Hazardous Goods (Arcane Transport) (25 page)

That got the jerk’s attention. He snarled over his shoulder at Ted, then resumed jostling for position in front of the net. One of our guys came over to help out, but he couldn’t budge the big guy. A shot came in, low to the near side. Ted snapped his knees down into a butterfly and the puck ricocheted into the corner. But our defenceman was too slow, and they regained possession. This time the jerk backed right into the crease in front of Ted, who had to peer around him to see the play.

Ted slashed at the back of the jerk’s legs just as a weak shot floated in. He caught it and stood, a wicked grin on his face.

“Whataya doing, man?”

Chili and a bunch of the other guys on the bench erupted into laughter. Big Jerk was crouched over, holding the back of his knee where Ted had laid on the lumber. I knew that feeling. Stung like a rusty nail through the sole of your boot.

Ted snorted, dropped the puck on the ice, and skated off to the corner so he could cool down. But the jerk didn’t know when to let things be. He skated towards our bench with the puck, then launched a hard wrist shot over the boards.

A little lesson on the game of hockey. A hockey puck is a vulcanized rubber disk, one inch thick and weighing a little under half a pound. A topnotch pro can shoot a puck at over a hundred miles an hour. Even at half that speed a puck can break bone or leave a purple and black bruise on sore flesh. And we were no pros. Most of us wore helmets but no facemasks, some with plastic face shields that covered the face from the forehead to nose.

So when Mr. Asshole fired into our bench, he knew there was a good chance someone was going to get hurt. As it happened, it was Denny Mills who took the shot right in the mouth.

Split lip and a lot of blood. Thank God he had been wearing a mouthguard, or he would have lost a few teeth for sure.

I went over the boards.

The game came to a sudden close after my tussle with Mr. Asshole. No big deal – we only had ten minutes of ice left anyways.

“Thanks, man.”

I glanced up from untying my laces to see Denny with a towel to his mouth. The bleeding had stopped, but you could see a half inch V cut into his upper lip. That was going to take two or three stitches to close, for sure.

“No problem, Denny. You going to be alright?”

“Yeah. My wife’s going to kill me though. I’m supposed to be going to my sister-in-law’s wedding this weekend. In all the photos.” He tried to smile, but it came out as a grimace.

“Guy was a complete jerk.”

“No kidding. Well, thanks for standing up for me.”

I nodded and watched as he slung his bag over his shoulder and headed out.

“Who was that guy, anyway?”

Chili had been talking to a few guys on the other team, who had stood by and watched when I went after Mr. Asshole. Apparently he didn’t rate a lot of loyalty from his teammates.

“Real estate agent. Cokehead. Went to Laurier with some of their guys.”

“Well if he shows up again, I’m going to break my stick over his head.” Chili glanced at Ted, then back at me. He knew Ted as well as I did. If Mr. Asshole hit the ice with us again, he was going home with a broken helmet and a skull fracture.

Ted was waiting for me in the hall when I emerged, his pads, bag and sticks in a mound blocking traffic in all directions.

My timing was impeccable as always. Just as I stepped out of the dressing room, Mr. Asshole emerged from the room next to us.

I stared up at him, a good four inches taller than me and with muscles on his muscles. A vivid welt shone under his left eye, and another on his chin, both remnants of our little battle on the ice. The knuckles on my right hand throbbed, reminding me that my first two punches had landed on the top of his helmet. I really did not want to go again, and I hoped he didn’t start something.

He stared down at me, anger flashing for a moment in his slate grey eyes, then his face relaxed.

“Sorry about that. Your friend okay?”

“Yeah. He’ll be fine.”

“Good.” He stepped past me gingerly, worked around Ted’s bag, and headed for the exit. As he passed Ted, he called back. “You throw a mean punch for a little guy.”

I looked at Ted, and we both shrugged.

“Let’s get outta here.”

“Hang on a sec, I’m just gonna grab something to eat.”

Good idea. I was starving. Normally we would hit a bar with the team after a night game, and on a night like tonight I might have joined them. However, half of the guys couldn’t make it, so they had postponed. The result was that there were no chicken wings or nachos in the immediate horizon, a discouraging thought.

