The Weight of Stones (23 page)

McKelvey flipped through the printed reports. “She was picked up at the Dove,” he said.

“Blades' unofficial clubhouse,” she said. “Must be working for one of their agencies.”

He glanced at his watch. It was twenty past twelve. The strip joint would be stumbling headlong into its final hours. There was no tomorrow, no day after that. It was right now, right here. This was everything.

“I'm going to ask you to go home,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” she said.

“Go home and stay by your phone. I'll call you to check in.”

“Charlie, no,” she said. “Let me stay here at least. I'll be worried sick.”

“I have to do this on my own,” he said. “You can understand that. Please.”

“I can't just let you leave here to go after Duguay. Printing a few files is one thing, Charlie, but I'm not going to be an accessory…”

“Shhh,” he said, and leaned over to take her face in his hands. “I don't give a shit about Pierre Duguay, Hattie. I want the girl, that's all. I want to find my grandchild.”

“She might not even work there any more,” she said. “Christ, she could be anywhere.”

“She's there,” he said. “I can feel it. She's still there.”

Duguay parked the car in the lot of a motel a block down from the Dove. The passenger side was trashed, streaked with black scratches and peppered with paint flecks from the car he had side-swiped, something in burgundy, and the driver's side mirror hung there like a popped eyeball. He walked back to the club, came in the front door and slipped past the doorman. He spotted a few of the hangarounds standing at the bar, guys who did the gang's dirty work while awaiting their promotion to “prospect” status. He would have them get rid of the car before it drew any more heat to him. Duguay slipped the keys in the jacket pocket of a hangaround named BB.

“Car got shot up. Get Davey to follow you and drive it out of the city,” Duguay said. “Take it up to Orillia or some place. Strip the plates and light it up.”

“What's Davey supposed to do?” BB asked. His mouth was open, and he had big teeth.

“Drive you back, asshole,” Duguay said and brushed past them on his way through the club to the apartment, using his shoulders to clear a path through the patrons. These were the soldiers Bouchard had sent to open a franchise, to raise a flag. Morons and crackheads. The thing was doomed from the start. And now his ass was on the line.

The sweat was drenching his T-shirt as he began to throw his clothes into a duffel, cursing his own stupidity for throwing in with this crew. He'd felt like he was in a no-win situation after the bad business in Lennoxville. He should have taken the hand extended by the Sorel Hell's Angels, moved past the fact they had killed a few of his good friends. Yet here he was. Pride or hatred, or perhaps both had prevented him from shaking hands with those people. He'd been sitting in a bar near the Montreal airport waiting for a flight attendant from Air Canada who imported cocaine for him on her body. That's when the friend of a friend had seen him there and made the introduction to Jean Bouchard. The old man had liked him right from the start. And that's when everything had changed for Duguay.

He went around the rooms of the apartment, and it was always this way in the end, it always came down to this: trying to decide what to carry with him, what to leave behind. He was in the living room zipping the bag shut when Luc, the acting boss, came through the door. He stood there regarding Duguay for a moment, and Duguay did not like the trace of a smile on the man's mouth.

“What's the joke?” he said, and straightened up.

“BB told me you came in, said your car got shot up,” Luc said. “What happened?”

“Why don't you tell me?” Duguay said.

“What are you talking about? Why would I want to hurt you?”

“Don't fuck around with me,” Duguay said. “I'm not playing games here.”

Luc took a few steps, careful not to move too fast, and sat down on a love seat. He was a tall man, but lanky, and his stringy black hair had always bothered Duguay, always hanging in the man's eyes. And he wore too much jewellery—like most of the bikers did—which Duguay saw as unnecessary and boastful. All show and sizzle.

“I swear on my life, I would never put a hit out on you, Pierre. It's the Para-Dice Riders, I bet. We're starting to get heat from them, too. The Hells on one side, the Riders on the other, both of them starting to squeeze our nuts. Loners are the only ones who will even sit and talk to us about an alliance. Have a drink with me, Pierre. Relax. Sit down and have a drink,” Luc said.

“It's all a mess,” Duguay said. “Nothing's organized. They sent us here to fail. The Hells own this place. It's a death wish trying to carve out a territory in this city with a bunch of fuckheads.”

“Listen,” Luc said, glancing at his watch, “I've got to run across the city to see a few of my guys. I'd like to have a beer when I get back so we can talk. But tell me what you need, Pierre, tell me what I can do right now to help.”

Duguay said, “I need a piece. Something big. A .45.”

He would make it through the night. Make it until morning, when he could hit the bank and grab his rainy day money. With a gun in his jeans, he could make it all the way back to the streets of Montreal.

Twenty-One

I
t begins with the bass line to a new song, and the curtains part to reveal the first glimpse of the dancer. And so the ceremony begins beneath the dim lights, the stage cool to her bare feet, the funky scent of liquor and perspiration in the air.

Feeling unknown
And you're all alone...

Bathed in steel moonlight, yes, the dancer moves liquid to the beat. Men watch, many of them believing they could find religion where her thighs meet, the delta of some deeper well. The prize they have sought for all time. Men pause with pool cues in hand, their eyes dialed in to the stage. This is what they have come for.

