The Vigilantes boh-10 Page 5

  Payne’s eyes turned in the direction of the sound, to the bedside table where he’d left his cell phone. It was set to SILENT/VIBRATE. Its color screen was now casting a pulsing bluish-green glow.

  Amanda playfully bit his lower lip and held it as she mumbled, “Don’t you dare get…”

  Matt, still in her grips, carefully reached for the phone, then held it more or less behind Amanda’s head so he could clearly see its screen.

  She bit harder.

  Payne grunted as he read the text message on-screen:

  – BLOCKED NUMBER -

  YO, MATTY. HOPE I’M INTERRUPTING SOMETHING REALLY GOOD AT THIS HOUR! GOT ANOTHER POP-N-DROP AN HOUR AGO. TWO ACTUALLY. COULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED TO NICER GUYS. YOU KNOW ONE. THE BLACK BUDDHA SAID TO GIVE YOU A HEADS-UP. CLICK ON FOX29 NEWS. -TH

  Matt sighed, then turned his eyes to meet Amanda’s and raised his hands up, palms out.

  “I surrender,” he muttered as best he could.

  She let loose his lip and slipped back between the sheets.

  Her tone sounding disappointed, Amanda said, “I sure hope that’s not what I’m afraid it is. Especially at this hour. Please tell me it’s not work.”

  He held the phone out for her to read its screen.

  As she did, Matt thought, Someone I know?

  What the hell does that mean?

  “TH” was Tony Harris-age thirty-eight, slight of build and starting to bald-who was widely regarded as a really good guy and a really good Homicide detective. He had worked closely with Matt and Sergeant Jim Byrth of the Texas Rangers last month when they’d tracked down Juan Paulo Delgado.

  And the Black Buddha was their boss, Lieutenant Jason Washington, head of the Homicide Unit. He was a great big bear of a man-six-foot-three and two hundred twenty-five pounds, with very dark skin. Washington, well-spoken, superbly tailored, and highly respected, did not consider the nickname unflattering. “I’m damn sure black, Matthew,” he said in his deep, sonorous voice. “And Buddha, the ‘enlightened one,’ surely is a wise man. I have no problem wearing that badge with pride.”

  “So,” Amanda said softly, “I guess since you’ve been working the pop-and-drops, we’re done for the evening?”

  Someone in the city was shooting fugitives. These particular ones were wanted on outstanding arrest warrants for crimes against women and children. He had not told Amanda that their crimes were sexual in nature.

  After “popping” a sex offender at point-blank range, the shooter then transported the body to the nearest police district headquarters, “dropping” it off in the parking lot with a copy of the perp’s Wanted information-a computer printout downloaded from one of various Internet websites listing fugitives-stapled to some part of his clothing.

  Thus, “pop-and-drop.”

  Not that anyone’s complaining that the scum of society is being swept from the streets for good, Payne had thought.

  But as Jason Washington said, “Murder’s murder, Matthew. And who knows what the shooter might escalate to next?”

  Matt Payne hadn’t figured out how in hell the shooter had been able to get so close to any of the district HQ buildings without being caught in the act of dumping a body. So far it had happened five times in about as many weeks, and the department had been able to keep the incidents quiet-which meant away from the news media-while the brass finally found someone who was available to take the cases and try to piece together who the hell the doer or doers might be. A lucky Sergeant Payne, stuck at his desk assignment, had been chosen.

  Matt turned, kissed Amanda on the forehead, and said, “Hold on, baby.”

  Matt reached back over to the side table and fished around in its drawer until he came up with a remote control. He thumbed the ON button and the sixty-inch flat-screen television mounted on the wall made a humming sound and its screen began to glow.

  He punched in from memory the channel of the local Fox station, and it was clear a live news report was being broadcast. In the bottom left-hand corner was confirmation: A small box alternately blinked the FOX29 logotype and the phrase “News Now, News You Can Use.” A white bar also ran diagonally over the left top corner of the image, and it flashed red text: “REPORTING LIVE at 11:21 P.M. from Old City.”

  As the red and blue emergency lights from the police vehicles flashed, the news camera panned down the narrow tree-lined street. On the red brick sidewalk were curious bystanders-Payne noticed more than a few in Halloween costumes-held back by a length of yellow crime-scene tape.

