The Weight of Stones (21 page)

Kendra squinted and nodded. McKelvey felt his chin quivering, nerves. “Well, at least your son wasn't afraid to get a tattoo,” she said with a smile.

“When was this taken? Do you keep records of this sort of thing?”

Tim was listening with interest now.

“I did both him and his girlfriend that day. I remember, because they didn't have all the cash, and we worked out a deal where they agreed to clean the shop and make up the difference. We'd have their authorization forms on file, for sure. Randy, the owner, is real anal about all the paperwork.”

Girlfriend
, McKelvey thought. And it brought back some of the comments the street kids had made. Innuendos, vague utterances. It was never confirmed that Gavin had a steady girlfriend, but then on the street that sort of declaration could be a liability. He had moved beyond the circle of the squeegee kids, graduating to the orbit of the drug peddlers. The kids beneath the expressway and in the drop-in shelters carried only faint memories of the boy by the time McKelvey had got to them, their population transient.

“They got matching tattoos?” McKelvey said.

Kendra dabbed the tissue at Tim's arm, where a line of translucent fluid was forming in a fat teardrop.

“I'm sorry,” she said, “I'm a little confused. You didn't know about the tattoo?”

McKelvey stared at the photo. In vibrant colour. His son, smiling, proud of the new artwork on his body. The black-haired girl smiling beside him, their heads touching, the whole rest of their lives spread before them.

“His son was murdered,” Tim offered quietly. “About two years ago now.”

“Oh my god,” Kendra said, and her shock was genuine.

“I'm so sorry. I didn't know...”

“Don't be sorry,” McKelvey said. “Listen. I need copies of their authorization forms. I need the girl's ID.”

“Oh, my god,” Kendra repeated, and now it seemed she was trying not to cry, the emotion of the connection coming through. “It's just that...”

“What is it?” McKelvey said.

“You knew they were expecting, right? I mean, the reason they were getting matching tattoos,” she said. “Because they were expecting...”

Kendra sniffed, the tears coming now. McKelvey didn't hear anything after that.

Nineteen

D
uguay's mind swam with the possibilities, and he took no notice of the white Ford minivan pulling away from the curb as he drove out of the club parking lot. The van kept its distance, then allowed a car to cut between it and Duguay's Mystique. Twice since the meeting at Danny's place, Bouchard had called him on the safe cellular, speaking in code, pushing him towards the dual objectives. He'd gleaned the retired cop's home address, even driving over there and circling the neighborhood, getting a feel for the territory. And for the first time in a long time, Duguay experienced the pressurized discomfort that comes when a man finds himself increasingly wedged between two wrong places.

Duguay saw it clearly laid out: Bouchard would use him to get rid of the dirty cop and the meddling cop—two cops, for Christ's sake—then it would be Duguay who took the bullet in the back of the head. He saw how it would unfold. The call to a meeting. The shot you never heard. His body tied in a sleeping bag, tossed in the lake with a set of weights. Or perhaps they would opt to roll his body into a minivan which would be found burned to its metal frame in a vacant lot in an industrial complex, in true Quebec biker style. No physical evidence, no leads. It would take significant efforts to identify the body. And when it was identified, it would make the front page of
Âllo Police
, then he would be gone from the world as though he had never been born.

With some of the guys it came easy. Guys like the famed Cortez from down south who had a dozen notches on his belt. Duguay had always sensed it was more than just a job for some of them, more than a contract to be fulfilled. It was something, the seeking and the finding, sniffing for the essence of death. With Duguay it was all business. There was no pleasure to be found in taking a man's life. You carried that blood on your hands for all of your days. There had been only one, and he had never talked about it, not with anyone. It was his hope that there would be no more. He wanted money and a string of businesses, a nice home, a truck. He didn't want to look over his shoulder for the rest of his days, wondering when the payback for an old kill might be delivered. It's what they didn't understand, that once it got started, there was no end.

With Balani it made sense. There was no question. The cop had stepped across to the other side, sticking a toe in the waters, accepting envelopes of cash, a hotel room with a high-priced call girl, the exhilarating knowledge that he was in many ways
above
the law. He was the law, and yet he was circulating in a realm of ambiguity, a sense of danger. Happened to the narcos all the time: good cops driven underground for a year or two suddenly found themselves no longer surprised by their own depraved actions. Of course Bouchard was right, it made business sense to get rid of Balani if the drug-addled cop was starting to spread stories.

With the other, this McKelvey, it wasn't so clearly defined. Duguay was puzzled, confused by the man, even more confused by his own feelings. There was no obvious connection, at least not in his memory. He had requested and received personal information on the man, relying on inside sources, police informants. He looked at the stark black and white departmental photo of the man, with his piercing eyes and his square jaw. The facts were plain: the man's son had been murdered. The cop's son peddling dime rocks for none other than Marcel Leroux. That was the connection to the Blades. So what did this have to do with him? McKelvey was retired. What was the point?

Or had he simply lost his nerve? Was he making excuses here?

The man had suffered the loss of his son, a weight to carry for the rest of his life.
So what? People die every day. They die in
accidents, stabbings, bombings, from food poisoning for fuck sakes.
Why am I supposed to feel bad for this asshole snooping around in
my life, making connections, drawing conclusions...

