Trust Me

by Paul Slatter

  He moved on towards the park, keeping the water just above his wound, hoping the salt would clean it. Then he moved out, wincing with every step as he made his way back inland into the trees until he was alongside the drive. That fucking bitch in the dress was still there standing on the lid to the pit with her arms crossed. Another guy in a suit with a bald head was on the phone standing next to another woman who looked hot.

  Fuck he thought, how the hell did he get himself into such a fucking mess?

  He looked at the firemen treating the loser heroin addict’s eyes and then to their 4 x 4 blocking his vehicle. In the distance, sirens could be heard, more cops and an ambulance no doubt. He moved along to the front of the house and saw Ditcon’s car sitting at the curbside. Coming out of the cover of the trees, he reached the driver’s side and looked in. The keys were there—perfect. Still dripping wet, he opened the door. He slipped himself inside and sat himself back in the darkness and waited as he listened as the sirens approached. Thirty seconds later, he saw the lights and ten seconds after, the ambulance and police car arrived, deafening the neighborhood as he started Ditcon’s car and drove away through the melee.

  ************

  Ditcon was pissed for two reasons. One, because Daltrey was a fucking idiot and should have followed police procedure, used her training and handcuffed the fucking idiot—or better still, shot the fucker. But no, she didn’t have her gun or cuffs because she’d been playing undercover slut in the strip bar for that stupid fucking dumb, fucking, fuckhead Chendrill. And two, his car was gone because his dumb-ass driver had left the keys in it. But possibly the most annoying thing about the whole shambolic episode was that his golf clubs were in the back.

  “Don’t say a word about the car—to anyone. The guy’s gone and it’s not important how,” is all he said to Daltrey and Stephanie as they walked back into the driveway.

  Then he said to Daltrey, “Where’s yours?”

  “In the park. I parked it there so as I could tail him through the trees.”

  Yeah whatever, Ditcon thought, big fucking deal, you dumb bitch. Then he said, “Well the RCMP around here have a lot of explaining to do since they failed to uncover and apprehend another killer we’ve found living in their jurisdiction. I can’t believe they let him escape.”

  He took a deep breath and shook his head, rubbed his neck, looked at Stephanie, then said to Daltrey, “Go get your car.”

  ************

  The first place Daltrey hit after dropping off Ditcon and his driver—who she could tell hated her—was her shower. Then her bath. But the smell was still there. So she showered again and this time scrubbed out the inside of her nose with her fingers.

  What was all that about, she thought, this Stephanie woman looking down on her when all she was doing was driving? Let her be the one who outfights a 250-pound monster. The fucking cock-sucking bitch. Fuck her. And she had beat him, this prick who Suzy had a thing for, she thought, as she stared at herself naked in the mirror for not the first time that night. It certainly had been interesting.

  She got dressed quickly and forty minutes later, she was standing at the side of Chendrill’s hospital bed.

  She asked, “Have you told your girl?”

  He hadn’t. What he had done as he’d woken though was to send a text.

  “I told her I’d be late,” Chendrill said.

  Daltrey said straight back, “She’ll be thinking you have another woman.”

  “Yeah but when she’s sees this, she’ll know different.”

  Daltrey stared at the wound in Chendrill’s right shoulder. She said, “Maybe she’ll think the other woman shot you.”

  Maybe? Chendrill thought as she heard Daltrey carry on saying, “The fucker nearly got you, hey?”

  Chendrill wanted to shrug, but knew he couldn’t so he just said, “Still standing.”

  Daltrey smiled, kind of, but she got the gist. She said, “I thought I had him, but you know—you trap a rat in a drain pipe and if one end’s rotten, it’s getting out.”

  Chendrill lay there and thought about the Italian crawling through a pipe, then thought about the fucker shooting him.

  Daltrey said, “I saw something tonight I never thought I’d see in my lifetime, Chuck.”

