The Vigilantes (Badge of Honor) - By W.E.B. Griffin Page 0,84

be punished.” Curtis paused to let that sink in.

“That what Mama said.” He was still looking at the sheet. “That why LeRoi live here.”

“You be good, Michael.”

Michael Floyd looked up at Will Curtis, then finally shrugged and nodded once.

As Will Curtis drove two blocks north, he heard sirens coming from the vicinity of where LeRoi Cheatham lay dead.

His pulse racing, he quickly stopped the minivan and got out. He peeled off the magnet-backed FedEx signs from both front doors, then hid them under the floor mat in the rear cargo area. Back in the car, he pulled on his denim jacket to cover his FedEx uniform shirt, buttoning it up as he drove.

He turned left on Cecil Moore Avenue and, still hearing sirens, had another idea. After two blocks, he turned down Second Avenue and followed it five blocks to where Second fed into the new Schmidt’s Brewery entertainment complex.

As calmly as possible, Curtis pulled the minivan into the line of other cars waiting at a red traffic light to enter a parking garage.

The traffic light turned green. But the brake lights of the vehicles in line stayed lit as their drivers waited for a police car—an unmarked gray Ford sedan with its emergency lights flashing from behind the top of the windshield—to come flying past, its horn honking a warning.

Five minutes later, Will Curtis had parked the minivan in an open slot between a pair of full-size SUVs and begun walking toward the complex’s multiscreen movie theater.

[FOUR]

S. Sixtieth and Catharine Streets, Philadelphia Sunday, November 1, 5:01 P.M.

A frustrated H. Rapp Badde, Jr., at the wheel of the black Range Rover registered to his Urban Venture Fund, squealed its tires as he pulled a fast U-turn on Sixtieth and parked at the curb in front of the rented row house that served as his West Philly campaign headquarters.

It took for damn ever to get here—and I really don’t want to be here.

City Councilman Badde tried to keep at least two levels of separation from those who worked in his various campaign offices. The separation afforded him a godlike persona, so that when he finally went to the offices and met with his worker bees, he was looked upon as the all-powerful one coming down from the holy temple that was Philadelphia City Hall.

More important, though, the levels of separation gave the ass-covering politician a buffer for when something invariably went sour. Badde had plausible deniability that he had knowledge of any lower-level act, which could easily and credibly be blamed on “a well-meaning but unfortunately overzealous campaign volunteer.”

Ever wary, he knew that coming to the campaign headquarters effectively removed that buffer and that he had to be careful. The last thing he wanted to do was face the media’s questions of “What did you know, and when did you know it?”

Yet when Roger Wynne called—“You need to get here as soon as possible to see what’s happened and deal with this Kareem situation before it blows up in our faces”—he was really left with no option.

He couldn’t get across town fast enough.

But just getting out of the Hops Haus Tower had turned into one helluva challenge.

First, he’d had to try convincing Janelle Harper that she hadn’t heard anyone screaming over his cell phone about somebody getting killed, and that he wasn’t rushing off to see his wife or another woman.

He’d been completely unsuccessful in persuading her on either count.

Then, to reach his Range Rover, he’d had to wait an eternity for one of the three elevators to ride down to the multilevel parking garage in the belly of the building. Then he had to drive the luxury SUV around and around, circling seemingly forever to reach street level. And then he’d had to wait for the metal overhead security door to slowly clank-clank-clank up and out of the way.

The sign affixed to the door told drivers to wait until the door was completely raised before exiting. But Badde, after some smug self-congratulating, had used the maddeningly long wait to hit the lever that caused the air suspension to lower the vehicle’s height. And as soon as the SUV barely had cleared the rubber gasket on the door’s bottom lip, he floored the accelerator pedal.

Only then to have to hit the brakes for a variety of other delays.

Driving from the far eastern side of Philly—the Delaware River was only blocks from the Hops Haus complex—to far West Philly was only a matter of five or so miles. But it was a