B
efore I went to bed I swallowed two litres of ice-cold water, so at midnight a full bladder forced me to wake up. Neither Claire nor the dog woke up and a few minutes later I was in the bathroom, where I dressed in the clothes I’d left there before I’d gone to sleep. First I pulled on a pair of white Adidas running shorts and a pale blue singlet, over them went black jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt, both large on me to break up my outline. Also cheap black runners and socks, all of it brand new and from a discount store far away from my home and paid for with cash. Last on was a black balaclava and leather gloves.
In my pockets were four heavy-gauge plastic ties from a plumbing store in case I had to tie anything and two quarters in case I had to phone someone. An important rule of thieves: never forget the quarters. I repeat, never forget the quarters. If worse comes to worse you can use them to bribe a cop.
Another rule of thieves is, if you can’t fix one problem, fix another. There was nothing I could do with Marie’s smuggling
at the moment, but that didn’t mean I had to sit there doing nothing.
That idea sort of explains what I did next.
No one saw me as I moved the two blocks towards the local fire station. I’d walked the route twice and knew where there were dogs and where there were bright lights and where there was open ground. I was almost caught when I was crawling by someone’s backyard. They were taking advantage of the fairly warm early September night to get busy.
“Oh Wayne …” I heard skin on skin slapping together. “… oh Wanda.”
Oh God.
I ignored them and kept going. Beside the fire station I paused and listened but heard nothing. The front doors were wide open and the light spilled out onto the boulevard and attracted sluggishly flying moths and other small insects in great numbers. I stayed in the shadows and moved beside the entrance and kept listening, but all I could hear were the wings of the moths.
When I was sure I was alone I moved around the corner and directly to the big pump truck. I stepped along the side of the truck to right behind the drivers’ cab. There I pulled the tool I wanted (a wrench with a long handle and weird head) off the brackets. Next I grabbed the rolled spare canvas hose from under the passenger side seat.
I’d taken a firehouse tour during the summer along with the kids and learned lots of interesting things, like that water comes out of a fire hose at seventy kilos of pressure and with a volume of six metres per second. I’d also learned that fire hydrants needed a special wrench to get the water moving. All useful information.
Huffing and puffing under the thirty-five-kilos hose, I went
back the way I came and headed to the drug house. I started to work and, frankly, it was harder than I’d thought. After I’d barked my knuckles on the fire hydrant cap the second time I took a time out and felt sorry for myself until I realized it was wasted emotion.
With a fresh grip I managed to pull the cap off. Then I attached the female end of the stolen hose to the hydrant and admired my handiwork for maybe a tenth of a second. I was right behind the drug house on the boulevard and therefore in plain sight. Or I would have been if I hadn’t piled all the garbage bags I could collect from the neighbourhood around the hydrant during the day when Fred had been sleeping nearby in the wagon. It also helped that the customers and staff of the drug house had systematically broken every street light they could find in the immediate area. This meant I had a nice bit of cover but could still hear the non-stop party in the house, and all around me the noise kept coming.
“… want to party?” Female voice. Frayed and coarsened and old. Listless.
“C’mon. I need some …” Male voice. Young and desperate and frantic.
“Fuck you.” Female voice but a younger one.
“Yeah, well, fuck you too.” Male voice, sounding frantic and furious.
“… ha … ha … ha … ha …” Strange one that, didn’t sound like either a man or a woman. It also didn’t sound like whoever it was was having any fun at all. All mixed in with a radio blaring inside the house, so each time the door opened I absorbed a shock of white noise. Hip hop and rap and punk and heavy metal. Songs about fucking and fighting and hurting and being hurt and truth and lies and rage, but nothing about love at all.
Back at the hydrant I stayed low and duck-walked while I
dragged the hose towards the back wall of the house. When someone had done work on the house sometime before, they’d been sloppy and left a big pile of lumber in the back along with a fridge with the doors torn off and other junk. Using that as a boost I climbed until I could reach one of the second-floor windows. Up close the noise was a palpable thing through the plywood and heavy cast-iron bars that covered the windows. I pulled the hose up to the bars and hooked the nozzle into place touching the plywood. Then I took out the plastic ties and used them to secure the hose to the bars.
Each tie had a breaking strength of over 500 kilograms; cops used a minor variation as a handcuff during riots. This meant they should hold the hose steady and in place. I climbed down and went back to the hydrant. A little more grunting and I managed to turn the main valve all the way to on, and then I dropped the wrench and booked it.
Behind me the water surged through the hose, turning it as rigid as a bar of iron. Right after that the same water pounded the plywood aside on the second floor and blew it into the room. Then the water itself began to pour in. Seventy kilograms of pressure. A six-cubic-metre volume of water entering the building every second. So six goes into 5688 meant that the building would be filled in … slightly less than 1000 seconds. Which was what? Sixteen minutes plus a bit?
This would definitely clean up the problem.
