“Do you have your gun with you?”
I didn’t get an answer.
I dropped my phone into my pocket and turned back to the stage where the band had just finished the last song and were leaving the stage and waving to the cheering crowd. As the Dudes made their way off, the emcee ran back to centre stage and the microphone.
“You wanna talk about courage? You wanna talk about never-backing-down? You wanna talk about telling it like it is … every time? Then this is the man you wanna talk about. Give it up for Buckley-Rand Larmer!”
As he stepped back, Larmer jogged out from the back of the stage and the roar erupted, louder and longer than ever. Larmer shook hands with the emcee, raised his arms over his head. When he brought them down, he pulled the microphone from its stand, brought it to his mouth and yelled, “Calgary, I love you!”
I was weaving my way through the crowd, trying to get to McCready. I’d lost sight of him as the kids pressed forward, wanting to be closer to their hero.
Suddenly I heard a shot, and then things got crazy. Kids panicked, turned, and began running in every direction, including mine. I was knocked flat and quickly lost count of the number of times I was stepped on and had people fall over me and onto me. But finally most of them had fled and were past me.
I struggled to my feet, feeling like I’d lost a fight with a gravel crusher. I looked toward the stage, expecting to see Larmer lying in a pool of blood. He wasn’t there. Either he’d been able to run to safety or people had already pulled his wounded body offstage.
I looked over to where McCready had been standing. He wasn’t standing now. He was on the ground, Mike Cobb on top of him, a handgun lying a couple of feet away. I moved to where McCready twisted uselessly in Cobb’s grasp. His glasses were broken and he was crying and half-yelling, half-whimpering over and over. “Let me shoot that bastard! Let me shoot that bastard!”
I stepped closer as Cobb pulled McCready to his feet, forced him to the stage, and pinned him against it, his arm behind his back, immobilized.
Cobb turned to me, his face bruised and showing the exertion of what he’d just done. He nodded in my direction. “Good call, partner.”
I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialed 9-1-1.
McCready laid out the whole story to the police in the hours after his arrest.
Tammy McCready and Larmer had been having an on-and-off affair for several months, maybe longer, he wasn’t sure. McCready had suspected it for quite a while but had only been able to confirm his suspicions a few weeks earlier. That was when he began his campaign of threats against Larmer, hoping that the broadcaster would leave Calgary, making Tammy return to her broken husband. He’d even researched how to disable the kind of alarm system Larmer had in his house and had broken in to add an even scarier element to the threats.
He’d come to realize that Larmer wasn’t going to run from Calgary and the threats against him. He’d been overjoyed when Larmer was charged with the murder of Jasper Hugg, reasoning that a conviction putting the man behind bars was even better — and more fitting — than a simple change of locale.
When Larmer was released from custody, there was for this tragic figure of a man only one thing left to do. In his mind there was no choice, no alternative. He had to kill the man who was fucking his wife.
Cobb tried to heap praise on me, but I knew I’d just been lucky. Lucky to recall the look on McCready’s face during our interview when he spoke of Larmer, the ladies’ man. Lucky to have accidentally walked into McCready’s office and seen his wife’s picture on his desk. Lucky to have noted the yellow Ford Focus when I was looking for someone driving a blue Jetta. And lucky again to have seen the yellow car again as I was walking to Prince’s Island.
Of course, knowing I was lucky didn’t keep me from accepting the “hero’s dinner” Jill and Kyla prepared and served while wearing cheerleaders’ costumes. The dinner was frequently interrupted by the slightly nauseating pom-pom–accompanied cheer:
“Adam, Adam, he’s our man,
“He fights crime like no one can!”
I was frankly relieved when the pom-poms were tucked away.
“Kyla’s idea.” Jill smiled, maybe a little ruefully.
“I’m damn relieved to hear that,” I said.
Kyla finally headed off to bed, and I was able to enjoy some much more pleasant hero rewards from my all-time favourite cheerleader.
TWENTY-ONE
It was the last game of the season. We were back in High River and the Bobcats were facing the undefeated High River team that had pummelled them into submission some weeks earlier.
The Cobbs, Mike and Lindsay, were seated on either side of me and we had been cheering throughout as Kyla and her teammates had managed to stay close to their much superior opponents. Kyla had two doubles and a single and had made a catch at second base that had both teams’ fans applauding.
As Kyla’s friend Josie, who had smacked a triple earlier, grounded to third for the last out of the game, the final score of 8–5 was what sports pundits would call a moral victory for our girls. More importantly it was a nice way to finish off the season and to start a day that Mike and I had put together a week earlier.
Jill jogged over to the bleachers where we were gathering jackets and pop cans and getting ready to leave.
“How about those guys?” She grinned at us.
“Amazing!” Mike smiled back at her. “A little different than the last time I saw them. I’m nominating you for Manager of the Year.”
“I’ll settle for Happiest Manager of the Year.”
Lindsay Cobb and I stepped down from the bleachers and high-fived the woman I love.
“Great game,” I said as she wrapped her arms around my neck. Are baseball managers allowed to hug fans?”
“Only certain fans.” Jill’s laugh was a welcome contrast to the stress of the past few weeks.
Cobb and I were sitting downstairs in front of the TV drinking Rolling Rocks. Kyla was in the backyard with her pal Josie playing catch. Apparently there’s no such thing as too much baseball.
Jill and Lindsay were upstairs looking at some website Jill was hoping to involve Lindsay in.
“What are we watching?” Cobb asked.
We were there at my insistence. “The Pride Parade.”
Cobb looked at me. “And we’re doing this because?”
“You’ll see.”
“I didn’t even know it was televised. I mean, it’s not exactly the Stampede Parade.”
“This one might be just as good,” I said as I brought up the sound on the remote.