“Grab me some fries, willya?” If I was going to drive for fifty minutes just to get him home, he could cough up for some carbo sticks.

A Peewee team was heading in for a practice, the kids staggering under their bags like miniature sherpas. I dragged our equipment out of the way, to avoid a pileup of twelve year olds.

“Two hot dogs, two plates of fries and a Coke, please. You want one?”

I nodded.

“Sorry, make that two Cokes.”

The Chinese lady behind the counter had been smiling and shaking her head up and down while Ted placed the order. Unfortunately, the smile was replaced by a look of confusion.

“Hot dog?” It came out as “haw dawk?”

“Yeah.” Ted pointed at the steamer cabinet to her left, where two plump dogs were turning next to a bag of buns.

“Ah! Hot dog!” Same “haw dawk”, but apparently she had caught on.

After a strange flurry of action involving paper plates mysteriously stored behind the candy rack, Cokes grabbed from a Styrofoam cooler on the floor rather than the standup glass-front refrigerator behind her, and a single napkin selected from the top of a five inch stack of napkins just out of my reach, we had our food.

“Ketchup?”

I glanced around the lobby, to see if they had set up a separate table for condiments.

She stared at Ted blankly, so he asked again.

“Ketchup?” That came out as “ketta.”

“Ketchup? Mustard?”

She couldn’t have looked more mystified if we had flown in on a UFO and asked to see her leader. Ted glanced at me, his left eye twitching just slightly.

“Heinz?” He mimed pouring ketchup across the top of his hot dog.

“Sauce?”

“Yeah. Sauce.” He glanced back at me, eyebrows raised and shoulders shrugged. What the hell.

“Yes, yes!”

With that she turned and headed to the refrigerator cabinet filled with pop that was apparently not suitable for distribution. At least not as compared to the pop in that classy Styrofoam container. Opened the door and leaned way down, reaching into the back of the bottom shelf. From where I stood, that shelf appeared to contain several industrial sized bottles of unknown origin, a bunch of paper plates and napkins (did they have several caches, in case of emergency?), and a very large piece of cheddar poorly wrapped in plastic.

“Christ’s sake.” Ted was muttering now, while I turned and smiled gamely at one of the Peewee moms.

“Ah!” That cry of triumph was accompanied by the site of serving lady hauling a magnum-sized plastic bottle of no-name mustard from the fridge, and thumping it down on the counter.

Ted nodded his head and smiled. She nodded and smiled back.

“Ketchup?”

“No, no ketchup. Sauce OK?”

Big sigh. Ted turned to me, then ripped into the bare hot dog with his teeth, mumbling throughout.

“Let’s get out of here before I jump the counter.”

I dropped Ted at home and headed straight out again. Amy had called right after I finished my yummy “haw dawk”, and asked me to meet her at Starbucks for a coffee. I guess she had been on duty since I saw her that morning, though she looked just as good, maybe better.

“Turns out it
was
Rev. Narcotics have been on my ass all day, wanting to know where I got the stuff. So you’ve officially become my confidential informant. That means I’m keeping a CI file with your name and contact details in it, but the file is confidential.”

“I’m cool with that. Do I get a code name?”

“Sure. How about – Mr. Dimples? Freckles Malloy?”

Great. I hated it when chicks played the “cute” card. Often the first sign I was headed for the friend zone, or at least the first sign I was capable of reading. Yes, I have dimples. And yes, I have so many freckles I look like I have a perpetual tan. That does not detract from my manliness.

“Nah. How about Studly Doright?”

“Ha! Yeah. Mr. Dimples it is.”

She tweaked my cheek, and I felt very small.

“You may need to meet with my supervisor at some point. He’s going to let me know.”

I wasn’t looking forward to that, but one thing I was sure about – I wasn’t leaving Amy out to dry on any of this. “OK. Whatever you need. So, what does all of this mean for Niki?”

“It means Narcotics are putting a team on him, starting right now. Once they find him, he’ll be put on surveillance.”

“If they don’t have any luck, tell them to try the Ruscan Industries’ head offices on St. Clair.”

“We figured that. They’ll head over there if they don’t spot him at his apartment.”

I returned home to a litany of questions from my dear brother. Did we do the deed? Was she wearing handcuffs? Was I wearing handcuffs? Who did the cavity search?

