I
spent the night and most of the next day in a room of the seventh floor of a fleabag motel near the airport eating peanuts and drinking bottled water. I had a chest of drawers across the door and the knife and darts ready for use. I’d pregimmicked the window to open and had at hand a length of Edelrid Sky Pilot rope I’d bought at the downtown Mountain Equipment Co-op store. That would give me quick and painful access to the ground if things got really bad. I say painful because I had the mountain-climbing and rappelling skills of a large, irregular stone with palsy.
When it was dark I visited the offices of Ultra Realty and stole their office gun, the Polish Radom semi-automatic pistol with its heavy leather holster, twin eight-round box magazines and the extra eleven rounds. I also took the cleaning rod and a small tube of gun oil.
In the dim light of my flashlight I stripped the gun and oiled it, popped all the shells out and polished them, and then reloaded them. The holster went on my belt on my right side,
covered by my jacket but easy to reach. I went into the basement and used a black marker to make a one-inch dot on one concrete wall, then stood with my back against the other, about twenty feet away. I clicked the safety off, aimed for the centre of the dot, and squeezed the trigger against a three-pound resistance.
Bang
.
A sharp, authoritative noise and a big chip of virgin white concrete appeared two inches below my dot while shards of metal and stone whizzed around the basement and broke something glass in the far corner. I waited but no one reacted, so I assumed no one heard anything or recognized it as gunfire. I adjusted my aim up and squeezed twice more. The dot vanished and more stone and metal shards broke more things around me. Then I reloaded the magazine, gathered up my spent brass, and left.
Outside in the alley I dumped the empty cartridges into a storm drain and kept walking.
It had taken me a while to figure out where Smiley could have gone. He had told me that Winnipeg was new to him, and he had killed off Sam, his main contact. Since it was a new city he would be cut off from most of his friends; he would have no one he could use as cover. It would also cut him off from anyone who could betray him. But Winnipeg was also a new city to Claire and me, that was one of the reasons we had come, to make a new start.
So I thought about the problem from Smiley’s point of view and that led me downtown to the big apartment building where Tracey and her boyfriend lived.
In the building I could see when I got close that the door to the suite had been jimmied with a sharp knife or chisel, I paused and pulled on gloves. The job on the door had been done carefully and you had to look hard to see it. Maybe Smiley was still there, so I held my breath and slowly pushed on the knob with every sense alert, listening and feeling for clicks or snaps or anything else that would mean a booby trap or someone pointing a gun at the door, but nothing happened, and I slid into the suite low to the ground.
Silence hung heavy in the room and my hands tightened around the stolen pistol. My right finger rested hard on the outside of the guard, a half inch from the trigger. In my mind I went through the positive visualization of shooting many bullets into Smiley’s main body mass and then the rest into his head.
Simple and direct.
I went through the apartment room by room, checking every place where a person could hide. I checked the closet, living room, kitchenette, bathroom, little bedroom, closet, big bedroom, and the closet there. And it was there that I found the bodies, two of them, a well-built male and a well-built female, both naked and wrapped carefully in a plastic cocoon of transparent wrap and duct tape. Their cocoon had swollen with the gases of putrefaction which meant they had been dead for awhile.
I examined the bodies as closely as I could through the plastic and thought I saw blunt trauma on the man’s head and face and more marks on the woman’s neck. I also saw that their hands and feet had been taped into immobility with more of the ubiquitous grey duct tape. And my mind twisted again to thoughts of
Possum Lodge
and the
Red Green Show
fixing everything with duct tape while George W. was telling everyone to seal themselves into their homes real tight.
Sitting there gave me the time to reconstruct it. Smiley comes in fast, hits the boyfriend, immobilizes the girl, and puts the two of them into two separate rooms. Then he asks them questions, which was the only reason to keep them alive; maybe he rapes the girl. Maybe not.
Then, with his questions answered, he beats the guy to death with some heavy, round object. Something like the barrel of a gun. I stood there in the silence and my mind raced through trivia. Never believe the shows on TV where someone hits someone else with the butt of the gun. In a semi-automatic pistol that’s a delicate bit of hardware that holds the ammunition, and in a revolver the butt plates break off easily. No, the cowboys of the old West knew better and used the barrel. They called it pistol whipping and it still works just fine. Now if you have a rifle or a shotgun with a wooden butt, that’s a completely different story.
So Smiley had a gun when he got to the apartment, but getting a gun was never hard, so big deal. It wouldn’t be the Enfield revolver I’d ruined though. He would have checked that out and thrown it away or repaired it. And the barrel would have been too short for the damage he had done to the man’s body.
Smiley kills Louis and then Tracey, strangling her with his hands, and then wraps them in plastic and stows them. I wondered where he got the plastic and couldn’t come up with anything. Why kill the two though? To use the apartment, was the simplest answer, so I went back into the smaller bedroom and saw for the first time that there was the imprint of a body on top of the sheets about Smiley’s size. And a couple of dozen cigarettes, Marlboro and Benson & Hedges, had been butted out on a china plate on the dresser. Flipping the pillow over showed me an oily outline the size and shape of a gun where it
had lain on the cover as Smiley had slept and dreamt whatever dreams he had.
