Angel's Revenge

PROLOGUE

Get these people out of here!” Detective Smalls bellowed.

The Essex County Courthouse had become a madhouse. Screams of confusion and cries of pain filled the air and seared the ears of the seasoned detective. In all of his thirteen years on the force, he had never seen anything like this. It was like a terrorist had dropped a bomb on the courthouse and transformed it into a war zone. Paramedics, uniformed police officers, and Newark’s Special Unit, along with the Newark Fire Department, all struggled to maintain order in the aftermath of the massacre.

“Move aside, please. Move aside!” Smalls commanded as he directed the curious who had filed into the bullet-ridden courtroom door.

“Officer! Officer! My son was in there, please…”

“Please don’t let my wife be dead! Someone help me!”

The faces and voices reminded Smalls of a recurring nightmare, one he could not wake up from. He had been one of the first on the scene and had seen the human remains strewn like discarded waste. As he entered the smoke-filled courtroom, the smell of death hit him in the face. It now lingered in his nostrils as he looked around in disbelief. The tragedy was an unbelievable sight.

Frank Sorbonno’s body lay grotesquely twisted against the rear wall. District Attorney Anthony Jacobs’s body had been blown to pieces, his headless remains sprawled on the prosecution’s table. The judge was slumped over his gavel, and nine of the twelve jury members leaned every which way on top of each other.

Innocent bystanders and the disguised Charlies lay strewn on the floor. Their blood was splattered all over the courtroom and even on the American flag that hung limp in the corner. That sight in particular caught Smalls’s eye and etched itself in his memory.

Smalls sat down in the back row of the courtroom and ran his hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. How could this have happened? he asked himself as he continued to inspect the room. Dutch had single-handedly taken the American justice system and slapped it with his bloody hand. If gunshots had been applause, the courtroom would have received a deadly standing ovation with Dutch as orchestrator.

Smalls silently watched as ambulance workers rolled corpse after corpse onto soiled gurneys and out the courtroom doors. All he could think of was Dutch. He prayed he would be found among the dead. He’d give his right arm to have Dutch in front of him, bleeding, dying, and begging to atone for the atrocity he had inflicted on the flesh of the American justice system. But Dutch was nowhere to be found. The police had sealed off the building and a ten-block radius around it. The Feds had stopped airline flights and bus and train departures. But all to no avail. Dutch had managed to slip through the tight noose they had meticulously prepared for him and escaped unscathed. He mocked them all.

But more than how he did it, everyone wanted to know where he had gone.

The question was very simple.

Where was Dutch?