Justice

by Doug Sutherland

  That saved Jed a couple of steps in his usual feeling-out policy and convinced him to mind his own business, not to worry about stuff he didn’t have to worry about. The guy was low maintenance and Jed didn’t want to fuck it up by asking stupid questions. He provided a service, a place to sleep, and that was it, end of story.

  16

  “You all right?” Angela asked.

  “What?”

  “I just asked if you were all right.”

  “I’m okay.”

  Actually Frank felt like shit. He wasn’t used to late nights any more, and when he’d been away he hadn’t had much to drink at all. After he’d dropped Billy off he’d gone back to the house and finished off the Scotch, hadn’t gotten to sleep until well past four. He hadn’t cleaned the place up and he could see from her pursed lips and furtive looks around the kitchen that she wasn’t impressed.

  It was strange, sitting with her in the kitchen. He wondered if she felt the same way. It had been a long time since they’d had more than a casual conversation, and after the rumor mill spat out the various stories about he and Adrienne even the casual conversations had come to an abrupt end, changing into decidedly terse hellos.

  The tour of Frank’s house had been necessary, but Frank couldn’t help wondering if it had been as awkward for her as it had been for him. It didn’t help that he’d slept in late and hadn’t gone to any effort at all to spruce the place up. She knew the house well enough from when she and Frank had been seeing each other, but that had been when he was still making an effort to live like a normal human being and at least keep the place clean.

  For the few weeks it had lasted their relationship had been intensely physical, something Frank had been uncomfortably reminded about when she’d preceded him up the stairs. At one time or another they’d probably made love in virtually every room in the house, and he wondered what was in her mind when she saw them again now. Frank had felt both aroused and embarrassed at the same time, and maybe she was acting skittish for the same reason. He realized he’d been looking around the kitchen too, maybe seeing it with her eyes, but when he turned back Angie was fishing around in her designer briefcase.

  “There it is,” she said suddenly, pulled out a thin folder and put it on the table. “Thought I’d left it at home.”

  She opened the folder and made a show of examining the papers inside.

  “So what are you going to do when this sells, Frank?” she asked. “Take the money and run? Move away to a desert island somewhere?”

  “Thought crossed my mind.”

  She pulled a boilerplate listing form out of the folder, then scribbled something on a yellow Post-It note and stuck it on the top right corner of the form.

  “That’s the number I have in mind,” she said, pushing it across the table. “What do you think?”

  Frank looked down at the note.

  “I think I can forget about the desert island.”

  “Well, you’ve let things go a bit, Frank,” she hesitated, “even since I was here last. I have to sell it as a fixer-upper, and not everybody wants that. And not everybody wants to live just down the road from Billy Dancer.”

  “Billy’s harmless.”

  “Maybe,” she conceded, “but you know what this town’s like.”

  “Better than anybody.”

  She looked him in the eyes, pursed her lips.

  “Yes, Frank, I guess you do.”

  Frank didn’t say anything else, just took the pen from her hand and scribbled his signature at the bottom of the page.

  17

  Vince didn’t know this part of the state, so he’d bought an old-fashioned road map, found that there were a few other burgs of varying sizes scattered in a sixty mile radius of where he was. If he needed anything he‘d have to be disciplined about it, go out of town for even the most trivial things, avoid the kind of casual contact in Strothwood that might get him noticed.

  Tommy hadn’t spent much time there, not even a year, and the only reason he’d been there at all was because of a Strothwood girl he’d met in Boston. That was typical Tommy, always getting tangled up with women. He’d been like that since he’d been a kid, always falling in love with somebody or other, taking things far too seriously.

  This one had been different, Tommy had told him earnestly. Just like they all are, Vince had thought but didn’t say. They were sitting outside in the exercise yard and they were far enough away from the others that nobody else could hear them and Tommy just wanted to talk to his big brother in a way they hadn’t talked in years. Vince could see the irony in it, that the twin personal tragedies of being locked away had brought two such disparate brothers together. The difference was that Vince had actually been guilty. Tommy had insisted that he wasn’t. The inside was full of people who’d been wrongly accused, wrongly convicted, cheated and lied to, but it was also full of people who were there for a very good fucking reason or even several very good fucking reasons. Sometimes it was hard to tell which was which. The difference was that Vince knew Tommy had no reason to lie, not to him.

  If they’d been lucky he and Tommy would have gotten out at about the same time. They weren’t. Vince Nicholls had let his guard down and somebody had gotten to Tommy, slid a tightly folded sliver of sheet metal straight into his heart. Vince knew it was Tommy’s fault – he’d gotten cocky living under his big brother’s protection, but even Vince couldn’t protect him around the clock. It didn’t help that Tommy, six years younger, had spent his life convinced that his big brother was invincible. Vince knew better. Nobody was invincible, anybody could get to anybody. All they needed was patience and the right time.

