The Vigilantes

[THREE]

Loft Number 2180 Hops Haus Tower 1100 N. Lee Street, Philadelphia Saturday, October 31, 11:05 P.M.

“Maybe I’m wrong about you being a cop,” Dr. Amanda Law playfully whispered to Homicide Sergeant Matthew M. Payne, Philadelphia Police Department Badge Number 471, “because I’m beginning to think that you do your best work undercover.”

He saw that her face was flushed and glowing as she smiled and pulled her shoulder-length blond hair into a ponytail, then threw back the soft cotton cover in question.

She leaned over and kissed him wetly and loudly on his heaving chest. Then she stepped out of bed and, after taking a moment to catch her breath, said, “Be right back, Romeo.”

Twenty-seven-year-old Matt Payne-who was six feet tall, one-seventy-five with a chiseled face, dark intelligent eyes, and thick dark hair he kept trimmed short-marveled at the magnificent milk-white orbs that formed the toned derriere of Amanda Law as she padded stark naked across the hardwood flooring, then disappeared into the bathroom.

There then came from behind the door a soft thumping and whine, followed by the sound of two clicks, one of a light switch and another of the door latch softly shutting.

The whine had been from Luna, the two-year-old pup Amanda had rescued from the animal shelter five months earlier. And the thumping had been the dog’s wagging tail hitting the plastic floor liner of the wire kennel crate that served as the dog’s den in the massive tiled bathroom.

Luna-Matt joked that it was short for “Lunatic” due to the dog’s occasional hyperness and regular talkativeness-was either a labradoodle or a genuine purebred Portuguese water dog. The two breeds could be spitting images, and had similar traits: a friendly disposition and a serious protective loud bark. It was Amanda’s opinion that Luna, at forty pounds, with a dense, tightly curled, nonshedding black coat, was more poodle than lab.

Payne smiled as he thought, What the hell? Is it possible to lose count?

He glanced at the bedside table. There, beside two beer bottles and a glass of white wine, was his cell phone. He looked at the clock on its screen.

It’s only eleven? And we got back here at maybe nine.

Payne, his heart pounding, put his head back on the pillow.

So, that means she… that is, we…

Damn! Three times in two hours…

As his chest continued to rise and fall with heavy breaths, he decided that if he was about to go into full cardiac arrest right damn here and right damn now, the luxury apartment of a medical doctor wasn’t necessarily a bad place for that to happen. Particularly considering that over the course of the last two hours, said medical doctor had been party to the cause of his current condition.

I’m not about to die, but when I do, I damn sure want to go wrapped in the arms of that wonderful blond goddess.

Thank God she’s gotten back so much of her old self.

And, thank God again, she seems only to have suffered a little of the anxiety that her shrink predicted-and none of the post-trauma stress he’d said would come.

He certainly underestimated her strong character and her ability to move forward and keep working.

And she loves her work.

Amanda Law, MD, FACS, FCCM, was chief physician at Temple University Hospital’s Burn Center.

Matt was then jarred by the painful memory of Amanda’s abduction from in front of the hospital a month before-and how close she’d come to being killed by a psychopath. And that made him think about what she’d just said about him being a cop, and that in turn made him think about her condominium and why he was really glad she had a place that he knew was safer than any place in the screwed-up city.

After what she went through, having The Fortress doesn’t hurt.

If only for her peace of mind.

Hell, mine, too.

Nearly nine months earlier, Amanda Law had bought Loft Number 2180, a luxury one-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath condominium on the top floor of the year-old Hops Haus Tower in the Northern Liberties section of Philly. The penthouse property had met her long list of requirements, starting with a good price.

“A really reasonable one, considering all the amenities,” she’d said.

But, she confided in Matt, what had really sold her on the place were the incredible panoramic views.

Even from his pillow, Payne could stare out at the lights twinkling on nearby Interstate 95 and the Delaware River and, past the far riverbank, the lights of Camden, New Jersey, and, spreading out even farther east, of the Garden State itself.

She’d said she also liked the retro industrial design of the high-rise, which reflected the feel of the Hops Haus Brewery, the renovated four-story, hundred-year-old building adjacent to the foot of the tower. The wall surfaces were alternately exposed red brick and stained concrete, and the flooring was a rustic dark hardwood planking. The high ceilings had exposed fire sprinkler pipes, and the metal ductwork for the air-conditioning hung from straps out in the open. The floor-to-ceiling windows were of the same design as those of the original Bavarian brewhouse downstairs.