Back in the kitchenette I saw that there were several dirty dishes out, with the unmistakable traces of peanut butter and toast and black coffee with sugar. In the fridge were deli packages growing old, a few bottles of Dos Equis beer, and a bottle of non-vintage champagne. Above the sink were four bottles of red wine on their sides, a half-filled bottle of single-malt Scotch and a full bottle of butter-ripple schnapps. And all that meant that Smiley wasn’t drinking, which was bad, because it meant he was still in control.
So I searched the rest of the apartment. Wallets and purses empty of all the ID and cards, no keys anywhere, and an empty antique gun case under the bed in the small bedroom. I checked the case out, a wooden hinged box lined with red fabric and the owner’s manual still in place for a Smith & Wesson Model .22/.32 Target revolver with heavy frame. With absent curiosity I read the manual. The gun fired .22 longs, had a twenty-centimetre barrel with adjustable sights, and was made in 1911.
A very accurate gun indeed, though not very powerful, capable of putting all six shots in a one-centimetre circle at fifteen metres if the shooter was accurate.
I kept looking. In the freezer there was an empty plastic pork chop, sold by security stores to yuppies to hide valuables. In the closet of the small bedroom there was a crudely built secret compartment on the shelf which held a small baggie of grass, three bottles of oral Turinabol (chlordehydromethyltestosterone steroids in pill form), and a carefully assembled spike-and-spoon setup for shooting up intravenous/intramuscular drugs. And in the big bedroom a very cheap jewelry case had been rifled, with some badly made amateur and costume jewelry left behind.
Eventually I left, pulling the door closed behind me. Smiley had at least one gun, he had cash, he was in control of himself, and he had assorted credit cards and identification which might help him. And he probably had a car, whatever Tracey or Louis drove when they were still breathing.
In the elevator heading to the garage downstairs I thought about dropping a dime, actually two quarters these days. One phone call would put the cops into the apartment. That would lead them to Smiley if he’d made even the smallest mistake. But if I called too soon, someone from the building might describe me, which would put heat on my trail too. Balancing the two things out made me decide to keep my mouth shut. I went through the garage and cut the wire to the fire alarm before I walked out through an emergency door.
S
miley was loose in the city and had nailed Samantha and boyfriend plus Tracey and Louis. And he could have done all that for lots of reasons, the standards for murder being jealousy, revenge, and money, the unholy three. There was also the possibility that he had been delivering a preemptive strike, but that was close enough to revenge to make it an unnecessary addition.
Like an appendix, or a conscience.
I believed his motive would lead me to him.
While trying to figure his motive out I decided to check out my house, just to make sure. I wondered if Smiley could be in the house, waiting for me with a gun, or he could have a partner of some type, waiting for me with a gun, or the house could be clean and empty, or he could have booby-trapped the place. If I had to bet I’d put money on booby-trapping because it would mean he wouldn’t have to be there and risk anyone. It would also be what I would do if I was in his place.
This all led me back to the house. On the way I found
an Internet cafe and rented a computer for long enough to open the e-mail account Claire and I had agreed on. I was lucky, managing to create it within ten minutes, and then I kept moving.
In the North End I circled my house a few blocks out and then moved in slowly. On the way I passed where the drug house had been and found a backhoe chopping the place down while a small sign on the edge of police tape read that this would soon be a local park dedicated to “The Residents of the Neighbourhood.” It would be tiny, but it would be a green place for children and adults.
And it was better than a drug house.
That meant that the Jarelskis were behaving themselves, which meant I didn’t have to go and burn their house down after I’d dealt with Smiley.
As I walked towards my house I thought about booby traps—I know them inside and out. I know the low-tech ones and the high-tech ones, the ones that are long term and the ones that are short term. I’m comfortable with the lethal ones and the ones you use to warn or wound. Take a grenade, put a rubber band around the lever, pull the pin, put it in a fireplace, and walk away. Or drop it into a gasoline tank where the gas degrades the rubber and
boom
with the grenade becoming the detonator and the gas becoming the primary explosive. Or give me three minutes with a rat trap, a length of pipe, and a rifle cartridge, and you’d have a detonator for a bigger bomb.
Make a few changes and you end up with a neat way to blow off someone’s foot or face.
During the war in Vietnam a friend who had been a member of the Vietcong told me they used to wire up motorcycles
with stolen C-4 and leave them where Americans would find them.
Hey Johnny, look at me, I’m a rebel without a cause …
Later they watched the GI’s kick soda cans down the road, so they used those as triggers to buried grenades and left them in handy places.
And bad guys had borrowed from the military and come up with their own variations. I’d been at marijuana grow ops where the entryways had explosives buried under the doors. Open the door and
boom
. Others had pits set up on the approaches full of wooden spikes (to fool metal detectors), some pointing up and some pointing down from the side in case a boot was worn with a reinforced sole. At another farm the trees around a clearing were booby-trapped with explosives to take down any helicopter that came a-visiting.
