The Vigilantes (Badge of Honor 10)

Payne broke the connection, then slipped the cell phone back in the left front pocket of his pants.

Matt Payne looked at Jason Washington and said, “So we have a mother bringing in her dead son, and now we have street-justice punks cashing in a really bad guy? And those first eight pop-and-drops. Killadelphia, indeed. The vigilantes—and now we know there’s at least one—are everywhere. Worse, I’m beginning to think Operation Clean Sweep has been commandeered by Five-Eff.”

“Well, Francis Fuller’s reward system is certainly superior to ours in attracting attention,” Washington said. “To start with, he’s not a cop. And, as we well know, nobody on the street wants to talk to cops.”

Payne grunted.

He said, “Carlucci is really going to blow his cork when he hears about the street vigilantes turning in this thug and that Kendrik’s doer is still loose and, we can presume, still active. Next time you see my head, it’ll probably be on a platter.”

Payne looked at Washington a long moment, then sighed. He said, “You’re smarter than I am, Jason. What the hell do I do next?”

“Applying for the monastery ever cross your mind?”

[THREE]

Jefferson and Mascher Streets, Philadelphia Sunday, November 1, 1:55 P.M.

“Bobby, what the hell does five fucking minutes matter?” Thomas “Little Tommie” Turco glanced at his wristwatch and anxiously tapped his steel-toed work boot. “The permit says two o’clock start time. We’re wasting daylight, not to mention burning rental money. Go on and swing it.”

Puffing on a stub of a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth, the bulky, thirty-eight-year-old Turco—who was anything but little—stood on the step outside the cab of a red-and-white Link-Belt crane he’d rented two hours earlier. A weathered cardboard sign, cut somewhat square, was taped to the door of the cab. It was poorly hand-lettered with a black permanent-ink marker: TURCO DEMOLITION & EXCAVATION. NOT FOR HIRE. UNDER CONTRACT WITH CITY OF PHILA HUD.

“You got it, boss,” said Bobby “the Ballbuster” Bucco, who was sitting at the controls. He fired up the Link-Belt’s diesel engine.

Little Tommie then gave a thumbs-up to Jimmy “Dirtball” Turco. His cousin was at the controls of a massive Caterpillar D3K bulldozer that sat next to a pair of Bobcats with front-end loading buckets and a line of five heavy-duty dump trucks waiting to haul away debris. The bright yellow, nine-ton dozer roared to life. Then its twin tracks and giant front blade began kicking up clouds of dust as the dozer started pushing into piles the scattered, busted debris of the onetime residential neighborhood.

This was the second time in the last ten days that Turco’s beefy crew—not one of the men weighed an ounce under two-fifty—had worked this Northern Liberties job site.

The first time, during a solid week of working dawn to dusk every day but Sunday, they had taken almost the entire block down to bare earth. Little Tommie himself would have admitted that it wasn’t really all that impressive an accomplishment, if only because over the years almost half of the row houses had burned and their shells had been removed by crews from the City of Philadelphia. Turco’s equipment only had to scrape up and truck off the concrete footings, and sometimes not even those were left, just weed-choked dirt.

The reason Turco’s crew had not been able to finish the job all at once—and had to return today—could be explained in part by the signs recently posted on the property.

There were four shiny new large ones, four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood painted bright white and nailed to four-by-four-inch posts, each erected on a corner of the block. Lettered in black was: MOVING PHILLY FORWARD!

COMING SOON TO NORTHERN LIBERTIES:

3,000 NEW JOBS!

PROJECT COST TO TAXPAYERS:

ZERO!

ANOTHER FINE DEVELOPMENT FOR YOUR FUTURE FROM THE PHILADELPHIA ECONOMIC GENTRIFICATION INITIATIVE

A PROJECT OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA HOUSING & URBAN DEVELOPMENT COUNCILMAN H. RAPP BADDE, JR., CHAIRMAN

And there were a score or more smaller signs that had been made with a stencil. They had been spray-painted on the exterior doors and walls of the last five standing row houses on the block, all of which were in a group at the southwest corner of the job site.

The stencils read: OFFICIAL NOTICE!

CONDEMNED PROPERTY!

CERTIFIED UNFIT FOR HUMAN HABITATION UNDER STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA URBAN REDEVELOPMENT LAW

NO TRESPASSING!

Forty-five days earlier, the entire block had officially been declared a blight and then condemned.

Every owner of the individual properties had been served a notice of condemnation that week, and all—except for the five holdouts—had let expire the thirty-day period for challenging the condemnation.