The Reluctant Detective

by Finley Martin

  “But before that,” she added, “there’s somethin’ I just gotta show you. It’s a surprise. Okay? Pull back the drapes. Look out the window,” she said. She acted like an excited schoolgirl hiding a present.

  Anne leaned against the back of the sofa and poked her finger in the direction of the drapes in front of her.

  “Go ahead… open them!”

  Sean came around the sofa, looked at Anne, and looked at the drapes. Without warning he lunged toward Anne, grabbing her by the throat and pushing her until she was bent over backwards, her feet dangling off the floor, and her body pinned. Anne was choking, but couldn’t scream. Her eyes bulged. She’d had lost her grip on the pepper spray. Her back ached as the butt of the .32 pistol dug into the small of her back, but she couldn’t reach it.

  “Ginger may be an airhead, but she’s not stupid,” Sean growled. His face was inches from hers. Cigarette tar had stained his teeth. Saliva spattered her face each time he spoke. “Did you think she wouldn’t tell me that somebody was snoopin’ ’round?”

  Anne was immobile under Sean’s weight, but his words lit up a picture of the stoned shopgirl at Smoke Signals. Then she wondered what Tim was doing. Had he heard anything? Would he suspect trouble or not? Could she get a hand free? Was Sean going to kill her? What would happen to Jacqui?

  “Who are you? And what do you want?” he demanded.

  Anne tried to speak, but the stranglehold on her neck left room enough for no more than a wheezy gasp and a raspy croaking sound. He loosened his grip slightly, enough for Anne to speak.

  “Money. My suitcase,” she groaned. “I want it back.”

  “So that’s it.”

  Sean straightened up and with him so did Anne, but he kept firm hold of her throat and held her at arm’s length. “Well, you’ve got balls comin’ up here,” he said. There was a hint of amused admiration in his tone, and then it turned venomous. “But you’re not too bright, are ya? Whaddya think, I’m gonna give it back? Besides, I don’t even know what you’re talkin’ about. I don’t know about no suitcase. I don’t know about no money. And I don’t wanna know about your little troubles. Now get the fuck out,” he said.

  Sean flung her toward the door. She lost her balance, hit the floor, and rolled against a table. Instinctively, she recovered and spun around to face him. He was coming toward her again. So she stood quickly, took one short step forward, and pressed the trigger on the pepper spray. A long steady stream of liquid caught him in the face. Sean screamed in pain, but the pepper didn’t stop him. Blinded, he continued to rush forward until he stumbled over her. He grabbed her with both hands, picked her up, and hurled her like a sack of old clothes towards the kitchen. Anne felt herself airborne for a long time. Her shoes hit the floor first. Then her slight frame skidded through a doorway into the kitchen, the back of her head slamming the side of the stove. She yelped when she hit.

  Sean staggered, still half-blind, toward the sound of her. Anne watched him cross the room. She remembered the little pistol. Her back still ached from it. She felt for it, but she didn’t want to use it. Then she saw the cast iron frying pan on the stove. She grabbed the handle and wound up.

  Then there was an explosion. When Anne heard it, she thought a truck had struck the house. She even felt the tremor. Sean heard it, too, and his head snapped around in time to see the front door burst free of its hinges and latch. The enormous bulk of Tim Perkins followed it in and drove the door far into the room where it fell just short of Sean McGee’s boots.

  Sean stared at Tim with frightened, burning eyes and a gaping mouth.

  Tim looked at Anne. He looked unsure of himself and a bit worried. “Nobody opened the drapes,” he tried to explain. “Was this okay?”

  Anne swung the frying pan with less force than she had first intended. It brought McGee down, and he dropped at her feet.