  The man who’d killed Tommy had been smart enough to wait for the right time and stupid enough not to take out Vince Nicholls first. It took a while, but Nicholls found out who it was, became even more enraged when he found out how dumb and petty the whole thing had been. It was the usual—money and dope—on the street not enough of either to waste time on but inside magnified far beyond its true value. That was what his little brother had been killed for, and Nicholls had known within a couple of days who had done it. In addition to being terminally stupid the guy—Dilworth, his name was—had let someone see him.

  It was hard, waiting, but in a way it was an apprenticeship for what he was doing now. Nicholls let it coast for a long time, long enough for the asshole to make the same mistake he and Tommy had. Dilworth had gotten complacent, so he wasn’t quick enough or observant enough when Nicholls slid up behind him and plunged a jaggedly sharpened toothbrush into his carotid artery, then stepped back and melted away into the crowd drawn by the sudden geyser of blood.

  Maybe someone saw him do it, maybe they didn’t—but for whatever reason nobody had said a word. Tommy had a big mouth but he’d been likeable, for the most part. Nobody liked Dilworth—or not enough to cross Nicholls. It was justice, after all, and justice counted for something inside. Maybe it counted for more inside than anywhere else.

  18

  After Tommy had been killed Vince had nowhere to go, no distractions to help him forget. Losing Tommy gave him a motivation to painstakingly reconstruct every conversation he’d ever had with Tommy, mine each one for names or fragments of circumstance that would help him do what he had to do. It was hard, something he had to work at, and it took a lot of time.

  Time was something Vince Nicholls had a lot of. It was hard, walking in the same places Tommy had been, seeing the same place every day where Tommy had died. It had done something to him that built up with each passing day. Vince put in another year and a half until his release, knowing what he had to do when he finally got out. At least, he thought wryly, it had given him a purpose in life, something he couldn’t remember having before. If they’d both served out their time and been released that probably would have been the end of it, unfair as it was. That had all changed when Tommy died, the years stolen from him looming even larger than they had before. Twenty-six years old when he died, too many of them waste
d in a place he should never have been.

  Vince’s life became about revenge, and he spent his remaining time inside endlessly replaying those conversations with Tommy and plucking out the facts and names and times and places he needed to know. He didn’t have all of it because even Tommy didn’t know all of it, couldn’t know all of it. Vince had to find out the rest so he could make sure the right people paid for what they’d done.

  He’d known it would take time, but it wasn’t as if he had anything better to do. His record had taken care of that. There was no chance of ‘turning his life around’ as popular myth had it. He couldn’t start somewhere else because he couldn’t get out of the country. Anywhere in-country was impossible, other than the dismal prospect of living from hand to mouth on menial jobs most people wouldn’t touch. He’d made that bed a long time ago, taken what he’d seen as an easy path. All he knew how to do was sell dope, although most of his clientele stayed away from the hard stuff. Instead they were mostly into weed or high grade cocaine, fancied themselves connoisseurs in the same vein as earlier generations who’d once stockpiled rare wines in their basements. That kind of distinction made little difference to the law. Ironic now that cannabis was legal in some states with more on the way, even more ironic that because of his criminal record he probably wouldn’t be able to get a job working in a plant where it was grown and refined in quantities even he couldn’t imagine.

  For the first time in his life he had a long term goal that wasn’t centered exclusively on himself. It was all about Tommy. Tommy had been a wild kid but harmless, had just walked into the middle of something he couldn’t get out of. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body, didn’t have the smarts or nerve or artifice to be a big-time drug dealer. He’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, too stupid to keep his head up, and he’d gotten clocked for it. Vince had taken out Dilworth, but there were others just as guilty, the people who had put Tommy there in the first place. Vince had a list, painstakingly put together from his disjointed memories of conversations with Tommy. At the time he hadn’t thought he’d need to recall their names years later, and while they’d stolen years from Tommy they hadn’t taken his life itself. It wasn’t an unfamiliar story to anyone who’d been inside for a while, and everyone had heard a version of it from somebody. He might have let it go if Tommy hadn’t gotten killed.

  With Tommy dead he couldn’t. All of them were out walking around, living seconds and minutes and hours and days and years that Tommy would never see or feel or live. The bastards probably still laughed about it, if they remembered Tommy at all.

  Vince Nicholls hadn’t been a killer when he went inside, but he sure as hell was when he came out. Tommy would still be alive if he hadn’t been inside to begin with.

