by Scott Cook
Chuck scowled. “In a very long, very strange phone call from Larocque at three in the morning about a month ago. Sarah called him saying someone had jumped her as she was walking home from a bar in the northeast. The guy pulled her down a slope into Fish Creek Park, where her screams would only be heard by the chipmunks, or maybe a stray moose. Things got ugly – he locked Sarah’s wrists behind her with a plastic zipline, then he tore off her clothes. Then he kicked her legs out from under her so that she was face-down in the grass. Broke her nose in the process. Sarah told Larocque that the guy forced her legs apart with his knees, and then he leaned down and whispered in her ear.”
“What did he say?” Alex leaned forward like a kid listening to a ghost story around the campfire.
Chuck’s mouth was a thin line. “He said ‘Tell your old man that your ass belongs to Rufus Hodge, and he can come collect it any time he wants.’”
Alex sat back in his chair, stunned. He felt like he’d just gotten a restaurant bill that was ten times what he’d expected.
“Larocque was beside himself,” Chuck continued. “If he’d had the key to Hodge’s cell at that moment, I’m pretty sure he would have driven to the jail and beaten the fucker to death right then and there. Or tried, anyway; Hodge would have ripped him to pieces, of course. But then, he didn’t need physical power, did he? Larocque called me, I had a Calgary uniform I trust pick up Sarah at the hospital and take her home. I’ve been keeping tabs on her ever since.
“I know how this is going to sound and I don’t care. I told Larocque that he had to put Rufus Hodge away, whatever it took. I wasn’t sure how he’d take that, but I was so fucking angry I didn’t know what else to say. I guess Larocque saw things from my perspective. He also asked me to look after Sarah.”
By this point, Singer was rubbing her temples, seemingly oblivious to what was being said. Chuck stared mutely at the wall while Alex let out a long, quiet stream of air. He was silent for almost a minute before he finally spoke.
“You did the right thing,” he said.
“Fucking-A I did the right thing!” Chuck snapped before getting himself under control. “Sorry. You know what I mean. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, and I think if you were in the same situation, you would too. Or am I wrong?”
“No,” said Alex. “You’re not wrong.”
“So now you understand why everything will be better if we kept this between us.”
“Yeah. But I do have one question.”
“How did Hodge find out about Sarah?”
“You’re a mind-reader.”
“No, I’ve just been a cop for a long time. The simple answer is that Hodge is smart. He built the Wild Roses out of a few ragtag gangs that spent most of their time getting drunk out in the foothills and fighting with the cops who came to break up the party. They were posers until Hodge came along and showed them what they could be doing with their time and energy, not to mention how much money they could make. We’ve gathered precious little intel from a few clowns who tried to get out of the Roses after they saw what Hodge was really like. They said he quickly fought his way to the top, crushing anyone who was stupid enough to challenge him. And I mean that literally – he left his opponents in a bloody heap of broken bones, sometimes two and three at a time.”
Alex thought of the look Hodge had given him in the courthouse hallway and shuddered.
“And he keeps his ear to the ground,” Chuck continued. “He’s been known to pay extremely well for information – up to five grand for the right stuff, always in cash, always in twenties. And any businessman in Alberta will tell you the best way to keep top talent is to pay them top dollar. He probably put out a request for dirt on Larocque and just sat back and waited.”
Singer, her eyes half-closed and her voice heavy with cognac, chimed in: “It’s fortunate that Hodge didn’t put out the word on you, Charles. He might have discovered that you’re a cocksucker.”
“Those are some serious resources,” Alex said, ignoring the old woman. “Not a guy to be fucked with. And yet that’s just what we did.”
Charles cupped a hand on the back of Alex’s neck and pulled him close. “We sure did, buddy. We fucked him hard, and pretty soon we’re gonna round up his stooges and fuck them, too. All because you were in the right place at the right time.”
Yeah, Alex thought. And Tom Ferbey was in the wrong place at the wrong time, even though we were in the same place at the same time. It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?
