False Witness

by Scott Cook

  Chuck Palliser, he thought bleakly as he took a final look around from the condo’s front door. Chuck was my friend. And now he’s dead and I’m running for my life. When the driver came to his door, Alex flipped on the porch light before he locked the door behind him. He didn’t know why, but it made him feel a little better.

  #

  The drama of the Rockies gave way to the smaller Kootenay Mountains as Alex wound his way west past countless tourist towns that were hinted at by road signs, but rarely visible from the highway. Most were hidden from the road by dense pine forest and steep dropoffs, but they all had large signs telling visitors how they’d have to be bug-shit crazy not to Stop ‘Inn’ For Pie at the River Ridge Inn or Take a Tour Through the Sawmill Museum and See How The West Was Once! One place, a little hamlet north of Creston, was home to the Boswell Bottle House, a twelve-hundred-square-foot architectural wonder whose walls were made out of five hundred thousand embalming fluid bottles. Alex wondered absently how many dead people half a million bottles represented.

  The secondary highway from Creston to Crawford Bay was a goat path full of blind corners, and Alex was virtually alone on the road that ran parallel to the eastern shore of Kootenay Lake. It was still familiar to him, even though it had been more than twenty years since he’d traveled it. He’d spent countless summer hours as a kid in the back of his parents’ station wagon, marveling at the steep dropoffs and rough rock faces on either side of the road, so different from the flat, golden carpet that rolled away from the highways in Alberta. It was a different time then, before the work that would take his father away from home so often, before his mother would crawl inside her bottle. They’d head out for the six–hour drive from Calgary, taking the long way instead of the TransCanada, singing goofy songs like The Happy Wanderer and Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall. As they sang that particular chestnut, Alex always imagined his grandfather picking up a stubby bottle of Old Style Pilsner from the shelf in his dusty garage and passing it around to the troop of buddies who used to gather there to shoot the shit on a summer afternoon. It would be warm if it was on a shelf instead of in the noisy old tank of a fridge in the garage, but in Alex’s little scenario, no one seemed to care.

  He drove in a sort of semi-daydream, his thoughts winding and wandering with the road, switchback after switchback, following the big lake. Countless more hamlets came and went in the Corolla’s rearview mirror, until he reached the turnoff for a stretch of secondary highway that took a right angle from the main road. Alex smiled at the nondescript blue sign with white letters that said, simply, Lost Lake. As a kid, that sign would always elicit a minor thrill in him, knowing he was only a half-hour from the place that was the geographical embodiment of everything that was good in life, everything that was fun, everything that was summer. As he got older and his father got richer and his mother got drunker, their vacation destinations got more exotic – Paris, Honduras, Singapore – before his parents finally started going on separate vacations when Alex was sixteen. None of them had ever measured up to that little sign next to a lonely road in B.C.

  The narrow road ran straight for a couple of miles before curving northeast. A few miles later, it dropped sharply into a corkscrew that wound him slowly down to the gulch that was home to Lost Lake and the town that had grown up around it. The Corolla’s brakes squealed mildly in protest of the extra effort they were putting in on the downward grade, but Alex paid no mind. He watched as the town emerged from behind the curved rock wall on the right side of the highway, like a stage curtain being pulled aside to reveal the show that was about to begin.

  I’m back, he thought, realizing that at some point in his drive, he’d sprouted a fool’s grin.

  In his reverie, he failed to notice the motorcycle in his rearview mirror.

  CHAPTER 8

  Crowe watched impatiently as the kid’s fat fingers roamed across a pair of keyboards. The constant clack-clack-clacking of the plastic keys put his teeth on edge and made him long for a tall, stiff bourbon.

  They were in a concrete-walled basement, lined with cheap plastic shelving units piled high with the guts of various electronic devices. The place reeked of stale pot, pizza, and moldering laundry. The two young women Crowe had brought with him seemed oblivious to the squalor, though, or maybe they were just used to it. They sat quietly on a legless old sofa, practicing their own keyboarding skills on their phones and looking bored. Dead, dusty air hung in the afternoon heat beaming in through the shallow windows beneath a water-stained acoustic tile ceiling.

