I
slept for four hours, put on my clothes, and went for a late lunch at the Secret Garden. It was a hole-in-the-wall place on Main Street, just down from a few really good Chinese food restaurants. I walked the streets and noticed the same three faces outside the restaurant each time I was nearby. They never noticed me because on each pass I was farther and farther away. The first pass was in front of the building. The second, ten minutes later, was from across the street. The third pass was done in a cab. We rode by twice, the first time watching the men I saw, the second eyeing the area for what I would need.
The three Chinese men were in their forties with tall bushy hair and tight leather motorcycle jackets. Two of the men stood near the entrance of the restaurant â one in front of the door, the other fifteen metres away in the mouth of an alley. Both had black hair that they had let grow long in the back. They accentuated the mullet with wisps of hair combed over one of their eyes. The men were similar in height, weight, and style. The only difference was the tattoo that showed on the neck of the man in front of the alley. The third guard was on the opposite side of the building. His hair was bleached and sculpted high on his head. The hair was very white, and I saw no roots, meaning the job had been done recently. The heavy leather made it impossible to tell if the men were carrying â I figured it was a safe bet that they were.
“Never guess anything that will make your life easier. The world has a way of making sure things stay as shitty as possible, remember that.” My uncle's voice was still as loud now as it was when he was alive.
The three men were a constant; customers were not. On every pass, I never saw anyone getting any food from the Secret Garden. There was an old woman behind the counter wearing an apron, but it was white â too white to belong to a cook. Miller's intel had been good. He knew about the three men out front, making me think what he had said about inside was probably true too.
On my fifth pass, again on foot, I walked inside the Secret Dragon. The old woman behind the counter looked at me, then into the back, then at me again.
“I help you?”
“An order of rice and sweet and sour chicken.”
“We no have sweet and sour chicken.”
“Just the rice then.”
“No rice.”
I blew out a bit of air and put my smile on. “Okay, just get me a plate of whatever you have.”
“Food cost a lot of money.”
“That's cool.”
“Food take a lot of time.”
“I'll wait.”
The woman disappeared into the back and was gone for five minutes. I used the time, and the small spaces between the lettering on the window, to look out at the men out front. They were tense because of my arrival, but they never left their posts; they stayed on duty outside the restaurant. The woman came back with a small Styrofoam container that cost ten dollars. The container was cold to the touch, and when I opened it across the street, and around the corner, I saw that it was some kind of meat in brown sauce. They had added a live cockroach for flavour too. I chuckled at the move and left the container open on the concrete. Birds descended on the open container, eager for a free meal. They got close enough to the container to see what it was, then left it alone.
The front served expensive, shitty food with service that paralleled the worst orphanage cafeteria line. People got the message to stay away in rude stereo. Miller had explained that the men out front were the primary security force. The men inside were mostly money counters. There were only three other armed guards behind the counter. The men outside watched who came in and out; if you tried a stick-up, they would be behind you waiting in the streets. If you took a run at any of the three men out front first, the money would be run out back by one of the armed guards, and the other two gunmen would back up the men in the street. The Secret Garden was a good front with satisfactory protection and not a lot of overhead. The main deterrent was not the men but the triad's reputation.
Igor was going to take money from a well-sourced, dangerous group of people, and he had to do it without help too. His own crew would be as dangerous to him as the Fat Cobra Society, but worse than that, if someone figured out that Igor worked for Sergei, pride would dictate a gang war. Then it wouldn't matter if Igor got the money back. Sergei would kill him ten times over for stirring up the Asian hornet nest.
I waited around the corner for just the right kind of truck. There weren't many big stores downtown that operated outside Jackson Square Mall. Most of the shops were mom-and-pop run, and they got stock in via the family minivan every week or so. I had to wait the better part of an hour for a U-Haul, the largest the company supplied, to lumber down the street. Traffic was slower than usual because of the people driving back home to their apartments in the core or driving through to their nicer homes on the fringes of the city. I let the U-Haul pass me and jogged into the temporary cover it provided as it rolled down the street. The angle of my body behind the U-Haul made seeing me impossible for the three men in front of the Secret Garden. The truck hit each pothole with a thunderous explosion of metal on worn out shocks. People ignored the sound and looked at something other than the orange and white truck with the large squid painted on the side that showed off the majesty of the aquatic life of Newfoundland. All of the U-Haul trucks had been painted recently. They each had images on the sides of the cabs that represented the different wild animals of Canada. The pictures were hideous, and they kept even more eyes off the truck in the same way a large facial mole forces people to look but not look.
Three storefronts up from the Secret Garden, I hooked, unseen by the guards, into a vacant storefront. The dark doorway was sunk two metres in, and the glass door still advertised a foreclosed decorative bead store called Bead Craft and Beyond. The smaller print underneath told me that the store was once the city's jewellery and decoration headquarters. The previous owner left notices up in the window about how-to beading classes and custom work that could be done to clothing. The store was like most others in the city â alive for a minute, then gone. The storefront would flicker with life a few more times over the next couple of years, I expected, until it finally became something more palatable to the city. When the vacancy was replaced by a Tim Hortons or a dollar store, it would finally stay occupied longer than a couple of months.
The doorway went back enough to keep me out of sight while I waited for Igor to show up. On either side of me, display windows went out to the sidewalk. I was able to look through the panes of glass beside me to see the Secret Garden. Miller had told Igor that the money came every day around lunch. It was counted, bagged, and picked up by eight. There would be a lot of cash, according to Miller, because this was the only money-counting front the Fat Cobra Society had in the city. Igor planned to show up just before eight. That way, the money would be together and already set up to move.
I spent a few hours in the darkness until I saw Igor, duffel bag in hand, walk past the Secret Garden. The leather-clad security out front didn't look at him more than once as he passed. Igor, on the other hand, stared openly. He even stopped in front of the restaurant to look for the third guard, who was standing out of sight, on his own doorstep, just up the street. When Igor was done his shitty scope, he crossed the street and took a spot on a bench four storefronts away from where I stood. The vacant storefront was perfect camouflage â he never saw me. Igor pulled out his phone and dialled a number. He said a few words before closing the phone and putting it back into his pocket.
I watched Igor sit for ten minutes until a wave of red light stabbed into my hiding place. An unmarked police car rolled down the street behind a large
SUV
. The
SUV
pulled to the curb, and the cop car pulled in behind, right in front of the Secret Garden. A huge man rocked his way out of the driver's seat of the cop car. Sergeant Miller was doing a traffic stop downtown.
Igor waited for Miller to get to the window of the
SUV
before getting up off his bench and crossing the street towards the Secret Garden. The three men out front saw him cross with the bag and enter the restaurant, brushing the arm of the fat cop as he walked over the sidewalk. Each guard stayed where he was, staring at the police lights and the fat cop. I could see through the window of the Secret Garden enough to make out Igor holding a gun. The guard closest to the restaurant saw it too, because he pulled a phone from his pocket and spoke into it using a walkie-talkie function. I watched the other two guards use their phones in a similar fashion. A rapid discussion broke out in Chinese. I knew what was on their minds. To stop the robbery, they would have to pull guns and rush past a cop to get inside. The cop would try to stop them, and that would cause them to break one of the only rules criminals have â never shoot a cop. You break that rule, and the whole weight of the police force will roll over you. Cops hold the line between the shit and everybody else, but if you go and make it personal, you'll find out they play dirtier than anyone on the street. They'll fuck you and make sure you get charged for not saying thank you. Everyone knows this, and it froze the Chinese men out front.
Inside, Igor had pistol whipped the old woman in the clean apron. Miller stood outside, with his back to the restaurant, holding the
SUV
driver's
ID
. He was moving the licence back and forth as though he were trying to focus his eyes without his glasses. Miller's stall kept the men out front, but they weren't standing still. One was still on his phone as he slowly approached the other two men and the restaurant entrance. Miller saw the men coming and went so far as to put his back against the glass for support while he wrote the ticket.
