The First Sixteen: A Vigilante Series crime thriller novella - The Prequel Read online

  With all the data I had on the man literally at my fingertips, tracking him down had been a no-brainer and I had quickly been able to determine his comings and goings. Divorced a number of years earlier and without a current partner, Chet’s pastime most evenings was knocking back a few cold ones at a local sports bar in the West Island sector where he lived. The place was close enough that he probably walked when the weather was milder and, by the same token, he ran little risk of any DUI consequences by taking the car on colder or inclement evenings.

  He worked the day shift starting at seven on weekdays at some manufacturing firm so he generally called it quits at the bar around ten or so weeknights, headed home, had a nightcap or two then hit the sack. I knew because I had been watching him for over a week. As it turned out, that was exactly what he was planning that night as well, which is what I expected.

  At about ten-fifteen, I saw his big Chrysler Newport turn into the driveway and roll out of sight as he parked in the carport on the far side of the house. I moved away from the front bedroom window and crossed the bungalow’s hallway into the rear bedroom. Chet apparently used it mostly for storage so I had little concern of him walking in there and finding me. The muffled rumble of the car’s engine ceased and, a moment later, I heard the side door opening and Chet entered, closing and locking the door behind him. So far, so good.

  Light filtered down the hallway as he flicked a switch in the kitchen and, seconds later, more light shone, followed by the sound of him urinating in the home’s sole bathroom. The toilet flushed and I heard him returning to the kitchen, his vinyl slippers sliding against the linoleum floor. The rattling of condiment jars and such told me he was into the refrigerator which was soon confirmed by the snapping pop of a beer can tab. A few more sliding, shuffling steps ensued, their sound ending as he entered the carpeted living room off the hallway opposite from the kitchen. The television came on and I heard Chet grunt, belch and sigh as he dropped his overweight form into his recliner. Show time.

  Soundlessly, I made my way down the hallway and entered the living room behind him, the back of his recliner conveniently facing me. He was seated in a semi-reclined position, his legs sprawled apart on the raised footrest, his opened can of beer in one hand as he fondled himself through his opened fly with the other. I stared in disgust at the television screen which displayed the images of a man well into his forties or more engaging in sexual activity with a girl of no more than ten.

  Pressing the end of the steel pipe I held against the back of Chet’s head, I said, “If you move, you’re dead, understand?”

  Chet stiffened in his seat but, believing my steel pipe was actually the muzzle of a large bore gun, he nodded and remained perfectly still.

  “Good man, Chester,” I said. “As long as you behave yourself, you and I are going to get along just fine. Now, take your hand out of your pants and reach over slowly to that VCR remote. I want you to turn that crap off because it’s making me sick.”

  He did exactly as I asked, the only part of him moving being his right arm as he reached over to the side table and located the remote. To his credit, he didn’t even turn his head but rather found the device by feel. Seconds later, the television screen turned blue as he powered off the VCR.

  “Atta boy,” I told him. “Stick with that attitude and I’ll be out of here before you know it.”

  “Who are you?” he rasped. “What do you want from me?”

  “I want some answers, Chet,” I replied. “I want to ask you some questions and I want some honest answers from you.”

  “What’s this about?” Chet insisted. “I’m nobody important. I’m just a shop worker making a living. What questions could you want to ask me?”

  “Aw, Chet, you’re underestimating yourself,” I said. “You’re far from nobody. I saw you on television. You’re practically a celebrity.”

  “This is about Janie, isn’t it?” Chet muttered. “Did the little bitch’s friends put you up to this?”

  “That’s no way to talk about your daughter,” I said, jabbing him on the back of the head with the pipe. “She’s dead because of you. What kind of a father are you?”

  “I don’t know who the hell you are,” Chet replied, apparently gaining some courage but remaining smart enough to stay still, “But she put me through hell with her damned accusations and taking me to court like a damned pervert. Nearly cost me my job and I could’ve ended up in prison if the law wasn’t like it is. If you knew the half of what she put me through, you’d call her a hell of a lot worse, mister, whether she’s dead or not.”

  Visions of my sister, Donna, flashed through my mind and I had to make a conscious effort to not bash his skull to a pulp with the pipe in my hands.

  “We’re getting off the subject, Chester,” I said, keeping my tone relaxed and calm. “Like I said before, I want to ask you some questions and I want you to answer them. No bullshit, no pretending anything was other than what it was. We need to do this to clear both our consciences. Okay?”

  Chet huffed. “Whatever, asshole. Ask me your damned questions. I have to work in the morning.”

  Clearly, Chet had reached a point of overconfidence with the given situation. I brought the pipe back and smashed him in the left temple with it, knocking him out. He slumped over to the right, completely limp and I had to check his pulse and breathing to confirm I hadn’t killed him. His heart was still beating, his breathing steady enough. Good, because I wasn’t done.

  With a roll of duct tape I’d brought along for the occasion, I bound each of his calves to the steel footrest supports then secured his wrists together, leaving his hands resting over his limp, exposed penis which still protruded from his opened fly. I finished the roll of tape by wrapping its contents across his torso, just below the rib cage, his arms across the lower biceps and around the back of the recliner several times, effectively pinning him into place.

