False Witness

by Scott Cook

  Phone calls interrupted Crowe a half-dozen times – business was still business, after all, and he had been the de facto boss during the months since Hodge had first been locked up in the Calgary Remand Centre after he was first arrested. He wasn’t comfortable with the position, but he couldn’t see any way out of it just yet, so he kept on keeping on, like the old song said. That had been his mantra for many years, and had served him well.

  It had been a long day already, and it wasn’t even four o’clock. And there were important things to finalize. Hodge had been transferred to the Badlands early the previous day, just hours after his conviction and sentencing. Remand had been a relative cake walk for Rufus Hodge for the last eight months; his reputation preceded him, and the few times he’d been challenged by the jumped-up wannabe thugs awaiting trial, he had ended things before they started with a couple of blows from his sledgehammer fists. One time he had simply stared down a pair of long-haired Blackfoot dudes who accosted him in the mess hall, until they finally remembered an important prior engagement and shuffled meekly on their way.

  But the Badlands was different. Hodge wouldn’t be facing lightweight punks who beat their wives, or bottom-feeding gangbangers trying to make a name for themselves by throwing down on the local celebrity. In here, he’d be up against real threats from dangerous people, career criminals who had all sorts of issues with the Wild Roses gobbling up the meth trade across the Prairies. At least half a dozen gangs – a couple of rival outlaw bikers, but mostly Asian and Eastern European immigrants – had multiple members inside Badlands. Many were lifers with nothing to lose and everything to gain by hurting Hodge. A broken arm inside, for example, would translate to a thick bundle of small bills discreetly delivered to a girlfriend or baby mama on the outside. Killing Hodge would turn someone into the undisputed ruler of the Badlands Institute, and generate major cash for associates on the outside. Even if the perpetrator were caught, what difference would it make? He already had a lifetime reservation at the cinderblock hotel.

  Hodge knew all this, of course, and it concerned him about as much as his trial had, which was hardly at all. During the two years he had known Rufus Hodge, Crowe had come to realize that he wasn’t like other men. Like other humans, for that matter. Hodge had a tendency to focus on the here and now, like an animal. Past and future didn’t exist for him, except in abstract states that bore only enough thought necessary to carry out a short-term plan. But Hodge had a very good reason to keep blood off his hands during his time in the Badlands. It wouldn’t be easy, but he didn’t have a choice if he ever wanted to see the world on the other side of prison bars again.

  The worst was yet to come, of course. Rufus Hodge wasn’t the biggest dude Crowe had ever delivered bad news to – that had been a Romanian giant nicknamed Orlog, who was famous for single-handedly overturning small Russian automobiles – but he was the baddest. Crowe was the only person still alive who had witnessed Hodge in action during the Winnipeg ambush. He had no desire to see a repeat of that night. In fact, he’d prefer not to think about it at all, thank you very much.

  Crowe knew the cops were going to make him wait for the boss in the hopes that he would sweat, that he’d drum his fingers and tap his feet like a man waiting for the sword of Damacles to drop and slice him through like the dirty, lying scumbag that he was. Instead, he lounged in the green molded plastic chair, legs crossed at the ankles of his fifteen-hundred-dollar boots, chewing on a wooden match. He looked for all the world like James Dean waiting on a bus.

  The cop-cum-guard cleared his throat in the corner of the room. Crowe favored him with a lazy smile. “You should look after that cough, officer,” he drawled. “Summer colds can be a real bitch.” The cop-guard scowled, cheeks glowing as he tried to determine whether his cover was blown, or if Crowe thought prison guards were called “officer.” In fact, they were.

  Stop being a smartass, Crowe scolded himself. This is serious shit.

  As if to underscore that point, a buzzer blared, the universal claxon that indicates a prisoner is entering a visitation room. Two brawny guards in dark uniforms led Rufus Hodge by the shoulders to the pod opposite Crowe. Through the Plexiglass, he could see fresh bruises blossoming around Hodge’s jaw and hairline. They were a couple of shades lighter than his orange prison overalls. The screws wouldn’t try anything while Crowe was in the room, of course, especially not with an undercover cop just a few yards away, but they had undoubtedly been hard at work already.