  Crowe stood with his arms crossed, surveying the suite. “Decorator still on vacation?”

  “Good one,” the kid said absently as he reached for a soda cup the size of a small cistern. The other hand still pecked with a speed that was amazing, considering its girth. “I’m laughing on the inside, where it counts.”

  You wouldn’t be laughing if you were face to face with Rufus Hodge like I was two hours ago, Crowe thought. He would very much have liked to kick the punk’s chair out from under his sweat-stained ass, but he couldn’t, and not just because the kid tipped the scales at upwards of three hundred and fifty pounds. As annoying as Donald Worrell was, he was also one of Crowe’s most valuable assets. English was Worrell’s second language – he thought in binary code, and it seemed like no time elapsed between the synapses closing in his brain and his fingers translating the thought into keyboard actions. Crowe almost believed the kid could actually see in code, like some fat, pimply, neck-bearded Neo in a real-life Matrix. In other words, Worrell was a hacker’s hacker. He could smash through the strongest firewalls with one hand scratching his balls. He broke encryptions and sauntered in through backdoors like Gretzky behind the net, getting in and getting out with what he wanted before anyone had a clue that something was amiss. And if that wasn’t enough, he had a tested IQ in the 170 range.

  And goddamned if he doesn’t know it, too, Crowe thought acidly.

  “Aaaand boom, we’re in,” the kid said without taking his eyes off the righthand screen on his desk. “Personnel files for the Badlands Crowbar Hotel. Fucking feds are taking that new crime bill seriously – this took me twice as long as it should have.” He flashed Crowe a smug grin. “That’s gonna cost you extra, my friend.”

  Crowe stifled the urge to cuff him across the jaw, and instead pointed to the girls on the couch. “Don’t tell me, tell them.” Worrell waggled his eyebrows. Crowe saw one of the girls, a petite Filipino who called herself Mariah Charisma, roll her eyes. He focused on the screen, scrolling down the page and scrutinizing rows of mug shots. The Bandlands Institute’s employees were listed by occupation – administration, supervisors, more supervisors, and finally guards. It didn’t take him long to recognize a familiar mustachioed face. He clicked on the mug to expand both the photo and the information, then pulled a small notebook from the pocket of his jeans and scribbled in it.

  “Can you hack Facebook?” he asked Worrell.

  The kid looked at Crowe like he was an adorable but soft-headed grandmother who needed to be indulged. “Yes, Mr. Crowe, I can hack Facebook. I can also tie my shoes and go to the bathroom all by myself.”

  Crowe felt the muscles in his neck tighten painfully, but he managed to keep it out of his voice. He pointed out the mug shot to Worrell, who glanced idly at the man with the moustache. “I want everything you can find on this guy.”

  More tapping. Within a minute, one of the screens showed the familiar white page with blue highlights, this one with a square picture of the guard and a wide horizontal shot of him in a karate uniform, looking very serious indeed. Crowe scrolled through his wall posts and read through the private messages, scanned the photo albums, occasionally jotting in his notebook. He wondered absently how he ever managed to do his job before the current obsession with living your life online. There seemed to be a significant portion of the population that not only felt the need to announce to the world that they had just taken a shit, but also needed to take a phot
o of themselves in the bathroom mirror to prove it. He didn’t understand it, but he was very glad it existed.

  Worrell, meanwhile, had dropped his country-wide ass on the sofa between the two girls. Mariah was smiling at the kid now, years of practice as a professional pleaser kicking in like instinct. The other girl, a wide-eyed buxom blonde who was a recent addition to the Wild Roses’ stable, seemed genial, if a little confused. Crowe cringed when he saw the kid had dropped his right hand down the front of his stained grey sweatpants.

  “Rein it in, Romeo,” he said with unconcealed irritation. “I brought you two girls because I gave you two jobs. You only finished one.”

