The Vigilantes (Badge of Honor 10)

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.