A Cloud of Suspects

by Laurence Gough

Jan paused to wipe blood from the guy’s arm with sterile pads. She tossed three bloody pads in the garbage one after another.

  “How long has it been, Harve?”

  “Fifty-eight months, fourteen days.” Harvey flicked ash at the worn linoleum floor. Bull’s eye. He said, “I lost track of the hours and minutes and seconds about the third week in, and I’m not going to bullshit you about it.”

  “Well, that’s a big relief.” Jan went back to work on the knife, filling it in. Toby had wanted a silver blade smeared with red. She’d suggested stylized blood, bright red flames. Like on a car? Yeah, like on a car. She liked the way the knife was turning out, violent but undeniably artistic. Too bad her walking billboard was three hundred pounds of moron, barely smart enough to sit tight for three or four minutes at a stretch while absorbing a minimal amount of hurt.

  She paused to wipe the arm clean again. Toby was breathing hard, through his nose. She said, “Want me to take a break?” Harvey said, “What for, you tired?”

  She went back to work. Harvey wordlessly offered her a hit on his cigarette. She ignored him. He said, “Want a drag?”

  “I quit.”

  “Before or after lunch?”

  “Five years ago, Harvey.”

  “How come?”

  “For Tyler.”

  Harvey shook his head. Not getting it, as usual.

  Toby said, “What’d you do, you pulled all that time?”

  “Poured a beer on somebody’s head.”

  “You got five years for a little thing like that?”

  “Hell, no.” Harvey laughed, started coughing, thumped himself on the chest. “In remand, there was a guy bothered me in the showers. Ever had one bad thing lead to something even worse?” Toby nodded.

  Harvey said, “Well, that’s what happened.”

  It did, too. Just like that. Harvey had dropped his soap, and the guy had turned and looked at him, waiting to see what he’d do. Harvey had picked up the soap, but had been careful to bend his knees and keep his back to the wall. The guy thought that was pretty funny. Harvey had told him where he could shove his sense of humour. The guy had unwisely tried to kick him in the balls. Harvey had grabbed his foot and twisted hard. The back of the guys skull had bounced off the tiled floor. Harvey had stuffed his bar of gritty prison soap a long way down the guys throat, shoved chunks of another bar of soap deep into the guys nostrils. He’d foamed up like a rabid dog. The wardens crashed the party in time to save the guy’s life, but not his brain. Harvey pleaded self-defence. The jury found him guilty of aggravated assault but recommended leniency. The judge wasn’t buying it. He gave Harvey twelve years, less time served waiting for trial.

  Harvey was a model prisoner, kept his nose clean except for a couple of times when circumstances forced him to defend himself. He’d whittled his sentence in half, got out eight days before his thirty-fifth birthday, wearing six-year-old socks, shoes, shirt and pants, boxer shorts, the gold-colour Timex with the dead battery. He had almost five hundred dollars in his pocket, money he’d earned and saved during his time in the joint. He spent a hundred on a used black leather jacket he’d bought at a pawn shop, another ten on beer in a skid-road hotel, three hundred on a .38-calibre snub-nose Colt and a plastic bag full of bullets.

  He’d used the Colt to bust up a card game and scored eighteen grand plus change. He’d spent twelve of that on a five-year-old meltdown-red Pontiac Firebird that had been owned since new by a mechanic who’d died in a big hurry when a hydraulic lift failed and a Jeep TJ fell on him. Harvey had made himself look sad and opined that these things happen. He stopped himself from adding, usually only once. The dead wrench’s wife had given him a good price on the car. She’d even let him bunk with her over the weekend, while he made sure it was the right vehicle for him. He’d forgotten the Colt when he left. For all he knew, it was still tucked under her pillow.

  He’d driven the Firebird right across the country, east to west, sunrise to sunset, three thousand miles and more, in three long nights and four endless days, across the boundless, rolling, golden, glorious dustbin of the prairies and over the Rocky Mountains, down into the wet, green depths of the rain forest. In Vancouver, he’d found a cheap but clean hotel on Kingsway, a ten-mile-long strip of asphalt that was home to endless used-car lots and Vietnamese restaurants and drab three-storey condos whose windows were permanently shut against the roar of traffic and endless blizzard of toxic wind-blown grit.