  22

  The first image in Sean McGee’s mind as he regained consciousness was the shattering of a door and a giant standing in front of him. It seemed so real, and his body twitched violently at the vividness of that memory. Then came the terrible pain in the back of his head. Sean could feel blood matting in his hair. He wanted to lift his hands and soothe his cracked skull, but his hands wouldn’t move. Both were tied behind him and fastened to the plumbing of an old cast-iron radiator. Both his feet were tied together, too, and, when he opened his eyes, he could see nothing. A blindfold covered them. He heard small noises that he couldn’t identify. He called out: “Who’s there?”

  “It’s just me,” said Anne. “I took some liberties and made myself some coffee. You were out of tea. Remember? Girl Scout cookies? You weren’t very nice, if you recall. A sonofabitch comes to mind. Other words, too.”

  “When I get out of here…,” he growled limply.

  “Who says you’re getting out of here, Sean? And, by the way, I’m not so sure I like your attitude. Now you may not think me charming, but I’m sure you’d agree that I’m still a whiz in the kitchen.” Anne enjoyed the playful torture of Sean, but she knew that he was not beaten down quite enough yet.

  The blindfold helped. Not seeing made Sean unsettled and disoriented. He couldn’t see where she was. He couldn’t read her expressions… her body language. He didn’t know where the giant was… what he might be doing. So much depended upon seeing and, in the dark, his ignorance deepened and his pain amplified. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t plan.

  Anne watched him coldly for a while and sipped her hot coffee. Then her tone changed to one which was humourless, grave, and matter-of-fact.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen, Sean. I want to know where the money is, and I want to know now. If you tell me, I’ll free you… once it’s in my hands… not before.”

  “Go t’ hell!”

  “If you jerk me around in any way… any way at all… you won’t see the sun rise tomorrow.”

  “You don’t have the balls.”

  “My friend… who you met earlier and who’s waiting downstairs… will drop you off the North River causeway. It’s not like you’d be missed by anybody. It’s not like you’re some little boy gone missing or some pretty young girl snatched from her home. In fact, you’re not important at all. Who’d bother to report you missing?”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “Put yourself in my shoes, Sean. Would you let someone walk away with a million and change… or would you drown the skunk who stole it so at least he couldn’t spend it? Think you might be spiteful enough to drown the skunk? I think I might, Sean, but that’s just me.”

  Anne stopped, drank the last of her coffee, and waited for another virulent response. Sean heard the small clink of her cup touch the saucer, and then he heard a wispy resigned sigh from Anne. He said nothing.

  “If I can’t get what I want from you, I’ll get it out of that kid, Carson. So… should I ask my friend to start riggin’ the anchor or what? Your call? Which is it?”

  He said nothing.

  “Fair enough, then.”

  Sean thought he detected a sadness in her voice. Then he heard a gentle scrape of her chair as Anne rose. A ripping sound. Anne’s footsteps coming toward him. The smell of her perfume. A strip of tape pressed across his mouth. Her retreating footsteps, and a “Good-bye, Sean.”

  Sean felt as if the lid to his coffin had closed over him. Panic followed in a single, hot, smothering wave and loosed a torrent of indecipherable words against the tape stuck on his face. His cheeks puffed under the back pressure. His eyes bulged. His body writhed. His muffled wails and stifled cries evoked a scene of pathos and desperation – that of a creature sensing the imminence of its own death, and that of a human being reaching out for mercy.

  Anne had reached the front door. It was propped loosely up against the frame where Tim had left it.

  “A change of mind?”

  He nodded briskly.

&nbs
p; “Full cooperation?”

  He nodded again.

  “Good,” she said. “Let’s get started.”

  23

  Anne felt a bit guilty, but she enjoyed watching Sean in pain when she ripped the duct tape from his mouth. He sucked in a few deep breaths and licked at his dry mouth. After that, he walked Anne through every step he had taken since leaving Smoke Signals with Carson White.

  Sean began with admitting that he had made a deal with Carson. He’d agreed to launder Carson’s money but had said he needed help from Mike Underhay to do it. So he and Carson had gone to the biker club. After they’d arrived, Sean and Cutter had turned on Carson and roughed him up until he told them where he had hidden the rest of the cash. Then they’d tied him up until Sean could recover it.

