I
n the middle of the night I couldn’t sleep so I kissed my lovely wife awake. I’d debated lies to tell her and finally said, “I’m going to go find a loose woman.”
“’Kay.”
“Is that all you can say?”
She yawned. “Bring her home. We’ll give her a spin. But if she’s better than you then you’ll be getting your walking papers.”
It’s very hard to shock my wife.
Outside it was cold and getting colder. I took a brisk walk and thought some fairly nasty thoughts. By 8:00 am I was tired and somewhat lost but in possession of a plan. Sam had struck me as being capable, smart, and with a potential for violence. She had also impressed me by having a team capable of picking up Greg quickly in a different city. All that information and impression made her scary and someone I should deal with fast.
Outside of a convenience store I made ten phone calls to
places that customized vans, figuring they’d open early like most garages. In each call I gave the same spiel: I had seen a van with the licence plate I’d seen outside Marie’s house for sale and I wanted to buy it but the number on the “for sale” sign wasn’t legible. On the fifth call I reached someone who knew something about the van and after three minutes of conversation they gave me a phone number. Ten minutes after that, with the help of the telephone operator, I had the address.
Then I went home and took a long nap while I was supposed to be watching the kids.
By six that night I was down at a big discount store on Portage Avenue by foot, Red Apple or Giant Tiger or Red Tiger or Giant Apple, I’m not sure which. For thirty-one dollars and a few cents I bought a dark blue cotton warm-up jacket, a black T-shirt, and a pair of black canvas pants with big pockets, along with three pairs of black sports socks and a pair of badly made runners from Taiwan. Further down the street there was a outdoor outfitter that sold me a big mountaineer’s carabineer for eight dollars, a roll of black fabric tape, some cheap white gloves, and a dark blue balaclava.
I changed in the alley behind the place after checking for cameras, my own clothes going into the plastic bag, which I tucked behind a big garbage bag. Then I took ten minutes to arm myself. First I put three socks one inside the other and loaded it with a fistful of fine sand I picked up from a fancy outdoor ashtray outside a hotel. Then I taped the makeshift sap into relative stiffness and put it in my right jacket pocket. The carabineer I fitted over my left fist to make sure it fit and then I padded it with more tape, which also removed the metal glint, and that gave me a brass knuckle. That went into my left-hand pocket and I was ready to go to work.
An hour later I was on the corner of a street in Osborne Village watching the black van on a concrete pad behind a dilapidated house. I had stolen a bicycle from an Italian coffee bar on Corydon; the owner had used a padlock and a normal steel chain. The lock was good, but the chain itself had twisted and broken when I applied force using the carabineer for leverage, and I had a bike. If anyone noticed the theft no one said anything. I left the bike in a pile of garbage near the house and started my surveillance.
Standing on a residential street corner is not the best way to be unnoticeable so I walked up and down the alley where the van was parked. I needed a plausible reason to be in the area, so I clapped my hands repeatedly and whistled sharply. Every few minutes I called out gently, “Fido, here boy!” in a wheedling tone. When I was beside the van the first time, I saw it was freshly washed, giving a completely different impression from the slovenly house whose parking space it occupied.
The second time I went by a young, fattish woman came to the edge of a fenced-in yard and stared hard at me, saying, “What do you want?”
Her voice gave a different impression from her appearance; it was precise and the diction was excellent.
I answered cheerfully, “Just looking for my cat.”
“Your cat is named Fido?”
“Yes.”
She stared at me some more, “Fido means faithful.”
“Yes. I almost named it Nemo.”
She was standing on something on the other side of the fence and I could see the caption on her shirt, LA LUCHA CONTINUA.
“What does your shirt mean?”
The woman looked down as though surprised at her breasts and then back at me. She didn’t smile, she never smiled
during the whole conversation, and I began to wonder if she indeed could smile. She answered, “It means ‘The Struggle Continues.’”
“Ah.”
She turned abruptly and left and I kept walking back and forth trying to decide what to do. Finally the fat kid who’d been in Sam’s van came out of the house and drove away. I followed on the bicycle.
The van outdistanced me quickly heading down Cockburn and I rode along slowly, ignoring stop signs and trying to keep it in sight. After three blocks it turned into a Tim Horton’s parking lot and stopped.
Perfect.