Igor had worked fast. He had an arm around the woman's neck as he headed towards the back room, gun pointed forward. He was following the plan he and Miller had devised back at his house. Igor would use the woman as a human shield while he took the money. Once he had the money, he would force everyone out the back door. He would lock them outside and then bolt out the front while Miller covered him with his bullshit traffic stop. As I crossed the street, Igor got a shoe inside the back room. When my foot crossed the median, I put three bullets, in one second, into Miller's unmarked police car.
The heavy .
45
spit the slugs
250
metres per second, and the bang chased after the lead, shrieking a warning to everyone around. The sound of metal repeatedly piercing metal was obscured by the gunshots from across the street. Everyone looked around for the source of the sounds except Miller and Igor. Miller dropped the ticket pad from his hands and took cover behind his car while Igor spun his human shield around to face the street. I put two more bullets into the unmarked car's tires before letting three more rounds chew holes into the Secret Garden's windows. Drivers ducked their heads below their dashboards and stomped on the gas. Cars crashed into one another, and traffic ground to a halt all around the restaurant. I used one car â its occupants screaming on the floor â to crouch behind as I reloaded. As I took cover I pulled a fresh magazine from my pocket. The spent clip slipped into my hand, and I slid its replacement home. I pushed the spent magazine into my pocket, racked the slide, and came out from behind the car. The four seconds I wasted reloading gave the leather-clad Chinese men time to cross the street towards me. A bullet starred the windshield of the car I was behind as I stood. Another bullet, from a second shooter close to the first, shattered a window across the street behind me. I went to one knee and took a two-handed grip. Another bullet whizzed over my head and found the hood of a nearby car.
The man in front of me was trying to pick me off without getting any closer. He was probably used to shooting at new-to-the-life kids or ambitious junkies taking a shot at a refund. He expected me to run away from the bullets and straight into one of his partners. He had no way of knowing that this wasn't my first rodeo. I came up fast, sighted the man, and pulled the trigger once, then twice. Two heavy slugs punched him off his feet. The first hit centre mass, the second impacted high in the chest near the collar bone. As he fell, a mist of blood and bone fragments stained a white car behind him.
I turned and moved along the car, looking for the other guard who had taken a shot at me. Through the rear windshield I saw the man with the neck tattoo approaching. He held his gun in two shaky hands as he wove through the petrified gridlock. Terrified heads lifted enough to see the man moving, gun in hand, and then disappeared back below the windows. The guard was staying low and waving his gun with stiff movements in front, behind, and under each car he approached. I watched him advance on a small hybrid and waited for him to check the space in front of the bumper when gunfire got my attention. Thinking it was the third guard, I ducked back behind the car, but the shots weren't at me â a firefight had broken out in the Secret Garden. Flashes could be seen from behind what was left of the starred and broken glass. Some of the shots came from an automatic, making me think that in the confusion Igor lost control of the situation and the men in back had enough time to get to a weapon. Within seconds of another burst of automatic chatter, Igor came running out of the Secret Garden â without his bag. His grey shirt was bloody, but he still managed a speedy getaway down the street. The guard near the hybrid saw Igor running away in his bloody shirt and turned his stiff-armed stance away from my direction towards Igor's back. I rose off my knee, aiming just above the tattoo, and put a bullet into the side of his head before he could pull the trigger. The top of the man's head came off, his scalp parting like leaves of cabbage.
Igor ignored the shot and kept on running. He turned down the first side street he saw and vanished from sight. I turned back to the store front and saw Miller on his feet, police pistol in hand. His feet were spread wide, and one eye was closed. I dove left as the muzzle flash erupted. Behind the car, I felt my chest for any wet spots, but I found none. I shuffled back and tried the door handle to the car I used for cover. The handle moved, but the door stayed closed. I swung the heavy barrel of the Colt into the window and was showered by pellets of glass.