  Then as the vision of the transvestite kneeling down with her nuts hanging down next to his head as he lay there on the ground flashed through his head, Chendrill said, “Same here.”

  He owed the transvestite one—that was certain.

  Daltrey said, “One thing I will say for Ditcon is, for as much of an idiot as we see him to be, once that trap door was open and it was empty, he was on the phone and had a photo from the club and the lower mainland shut down, and he says it’s staying that way.”

  Chendrill smiled and said sarcastically, “Yeah—good for him for doing his job.” Then he took a deep breath that hurt and said, “Well I can tell you there’s little point because I’d put Tricia’s new house on the line and say the man’s still here.”

  And as always, he was right.

  *************

  In the Italian’s eyes, he had done little wrong. Yeah, he’d killed the odd fucker and shot an ex-cop, but the junkies were on their way out anyway and in reality, the State should be thanking him as he was doing society a service. That cop also should have known better than to get physical with a known gangster, Jesus, fuck me. And on top of it all, he was in love, and about to, after all these years, get back the girl of his dreams, along with the kids that he knew were both his. All he had to do was lay low for a while until everyone got bored and then wait for his girl to leave her husband, which she was about to do. It had all been perfect until that little slimy gay fuckhead with the poofy little dog had come drifting back in from the past and gone and fucked it all up by buying her and her husband a house.

  Now he had another slight setback, as well as a huge hole in his leg.

  With his head down, the Italian limped along the street, bought a razor and some scissors from a convenience store and shaved his head in the cracked mirror of the shitty bathroom of a room he found on Hastings Street. The man at the reception window of the cheap hotel only taking cash in advance and never looking up. Then with his new look, he crossed the road and hobbled up three blocks to the charity shop and bought some clothes that someone no longer liked or fit into, stuck an oversize truckers cap on his head, and threw his designer wear that stank of death into a bin. He carried on in great pain back along Hastings Street, limping and beginning to cry out with every step. His body twisting as he moved, he passed an all-night pharmacy which gave a deal on prescription methadone and stepped in, grabbed some iodine, painkillers, and bandages and carried on up the road, passing the shitheads who lived on the street towards the hotel.

  He found the entrance to his new home and passed the desk with the manager sitting there in a string vest that he’d ripped at the front from scratching. Struggling with the stairs, he found his room. The place was a shithole full of shitheads, but a perfect place to lay low, he thought, as he sat on the bed and pulled the banker’s draft from his wallet and looked at it.

  He had this $250,000 here and another $650,000 he’d stashed away in the Caymans, and $51,000 in usable money from incorporations he owned here. But he couldn’t access that because they may have tallied up his connection and already be watching the system for movement. If he was quick though he could hit the debit machines and pull maybe a grand out on two cards and be gone.

  If he was quick.

  But they’d know he was still around.

  He’d wait, he thought. He’d wait it out. Let them think he was long gone and then work a way out of this mess from there.

  He looked about the room—the curtains had blood on them, as did the sheet. But the sheet was washed. The walls were shiny yellow from nicotine. He was sure the place stank, but for the moment his nose had stopped working. Fuck—that fucking bitch, he thought. Fucking up his leg. He pulled down his new trousers and loo
ked at the wound in the cheap fluorescent light. It was bad, but he’d seen worse. Stripping off, he walked to the bathroom and jumped in the shower that was thick with black mold. He turned on the taps and waited for the hot water, which wouldn’t come.

  “Fuck it,” he said out-loud and got in anyway. Then he reached for the soap that wasn’t there and then after for a towel that wasn’t there either.

  Getting out, he limped his way back into the bedroom and dried himself on the bedspread that left him with hair that wasn’t his. He sat down on the side of the bed and looked at his leg again. Wincing at the pain, he pulled the wound apart and then screamed out loud as he poured a splash of iodine straight in. Falling back, he lay down and looked at the ceiling, wondering if someone would care enough about his screams to check.