  Carson told them that he’d moved the suitcase from where he’d first hidden it and concealed it under the back stoop of an empty house near the high school. Carson had been afraid his father might find it in the family garage. Sean had retrieved the valise and brought it back to Cutter. Both had planned to begin the process of exchanging the currency into Canadian money tomorrow and, over the next week or so, the two of them would launder the bills across New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. They believed that, if they split up and spread the money over 150 or 200 bank branches, they could convert most of it without suspicion.

  “What about Carson?” asked Anne.

  “We scared him half to death already. We figured that we could slip him a few bucks every now and then. That would keep him happy and quiet. If not… well… who knows?”

  “And exactly where is the suitcase now?”

  “Exactly? I don’t know. I gave it to Cutter. He could keep it safe. It’s in the club somewhere.”

  “Where likely?”

  “Not downstairs. There’s too much traffic, and he couldn’t keep an eye on it. Upstairs there’s a couple of offices for meetings and stuff. There’s a storeroom. Maybe there.”

  “Who else knows about the money besides you and Cutter?

  “No one… just Carson.”

  “And where is he?”

  “Upstairs. Tied up in the storeroom… last I saw him. That’s it. That’s all I know.”

  “Not quite. I want details on the layout of the place. Start with the main floor.”

  Anne sketched the layout of both floors according to Sean’s description and stuffed the paper into her pocket. Before she left Sean’s apartment, she re-taped his mouth so he couldn’t raise an alarm, but she took off his blindfold.

  “Where’s that big guy?” asked Sean looking around.

  “Like I said… downstairs… outside… and he’ll be stickin’ around for quite a while. So don’t wander off.”

  Anne had lied about Tim Perkins. He wasn’t downstairs, and he wasn’t outside. After he’d broken down the door and she’d knocked Sean out, she’d slipped him a hundred dollars. Then he headed for home. He’d earned his money. Besides, she didn’t think she needed him any more tonight.

  Now she regretted letting him go. She had been convinced that Sean had the suitcase with him or had stashed it nearby. She was wrong about that. And Cutter Underhay’s involvement. She was wrong about that, too. Things were getting complicated. One thing hadn’t changed, though. Anne had to recover the money tonight, or it would be scattered all over eastern Canada tomorrow, and she dared not contemplate what failure might mean to her and to her family.

  She tried to conjure up a picture of her mysterious client, the man at the heart of all her troubles and all her fears, but not even a silhouette outline held its shape in her mind. Every attempt dissolved in a wash of grey flickering noise like a TV tuned to a dead channel. No shape. No personality. No inkling of his goals. No test of his will. No measure of his character. No estimate of his power. Just a dozen curt words, a twisted cartoon, and a bullet.

  How do you battle nothing? she asked herself.

  Anne drove past the Hillsborough Bridge, which separates Charlottetown from the community of Stratford, across the bay. It was too dark to see Dit’s house on the far shore, but she wondered if he were still awake.

  She had been thinking more about Dit lately, and she didn’t know why. In fact, she was not even sure that thinking was the right word, not in its true sense. He would just walk into her mind unannounced, do this or that, and then disappear, interrupted by some intrusion of reality. At first, these imaginary drop-ins seemed incongruous, if not somewhat startling. After a while, though, she found that she enjoyed having him in her mind. It was a warm feeling, and there was often disappointment when the real world shoved him to one side. She thought of him now, bent over his workbench, labouring over some piece of electronics, his curly hair, chestnut brown, with a hint of red when the sun struck it. He hated his curls, just as much as Anne loved them. It gave him a boyish charm. Dit was surprisingly strong, too. Despite his handicap or maybe because of it, Dit worked out daily – weights at the gym and swimming at the pool. He considered himself an athlete, wheelchair or no.

