Urgent Justice: Vigilante Justice Thriller Series with Jack Lamburt

By John Etzil

 

"With intense action scenes, cutting dialogue and sparse, mood-setting language, Etzil maintains the same relentless tone and pace of his earlier books"

 

"Etzil does a very good job of slowly cranking up the pace and the intensity, releasing the valve with occasional moments of levity"

 

"Etzil has carved out a well-deserved following with his Jack Lamburt series"

 

-Self-Publishing Review

A small-town sheriff will catch a predator, come hell or high water…

 

Nothing raises Sheriff Jack Lamburt's hackles like a child in danger. After a local orphaned teen disappears under suspicious circumstances, he vows to bring her home safe. And there'll be no escape from the world of pain he'll leave in his wake…

 

To track down the missing girl's abductor, Jack teams up with the only resident who can spot the culprit out of a crowd—a feisty 90-year-old with a taste for rye whiskey and revenge. But what was supposed to be a recon-only road trip soon takes a treacherous turn. And the two traveling companions find themselves fighting for survival in a crooked town overrun with the vicious disciples of a sexual predator and self-proclaimed prophet.

To save the girl, Jack will have to bring the entire unholy criminal network to its day of reckoning…

 

Urgent Justice is the standalone spin-off book in the best selling series of vigilante thrillers starring Sheriff Jack Lamburt. If you like non-stop action, high-tech crime solving, and brutal violence, then you'll love John Etzil's gritty tale.

 

Buy Urgent Justice, and buckle up for a wild road trip to revenge, today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Etzil
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393574309

Book preview

1

Meeting His Maker

I pressed the tip of my Glock 17 against his forehead. He was sprawled flat on his back on the plush white carpet of his office. I pinned him down with my knee across his belly, forcing his old and out-of-shape gut to support most of my two hundred and twenty pounds. He struggled to catch his breath and wheezed like a four-pack-a-day smoker who’d just sprinted up a few flights of stairs.

He was in his mid-sixties and had short white hair combed to one side. A nice button-up shirt along with navy slacks and expensive shoes completed his appearance of a man well-respected in the community. His clean-shaven face was drained of color, an odd mixture of pasty white with shades of gray, and I could see a bluish tint forming around his dried-up lips from lack of oxygen.

Well? What’s it going to be? I asked in a pleasant voice, as if I were a waiter taking his food order down at the diner, or a non-pushy salesman helping him select the interior color of his new Chevy Volt.

No answer.

I pressed the pistol harder against him, transferring some of my weight from his stomach to his forehead, where a little red ring formed on the indented skin that surrounded my gun barrel. He cried out and turned his head to one side to try and alleviate the pressure.

I don’t have all night. Tell me what I want to know, or die.

Please…

I ran out of patience. Please nothing. Close your eyes.

He squeezed them shut, forcing out tears. They ran down the side of his face and pooled in his ear before overflowing and dripping onto the carpet.

I didn’t want to do this, but he left me no choice. Damn him.

I usually took better care of my hearing, knowing full well that once the tiny hair follicles that line the inner ear were damaged, they couldn’t be repaired. My ears were already ringing from multiple gunshots today, and I had a terrible headache, maybe even concussed, from being knocked out twice in the last twenty-four hours. The non-silenced 9mm blast that I was about to fire off was only going to make things worse. When I got my hands on that thief who’d stolen my Glock silencer…

I adjusted the gun and pressed my free hand over my ear in an attempt to lessen the damage from the blast. I squeezed the trigger.

That was loud. Bowel evacuation. Him, not me. I held my breath and said a silent prayer of thanks that I didn’t have to clean any of this mess up.

White carpets are a bitch.

2

Cecile’s Orphanage

The Friday Before

As sheriff, I’d witnessed a long list of things that would be upsetting to most people: senseless violence, human beings decimated by drugs, domestic abuse, and the granddaddy of them all, death. That didn’t bother me, though. As long as there wasn’t a child or other helpless person involved, I was fine with it. Like most rational adults, I had a soft spot in my otherwise hardened soul for kids, and as I sat at the kitchen table of the Happy Home Orphanage and interviewed the owner, Cecile, a gut feeling of sadness crept over me.

