Primary Justice

by Dave Conifer

  “What the fuck’s that? What case?” Fargo asked. “The fire?”

  “Yeah. Just thought I’d warn you. Hopefully they let you stay free. Willmar said they might, since they got that tracker strapped on your leg. Fifty-fifty chance they don’t revoke your parole. But even if they don’t, it looks like there’s going to a bunch of new rules for you.”

  “Shit,” Fargo whispered. “They just called me in this afternoon with no warning. I’m back downtown. I just walked into the place.”

  “At parole? Already? Damnit,” Bismarck said. “Damnit. That can’t be good. When did they call?”

  “She called about an hour ago,” Fargo told him. “I didn’t have nothin’ to do, so I just came in without waiting around. She didn’t say anything about that case. She said--“

  “Of course she didn’t.”

  “--it was some paperwork that had to be fixed or something.”

  “She don’t want you to know the real reason. If you did, you might not come in.”

  “Russ, what should I do?” Fargo hissed.

  “What can you do? Brace yourself, that’s all. I know it’s hard, but try to relax. Maybe--” Fargo heard a voice in the background over the phone. “They may take you in. Be prepared to deal with it. Joanie’s here. She wants to talk to you.” But before she came on, the sound from the phone changed. Not just changed, but ended. The phone in his hand was done until he plugged it into a charger, something he didn’t have. He had worse problems, anyway. Now he knew the real reason Faribault had called him in for this meeting. In through the front door as a free man, cuffed and out through a side door into a plain van on the way back to West Penn. That’s how the law worked, at least for him. She called him in to send him back to prison. He was sure of it.

  Fuck that. Nobody even knows I’m here yet. Well, maybe they do, he corrected himself when he remembered the tracking device. But I ain’t going back. I’ll die first, or get myself killed running away if it comes to that. When he turned back from the glass window panels that looked out onto the street the guard hadn’t moved, content to flip pages on a clipboard that rested on the counter. Fargo wasn’t fooled. He knew that sideways scan after eleven years of being watched. They must teach that in guard school. Still watching me. Maybe he’s about to call Faribault, to tell her I just took a call, and now it looks like I’m getting cold feet about coming up. If he tells her that, he’d be right.

  At that moment he knew what he was going to do. With the now-dead phone squeezed tight in his hand he tried to stay calm, the way Bismarck had told him to, as he walked to the set of doors. When he looked back the guard was on his feet with the phone back in his hand. Now Fargo knew for sure. They’d been waiting for him. There would be big trouble as a result of what he was about to do, but for the moment Bismarck had saved him. Willmar, too. All the eyes and ears that those two had set up on the ground had picked up the signals, and just in time.

  He reached the doors and pushed his way through. The guard was halfway across the lobby by then, a backward glance told Fargo, but he wasn’t moving very fast. He probably can’t leave his post, he realized. That’s good. Once on the street, he retraced his steps back toward the parking garage, peeking over his shoulder several times. The last time he looked the guard was outside in front of the building, this time barking into a walkie-talkie. Fargo ducked into an alley and out of view. With his head start he didn’t think getting to the car was going to be a problem. What worried him was who was on the other end of that walkie-talkie connection, and how fast they could get out onto the streets to track him down.

  The other end of the alley opened onto another street, so he scrambled there quickly. He knew he was on Mercer Avenue, and a street sign confirmed it. No cops on the street and all was quiet. Walking as fast as he could without looking like somebody on the lam, he reached the next intersection at Livingston Street. Shit yeah, he thought. The garage was close. When he peered down Livingston he could see the giant blue “P” hanging out over the sidewalk. That was where he needed to be. That’s where the car was.

  It was two blocks away, but it looked more like two miles. At least he wouldn’t be completely out in the open. Keeping as close as he could to the storefronts that lined the street, he moved efficiently toward the garage, staying alert for signs that he’d been spotted. There was a good chance that he wouldn’t be. Nobody knew exactly where he’d gone or where he was headed. If he hurried, he could stay out of sight and be gone before they set up any kind of decent search.

