AllFreeNovel
Share Us
What the hell does that mean?
“TH” was Tony Harris—age thirty-eight, slight of build and starting to bald—who was widely regarded as a really good guy and a really good Homicide detective. He had worked closely with Matt and Sergeant Jim Byrth of the Texas Rangers last month when they’d tracked down Juan Paulo Delgado.
And the Black Buddha was their boss, Lieutenant Jason Washington, head of the Homicide Unit. He was a g
reat big bear of a man—six-foot-three and two hundred twenty-five pounds, with very dark skin. Washington, well-spoken, superbly tailored, and highly respected, did not consider the nickname unflattering. “I’m damn sure black, Matthew,” he said in his deep, sonorous voice. “And Buddha, the ‘enlightened one,’ surely is a wise man. I have no problem wearing that badge with pride.”
“So,” Amanda said softly, “I guess since you’ve been working the pop-and-drops, we’re done for the evening?”
Someone in the city was shooting fugitives. These particular ones were wanted on outstanding arrest warrants for crimes against women and children. He had not told Amanda that their crimes were sexual in nature.
After “popping” a sex offender at point-blank range, the shooter then transported the body to the nearest police district headquarters, “dropping” it off in the parking lot with a copy of the perp’s Wanted information—a computer printout downloaded from one of various Internet websites listing fugitives—stapled to some part of his clothing.
Thus, “pop-and-drop.”
Not that anyone’s complaining that the scum of society is being swept from the streets for good, Payne had thought.
But as Jason Washington said, “Murder’s murder, Matthew. And who knows what the shooter might escalate to next?”
Matt Payne hadn’t figured out how in hell the shooter had been able to get so close to any of the district HQ buildings without being caught in the act of dumping a body. So far it had happened five times in about as many weeks, and the department had been able to keep the incidents quiet—which meant away from the news media—while the brass finally found someone who was available to take the cases and try to piece together who the hell the doer or doers might be. A lucky Sergeant Payne, stuck at his desk assignment, had been chosen.
Matt turned, kissed Amanda on the forehead, and said, “Hold on, baby.”
Matt reached back over to the side table and fished around in its drawer until he came up with a remote control. He thumbed the ON button and the sixty-inch flat-screen television mounted on the wall made a humming sound and its screen began to glow.
He punched in from memory the channel of the local Fox station, and it was clear a live news report was being broadcast. In the bottom left-hand corner was confirmation: A small box alternately blinked the FOX29 logotype and the phrase “News Now, News You Can Use.” A white bar also ran diagonally over the left top corner of the image, and it flashed red text: “REPORTING LIVE at 11:21 P.M. from Old City.”
As the red and blue emergency lights from the police vehicles flashed, the news camera panned down the narrow tree-lined street. On the red brick sidewalk were curious bystanders—Payne noticed more than a few in Halloween costumes—held back by a length of yellow crime-scene tape.
Payne’s eyes went to the ticker of text scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen: BREAKING NEWS . . . TWO MEN FOUND BOUND AND SHOT DEAD . . . ONE IS A 25-YEAR-OLD WANTED ON AN OUTSTANDING BENCH WARRANT . . . ARREST WARRANT WAS FOR FAILURE TO APPEAR IN MUNICIPAL COURT ON TWO COUNTS OF INTENT TO DELIVER A CONTROLLED SUBSTANCE . . . THE OTHER DEAD MAN IS A CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYER, ABOUT AGE 50 . . . BOTH BODIES DUMPED AT LEX TALIONIS OFFICES . . . POLICE WITHHOLDING NAMES PENDING NOTIFICATION OF FAMILIES OF THE DECEASED . . . BREAKING NEWS . . .
Then the camera cut away from the shot of the sidewalk and the TV screen suddenly filled with an awkwardly tight shot. It showed the jowly face of an almost bald man wearing a dark rumpled suit coat and a wrinkled white shirt with no necktie. The emergency lights bathed him in pulses of red and blue.
“Oh, hell!” Matt said. “That’s a bit more of good ole Five-Eff than I’d care to see.”
Then, in a jerky motion, the camera lens pulled back.
Amanda looked at the TV screen. She recognized the man, who now was shown head-to-toe in front of a nice but old brick building. He was in his mid-forties, short and stout with a small defined gut. He had a round face and wore, perched at the end of his bulbous nose, tiny round reading eyeglasses.
He stood addressing a small crowd of news media types. Reporters held microphones to the portly man’s face, almost touching his big nose, as well as camera lenses, both still and video.
“‘Five-Eff ’?” she repeated. “I thought Frank Fuller was ‘Four-Eff.’”
Payne turned to her and smiled. He said, “Fucking Frances Franklin Fuller the Fifth. That makes five.”
[THREE]
Matt Payne’s family had known Francis Fuller’s as long as Matt could remember. They had many connections, both social and professional, and while Payne did not actively dislike the man, he had on more than one occasion called him Five-Eff to his face—and that almost always had happened when Fuller was being a pompous ass.
Payne otherwise addressed Fuller as “Francis,” knowing full well (and purposely ignoring) that Fuller preferred the more masculine “Frank.”
Fuller boldly and shamelessly touted the fact that he traced his family lineage—and what he called its puritanical ways—back to Benjamin Franklin. Fuller fancied himself a devout Franklinite, mimicking his ancestor from his looks to his philosophical beliefs. Fuller regularly sprinkled his conversations with quotes from Poor Richard’s Almanac and other Ben Franklin sources. And like the multitalented Franklin, Francis Fuller was involved in all kinds of enterprises, private and public.
Payne somewhat begrudgingly admired Fuller for having built on the wealth he’d been born into, because he himself had enjoyed being raised, as he called it, “comfortably”—though certainly not nearly on the level of the super-wealthy Fullers—and he’d seen many others piss away vast sums of money that they had done nothing to earn and, he believed, thus did not deserve.
Fuller’s primary company—Richard Saunders Holdings, which he’d taken from the name Franklin had used to write Poor Richard’s Almanac—had many entities. There was KeyCom, the Fortune 500 nationwide telecommunications corporation that he’d built city by city by buying up local community cable television providers. And KeyCargo Import-Exports, which was one of the largest leasers of warehouse space at the Port of Philadelphia, which was easily visible from another of Fuller’s holdings—the Hops Haus Tower—which fell under his KeyProperties.
With so much financial wealth came a great deal of influence, and Francis Fuller had political connections from Washington, D.C., to Harrisburg to Philly’s City Hall and police department. He was more or less happy to share with all both his wealth and his opinions, though sometimes far more of the latter than the former. And in terms of the latter, Fuller was a devout believer in the Bible’s an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