  Jan said, “How did you find me?”

  Harvey gave her a playful grin. “I got your letter. You mentioned a job, remember?” The way Harvey said the word job made Toby look up.

  She nodded, hard at work, not giving him much of her attention, just enough to let him know she was aware of him. Concentrating, she bit gently down on her lower lip. Harvey loved it when she did that. So sexy. He wondered who her current sweetie was, and how long she’d been with him. Not long, probably. Whoever the guy was, he was about to learn the hard way that it was time to find someplace else to sleep.

  Harvey got up, went outside, and flicked his butt into the gutter. A matched pair of motorcycle cops cruised by on their Harleys. The cops wore white half-helmets, but everything else about them was black as sin. Black uniforms, sunglasses, nightsticks, guns, leather stomp — ’em boots, and tight black leather gloves. They looked exactly like L.A. cops, and from the dribs and dabs of info Harvey had picked up during his period of incarceration, they pretty much misbehaved like L.A. cops, too. He waved as they went by. Neither cop paid any attention to him, but they made a pretty, synchronized right turn at the end of the block. When he heard the rolling thunder of their V-twin engines going down the lane behind Jan’s shop, he knew they were coming back for another pass at him, would want to have a word. He didn’t have a problem with that. He’d dumped the Colt, and the card game he’d busted had yielded up eleven separate sets of I.D. Three of the driver’s licences had such bad pictures that he could pass, in a pinch. Add it all up, he had more lives than your average cat.

  *

  Rabbit ears

  Peter Markson stared out his living-room window at the stricken condominium complex across the street. For the past few months, the eight-year-old complex had looked as if it had been swallowed by a gigantic bile-green tent caterpillar. Workmen had torn off the stucco cladding and fibreboard, revealing fields of perky mushrooms, rain-soaked insulation, and mouldy black swaths big as a kingsize bed.

  The whole city was riddled with waterlogged buildings. There was such a strong demand for repairs that in some cases the same heartless scumbags who’d hidden behind the numbered construction companies that were responsible for the original mess were now behind the numbered companies that repaired them. Naturally, these businesses hired the same consultants and workmen who had earned them huge profits the first time around.

  Peter tired of looking at the condo. His fingers slipped from between the thin metal blinds. He stood there by the window for a moment with his hands dangling at his sides, and then he walked slowly into the kitchenette and drank some lukewarm water from the tap. When he had quenched his thirst he went back into the living room and flopped down on the sofa and turned on the TV. He enjoyed TV. He could count on TV to always be a wonderful, wonderful experience, TV never let you down, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. If you were bored you could flip channels. He had only twelve, but it was more than enough.

  He went over to the TV and turned it on. The TV was a Magnavox. It was old but reliable. There was a box on top that the cable went into and then out of again. The box allowed him to change channels with a remote, just like on a newer model. But first he had to turn the TV on manually. He didn’t mind that at all. His secret unclean truth was that he really liked touching the TV. Some people might think there was nothing wrong with that. He wondered if they would feel the same way if they knew he enjoyed touching and looking at the TV a lot more than he enjoyed touching and looking at his wife, Janey.

  Peter sat down o
n the sofa. He took the remote out of his pocket and pointed it at the TV and ran through all twelve channels, up and down and up and down again, as if he were a pianist warming up.

  If he was sober and his timing was right, he could sometimes make people living on different channels mouth each other’s lines. Or he could flip rapidly back and forth between channels and get nothing but a silent black screen. He had been doing a lot of that, lately. It took a certain amount of skill. This morning he had spent half an hour of his valuable time watching an infomercial on achieving unbelievably enormous wealth by simultaneously manipulating the real-estate market and one’s fellow human beings. The infomercial’s gorgeous host assured her viewing audience that very little financial and absolutely no moral capital was required. That was a good thing for Peter, because he hadn’t held a job for more than a year. Janey didn’t know it, but they would have been in one big financial mess if it weren’t for the inadvertent generosity of people so unbearably and irrevocably stupid they made after-dark withdrawals from isolated ATM machines.

