The Vigilantes (Badge of Honor 10)

As he sat back on the couch, Amanda was holding the glass by the stem and swirling the wine around the goblet.

Kind of anxiously . . . nervously.

Then he noticed her left foot moving back and forth.

If that was attached to a churn at an Amish dairy, she could be making butter for all of Lancaster County.

Amanda turned to him.

“Want to talk about your ‘crazy day’?” she said. “It’s horrible that more people are dead and just up the street. Do you know who did it? And are they—you, I guess I mean—close to catching them?”

Matt took a sip from his drink, then said, “The simple answer is ‘no’—to all that. No, we really don’t know who. And I’m really mentally racked from thinking about the whole thing. So that means I’d really rather not talk about it. I hope you don’t take that the wrong way.”

Amanda smiled.

“Oh, not at all,” she said. “I do understand. Sometimes you have to step back.”

“How about you? Anything at the hospital?”

She nodded. Then she leaned forward and put her wineglass beside the antipasto platter on the marble table.

She really is in deep thought.

She turned to him, and suddenly he could see tears starting.

My God. What the hell has got her so upset?

“Matt, you saved my life. I will never forget that terrifying moment I realized who they were and what they’d done—and knew that was the end for me. But then . . . then you suddenly were there. And I heard your voice calling out to warn Tony Harris, ‘It’s me, Matt Payne!’ I truly thought I was hallucinating.”

Oh, shit. In vino veritas. . . .

Matt stared into her eyes and felt his throat constrict.

And I remember that moment, too.

Inside that pillowcase they’d taped over her head, she whimpered.

When I cut her free, the last person in the world I expected to find a prisoner in that hellhole was the woman I loved.

It was an unimaginable moment.

She reached back for her glass, took a big sip, and said, “You saved my life, Matt. Now it’s my turn.”

[FOUR]

“How does survivor’s guilt fit?” Matt Payne was saying, reaching for another slice of salami and wrapping it around another big black olive.

Even though the platter was now nearly three-quarters empty, all the meat and cheese and fruit he’d eaten wasn’t keeping up with the alcohol he was washing it down with. He was starting to feel a bit tight.

Or maybe it’s a combination of that and being exhausted.

He’d made them both fresh drinks.

Luna was asleep at their feet, snoring softly.

“Survivor’s guilt,” Amanda Law said, “because Skipper died and Becca didn’t.”

Twenty-five-year-old Becca Benjamin, just shy of two o’clock in the morning on September 9, had been sitting in her Mercedes SUV waiting for J. Warren “Skipper” Olde, her twenty-seven-year-old boyfriend, to come out of a seedy Philly Inn motel room. Which he did, right after the meth lab inside had blown up the damn place, turning it into an inferno. The blast demolished the Mercedes.