  Payne’s eyes went to the ticker of text scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen: BREAKING NEWS… TWO MEN FOUND BOUND AND SHOT DEAD… ONE IS A 25-YEAR-OLD WANTED ON AN OUTSTANDING BENCH WARRANT… ARREST WARRANT WAS FOR FAILURE TO APPEAR IN MUNICIPAL COURT ON TWO COUNTS OF INTENT TO DELIVER A CONTROLLED SUBSTANCE… THE OTHER DEAD MAN IS A CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYER, ABOUT AGE 50… BOTH BODIES DUMPED AT LEX TALIONIS OFFICES… POLICE WITHHOLDING NAMES PENDING NOTIFICATION OF FAMILIES OF THE DECEASED… BREAKING NEWS…

  Then the camera cut away from the shot of the sidewalk and the TV screen suddenly filled with an awkwardly tight shot. It showed the jowly face of an almost bald man wearing a dark rumpled suit coat and a wrinkled white shirt with no necktie. The emergency lights bathed him in pulses of red and blue.

  “Oh, hell!” Matt said. “That’s a bit more of good ole Five-Eff than I’d care to see.”

  Then, in a jerky motion, the camera lens pulled back.

  Amanda looked at the TV screen. She recognized the man, who now was shown head-to-toe in front of a nice but old brick building. He was in his mid-forties, short and stout with a small defined gut. He had a round face and wore, perched at the end of his bulbous nose, tiny round reading eyeglasses.

  He stood addressing a small crowd of news media types. Reporters held microphones to the portly man’s face, almost touching his big nose, as well as camera lenses, both still and video.

  “‘Five-Eff ’?” she repeated. “I thought Frank Fuller was ‘Four-Eff.’”

  Payne turned to her and smiled. He said, “Fucking Frances Franklin Fuller the Fifth. That makes five.”

  [THREE]

  Matt Payne’s family had known Francis Fuller’s as long as Matt could remember. They had many connections, both social and professional, and while Payne did not actively dislike the man, he had on more than one occasion called him Five-Eff to his face-and that almost always had happened when Fuller was being a pompous ass.

  Payne otherwise addressed Fuller as “Francis,” knowing full well (and purposely ignoring) that Fuller preferred the more masculine “Frank.”

  Fuller boldly and shamelessly touted the fact that he traced his family lineage-and what he called its puritanical ways-back to Benjamin Franklin. Fuller fancied himself a devout Franklinite, mimicking his ancestor from his looks to his philosophical beliefs. Fuller regularly sprinkled his conversations with quotes from Poor Richard’s Almanac and other Ben Franklin sources. And like the multitalented Franklin, Francis Fuller was involved in all kinds of enterprises, private and public.

  Payne somewhat begrudgingly admired Fuller for having built on the wealth he’d been born into, because he himself had enjoyed being raised, as he called it, “comfortably”-though certainly not nearly on the level of the super-wealthy Fullers-and he’d seen many others piss away vast sums of money that they had done nothing to earn and, he believed, thus did not deserve.

  Fuller’s primary company-Richard Saunders Holdings, which he’d taken from the name Franklin had used to write Poor Richard’s Almanac-had many entities. There was KeyCom, the Fortune 500 nationwide telecommunications corporation that he’d built city by city by buying up local community cable television providers. And KeyCargo Import-Exports, which was one of the largest leasers of warehouse space at the Port of Philadelphia, which was easily visible from another of Fuller’s holdings-the Hops Haus Tower-which fell under his KeyProperties.

  With so much financial wealth came a great deal of influence, and Fr
ancis Fuller had political connections from Washington, D.C., to Harrisburg to Philly’s City Hall and police department. He was more or less happy to share with all both his wealth and his opinions, though sometimes far more of the latter than the former. And in terms of the latter, Fuller was a devout believer in the Bible’s an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

  And so Francis Fuller funded and personally promoted a nonprofit organization he called Lex Talionis, from the Latin phrase for the “law of talion,” which more or less translated as “an eye for an eye”-which, of course, was the meting out of punishments that matched the crimes. The logotype of Lex Talionis had the “o” as a stylized eyeball.