I checked the restaurant from the lot of a tire store across the street. Inside were four people at four separate tables, none of them familiar except for the fat boy. I went in and bought a cup of coffee to go and checked the boy out more closely. He was about nineteen, dangerously overweight, eating chocolate donuts with chocolate frosting and drinking grape pop. On the table was a slim cell phone holding open a very thick, brightly coloured comic book. Possibly the same one he had been reading earlier, apparently titled
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
.
As he ate he wheezed and I snuck up close to see a paint-by-numbers picture of Dorian Gray. I vaguely remembered a lousy Hollywood movie of the same title with Dorian Gray as one of the villains. I also vaguely remembered Dorian Gray as a character in a horror movie and I wondered if it was the same person.
Outside I went to a phone booth by the nearest gas station and called the donut shop. When the counter clerk answered I told her I’d been driving through her lot and had scraped the
side of a black van but that I was in hurry and couldn’t stop. Then I asked her to tell the owner. As I was coming back to the shop I could see the clerk through the counter as she went directly to the fat boy and told him. He immediately gathered up his comic and phone and came out, almost running. By the time he reached the van in the corner of the lot I’d reached it as well, pulling the balaclava down as I went. He was swearing under his breath with his back to me as checked out the side panels when I made a final rush.
When I hit him, Fat Boy hissed loudly, lost control of his bladder and folded onto the ground, unconscious. Before he was all the way down I reached into his cheap leather jacket and retrieved his car keys. Two minutes later I had twisted him into the back of the van and I was driving serenely away. When I reached a big mall on the west end of town, I parked away from the doors and went into the back where Fat Boy was still out.
Ignoring the smell, I patted him down. He had the comic, two cell phones, a brass-handled Buck knife with a quick-release thumb switch soldered onto the blade, a wallet with a Visa card, and sixty-seven dollars in bills and coins. The van interior had been to turn it into a cargo carrier, but taped to one bare wall was an Easton Connexion aluminum bat spray-painted black. I pulled it free and used it as a lever to help me dislocate Fat Boy’s right arm at the ball joint in his shoulder.
That woke him up and he screamed into his socks, which I’d knotted around his head to keep him quiet. When he stopped screaming I patted his cheek. “Hi! My name is Montgomery Uller Haaviko. Did your boss tell you about me?”
His eyes blinked repeatedly in the dim light from a nearby street.
“Can you understand me?”
He nodded.
“Do I have your undivided attention?”
He nodded again.
“Good.”
I opened his knife one handed and cut the socks free so he could speak. The knife attracted his attention; knives are good for generating visceral fear. Fat Boy’s first words were plaintive and whiny. “Jeeze, you didn’t have to do that.”
His face was grey-green and his eyes were pinpoints from the shock but I waved his comment away with the knife and said gently, “Let me tell you something about torture. If you are getting tortured, just give up the information as fast as you can. It’s actually expected by professionals. Everyone breaks in time, so break quickly and keep your health intact.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I’m torturing you. Right now.”
“Oh.” There was a long pause and then he added, “Oh.”
“So are you going to tell me what I want to know?”
“I don’t know …”
He shut up when I held his Buck knife before his eyes. Then I corrected him, “Wrong answer. The right answer is, yes. Or I’ll cut off one testicle. I’ll let you choose which one.”
Fat Boy pissed his pants again and started to hyperventilate. When he calmed down I asked him again, “So are you going to tell me what I want to know?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a very, very good answer.”
F
at Boy was extremely helpful and for the next two hours he directed me around the city in the van and told me about the organization he worked for. To the best of his knowledge Sam owned two houses and he showed them both to me, one in the West End and one across the river in Saint Boniface. From there she ran eleven low-rent, tire-biter hookers (his term for a prostitute who worked in the back seats of cars only). She also dealt drugs to lower-level dealers and addicts and did a little bit of fencing. In total there were six guys employed as muscle, including Fat Boy. Samantha Ritchot was the boss but she did have a boyfriend who helped.
He told me all sorts of other stuff too, most of which I ignored.
The rest of the night sucked, mostly. I parked in another shopping mall lot and waited for the stores to open and every few hours Fat Boy would come out of shock and whine a little and then drift away again.
On the plus side, I got to read
The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen
and found it to be very, very cool. Who knew comics could be smart?
