Deadly Assets (Badge of Honor 12)
As the four men began running wires to the stage and the speakers, a rented yellow six-wheeled box truck rolled into view of the camera. It turned off Twenty-ninth onto Arizona, briefly going the wrong way on the one-way street before rolling up onto the sidewalk and parking in front of the former row house next door that had the sign reading FELLOWSHIP HALL over its double wooden doors.
The driver, a wiry young black male who walked with a spring in his step, hopped out, exchanged words with the four assembling the stage, then went back to the box truck and rolled up its door. Simpson, due to the angle, could see only a few feet inside the box, and there was nothing in view.
The driver then climbed up into the box and pulled out what looked at first to Simpson like a roll of a thin white sheet of linoleum flooring, and maneuvered it to the lip of the box’s roof and then slid it completely on top. Then he smoothly hopped to the sidewalk—Simpson half expected him to slip on the snow but he didn’t—and went to the nose of the truck. He then effortlessly climbed from the bumper to the hood, then to the roof of the cab, and finally to the roof of the box. There he unrolled the thin white sheet down the side of the box.
“Aha!” Simpson said, seeing that it was actually a vinyl fabric sign.
It read Word of Brotherly Love Ministry 5th Annual Feed Philly Day Dec. 17th 4 p.m.–Midnight. Proudly Sponsored by Phila City Councilman H. Rapp Badde Jr. YOUR Voice in City Hall.
“Four to midnight?” Simpson said aloud to himself. “Timed to make the five, six, and eleven o’clock news. Go f’ing figure.”
Simpson, sipping from the stainless steel cap of his thermos, then watched the male slide down to the cab and hood and to the sidewalk, then walk to the double wooden doors of the Fellowship Hall. He called back to the four men assembling the stage, then went inside the hall.
After a few minutes, the Hispanic male walked from the stage over to the box truck. He hopped inside and began sliding big cardboard boxes to the outer edge. He popped open the flaps to one, reached in, and came out with a white T-shirt. He held it up to his torso to show the others. Simpson saw that its silkscreened block lettering screamed STOP KILLADELPHIA! on the front and back, the STOP in bright red ink, the KILLADELPHIA in black.
The Hispanic male pulled out more shirts from the box and tossed them to the others as they walked up. Everyone slipped one on over their hooded sweatshirts.
Then the Hispanic male began sliding five-by-three-foot posters to the outer edge, and when he handed them down, Simpson could see the front of them. They were enlarged images of murder victims, posters similar to those used in the Center City demonstrations at JFK Park and the Roundhouse.
The first showed Lauren Childs. She was in the photograph that she had posted online that morning, the one taken at the LOVE artwork with Tony Gambacorta. Her boyfriend had been inelegantly cropped from the frame—his arm, around her neck, was all of him that remained visible—and a white circle with MURDER VICTIM #362 in red text was positioned over where his head would have been. Along the bottom of the poster was her name, followed by “19 Years Young.”
On the second poster was Jimmy Sanchez, his serious face pockmarked with acne. He was wearing not a green elf costume but, instead, a shirt and tie and blazer. He sat staring at a chess-board, his right hand hovering over a white rook. Under his image was “Jaime A. Sanchez, 15 Years Young.” The white circle in the upper corner had MURDER VICTIM #363.
The next poster showed a grinning black male with MURDER VIC
TIM #360 in the white circle. At the bottom was “Dante Holmes, 20 Years Young.”
These were carried to the stage and leaned against its front.
When Simpson saw the next poster getting moved to the back of the truck, he muttered, “I’ll be damned.”
The poster was an enlargement of a digital image originally taken by police department closed-circuit cameras and then picked up by the media.
The image showed one of the PPD Aviation Unit’s Bell 206 L-4 helicopters hovering over the Ben Franklin Bridge, the eighty-year-old steel suspension bridge that spanned the Delaware River. Traffic was stopped around wrecked vehicles, and everywhere were ambulances and fire trucks and police cruisers.
And standing in the middle of the mayhem—in front of a sheet that covered a human form—was Matt Payne.
He wore gray trousers, a pale blue starched shirt with a red-striped tie, navy blazer, and shiny black loafers. The slacks had been soiled and the shoes scuffed during the chase. He had his Colt .45 in hand, and was giving the helicopter a thumbs-up gesture.
Bright red lettering at the top of the poster read SGT. MATTHEW PAYNE, and PUBLIC ENEMY #1 was along the bottom.
Simpson clicked on the ECC button.
“Yeah, Harv,” Kerry Rapier’s voice came over Simpson’s headset. “Saw it on the monitor here. I’ve sent word up the chain of command.”
“Payne didn’t shoot that guy, if I remember right.”
“You’re right. That guy—something Jones . . . Kenny Jones—had just fled the scene of a shooting. He stole a minivan, and Matt pursued him in an unmarked Crown Vic. Jones managed to get on the bridge going the wrong way—into seven lanes of oncoming traffic. Payne caught up in the Police Interceptor and executed a textbook PIT maneuver, bumping the minivan so that Jones spun out and hit the zipper barrier.”
“Who knows how many lives he saved doing that. But you get no points for that, huh?”
“No kidding. And then Jones ditched the minivan and made a run for it—with Payne on foot in hot pursuit. It was anyone’s guess what the hell the guy would do next—probably carjack someone headed toward Camden—but then he blindly ran into the path of a bus.”
“At least there’s not a poster of Jones.”
“I wouldn’t speak too soon, Harv.”
Simpson grunted as the screen then showed the men placing another poster at the back of the van, this one of a pudgy, balding, middle-aged white male wearing a coat and tie.