The Vigilantes (Badge of Honor 10)

There then came from behind the door a soft thumping and whine, followed by the sound of two clicks, one of a light switch and another of the door latch softly shutting.

The whine had been from Luna, the two-year-old pup Amanda had rescue

d from the animal shelter five months earlier. And the thumping had been the dog’s wagging tail hitting the plastic floor liner of the wire kennel crate that served as the dog’s den in the massive tiled bathroom.

Luna—Matt joked that it was short for “Lunatic” due to the dog’s occasional hyperness and regular talkativeness—was either a labradoodle or a genuine purebred Portuguese water dog. The two breeds could be spitting images, and had similar traits: a friendly disposition and a serious protective loud bark. It was Amanda’s opinion that Luna, at forty pounds, with a dense, tightly curled, nonshedding black coat, was more poodle than lab.

Payne smiled as he thought, What the hell? Is it possible to lose count?

He glanced at the bedside table. There, beside two beer bottles and a glass of white wine, was his cell phone. He looked at the clock on its screen.

It’s only eleven? And we got back here at maybe nine.

Payne, his heart pounding, put his head back on the pillow.

So, that means she . . . that is, we . . .

Damn! Three times in two hours. . . .

As his chest continued to rise and fall with heavy breaths, he decided that if he was about to go into full cardiac arrest right damn here and right damn now, the luxury apartment of a medical doctor wasn’t necessarily a bad place for that to happen. Particularly considering that over the course of the last two hours, said medical doctor had been party to the cause of his current condition.

I’m not about to die, but when I do, I damn sure want to go wrapped in the arms of that wonderful blond goddess.

Thank God she’s gotten back so much of her old self.

And, thank God again, she seems only to have suffered a little of the anxiety that her shrink predicted—and none of the post-trauma stress he’d said would come.

He certainly underestimated her strong character and her ability to move forward and keep working.

And she loves her work.

Amanda Law, MD, FACS, FCCM, was chief physician at Temple University Hospital’s Burn Center.

Matt was then jarred by the painful memory of Amanda’s abduction from in front of the hospital a month before—and how close she’d come to being killed by a psychopath. And that made him think about what she’d just said about him being a cop, and that in turn made him think about her condominium and why he was really glad she had a place that he knew was safer than any place in the screwed-up city.

After what she went through, having The Fortress doesn’t hurt.

If only for her peace of mind.

Hell, mine, too.

Nearly nine months earlier, Amanda Law had bought Loft Number 2180, a luxury one-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath condominium on the top floor of the year-old Hops Haus Tower in the Northern Liberties section of Philly. The penthouse property had met her long list of requirements, starting with a good price.

“A really reasonable one, considering all the amenities,” she’d said.

But, she confided in Matt, what had really sold her on the place were the incredible panoramic views.

Even from his pillow, Payne could stare out at the lights twinkling on nearby Interstate 95 and the Delaware River and, past the far riverbank, the lights of Camden, New Jersey, and, spreading out even farther east, of the Garden State itself.

She’d said she also liked the retro industrial design of the high-rise, which reflected the feel of the Hops Haus Brewery, the renovated four-story, hundred-year-old building adjacent to the foot of the tower. The wall surfaces were alternately exposed red brick and stained concrete, and the flooring was a rustic dark hardwood planking. The high ceilings had exposed fire sprinkler pipes, and the metal ductwork for the air-conditioning hung from straps out in the open. The floor-to-ceiling windows were of the same design as those of the original Bavarian brewhouse downstairs.

But what Payne liked best about the residential tower—and why he privately called it The Fortress—was that, while it was meant to appear old, the place had the absolute latest in state-of-the-art security. That included, of course, being wired with high-end closed-circuit TV cameras with overlapping fields of view so that no corner went unrecorded, as well as a multifactor authentication system for anyone who wished to access the property.

And all of it was monitored by round-the-clock private security personnel. The security chief was Andy Hardwick, a mid-forties, bald, and barrelchested sergeant from Central Detectives who’d conveniently retired from the Philadelphia Police Department right before the development was completed. He’d known Payne’s biological father and uncle, had known Matt since he’d been in diapers, and was more than happy to show him all the building’s bells and whistles and bad-guy booby traps.

Hardwick had promised Payne there’d be a close but discreet protective eye kept on the primary resident of Loft Number 2180, as well as heightened surveillance, mostly via CCTV cameras, but also by occasional security personnel “performing routine safety-device inspections,” of the twenty-first floor.

This place is probably tighter than a Graterford RHU, Payne thought, and then he had a mental image of the hellish super-secure Restricted Housing Units—effectively individual prisons for the worst offenders serving time in solitary confinement—at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution thirty miles west of Philly.