  This was big, he realized as he dodged sidewalk traffic without losing any speed. He’d just made a decision that was a game-changer, and he’d only had a split-second to make it. It was already too late for second thoughts, but he was already wondering if it was worth blowing parole over this, something that might be nothing but a misunderstanding? Because that’s what he’d just done. Making it to a meeting with a parole officer was rule number one, and he’d just broken it. Shattered the piss out of it. He’d actually gone to her office and then walked out on her. It had all happened so fast that he wasn’t sure what any of it meant yet, but he knew in all certainty that he’d just become a fugitive from the law. And if he was, he was going to do it right.

  -- Chapter 12 --

  I should have told him, Gail Mankato decided after wrestling with it since Fargo had left her place the day before. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t. It wasn’t like she hadn’t thought about it when it came up in the course of conversation. Hell, she’d been the one to bring it up, if she remembered correctly, but she hadn’t come clean with everything she knew. Now she regretted holding back. He deserved to know. She should have told him she didn’t truly believe that Rip Mankato was dead.

  Oh, she was aware of the initial rumors, had read the papers and heard from family and friends that he’d met his end in some mysterious and violent way. Neither the mystery nor the violence was a surprise to anybody who knew the man. That was how he lived, and apparently how he’d died. Or so she thought for a few years, until she received a curious piece of mail where she still lived in the rebuilt house in Ewing.

  The envelope was plain, with her name and address written in block letters. There was no return address, only a faint postmark that was hard to read, but looked like ‘Upper Bucks County,’ which she knew was across the river in Pennsylvania. She opened it and found a single sheet of paper, blank except for a ‘Brinks Dairy Land’ letterhead. Is this a dairy farm? That cow on the top of the page says yes. When she re-examined the envelope, turning it over in her hands, she found two words, printed carefully in the same block letters that adorned the front:

  ERIN

  EMILY

  She had no idea who had sent it or what it meant, except of course that these were the names of her dead daughters. The block letters were probably an attempt to conceal the identity of the writer. That seemed unnecessary to her, but it made the note worrisome. It didn’t take long to check out Brinks Dairy Land, which, indeed, was a dairy farm in Nockamixon, at the northern end of Bucks County. But who in the world at a Pennsylvania dairy farm would send this to her?

  Deciding what it could mean was a slow process. She thought about it for months, and eventually came to believe that the note was some kind of threat, and that it must have come from the supposedly-dead Rip Mankato. Who else could it be? It couldn’t be Billy Fargo, the first person she thought of, because she knew exactly where he was, and it wasn’t some dairy farm. It had to be Rip. Maybe he’d faked his own death and was hiding out at this farm, biding his time until it was safe to come out.

  If it was him, she wasn’t sure why he would threaten her. She hadn’t been the one who burned up his grandkids. She’d nearly burned to death herself. Could it be that he held her responsible for not protecting them? She never came up with a satisfactory answer, and, in fact, still believed that it was Rip Mankato himself who was behind the fire that night. Fargo felt the same way. But still, why the note?

  She’d been so af
raid after convincing herself that he’d authored the note that she left the house in Ewing the very day she decided it was him. Third-degree burns did that to a person. With no place to go, she’d moved sight unseen to Freehold, for no other reason than that it was the hometown of Bruce Springsteen. It wasn’t like she’d be doing anything except sitting inside collecting disability checks, anyway. She could do that anywhere, and it would feel better doing it in a place where Rip might not be able to get at her, at least not until he tracked her down again.