  Easy money, once you’d learned the trick of convincing your victim that you would shoot him dead if he didn’t cooperate.

  Easy money, until last night, when a stupid woman had ignored all his carefully worded instructions. She had screamed when he had told her to be quiet, and kicked him when he warned her not to resist, ripped his black ski mask off his face when he snatched at her purse. The ATM’S security camera caught him in sharp focus. This morning, he’d recognized himself the instant the “Crime Stoppers” picture hit the screen. The pictures showed him dancing around like an idiot, snatching at his mask and her purse in turn, firing the gun and blowing quite a surprisingly tidy hole through the bank’s glass door. There had been more stilted pictures of him fleeing into the darkness, tangled up in such a blind panic that he’d forgotten all about his getaway bicycle. The cops would have found the bike by now, dusted it for fingerprints or DNA, or whatever. He knew nothing about forensics, but he knew for a dead-as-a-run-over-dog certainty that his carefree life as an armed robber had pretty much hit the wall.

  When Janey found out, she’d leave him again. Pack her bags and put on those boots that were made for walkin’. She’d left him many times before, for a bewilderingly wide variety of reasons. One time he’d forgotten to reassemble the newspaper so all the sections were in order when he’d finished reading it, and she’d stormed out the door and hadn’t come back for a week. No, eight days. He didn’t know beans about the law but he knew that attempted armed robbery was an offence a lot more serious than failing to reassemble a daily newspaper, or forgetting to clear out the dishwasher or wax the kitchen floor. This time she’d leave him for good. No, for bad. He couldn’t picture life without Janey.

  He went into the bedroom and threw himself face down on the unmade bed. The alarm clock told him it was five minutes past three, but the alarm clock was a damned liar, because Janey set it ten minutes early, to give herself a little more time in the morning, so she could make herself pretty before she went to work.

  Janey got off work at four-thirty. Unless she missed her bus, she’d be home in less than two hours. She was going to have a foamy screaming fit when she walked in the door and saw he hadn’t done any housework or even begun to think about supper.

  Maybe someone would turn him in by then and save them both. Peter rolled over onto his back. He clutched her pillow to his face, and smelled her perfume. His life as he knew it was almost over. Maybe if he pressed down on the pillow extra hard, he could smother himself to death …

  Nope.

  The lawyers would portray him as a violent armed robber who’d recklessly fired his deadly weapon during the commission of his crime. The jury would hate him with a passion. He’d plead for mercy, but they wouldn’t care. He’d get ten years, maybe even twenty. Because of the nature of his crimes, they’d dump him in a maximum-security institution, a great, ugly lump of concrete and barbed wire, where his fellow convicts pumped iron and watched daytime soaps and slaughtered each other just to relieve the boredom. Like Alcatraz in that Clint Eastwood movie. He wouldn’t last a week in a place like that. Somebody would shove a sharpened spoon into his chest because he wanted his toothpaste, or didn’t like the way he combed his hair. His lungs would fill with sticky-hot blood. He’d fall down and die. The end.

  Peter tossed the pillow up in the air, so high it almost hit the ceiling. He caught it and threw it again. Wouldn’t Janey be surprised if she came home and found him lying in the bathtub with a bullet in his brain! But he wouldn’t be around to see the stunned expression on her face, so how much fun would that be?

  Better to wait until she got home, explain the situation, and see how she reacted. See if she was going to straighten herself out and try to be helpful, or stuff her suitcase and run for her life. Give the woman a chance to do the right thing. If she failed the test, it would be all her fault and he could do whatever he pleased, in terms of taking her with him, and stuff like that.