  The offices for Lex Talionis took up half of the first floor of a five-story brick building on the tree-lined corner of North Third and Arch Streets. Fuller said he felt the location on Arch, in the historic section of Old City, with the Delaware River just blocks to the east and the Liberty Bell on display just blocks to the west, was more appropriate than any shiny marble-and-glass high-rise office building.

  Francis Franklin Fuller V’s belief in the fundamental philosophy of Lex Talionis was strong and unwavering, and there was a good reason for it: Tragedy had struck him personally.

  Five years earlier, his wife and their eight-year-old daughter had been driving home in the early evening of a rainy Saturday, when she had accidentally exited just shy of the Vine Street Expressway she’d been aiming for.

  My dearest could get lost in a closet, Fuller later lamented, and that GPS street map in the dash of her Benz may as well have been a video game for all she knew how to operate it.

  After getting off the expressway at Spring Garden Street, then driving east and crossing over the Schuylkill Expressway, she’d somehow, maybe because the rain was disorienting, made a wrong turn onto Pennsylvania Avenue. Shortly thereafter she’d found herself in the North Philadelphia West area, driving down the darkened streets of struggling and failing neighborhoods.

  What had happened next was a matter of great speculation. It could have been because of the luxury convertible automobile she was driving. Or it could simply have been an unfortunate case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  According to two eyewitness statements, as the Mercedes waited for a traffic light to turn green, two vehicles flew up to the intersection and squealed to a stop alongside. The second car actually went up over the curb, striking a garbage can and newspaper dispenser box, knocking them over.

  Angry words were exchanged between the occupants of the two cars-and suddenly a torrent of gunfire filled the air.

  Then the first vehicle ran the red light, followed by the second, both racing off into the night.

  The Fullers’ Mercedes-Benz did not move for a couple of minutes, even as the traffic light cycled to green and back to red. Then the car began to roll into the intersection, running the red traffic light and getting struck by an old pickup truck.

  The truck did not kill them, although it struck the Mercedes-Benz hard enough to trigger its air bags. The Medical Examiner’s Office determined that both mother and daughter had died when struck by multiple hits of single-aught buckshot from a shotgun-or shotguns. The windows of the Mercedes, and certainly the soft fabric of the convertible top, were no match for the fusillade of lead balls.

  The shooters were never caught, despite the extreme pressure Francis Franklin Fuller V placed on everyone from the police department to the offices of the mayor and the governor.

  Frustrated, Fuller shortly thereafter announced his new nonprofit organization: “That night, I lost my wife, my child-my family. Sadly, it was a tragedy that could happen to anyone. And those responsible for such harm must be brought to justice and held accountable. To help the police and the justice system do exactly that, today I have established Lex Talionis in honor of my wife and daughter and all other victims in the City of Philadelphia.”

  He explained that he had funded the organization with an initial endowment of five million dollars. From that, he said, “Lex Talionis will reward ten thousand dollars cash to any individual who provides information that leads to the arrest, conviction, and/or removal from free society of a criminal guilty of murder or attempted murder, rape or other sexually deviant crime, or illicit drug distribution in the City of Philadelphia. Lex Talionis will work with the Philadelphia Police Department and our courts to protect the identities of those providing the information, keeping them anonymous.”

  Every week, usually on Fridays, he ran an announcement restating that message in Philadelphia’s newspapers and on its television stations.

  “You don’t like Fuller?” Amanda Law asked Matt Payne.

  “Sometimes I do. And sometimes, not so much,” Matt said, turning up the volume. “Here. Let’s see what he’s saying.”

  Fuller’s voice filled the bedroom: “As my ancestor Benjamin Franklin wrote in the Year of our Lord 1734, ‘Where carcasses are, eagles will gather. And where good laws are, much people flock thither.’ And so tonight I am personally signing the paperwork for my organization”-he gestured grandly toward the cast-bronze signage listing all his companies that was embedded in the wall behind him, to the line that read LEX TALIONIS, LLC-“to transfer two ten-thousand-dollar rewards into two separate escrow accounts at PNC Bank. These will be payable immediately upon the determination of who is properly responsible for the apprehension of these evildoers.”