Cecile took off her glasses and dabbed at her moist eyes with a ratty old embroidered handkerchief she had in one hand, while holding her husband’s hand on her lap with the other. Thanks to a bad diet, I calculated that she was eighty pounds overweight and had adult-onset diabetes. The silver-haired lady looked twenty years older than her sixty-two years. I glanced down at the floor and realized with a shudder that she had small half-open scabs running up and down her calves and ankles. Whooff.

In between tears and sniffles, Cecile explained in great detail how she’d tried to make troubled little Wendy Connor’s life perfect. Or as perfect as it could be when your parents abandoned you on the front steps of the church rectory a few days after you were born. Poor Wendy had bounced around from orphanage to foster home to orphanage for over fourteen years. What a terrible start to life. Not many kids could handle that kind of abandonment, and Cecile made it sound like Wendy wasn’t one of them.

When Cecile had gone to Wendy’s room this morning for the usual wake-up, the troubled teen was gone. Picked up and left in the middle of the night. No note. No nothing. She’d taken a backpack and some clothes, and that was it.

Cecile and her husband, Hardy, had owned and managed the Happy Home Orphanage for decades, and on initial appearances, they ran a nice home. A large yet simple two-story colonial surrounded by twenty-one acres on a quiet side street in the bucolic Cobleskill, New York. It had a little stream that ran along the back of the hilly Sound of Music–like landscape. Plenty of room for the little tykes, all seventeen of them—well, sixteen now—to run around and burn off all of their youthful energy.

There was one problem. Runaways. In the last nineteen months, the Happy Home Orphanage had had three times the national average for runaways from an orphanage. Wendy was the latest of four. All of the runaways were female, and all were fourteen or fifteen years old. Hmm…

I sat and listened to Cecile pour her heart out, trying not to look at her scab-covered ankles. While I should have been paying attention to her ramblings, my mind drifted to why anyone with legs that hideous would wear a dress.

I had to say something to get my mind back on task. Did Wendy have any money saved up that you know about?

No.

Any friends outside of the orphanage? Someone who might be helping her?

Not that I know of.

What about online friends?

We don’t allow the internet here.

Boyfriends?

No.

How about friends from school? Did she ever mention anybody?

No, she pretty much stayed to herself. Her therapist says that she has trust issues.

Do you have any recent photos of her?

Yeah, I figured that you’d want one. She reached into her apron pocket and handed me a coffee-stained manila envelope. I opened it. Inside was an old Polaroid, of all things, of a cute little dark-haired girl who looked to be about ten or eleven.

A Polaroid? I asked. How old is she here? Is this the only photo that you have of her?

Yeah. Hardy’s our photographer. He’s a good man, but he’s not big on technology. She squeezed his hand and looked at him with a small smile. She was eleven when that photo was taken.

By state law, you are supposed to have current photos of every child. Please make that happen with the rest of them. I stood up and stuck my hand out to shake hers, trying not to look at her cankles. Even in my peripheral vision, they demanded my attention, jumping up and down and arm-waving like the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders.

Thank you for your time. We’ll let you know as soon as we find her. I shook Hardy’s hand. It was damp and limp. I’d interviewed him earlier in the day, and he’d been of no help. He didn’t interact with the kids. He spent his day doing handyman jobs around the house, taking care of the few sheep and goats that they had, and keeping up with the wide expanse of grass via his bright red Farmall tractor with mowing attachment. After a long day in the field, he’d fill his beer belly up during dinner, which he chowed down while couched out in front of his TV.

I didn’t trust him.

I put on my hat and left.

Orphanages are not a lucrative business, but that’s the point. You’re supposed to get into the orphanage business because you have a strong desire to help kids. Not for the money. And although Cecile and Hardy might have started out the right way when they’d hung the Happy Home sign on their house over twenty years ago, the last couple of years had been too strange to ignore.

New York orphanages go through rigorous inspections on a regular basis, some unannounced, to try and catch things that shouldn’t be going on. The Happy Home Orphanage had, up until the last nineteen months, done very well. They still did well during inspections; they just didn’t do very well in keeping children. Don’t get me wrong, children run away from orphanages all the time. But almost every single one comes back after a day or two on their own, especially if they were located in the middle of a huge forest, like the one that surrounds Cobleskill. They’d quickly realize after a night of sleeping in the woods and getting feasted on by mosquitoes that they were much better off in the orphanage. Even if they weren’t happy.

But every single one of Cecile’s runaways in the past nineteen months was still missing…

3

HFS

I’d taken this job as sheriff in a sleepy little upstate New York town because I needed a cover for my life’s mission.