*
Feeding time
The answering machine’s flashing red light caught Parker’s eye as she entered the house. She shifted Hadrian to her left hip and hit the machine’s playback button. Jack told her he was in a situation, would be home late.
Hadrian wriggled in her arms, and then, without warning, burst into tears and started screaming deafeningly. Parker went over to the sofa and sat down and gave Hadrian her nipple. He bit her, and then screamed again and slapped at her with his little hands. God, but her breast hurt. Parker controlled her anger with an effort.
Hadrian’s eyes were squeezed shut.
Tears flowed down his pudgy cheeks.
He blindly groped for her breast.
Parker shifted him in her arms to make things easier for him. She flinched as his questing mouth found her nipple.
This time, he suckled contentedly. If Parker had her way, Hadrian would stay on the breast for the next year or so, or at least as long as she could manage it. On work days, she had to express her milk into bottles that Miriam or the daycare staff warmed up. Thinking about it made her jealous. In the evening and on her days off she could hold Hadrian in her arms and watch him suckle. Staying off the bottle wasn’t easy, but she firmly believed it was worth it, for health reasons and because of the bonding that went on between them, the heat of his small body, the touch of fingers, the eye contact.
When Hadrian had been fed and burped, Parker took him into the shower with her. More often than not he peed in the shower, but she didn’t mind. He obviously loved the sensation of the water beating softly down on him, because he wriggled excitedly in her arms and made the most amazing cooing sounds, and sometimes shrieked with glee, so loudly it hurt her ears.
When they’d bathed, Parker dressed Hadrian in a long-sleeved Gap T-shirt and blue-and-white gingham shorts. No socks or shoes, because of the heat. She wore a black one-piece bathing suit under shorts and a sleeveless T. She carried Hadrian on her hip as she made herself a tomato and cucumber sandwich, and put together a small picnic basket. Hadrian was a big fan of apples. Apple juice, apple sauce. She put an extra jar in the hamper, and wrapped a spare diaper around the jar to help keep it cool. Hadrian watched her closely. He pointed at the jar of apple sauce and excitedly said something neither of them understood.
Parker said, “We’re going to have a day at the beach. Do you remember the beach, Hadrian?”
Hadrian wasn’t giving anything away.
Parker said, “We’re going to go for a swim and then we’re going to flop down on a blanket on the sand, in the shade of that big umbrella you love so much, and then we’re going to have something to eat, and watch the world go by. We have to wear a hat and sunglasses, but it’ll be worth it, because it’ll be so much fun.”
Hadrian frowned. He had a faraway look in his eye. He was having a bowel movement. It was the strangest feeling. What was going on down there? His eyes widened. His head jerked from side to side.
Where in the world was that wonderful smell coming from?
Chapter 5
Nuance is everything
Harvey wanted to move in with Jan so he could sleep with her and watch her cook his meals, and also so he could play with Tyler if he felt like it, teach his kid the kind of valuable stuff fathers taught their sons. He had no idea what kind of stuff that might be, but reasoned that he would be able to figure it out instinctively.
Harvey wasn’t a patient man but he wasn’t stupid, either. He knew he wouldn’t be doing himself any favours by trying to rush Jan. That was fine with him. If he had to wait a day or two before getting into her pants, he could do that. Probably.
He rented a room in a cheap hotel on the sunny side of Main Street, a few blocks from the train and bus terminals and the elevated rapid-transit line that could speedily take him to or far away from the city. The room was small and dirty, and smelled like a large rat had crawled under the bed and died. The roar of traffic was a brain-numbing constant, but Harvey didn’t mind, because it was a temporary situation. All he needed was some place to hang his hat for a little while, so Jan wouldn’t rip into him about wrongly making assumptions. But that didn’t mean he had to stay there night after night, suffering in manly silence.
He’d never admit it to her, but he’d hung on tight to Jan’s sweet memory every single day and night of his stretch in the joint. If the image that had festered in his brain wasn’t a dead-perfect match for the woman she’d become, well, that wasn’t his fault. It was just something that happened, was all.