The girl with the coal black hair arches her back, rolls to her side and lifts her head. McKelvey stares into her eyes, and he sees only a girl, the girl his son perhaps loved, and this leaves him feeling lightheaded. The room begins to rotate on an axis, and he doubts himself, doubts his ability to follow through with all this. But the doubt is fleeting. The training comes back. The years of walking the beat, driving the streets of the division. He slows his breathing, focuses on the task at hand.

Lift up the receiver
I'll make you a believer

Someone howls, then there is clapping as the dancer rises from the floor, a goddess come alive, and she slips back through black curtains. It is as though she simply dissolves. It takes a long time for McKelvey's eyes to adjust to the dim lighting, or more like the absence of lighting. He is no stranger to these establishments, but it has been a while.

She is just a girl, just a kid. Somebody's daughter, he thinks. He moves through the tables, past the girls on the stools touching their toes for private dances, through groups of young men with dozens of beer bottles on their tables, and he moves to the hallway at the rear that will lead him to the dressing room.

Experience had taught McKelvey that to be in command, a man must believe he is in command. “Fake it if you have to,” is how the old veteran cop had put it to him his first day on the job all those centuries ago. Now he had the .25 pistol shoved in the back of his waistband with his untucked dress shirt covering it, and he reached back and felt it, a slight comfort, as he slipped down the hallway and on past the set of doors for the washrooms, crossing the final threshold of his life. At the end of the hallway, there was a set of stairs. He took the only other route, a short hallway to the left. At the end of it he turned the knob on the door and pushed it open, coming into another long and blue-lit hallway. Now the music began to thump in his chest as the next dancer came on stage and the men clapped in half-hearted appreciation. He opened the door at the end of that hallway, and he was inside the dressing room.

It was very dimly lit. Three women were in various stages of dress and undress, they were all smoking, and only one of them, a tall and skinny blonde girl, seemed to take notice of him. The blonde eyed him while she brushed her phoney hair. McKelvey pulled out a cigarette from a package he'd bought just that afternoon after the nuclear devastation of the tattoo shop, his first transgression in months. That initial draw sending a dose of dope to his head, good old dependable nicotine. It made him feel guilty to give in, to surrender once again, but Christ, it didn't really matter any more, did it?

He had just finished lighting the cigarette when the girl with the black hair came into the room from the stage hallway. Dressed in a short kimono now, carrying the blanket she used on stage.

“Jessie,” McKelvey said.

She squinted and gave him a look. She got closer to him, but not too close.

“Who are you?” she said.

“I'm Gavin's dad,” he said then reached into the back pocket of his pants and pulled out the Polaroid from the tattoo parlour. She stared. She seemed transfixed, on the verge of breaking down, then suddenly her body language changed, and she was defiant, tough.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she said. But she was visibly shaken. He knew the truth without asking. Years of questioning drivers, crooks, garden variety assholes, had honed that sixth sense to a sharp edge. He saw her life and her connection to his boy in her eyes.

“It's right here in the picture. You got matching tattoos. Because you were pregnant. The girl at the shop told me the whole story. Come on, Jessie, cut me some slack here. I just want to talk to you for an hour. Just an hour of your time.”

The other girls were listening now, pretending to curl their hair or apply thick mascara. Jessie tossed the comforter over in a corner and took a cigarette from the ashtray, took a haul.

“He was my son,” he said. “I only had the one. I just want to talk to you, Jessie. It's been a rough couple of years. Would you do that for me?”

She looked at him, and as he spoke, she visibly softened. She liked him, just something about him. Then she knew. She knew the parts of her boy that she saw in this man standing there in front of her. The curly hair, the intense blue eyes, that handsomeness that was neither conventional nor easy to explain.

“Well, I'm sorry you came all this way,” she said, “but somebody lied to you. There's no baby.”

“Come on, Jessie,” he said. “Don't fuck with me, not tonight.”

McKelvey saw the expression change on the blonde girl's face, and he turned to see a stocky man coming through the door. McKelvey did the calculations quickly. The man was about his height, but a good bit heavier, more solid. A bouncer or paid muscle.

“This guy bothering you, Jess?” the man said and wagged a thumb at McKelvey.

“He was just leaving, Gerry,” she said.

“Now just wait a minute,” McKelvey said, but Gerry took steps towards him, and it was McKelvey's experience that once the distance was closed, there was no going back. So he reached behind his shirt, pulled the pistol free and brought his weight down through his arm and his hand and cut the man across the head, a short and deep gash across the forehead that instantly opened up and flowed. Gerry blinked and staggered, but only for a second.

“Get Duguay!” one of the girls yelled.

Gerry put his hand to his face to wipe away the blood but kept coming on, all rolling shoulders and thick arms, and McKelvey absorbed a hard shot to the left cheek before employing a manoeuvre he'd been taught thirty years earlier, one he'd used on more than one occasion in the outdoor parks and graffiti-splashed hallways of city housing complexes, and he side-stepped a quick shuffle, got hold of the man's neck and had him off balance and on the floor with a sharp knee to the back of the leg. He felt quickly for the cuffs at his belt, an old habit, then stepped off with his back to the wall, the pistol trained.