  *

  Good vibrations

  Toby swung a leg over his motorcycle as if it were a very small but seriously overweight pony. He took his own sweet time putting on his beanie-style micro helmet, wraparound oil-slick shades, and cool, fingerless, black leather gloves. Then, just as he grabbed the handlebars, he remembered that he had to take the gloves off so he could get out his Zippo lighter with the Harley logo, and his smokes. He lit a cigarette and jumped on the bike’s kick-starter. The Harley coughed twice, and died. Toby cocked an ear and tilted his bike from side to side, listening for gas sloshing around in the tank. He tried the kick-starter again. The bike made a mechanical gargling sound, as if it were being strangled to death. He sat there for a moment, looking cool, and then pulled meditatively on his smoke and unscrewed the gas cap and peered inside. Couldn’t see much with his shades on. He took them off and tried again. Sure was dark in there. Ash fell from his cigarette into the tank. He flinched, screwed the cap back on, looked around, and saw Harvey watching him from across the street. Toby was in the middle of giving Harvey a hard look when his boot slipped in the puddle of 50-weight oil that had leaked out of the bike in the past half hour. Harvey blew him a kiss. Toby reared up and took another futile shot at starting the bike. His beanie-style helmet slid forward over his naked, sweaty skull.

  Harvey finished his own cigarette and flicked it arcing across the street.

  Toby kicked the Harley again. The bike roared to life, the engine shuddering painfully. Sunlight skittered off the polished chrome and cool, tinted mirrors. Toby stomped the Harley into gear. The heavy clunk of misaligned steel was drowned by the roar of his shotgun exhausts. He cranked the throttle and tore off down the street, trailing a roiling blue cloud of oil.

  Harvey went back inside, shut the door behind him, shot the deadbolt, and turned the SORRY WE’RE OPEN sign around so it read COME BACK WHEN WE’RE OPEN, STUPID.

  Jan was still in her little room, cleaning her instruments. He waited patiently until she was finished, and then took her in his arms and held her as tight as was reasonable. She smelled of expensive perfume and wide-open spaces. He wanted to kiss her but knew he better not try. Later, maybe, but not now. When the time was just past just right, he let her go, and stepped back. She saw the carnal glow lurking in his eyes and said, “i’ve got a boyfriend.”

  “I’m happy for you.”

  “It’s a serious relationship, Harvey. I don’t fool around, and neither does he.”

  “You hope.”

  Jan didn’t say anything.

  He said, “You living together?”

  “Off and on.”

  He rolled and lit a cigarette.

  Jan said, “Everybody I know smokes. Why is that? If I ask for one of those, tell me no.”

  He smiled. “i’ll never say no to you. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”

  “Gimme a fucking cigarette.”

  “No way.”

  She patted his cheek. “You’re a good boy, Harve.”
Her knuckles were red and her skin smelled of bleach. She said, “Want a Coke?”

  “Sure.”

  She opened the bar fridge and took out two cans and opened them both. Harvey took his and sat down in the antique dentist’s chair he’d given Jan when she’d signed the lease on her first tattoo parlour, eight years ago. In all that time, it didn’t look as if she’d made a whole lot of progress. He stretched out his stubby legs and drank some Coke. He was aware that Jan was watching him as closely as if he were a train. He knew what she was thinking. She wanted to know if he still had what she needed. He didn’t blame her. If she’d asked him point-blank, he wasn’t sure he’d know what to say. Prison did strange things to a person. If you wanted to survive, you had to change in ways you’d never have thought possible. Harvey had decided long before his trial was over that he wasn’t going to be anybody’s sweetheart. Inside, a black lifer named Marvel Durwood had taken a shine to him. When the time came to bend over or stand up, Harvey snapped the right-side nylon arm off his glasses and shoved it deep into Marvel’s gaping nostril, slammed it home with the palm of his hand. Marvel’s eyes rolled up in his bowling-ball head. His knees buckled, and he dropped. Hit the concrete so hard the impact had been heard from one end of the cell block to the other. There had been a lot of blood, but no witnesses. Marvel was past talking. The three-inch long spear of nylon had showed up in the X-rays. Harvey didn’t wait for the guards to notice his glasses were broken. He requested an interview with the warden, sat down in a plain wooden chair in front of a rolling camcorder and told the world how it had gone down. The warden filed a report, but it hadn’t gone anywhere. Marvel had six inches and more than a hundred pounds on him, was in for life on a multiple-murder rap, and had already killed two of his fellow convicts. Truth was, the only person on this planet or any other who had ever cared about Marvel Durwood was Marvel Durwood, and he couldn’t even count on himself any more, because he’d been messily but effectively lobotomized.

  But after that, with two brain-dead inmates on his sheet, Harvey had been the very model of a modern model prisoner.