He sat down on the sagging, sorry-ass excuse for a bed, and lit a cigarette. Five years was just short of forever. He hadn’t expected Jan to lock herself in a closet, all that time. But he hadn’t expected her to slip a new hombre into her life, either. Or if she did try to replace him with someone else, he expected her to drop kick the guy out of her life the moment she laid eyes on him. What else could she do? They were man and wife. A team. Plus, Tyler was his son. His own flesh and blood. If that didn’t count for anything, what did?
A cockroach scuttled across the scabrous carpet. The damn thing was so big it should’ve had a licence plate. The roach bumped up against his boot. Its antennae or whatever the hell they were called tickled the black leather. Was it sizing him up? He took a long pull on his cigarette and flicked ash at it. The length of ash hit the roach and exploded like a tiny bomb. Stunned and disoriented, the roach whirled around and around in a frenzy until Harvey rained on its parade with the heel of his boot. He bore down hard, grinding the roach to muck. But when he finally lifted his boot, the thing was still alive, wriggling erratically, as if its battery needed replacing. He stomped the roach again and again, until it wasn’t an insect any more, just flattened pieces of an insect.
Harvey took a long pull on his cigarette and said, “That’s what I’m going to do to your boyfriend, Jan. Squash him like a bug.”
A passing truck drowned his words. He waited until the truck was gone and then he said, “That’s what I’m going to do to your boyfriend, Jan. Squash him like a bug.”
Was roach better?
Harvey said, “That’s what I’m gonna to do to your candy-ass boyfriend, Jan. Squash him like a roach.”
Nope, too specific. Confusing.
Harvey practised saying I’m gonna squash you like a bug until he was certain he had it down pat. It took him a long time to get it right, crammed full of evil menace and impending doom. By the time he was finally satisfied with his delivery, he’d smoked half a pack of cigarettes and had a fresh appreciation for Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the acting profession in general.
Squash you like a bug!
Get it wrong, it sounded ridiculous, like some kind of dumb kid’s joke. “Squash you like a bug squash you like a bug squash you like a … ”
Somebody pounded on his door. A wheezy voice shouted, “You okay in there, fella?”
Harvey yanked open the door. A heavyset guy wearing jeans and a red-and-black-plaid flannel shirt stared down at him. The fingers on the guy’s left hand had all been cut off just below the first knuckle. Harvey figured the guy for a disabled logger. He grabbed two handfuls of flannel and said, “I’m gonna squash you like a bug!”
Harvey’s room was on the third floor. He could hear the ex-logger thundering down the stairs all the way to the lobby. He went over to his window and looked down. The hotel door banged open. The logger turned right when he hit the sidewalk. He’d stopped running, but he sure was walking at a brisk pace.
Harvey lit another cigarette. The thing about Jan was, she wouldn’t hang out with a punk. Which meant vile threats might not do the trick.
What if Jan’s boyfriend decided to squash him like a bug? What would he do then?
Harvey thought it over. He decided he needed to buy himself a large-calibre mothafucka handgun. Something big enough to blow a hole in a battleship.
*
Best laid plans
Jan and Sandy made love twice and then she drifted off. When s
he woke up it was past seven. Sandy had left a note on the pillow. He told her he’d had a great time, it had been a perfect day and he was crazy about her, but there were some things he had to do and he’d probably be working late, would call her in the morning, around eleven.
Jan balled up the note and threw it at the wall. She was furious, but mostly at herself. She’d worked hard to arrange Tyler’s camping weekend, and it wasn’t just for his benefit. It was for her, too. She should have told Sandy she wanted him to spend the night with her, instead of hoping he would choose to stay simply because he could. He was a guy. She should have spelled it out for him. Told him outright that she’d sent Tyler away and that it was the first time in her son’s life that he’d been away from home and she worried about him even though she thought the trip would do him a lot of good. But all of that was totally beside the point, because the real reason she’d let Tyler go camping was because she wanted to be with Sandy all night long, make love and fall asleep in his arms and wake up and make love again, and have a leisurely breakfast in bed with him. What was wrong with her, that he couldn’t find it in himself to stick around for one single night?
