JUSTICE
Frank Stallings #3
Doug Sutherland
JUSTICE
Copyright © Doug Sutherland 2019
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, or to actual events, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication, (other than brief passages for review purposes) may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written consent of the publisher.
First published 2019 by StreamLight Productions.
Cover design by Melchelle Designs
CONTENTS
Dedication
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 • 16 • 17 • 18 • 19 • 20 • 21 • 22 • 23 • 24 • 25 • 26 • 27 • 28 • 29 • 30 • 31 • 32 • 33 • 34 • 35 • 36 • 37 • 38 • 39 • 40 • 41 • 42 • 43 • 44 • 45 • 46 • 47 • 48 • 49 • 50 • 51 • 52 • 53 • 54 • 55 • 56 • 57 • 58 • 59 • 60 • 61 • 62 • 63 • 64 • 65 • 66 • 67
About the Author
Also by Doug Sutherland
To Maureen
1
The old man wasn’t sure what woke him. It didn’t take much to do that anymore. He was close to eighty now, probably hadn’t slept the night through for years. It was either his bladder or his dreams or no reason at all. Even so, even with the lack of peace sleep brought him, he’d still wake up at some godawful hour in the morning and fight to go back to somewhere dark and warm.
It was always in the first few moments of awareness that the regrets would come flooding in. When he was still on the bench Judge Jonathan Landers had always been blessed with an arrogant certainty in everything he did, but after he’d finally retired that certainty had slowly begun to evaporate. The law and his wife Bethy were all he’d ever had, and he’d lost her only two years after he’d retired. She’d always been firmly behind him in everything he did, always reinforced that ironclad, immutable certainty of his, and after she died all he had left was a void that gradually flooded with his memories of her and the law and what he could have done other than what he actually did. He found himself replaying snippets of time, reliving the consequences of his selfishness.
He knew now that he’d robbed them both. He’d finish his day in court and come home to a single malt scotch, then sit there in the big Barcalounger while she bustled around in the kitchen. In his vanity he thought—accurately—that when he came through the door it was the high point of her day. That was how much she loved him. He had no idea why.
She loved him enough that she’d leave him alone with his scotch for a half hour while he brought himself back from whatever pathetic dramas he’d presided over in the courtroom. Most had been petty incidents fueled more by stupidity than anything else. He came home from those days with a sense of relief that he’d only experienced lives like that from the elevated vantage point of his own superiority.
There were only a handful of days when the seemingly endless banality of life in Strothwood would be punctuated by something truly dramatic and worthwhile. Days like that usually involved drugs or violent death or both and the corresponding requirement of a civilized society to impose the rule of law on those who caused it. It was an imperative and it was justice and that was what he had worked for all his life, to finally be in a position where he could make a difference.
Now that his professional life was over he’d had time to think. They’d retired to Florida, something he’d done in a belated attempt to make Bethy happy. They had enough money to live well, and it was only midway through the first winter when he’d seen that at least in that way he’d done the right thing. For his part he hated the place, although that had as much to do with the enforced idleness of retirement as anything else. The bench had been his life and he’d never developed a sincere or lasting interest in anything beyond that. Bethy loved greenery and gardening and people, so she was content to make friends for both of them, friends he tolerated to please her. It was her time now, not his, time he owed her after all the years she’d supported him and cared for him. In his own way he loved her, and so once or twice a week he’d go along with her to the informal social gatherings that seemed to revolve in an unrelenting circle around the quiet cul-de-sacs of the inland gated community where they lived. He listened to the vacuous conversations, politely declined when asked about his experiences on the bench, or simply deflected the topic to something else.
Even as Bethy’s life had flowered his own had decayed. It had been a trade-off he’d been willing to make. He’d realized far too late the sacrifices she’d made for him, decided that all he could do was acquiesce, for once, to her wishes. What she had wished for was Florida, away from the grayness of life in Strothwood. The truth of it was that now that his career was over he didn’t care where they were.
He’d seen too much of the people of Strothwood to feel any particular remorse about leaving. There was nothing about whatever remained of his life that he looked forward to, and even less than nothing when Bethy passed away only a few years after they’d moved. Their friends—her friends, really—had made an effort to console him, keep him engaged in their vapid little community, but after a few gentle rebuffs they’d finally left him alone.
It was impossible to avoid them entirely. The houses were fairly large but the lots themselves were small, the driveway of one house often adjoining the driveway of another. He didn’t like small talk, never had, and in the nature of the community small talk was all there was. He spent more and more time inside or in the small and now neglected lanai at the back of the house, the only place he could go outside where some well-meaning soul wouldn’t try to talk to him or at least say hello. Gradually even the most charitable of them stopped trying, tired of what they rightly determined to be his disinterest and condescension.
That was impossible to hide, and in the end just too much effort. He thought of leaving, maybe even going back to Strothwood, but he had enough self-awareness to know that he’d still be the same man, just older and in a different location. He was financially secure but not spectacularly so, and he couldn’t think of anywhere he could afford to live where he wouldn’t be surrounded by the same dullness that surrounded him here. The only conceivable attraction Strothwood had for him was the memory of his wife, and most of that was inextricably bound into the home they’d shared for more than thirty years. That was gone—they’d sold it to afford the move —and so in the end he stayed where he was, where at least he could look around the house and the lanai and the small yard and see traces of her everywhere, even tell himself that she was just in the next room and that nothing had changed.
In some ways nothing had. Even though Landers still keenly felt and believed in his own superiority, traces of doubt sometimes infiltrated his idleness. Stray thoughts like that led him to places in his memory where he didn’t want to go.
He saw the flaws in his certainty now, and when he looked up and saw the dark silhouette standing over him he knew that what he’d finally come to suspect was true after all.
He’d been wrong, at least once.
2
Money wasn’t a problem. Before the law finally caught up with him Vince had built a very exclusive boutique clientele, people who had the wherewithal for self-indulgence. Lawyers, investment bankers, trust fund kids, a couple of people who against all odds had actually made a lot of money in the arts. They were people far removed from the attentions of law enforcement and that helped Vince keep a low profile. Vince had no intention or ambi
tion to become some kind of drug kingpin, orchestrating risky moves of huge quantities across borders. Instead he’d created a niche for himself, comparatively low volumes at very high prices to a very limited and exclusive market. He had the personal charisma and social skills to pull it off, establish himself as an equal among people who in their turn regarded themselves—hell, actually were—part of a moneyed elite, untouchable. He cleaned up well, acted like them, talked like them, and made sure he knew the same people they did, and was always artfully vague about what he did and how he did it. Even at the height of his run he couldn’t touch them financially, wasn’t even close, but he was a gifted illusionist. Underneath it all Vince was a very hard man, but he was smart enough to know that persona wouldn’t play well in the circles he wanted to travel in and he became very adept at concealing it. It was a very narrow tightrope but somehow he was able to keep a tenuous equilibrium, managed to always be in the right places in the right circles of the right people at the right times and look like he belonged there. He was so good at it that his clientele didn’t think of themselves as his clientele at all, just somebody they knew who always seemed to have what they wanted. They weren’t complete fools, knew that perhaps there was something there that didn’t bear close examination, but if anything that gave him a tinge of dangerous glamor that added to his appeal instead of subtracting from it. They saw drug use as a victimless crime anyway, and any possible consequences were so alien to their personal experience that they rarely if ever thought about it.
It was a rarefied atmosphere, and as low-risk and secure as a life like his could get. After a few years the illusion became reality and his perceptions shifted until he saw himself in the same light as they saw themselves, moving easily above and beyond the everyday grittiness in which he’d begun his life.
That kind of hubris wasn’t going to end well, and it didn’t. His clients were highly intelligent, well-educated and entitled – special. Street-smart and street-tough they weren’t. One of them, the pampered son of an Eighties-era Master of the Universe, eventually got tagged with a penny ante possession charge. The little asshole panicked and folded up like an accordion, traded what would have been a relatively minor inconvenience for him into something that wrecked Vince Nicholls’ life.
He’d always known it was an occupational hazard but one he’d unwisely pushed to the back of his mind. Vince had bought into his own artificial construct to the extent that he’d never seen himself as a career criminal or drug dealer, at least not in the conventional sense. The money had been relatively easy, there’d been a lot of it, and the lifestyle could by his own lights be described as wonderful. Even so he’d never thought it would last, didn’t even want it to. At some point he’d bail when he had enough put away, go somewhere exotic and just live without limits.
That had been the real reason for the bug-out bags. Most of his, uh, former colleagues operated on instant gratification and impulse. Unlike them Vince had money stashed in four or five locations scattered around the eastern half of the country. He’d been inside a long time but he hadn’t been worried about finding them again.
The first location had been the most important; the one that had the GPS coordinates of all the others. He’d burned through the cash too fast, in spite of the self-discipline he’d thought he had. He’d blown a lot of it just living, a futile attempt to make up for the lost time he’d never get back. When he finally came out of it and realized that wasn’t going to happen he had barely enough left to get down to Boca, do what he had to do, and then go north again.
The fucking interminable bus trip took him two days into northern Maine and then a couple of hours of hard hiking in the woods. The landmark for the trail was easy. It was a lighthouse, chosen because lighthouses usually didn’t go anywhere or get torn down, not in a place that depended on tourist icons.
He’d checked the GPS yet again and gone inland from there, up into the woods overlooking a bay and then working his way back. He couldn’t see the bay anymore but could still smell the sea. For a man who’d spent years looking at bare walls it was almost overwhelming, and he had to fight the impulse to just stay where he was. He shook it off and kept going, worrying that against all odds somebody else might have found it.
He started hearing the rush of water before he saw it, and after a couple of hundred yards he suddenly came onto a vertigo-inducing promontory that overlooked vicious rapids over thirty feet below. Nothing down there but rocks and fast water, no chance of surviving a fall, and he edged carefully down the muddy, narrowing trail toward a huge granite boulder. Now that he was here the uncertainty bloomed in him once more, the unreasoning worry that somehow the money would be gone.
The second bag, the one he needed now, was five paces in back of the boulder. Now that he was here he could remember burying it maybe two and a half feet down. The ground looked undisturbed. He unslung the shovel and dug until it finally hit the hard surface of the heavy flat rock over the garbage bag that in turn encased the backpack underneath. It was awkward, but he got on his knees and reached down for the rock, his fingers digging into the damp soil. He had to reach down below his feet, work his fingertips under the rock’s edges. It was easy on one side, the side that was balanced on empty space, either because the rock was resting on the edge of the backpack or because there was nothing underneath there at all. He felt a sudden irrational fear that maybe he’d imagined the whole thing night after night in his cell and the money had just been a dream to get him through it. He fought the feeling down and finally got the fingertips of his other hand dug in and he pulled up on the rock, feeling the strain in his lower back as he manhandled it clear, lost his balance and collapsed back on his butt.
He got back onto his knees and looked back in the hole and all he could see was dark earth. He groped for the shovel and started digging all over again, not remembering whether he’d covered the bag with more dirt or whether he’d just put the rock over the top of it. The blade of the shovel hit something harder than the soil around it and a moment later he could see a corner of dun-colored canvas. He wanted to just yank on it, pull his future out of the dirt, but there was still too much earth holding it down so he just dug a little harder a little longer and got enough free space around the pack so he could reach inside and get his hands on the straps of the pack and pull it out.
Belatedly he remembered to look around, make sure he was alone. The roar of the water was so loud and he’d been so intent on what he was doing that someone could have driven a Cat D9 right up beside him and he wouldn’t have heard it. That kind of lapse was a dangerous thing and he reproached himself for his carelessness. He undid the straps of the pack, groped for the zip lock bags inside. Everything looked right – around fourteen thousand if he remembered correctly. There was one plastic bag that was light, and for a moment that startled him until he realized that was the one with the backup piece of paper inside that listed the GPS locations of the other hides and a few ‘in case of emergency break glass’ phone numbers and addresses that might or might not be ancient history by now. All the caches together probably totaled a little over eighty grand, all of the others hidden like this one in isolated forest country. He remembered being pretty smug about his foresight, the thought of the money waiting for him softening the regret of the time he’d lost inside. He’d known that when he got out his options would be limited, but a chunk of money like that could give him a good year or two of leeway, maybe somewhere in the Southwest or Florida or even Hawaii, and the fantasies helped him through some long nights. Then the thing with Tommy happened and everything changed.
He couldn’t live on eighty grand for the rest of his life, but doing what he had to do now meant the rest of his life probably wouldn’t take very long anyway.
3
Kelly Randall asked herself yet again why she’d become a police officer.
The answer, of course, was easy. She had two good reasons, both kids farmed out to her mom and dad while she was sitting in a stiflingly
hot police car providing ‘security’ for a function that didn’t need any security at all.
She knew what it was really about. Even though he’d retired to Florida years ago, the late Judge Jonathan Landers had been a really big deal in Strothwood for a very long time. Certainly a show of respect was called for, but the real reason she was going to miss a beautiful summer day with her kids was that so-called Acting Chief Brent Williams wanted a little showcase for his version of the new and improved Strothwood P.D.
It wasn’t much of a showcase. She’d spent the last hour sitting in a patrol car while across the street Charlie Raycroft had been doing the same thing. There were only two other cops involved, FNGs standing at rigid attention outside the main door of the church hall where the reception was taking place. There was no earthly reason for them to be there, although even Kelly had to admit they looked good in uniform. They knew it, too, and she suspected that they actually liked standing there staring rigidly ahead into nothing.
Better them than me, she thought. As hot as it was in the patrol car was she had no desire to be any more visible than she already was. She was absolutely sure Raycroft felt the same way. The new guys, Scofield and Hanson, had both been hired a couple of weeks ago straight out of an out of state diploma mill. They were basically carbon copies of each other, early twenties, both of them whiter than StarKist tuna, both big boys pumped up with gym muscles carefully shown off with tailored short sleeve uniform shirts. Nobody could remember or cared which of them was which, especially after Rich Comeau had taken one look at them and immediately dubbed them Hans and Franz. Hear me now and believe me later.
They’d gotten a fairly frosty reception from the rank and file. No one had disputed that the Strothwood P.D. needed bodies, although from what Kelly had seen so far apparently brains had been optional. Gary Wheelock was on disability and Rich Comeau was under a cloud with Williams and had been forced to fight hard even to stay on desk duty.
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