  He waited, listening for doors to open, footsteps along the old wooden floorboards of the corridor that would stop outside his door to see if he was okay. Nothing. He spun around and looked out the window through the shitty net. People outside were sitting in doorways, some high on crack, some selling second-hand junk they said was theirs. Some doing both. That guy that kid saved, Clive Sonic, there in the distance, lit up on a billboard in the night sky. The man with the smile, looking cool, Saying, ‘Trust Me’ to anyone who cared to look.

  Fuck off! the Italian thought as he laid back down and stared at the fluorescent light with its burned out ends and dead flies stuck to its grease and wondered about Suzy. How was he going to explain this one to her? He should call. Twisting the dyke’s arm was fixable; having a pit with the odd dead loser in the garden where she’d sat with him and had barbecues, that was going to be a tough sell—it was work though, so maybe she’d get that? Maybe, but sometimes women could get funny about the strangest things.

  ************

  The light was just coming up on a new morning when Chendrill pulled himself out of the bed and walked to the window. Somewhere out there was a group of men who had conspired in various ways to close his curtain. It was a strange feeling. One that sat there in his stomach and gave a real-time wake-up call. Twice now in the last month someone had tried to remove him from society. Maybe it was time to grow up, Chendrill thought. He could settle down with his new girl and ride it out for the next 50 years—if he was lucky enough to get that far and become a cool guy in his nineties. It would be hard though to do that, sit back and know there were people out there wandering around who’d had a part in orchestrating his downfall.

  The Italian was at the top of the tree, but who were the others and how much did they actually know? He’d find out soon enough, he knew that. Someone sent the text about where the car was sitting hidden to his guy in the know. He called him up. The phone went for the longest time before the man answered and said, “You get it?”

  “Oh, I got it alright,” answered Chendrill, “right in the shoulder, from some Italian.”

  His man, who Chendrill now paid but hadn’t before when the man had owed Chendrill for getting him a suspended sentence instead of spending two years in a holiday camp, was now silent for a moment. Then, confused, he said, “What?”

  Chendrill hated saying it, but he said it again, “The car was there, but there was this Italian loan shark with it, and he had other ideas.”

  “This is the guy they’re looking for?”

  The guy was on the ball.

  “Yeah, but not because of me. It turned out he was starting his own cemetery in his yard. Where’d the info that sent me there originate?”

  “A text. I’ll send it to you.”

  It came up and Chendrill read it.

  The Aston’s at Raymur and Casper for 2 hours.

  Fuck, there it was again, Casper, why had he not listened to that woman who was trying to warn him, why hadn’t he just looked where the street was, just for curiosity even? he thought. Then he carried on talking to himself in his mind as he stared at the name on the phone. Hocus pocus, that’s why. That’s what you get for being small minded. You, big dumb fuck.

  Putting his phone away, he said, “Well they weren’t lying.”

  The Italian wasn’t following the car and hoping to see Chendrill arrive though, he knew that. The thing was planned. After all, the guy had been busy driving around Hastings looking for a certain person to feed the lawn with.

  The fucker would surface soon, they always did, Chendrill thought as he watched the clouds begin to pick up the low sun. And when he did, he’d make sure he spilled the beans.

  There was a slight knock at the door and without waiting, it opened. It was Dan’s mother and seeing her man standing there in his hospital gown she came straight over. She said, in a manner that only someone who had spent their working life in patient care could, “You’d be better if you didn’t walk about.”

  Chendrill turned and smiled. It was good to see her and as soon as he did, he felt an overwhelming sense of guilt.

  Tricia walked over and held him, and in her embrace, he could feel his woman’s anxiety. She said softly, “Chuck, I think it’s time to stop this.” She looked at his legs—still bruised and scabbed from before. Then she said, “Last time it was your legs, this time your shoulder, where do you think the next injury’s hitting Chuck?”