Jan got dressed and walked eight blocks to the nearest liquor store and bought a bottle of rye. On the way back she stopped in at Blockbuster and rented a couple of movies she’d been meaning to see. Back home, she made some toast, scrambled some eggs, poured herself a rye and 7-Up and settled down in front of the TV. The rented movie ended at a few minutes past nine. By then she considered herself reasonably but not by any means excessively drunk. She decided to treat herself to a double feature, and slipped the second movie into the VCR. That film ended at quarter past eleven. The bottle of rye had a pretty serious dent in it by then, but she was still fairly steady on her feet. She rummaged through the cupboards. There was nothing to eat but Arrowroot biscuits and Cap’n Crunch cereal. She poured herself one last drink, rye on the rocks, because she was out of 7-Up, and sat back down in front of the TV just as they switched from the national to the local news.
The lead item was about a late-night shooting in Metrotown, in the suburb of Burnaby, half an hour’s fast drive from her apartment. There had been an ambush and gunfight in the mail’s underground parking lot. Hundreds of terrified shoppers had run for their lives. Two men had died: the intended victim and a mall cop who had been caught in the cross-fire. The victim was known to the police, who believed he was a highly ranked member of a local gang.
There was amateur camcorder footage, jerky and blurred, of a burly female RCMP officer pushing back the crowd, then a slow pan past a yellow Porsche Boxster to a bullet-riddled body. The camera zoomed in, and steadied. The image of the dead man’s face cleared, like something rising up out of turbulent water.
Jan’s glass hit the carpet, and rolled. Her hands flew to her mouth. She said, “Oh my God.” Her words sounded small and lonely.
The dead man was a friend of Harvey’s named Matt Singh. Jan had met him just after Harvey took his fall, when she’d taken Harvey’s Cadillac in to have it detailed. She’d wanted the Caddy to look as sharp as possible, so she’d be able to get top dollar for it. She and Tyler had needed every cent she could lay her hands on. Harvey didn’t need the car because he wouldn’t be doing any more driving, not for quite a stretch, anyway … Matt had taken an interest in Jan. He’d told her he knew somebody who might be interested in the car. They’d gone clubbing a few times but one thing hadn’t led to another, and they had eventually gone their separate ways. At the time, Jan wasn’t quite sure why. She’d told herself the chemistry wasn’t there for her, though that wasn’t exactly true.
When Matt called her out of the blue a couple of years later, and asked her if she was interested in making a thousand dollars in five simple minutes, she told him to go to straight to hell. He came around that same evening, knocked on her door, and before she could say anything, told her all she had to do was walk across a parking lot.
Jan said, “That’s it? Walk across a parking lot?”
“Yeah. And when I say five minutes, that’s five minutes max. You’re probably looking at something like thirty seconds of actual work.”
“What’s the catch?”
Matt laughed. He had the whitest teeth she’d ever seen on somebody who wasn’t a movie star. He said, “You have to look really sexy, show a lot of cleavage, a lot of leg, lots of real juicy attitude … ”
“I can do that.”
Matt said, “I know, I seen you do it.”
Jan smiled. “And that wasn’t even on purpose,” she said, “because I didn’t like you all that much, and I still don’t.”
“Don’t matter. All this is, is business.”
Jan sat him down on the sofa and got him a beer. She said, “Okay, I put some nice clothes on, and take a stroll across the parking lot. Then what?”
“Nothing. That’s it. See, what you are is a distraction. You do your distracting and then you beat it. The only way you could have a problem is if you walked in a big circle instead of a straight line.”
“In the meantime, you’re going to be doing what?”
Matt smiled. “Not just me. You remember Billy Zeman?”
“The bartender, skinny black guy with the crooked teeth, at that new place on Granville, with the fake palm trees? How could I forget him?”
Matt nodded. “Me and Billy are doing an ATM. There’s two guards, both armed. One shoves fresh money into the machine while his partner keeps an eye open for trouble.”