CHAPTER 2
It was two o’clock in the morning, and Chuck Palliser was still up. It had been almost eight hours since he and Alex had stuffed Singer’s sizeable derriere into a taxi and sent her on her way to her beautiful old house in Park Royal and the prissy old coot she called a husband.
Chuck had accomplished a lot in the hours since returning to his little bungalow in the southeast. It was on the smaller side, older, but still nice enough; with Calgary’s white-hot housing market, even after oil prices tanked a couple years earlier, it was all he could afford, so there was no point in complaining. He’d done much of the night’s work in his living room on his task force laptop, plugged into the password-protected national database that linked municipal and provincial cops with the federal RCMP. He’d been doing his job long enough to know that there were always wheels within wheels when it came to organized crime and its influence. He scanned files from across the country, trying to get at least a broad view of where everyone stood in the game, now that Hodge was off the street.
Hodge. He’d been a hell of an opponent, no doubt about it. Smart, unpredictable and ruthless. Chuck had spent more than a few sleepless nights over the past eight months listening for creaks in the floorboards, or the sound of a lock being picked open. He had gotten into the habit of sleeping with his Browning nine millimeter under his pillow. But the good guys had finally won, and if ethics had to be moved to the sidelines to make it happen, well, that was a small price to pay. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
His thoughts turned to Alex Dunn as he got up and headed for the door. Alex was the key to everything, and Chuck felt a twinge of guilt at the way he’d downplayed the Wild Roses to him. Yes, most of them were stupid, but they were also vicious. Years of eating, sleeping and partying with people like the Roses had taught Chuck many things, not the least of which was the fact most hardcore bikers were textbook sociopaths. They lived their lives solely to satisfy their own appetites, and they were incapable of seeing the consequences of their actions. Most sociopaths – the smart ones – learn to mask themselves beneath a veneer of superficial charm while fulfilling their needs with elaborate plans designed to keep them from getting caught. Bikers seemed either unwilling or unable to do that; they wallowed in their lifestyle, and anyone who didn’t like it had a date with a lead-cored baseball bat, or something worse.
It wouldn’t have done any good to pass along that information to Alex. He would have just ended up scared for no reason. Like all cops, Chuck knew that if people really paid attention to statistics, really understood just how dangerous it was to get behind the wheel of a vehicle on a daily basis, they’d never go anywhere and society would grind to a halt.
Chuck sighed as he locked the front door behind him and walked to the car parked on the street in front of the house. It was a ‘67 GTO he’d restored himself – his one indulgence, a nod to the kind of expensive vehicle he shouldn’t be able to afford on a cop’s salary. Calgary was littered with huge pickup trucks and high-end imports – there were probably more BMWs in the city than there were in all of Berlin, for Christ’s sake – but that’s to be expected in a town that sweats money, and where anyone with a towel, it seemed, could get some of it. Except a guy like him, who was tied to his cop’s salary.
The street was deserted and dark, except for a couple of houses where night owls still had their bedroom lights on. He was almost done. He unlocked the GTO with the big old key and slid behind the wheel. Everything will work
out fine, he told himself. The Roses will be neutered soon enough, Alex will write a book about the whole thing, and everyone will finally get on with their lives.
Less than a minute later, a signal from a remote radio device detonated six pounds of C4 explosive, placed strategically throughout the Pontiac’s huge engine, undercarriage, gas tank and cockpit. The blast sent the car nearly nine feet in the air, destroying the Audi Quattro and Chevy Blazer parked on either side of it, and igniting an old cottonwood tree hanging overhead from the boulevard. The heat and force of the explosion blew out windows on both sides of the street, and set off car alarms half a block away.
By the time emergency crews arrived, they couldn’t even tell whether the smoking cinder was a vehicle until the neighbors told them.
CHAPTER 3
Richie Duff felt like a kid on Christmas morning – except for the hangover, of course, and that was his own damn fault. But he wasn’t going to get down on himself about that. After all, who in his position could have resisted the temptation to go out on the town for a bit last night? Nobody, that’s who.