But what Payne liked best about the residential tower-and why he privately called it The Fortress-was that, while it was meant to appear old, the place had the absolute latest in state-of-the-art security. That included, of course, being wired with high-end closed-circuit TV cameras with overlapping fields of view so that no corner went unrecorded, as well as a multifactor authentication system for anyone who wished to access the property.

And all of it was monitored by round-the-clock private security personnel. The security chief was Andy Hardwick, a mid-forties, bald, and barrelchested sergeant from Central Detectives who’d conveniently retired from the Philadelphia Police Department right before the development was completed. He’d known Payne’s biological father and uncle, had known Matt since he’d been in diapers, and was more than happy to show him all the building’s bells and whistles and bad-guy booby traps.

Hardwick had promised Payne there’d be a close but discreet protective eye kept on the primary resident of Loft Number 2180, as well as heightened surveillance, mostly via CCTV cameras, but also by occasional security personnel “performing routine safety-device inspections,” of the twenty-first floor.

This place is probably tighter than a Graterford RHU, Payne thought, and then he had a mental image of the hellish super-secure Restricted Housing Units-effectively individual prisons for the worst offenders serving time in solitary confinement-at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution thirty miles west of Philly.

All of the Hops Haus Tower’s common-area and exterior doors were on computer-controlled locks. Every resident was issued an electronic fob, smaller than a cough drop and designed to fit conveniently on a key ring, each of which had a unique electronic signature that could be turned on-and, perhaps more important, turned off-at one of the security computers. Most residents also had electronic scans of their thumbprints saved to the security computers.

For entry, residents could unlock the common-area and exterior doors-including those on each floor of the parking garage that led to the elevators-only through a two-step authentication process: First, they used the electronic fob, and second, they submitted to a biometric thumbprint reader or manually entered a unique code on a keypad. The doors guarding each elevator bank within the building were fitted with the same certification devices.

Finally, as a last electronic barrier, there was a fob receiver panel inside each elevator, on the wall of buttons. You had to swipe the fob in order for any of the buttons to become live and light up when pushed.

Each fob was coded to be floor-specific, which meant two things. It was noted if the resident associated with the thumbprint or keypad code at the elevator bank door got off at a floor other than the one linked to the fob, and the anomaly was flagged and archived and available in the event anything unfortunate happened.

And only residents of the penthouse floor had fobs that allowed access to that level. The fobs of every other resident could go only as high as the twentieth floor. Which was another reason Payne thought that Amanda’s top-floor unit was highly secure.

Then he had an unkind thought.

Of course, no matter how high the professional standards, including Andy Hardwick’s, the weak link in the most secure of facilities, whether it’s a luxury residence or a super-max prison, is the human factor-the gatekeepers, whoever the hell is manning the desks and machinery.

One crooked guard on the take and the whole fucking system may as well be a bucket of rusty bolts and blown locks.

Especially with security-and certain concierge-personnel having access to that master key to every unit, the one that that effeminate manager had said “was necessary, you know, just in case of emergency, like your washing machine’s water line ruptures while you’re gone or your bathtub overflows and starts flooding your neighbors.”

Yeah, right. And for what he didn’t say: “Or there’s the stench of rotted flesh coming from behind your locked door.”

Still, for what it is, and where it is, this place is as good as it gets.

His pulse starting to calm, Payne sat up and heaved one last deep breath. He reached back over to the bedside table and picked up one of the beers, a half-empty bottle of Hops Haus India Pale Ale. After he and Amanda had eaten dinner in the pub on the first floor of the building, he’d bought a case of the IPA-the pub had its own microbrewery-and that case of twenty-four bottles was now down to twenty.

He looked out the tall windows again as he took a swig of beer. While he could appreciate the view, being a cop he couldn’t help but look past the twinkling lights and think of all the criminals hiding out there in the shadows, masked by darkness.

His eyes followed the Delaware River up to the Betsy Ross Bridge, then beyond that. Though too far to see clearly, he knew that a few miles beyond the bridge, on State Road in the Holmesburg section of Northeast Philadelphia, some of those lights were from the Philadelphia Prison System. Its Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, the largest in the system, alone processed some thirty thousand inmates, all adult males, each year, every year. The intake center operated around the clock.

But not damn near enough.

What was that figure on fugitives from the courts? Almost fifty thousand who’ve jumped bail and run?

Now they’re in the wind… out there, somewhere.

They’re damn sure not in church confessing their sins and praying for absolution.

Hell no. They’re roaming the streets, committing more robberies, rapes, murders, whatever, at will.

They know the court system is so clogged that they can just ignore it, thumb their nose at it.

Jesus, what a mess…