  Worrell had retrieved a bottle of champagne from a pony fridge next to the sofa, and was in the process of filling three plastic Solo cups. Crowe was a little surprised to see it was the real deal, Laurent-Perrier, upwards of two hundred bucks a bottle. But why not? He knew he wasn’t Worrell’s only client, and it wasn’t like the fucker was blowing his money on clothes and girls.

  He scowled as the kid drained his cup in three gulps, bubbly dripping from the sides of his mouth onto his Nirvana t-shirt. “I finished that before you even got here,” he said, his free hand now out of his pants and groping one of Mariah’s pert breasts through her blouse. “He’s in a place called Lost Lake. In the Kootenays. There’s a printout on the desk.”

  Crowe looked down, dumbfounded. Sure enough, there was a sheet with a credit card number and the name of a motel. His eyes narrowed. There’s no way he got all this so fast. No fucking way. Crowe considered himself a consummate professional, worth every penny of the astronomical fees he charged his clients, but even he couldn’t promise his clients a turnaround like this. It beggared belief. “You managed to dig all this up in less than three hours?” he asked, fixing the kid with a serious glare. “Listen to me very closely, Donny: you fuck with me, you fuck with my employer, and trust me, that’s the last thing on earth you ever want to do. If you’re fucking with me, you better fess up right now. If you don’t, I’ll take that hand you have down your pants and shove it so far up your ass you’ll be brushing your teeth from the inside.”

  Worrell snorted a laugh, oblivious to the threat. “Come on, man, give me some credit. All I had to do was Google the guy’s name and hack his Facebook account. Cross-reference some names, browse through some friends’ photos and their accounts, and I find out he used to spend his summers at a little town in the Kootenays as a kid. Where better for a guy on the run to hide out than a place he knows intimately, that barely makes it onto the map, and that’s only a few hours from home?”

  Crowe’s glare turned steely. “That doesn’t explain the rest of the information.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake. This isn’t rocket science, dude. All I had to do was check the rosters of the three motels in town to find someone named Alex who had checked in within the last couple of days. Even at the height of tourist season, a little place like Lost Lake isn’t going to have that many people registering in the middle of the week.”

  Crowe glanced down at the paper. Both the Mastercard and the rental car were in the name of Alex Wolfe. This is too easy. “Why would he keep his same first name?”

  The kid rolled his eyes. Crowe was glad his Sig Sauer was in the Lincoln; otherwise, he might have given in to the urge to put a few slugs into the kid’s flabby tits.

  “Think about it,” Worrell said as if Crowe were a particularly dim student. “We’re programmed from birth to respond to our names. How suspicious would it be to show up in some town, tell people your name is Steve, and then sit there oblivious every time someone says ‘Hey! Steve!’? Once I found the name, it only took a few minutes to find out that the credit card issued to Alex Wolfe was less than two months old, had never been used before renting a late-model Corolla, and was twenty grand in the black.” He paused to let that sink in. “And if that doesn’t raise enough red flags, according to the file, he’s thirty-three years old. Know any thirty-three-year-olds who just got a credit card?”

  “A couple,” Crowe said petulantly, thinking of the Wild Rose membership.

  Worrell smiled and shook his head. “You’re a cranky hardass, Crowe, but that’s why I love you. I left the final piece on the desktop of the right-hand monitor. It’s called ‘Wolfe video.’”

  Crowe saw the file and double-clicked on it. Up came a black-and-white security video of a man signing a motel register. Worrell had taken the liberty of zooming in. Even in the grainy digital video, Crowe could clearly see it was a clean-shaven, dyed-blonde Alex Dunn.

  Worrell laced his fingers together and extended his arms to crack his knuckles. The girls were returning his favor, stroking his own boobs under his tee-shirt. They were both doing an excellent job of making it look like they were enjoying themselves, God bless them. “I’d say that’s worthy of a bonus, wouldn’t you?”