He was sitting in his kitchen in the underwear he’d worn to bed the night before, eating Froot Loops out of the only clean bowl left in his little wartime house. The room was crowded with boxes of empty beer cans and leftover takeout cartons. As he slurped up the cereal and milk (noting vaguely that the latter tasted a bit like cheese), he ran his free hand along the top of the sleek black briefcase for the zillionth time since he first opened it twelve hours earlier.
The case had been waiting for Richie last night when he got home, just as he’d been told it would be. His palms had been slick with sweat as he fumbled with the four-number combination lock the first time. Inside were more little green pictures of the Queen than he’d ever seen in his life – fifty stacks, one hundred bills in each, to be exact, which equaled one hundred thousand dollars. Richie would have been extremely hard pressed to figure that one out for himself, even with a calculator. His mother had always said he was meant to work with his hands, not his brain. His father had summed it up more simply: fuckin kid’s soft in the head. But his old man had drank himself to death, so what did he know?
Richie had been getting that his whole life. In school it had been Richie the Retard or Dickie Dum-Dum. Later, as he gravitated into petty crime circles, he was promoted to Dumb Fuck Duff. (For a brief period in the nineties, he’d tried to get people to call him Duff Man, like the guy on The Simpsons, but no one had taken him up on it.) If he had read that day’s Chronicle, which was about as likely as his noodling out the math of his windfall, he might have spotted the mistake where he’d been referred to as “Dum-Dum” Duff and called the paper to complain. But, of course, he hadn’t.
He dropped his bowl into the overfull sink, grabbed a bottle of Jackrabbit from the fridge (he had been a Lucky Extra man for years, but decided to pick up some of the good stuff now that he was flush) and shuffled into the living room, briefcase in tow. He hadn’t let it out of his sight since last night, even sleeping next to it on his stained queen-size futon like a lover. He’d brought it with him to McNally’s Bar & Grill, which in the hard, hungover light of morning seemed like less of a good idea than it had the night before.
But hell, why not? Guy gets a hundred grand dropped in his lap, he’s gotta spend some of it, right? It’d be, what-do-you-call-it, against nature not to. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, money’s gotta get spent. It wasn’t like he’d shown anyone the case. Just bought a few rounds with his endless stack of twenties, got a couple of hotties drunk on sweet shooters, and gotten pleasantly shnockered himself. Even Big Jim Burris, the bartender, had given him the time of day last night, which was a first. It was like that old Styx song: I got dozens of friends and the fun never ends, that is as long as I’m buying. The irony of the lyrics was, of course, lost on him.
He flopped down on the couch and scratched his balls thoughtfully through the thin fabric of his boxers. He kept his other hand on the case. Probably best not to tell the dude about last night. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who was all that impressed by money – how could he be when he delivered hundred-thousand-dollar briefcases? – so he might not understand the simple thrill of a night out with a stack of cash.
The guy was scheduled to come by tonight to discuss Richie’s future. He told him he’d have to lay low for awhile - duh! Even Richie could figure that one out. You fuck with Rufus Hodge, you better keep your head down, or someone will cut it off with a rusty steak knife. After what Richie did to the Roses, they’d probably shit down his throat, too. The thought was enough to make him shiver, and he felt his scrotum shrivel slightly in his hand.
He had to get out of Calgary, of course. The dude had kept Richie in the dark about where he’d be going, which in light of last night’s escapade, was probably a good idea. Loose lips sink ships, and all that shit. Richie had even dug out his passport – he’d only used it once on a trip to one of those all-inclusive resorts in Cuba a couple years earlier – in the hopes that the guy was going to send him to Las Vegas. The thought of walking around Sin City with a hundred grand in his pocket made Richie feel light-headed. The fella everyone thought was too stupid to be anything but the fall guy, living in Vegas like George Clooney as Danny Ocean. He might even find himself a real girlfriend. If not, he could certainly afford a girl who would pretend to be. So long Dumb Fuck, hello Duff Man.