At ten the next morning the stores opened and I tied Fat Boy up with his belt and shoe laces, stuffed his socks back in his mouth and covered his head with his jacket. When he complained I opened the knife again and he changed his mind. I made my first stop at the Fishing Hole tackle shop and bought a tan-coloured, multi-pocketed fish-killing vest. Then I went to the Cellar Dweller hobby shop for some radio-controlled car supplies and extra wire and finally to the European Sausage Experience, where I bought all the marzipan they had, two kilos of the sugar-and-almond paste.
In a parking lot for the Forks shopping centre in the middle of town, I cut the marzipan into slices about a centimetre thick, blotted them dry with napkins, and then stuffed lengths of wire into them, one to the other. When they were all done I tucked them into the pockets of the vest, closed the flaps, buttons, and zippers, and made a few more adjustments here and there before pulling my jacket on to cover the vest. The smell was very strong but that was okay, I wanted it strong.
Next I stopped at a Canadian Tire store off St. James and bought ten full tanks of propane using Fat Boy’s Visa. A couple of blocks away from that I stopped at a Wal-Mart and used the same card to buy twenty plastic containers for gasoline, some highway flares, a mechanical alarm clock, some heavy-gauge wire, and a car battery. Then I went down Portage Avenue and filled two gas cans at each station I found until they were all full, and parked near a McDonald’s to assemble the fuse and detonator from the clock and battery.
I set it for one hour and drove to the house in Saint Boniface where Fat Boy had said Sam would probably be. I parked beside the house with the nose of the van touching the garage
itself. Then I went into the back and checked the restraints on Fat Boy. They were good and I opened his hand. He stared at me wild-eyed and tried to talk around the gag as I reassured him.
“I’m not going to hurt you. Not unless you make me. I’m going to duct tape your cell phone so you can reach it, ’kay?”
He nodded and I gestured with my head while working. “Look around. See the gas cans? I’ve turned the van into a bomb.”
His eyes bulged. “Now, someone’s going to call you on the cell. Just tell them there’s a bomb. Understand?”
He nodded. “Good. Now if you do anything else—like call the cops or whatever—then I’ll blow you into little bits. ’Kay?”
He nodded and I put the jacket back over his head with the cell phone tied right in front of his nose and went back to the driver’s seat and sat down. It was a nice neighbourhood and the house looked in good repair, not like a drug house at all. I waited ten minutes to let them notice me and then locked the van, walked to the door, and knocked.
Immediately the door opened an inch and a big guy looked me over dispassionately from under a heavy chain. “Where’s Tony?”
“Who’s Tony?”
“The driver.”
I shrugged. “In the van. It’s booby-trapped though. Let me in.”
He undid some bolts and let me into a narrow entryway, where the air smelled of burnt chemicals, flint, ozone, battery acid, tobacco, marijuana, sweat, fried food, pepper spray, unflushed toilets, and mould. The big guy was white, maybe six foot six and made up of terrace upon terrace of muscle,
all stuffed into a greyish leather vest, Doc Marten boots, and a pair of spandex shorts. In his right hand he casually held a mountaineer’s ice axe with rust spots showing on both pick and axe end. He stared at me with lustrous brown eyes under a shaggy mop of black hair and I showed him my empty right hand.
“Klaatu-barada-nicto.”
“What?”
A voice from behind him said, “It’s a joke. From an old movie about the end of the world. It’s a code to deactivate a robot.”
I couldn’t see who was speaking and the guy’s eyes narrowed, “’zat so?”
“It’s a compliment.” I spoke quickly; my options were relatively few. “I’m comparing you to a kick-ass robot with the power to destroy the world.”
His eyes opened a little more. “Cool.” And then he let me pass. Behind him Samantha was wearing a dark-blue track suit. “Montgomery Uller Haaviko.”
“Yep.”
“I talked to some people who talked to some people. You did the racetrack in Surrey three years ago.”
The hair on the back of my neck went up; I’d never been convicted, connected, or even arrested about that one. “Maybe.”
She smiled. “Yeah. And you did a Texas hold ’em game at the Blue Goose lodge on the little Sou-west about eight years ago. And a getaway man named Ron in Banff, him you knee-capped; he’s still around but moving slowly. He talks about you with a lot of hate but seems to be unwilling to do much about the whole thing.”
“You’ve done your homework.”
“I did.”