  The meaning of the dairy farm note and the identity of its author was something that she would probably never understand, but Fargo should know about it. He was entitled to. Unfortunately, wherever he was, he wasn’t answering his cell. He didn’t seem like a guy who was glued to a phone, and he sure wasn’t on that day. After several hours of fruitless dialing, she gave up. Maybe there was another way.

  ~~~

  Despite the cold he could feel the perspiration of nervousness – no -- fear-- dripping down his sides when he crossed on foot at Broad Street and slipped through a side entrance into the garage. Still there were no police sirens in the air. He came across a filthy concrete stairway in the corner which he ran up two steps at a time until he reached the top. The Stratus wasn’t there, he realized as he stood huffing and puffing with his hands on his knees, surveying the scene in the cold. It couldn’t be far, and there was nowhere to go except down. Luckily there was nobody around to notice and report the man in the shabby clothes darting around the place. He trotted down a ramp, turned a couple of corners and there it was waiting for him.

  Getting to the car so quickly was going to save him, he felt. They probably weren’t prepared for a manhunt. How could they know that he had somebody in his corner watching the watchers? It was easier for them to assume that he’d walk right into their net, on their turf, with no way out. If it all went the way he hoped it was going to, he’d be out of harm’s way just a few minutes after taking the call from Bismarck in the lobby. It just wasn’t enough time for them to put a backup plan into effect, even if there was one. By the time they put their men on the streets he’d be out of their jurisdiction. Concern about jurisdiction hadn’t stopped Trooper Colfax from spotting that body in the dark on the Pennsylvania shore eleven years earlier, but it would more than likely be good enough this time.

  After he was safely in the car he looked around, saw nothing moving, and decided that he hadn’t been followed. Yet. All the wrong people probably knew by now that he was AWOL, but if they were out looking for him this soon, they were looking in the wrong places. Before that changed, he started the engine and wound back down to the bottom level. He was ready with a few bills to pay for the fifteen minutes, but the woman inside the glass cube raised the gate and waved him through. A police siren rose from the street din as he waited for a single car to pass, but it was far enough away that he was sure it had nothing to do with him.

  The garage, at Livingston and Broad, was at the heart of the state government complex. What that meant to Fargo was that it was also close to the river, and the border. That mattered. He pulled onto Broad Street, made a quick right onto Market and then onto Warren, because that’s where the river was. He could see it. So far, so good. There didn’t seem to be anybody on his tail. It was wishful thinking to hope they didn’t know what he was driving. He’d lost track, but he was certain the staties had pulled him over at least once since Bismarck had swapped the cars. No use worrying about that now, he told himself. The only thing he needed to concern himself with was getting across that river.

  He thought he could catch Route 1 from Warren and cross on the expressway bridge, but it didn’t work out that way. Warren Street bent toward the river so that it was parallel to Route 1, but he couldn’t get to it. He was about to cross the Delaware, but not on his bridge of choice. Instead, he had no choice but to guide the Stratus into the green, steel webbing of the goddamned Trenton Makes Bridge.

  The thirty-foot letters whizzed past him on the left, spelling out ‘The World Takes’ in reverse as he moved toward the center. Before he reached mid-span the elation of having made a clean escape gave way to the realization that the ankle bracelet was still broadcasting his whereabouts. Shit. He was done with that goddamned thing. Don’t matter now if I ditch it. Not anymore. He felt around blindly on the floor and came up with a screwdriver. That would do the trick. After his fingers closed around the heavy plastic handle he forced the shaft inside the rubbery band of the bracelet and twisted until it snapped. He felt it fall away onto the floor but he quickly snatched it. It was still giving his position away, strapped on or not.

  ‘Trenton Makes’ was now flashing past one letter at a time from where it hung in the skeleton of the bridge. He rolled the window down but wasn’t sure where to throw the goddamned bracelet. It wasn’t going to matter, anyway. Whether it landed it in the river or was crushed by bridge traffic, they’d know where he’d been when he chucked it. He knew it wouldn’t die quietly without making a final report. No use getting fancy. He tossed it out the window and immediately heard it rattling and thumping around inside the back wheel well. As he reached down to rub his ankle where the screwdriver had scraped away a groove of skin he passed under the four-lane ‘Welcome to Pennsylvania’ sign. For better or for worse, he was away. And he didn’t think he could ever go back.