  Anne glanced at her watch as she continued down Water Street. It was getting late. Only a few residential lights squinted behind the dark screen of trees along the banks of Stratford. Then the commercial wharves of Charlottetown blocked her view, and their orange security lights blazed along the docks and turned the ripples of the falling tide into a darkly glowing washer board. A cluster of large bulk oil storage tanks appeared ghostly white in her rearview mirror. The solitary remnant of the old railway, a walking trail, flanked the street she travelled. The biker club was just ahead.

  What locals referred to as the biker club or the Harley club was actually a licensed bar registered with the Liquor Control Commission under the ownership of a Mr. Michael P. Underhay and named “Cutter’s Hole in the Wall.” A rather modest neon sign on the front of the building carried those words. It sputtered a red glow. Above it were the club’s colours – a winged motorcycle wheel couched in flames. On the hub was “1 %,” the mark of an outlaw pack.

  Cutter was proud of the name he’d given his bar. It copied an outlaw hideaway in Wyoming, once home to half a dozen notorious gangs: Jesse and Frank James, Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, the Currys, and the Logan brothers. For fifty years, sheriffs’ posses had tried to cross the pass into the Hole, but none of them succeeded. It was impregnable. Cutter hoped that Island police would catch the comparison and believe the same of his Hole in the Wall.

  That allusion had not escaped Anne as she drove past the place, though the connection would have gone over the heads of most local cops. It looked like a fortress, and maybe it was impregnable, but that remains to be seen, she thought.

  Cutter’s Hole in the Wall was a formidable structure. It was stone and brick construction, an old building, and once a maintenance shop for the Canadian National Railway. When railroad maintenance shifted to the mainland in the 30s, many of these repair depots were sold off and used as commercial warehouses. Cutter’s uncle had turned it into a dance hall and bar in the late 50s. Cutter had inherited the property forty years later.

  Windows in the one-time maintenance shop were small, and they were steel-barred to prevent theft. They’d been that way when Cutter acquired the property. They remained that way. Barred windows suited his purposes, too. He’d made other changes, though. He’d replaced the heavy wood doors at the main entrance and loading dock with steel ones. Both new doors locked automatically when closing. An extra-high chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire strands, cordoned three sides of the property. This discouraged anyone approaching from anywhere except the front door, and that was down an alley formed by one of the fences. A surveillance camera covered the alley and revealed anyone approaching the main entrance. Visitors and patrons rang a buzzer to get inside, and a bouncer monitoring the camera opened the door if he liked what he saw.

  Anne spotted only one possible weakness in Cutter’
s Hole in the Wall – the steel door along the receiving dock. It was located near the street for easy delivery truck access, but it was not covered by a camera. If she were able to get inside, it would be through that door.

  Anne circled the block slowly one more time, passed Cutter’s flickering neon sign, and parked on the street just past the Hole in the Wall. Anne popped the trunk latch, got out, and rummaged through a box of professional junk Uncle Billy’d always kept there: tools – some standard, some specialized; rolls of tape; coils of rope and wire; latex and work gloves; a couple of knives and scissors; spare notebooks; harnesses; a grappling hook; pry bars; blocks and tackle; glues and fasteners; lengths of chain; batteries and flashlights; flares, suction cups, glass cutter, and spare clothes. She’d always marvelled at the variety, but had sometimes questioned the utility of some of the stuff in Billy’s treasure chest. When asked about them, sometimes Billy had told her; other times he’d just winked and smiled and said “Ya never know.”

  Anne pushed aside a container of cherry bombs and a knot of bungee cords and pulled out a cheap, three-hole plastic binder, a pair of scissors, and a roll of packing tape. She cut a three-inch square section out of the binder and put it in her jacket pocket with the scissors and tape. In a vacant lot up the street she’d found a hefty rock and a small chunk of wood. With that, she thought she had everything she needed.

  Her first job was to extinguish the light above the loading dock. It was close to the street, and traffic was steady. So she bided her time until pedestrians had passed and no cars approached. Then she tossed the scrap of wood at the overhanging light. It took four tries before the bulb shattered and that corner of the building fell into darkness.