The Vigilantes

The Vigilantes

1834 Callowhill Street
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Saturday, October 31, 7:30 P.M.

Will Curtis, a frail fifty-four-year-old, was sitting slumped against the driver’s door of his rusty Chevrolet Malibu when the thoughts suddenly hit again, causing him to wince and grunt. He quickly pulled his right hand from the .45 gap Glock Model 37 semiautomatic pistol beside him on the seat, stabbed at the dash to turn off the radio, then smacked at the brim of his grease-smeared red-and-blue FedEx cap, knocking it from his head. With the fingers of both hands, he began rubbing his sweaty temples.

Goddamn these flashbacks! he thought.
The fingertips pressed harder and deeper in a futile attempt to make the mental images vanish.
Damn them all to hell!

Only six months earlier, Curtis had been what he’d thought of as bulky, standing at five-eleven and weighing two-ten. But now he had withered to a sickly one-sixty. His jeans, T-shirt, and denim jacket were ill-fitting, hanging on him so loosely they looked as if they belonged to someone far bigger. His close-cropped silver hair was damn near disappearing, and his formerly warm gray eyes were becoming more and more hollowed and distant in his slight if somewhat hard face.

Curtis felt he was fast becoming a miserable shell of the man he’d been. He had gone from fearing nothing and no one to being scared shitless to, now, just not giving a good goddamn anymore.

He wasn’t sure what was most responsible for that—the constant stress from the mental anguish that caused the flashbacks, or the aftereffects of the intense chemotherapy treatments to slow the aggressive cancer they’d first found in his prostate.

Probably both.

Easily one or the other—especially that fucking chemo that makes me shit my shorts like some sorry bedridden invalid—but probably both.

The flashback scenes torturing Will Curtis were of the brutal sexual assault of his only child, Wendy. After leaving a pub late on the night of Saint Patrick’s Day almost eighteen months ago, his beautiful, bubbly, twenty-four-year-old daughter had been attacked in her apartment.

She was just two years out of college!
Just beginning to enjoy a full life!

Triggered by the slightest of things—for example, hearing a song she liked, which had just happened as he sat listening to the radio in the Malibu, or driving past Geno’s and smelling her favorite cheesesteaks—the flashbacks would suddenly hammer him. They were grotesquely lit and
viciously vivid, showing the attack in her bedroom again and again from damn near every possible angle.

Copyright © 2010 by William E. Butterworth IV All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorized editions.