Justice for All and Mercy Toward None – That was my motto. I was, what many people called, a vigilante. I never planned on becoming one, but sometimes life has a strange way of changing you.

My younger brother, Ted, owned a liquor store on the north side of town. Two years ago, one steamy hot July night, some punk shot him at close range in an armed robbery. The police were unable to find the suspect. To make matters worse, they had little evidence, no eyewitnesses, and no description of the person who killed my brother. That's when I decided to take the law into my own hands.

I did my own crime scene investigation, disappointingly resulting in no more information than the police report and the local newspapers. But when I started asking questions around the neighborhood, I finally began to see the light at the end of the tunnel, as they say. A few of the folks who had been afraid to talk to the police weren't so shy with me.

Take Jack Murton, for example. Jack lived a block away from the package store. He told me several punks had held up a 7-11 and a small grocery store in the area a few weeks before my brother got killed. He said one of the punks went by the name of Sparky. Sparky, or Sylvester Zaremba, was the ring leader. They called him Sparky because he always had a cigarette hanging from his lips and would always ask someone if they had a light, or as he called it, "a spark."

And there was Mrs. Margolis, who lived in the apartment across the street. She didn't witness the robbery or the murder, but she knew who Sparky was, and she claimed to have seen him walk into the liquor store moments before the crime.

Then I spoke with a young couple who did not tell me their names. They were hanging out in the area that night in July. They both said they saw a man who fit Sparky's description nervously running down the street with what they believed to be a pistol in his hand.

After hearing a few more leads, I was ready to make my move. One of my informants had told me I could find Sparky hanging out at the pool hall down the street almost every night. Or, if he wasn't there, he most likely was next door at Murphy's Bar.

Sparky had medium-length jet-black hair slicked back and usually wore a blue denim jacket over a white tee shirt. Sometimes he wore a lightweight red spring jacket. If the weather was too warm, he just wore a tee shirt, always white. His pants were usually blue jeans but sometimes black. He always wore the same black and white cowboy boots – those and the dangling unlit cigarette may as well have been his trademark.

So, one night I glanced in the poolroom window – no Sparky.

Then I casually stepped into Murphy's bar.

Story and Illustration Copyright© 2022 by Michael DeFrancesco