What the hell is wrong with my head?
Duguay joined the traffic merging onto the four-lane highway headed east. His mind finally drifted, and he thought of Chantal LeClair's body and the taste of her, the smell of her, the girl from his street back home, the only woman he'd ever thought of marrying. He wondered, as he did from time to time, where she was or who she was with, what she was doing now, right now. Another missed opportunity, choosing the boys and the lifestyle over a home with babies, Chantal in her summer dress to greet him at the door with his lunch bucket and his little paycheck. They could have made it, he knew. She had wanted to. Get married, get out of the life, get a trade ticket and live like all the rest of the people in their row houses, living for a Saturday night drunk, getting old and your kids coming back home for Sunday night roast beef.

Chantal LeClair. What would she think of him now? It made him smile. To think of the old days and the old places, those nights when they were seventeen and made love in the back seat of a car parked down a dead end street. Probably something he'd stolen. He smiled at the memories of Chantal, the girl he could have had and should have had. Some times when he felt himself starting to go crazy inside the penitentiary, he would go back to those days. Before he'd robbed the bank in Dorval and been caught two days later asleep in a room at the Holiday Inn in Pointe Claire. It was the first time he'd used a handgun, the first time he'd drawn more than a short stint.
Seven years.
Too long for Chantal to wait, even though she would have. She would have waited. But he never gave her the chance.

Duguay pulled into the lot at Danny's place. He glanced around as he walked from the car to the door, quick shoulder checks to scan the field of vision. He sensed the vehicle near him, around him, always just out of sight. He'd made the connection halfway across town. It was Bouchard's man keeping tabs on him, or a Hells associate come to make good on that promise made all those years ago after the Lennoxville Massacre. Sign with us or retire, that was the ultimatum. He knew things, he knew people, he held secrets, and they'd offered him a place with the new chapter, but he had turned his back on them.

Duguay slipped inside the garage with its strong smell of epoxy. He paused at the door to the bay, watching his friend work on the frame of a rare 1981 Trans Am. Danny's hand moved in slow circles across the front quarter panel, shaping the body one invisible layer at a time.

“Sugar plum,” Duguay said, “I need a favour.”

Danny looked up, smiled. He set the square of sandpaper down and wiped his hands across the front of his coveralls. His eyes were red, and he moved slow, buzzed.

“You're in your zone,” Duguay said. “You wouldn't even notice somebody coming in here to rob you. You should lock the fucking door at least.”

Danny came over and stood with a shoulder against the door frame, fishing for his pack of cigarettes. He offered the pack to Duguay. Danny lit their cigarettes and blew a mouthful of smoke toward the tubes of bright fluorescent lighting that made everything, even the flesh on their faces, seem fabricated, plastic.

“Not much to steal around here,” Danny said, looking around. His face was dark with ground dust and fibreglass shavings. “Anyway, I got a full set of wrenches that'd knock a row of teeth out pretty quick. Not to mention I still keep an old pistol in the bottom drawer of my desk.”

Duguay laughed, said, “Not the same little .38 I gave you,
es ti.”

“That would be the one.”

“Thing probably wouldn't shoot any more, buddy. It'd jam on you. You have to clean them, or they don't work. We'll have to get you set up with something newer. A Taser, maybe. They're getting popular. Bring a guy down without having to waste him, at least not right there and then.”

“Come on, Pete, look at me. I don't need to keep a fucking gun around, man. I'm just hiding away in here with my cars, you know? I'm not bothering anybody.”

“I brought you into this, Danny. You're
in it.
If Bouchard is looking to get rid of me, then he won't think twice about wasting you. The guy's fucking paranoid.”

“What can I do, Pete? Just say it.”

“When it happens, it's gonna be big. A real big bang.”

Danny pinched his cigarette at the halfway mark, twisted the end and slipped the butt in the front pocket of his coveralls. It was an old habit, and witnessing it brought Duguay back to prison, where cigarettes and decks of smokes were traded with the weight of cash. A man on the inside could have another man beaten for the mere price of a few cartons of cigarettes. Everything had a value: blowjobs from the trannies, a pinch of dope hooped in a con's anus, a copy of the key to the phone in the administration wing. He remembered a green kid coming to the pen for the first time, how badly he'd wanted a deck of smokes, and how Duguay had warned him to wait until the canteen order was placed in a few days, not to borrow a pack. The kid couldn't wait and wouldn't listen to advice, ended up “borrowing” a deck of smokes from a particularly degenerate old con, an infamous and merciless sex hound. The kid's time inside quickly turned to a version of hell when he found out the next day that it wasn't a one-for-one trade; no, the old con wanted a full carton for his single pack. It was inflation in triple digits. The kid didn't have the ways or the means to cover the carton right away, so he began digging himself deeper into the debt of the old con until finally he was owned outright. Duguay saw the kid crying in fear and desperation, coming back to him for help. But the old con's game had been played straight up, it was the code, so Duguay had no choice but to turn his back on the kid.

Whatever happened to that kid?
Duguay wondered.
What
makes one stronger than the other? Why am I still here, still
standing, when so many of us fell back in the day?

His mind flashed with memories from the penitentiaries, the stabbings in the weight pit with jagged hunks of glass, toothbrushes melted and fitted with a razor blade, an uncoiled bed spring sharpened to a deadly point, the actual smell of fear that settled upon the place like a poisonous gas as a new fish was brought down the line—the ways they tried to maim and kill one another on the inside, it was mediaeval. It didn't happen every day, but when it did, it was brutal, and it was fast. The last stint awaiting trial, it had made him think. He wasn't sure he had it in him to do another long stretch. He couldn't say it, but it was there in the back of his mind, a whisper.

“So what about this favour?” Danny said.

“It can wait a little. Why don't you roll us a joint like the old days.”

Danny Madill didn't have to be asked twice.