  I checked his vitals again and determined he was still alive and kicking, just taking a nap from the tap I had given him. Confident he wasn’t going anywhere, I headed into the kitchen and found a large plastic pitcher then went to the sink and turned the cold water on. I knew it would get really cold pretty quickly at this time of the year but I let it run for a full two minutes before filling the pitcher to the brim.

  Heading back into the living room, I walked around to the front of the recliner and gazed at Chester for moment. He was still out, his head lolling to one side, but breathing steadily, slightly snoring, in fact. I shook my head in disgust then heaved the contents of the pitcher in his face.

  It revived him instantly and he immediately began to splutter and cough, likely because he had snorted some of the water as he inhaled.

  “What the hell?” he stammered, trying to move but unable to do so. He raised his head up and stared at me, his expression a mix of anger and fear. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m not a friend,” I replied, my expression supporting my statement, “And, for the record, I had nothing to do with Janie, per se, because she didn’t even know I existed. I’m here on my own accord and I want some answers to my questions.”

  Chet’s demeanor changed at that moment. He seemed to understand that something he had no control over was going on, as if fate had finally caught up with him, which it basically had.

  “Ask me your questions,” he said, his tone resigned.

  “Did you sexually abuse your daughter, Chet?” I asked. “Did you take advantage of your own child to satisfy yourself, just like that animal in the film you were watching?”

  “What do you want from me?” Chet whispered. “She’s gone. It’s over. What damned difference does it make to you?”

  “Do you realize that Janie is dead because of what you did to her, Chester?” I went on. “Do you understand that you murdered your daughter, slowly, painfully over almost three decades?”

  “You’re crazy, mister,” Chet tried to argue. “She killed herself and that was her own damned decision. She could’
ve just let go of the past and moved ahead but she was weak and gave up. She was a coward right to the end.”

  “Do you hear what you’re saying?” I asked. “You forced yourself onto a defenseless, innocent child, over and over, you refuse to admit it and now you have the gall to call her a coward? Is that your story?”

  “It is what it is,” Chet replied, apparently regaining some of his earlier confidence as he gazed at me. “Now, I don’t know who you are or what you want from me but if you’re trying to get me to make some confession so you can feel better somehow, you’re wasting your time. Maybe you’d just better cut me loose and get the hell outta here and we can pretend this never happened.”

  I stared at a spot behind him, despair and failure obvious in my expression. “So, that’s it? You’re not even going to admit feeling bad about anything? About what happened and what you did?”

  Chet studied my expression and even had a slight smile as he replied. “That’s it, mister. I can’t change anything with what happened so there’s no use making a big deal about it. Life goes on. Now, cut this damned tape off of me and, you have my word, I’ll let you go without any trouble. I won’t even call the cops once you’re gone.”

  I nodded absently as I pulled a knife out of my jeans pocket, the five inch locking blade my first victim had left with me. I stepped forward toward Chet and he actually grinned as I approached, but only for a few seconds.

  #3 - Mathieu Masson - Tuesday, February 20, 1996

  In the early evening of August 17, 1995, twenty-three year old Sylvie Theriault had been sitting on the rocking chair they kept on the front balcony of their first floor apartment, enjoying the late summer warmth. While waiting for her husband to come home from work, Sylvie had been in a lovely world of her own, gently rubbing her extended tummy as she cooed softly to the twins she was expecting at the end of September.

  Boulevard St-Michel, on which their apartment was located, had been fairly busy as usual with both vehicle and pedestrian traffic but Sylvie was used to the noise and was easily able to block it out for the most part. Paying no attention to her surroundings, she hadn’t really noticed the four young men coming along the sidewalk, members of a local street gang, which was unfortunately a fact of life in the area.

  By sheer coincidence, just as the foursome happened to walk past the building which housed Sylvie’s apartment, a car had approached heading northward. As it had neared the four gang bangers, it had slowed for a moment and the occupant seated on the passenger side had raised a semi-automatic rifle though the open window and quickly fired nine shots, the last few while the car accelerated and sped away.

  Miraculously, only two of the four intended victims had been hit and both had sustained relatively minor wounds. Sadly however, two of the nine shots had hit Sylvie, one in the throat and the other in the forehead, killing her, and consequently, her unborn twins.

  A witness, as surprising at it may seem, had noted the plate number of the car and reported it to the police. The vehicle in question had turned out to be registered to a member of a rival gang but further investigation had revealed that the owner had a solid alibi at the time of the shooting. He had been serving a thirty day jail term for some probation violation. Though a number of other gang members had been suspected of using the automobile, none had been identified as the actual offenders and the case had gone cold… with three innocent lives lost for naught.

  I had the advantage of operating on a different set of rules so when I reviewed the police case files, I was confident I could get to the bottom of this and find out who had been responsible for Sylvie Theriault’s death. The car’s owner at the time had a younger brother who had also been affiliated with the same gang. Considering the connection and that the vehicle had been parked at the family home during the owner’s thirty day incarceration, it made sense that the younger brother might have been involved or, at the very least, knew something about the incident. In fact, the car had since changed hands and was now registered to the very same younger brother.