  Now Vince had a date with the bastards who put him there.

  19

  Vince could afford to spend the money and time to get it right. It had cost a couple of hundred bucks to fix the car but what he didn’t like was that unavoidably it had brought him into contact with a couple of the locals. He said he’d come to Strothwood looking for work and they’d looked at him like he was crazy.

  He’d done his homework, but up until now all of it had been at long distance, a combination of net-surfing and reconstructing all the conversations he’d had with Tommy. The men had been easy to find. One of them had no social media presence whatever, but all had been or currently were prominent enough that he’d been able to track down pictures of them online. One of them was an anomaly, a local businessman whose extensive advertising told Vince virtually everything he needed to know. By the middle of the following week he’d gotten a good feel for the local geography and the physical locations of the men, often by doing nothing more than checking the phone book and then doing a drive-by. The rest of the time he was careful to stay low.

  The pictures were useful but they weren’t enough. Now that he was actually here he spent the first ten days or so on the basics, updating and matching vehicles and physical descriptions with reality. Facial hair or hair coloring could change, they could gain or lose weight, a man who had spent his whole working life in a suit or uniform could retire and spend the rest of his days in khakis and flannel shirts. Vince knew he had to get it right, and to do that he had to have eyes on them at least once.

  It wasn’t as hard or as time-consuming as he’d thought it would be. All he had to do was get close enough long enough to make sure he’d know them by sight when the time or opportunity came. They never knew he was there. In spite of their backgrounds the men seemed oblivious to their surroundings, never did anything to indicate they were concerned with their own security. Vince supposed that in a place like Strothwood they’d never had to.

  One of the women had been relatively easy, the other one not so much. He still remembered smiling the first time he got a look at their pictures. Leave it to Tommy. Women who looked like that would stand out anywhere.

  They were still a problem. All he had was the work address of the first one. Her business coordinates were all over the Internet but there wasn’t a trace of her actual residence. He’d staked out her workplace a couple of times in an attempt to follow her and find out where she lived, but she kept irregular hours and he’d only managed to get eyes on her once. When she finally walked out of the building Vince could understand why she was so careful about revealing her home address. She wouldn’t want lovesick riffraff stacked up on her doorstep.

  He’d been able to follow her but she’d only gone a few blocks when she pulled into one of the few decent restaurants in town. There was no place to park where he wouldn’t be conspicuous so he peeled off and kept going. The only thing he’d been able to establish was the car she drove, a useful marker for later on. Even those few blocks in sparse traffic had confirmed what he’d already encountered with the men. Strothwood was a lousy place to follow anybody.

  He had nothing on where to find the other woman, other than a vague social media reference that she worked in a bar somewhere in Strothwood. That had surprised him. From what Tommy had told him she’d been a Daddy’s rich girl. Ending up as a bartender in a place like Strothwood seemed like a long fall from that kind of upbringing. That hadn’t made any sense until he’d checked out her old man and found out that he’d died a few years ago. Vince felt oddly cheated. Her father had been on his list too.

  At least now Vince didn’t have to do everything from a distance. From what he’d seen so far there weren’t too many bars in town. A woman who looked like that wouldn’t be hard to find. In the meantime he had other things to do.

  Making a list, checking it twice…

  20

  It was a big old house, all brick and two storeys, white shutters, not exactly the kind of place you’d expect a retired police chief to live in. It had to make you wonder what kind of money the old man had been making and how he’d made it. The house was in an old, leafy neighborhood that didn’t look like it had changed much in the last hundred years, except maybe to start a long slide downhill. Vince had done his first daylight drive-by a few days ago and the signs had been obvious – shingles coming adrift , tired paint, big yards that showed signs of neglect, driveways with four and five year old vehicles in them. There’d been a lot of money here once but now it was dying off.

  It occurred to him that the long-retired Chief Harrison was probably in the same category. Vince was taking a big risk to do something that was probably going to occur naturally and very soon. He’d had the same internal debate about the judge, dismissed it for the same reason, the reason that Jews had kept hunting down Nazis until they were harmless old men.

  The ground floor of the house wasn’t really the ground floor at all. There was a central stairway up to a narrow landing, the front door framed by two white pillars. The first row of windows overlooked the lawn by a good five feet or so, but getting in had been easy. Break and enter had never been his thing but after what happened to Tommy and what he’d decided to do about it he realized he was sitting
in the perfect place to find out whatever he needed to know. He’d hooked up with an old pro who’d been in too long to be current but not so long that he couldn’t give him a heads-up on who and what to ask when he got out.