  Crowe folded the piece of paper and tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans with the other information. He reached into his front pocket, withdrew a thick wad of twenties, and threw it at Worrell as he passed the sofa on his way to the stairs. He had to watch his spending these days, but this was one instance where he couldn’t afford to be stingy, and it pissed him off mightily. “Choke on it,” he said with a grim smile.

  As Worrell scrambled to grab the scattered bills, a haggard-looking middle-aged woman appeared halfway down the stairs. She cast a befuddled glance at Worrell, then smiled sweetly when she saw Crowe. “Mr. Crowe!” she said warmly. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

  Crowe returned the smile and shook her hand. “Mrs. Worrell, you look prettier every time I see you.”

  The woman blushed, filling her homely face with blotchy color that reminded Crowe of her son. “Oh, you!” she blurted. She turned to see her son and the two girls on the sofa. “Donny, would you and your friends like some coffee? I just made a fresh pot.”

  Worrell scowled. He hadn’t bothered to stop pawing the girls; in fact, Crowe caught sight of a stubby tent under the front of his sweatpants and nearly gagged. ”God, Mom! Just leave us alone!”

  Worrell’s mother flashed a pained smile that Crowe thought she wore like an old apron. He put a hand on her shoulder as he passed her on his way to the door. “You must be very proud,” he said as he left.

  #

  Crowe had quickly learned that there were two seasons in Calgary: winter and road construction. Since it was the middle of the latter, Crowe’s Navigator crawled through the late afternoon traffic like a big blue turtle, passing the crumpled remnants of collisions and bored-looking flagmen leaning on signs that said STOP and SLOW. On most days, he might have been annoyed, but today it offered him some much-needed time to analyze and strategize. By the time he made it to the Wild Roses clubhouse in Bowness, he’d puzzled out a game plan that was about as good as he could hope for under the circumstances.

  The clubhouse was known locally as the Rosebush, though there was nothing to indicate it had a name at all. It was a nondescript concrete shoebox attached to the rear of a run-down storefront on an overgrown lot. A chain link fence around the property seemed to be working equally hard at keeping people out and keeping the rambling crabgrass in. The storefront was once a thriving secondhand shop, popular among the neighborhood’s working poor, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the area who remembered what it was before that. The shoebox had been a warehouse decades ago, but that had been lost to the mists of time as well. In any case, the former owner, a Chinese immigrant, had been well paid for the building, and was now living in a condo in Puerto Vallarta. Most people knew the Rosebush for what it was these days and gave it a wide berth if they didn’t have direct business with its inhabitants.

  Crowe parked out front and walked into the storefront. A rat-faced young man with tattoos up and down his skinny arms sat on a stool behind the cash register. The kid looked up from the porno mag he was reading and fixed a wary eye on Crowe. “They’re waiting for you, I think,” he said.

  Crowe
scowled. “Get the fuck out of here.” Rat Face flashed him a sullen look but did as he was told. Crowe closed the door behind him and stalked through a swinging door into the back of the building.

  The Rosebush proper was a converted two-story concrete warehouse, home to an office, a large unisex bathroom and a common area with a few well-worn sofas and chairs. A pool table and a wet bar with a kitchenette added a honky tonk atmosphere, and there were a couple of rooms with army surplus beds for Roses who couldn’t navigate their way home after an all-nighter. A double-wide steel garage door opened onto a mechanical and body shop, where the Roses kept their rides in top condition.

  The second floor was something else entirely. It consisted of tiny rooms decked out to look like college dorms. Each was assigned to a particular girl and outfitted with a webcam in front of which said girl (and sometimes her friends) would perform various acts for the viewing pleasure of thousands of eager men (and no doubt a few women) via the Internet, for the perfectly reasonable sum of $37.50 a month. The perverts would see a charge from Wild Rose Media, Inc. on their credit card statements, the information age equivalent of a brown paper wrapper. And the best part was that it was completely legal. The girls were well paid, and always made sure the good folks at Revenue Canada got their cut of the action – except, of course, for the cash bonuses they received for jobs such as servicing Donald Worrell, always paid in used twenties.