  The police are not idiots and they had investigated the same avenue I was looking at. However, as I mentioned, they worked with a different rule book. The police interview reports I reviewed made it clear that the younger brother, Mathieu Masson, had no clear alibi at the time of the shooting. His prints had been found in his brother’s, now his car, following the incident but that had been far from definite proof. Masson had stated he had been sleeping at home when the shooting had taken place, his mother had backed up his statement, and the cops had been up against a wall.

  Since the time of the unsolved drive-by shooting, Mathieu Masson had left home and moved into his own place, a ground floor apartment on Chambord Street in one of the countless duplex and triplex row houses which made up most of the residential property in the Rosemont district. Though parking in the area could be difficult at times, Masson had no such problems as his apartment included an unattached one car garage which was accessed by the back alley.

  Humans are creatures of habit, which allowed me to establish Masson’s usual evening routine without too much effort. Between eight and nine most evenings, he’d go out to his car with his ever-present Adidas gym bag loaded up with a variety of pre-packaged dope for sale, and drive to Chez Pitt, a local drinking dive heavily frequented by drug users.

  On this particular evening, when Masson entered the standalone garage, I was waiting in a back corner, shielded from view by a pile of boxes and other junk. He went right by me as he walked around the rear end of his car, on his way to toss the gym bag in from the passenger side. Moving in behind him, I raised the tire iron I was holding and brought it down on his head, effectively knocking him unconscious. A bit of duct tape later, I had him trussed up nicely, hands behind his back, ankles bound and lying face down in the trunk with a strip or two of tape across his mouth, just in case he woke up along the way.

  I found his car keys in his jeans pocket and, after a quick look outside to make sure nobody was around, I opened up the garage’s gate-style doors and drove the car out. I didn’t bother with closing the doors behind us. I didn’t think too many people would be walking out in a back alley in the middle of winter to notice and my main priority was to get away from there as quickly as possible.

  I was still kind of new to this self-prescribed vigilante therapy program and had a lot to learn but driving around in some gang banger’s gold and silver 1987 Chevy Caprice, in his neighbourhood, I might add, wasn’t something I felt I should do for long. However, I didn’t want to deal with him at his place, not knowing if somebody might show up, so I had to get him out of there. Six or seven blocks southwest was an industrial area along the railroad tracks where I had identified an abandoned warehouse as an appropriate location at which I doubted we would be disturbed.

  We made it there without issue and I was pleased to see the fence gate remained opened as I had left it earlier. I drove the Caprice around the back and out of sight from the street, stopping by the roll-up door I had unlocked on my previous visit. Hurrying to the door, I heaved it upward, raising it just high enough to allow the car to pass. Within a minute, I’d driven inside and cut the engine, the door was lowered again and it was time to deal with Mathieu Masson.

  I turned on a battery-powered lamp which I had left at the warehouse then moved around to the rear of the car, popping the trunk while being mindful that my captive might have rolled over and be in position to kick out. However, he wasn’t, though he had started to come to. I rolled him onto one side and shifted him into a sitting position with his back to me then slid my hands under his armpits and dragged him out of the trunk and onto the concrete floor.

  “Time to wake up, buddy,” I said as I ripped the tape from his mouth.

  “Oww, hostie,” he cursed in French. “What the hell is going on?”

  “I needed to speak to you in private,” I replied, “So I brought you to this place I found where I’m pretty sure we won’t be disturbed.”

  “Why am I
tied up?” he demanded as his thoughts became more lucid. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Who I am isn’t important,” I said. “What’s important is that you answer my questions.”

  “What questions?” Masson asked, trying unsuccessfully to get into a sitting position. “What’s this all about?”

  “Here, let me help you,” I said.

  Bending over him, I grabbed the front of the leather jacket he wore and dragged him back a couple of feet before pulling him up to a seated position and leaning him against a support post.

  “There,” I said with a smile. “Now you’ll be more comfortable while you answer my questions.”

  “What questions?” he repeated. “Are you ripping me off here?”

  “Not at all,” I assured him. “I have no use for that crap you have in your bag. Now, stop interrupting me so I can ask my questions.”

  “What damned questions?” he snarled in frustration. “What’s this about?”

  “Were you driving this car during the shooting on August seventeenth last summer?” I asked. “That’s what this is about.”

  “I already told the cops everything I had to say about that,” Masson replied.

  “Well, there are a couple of problems with that,” I said. “For one, I’m not the cops and secondly, you lied to them and so did your mother. You weren’t sleeping when that shooting took place because you were driving this car right here. I want you to admit that to me.”

  “It’s like I told the cops,” Masson insisted. “This was my brother’s car then. I don’t know who was driving it but it wasn’t me.”

  “The police found your prints and your brother’s on the steering wheel, Mathieu,” I said. “That’s it, nobody else’s. Since bro was in jail, you had to be the driver.”

  “Somebody coulda been wearing gloves,” Masson argued.

  I went to the car and returned with the tire iron I had used on him back at his place.

  “You know as well as I do that the glove theory is bullshit,” I said as I examined the tire iron.