I went back home via a very roundabout route, along the way dumping my outer clothes in a big dust bin behind a shopping centre and finishing my trip as a very cold jogger in shorts and shirt. Claire greeted me at the back door holding the crowbar ready in her hand, the bayonet tucked down the front of her pants with the hilt on her right side. The sounds of sirens filled the air and a fire engine blew past the front of the
house. The noise and light turned the whole neighbourhood into a carnival.
“Is that any way to greet your beloved husband?”
She adjusted her grip on the bar and spoke quietly. “What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
She hefted the crowbar again and finally let me in. Upstairs we fought for a while and finally we made love and fell asleep, angry, sweaty, and both feeling like we had accomplished something.
The next morning Claire turned on the radio during breakfast. Over cereal we caught a very excited CBC voice describing the scene. Apparently the water had knocked all sorts of staff and clientele of the drug house about, then it had filled the basement and blown out the windows throughout. Apparently there were no windows on the main floor; they had been replaced with sheets of plywood supported with two-by-fours as well. Eventually even those went, and when they gave way, the water took the window frames with them and deposited the whole mess in the yards.
Included amongst the assorted trash were needles, condoms, loose cash, homemade crack pipes, a few sawed-down rifles, lots of no-name baggies, a bunch of stolen electronic equipment and CD’s; even a couple of stained mattresses and cheap lawn chairs.
And people. Young people. Old people. Middle-aged people. Now broken and battered. Bruised from the water pressure. People scratched as they’d struggled against each other to find a door and escape. However, the main door had stayed locked. Pushed shut by the tons of water as the people were battered and smashed against it.
No one had drowned or otherwise died, although many were hospitalized.
“Probably not one of your better ideas.” Claire had her arms crossed.
I looked her over and smiled while patting her hand. “I could have burned the place down. Or blown it up. Or, since the people inside are really the problem, I could have just gotten rid of them, I could have pumped carbon monoxide into a window. Or gone in with a shotgun and a bag of double-ought buck shells and cleared it out room by room.” She flinched and I turned back to my generic corn and rye flakes. “At least this way no one died.”
On the radio it described the cops on the scene gathering money and guns and drugs and knives and clubs.
Claire stared at me and I shrugged and turned off the radio. “The place was an eyesore and needed to be cleaned up. Water’s clean.”
That drew a smile from her.
W
ith the drug house out of the way I could focus on the smuggling. Which was what was paying the bills, so I spent the next three days with tools and an overactive imagination turning Marie’s house into a fortress. I did nothing too obvious because there were limits to what I could and couldn’t do. I couldn’t tear the place apart and rebuild it; Marie was renting and Claire couldn’t allow that. I also couldn’t be too obvious about what I was doing because a variety of innocent people had access to the place, people like meter readers. If I was too obvious, someone would call the cops because Winnipeg, like most communities, had some fairly strict (and unenforceable laws) about defending your home and the cops would come down like a ton of bricks.
Marie might need a fortress to stash her cargo once her route was running and the route itself would be valuable and therefore worth protecting. Lots of people were always looking for a clean way across the border without having to deal with guards and other inconveniences. Some things were
worth more on one side of the border than the other and that simple truth was behind all smuggling everywhere. Guns were cheaper and more available in the States than in Canada, so those came north. Hydroponic grass in Canada was cheaper and better than in the States, so that went south. Cocaine was cheaper in the States, so that came north. Methamphetamine precursors were more available in Canada, so those went south. Booze was cheaper in the States, so that went north.
There were lots of examples like that.
The route was valuable and Marie might need protection. I thought about that as I worked on Marie’s house, installing motion alarms on the windows (battery powered in case the power was cut). I also put hanging bead curtains in all the doorways (to break up sight lines; no one, bad guy or good guy, moves into a place they can’t see) and plastic horizontal shutters on all the windows, backed up by heavy black canvas drapes. I replaced the doors throughout with solid core ones (harder to break down) and each of the three exterior doors (front yard, back yard, garage) had six big bolts installed (four on the right side of the door, one on the jamb side of the door, one coming down from the ceiling).
When all that was done I went into the basement and knocked together some forms with two-by-fours and made shelves to cover the windows. Although they were lousy shelves they made excellent barricades and didn’t look too obvious. Battery-powered smoke alarms went onto the ceiling of every room and in the corner went disposable flashlights, small first-aid kits and two medium-sized fire extinguishers, one set per room. While I was doing that I had Marie stock the basement with canned food (choosing stuff that wouldn’t taste bad cold, like ravioli and fruit salad) and bottled water, just in case.
“What about protection?”
I dusted my hands off. “You have to make a decision now. Remember that anything you use as a defence can be taken away and used against you.”
“I understand that.”
“Okay. This is what I’ve brought.”
I laid twenty-one cans out on the kitchen table while Eloise made regular coffee. Marie looked the items over with incomprehension. “What is this?”
“First. Air horns, one per room. Someone breaks in and you turn on the air horn. Bad guys don’t like loud noises, it attracts attention. I’ve broken the latch so the horns can’t be shut off.”
I held up another can. “Cans of spray paint. This stuff is metallic neon green. Again, bad guys don’t want the attention and if you spray someone with it they’re going to stick out. Also, it can be sprayed in the face; it’ll blind the person, permanently, I think.”