  There was a smattering of loud applause in the background, and the cameras panned to show the people who were clapping outside of the police crime-scene tape.

  Matt said, “Looks like Francis has the support of Batman and-what’s that other character there that’s the supervillain?-the Joker?”

  Amanda looked at the screen and made a hmm sound.

  “I think that particular Joker costume is supposed to be one of our distinguished city councilmen. You can tell by his trademark black bow tie that looks like a tiny cheap clip-on. And by all those exaggerated dollar-bill bribes-they’re stuffing his pockets to the point of overflowing. The handcuffs on his left wrist are a nice touch. Oh, and there’s a dollar symbol on his coat, kind of like the Riddler had those question marks.”

  Payne recalled that the loud cries of corruption in City Hall were back in the news-if they’d ever really left.

  Either way, to bow-tied City Councilman H. Rapp Badde, Jr., a thirty-two-year-old native Philadelphian who was alternately charismatic and arrogant, it was simply politics as usual. Which also meant shenanigans as usual, including the hiring of a twenty-five-year-old “highly regarded colleague” as his executive assistant and the use of funds from his election campaign for them to attend a conference on urban renewal in, of all places, Bermuda.

  As luck would have it, someone happened to recognize the publicity-happy councilman during the trip. And when a photograph appeared in the news media of the councilman and his tremendously attractive assistant on the beach-wearing, as one TV news wag said, “nothing that could be considered business attire, unless they were employed in a strip club at SeaWorld”-citizens of Philadelphia were furious, perhaps the least happy being Badde’s wife of seven years.

  Of course, the councilman, drawing on both his charisma and arrogance, repeatedly stated that it was all being misinterpreted, that the trip had cost the city not one red cent-his excess campaign contributions covered it. Then he spun the subject to what he and his able assistant had learned on advancing urban renewal and how H. Rapp Badde, Jr., was going to change Philly’s fortunes.

  The behavior stemmed from the same sort of above-reproach attitude-from the hanky-panky to the deny-and-spin-that he’d learned from his father, Horatio R. Badde, Sr., who’d once held the office Junior now so desperately desired, that of mayor.

  To Matt and countless others in Philadelphia, the good news in all this was that there was a genuine first-class person serving as Hizzonor. The Honorable Jerome H. “Jerry” Carlucci was no-nonsense to the point that his detractors-and quite a few admirers-cla
imed he governed with an iron fist. Unapologetic, Carlucci fought the culture of corruption in City Hall just as he had fought crime in the city before being elected to public office.

  Carlucci had risen through the ranks of the Philadelphia Police Department, and he bragged that he’d held every rank but that of policewoman.

  Payne said: “Or maybe, more appropriately, that dollar sign is also supposed to represent a scarlet letter for Badde?”

  These days it’s easier finding a virgin in a whorehouse than an honest politician. He grunted to himself. An honest pol in or out of a whorehouse. With or without a scarlet letter.

  Fuller could be heard speaking again, and the camera cut back to him:

  “So, to all you out there who commit crimes, or you who are considering doing so, I share with you further wisdom of Benjamin Franklin: ‘Fear to do ill, and you need fear nought else.’”

  There was more applause. Fuller paused, waved briefly to acknowledge it, then looked back into the camera.

  His face turned stern, and he wagged the stubby fat index finger of his right hand as he went on dramatically: “Evildoers, know that you are being watched. Know that eventually you will be caught”-with all his right hand’s stubby fat fingers, he gestured behind himself, where the bodies had been dumped, never taking his eyes off the camera-“and know that you will be brought to justice. By God’s grace and by God’s words: As it says in Exodus 23:24, ‘Then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, foot for foot.’ Lex Talionis. Thank you.”

  There was more applause, this time accompanied by whistles and cheers.

  Matt sighed.

  “‘Evildoers.’ Jesus! I’ve heard enough of that,” he said, thumbing the MUTE button on the remote.

  After a moment, Amanda said, “Well, I can’t say I am opposed to what he’s trying to accomplish.”

  Matt looked at her with an eyebrow raised. “But, baby, people just can’t take the law into their own hands. And that’s what he’s basically encouraging.”