A
h, burglary! It was ten o’clock at night and I was right back at it for the second (or was it third?) time in a couple of days after years, positively years, of abstinence.
I thought about it and realized I was lying to myself. I had broken into several locations when Walsh had been busting my ass that spring. Which meant it had been months since I’d broken into anywhere and now I was breaking into Samantha’s house, a simple bungalow right near the edge of town along Lagimodiere Avenue in the east end of the city. I stared at the place and weighed options as I walked up the sidewalk and tried to work out some basic assumptions. First, the house would be purchased and not rented. Second, the bungalow would not be located anywhere near where Sam was working. Third, there would be something interesting in the house that the cops had missed.
And I could make these assumptions because Samantha was a career criminal and a good one. She would buy and not rent because cops could always pressure the owner of a
house (if she was renting) to allow them access without having to deal with those pesky search warrants. “After all, Your Honour, we had the permission of the owner of the house and therefore could look.” The second thing she would do is live far away from where she worked because you do not want to live right beside where you work, it is too dangerous. See the rule of crooks and hustlers titled “Thou shalt not shit in thine own nest.” And the third assumption was actually supplied by my own ego and superego; I believed Sam would hide things in her house, hopefully including the hockey player’s address. And I also believed that the cops would not have found them because they weren’t bad guys and didn’t think like bad guys.
Check out the bible, “Set a thief to catch a thief.” Or something like that.
I used the Bionic Ear, standing in front of the house and fumbling in my bag while the machine did its job of amplifying noise. I didn’t hear anything so I put the machine back in the bag and then walked up to the front door and in. Sam had had a good lock, but the cops had used a portable ram to knock the door entirely off its steel frame, so all I had to do was pry loose the padlock they’d used to secure the place. And then I was inside in the silence and the dark with my fingers resting lightly on the butt of the pistol.
Living room, bedroom, kitchen, pantry, dining nook, and bathroom on the first floor. Recreation room, spare room, laundry room, and bathroom in the basement. Attached garage off the kitchen. Concrete pad patio off the dining nook.
Nobody inside, but many signs of a search, including emptied drawers and papers strewn about. I closed all the drapes, turned on the lights, and started going over everything millimetre by millimetre.
In the basement bathroom I found one hiding place concealed behind a very large medicine cabinet in the perfectly finished bathroom. What attracted my attention was the realization that the cabinet did not match the one that was installed in the upstairs bathroom; it was a lot bigger and newer. Using a screwdriver to remove the screws allowed me to pull the whole unit up and put it in the shower stall. Behind the cabinet was the hole that had held the original cabinet cut between the two-by-four frames of the wall itself.
There was nothing there, just a thin layer of dust and smears of grease. That probably meant that someone had gotten there first, probably Smiley, and he had found the cache and cleaned it out. Which might explain the hand grenades, if Sam had been keeping them for a rainy day. I considered the cache and liked it; if the cops brought in metal detectors, the steel frame of the cabinet and the steel nails in the walls would mess up their readings. All in all it was a great hiding place.
With that found I kept looking; odds were that Sam wouldn’t stop with one cache, just in case the first was discovered. But I found nothing until I reached the backyard, which was surrounded by a wooden fence almost two metres high. It was there that I found six cast-iron flower pots along the edge of the lawn and the porch, each pot of the same design as the ones in the house. Which meant what, that Sam and boyfriend rotated their plants from the inside to the outside? Nothing suspicious there, but an interesting idea I decided to remember to use when Claire and I were back in our house.
Just to be thorough, I picked up the first pot and found that there was a metre-and-a-half-long sealed length of PVC pipe twenty centimetres in diameter pushed down into a round hole. So the pot was there to distract any metal detectors, and the pipe was the cache. With a little elbow grease I managed
to pull the pipes out one at a time and unscrew the tops to gain access.
Packed inside the first PVC pipe driven into the ground was a heavily greased Chinese SKS rifle and a bandolier of thirty rounds of military hardball ammunition, each with its primer carefully covered in a dab of grease. The SKS was a good choice for an emergency rifle, cheap, reliable, powerful, small, light, and, most importantly, it fell into the non-restricted weapon category of the Canadian Criminal Code, not the restricted or prohibited weapon category which translates into longer jail time.
The next four pipes were full of freeze-dried-food packages, a water purification kit, a Second Chance Deep Cover bullet-resistant vest that looked like a T-shirt, a big first-aid kit, an assortment of tools and other odds and ends that your average paranoid thief might need. And the last pipe held a rolled-up fisherman’s vest with many pockets. I pulled it out and patted it down to find an even thousand dollars in mixed Canadian and US currency along with five dollars in quarters. Also driver’s licences and social insurance cards for Sam and Charles, her boyfriend. Then a big ring of keys, granola bars and beef jerky, tubes of vitamins, Aspirin, Demerol, and a vial of cocaine. Then some band-aids, antibiotic gel, a good quality Leatherman multi tool (which looked like my Swiss Army knife on steroids). And the pièce de résistance, a Ziploc baggie with a small address book and pencil.
I was impressed; the pipe was a great cache. You could buy them in varying sizes and lengths at any hardware store along with the tools to cut them, the glue to seal them, and the end caps. You could also buy a posthole digger, which made installing them relatively easy, and the pipes were pretty much impervious to the weather. And if you stored your illegal stuff
outside your home, it made the prosecutor’s job that much harder, as long as you didn’t leave fingerprints.
“Your Honour, I had no idea those things were hidden near my house because they certainly were not in my house …”
Right? Wonder if the judge would buy it.