  One of the guards, a younger guy with a moustache who looked a little like Burton Cummings, shoved Hodge roughly into his chair. Crowe watched as Hodge turned his head slowly to look up at the man. A casual observer probably wouldn’t have read anything into that look, but Crowe knew Hodge was telling him that Burton Cummings was the one responsible for the bruises. Crowe filed the man’s face in his memory. It would come in handy soon enough.

  The boss’s face looked like forty miles of bad road at the best of times, but today it seemed especially hard. The toll of the past eight months appeared to have shown up overnight – Hodge’s hooded eyes seemed more distant than ever, the set of his unsmiling mouth more bitter, the relief map of scar tissue on his high forehead even deeper, if that were possible. Even Crowe, who had spent almost twenty years making a personal religion out of Looking Out For Number One, couldn’t help but feel sorry for the man.

  And just in case he hasn’t had enough yet, I’m here to shit in his dinner tray. Lucky me.

  Hodge picked up the telephone receiver on his side of the glass; Crowe did the same. He waited for a moment, wondering if the boss was going to speak first. After a few seconds, Hodge raised his eyebrows, which Crowe took as his cue to start the conversation.

  “Looking good,” Crowe said with a half smile. “Nice to see you’re getting some color in your face.”

  From the corner of his eye, Crowe saw the cop-guard scowl, a sure sign that they were listening in on the conversation. Of course they were. They would have to be complete idiots not to, given the events of the past twenty-four hours.

  Hodge snorted quietly to show he understood. Crowe marveled at the boss’s instincts; he had worked with, and against, plenty of sharp operators in his day, but none came close to Rufus Hodge when it came to sheer coolness. Even now, after months of incarceration, the guards had no idea what they were dealing with. Crowe alone understood that the man behind the bulletproof glass was a Bengal tiger, a supreme predator that was simply waiting for the right time to sink its teeth into the sheep that surrounded it. They worked well together. It was the main reason Crowe hadn’t just cut his losses and disappeared the day after Hodge was arrested; he actually admired the guy. Most of the other reasons, of course, had to do with money. The Sacred Church of the Almighty Number One.

  Hodge leaned back in his chair, seemingly bored by Crowe’s visit. “You here to bust my balls?” he asked wearily.

  “Perish the thought,” Crowe replied. “How was your night?”

  “My friends here thought I might benefit from some alone time to reflect on the verdict.” In other words, he’d been in solitary confinement since yesterday afternoon. Crowe guessed that Burton Cummings had heard the news about Palliser and Duff, and taken advantage of the situation to go running back to Saskatoon on Hodge’s face.

  It also meant the boss was likely oblivious to what had taken place overnight. News reports and Internet access were hard enough to come by in prison, let alone in solitary. Crowe would have to choose his words carefully from here on in. The Calgary cops would be hanging on every word, and they would no doubt share any and all information with the federal task force. Canadians, he thought. Too fucking polite to engage in interjurisdictional pissing matches.

  “So you haven’t seen the news?” Crowe asked.

  “I’m guessin I’m still on the front page.”

  “I suppose you could say that.” Crowe leaned closer to the glass. “But not for the reason you think.”

  Hodge’s gaze na
rrowed. “Yeah?”

  Crowe sighed. “Yeah.”

  “As my old dad used to say, spit it out, asshole.”

  “All right, then. Chuck Palliser’s dead. So is Richie Duff.”

  Anyone else in the room would have seen nothing but cold indifference in Hodge’s expression. Crowe, however, could see the narrowing of those steel-gray eyes and the sudden fire behind them. Crowe glanced briefly at the cop-guard, who was practically drooling. He could picture a van parked nearby with a half-dozen clowns in Sears suits and twelve-dollar haircuts, earpieces attached to long, coiled cords, noting times on digital recordings and popping boners in spite of themselves.

  “Yeah?” Hodge said with an anger only Crowe could hear. The two men had spent many previous unmonitored visits discussing in detail what might happen in the event of a guilty verdict and Hodge’s transfer to the Badlands Institute. But they hadn’t discussed anything like this.