“I’m just checking to make sure you understood me before. I don’t want any trouble, I just want you to leave me and what’s mine alone.”
My smile was false and she said, “No.” Her smile was genuine and she went on, “You like movies?”
“What do you mean, no?”
Her face lit up. “No means no. Me, I love movies. But I hate the latest version of the first
Star Wars
. Where Lucas gives Greedo the first shot at Han Solo under the table in the Cantina scene. You know what I mean? In the original, Han has balls, he’s a drug smuggler, someone braces him and he pulls his piece under the table and BOOM. Bye-bye Greedo. Know what I mean?”
She leaned forward and kept talking. “Guess what’s pointed at you right now? Through the plaster wall right beside you.”
“A gun?”
“That was too easy, what kind of gun?”
I kept my voice level. “No idea. So you’re not going to make nice?”
Samantha’s face tightened and her voice dropped. “There’s a boy with a twenty-gauge sawed-off pump shotgun pointed at your head right now. It’s loaded with slugs. Listen, hear that?”
The ratcheting sound of the pump being worked somewhere to the right of me through the thin wall was loud.
Very slowly I held up my hand. “I came here in good faith …”
She shrugged and her eyes sparkled. “That’s your problem. Not mine.”
“… but I’m not an idiot. You know what this is?”
I held up the yellow plastic handgrip in front of her and she stared at it. “No.”
“It’s a remote off a set of toy race cars. A short-range radio, hooked up to four kilos of Semtex, which are rolled thin around my chest right now in this stupid vest. If your boy pulls the trigger, that might set the detonators off, or I might drop the remote as I die and that might do it.”
She chewed her bottom lip and I watched her eyes absorb what I was saying. When her eyes started to narrow I waited and counted my own heartbeats.
One.
You gotta make bad guys fear and their capacity for violence is truly amazing, so their capacity for fear is awesome indeed. That’s because they can imagine bad things happening.
Two.
In other words the bad ones can do really bad things and therefore believe the same in others.
Three, and I went on, “Smell, that’s not air you’re breathing. That’s the sweet chemical tang of Slovakian plastique, a mixture of cyclonite and pentaerythrite tetranitrate. Shipped from the Synthesia Pardubice factory to Odessa in Ukraine and from there by freighter to Churchill, Manitoba, where it is exchanged for Levi jeans, Viagra, and Colombian cocaine. And from there to me.”
“Bullshit.”
I nodded. “Sure. I’m lying. I walked into this place with my dick in my hand and no plan. And maybe the van outside is loaded with gasoline and propane tanks to blow this house into orbit. And maybe it has a timer, just in case the vest fails.”
“Bullshit. Why are you so willing to die for this kind of shit?”
“I’m not fucking around; I want to show you that, so here are all the cards on the table. I’m showing you some respect here; I’m laying it on the line with no bargaining. I’m telling you that I’m connected, honey, that I’m wired, pardon the expression. And I do not lie and I do not play games. My past will hopefully have shown you that.”
“Bullshit.”
“There’s enough bang here to make a hole twenty metres across and six deep. Enough to kill every person within thirty metres of here, guaranteed.”
“Bullshit.”
“Why don’t you call Fat Boy? He’s taped up in the van but I taped his cell phone into his hand. He should be able to text you something.”
Sam pulled out a cell phone and tapped away quickly for a few seconds and then read the message out loud. “He says the van is wired. That’s the van right outside?”
“That’s the one. That’s my back-up with anti-tampering fuzes, a timer, and it’s linked to the same controller as this one. Breathe heavy on it and BOOM!”
“Sure …”
She sounded less positive and I nodded again. “Instant urban renewal. So I’m gonna walk one way and you walk the other and if I see you anywhere near Marie’s route or around me then I pull my gloves off and take you out.”
Samantha wasn’t moving. “You’re bluffing.”
“Trust your nose.”
It wrinkled slowly and deliberately, and about a minute later I walked out, went to the van, and shut the timer attached to the propane and gas off with twenty-eight minutes to go.
Two blocks away I took the bus home. When I arrived
I was A) smacked by Claire, B) kissed by Claire and told to behave better, and C) mobbed by many small children. After Claire had left, the kids helped me make 142 chocolate brownies with marzipan frosting. When the parents came to redeem their kids, each received a dozen brownies decorated by their kids.
I hate to let things go to waste.