Ted needed to get out more.

He went to bed just after eleven, but I was too wound up to sleep and ended up watching an hour of MMA fighting. Mixed Martial Arts, or no-holds barred beat’em bloody fighting, as I like to think of it. You would imagine I had seen enough violence for one day, but it was just nice to see someone else throwing punches for a change.

Some guy was bending his opponent’s arm in spectacularly abnormal angles when the phone rang.

“We got him!”

What?

“Niki?”

“Yup. Right in the middle of a deal, four grams of Rev. And he was carrying a gun.”

“
No kidding
.” Jeez, how long had the guy been wearing the ring? He was getting it even worse than Jamar had. Sweet.

“Oh yeah. High fives all around. Narcotics love me right now. I owe you dinner.”

My heart leaped and I admit it was not the only part of my anatomy that experienced a surge.

“Sounds good to me.”

“Don’t get any ideas. Anyways, keep an eye out. We’ve got him, but he’ll probably make bail and be back on the street in a day or two.”

“He’s a hard guy to miss.”

“True, but he’s also a real hardass. They’re still questioning him, but he refuses to give up any names. Guy’s been in the system awhile. He’ll be a tough one to crack.”

“You get the sense he was supposed to be dealing, or is he doing this on the side?”

“Can’t figure that out yet. He was definitely dealing in the club when our guys arrested him, but he had enough at his apartment that we think he might also be a middle man.”

“I thought that was a real no-no in the drug world.”

“No kidding. The whole idea is to maintain cut-outs, not rely too much on any one player in the game. The guys up the chain stay off the street to reduce their visibility. If Kuzmenko really is a distributor, then he’s in for a heap of shit. We’re squeezing him like crazy, trying to climb the chain.”

“Any links to Legenko?”

“Nothing. But we’re going to keep searching. If he’s a supplier, there may be some leads from the surveillance. If we’re lucky, his tracks will lead us to Legenko.”

Hard as it is to believe, the next few days were quite pleasant. The thought of Niki’s ass lodged in jail was of tremendous comfort to me. Not only that, but Amy had been calling me every night, to update me and just to chat.

That gave me a chance to sort out a few things back in the office, including following up on our suspicions regarding Bindings, Dr. Galt and the fearstone. I had Kara make an appointment for me to meet with Dr. Galt, and I dropped by their offices at the end of the day on Thursday.

Bindings was located in the Theatre District, which was hopping at this hour. The mid-day trickle of suits had been replaced by casual blazers, open collars and ladies in evening wear.

The store was open for business, and several customers were milling about. Galt spoke with two men in suits who looked like bankers, and one of his associates checked in with the other shoppers, pulling out a book for examination by one fellow, and reviewing the history of another text with a younger couple. The receptionist was the same blonde I had met on my first day – Mary O’Connell, according to Kara.

I’m pretty sure the good doctor registered my polo shirt when I entered, but it still took a good ten minutes and three reminders from the receptionist before he excused himself and gestured for her to lead me in. Not so much as an insincere apology.

Ms. O’Connell led me to a small sitting room tucked in an alcove I had not registered on my last visit. Galt lowered himself into a wicker chair in the corner, and I opted for a matching chair facing him. I eased myself down, conscious of my long-standing view that wicker is a fragile substitute for oak or metal. The checkerboard strips creaked as my weight settled in, and I tried to hide my wince.

“...was saying this was about a lost package?”

“Yes,” I drew the trench coat out of the gift bag Kara had provided for the trip. “I guess last year this coat was left with us to deliver to your offices, but your receptionist at the time,” I referred to my notes, anal fellow that I am, “Ms. Morgan? I guess she told Clay you hadn’t ordered any coats.”

He extended a manicured hand, and I passed him the coat. He turned it over in his hands, checked the label and length, and even sniffed the damned thing. I took the opportunity to observe my customer. Omega watch and bespoke suit. Apparently old books were good business. His motions were precise and delicate, with the fine dexterity I associated with a dentist. Or a pianist. I suppose that made sense for someone handling antique papers on a daily basis.

“Well, this appears to be one of my own coats. I thought I had lost this some time back. But you’ve had this for several years now – why did you take so long to contact us?”