  “Yeah,” said Crowe. He was trying hard to match the boss’s cool tone.

  Hodge leaned forward, tenting his index fingers under his chin. His face didn’t show it, but his eyes could have started a bonfire. “Huh,” he barked. “That’s a fuckin shame, all right. I was looking forward to having a few beers with Richie when I get outta here.”

  Crowe glanced down at the shelf under his elbows for a moment. No one but Hodge could make him feel like a punk kid in the principal’s office, and he hated the man just a little bit because of it. “Yeah, the boys at the shop are really broken up about it.”

  “I’ll bet they are.”

  Crowe leaned forward and locked his gaze on Hodge’s. “I mean it, boss. They’re crying in their beers.”

  Hodge gave him a quizzical look. Then he slowly sat back in his chair, a thoughtful frown on his haggard face. A full minute passed, then another. Finally, Hodge broke out of his reverie and turned back to face him. “Izzat right?”

  Crowe relaxed a bit. Message received. “That’s right.”

  “You absolutely sure about that?” said Hodge. “Cuz some of them guys, they’re pretty hardcore. They don’t show any emotion over somethin like that. They couldn’t care less.”

  The message was clear, but disturbing: Hodge didn’t trust some of the Roses.

  “Huh,” said Crowe. “Well, you’d know better than me. Guess I better make sure we’re all on the same page here. Wouldn’t want anyone to think we weren’t sympathetic.”

  Hodge ruminated a few more moments. “What about the reporter? Dunn?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Crowe saw the cop-guard tense and tilt his head. Tread carefully. “He’s fine, as far as I know.”

  “Well, let’s hope he stays that way. Anything ever happened to him, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself. You know?”

  “I know,” Crowe said earnestly. “Believe me, I know.”

  Hodge stared at Crowe until Crowe’s guts started to crawl. He had come into the Badlands knowing things would be rough, and that he would have a monumental task ahead of him, but he was surprised at how he was reacting to the boss. He felt the way he imagined a teenager might feel if he had disappointed his parents, and it disturbed him.

  “That it?” Hodge finally said.

  Crowe sighed inwardly. “Yeah. Except to remind you to stay cool. Like we talked about before.” He glanced over at the guards again. Burton Cummings flashed him a steely grin and dropped an eyelid in an obscene wink. Don’t you worry, that look said. We’ll look after your cop killer buddy for you.

  Crowe looked back through the Plexiglas, leaning in close: “Take care of yourself, boss. Watch your back.”

  “I always do. And what’re you gonna do?”

  “I’m going to do what you pay me to do.”

  Hodge favored him with a grim half-smile. “That’s right. I pay you to fix things. Because you’re a mechanic.”

  Crowe returned a quasi-smile that he didn’t feel. “That’s what it says on my tax return.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Alex decided to stay off the TransCanada and take the secondary highways, even though he was positive no one was following the silver Corolla rented in the name of Alex Wolfe. He drove west out of the city into the lush, green foothills that had enticed celebrities like Brad Pitt and Kevin Costner to build hobby ranches with cabins the size of small-town high schools. After a while he turned south on Cowboy Trail, an old single-lane that wound ninety miles to Blairmore, where Highway 3 climbs and twists west through the Crowsnest Pass into the Rockies and British Columbia. It was single-lane all the way, and Alex spent most of the next four hours trapped behind recreational vehicles ranging in size from enormous to galactic, each captained by one of the new generation of old buggers, to whom getting there really was half the fun, judging by their glacial pace. Alex didn’t mind; his thoughts were elsewhere.

  He was surprised and unsettled at how easy it had been to leave his life behind and light out for the territories. He’d left his Guy Laroche work shirts and sport jackets behind in favor of three pairs of cargo shorts, a pair of jeans, a few golf shirts, an assortment of t-shirts, socks and underwear, all stuffed into an old duffle bag. And, of course, his new driver’s license and credit card, which had seemed a little surreal in his hands as he tucked them into a new leather wallet. He thought briefly about packing warmer clothes, but decided against it. It was July, after all, and this shit would all be sorted out long before summer was over. He’d picked up a throwaway cell phone and a couple hundred minutes in pre-paid phone cards at the local drug store, and then he was on his way.