Marie touched the last can. “And this?”
“Spray glue. Bonds almost instantly. Spray the target and whatever the target touches they stick to. It comes out fast; it’s also mildly corrosive, unpleasant shit.”
I went through the house and put three cans in each room. Then I came back. “There you go.”
“And it’s all legal?”
“Yeah. All of it. Until you use it on a person. Then it’s assault with a dangerous weapon.” Eloise gave me a cup of coffee and I sipped it and went on, “Just remember that there are no dangerous weapons, just dangerous people.”
Two days later in the morning Claire took care of the kids and I caught a bus downtown to the Millennium Library which
was right beside a big old church and the MTS Centre. Outside on the sidewalk I paused and looked the Centre over. I’d read Claire’s book about the Eaton Building that had been there. The old building won hands down for style, but there was still a certain something about the new complex; a kind of modern, looming grandeur and artificial coolness.
Old habits made me walk the perimeter inside and outside and I sadly concluded that there would be no easy way to rob the place. Busy, one-way streets on all sides, tons of cameras, and easily secured loading zones.
That was too bad because the place would seat at least 16,000. And figuring an average ticket price of $30 (I picked the number out of the air), that meant a box office of maybe $480,000. That was if everyone paid in cash and bought the tickets when they arrived, which they never, ever did. And that sum of cash was a legitimately sized target, maybe thirty years’ worth of work at a wage-slave job.
Those kinds of thoughts led inevitably to madness so, with difficulty, I turned my face away from temptation and the easy way.
Inside the library I admired the glassed-in rear which fronted on a small park; there was something divine and inspiring about the four floors of clean light and work space. Made me wish I was more, I don’t know, academic with some great, important project to work on. Something like the complete history of the spoon. Instead I stayed on the first floor by the graphic novels and mysteries and picked up copies of the local papers, the
Free Press
and the
Sun
, for the past couple of days. No ID was needed to look so I picked them up and sat down at a table and scoured the news sections. I was looking for any reports about the drug house I’d wrecked, any references at all, but there was nothing. Just the normal byline that
the police were expecting to make more arrests soon and that the guilty party (or parties) would face the full punishment of the law.
I really wasn’t sure what I was looking for; just double-checking the cops didn’t have a description of me listed along with a reward.
At the very tail end of the most recent
Free Press
article, though, the crime reporter gave the name of company that had rented the house out in the first place—Ultra Realty Rentals and Sales, which matched what Claire had told me. I wondered what kind of business would rent to a bunch of druggies; it could be an honest business fooled by the bad guys, or the realtor could be a front for the bad guys.
I wasn’t positive either way, so I headed over to the free Express Internet service and dialed into Google, which directed me to a little web page that listed the address of Ultra Realty. I wrote that down on a little scrap of paper conveniently provided right next to the computer along with stupid little golf pencils. Knowing about the realtor would be a good thing and I stared into the distance and thought some more.
The Express Internet at the library was only usable for fifteen minutes at a time. Which was bad; however, again I didn’t have to provide any ID to use them, which was good, privacy being hard to find and keep. And my search only took me five minutes, really.
Outside it was a beautifully warm fall day. The kind Claire’s aunt would have called an Indian summer, which would have resulted in Claire’s cousin giving her a lecture on political correctness. This would have resulted in a fight of some seriousness which I would have probably had to break up. Which would have meant someone would have called me a thieving so-and-so.
Sometimes I’m glad Claire and I don’t live in the same city as her family.
Outside the library, on the sidewalk, I decided to burglarize Ultra Realty. That meant I’d need tools. I walked a few blocks to a small store that specialized in selling cheap junk at low prices; there a pinch-faced young Asian man greeted me with bustling cheer.
“Can I help you?”
“I’ll just look around.”
“Sure! Ask if you need anything.”
For a moment I felt nostalgic and thought about going back to my favourite independent hardware store on Main where the owner hated me. I kept trying to make friends with him and it wasn’t working. He couldn’t forgive me for being an ex-con. A few months before he’d gone along with a Winnipeg detective named Walsh to try to force me out of town. After the dust had settled the cop had retired under psychiatric care and I was still coming into the hardware store whenever I could. And the old man kept snapping at me.
But this guy was worse, he was too damn happy.
Burglary requires thought and consideration and planning, all of which I was avoiding. Instead I picked up a couple of metres of different gauges of wire, some cheap screwdrivers, and a roll of wide, clear tape. Then a roll of paper towel, some lightweight canvas gloves, a glass cutter and a little pry bar forty-five centimetres long. When I went to pay, the owner kept smiling at me over the cash register. “Thank you for shopping!”
I nodded and he went on, “And have a nice day!”
It was barely 3:00 so I found a coffee shop to drink good coffee and wait. I figured the office of Ultra Realty probably closed at 5:00 or 5:30, so I’d wait until 6:00, early enough
for people to be on the street so my presence wouldn’t be as noticeable, because burglary is a profession best practised in peace and quiet.