The Vigilantes (Badge of Honor 10)

He blinked, then looked. He saw a yellowish pair of big, round headlight beams bouncing up and down the street toward him. Then he heard the sound of the engine valves knocking noisily as the driver accelerated.

That’s one old damn car.

The shocks are shot. And it sounds like the engine is just about to go, too.

The car rattled to a stop at the weed-choked curb in front of the row house at 1822 Ontario Street. The air became heavy with the smell of raw gasoline and half-burned exhaust.

Will Curtis pulled on his grease-smeared FedEx cap and swung open the minivan’s door. He stepped out, swaying a bit, then walked back and stood in the beam of the car’s left headlight so that the FedEx logos on his hat, shirt, and the envelope were clearly visible to the driver.

He held the envelope in front of his crotch, concealing his hand holding the pistol.

As Will Curtis carefully continued stepping toward the car—which he now could see was a mid-1970s AMC Gremlin, in his opinion one of the ugliest and most worthless vehicles that had ever been produced—there came the sound of tortured metal as the driver pushed open the rusted-out door.

“You stay there, girl,” the driver, a black man with shoulder-length hair, said to someone in the passenger seat.

Curtis could barely make out what he thought was a thin young teenage girl sitting there. She wore a white sleeveless jacket.

So he’s still got a taste for the young ones. . . .

The black male turned to Will Curtis and aggressively said: “What the hell you want?”

“Your grandmother said I should wait for you to deliver this envelope,” Curtis said. “You’re Jossiah Miffin, right?”

As Curtis stepped closer, he saw the black man’s attention turn to the envelope. Then, despite the now-long black hair, Will saw the face from the mug shot, including the J-shaped scar.

“What up with the envelope? What’s in it?”

Unexpectedly, a delirious Will Curtis heard in his head Stan Colt’s voice. Colt, playing an over-the-top tough-cop character, was saying one of the lines in the shoot-’em-up movie that Curtis had just sat through twice.

Curtis tossed the envelope at Miffin’s feet.

Miffin instinctively tried to catch it.

Will Curtis then leveled the Glock at Miffin’s head and, in his best deep gravelly Stan Colt voice, recited the line “A heavy diet of lead, with a side order of penance.”

Curtis squeezed the trigger twice.

The first round pierced the hook of the J-shaped scar, causing Miffin’s head to jerk backward. The second round then went into the roof of his open mouth and exited through the top of his skull.

Miffin collapsed to the asphalt street.

The teenage girl in the car began screaming hysterically.

And suddenly, feeling very dizzy, Will Curtis saw nothing but black. He collapsed beside Miffin, dropping the Glock as he went down.

Will Curtis didn’t know how long he’d been passed out, only that he’d definitely been out cold. He had a lump on his forehead from where it had hit the pavement.

He figured that he couldn’t have been out too long, because the teenage girl was still screaming in the passenger seat.

And Jossiah Miffin, of course, was still where he’d fallen dead.

As Will Curtis tried to stand, he quickly discovered that he had almost no energy whatever.

He made it up to his hands and knees and began crawling back to the Ford minivan.

It took an eternity to pull himself up into the driver’s seat, then get the door closed.

With a lot of effort, he started the engine, put the shifter in drive, and rolled forward.