  He couldn’t think of anything else to bring. Keepsakes? Outside of his author’s copies of The Devil’s Wristwatch and his National Newspaper Award plaque, he didn’t have any, unless you counted a handful of photos of his parents. But it wasn’t like he needed pictures to remind him of what they looked like. A quick review of his condo showed that Alexander Michael Dunn was basically a rolling stone, gathering moss only on occasional visits to IKEA and Best Buy. Even his music collection was now contained in the digital netherworld of his iPod. The actual CDs – heavy on Springsteen, Tragically Hip and, though he’d never admit it to anyone, Michael Buble – were long since pawned down on 16th Avenue. The pantry was home to half a dozen dusty boxes of Kraft Dinner and a few cans of beans, and the fridge housed nothing but booze bottles in various stages of emptiness, and an extremely suspect block of cheddar. Alex’s diet consisted almost entirely of fast food, pub fare or takeout.

  He was thirty-three, and all he had to show for his time on Earth was – well, stuff. And according to George Carlin, stuff is stuff only to you; to everyone else, it’s shit. What did that say about him?

  There was no girlfriend to explain everything to. Alex’s last relationship had been with Tess Gallagher, a fellow reporter at the Chronicle, and that had never really progressed beyond office flirting and a couple of martini-fuelled romps between the sheets. He doubted she would waste much time thinking about him. And friends? He’d never given it much thought before, but now it seemed to be all he could think about. He had buddies at the Chronicle, sure, guys he played hockey and softball with, guys who were always good for a team jug and a few laughs after the game. And, of course, there was always the false intimacy of the newsroom – everyone packed into low-walled cubicles, some face-to-face for eight to ten hours a day. Chit-chat about families, about the movie they saw on the weekend, gossip about whoever wasn’t in the office at any given time, an occasional drunken hug at the Christmas party.

  But where were they all in the first months after that night last October, the nights when Tom Ferbey’s head exploded in his mind’s eye, over and over again, like a film loop that he couldn’t stop? It wasn’t that they were unsympathetic, exactly. A few of the women he knew had offered Alex the old chestnut, “If there’s anything I can do . . .” Anything they could do invariably turned out to be casseroles.

  But most had just congratulated him, as if witnessing a cold-blooded murder was some sort of journalistic
coup, like Woodward and Bernstein connecting the dots on the Watergate burglary. Bill Vogt, the Chronicle’s frenetic young publisher – who was only four years older than Alex, and had never given him the time of day before – was suddenly his shadow. He invited Alex to lunch at Saint Germain with the CEO of the Chicago-based holding company that owned the Chronicle. Alex had found the old bastard marginally more charming than a dead eel, and said as much to Vogt after the lunch. Vogt had laughed and clapped him on the back. “I won’t disagree with you, Dunnsie,” he’d said. “But he loves you, and he owns papers all over the goddamn world. I personally wouldn’t mind running the Miami Dispatch, and if that was to happen, I’d need a managing editor. Are you picking up what I’m laying down?” Alex had offered him a tired smile but said nothing.

  Shippy had shown him fatherly concern in his gruff way, but his old-school ethics had kept him from getting too close to an employee. Sam Walsh had been uncharacteristically quiet in the weeks after Ferbey’s murder, no doubt realizing that Alex couldn’t cover his own story, and that this was his chance to finally jump into the crime beat he’d been coveting since he showed up at the Chronicle from whatever jerkwater weekly he’d been working at.

  Ultimately, Alex didn’t feel a real connection with any of them. As he sat there with his duffle, waiting on the cab that would take him to the rental car company, which would assign him a vehicle for his voyage into the great unknown, Alex realized he hadn’t made a single honest-to-god friend since his days at Carleton almost ten years earlier. And as much as he’d truly loved those people, the closest he’d come to talking with any of them in years had been messaging back and forth on Facebook. Hell, he’d been living at the same address for four years and didn’t know the name of a single neighbor in his condo complex. He could pick them out of a line-up, sure, but anything more was a mystery.