“And that would be me.”
“Nothing to it,” said Matt.
“When do I get paid?”
“Right this minute, that’s what you want.”
Jan held out her hand, palm up. He handed her a fat envelope sealed with a length of clear tape. The envelope had her name on it, written large. She said, “You’re a dime short, it’s like I got nothing.”
“In that case, count it.”
Jan ripped open the envelope. It was stuffed with twenty-dollar bills. The bills had been in circulation for a while. She counted them out on the coffee table. Fifty, in ten piles of five. She shoved the money back in the envelope and tossed the envelope on the table. She said, “I got a kid I got to take care of. For him, there’s nobody else but me.”
“Lucky bastard.”
“I want another four thousand, when you’re done.”
Matt laughed. “Forget it.”
“Okay, three.”
“There’s plenty of good-looking women around, Jan. You sure you don’t want the job?”
“Sure there are, but how many of those women can you trust?”
“Fifteen hundred.”
“We’re back to four,” said Jan. “Ten, if anybody gets shot.”
“Nobody’s gonna get shot.”
Jan said, “Okay, then it’s four, for a total of five thousand dollars. If there’s a fuck-up, you don’t know me.”
“Fine.”
“I mean it, Matt.”
He laughed again, throwing back his head. His gums were black. He said, “A blind man could see that you’re serious. Don’t you worry your pretty little head, Jan. We got everything all figured out. It’s the perfect score, and it’s gonna go smooth as yogurt.”
Jan had almost backed out at the last moment. Her fear of what Matt might do to her had kept her in the game. In the end, Matt had been right about the score. He’d worked everything out perfectly, and it had gone exactly as he’d said it would.
Except one of the armoured-car guys had been shot in the head at point-blank range, when he’d pulled his gun. He’d been in a coma for more than four long years, died just over two months ago. Funny how things turned out …
The morning after the robbery, Jan read about the shooting in the paper. She learned that the guard was expected to survive, and that the thieves had gotten away with four hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars. She’d called Matt on his cellphone to complain about her small piece of the action. Before she could say a word, he to
ld her to watch her mail, and slammed down the phone.
Two days later she found a small package with no return address in her mail box. She went back into her apartment and locked the door and ripped the package open. It contained ten thousand dollars in a wide variety of denominations, the promise of another five grand every second month for the next year, and a terse typewritten note warning her to keep her mouth shut and not to make any unusually large purchases.
Jan rented a safety-deposit box from her credit union. She let the money add up for six long worrying months, and then she paid cash for a low-mileage three-year-old Pontiac Sunfire, and treated Tyler and herself to a pressure-relieving trip down the coast, all the way to L.A. They’d spent two full days at Disneyland, toured Universal Studios and a bunch of other zany tourist hangouts, ate at decent restaurants, stayed up late, and slept in even later. It was heaven, while it lasted.
Matt still owed her ten grand when the payments stopped. She asked around. He’d tried to rob a nightclub. The bouncer had beaten him half to death with his own gun. He’d pled, and taken a five-year hit. Jan visited him a couple times. He’d lost a tooth in a fight and felt sick about it. She voluntarily contributed a few hundred dollars to his prison account, giving him some much-needed juice.
He’d got out a couple of years later but hadn’t been in touch until a month ago, when he’d dropped by unannounced to tell her about a score he’d been working on. He’d somehow found out that a wholesale diamond merchant was expecting a shipment of uncut African diamonds. They were blood diamonds stolen from a mine. He told her there had been a firelight at the mine, and more than twenty men, security personnel and miners and thieves, had been shot dead.
Jan said, “Are you trying to tell me the diamonds don’t belong to the person you’re going to steal them from?”
“That’s right.”
Matt smiled. His smile was perfect again, the missing tooth replaced. He leaned a little closer, and lightly touched Jan’s arm. “What they do, they cut the diamonds and then they use a laser to carve a tiny little polar bear into the stone. It’s so small you can’t even see it with the naked eye.”
A Cloud of Suspects Page 5