  ~~~

  “Put me through right now!” Colfax shouted into his cell phone as he paced on a sidewalk outside the state police barracks at Sea Girt. “Don’t play games with me. If you do, I’ll see that you’re held responsible for this. Get him on the line!”

  He heard the shuffle of a phone passed around, and the murmur of several voices. “Hold please,” said a new voice, followed by several clicks. He adjusted the tunic of his New Jersey State Trooper uniform, twisting the front until the buttons aligned with his belt buckle. He’d already begun to wonder why he still wore it. They tried to be discreet, but he knew there was plenty of pointing and snickering behind his back at Homeland Security. Earlier in the week he’d heard a faceless office minion wondering out loud to his buddy why Dudley Do-right doesn’t wear his mountie cap. They all thought it was arrogance, but really, it was only his desire to get back to the career he loved, being a policeman, that made it hard for him to put the uniform in mothballs. It was probably time to concede that he was through as a trooper and start wearing a suit like everybody else.

  “What’s going on? What’s all the fuss about?”

  “Plenty,” Colfax answered curtly. “Listen. We got major troubles. Plan B is wasted. He’s out of the net. I need to know what you want me to do about it and we don’t have a lot of time.”

  “What? How’d you screw this up? What happened?”

  He wanted to say that they hadn’t been given enough time. He wanted to say that there hadn’t been enough people in position to make it work, and that wasn’t his fault. He wanted, plain and simple, to tell him to fuck off and that it was all over, nobody owed anything to anybody anymore, and to have a nice life. But he did none of these things, because like it or not, it wasn’t all over. Not even close. Their lives were entangled forever, and they both knew it. “He was on to us,” he said simply. “He was tipped off.”

  “What do you mean, he was on to us?” the voice demanded. “How the hell could some bottom-feeder who just got out of prison know anything about this?”

  “You tell me,” Colfax snapped. “Maybe you have a leak on your end. How should I know? But he showed up, got a call as soon as he stepped in the door, and then he vanished.”

  “How did he vanish in the middle of Trenton? The place is crawling with cops! I can’t believe you let him get away!”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Colfax said, cutting off the bluster he knew was coming.

  “Don’t tell me what we have time for. Don’t you dare. I’m on the verge of something big here. You know that as well as I do. I can feel it. It’s going to happen and I just need two more weeks. Why ca
n’t you finish this off?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “What else? Plan C. Find him.”

  “That could be a problem,” Colfax told him. “Last we know he was on a bridge heading out of town. Out of state.”

  “Solve it and get back to me. We’re in this together. And make no mistake about it. If I go down, you’re going with me.” The line went dead.

  Colfax looked at the framed photo on his desk, the one with his wife and three daughters. He remembered the day the picture was taken. It had been hectic as hell, but somehow they’d managed to converge at Sears. After some primping they’d all stood in front of a background that depicted a serene meadow and smiled, as if life was good and they didn’t have a care in the world. If only life was that simple. He never knew it was going to come to anything like this. If he didn’t have four beautiful ladies depending on him he’d have cut it off and walked away a long time ago, before he ended up doing anything worse than he already had. Because that’s where this was headed.

  ~~~

  Fargo never thought to ask Bismarck where he was calling from, so he assumed he’d been home. That was as good a place as any to head for. The Pennsylvania police would cooperate with the New Jersey authorities, he knew, especially when it was about a parolee from the Pennsylvania penal system. That would take time to work out, though. He had a few hours to touch all the right bases before he had to disappear.

  Every time he felt himself giving in to the urge to fly to Tacony as fast as the car would take him, he forced his foot off the gas pedal and pulled back into the right lane. Getting nailed for speeding right now would be fatal. Maybe literally. He had time. Not a lot, but some. What he could really use was a beer. Maybe Russ would have some to spare.