[Lady Justice 07] - Lady Justice and the Vigilante Read online

  “I understand. I apologize.”

  I was afraid he was going to send me to the principal’s office.

  Having been thoroughly chastised, I decided to take a stroll by Price’s room.

  All three of us had been keeping an eye on it and now it was my turn.

  Ed Jacobs was livid.

  He had just read the morning headline in the Star,

  “Vigilante Strikes Again, But Victim Survives!”

  He realized that he had made his first mistake.

  The old .22 just couldn’t do enough damage.

  He wouldn’t make that same mistake again.

  He knew he needed to finish the job, but he also knew the cops would be looking for him.

  If he were going to succeed, he would just have to be smarter than them.

  It was time to reach into his collection of disguises.

  His first task would be to check out the situation and who better to roam the hospital halls unnoticed than the lowly janitor.

  He spent his first afternoon locating Price’s room. He was surprised that there were no uniformed officers on watch. He suspected that they had someone undercover.

  He saw the usual doctors, nurses and orderlies as well as an older candy striper.

  Another custodian named Lenny directed him to the laundry area where he found a doctor’s smock that he carefully tucked away.

  That night, he carefully crafted a badge bearing the Truman Hospital logo with his new name. He gathered the badge, a stethoscope, a clipboard and the smock and after carefully applying his makeup, he was ready to go.

  He had watched who was coming and going in the halls and when everything was clear but the old candy striper, he decided to make his move.

  The candy striper had entered Price’s room and he followed close behind.

  When she saw him, she dutifully stepped aside.

  He approached the monitors and pretended to compare the current read-out with the clipboard he was carrying.

  He turned, and with a serious look on his face, he addressed the woman.

  “We have a problem. This man’s electrolytes are spiking. I need to run some tests.”

  He looked at her name badge, “Uhhh, Fanny, could you please run to the nurse’s station and ask them to bring a Henway Machine to the room? Stat!”

  The woman looked at the doctor’s name badge, “Sure, Dr. Guistizia. I’m on the way.”

  As soon as he was sure that the candy striper was gone, he withdrew a syringe from his smock and injected the contents into Price’s angiocatheter.

  He watched Price’s body tense and then relax.

  When he was sure that the drug had taken effect, he slipped out into the hall.

  I had just reached the nurses station when a monitor started beeping.

  A nurse looked at the monitor and immediately picked up a microphone.

  “Code blue! Code blue!”

  There was a flurry of activity as a doctor and several nurses pushing carts loaded with all kinds of stuff rushed down the hall.

  To my horror, I saw them enter Price’s room.

  Ox and Judy met me in the hall outside his door.

  I relayed what had just transpired.

  “It looked like everything was fine when the doctor sent me to ask for a Henway Machine.”

  I saw the look on Judy’s face. “Henway! You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  “What? What’s a Henway?”

  She just shook her head. “About three pounds.”

  I looked at Ox, “Do you have any idea what she’s talking about?”

  Ox shrugged his shoulders.

  “Henway!” she said again. “Don’t you get it? What’s a hen weigh? About three pounds!”

  Then I got it. I’d been duped.

  “At least the guy’s got a sense of humor,” Ox said.

  At that moment the doctor and nurses came out of the room shaking their heads.

  “We couldn’t save him.”

  “What killed him?” Judy asked.

  “We won’t know until we do an autopsy, but my guess is that something was injected into his angiocatheter. How could this have happened?”

  I relayed my story for a second time.

  “I wasn’t about to argue with another doctor. I had just got my ass eaten out by one.”

  “Did you see the doctor’s name?”

  “Yes, it was a weird one --- Giustizia, or something like that.”

  The doctor thought for a minute, “We don’t have anyone on staff by that name.”

  A nurse standing close by spoke up. “Giustizia! That’s the Italian word for ‘justice’.”

  I wasn’t sure how we were going to explain this to the captain.

  CHAPTER 7

  The press had a field day with our latest blunder.

  The department was already reeling from the latest blow to its creditability delivered at the hand of Suzanne Romero.

  The fact that we had let the vigilante whack the same guy twice only added fuel to the fire.

  Headlines screamed, “VIGILANTE CLEANING UP DEPARTMENT’S MESS!”

  Every politician and pundit put in their two cents worth and every newscast had interviews with citizens on the street.

  Advocates decried the liberal laws that seemed to give more protection to the criminals than the victims.

  “In the United States today, where lawyers have tied the hands of law enforcement personnel to the point of police being rendered completely impotent, we see nothing wrong with an individual taking it upon themselves to stop crimes where they may be happening. This is not revenge. This is not criminal. This is right.”

  Victims and Citizens Against Crime spoke out boldly. “People think a victim’s nightmare ends when the attack is over. Not so. The nightmare is only beginning. For some, the shock and pain of what they now face at the hands of our criminal justice system can be as painful as the shock of being mugged, raped or having a loved one murdered.