I’d seen guys set daisy chains that were booby traps linked in series to channel the targets and to eliminate them with maximum loss. I’d seen homemade crossbows and shotguns set up on trip wires to fire down a path at knee height to generate crippling wounds. I’d seen snares, barbed fish hooks hung on fishing line at face level in case anyone came knocking, and I’d seen varieties of leg-hold traps modified for people.
And you can booby-trap anything. With practice you can gimmick a body, a book, a door, clothes, condoms, a whistle, pets, beer, windows, and plates. You can do cigarettes, lighters, stoves, bathrooms, cars, and letters.
You can even booby-trap a vagina.
I knew the triggers. Pressure could be a trigger, cutting a wire could work too, opening a door could pull a pin, walking into a room could set off a cheap radar security device, and the heat sensor used to control lighting in a room could set off anything you could imagine. A trap could be set to detonate when an electrical current was interrupted, or on pressure, or
on the absence of pressure. You could use a handyman’s level to make a motion-sensitive trigger and you could make a command detonator with a garage door opener, or a cell phone, or a pager. It was even possible, I’d heard, to set up a trigger that would go off when someone breathed.
And what I knew, Smiley could know, which made coming home… a little nerve wracking. Because I would have wired the place in a serious way.
Which meant he would have done exactly the same thing.
Trick to avoiding booby traps and ambushes number one is: don’t go in by the normal entry way. Instead I went next door to the Kilpatricks’ and knocked politely. The wife answered, “Oh, hi Montgomery.”
She’s the only person still alive who uses my full name. My grandmother, gone and buried, did it but she’s not around any more.
“Hi. Can I borrow a ladder and your upstairs window?”
She stared at me. Not too long ago she and her husband had tried to run Claire and me out of town by leaving threatening notes and such. When I’d found out I’d hurt her husband fairly badly and scared both of them quite a lot and now I was babysitting their grandchild.
Go figure.
“Ummm. Sure?”
The ladder was in their garage. I picked it up and carried it through the house, carefully while Mrs. Kilpatrick ran ahead of me and kept offering me coffee or maybe a beer and would I like a cookie?
“No. Thank you but no.”
Upstairs I found a window in the main bedroom that faced my bedroom in our house with maybe eleven or twelve feet
between us. Carefully opening the window first I laid the ladder down until it reached the sill. I adjusted it twice until I was sure.
“You know, I changed my mind about that cookie.”
“Oh, sure.” And off she bustled. While I was waiting I checked my bag and made sure the tools and gun were in place. When she brought the cookie (one of those soft-on-the-inside chocolate chip ones) and I’d eaten it I climbed onto the ladder and started to crawl across to my own window with the backpack strapped to my belly where I could easily reach it.
“Thanks, and can you pull the ladder back when the window’s open?”
“Sure. May I ask what you’re doing?”
“You probably don’t want to know.”
“Oh, I do. Really.”
“It’s called mouse-holing. It’s a way of moving from one house to another by soldiers without leaving the house and exposing themselves to enemy fire. This is one way; another is to use explosives to blow through the walls of adjoining buildings.”
“Oh. Well. Yes. Right.”
And off I went. At my window I drew the Swiss Army knife and puzzled briefly over the blades. My in-laws had given it to me while I was in prison with the little file extended and CAKE TO FOLLOW engraved on the handle. It had, of course, been immediately confiscated, but one of the screws had shown it to me through a pane of bullet-proof glass before it had ended up in storage. The whole thing still rankled, but I now found the thinnest blade on the knife and went to work on the sill, sliding the knife past the layers of paint and dirt and using it to slowly push the hook out of the way.
While I did that I watched the room carefully but saw nothing that leaped out as wrong. I did, however, note that the shades were open, whereas Claire and I always drew them, and that the door was shut, whereas I always left it open to promote air circulation.
When I had the window up I put my legs over the sill and gestured for Mrs. Kilpatrick to pull the ladder in while mouthing, “Thanks!”
With my back to the window I kept my legs up and used the time to really examine the floor but there was nothing out of place. No wires, no devices, nothing other than the open curtains and the closed door to tell me that anyone had even been here since Claire and I had fled. There were also no noises in the house, no sounds of someone running up the stairs with a gun or something like that.
I did not want to step onto the floor so I sat there and thought and stared and thought some more. The term
booby trap
is a relatively old one. Originally it comes from the term
balbus
; the Latin word for stammering, which the Romans thought meant the speaker was stupid. A little later on the English used the term
booby
to describe really stupid seabirds which were easy to catch and kill. From there it became used for all sorts of descriptions, culminating by the middle of the eighteen hundreds when it was used to describe a trap used to catch an idiot, because they, whoever “they” were, would have to trigger it themselves.
And because I have a dirty mind I also once looked up the earthier meaning of
boob
. Apparently it had never meant that breasts were stupid but instead came from the Elizabethan English term
bubbies
which meant any alcoholic drink. This probably came from the Latin term
bibere
, to drink.
Which makes me, personally, feel much better. I’d hate
to think that breasts were stupid. Mostly I was in favour of them.
After all that raced through my brain I found myself still waiting. Because I did not want to touch the floor.