W. Griffin: The Vigilantes

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 facade-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.

Right 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.

Eight o’clock on the nose.

Then, as he’d seen happen the other times here, out walked the overweight black woman. Tonight she wore a gray knee-length woolen overcoat, which only made her obesity more pronounced, and slung a black patent-leather purse over her shoulder.

Right on time.

He guessed that she was Gartner’s part-time help, one who came in maybe after attending college classes or another job and worked for him till eight. Gartner’s full-time assistant, a bony white woman of maybe forty, was one of the ones who left the office at five o’clock on the dot.

That meant, to the best of Curtis’s knowledge, that Gartner was now alone. Which was how Curtis wanted it. He held no animosity whatever toward any of the office help. Everyone had to work for a living, he reasoned, and no one should be held accountable for what their bosses did.

Which was why he did not mind waiting so long in the car and pissing in canteens. While he knew that the spreading cancer wasn’t going to give him all the time in the world-Sure as hell not much more time left on the top side of the turf-he felt that he did have enough time to settle some scores with the ones who deserved it.

Curtis glanced down at the Glock. The matte-black gun reminded him of the semiautomatic Colt Model 1911. 45 ACP with which he’d first learned to shoot. That had been during his short stint-two years, ten months, and twenty-two days during the 1970s, discharged honorably during a postwar Reduction in Force-in the Pennsylvania National Guard.

And that caused him to shake his head in disgust.

I joined up to fight for freedom-but damn sure not so our legal system would allow these worthless shits to do what they want to innocent girls.

No one is going to miss him.

And there’s not a damn thing that’s going to happen to me for taking him out-that is, if I get caught.

Then he chuckled.

Like that saying goes, “You can’t kill a man born to hang.”

Or, in my case, hang dead at the end of a chemo IV drip…

He slipped the Glock into the right pocket of his denim jacket and opened the driver’s door. As he shuffled his feet to get out, he accidentally kicked the full canteen across the floorboard. He looked down at it and made a face.

Oh, what the hell. May as well dump it out now.

Then he smirked.

And I know exactly how.

He looked over at the cracked frosted plate-glass window with LAW OFFICE OF DANIEL O. GARTNER, ESQ. He saw a couple of overhead white lights go off behind it, then there began a pulsing of different-colored lights. He’d seen that happen on the other nights he’d sat watching the office, and decided that Gartner liked to watch a little television, maybe a movie, after the help had left.

He picked up the canteen and swung open the door.

Will Curtis, staying in the shadows, walked up the sidewalk on the far side of the street. As he approached a parallel-parked filthy old Ford panel van-one that apparently hadn’t been moved in a month of Sundays, judging by the parking tickets and fast-food restaurant flyers stacked thick under its windshield wipers-he stepped off the curb to cross the street. He turned his head left and checked for any traffic, and just as he saw that there wasn’t anything coming, there came from the opposite direction the sound of a roaring motorcycle engine.