  Time to stop?—she wasn’t wrong, Chendrill thought. How long had he been fucking with these guys at the tow shop even though he knew they were all connected? Even if that wasn’t the actual reason the Italian had decided to set him up—after all, he hadn’t been particularly nice about handing over Sebastian’s money—but fuck him, Chendrill thought as he held his girl without speaking and felt the blood rush from his stomach. Fuck him. He had tried and failed, and if you’re going to do something, you do just that—if not, watch out. He’d been there in the hospital long enough. It was time to go, so he said to his girl as she held him and worried about him, “You didn’t bring me a new shirt by chance, did you? The one I had on has a hole.”

  *************

  Carl the big fucker of a tow truck driver who could use his neck as a pillow was shitting himself. Yeah, he had an old Buick Sabre with a veteran plate and a disabled sticker attached to the back of his rig which normally would have made him smile. But today, more so than any other day in his life, he was terrified.

  Everything he had worked for, which amounted to a job at the tow company and a shitty rental home in Surrey, was now in jeopardy just because he’d let his ego get the better of him. The guy had met the Italian by chance at the football, knowing him from old when he’d done repo for one of the man’s friends. Big Carl the tow truck driver, standing there with a beer in one hand and a hot dog in the other, trying to be cool and asking him stupidly, “What’s it gonna cost to whack the big fuck who wears the loud shirts.”

  The tow truck driver who didn’t need a support cushion on a plane all pissed off, having had enough of this Hawaiian shirt wearing motherfucker making a mockery off him within the tow trucking industry. The tow truck driver in bed at night so pissed off now that he couldn’t even have a wank. Lying there whilst his wife snored and farted in her sleep. The guy dreaming and fantasizing about killing Chendrill himself or paying a hit man to do it so as he could feel like the gangster boss he didn’t have the chops to be.

  He could do it, yeah course he fucking could, he’d lay there thinking. In his eyes, no one needed to know he’d paid the guy or was involved in any way, but if the man was to suddenly disappear then anyone working at the depot who’d been smirking at him, or leaving toy Ferraris in the lot like they had, would all think hey, the big guy Carl, watch out for him—don’t fuck with that guy Carl.

  But just as he was expecting the Italian with the rings to smile and deny that killing people was what he did or used to do, the man had said, “Tow his ride and leave it where I say and let’s see what happens.”

  Now the man had gotten what he wanted and wished he hadn’t. Fuck, fuck, fuck, he thought as he sat at the lights next to the charity shop on Hastings and felt the big diesel engine of his rig chug
away.

  He’d gone in to pull the Aston the previous night. Big Carl getting the call from the Italian just as he was about to go home late after ruining people’s evenings. Big Carl the tow truck driver going in stealth-like, getting up some speed at the top of Dan’s mother’s road and turning his tow truck’s engine off so he could coast in towards the Aston. The guy stopping, cutting in at an angle in front of Chendrill’s car, and in one practiced move he had the luxury car on the back of his rig and then dropped it off again in that quiet area where the trannies liked to hang out.

  Sixty minutes later, he was home feeling like a king and coming on his wife’s face as she liked him too do. Then off to bed feeling smug. Now though, in the cold light of day, not even twelve hours later, the whole of Canada was looking for the Italian prick—wherever the fuck he’d gone. How long was it going to be before they caught on to the fact that it was him who dropped the car off right next to where the idiot had to have shot him?

  He’d had enough calls to tell him the guy who’d been fucking with him was in the hospital with a gunshot wound. So how long would it take for the detectives, whose job it was to put people away, to find out and put two and two together and come back with him?

  “Fuck!—Fuck!—double fucking fuck!” Carl called out as the lights changed and he pulled away and passed the shitty hotel where his partner in crime was hiding with a festering leg.

  He reached the yard on McGill and felt the eyes on him as he pulled in—thinking he would look big, but now feeling as distressed as the veteran whose car he’d just towed. He dropped the car and threw the keys on the counter just as he always did and walked inside to the rest area at the back to grab a coffee to calm his nerves. Passing the open computer, he looked at the screen—someone had been searching. The top of the search screen read: