Invisible Dead

by Sam Wiebe

  Terence, who drove with the one-handed grip of someone with more practice than patience, told Ross there was a lot down the street and he’d wait for him there.

  “Fine,” Ross said. “But when we come out I want that limo right on the curb, bam, like it is now.”

  I asked Terence for the limo’s phone number and told him I’d text before we left the club.

  “Good thinking, buddy,” Ross said. “Mind getting the door for me?”

  I did, standing stoically as Ross and his escort made their red carpet entrance. Tammy had forgotten her purse. As I leaned in to grab it I heard Terence muttering to his steering wheel.

  The club music was a series of sonic booms, accompanied by the guttural rumble of a blown subwoofer. People danced. I sat at a VIP booth holding Tammy’s purse, watching Ross ply his trade.

  To his credit Ross had a smoothness with people. He could follow three conversations at once. He could make jokes that, while not funny, goosed the conversation along. He was something of a maestro in making the vague promises that would move women to follow him.

  Soon he’d cut three women out from the pack, one with a boyfriend in tow. So now there were seven of us. The boyfriend was in jeans, a collared T-shirt and a chain wallet. He grew surlier the happier his date got. Ross bought champagne and Courvoisier and told the booth what he did for a living. It was a boring two minutes but it allowed him to drop in his net worth and car collection. He made frequent toasts and poured the liquor himself. The girls got drunker and the boyfriend got surlier. Ross and one of the girls danced. Tammy danced with the other girl. The couple argued. An ultimatum was made. A bluff was called. The man stormed off while the woman slumped in the booth.

  “I don’t know why some people don’t want to have fun,” she said.

  Ross and Tammy came back from the dance floor and I couldn’t swear they hadn’t switched partners. Laughter, ass-slapping, another round of drinks. The quartet was happy and they lured the girlfriend or ex-girlfriend out of the booth and we headed to the limo.

  I rode up front with Terence. He had the CBC on. Genocide, uprisings, terrorism. The prime minister was calling for an end to something. The back of the limo filled with weed smoke.

  “Guess you boys are from BC,” Terence said.

  “Dope give that away?”

  “That, and you act like you above this place.”

  “I got business back home,” I said.

  “That not your business in the back seat? Kind of bodyguard are you?”

  “A reluctant one,” I said.

  We hit another club, although in layout and patrons, Terence might as well have rolled once around the block. I opted to wait by the car and smoke. Terence stretched and leaned against the front panel. He’d played for the Roughriders before tearing a quadricep, and had done some bodyguarding before his chauffeur licence came through.

  “Hated bodyguarding. Quit the second week. Old teammate hooked me up. Fullback, two point three mill contract over four years. Talking stacked. Like your boy in there.” He pointed to the club.

  He opened his lunch pail, took out a sandwich and an orange. I offered him a cigarette. “Two years four months,” he said.

  “What was it made you quit the bodyguard racket?” I asked. “Being around your rich friend?”

  “What it is,” he said through a mouthful of orange, “is too many people wanting to be gangster without wanting to do the work to be hard.”

  He chewed thoughtfully and added, “My girl says she misses the money, but damned if being a chauffeur doesn’t bring in almost the same, once you factor in the tips.”

  “This whole corporate world irks me,” I said.

  “I feel that. But miss enough meals and it starts to look pretty damn attractive.”

  “Shit.” I caught sight of the boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, stalking over toward the stretch.

  He paused and looked at me as if he was going to ask a very silly question. Then he turned and walked into the club, held back by the bouncer long enough to flash his ID.

  I rushed in after him, plunging into black light and lasers, the sweat-fog of attractive people. I scanned the dance floor, didn’t see Ross. I caught sight of a square head that might have been the boyfriend. I followed it in, pushing past couples, breaking embraces.

  And then a strobe light kicked in and I lost the boyfriend, although it could have been someone else. There was a bar with a waterfall and the private booths stretched behind it. I caught a flash of silver lamé on a hip disappearing around the falls and I jogged over.

  Ross sat in a roped-off booth with the women all across from him like a row of golden-haired dolls. Two of them looked tired. An empty pitcher sat on the table. Tammy slid in next to Ross, carrying more drinks.

  From the other side of the waterfall came the boyfriend.

  I stepped over the rope. As soon as I did a big bald bastard put his hands on me. He was doing the bouncer shuffle—“We can talk about this, sure, but as I listen you’re going to back-peddle toward the door.”

  While the bouncer was distracted with me, the boyfriend slipped over the rope and approached Ross’s table. He put his hand out and seized his ex-girlfriend’s—definitely now his ex-girlfriend’s—thin pale wrist.

  I slipped the bouncer’s grasp and beelined for the booth. Hooked an arm around the ex’s shoulder and pulled him away. His breath had a gasoline reek and his cheeks were red and puffy.

  “—of your damn business,” he was saying to me.

  He took something from his pocket, something with a handle. His other hand grabbed for my lapel.

  I jabbed him in the face and when his arms went up I hooked him in the side above the hepatic nerve. The Micky Ward special. The ex dropped the way Sanchez did to Ward, straight down, folding in on himself.

  A butterfly knife fell from his hand and tapped the toe of the bouncer’s shoe. Ross stared at the man, at the knife. He cheered and climbed out of the booth. The bouncer had picked up the knife and I was explaining things to him, stationary this time.

  I thought Ross was going to congratulate me, a lot of backslapping and toasts. Instead he walked to the crumpled ex-boyfriend and kicked him in the face.

  —

  Tammy had an iPhone. It absorbed her attention as we waited in the parking lot of the Executive Plaza, a monolith of brass trim and light fixtures that looked like melting crystal. I read my Grafton and Terence listened to the CBC.

  After two hours Ross came down alone. His hair was mussed and he was down to an undershirt and dress pants. As he climbed in I caught a whiff of mingled perfumes and sex.

  “I want to teach you something,” he said solemnly. “Take a look at this.” He held up a credit card, embossed with the words EXECUTIVE and EXPENSE and stamped with a hologram of a soaring eagle.

  “This is not a card,” he said. “This is a key. A key that opens any door. Any bottle. Any pair of legs.”

  And he laughed and returned to his jovial self, and told us how he’d fucked two of them while the third lay passed out on the adjacent bed. Evidently one of the participants was the ex-girlfriend of the man I’d decked.

  “If he hadn’t’ve been such a douche I wouldn’t’ve gone after her,” he said. “How about that punch? Wham right in the side. I gotta learn how to do that. Where to?”

  “It’s your party,” I said.

  “Know where I really want to go? Let’s go out to the reservation. They probably throw sick parties out there.” Ross rapped on the divider. “Terence, man, take us out to the res.”

  “Bad idea,” Terence said.

  “Terence.” Ross pressed his platinum card into the glass. “Take us out to the res, man. Time to kick this party into fourth gear.”

  “Which res?” Terence said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Which res.”

  “One with the Indians on it. There another kind?”

  “There’s different reservations for different peoples,” Terence said patiently
. “Assiniboine, Cree, Métis, which ain’t strictly speaking—”

  “I don’t fucking care,” Ross said. “Take us to the party.” He snapped his fingers in epiphany. “Where do the Indians go to party when they come into Winnipeg? Yeah, take us to an Indian bar. The best Indian bar.”

  —

  I don’t know if Terence tried to comply or decided to teach Tommy Ross a lesson. He headed toward the North End.

  Ross cuddled an arm around Tammy, who was wrapped up in texting. He said to me, “We having fun?”

  “Could use that coffee shop,” I said.

  “Ah, fuck coffee shops. Bunch of turtleneck douchebags working on their screenplays.”

  A broken clock, I thought.

  “I liked the way you handled that,” he said. “No-nonsense, just deck the bitch with body blows. What martial arts do you know?”

  “I took junior karate for a year at the Douglas Park Community Centre, but I was awful. I learned a few things boxing.”

  “Boxing’s cool,” he said. “Yo Adrian. But I want to learn MMA, jujitsu and stuff. I really want to devastate people if they try and fuck with me. You ever watch MMA?”

  “I liked the Gracies,” I said.

  “One time I was at this party,” he said. “Guy had Exiles doing the security. Now those dudes are hardcore. This guy starts mouthing off and one of the bikers walks over to him and folds him in half. Like closing a briefcase. Awesomest thing I’ve ever seen. And you know who it was?”

  I said I didn’t.

  “Charles ‘Ill-Gotten’ Gains himself. Two-time light-heavy champion.”

  “What party was this?” I said. “Who hosted it?”

  “Who cares? Charles Gains, man. He’s a badass.”

  “He’s very scary,” I agreed. “Who hosted the party? Was it a corporate event, or—”

  He snapped his fingers a few times. “You know who it was for? George Overman, the Discus Solutions guy.”

  I felt the plate tectonics of the Loam case grind and shift, if not exactly erupt in revelation.

  “The name is familiar,” I said.

  “He owns a few franchises, an auto mall. I’m sure if you—”

  The vehicle stopped. Terence announced that we were here.

  The place was called Holloway’s Hideaway. It was situated in a concrete desert of parking lots, industrial sites. Decades-old neon advertised Michelob and Coors Regular. It was a country bar, with all the country charm of a double-barrelled shotgun.

  “Perfect,” Ross said. “Time for some real fun.”

  As he and Tammy climbed out, Terence lowered the divider. “So’s you know, I’m on the clock another thirty-five minutes. There’s a cab stand four blocks down that way. I got the card somewheres.”

  “How rowdy is this place?” I asked.

  “They’re good folks, most part. And you’re strapped, so you shouldn’t have problems.”

  “Strapped as in a gun?” I asked.

  “Kind of bodyguard doesn’t have a gun?” he said. “I know, I know, a reluctant one. Take care of him, man.”

  The inside of the Hideaway was simple enough. Red carpeted floors, solid pine benches and booths. A bar in the centre of the room, a historical display of beer bottles in a greasy case above the bar. TVs turned to pre-Olympic hype, baseball and darts. Row of pinball and shooter games on the far wall. Cigarette dispenser by the john.

  It was halfway busy, the clientele about an even mix of aboriginals and whites. A few veteran types, some in wheelchairs. The women were older, harder, and when one cornered me and said she’d suck my dick for a twenty and I said no thank you, she laughed and asked if I was a fag.

  “Totally,” I said.

  She laughed again and crowed to a couple of denim-jacketed buddies that it was a rare night that the joint would be graced by the presence of two gays. “Not counting you two,” she said, sparking off a round of merriment.

  Ross was at a booth, elbows on the table, looking like a college freshman about to taste his first alcohol. He peeled a twenty off his roll and tossed it in front of me. “I’ll have an Old Fashioned, she’ll take a Screwdriver, and whatever you’re having.”

  I crossed the empty dance floor. The bartender, a punk chick with alabaster skin, filled out the order capably without once glancing at me. When I returned to the booth, two women had joined Ross. One was native, one white, both closer to my mother’s age than to Tammy’s or mine.

  I put down the drinks and Ross handed me money to bring Patti and Margot what they wanted. Which turned out to be cream sherry and a Boilermaker, respectively.

  I fetched the drinks again. When I came back Ross was ready for a refill. He slid out of the booth, told me to sit, and handed me a bundle wrapped in a sticky garbage bag.

  “Present,” he said.

  Inside was a carton of untaxed cigarettes.

  I sat down and told the two women, “Run your scam but don’t hurt him.”

  “Relax,” Patti said. “We like him. Don’t we?”

  “We like you, too.”

  “Tommy Boy was telling us about you.”

  “You killed a man tonight.”

  “Folded him in half.”

  “Hands like lethal weapons.”

  “Like that movie.”

  “Right, with what’s his name. What is his name?”

  “Mel Brooks.”

  Ross came back and we switched places. I hovered around the table, bringing drinks and watching the door. When the ladies of the manor left to powder their noses, I sat and asked Ross what his endgame was.

  “Ever fuck two women at once?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m’n’a be the first guy to ever fuck twice two women and on the same day. My cock will be a Guinness record.”

