The Vigilantes (Badge of Honor 10)

“What’s going on, Matt?”

“I don’t know, baby. I told you I’m not going to check those.”

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But I should. What the hell?

Ping!

She moved again, then suddenly squirmed out from under him.

“Well,” she said, “if you’re not, I sure as hell am.”

She reached down the side of the bed and grabbed the waistband of the khakis, tugging hard when she felt the weight of Luna on them.

“Sorry, girl,” Amanda said as she dug in the pocket and pulled out the phone.

Luna slinked across the room and went into her crate in the master bath. It sounded as if she threw herself down onto the hard plastic liner. Then Luna gave a heavy sigh.

Amanda looked at the phone’s screen.

She said, “Three from Tony—”

“What the hell?” he said, sitting up and adjusting the pillow to lean back on.

“—one from Kerry, and the last one’s from Denny.”

“Denny?” he said.

She held the phone out to him.

“That can’t be good,” Matt said. “He doesn’t like texting and only does it out of necessity. Wonder why he didn’t just call.”

He glanced at them, then saw that the time stamps of the various messages were not all from the last few minutes, as the multiple ping-pings would have suggested. Instead, the first one, from Harris, went back almost an hour. That suggested the messages had been stacked up somewhere, unable to get through. He then looked at his signal-strength icon, and it was flickering from the weakest signal to the icon that read: NO SIGNAL.

Payne shook his head, then read the first message from Tony Harris: -ANTHONY HARRIS-

YO, MATTY. TURN ON KEYCOM CABLE CHANNEL 555 & BACK IT UP TO THE TOP OF THE HOUR. TROUBLE BREWING . . .

When Hops Haus Tower had been built, the entire property had been wired, so to speak, with super-high-speed KeyCom plastic fiber-optic digital transmission cables. The lines allowed for the advanced technology of KeyCom’s various communications packages—telephone, Internet, television—to be exclusively provided by KeyCom to the residents and the retailers.

There was a simple reason for this select relationship: KeyProperties was heavily invested financially in the complex. And while some complained that such a noncompetitive environment effectively violated at least a dozen antitrust laws in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania alone, the man who controlled both companies argued differently.

Frances Franklin Fuller the Fifth said that everyone did indeed have other options: “They are free to choose to live anywhere else and purchase the inferior communications packages offered there.”

Matt looked at Amanda and said, “Tony says I need to see something on channel 555 real quick.”

She nodded. “But be aware: If you run out the door on me two nights in a row . . .”

Matt smiled, then picked up the remote control, turned on the sixty-inch flat-screen television mounted on the wall, and hit the 5 button on the keypad three times.

Because the high-speed system was all digital, the control box for the television had a function that allowed any recorded program to be replayed or fast-forwarded for up to two hours. The fast-forward mode did not, of course, work for anything that was airing live. (“Now, that’d be revolutionary,” Payne had said when an installation tech was showing him all the system’s bells and whistles, “because if it could do that, it’d be tantamount to looking into the future.”) But a live newscast, once recorded on Key-Com’s massive servers, could be replayed.

“Hey,” Matt said, “this is the cable channel for the live streaming news from Mickey O’Hara’s CrimeFreePhilly website.”

The news live stream looked exactly like any conventional television network newscast. It had a slick “News Center,” a studio set that consisted of a brightly lit anchor desk, behind which sat a pair of young, perky, and polished talking heads. On the wall behind them, CRIMEFREEPHILLY.COM NEWSCAST was spelled out in gleaming chrome letters that were splashed with various colors from filters on unseen klieg carbon arc lamps that hung from the studio ceiling. Below the chrome letters, the wall held a bank of four giant flat-screen studio monitors, each showing some working news story.

Matt hit the button on the remote control that restarted the newscast at its beginning.