  “Victims feel disenfranchised, isolated and even treated like criminals.

  “They may suffer untold emotional grief, financial hardship and public humiliation, only to watch the offender become the center of attention in a legal system that goes to great lengths to protect the rights of the criminal. It is time to balance the scales and make the system more sensitive to the rights and needs of the victim.”

  Detractors screamed ‘MURDER’ and said that the vigilante was even worse than the offenders he was killing.

  “Vigilante justice has been used to justify some of the vilest forms of violence in the history of this country. Many people have a view of what justice is and get bent out of shape if that view is not what is dealt. The only way to have a civil society is to follow the law and if we don’t like it, work to change it. Otherwise, we are all subject to the punishment of what some other person views as justice.”

  Whoever it is that keeps track of these things reported that the vigilante’s supporters outnumbered his detractors by a three to one margin.

  Another byproduct of the vigilante’s work was a groundswell movement against crime throughout the city.

  Retailers and pawnshops reported a significant jump in the sale of firearms and ‘concealed carry’ classes were filled to capacity.

  We also noticed a trend of a different nature.

  Prior to the emergence of the vigilante, the majority of our emergency calls involved taking the statements of victims who had been robbed, mugged or raped.

  As the days rolled by, more and more of these calls found perps being held at gunpoint or laying in a pool of blood.

  Ox and I were patrolling midtown when a call came through.

  “Car 54, what’s your twenty?”

  “Thirty-fourth and Broadway.”

  “Proceed to Westport Road and Pennsylvania. We have a report of shots fired.”

  When we arrived, a crowd had gathered around a red Ford Fairlane in the lot of a convenience store.

  A middle-aged man wa
s behind the wheel and a woman of the same age sat in the passenger seat.

  A man in his mid-twenties with long, dirty dreadlocks and a face full of studs was prostrate on the ground.

  The driver held up a snub nosed .38 by one finger. “Here, Officer. I figure you’ll be wanting this.”

  “What happened here?” Ox asked, relieving the driver of his gun.

  “We just stopped here to pick up some things,” he said, pointing to a bag in the back seat, “and this guy approached our car and started waving a gun and telling us to get out of the car.

  “So I just popped open my console where I keep the .38 and shot him. I figured it was either him or us.”

  “I don’t see a gun,” Ox said, looking around.

  “It’s under the body,” an onlooker offered. “He fell on it.”

  “Did you see what happened?” I asked.

  “Sure did. It was just like this fellow said. I saw it all.”

  Ox rolled the body and found a 9mm Glock.

  So there it was --- self-defense pure and simple.

  That evening, when I got to the apartment, my old friend, Professor Skinner, was just returning from his afternoon constitutional.

  He noticed that I was a bit wrung out.

  “Bad day, Walt?”

  I told him about the shooting of the carjacker.

  “Bernhard Goetz”

  The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  “Who is Bernhard Goetz and what does he have to do with anything?”

  “Bernhard Goetz was the Subway Vigilante.

  “During the eighties, crime was rampant in New York.

  “Goetz was riding the subway when he was accosted by four young punks who tried to mug him.

  “He pulled a gun and shot all four.

  “He was charged with attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment and several firearms offenses.

  “The subsequent trial initiated the first real nationwide debate on vigilantism.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Much the same thing that is happening in our fair city. Public sentiment overwhelmingly supported Goetz.

  “The jury included six people who had been mugging victims, consequently Goetz was found not guilty on all charges except illegal possession of a firearm. He served two-thirds of a one year sentence.”

  “And that applies to us how?”

  “Goetz became a cultural hero. People realized they didn’t have to be victims.

  “They armed themselves and fought back. In the years following the subway shooting, New York went from being one of the most dangerous cities with a population over 100,000 to one of the safest.

  “Criminals backed off not knowing if their next victim would be packing heat.”

  “So you’re all for this vigilante thing?”

  “I didn’t say that.

  “It’s one thing for an individual to defend himself when being attacked. It’s quite another when a man assumes the role of judge, jury and executioner.

  “If everyone operated on that premise, we would be right back to Dodge City, Kansas in the early eighteen hundreds. The biggest, baddest guy with the biggest gun was the law.

  “I hope we’ve evolved beyond that.”

  I said ‘good night’ to the Professor and climbed the stairs.

  Maggie met me at the door. “Hurry, you’re on TV.”

  The featured story on the news was our carjacking gone bad.

  The cameras had captured Ox and me cordoning off the crime scene and taking statements from witnesses.

  A reporter had approached me, but as instructed by the captain, all I could say was ‘no comment’.

  Realizing that they weren’t going to get a sound bite from the cops, the reporter began interviewing onlookers.

  Public sentiment was most definitely on the side of the intended victim.

  Some of those interviewed waxed philosophical.

