after Gartner, their loser of a lawyer, had told them their turn-in date to report to jail.

  Other than that, there was damn near nothing here.

  And that served his purpose tonight just fine.

  It had been a little more than three hours since Will Curtis had pulled the Chevy sedan into the parallel parking space across the street from Gartner’s office. In that time, he’d come to feel comfortable that the patterns he had noted on his previous two nights of surveillance were similar to what was playing out tonight.

  First, most workers in the nearby offices had headed for home—or probably a corner bar, he’d thought—the great rush of them at the stroke of five o’clock. There were even a few who’d worn Halloween outfits. If black tights and cat whiskers and a headband with pointy furry ears counted as a costume.

  Then, for the next hour, out came the stragglers. They disappeared one by one down the cracked sidewalk until, easily by six, Callowhill Street—not counting an occasional patron for the restaurant or the tattoo parlor—was more or less deserted.

  R
ight about seven-thirty, a woman left Gartner’s office, returning fifteen or so minutes later with some sort of fast food. Each night it was the same chunky woman, about age thirty and black and overweight but with a pleasant face. The first time she had carried two flat cardboard boxes with pies from the pizza joint on the corner of Callowhill and North Twenty-first Street. Tonight she’d gone a block up to Hamilton Street and come back with a couple of greasy white sacks that had Asian-looking lettering: TAKIE OUTIE TASTY CHINESE.

  The thought of smelling, let alone tasting, greasy egg rolls made Will’s stomach grumble. Not because he was hungry—he had almost no appetite these days—but because the chemotherapy treatments had made his gut easily upset.

  Even before they found the cancer, his prostate had caused him to have to take leaks far more often than he liked. Particularly because finding a pisser was not always easy, especially while driving a FedEx truck on its delivery route schedule. He couldn’t keep stopping continuously—his boss would wonder why he was constantly late—so in Center City he’d swung by Goldberg’s Army-Navy on Chestnut Street and bought a couple of surplus gallon canteens. The plastic containers weren’t the most sanitary solution, but they worked. He could do his business while seated, then later simply crack open the door and dump out the canteen onto the street.

  And that had damn sure come in handy the nights he watched the law office.

  Now, for the third time tonight, Will Curtis picked up the canteen, unscrewed its top, unzipped the fly of his blue jeans, and relieved himself into the half-full container. Then he screwed the top back on tightly and dropped the canteen to the floorboard.

  And heaved a huge sigh of relief.

  Ten minutes later, Curtis saw the battered heavy metal door of Gartner’s office swing open. The doorway opening filled with a harsh white glow of fluorescent light.

  He checked his well-worn gold-toned Seiko wristwatch.