I kept the bullet-resistant vest, the money, the Leatherman knife (which I had lusted after in the past), and a plastic jar of dry roasted peanuts. With difficulty I left the cocaine and Demerol, although the monkey on my back felt it would be a great idea to take that with me.
I might need it.
I might want it.
It might be a clue.
I took the rifle and bandolier into the basement, where Sam and her boyfriend had kept their tools, found a hacksaw and a heavy-duty file, and took twenty minutes to saw off a chunk of the barrel and the buttstock. That left me with a seventy-centimetre-long, fundamentally inaccurate monstrosity that I could tuck into my backpack. Fully loaded, the gun held ten 7.62x39 mm rounds of ammo, all solid military bullets that would go through an engine block without slowing.
Then I left, walking the six blocks south until I found a bus stop, and headed back downtown on the last bus running. On the bus I went through the little notebook and found a long list of names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and even a few physical addresses. Most of them, however, were area codes from Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver; only two were in Winnipeg.
After another lousy night in a new lousy hotel I was ready to check out my addresses. The first one was the hotel where Smiley and I had braced Sam and company. The second address
was in a run-down housing development downtown, rows of brick houses built side by side and maintained by the Manitoba Housing Authority. I looked at it curiously and went off to find a different library where I could use the Internet. In the e-mail box was a brief note: “Six reasons you never told me about.” Smiling, I typed “Wild pig.” Then I typed some more: “Our friend came back and gimmicked our crib, trashed it, could’ve hurt the next person in. It’s fixed now. Stay loose but stay away from it.”
After I closed the computer down I went back to the Housing Authority and walked past the address I was interested in. In the parking space right in front of the brick building was a big, ugly purple T-bird car, so I wandered a hundred metres away and found a bench in a tiny, decrepit park. No one was there, so I took out the binoculars I’d gotten from the surplus store and watched to see what would happen next.
At a little past noon the hockey player came out of the front door and carefully locked the door behind him. He had his right arm in a cast, from the tip of his fingers all the way to his shoulder and then across to the other shoulder, with a brace on his neck as well. He also had his left foot bandaged and walked with an aluminum cane as he moved down the sidewalk towards the T-bird. I still didn’t know his name, but I was up and moving, weighed down with my packs but moving pretty fast on adrenaline and anger.
“Hey!”
He turned slowly to see me coming across the parking lot and sputtered, “You!”
His left hand reached into his jacket and pulled out something. Before it had cleared his pocket, though, I opened the jacket and showed him the butt of the pistol. His fingers opened slowly and whatever it was fell to the ground with a clank.
“Now don’t move.”
I moved over to him carefully, watching his hands and his feet and his eyes for any hints of ill intention. The casts didn’t impress me; Ted Bundy had worn a fake cast to elicit help and sympathy from the women he was going to rape and murder, and many true crime writers had written about that, so maybe the casts were real and maybe they weren’t. Up close the hockey player stank with the reek of old sweat, unwashed dirt, reefer smoke, and stale beer. He hadn’t shaved for a long time, either, and his fingers trembled as he swayed from side to side.
“Drop the cane, too.”
“I need it to walk.”
I shrugged; time to be a bad guy. “If you don’t drop the fucking cane, I assure you you’ll never walk anywhere again. If I need you to walk, I’ll give it back. Drop the cane.”
He dropped it and I risked glancing at the object he’d dropped. It was a short-barrelled cop’s flashlight; good for beating someone’s head in or shining light. Either/or.
“We need to talk.”
“Fuck you.”
He said it mildly and without passion, and his eyes glanced all around the parking lot looking for someone to help him. But there was no one. I tried the carrot. “I’ll give you a thousand dollars.”
“What?”
“A thousand dollars for you to talk to me, right now.”
“Cash?” He didn’t trust me.
“Cash.”
“That’s not a lot.”
That was bullshit on his part. A grand was a lot of money to a penny-ante bad guy, so I showed him the wad of money I’d pulled out of Samantha’s yard. “A grand. Half in US funds,
half in Canadian. Nothing bigger than a twenty. Nothing marked and nothing funny.”
He looked at it and swallowed. “What do you want to know about?”
“Smiley. What he’s doing right now.”
His face soured and then he nodded and reached for his cane without asking. Had I been a little less trusting I would have shot him but he never even realized that.
“Okay. But not for a grand.” And now, the bargaining. “I want two grand.”
If I paid him that I’d only have about eight hundred left. Which really didn’t matter to me, because if I ran low I could always find more. There’s too much money in the world, they print more every day, and that was always a comfort to me when I thought of my eventual old age.
“Sure. Give me the keys, I’ll drive. We’ll go someplace quiet.”
He did and I dropped my bags in the tiny luggage area behind the seats. Then I drove us just out of town heading west to the Assiniboia Downs race track, which was closed for the season. When we were in the parking lot I gave him the money. He licked his lips, and I could see anger and sneakiness at war in his eyes.
“And the gun… I want the gun… I don’t trust you. If I’m holding the gun, that means you don’t have any plans to turn on me.”
So I handed him the gun and sat there, turned in the seat to face him with my right hand on the steering wheel and my left in my jacket pocket. The hockey player checked that the chamber was loaded, although it was hard to do with only one hand. Then he rested it on his knee and pointed it at the centre of my stomach. I inhaled involuntarily.
He gloated, “You dumb fuck.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You cockless bastard.” He was enjoying this.
“Sure.”
“You ignorant, spineless freak.”
“Sure. Now about Smiley …”
“I’m not telling you anything … after what you did to me I’m gonna pop a cap in you. I’m gonna cash you out.”