  “A gun in the hand is better than a cop on the phone.”

  Maggie giggled and punched me in the arm.

  Others were more serious.

  “An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a victim.”

  Our city was in a period of transition due to the actions of this vigilante and as far as I could see, there was no end in sight.

  As wire services picked up the stories of the vigilante killings and the groundswell of citizens defending themselves against crime, Kansas City became a focal point in the ongoing national debate pitting gun control advocates against those championing the Second Amendment.

  The first to hit town was the National Rifle Association, the foremost advocate of the right of the average citizen to bear arms.

  Members of the Brady Center who were leading the battle for federal gun control laws soon followed them.

  Local TV stations were quick to air interviews with members of both groups.

  The NRA argued that the Second Amendment of the Constitution guarantees individuals the right to own and carry guns. They also argued that if law-abiding citizens have guns, they are safer from criminals, bringing crime rates down.

  The Brady Center countered with statistics from The New England Journal of Medicine, stating that “keeping a gun in the home makes it 2.7 times more likely that someone will be a victim of homicide in the home (in almost all cases the victim is either related to or intimately acquainted with the murderer) and 4.8 times more likely that someone will commit suicide, and that research has shown that a gun kept in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a member of the household, or friend, than an intruder.”

  In spite of all the statistics quoted by the Brady Center, it seemed that Kansas Citians wanted no part in the government meddling with their right to pack a six-gun.

  One of the more popular propaganda tools of the NRA was ‘The Armed Citizen’.

  It was a feature in their quarterly magazine and a fixture on their website where they related stories from all across the United States of ordinary citizens foiling crime and repelling attackers with everything from hatpins to twelve gauge shotguns.

  Naturally, our local heroes were interviewed and became instant celebrities.

  In their interviews they quoted timeworn slogans like, ‘if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns’.

  When confronted with the Brady Center statistics, they countered with, ‘if guns cause crime, then pencils cause misspelled words’.

  All of this, of course, was a nightmare for the Kansas City Police Department.

  They were between a rock and a hard place.

  The vigilante was, without question, breaking the law and there was no choice but to use all the resources of the department to bring him in.

  The failure of the department to do so made them a laughing stock and it was obvious that the majority of citizens were hoping he wouldn’t be caught.

  While the last high-profile case had been Damien Price, it was quite apparent to investigators that the vigilante was hard at work.

  Every week, police were summoned to some remote alley or warehouse where the body of a known felon was found shot to death.

  The police tried to keep a lid on these executions, not wanting to fan the flames of support for the man who was methodically exterminating the vermin of Kansas City.

  Ed Jacobs was amused by all of the hullabaloo he had caused.

  He watched all of the interviews on TV, both those calling him a murderer as well as those labeling him a hero.

  He took personal satisfaction in seeing the man on the street fighting back against the criminal element.

  After the Damien Price execution, Ed realized that, so far, his war against crime had been reactive.

  His retaliation had come against criminals that had slipped through the loopholes of the legal system.

  He decided that it was now time to become proactive.

  He remembered that in Death Wish, Paul Kersey had taken a similar route.

  In order to lure the bad guys into the ope
n, he had used himself as bait, flashing wads of cash and carrying expensive cameras in dangerous neighborhoods.

  The plan had certainly worked, but Kersey had gotten himself shot and stabbed for his trouble.

  Ed wanted no part of that.

  So the question was how to gain access to information about the scum terrorizing the streets without exposing himself to danger.

  He reasoned that if one wanted to know what was happening on the streets, one should listen to the people on the streets.

  He could think of no better place to rub elbows with the street people than at the local soup kitchens.

  He did some research and decided that the best place to go was the Salvation Army.

  Not only did they have a soup kitchen that provided hot meals every day, they also had a temporary shelter for the homeless and a battered women program.

  The Army was always looking for volunteers and soon, Ed Jacobs was a regular fixture on the serving line of the soup kitchen, always watching, always listening.

  He was perfectly safe and more important, who would ever suspect that the retired senior, ladling soup into the bowls of the homeless, was the notorious vigilante.

  CHAPTER 8

  While most of us in the squad were pre-occupied with the vigilante case, there was one among us whose thoughts were drawn in another direction.

  Saying that Ox was ‘smitten’ was like calling the Grand Canyon a ‘ditch’.

  The guy was head over heels.

  Since our night at the spook house, Ox and Judy had been out to supper several times and seen a couple of movies.

  Each morning, when I quizzed him about how things were going, I always got the stock answer, “Fine --- just fine. We’re --- uhhh --- taking it slow.”

  Then, one evening, Maggie and I were watching a movie on the tube when we heard a knock.

  I opened the door to find my old friend standing there, white as a ghost, with a pathetic look on his face.

  “Ox, what’s wrong? Are you OK?”

  He nodded his head ‘yes’ and then he shook his head ‘no’.