  “Make sure it’s at your place, at least.”

  “This is my place. My favourite place.”

  “Take them to your hotel room. Get a cab. Don’t go home with them.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” he said.

  He peeled off eighty dollars. “Will you take the Tamster home? She says she lives a few blocks from here.” He tossed the money in front of her. “A tip, on top of your cut from the agency. Always good to keep a spare.”

  She pocketed the money, not thanking him. I offered her my jacket and as we left the Hideaway we passed Patti and Margot, smiling sweetly as they supplanted us.

  We took quick steps along the sidewalk as traffic roared past. Trucks mostly, intervals of bright light, rumbles, then silence. It was balmy but the temperature was dropping. Tammy clasped the jacket around her as we walked.

  “Been escorting a long time?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Pays good?”

  “Some nights.”

  “We don’t have to talk.”

  “Okay.”

  Tammy lived in a second-storey flat above cheap and battered storefronts. A bailbondsman, a thrift store. There was a covered bus stop on the opposite corner. Not much else.

  She slid the coat off her shoulders, handed it to me, and wordless, left.

  I speed-walked back to the Hideaway.

  On the curb, folded, where the limo had been, was Ross’s sport coat. I checked the pockets. Cellphone, Cialis, car keys, cocaine.

  Ross was no longer in Holloway’s. The bartender told me he’d called a cab. She didn’t know where to. I called one for myself, guessing, hoping he’d taken them to the Plaza. I wondered if the blonde girls would still be there, and if so, would there be a scene. But Ross hadn’t come back to the Plaza. He hadn’t left word. The golden trio had left hours ago, two of them carrying their nearly comatose friend, a parade of mussed hair and miniskirts that the desk clerk remembered well.

  “Whoever your boss is, he’s my hero,” he told me.

  I tipped him twenty to call me if Ross appeared, gave him twenty more to pass the message on to whoever relieved him. The same taxi driver was dozing, his cab parked in the roundabout. I knocked
on the glass and told him to take me back to the Comfort Inn.

  An LCD display built into the passenger’s side headrest played nothing but commercials. Soft drinks and online poker. The driver told me about the rash of stabbings a few years ago that had led to the installation of panic lights in all the cabs in the city. He told me he was ready for someone to just try starting something with him, just once.

  At the motel, I took the stairs up to my room on the fourth floor. There, on the bed, Ross was being ridden by one of the women in reverse cowgirl. A fungal smell hung in the air. The other woman stood over them, holding up a pen, tracing their movements like a demented conductor.

  I didn’t even try to decode the scene. I let the door glide shut on its pneumatic hinges. I walked to the lobby and found a comfortable chair, put the coats over my lap and tried to think about George Overman and Terry Rhodes and Shay and Chelsea Loam.

  Before I passed out I realized that Patti or Margot, whoever had been standing over the other two, had been aiming a Wakeland & Chen novelty pen cam, capturing the writhing of Tommy Ross and the woman for posterity.

  —

  Second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse. So proceeded my second night in Winnipeg.

  —

  As the third night wound down I watched Tommy Ross and two Greek prostitutes take turns potshotting rats with a .22 target pistol as they stood on the back bench of the car. I was driving a vintage drop-top Eldorado that Ross had rented, with the idea that if I was going to stay sober anyway, I might as well drive. Ross had bought a suit of purest white and a nautical hat, and had insisted on being addressed for the entire night as Admiral. The girls, with their slippery Mediterranean accents, were calling him Animal. We were parked at the Winnipeg landfill. They were very drunk.

  “Take a drink, Seaman.” He thrust a bottle at me. Ross had bought a two-litre Coke, dumped out three-quarters and topped the bottle up with Goldschlager. He had almost finished it. I considered the dregs and handed the bottle back to him.

  “Driving, remember.”

  “How dare you refuse a direct order.” He stood and leaned over the seat to where the women stood in the back, plugging away at the scurrying shadows. He kneaded the shin of the girl with the gun. “First Mate Nia,” he said. “Ensign Wakeland has disobeyed a direct order.”