The sound of his back door clicking open pulled Richie from his ball-scratching reverie. That would be his mother – she owned the house, he just lived there – so he grabbed the case and jogged upstairs to his tiny bedroom. He pulled on some jeans and the shirt he had worn to McNally’s the night before, picked up the case, and headed back to the main floor. He felt a mild sadness as he descended the stairs; he would have to remember to call his mom when he got settled so that she didn’t worry about him. The guy said not to, but you can’t just disappear on your mother, for crying out loud.
“Hey, Ma, we have to talk. . .” he said, trying to buckle his belt with his free hand. Then he looked up and realized the person standing in the living room was definitely not his mother.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he managed to say, before the twelve-inch carbon steel blade entered his throat on a vertical axis, severing his tongue at the base and sliding effortlessly through his soft palate, sinus cavity and brain, until it hit the inside of his cranium with a muffled thunk.
Richie dropped to his knees, dead as dead could be. His killer quickly glided behind him and lowered his back slowly to the floor, so that Richie looked like some crazy limbo dancer. The killer took the case from Richie’s hand, opened it – Richie hadn’t bothered to lock it while he was at home – and pulled out two stacks of twenties secured by elastic bands. Gloved hands carefully counted out fifty bills from a third stack, then placed the rest of it back in the case. The hands removed the elastics from the other two stacks, leaving five thousand dollars in cash.
The killer knelt beside Richie, reached into his mouth with gloved hands and removed his severed tongue, then stuffed the cash into the empty cavity, tearing the cartilage around the jaw to fit all two hundred and fifty bills inside. Then the killer carefully positioned the tongue in the center of Richie’s chest. Blood bloomed into the white shirt underneath, forming a stain that vaguely resembled a black rose.
The killer smiled faintly at the image before wiping the blade on the curtains and returning it to its sheath. The black briefcase glared for a moment in the early morning sun before being shuttled outside and into the saddlebag of a waiting motorcycle. The door swung closed a few moments later, leaving Richie Duff to decompose in the soon-to-be stifling heat of the day.
CHAPTER 4
Like Richie Duff, Alex awoke with a hangover. He’d driven home after parting company with Singer and Chuck Palliser, and cracked a bottle of twelve-year-old Dalwhinnie scotch that Calgary’s chief of police had presented him with at the launch party for The Devil’s Wristwatch two yea
rs earlier. He wondered idly when he opened it whether the extra two years meant the scotch was actually fourteen years old, and thus somehow better.
Alex drank more than he’d planned to, which is often the case with young, single men who open a bottle alone, especially when it’s good booze, but he didn’t really give it much thought. He was running on autopilot after the verdict, a sort of mental and spiritual exhaustion. It had been a crazy eight months to begin with, then the verdict and the secret revelation that the judge had found Rufus Hodge guilty as revenge for a brutal attack on his illegitimate daughter – sorry, folks, show’s over. Alex’s brain is temporarily out of order, please try again later.
He’d finally passed out in his clothes on the leather recliner in the living room. At some point in the night, he dreamed that Rufus Hodge was standing over him, forcing his legs open and whispering in his ear: Your ass belongs to me, and I can come collect it any time I want. Alex tried to fight back, but his body felt slow and heavy, like it was swimming in quicksand. He screamed for help, but the only response came from Leslie Singer, who was standing next to Hodge with a glass of cognac in her hand. She raised her glass to Alex and slurred, That’s what you get for being a cocksucker, my boy.
Alex woke up damp with sweat and smelling like a sack of dirty laundry. His eyes felt too big for his skull, and his mouth tasted like a litterbox. He got up slowly, worked the kinks out of his back, and shuffled his way to the shower, secure in the knowledge that today, of all days, no one was going to be on his ass if he was late for work. He stood in the stall with his arms propped against the wall, letting the hot water run over his head and neck until it turned cold.
He dried himself, brushed his teeth, scrunched his hair with styling putty and threw on some jeans, a shirt, and his corduroy blazer. According to the mirror, he looked like he did most other days, except for the glowing red eyes. He wondered for a moment how Leslie Singer managed to pull it off day in and day out for as long as she had. That thought prompted a memory of his dream, and a shudder along with it.
