by Dave Conifer
Primary Justice
Dave Conifer
Copyright © 2011 by Dave Conifer
Cover design and art by Streetlight Graphics
Also by Dave Conifer:
Throwback (2004)
FireHouse (2007)
Man of Steel (2008)
eBully (2008)
Snodgrass Vacation (2009)
Wrecker (2011)
-- Chapter 1 --
Billy Fargo’s eyes burned with the weariness of so many hours on the road as he counted traffic lights after crossing the Delaware River into New Jersey. When he came to the sixth one – there should be a Texaco and a Wawa – he knew to turn right. After that it would only be a few more miles along Delancey Road. Three and a quarter, to be exact, he reminded himself after glancing at the now-grimy directions sheet he’d printed off the internet. It was the last thing he’d done in the legal center at West Penn medium security correctional institution near Erie, Pennsylvania, his home for the past eleven years. Inmates weren’t supposed to have access to the internet, and it wasn’t often that he risked his privileges in the center by going online, but nobody ever said a word any of those times when he slipped over to the computer behind the counter and started pounding keys. He chose his moments, those times when he absolutely needed to know something, and he’d had some success at finding what he was looking for.
He’d traveled nearly four hundred miles since walking out the side gate of West Penn and boarding a non-descript shuttle van the night before. He’d been the only occupant other than the driver. In his possession was nothing but a small wad of cash that he’d earned working in the prison and a thick yellow envelope that contained his battered wallet, some case documents he’d been collecting in the legal center, and a stack of paperwork that he’d accepted a few minutes earlier without reading through.
Walking into a barber shop right after that to get cleaned up for his re-introduction to the world had been nerve-wracking, despite knowing that the visit had been pre-arranged and they knew he was coming. Hell, the quick stop at Wendy’s for a hamburger was just as bad. The people working in both those places knew where he’d spent the last three thousand or so nights of his life and were clearly uncomfortable around him. That was something he was going to have to get used to and learn to make the best of. He was relieved that anybody on the outside was willing to deal with him at all. Part of him knew that money was money, and nobody would care who he was or where he’d come from. But deep down in his heart there were doubts about ever fitting in again. For the most part he didn’t know what to expect, so it was a relief that his first two stops went without a hitch.
Truthfully, the first hours back in the world weren’t as scary as he thought they would be. After buying a ticket at the Greyhound station he sat nervously in the waiting room, but it had only taken a few minutes in the padded window seat on the near-empty bus before he started to feel comfortable. The February air rushing in through the window that he’d opened as the bus rolled eastward on the turnpike was cold, numbingly so, but he couldn’t get enough of it anyway. It had been a long time since he’d felt more than a stale breeze on his skin. Two soft-looking men in the back were pissed off about the open window, but they didn’t look to Fargo like the type that would do anything about it. Couple of lightweights, he thought as he listened to them complain to each other. It was nearly three in the morning when he finally grew tired of his chattering teeth and the passive-aggressive comments from behind, and sealed it back up.
Doing time in a state prison had been horrible, but he knew it could’ve been a lot worse. He’d seen how bad it could have been with his own eyes. Lucky for him – or maybe this was actually the curse that put him there – he’d grown up around so many ex-cons that he’d benefited from advice that saved his sanity, and maybe even his life. He knew what to do. Fight when anybody crosses you, and fight loud so everybody knows you’re not a chump. Most of the important rules of survival were “don’ts.” Don’t disrespect others but don’t be disrespected, either. Don’t mess with anybody’s property and don’t let them mess with yours. Don’t try to be popular. Don’t talk too much. Especially to the guards. And never squeal, no matter what. Never. Punishment from inmates for ratting out one of their own was a lot worse than anything the guards would come up with for keeping quiet. There were worse things than a few weeks in solitary or a few bruises or broken knuckles from a guard’s club. Best advice he’d ever gotten before going in. Well, maybe second best.
It hadn’t been fun. His time at West Penn had worn him down, and changed him. He knew he was a lot meaner now than when he went in. On the other hand he knew he’d been forced to grow up, and he’d learned discipline. No man would choose a decade behind bars, but oddly, he was sure he was a better man for it. Often times he wondered if the reckless twenty-five year old he’d been before going in would even have survived those years if they’d been out on the streets rather than in a prison cell.
He remembered how the bus driver had groaned when the sun rose high enough to hover above the roadway ahead. Instead of squinting behind a pair of sunglasses the way the driver was, Fargo savored it. A clear view of the sun was something else he’d done without for years, and he was going to enjoy every minute of it no matter how much it hurt. He didn’t get so much as a passing glance from the other passengers when he slipped out of his seat and staggered up the aisle to the front, where he could sit in the sun without anybody screaming at him that his time was up and he had to go back inside.
The car had been waiting for him just where it was supposed to be when he stepped off the bus at the terminal in Valley Forge. The faded green Monte Carlo was already old even before Fargo had finished the first day of his sentence. It had been left there by Russ Bismarck, a mentor from his earlier life, the life that had seen him end up doing time for rape at West Penn. He didn’t even know why this man, now approaching seventy years old, wanted anything to do with him. Nobody else did. If he’d had anybody else to turn to he would have, but Bismarck was one of the few friends he had left on the outside.
Fargo knew Bismarck had flirted with crime his entire life. You could just tell. But he’d managed to stay ahead of the cops and out of trouble, a boast that Fargo couldn’t make. If he was willing to lend a hand after all these years, Fargo was in no position to turn him down. As he turned the key and the engine roared to life, he expected that his day would end on a couch in whatever dumpy apartment in the gritty Tacony section of Philadelphia that Bismarck now called home.
Driving came back to him almost immediately. Like having sex or riding a bike, isn’t that what they say? He knew exactly where he was going, but calling ahead was something he’d decided against. Eleven years was a long time, plenty of time to consider it from every angle. There were pros and cons either way, but the bottom line was that he just knew the look of surprise on Kevin Morris’s face was going to be priceless. He knew he’d made the right call by the tingle of excitement he felt when suburban shopping plazas began to appear on both sides of the road. One more light and I’m there, he thought. When he saw the sturdy brick Walgreens standing tall behind a grassy berm he had a hard time controlling his emotions, whatever they were.
He couldn’t be sure that Morris would be there, but as soon as he walked inside and locked in on the pharmacy counter he saw a tall, dark-skinned man that he instantly recognized. The internet don’t lie. At least it didn’t this time. My man Morris really is a pharmacist at Walgreens. He always was pretty smart, Fargo recalled. The last thing he remembered was that Morris was taking classes at some community college in his spare time.
Even if Morris had looked up, Fargo doubted that he’d know who he was looking at. He didn’t look much like he had before prison.
Doing time had aged him on the outside the same way it had on the inside. Gone was the long hair and bad mustache, and most of the melanin in his skin. Clean-shaven with a rugged crew cut, the only things left for Morris to recognize were a pair of ice blue eyes and the eleven-year-old gray hoodie and jeans that had been returned just before he walked out of West Penn. And that was just the way Fargo wanted it.
A bubbly twenty-something woman asked Fargo how she could help him when he reached the counter. “I need to talk with Morris,” he said, pointing to her colleague in the back who was probably counting diarrhea pills. She stared, not sure how to respond. “Go ahead,” he urged, waving his hand dismissively. “Ask him, okay? He knows me.”
If Morris knew him, he didn’t show it. He squinted helplessly at Fargo after she relayed the message. Fargo nodded back, with no change to the grim expression on his face. Finally there was the tiniest spark of recognition. With his mouth falling slightly open, Morris carefully placed whatever he was holding onto the table in front of him and came around a barrier that was filled with racks of prescriptions, never taking his eyes off Fargo.
“God almighty,” he said when they were face-to-face, with the chippie pharmacist taking it all in from five steps away. “Fargo?” he asked, turning his head at an angle. “Is that you?”
“In the flesh. How ya’ been?”
“I don’t believe this,” Morris said. “Unbelievable. I never thought I’d see you again.”
“Well, here I am,” Fargo answered. “Guess you thought wrong. Just got sprung last night.”
Morris wiped his forehead. “Man. Man. I never expected to see you again.”
“We need to talk,” Fargo told him.
“Who, me?” Morris replied. “Hey, don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t think so.”
“Okay. Maybe you don’t need it, but I do.”
“What about?”
“Stuff. There’s some stuff I got to say,” Fargo said, “and some stuff I need to know. What time do you get off?”
“See, Billy, I don’t have a lot of time after work,” Morris explained as he eyed the small but growing cluster of customers lining up behind Fargo. “I told the kids I’d – there’s something I’m doing with them.”
“The kids?” Fargo asked. “You still with Gail? You got kids now?”
“Hell, no,” Morris answered quickly. “I haven’t seen her in years. Not much since, well, you know. I hooked up with somebody at Rutgers. Six years now.”
“Damn. Now I got even more questions. It’ll just take a few minutes. Come on, man. I drove all night to see you.”
A customer coughed, momentarily distracting Morris. “Okay,” he said with a sigh. “I can squeeze out a few minutes. I don’t know what you want from me. I’m not your friend. Never was. But lemme’ get these people taken care of. Then we can work it out.”
~~~
Fargo walked across the parking lot to McDonald’s, where they’d agreed to meet when Morris’s shift in the pharmacy was over. Out of habit he checked his back several times as he crossed the expanse of asphalt. While ordering a Big Mac and a strawberry milk shake he listened to himself and wondered if he would always sound so nasty, like he was looking for a fight. He guessed that he probably would. Prison does things to a man, he thought. Bad things.
The sandwich was gone and he was taking the final drags on the strawberry shake when Morris appeared. Fargo watched as he threaded his way through the tables and took a seat in the booth. “This stuff’ll kill you,” he said, gesturing at the cardboard Big Mac carton on the plastic tray.
“Beats what I been eating,” Fargo answered. “I ain’t worried. I never thought I’d make it this far.” He waved at a puff of cigarette smoke that floated over from another table after drifting across a partition. “I thought you couldn’t smoke in public no more,” he complained.
“Not everywhere. What, you don’t smoke anymore?”
“I gave it up. One less thing to get killed over inside.” He pointed at a cross affixed to Morris’s collar. “What the hell is that? Don’t tell me you found Jesus.”
“I didn’t know he was lost,” Morris answered.
“Oh man,” Fargo groaned. “How many times have you used that line? Did you join up with the God squad? Can’t say I saw that coming.”
“I guess you could say that. After what happened, I was pretty down on life,” he explained. “The church was there for me. I’m a deacon now. Burlington City Baptist. It really helped me put my life back together.”
“A deacon? I heard of that,” Fargo said. “Is that like a priest?”
“No, no,” he said. “Nothing like that. I already told you I got married. We don’t even have priests in the Baptist Church. I’m more like a glorified gopher.”
“No shit,” Fargo said. “So what does a deacon do?”
“I sit on the church board and help, you know, plan what we’re doing. I hand out bread and wine during services, and I teach Sunday School. I end up chauffeuring the old folks around when they need it. Stuff like that.”
“Well, what do you know,” Fargo said.
“So what was it like in prison?” Morris asked. “As bad as you hear in the movies?”
“Worse. It sucked. What do you expect me to say? That’s the point of it.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Morris conceded. “But, you know, what was it like?”
“What sucked the most was I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I didn’t kill nobody that night.”
“You didn’t go to jail for murder,” Morris pointed out. “Not that I believe you.”
“I didn’t rape nobody either.”
“Come off it, man,” Morris said. “We all read the papers. Your junk was all over her, plain as day from what I heard. You can’t hide from the DNA, man.”
“Damn man. This is exactly what happened back then,” Fargo said. “I had that free crap lawyer but he didn’t care about me. He didn’t want to be there. See, I never said I didn’t have sex with her. Sure we did. So of course my stuff was in her. But I didn’t rape her. She raped me is more like it.”
“Yeah, sure she did. And she threw herself over the side of the Trenton Makes Bridge when she was done with you?” Morris asked. “Yeah, I read all about it,” he added when he saw the look on Fargo’s face.
“That had nothin’ to do with me. I don’t know how the hell she got down there, but nobody threw her off. If they did she’d have been all busted up, but she wasn’t. No bones were broke or nothing like that.”
“Why didn’t you say all this at the trial?”
“What the fuck, man? Get a damn clue! There was no trial. That lame-ass public lawyer made a deal behind my back. He never asked me nothin’ about what happened and he sure as hell didn’t tell me what the cops knew. He just decided I must be guilty. Next thing you know I’m chained up in a van wearin’ an orange suit, going for a long ride. If I’d known any of this I’d have spoke up but I didn’t know shit.”
“How do you know so much now, if you didn’t know it when it happened?”
“I was in bad shape, Kevin. I didn’t sober up until I was sitting in that prison. Then, I forced them to let me see all the records about my case. Some kind of coma sum laude petition or some lawyer shit. But I found all this out. Too late to help, but at least I knew. They didn’t even have a decent case against me.”
Morris looked around and saw that everybody was looking at the angry white guy. “So what do you want from me? Is that what you wanted to tell me? Because I have to be honest. I really couldn’t care less. I only cared about Gail. I hated you for what you did to her. But I’m past it. That’s part of what I needed from the church, and I got it.”
“I heard you told them I didn’t kill those kids. If there was a trial you wouldn’t testify against me. Thanks.”
“All I said was I didn’t know for sure,” Morris said. “I saw a man in a ski mask driving a van and shooting a gun. Then the house exploded. They wanted me to
say it was you but I couldn’t know for sure. That’s all. It wasn’t because I thought you were innocent. As a matter of fact, I thought you were guilty as hell. I still do. I didn’t want you going to prison because I wanted a clean shot at you. I was going to make you tell me why you did it, one way or another. I’m ashamed to say it now, but I would have killed you if I had the chance.”
Fargo watched over Morris’s shoulder as a dump truck rumbled past the restaurant. “Damn,” he finally said. “Now I wish I didn’t say nothin’ about it.” An awkward silence passed. “So are you still in touch with Gail? How is she?”
Morris glared back. “She was in and out of the hospital for years doing skin grafts. She looked pretty bad. She felt pretty bad. I lost contact after a while, and not by accident. I could only take so much of her misery. I know that sounds selfish as hell.” He shrugged. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
Fargo slouched back, his legs sliding further under the table, until they bumped Morris’s. “You know, all these years, I was thinking you were on my side.”
“Nope. Not even close. I wanted you dead. But then you went down for rape, anyway, so it didn’t matter anymore. Now it’s too late.” He paused. “Or maybe it isn’t. They could still nail you for murder. Right?”
“There’s no statute of limitations, if that’s what you mean,” Fargo answered. “I learned a lot about the law while I was locked up. It was something to do. But I’m tellin’ you, I didn’t kill nobody. I don’t know shit about it. I wasn’t even there.”
“You screwed me up big time,” Morris said. “Gail was never the same without those kids. I loved her. Unlike you. For you it was just a place to shack up.”
“Until you stole her from me,” Fargo said with no emotion. “Let’s not forget why she left me. You came along like a fucking snake. And I didn’t kill those girls. Why would I? It was already over between me and her.”