We watched for a few minutes as floats and bands and a couple of classic cars rolled by the camera location. Big smiles, lots of cheering, people waving rainbow flags. The camera zoomed in on some of the walkers. Mayor Nenshi led the group. Behind him I recognized several athletes, a few politicians, entertainers, and throngs of waving, hand-holding men, women, and kids of all ages.
Then the group I most wanted to see appeared. The camera gave us a great view as Buckley-Rand Larmer strode into the shot, a grim neo-smile pasted on his face. He was flanked by two women, both looking markedly happier than the radio star. The women held notebooks and were talking to him, the one nearest the camera jotting down something in her book.
“You did this, didn’t you?” Cobb looked over at me.
I nodded and grinned. “The woman on the right is a writer for the Herald. Her name’s Patsy Bannister. She’s interviewed Larmer before. They’re not tight.”
“And why do I think you know the other woman, too?”
“Ariel Mancuso.” I nodded. “Came all the way from Fredericton to walk in the parade. Turns out Ariel was the girl who was there when young Randy Larmer stepped in and saved the gay kid, Jaden Reese, from the bullies. By the way, Ariel was one of the bullies. But it seems Ariel’s memory has some
how managed to right itself. She talked with two of the boys who were also part of the incident, including one who got his nose broken, and they decided it was time to tell the real story of what happened that day.”
“And that was?”
“Turns out Jaden Reese wasn’t the one being bullied. It was Larmer.”
“And let me guess … Reese stepped in and did the rescuing.”
“Give that man a kewpie doll. And since neither Larmer nor the bullies were all that excited about it becoming public knowledge that the school’s fag was tougher than all of them, they hatched a little story that adjusted the facts just slightly.
“Ariel called me the other night to tell me she’d seen Larmer on TV and heard him on radio and the man made her sick. She decided to do something she’d wanted to do for a long time.”
“Wanted to cleanse the soul, right a long-standing wrong.”
“Or words to that effect,” I answered without looking away from the TV. “I thought about it and decided to call her back — suggested we might be able to do better by telling Larmer the group had decided to come clean but might be persuaded to stay quiet about it in return for a concession or two.”
“One of them being an appearance in the Pride Parade.”
“Correct.” I watched as Patsy Bannister leaned in to Larmer with a question. “The other being that he would walk with Patsy and Ariel and submit to an interview as he walked.”
Larmer wasn’t waving to the crowd. He wasn’t smiling anymore, not even the fake smile. But he was talking to his two co-walkers. No doubt explaining how one of the city’s most prominent homophobes had come to realize that the parade was a good thing, after all, and that he should be a part of it.
I took a satisfying gulp of Rolling Rock.
Cobb was smiling and shaking his head. He looked at me.
“You don’t think using the LGBT community to work your revenge might be a little inappropriate, maybe a tad self-serving?”
I grinned at him. “Guilty as charged. But if it gives that community even a momentary respite from the rantings of a snake like Larmer, I think they’d be okay with it.”
Cobb watched for a while before he spoke again. “Well, I’m not sure this is how I would have done it, but I can’t say I’m pained to see that man a little uncomfortable.”
“Amen to that.”
I was standing in a dark alley. Twenty or thirty steps from where Faith Unruh had lost her life. The garage beside which her body had been found and the house behind it rose up dark and quiet in the still of the midnight hour.
I wasn’t alone. Cobb was to my left and on my other side the brooding hulk of the man who called himself Marlon Kennedy, but who’d been known to Cobb and the world as Kendall Mark.
We had met earlier that evening at the Farmer’s House, a restaurant in Marda Loop. It was a great place, but none of us did justice to the food or the atmosphere. We’d talked about Faith Unruh and none of us felt hungry.
Cobb had impressed on his former police colleague the need to do things right.
“I’ll do them right,” Kennedy had said, and despite the warmth of the evening I’d shuddered. I remembered what had happened and what had almost happened the night Kennedy had taken me down in the alley behind my apartment.
“We’re willing to do whatever we can to help,” Cobb had said, “but for that to happen it has to be legal, and it has to be right. No vigilante shit.”
For several seconds they glared at each other and I wondered if either of them would back down … could back down.
“What help is that?”
“I don’t know,” Cobb answered. “We go back over it again. Maybe Cullen can get the media onside and we ask the public for help. I know it’s been done a few times, but maybe this time …”
“And maybe you get nothing just like every other time,” Kennedy said.
“That’s damn sure possible.” Cobb nodded. “And maybe you keep watching the house and the alley for shadows that might never come. And you look at tapes hoping for a glimpse of the guy who killed a little girl. And maybe you get it wrong next time, if there is a next time … just like you did with him.” Cobb glanced in my direction, then back at Kennedy. “And maybe next time some homeless person happens to wander into the wrong place or the wrong camera frame and he isn’t able to talk you out of it and you waste the wrong guy.” Cobb paused then and looked at the ground where Faith Unruh had lain in death.
“Or maybe we try to help each other, and one day — someday — we get it right and we find the guy and we take him down the right way. And put the bastard away forever.” He looked back at Kennedy.
Several seconds passed.
“Yeah,” Kennedy said. “Yeah.”
And the house and the garage and the ground in front of it and the shadows — nothing had shifted … nothing had changed.
And maybe never would.
Or maybe …
Copyright © David Poulsen, 2017
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Poulsen, David A., 1946-, author
Dead air / David A. Poulsen.
(A Cullen and Cobb mystery)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-3668-9 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3669-6 (PDF).--
ISBN 978-1-4597-3670-2 (EPUB)
I. Title. II. Series: Poulsen, David A., 1946- Cullen and Cobb mystery.
PS8581.O848D43 2017 C813›.54 C2016-905649-X
C2016-905650-3
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Dead Air Page 32
