Invisible Dead

by Sam Wiebe

  “I’m speaking to Mr. David Wakeland?” The voice was booming, tinged with a foreign lilt. Filipino if I could trust my ears.

  “Yes, you are,” I said quietly, hoping the voice would modulate its volume accordingly.

  “You’re related to a Beatrice Wakeland?”

  “She’s my mother, yes.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Wakeland,” the voice said, sounding not at all sorry. “Your mother has suffered a stroke. You are her emergency contact, yes?”

  “Where is she? VGH? I’ll be right over.”

  “Yes, do come,” the voice said. “She seems to have avoided the most debilitating effects, although there are more tests to run. She will be here for a while, I’m afraid.”

  “A week? Months?”

  “At least a week for the full battery,” the voice said. “We encourage family members to bring things from their home. Photos, pillows. Things the patient would easily recognize. It helps their memory and brain function and their overall comfort. Would you like me to read you a list of approved items?”

  “I get the gist,” I said. “Is my half-sister there?”

  “Who?”

  “She’s staying with my mother. Her name’s River.”

  “Right. If we see her we’ll tell her you’re on your way.”

  I grabbed keys, wallet, threw a flannel over my grubby shirt.

  I called River’s cell and left a message. I saw I’d received a text from Shay. It was dated the previous night.

  WE SHOULD TALK. I SAID SOME THINGS. LETS TALK. PLS CALL.

  Peace talks and détente. Yalta and Potsdam. I tried to think of what I wanted to say to her, what would be healthy.

  Everything would have to wait.

  I’d driven halfway to VGH when I remembered my mother’s stuff. I made an abrupt left. I had an idea of what she’d like to wake up to—some flowers from her garden, arranged in the crystal vase my father had given her for their anniversary. Maybe a Hummel, the one with the brother and sister fishing. Would she want jewellery? Photographs?

  Chagrin washed over me. I knew her better than I knew anyone, and I couldn’t figure out the four or five items she’d want by her bedside.

  And where was River, who was still technically underage? Would she go back to Alberta without an adult to stay with? Would she stay on as my mother’s caretaker? What kind of life was that for a kid dealing with her own problems?

  Hell.

  The house looked the same. I parked in the first spot I could and detoured across her neighbour’s lawn, stepping carefully over an accumulation of dog shit. I almost rang the bell.

  Inside and up the stairs to the bedroom and—

  Dogs.

  Mine had spent her last months in this house and I was used to the smell. Wet, earthy. But the house hadn’t smelled like that for a year, not since I’d ripped out the carpeting. I breathed in the smell of the creatures, not my dog, and heard tittering laughter. I sank onto the step.

  “Come on down here, Davey Boy,” Terry Rhodes’s voice called from the kitchen.

  —

  Rhodes, Charles Gains, two other large white men and a stout, grinning Filipino man filled the kitchen. Rhodes’s right hand was wrapped in the leashes of his dogs, which lay like sphinxes on the marble. They all looked happy to see me.

  “We were getting bored,” Rhodes said.

  The stout man tittered. It was his voice I’d heard on the phone.

  I stood frozen. Not out of fear, though there was plenty of that. Out of indecision. Running, retreating, would only delay what was coming.

  I looked for guns. I didn’t see any. A knife on one of the flunkeys’ belts. And the dogs. My handgun was unloaded and locked up back at the office. It might as well have been in Burundi.

  “The old bitch is at the casino,” Rhodes said. “This half-sister of yours gonna come looking for you?”

  I shrugged. “I’m very popular and well regarded.”

  Another titter from the stout man. Rhodes uncoiled the leashes. He lit a Turkish cigarette.

  “There’s no reason everybody in this room can’t stay above ground,” he said.

  “Don’t bullshit me.”

  “Fair enough. I’m going to kill you. But first we’re gonna talk.”

  “Good,” I said. “I have lots of questions.”

  Rhodes laughed. The others joined in, the stout man hardest of all. “I got a few for you,” Rhodes said. “Starting with this diary I been hearing about.”

  He put his hand over the skull of one of the dogs. “Sicced Fuck here on poor old Kazz to get a straight answer as to what’s in there. Funny thing was, he wouldn’t talk to my guys. He was too afraid of what you’d do to him. You, the badass private dick.”

  Rhodes crouched and rubbed the dog’s jowls affectionately. “Course he talked eventually, once Fuck here persuaded him. Cost poor old Kazz a ball.”

  “Guess that ends his chances of being a high-wire balancing act.”

  More laughter from them. Keep them laughing.

  “Funny guy,” Rhodes said. “I never saw your pops crack so much as a smile.”

  “What the hell do you want?” I said.

  “That girl’s diary for starters.”

  “You’re not afraid of that,” I said. “A book with a bunch of initials in it? You beat a million-dollar surveillance case.”

  “I want it,” he said. “That’s reason enough you give it to me.”

  I heard the front door behind me. I turned. Ken Everett and Skeet filled the door frame. Everett held a shotgun, pointed at the ground in front of him. Skeet held a fistful of zap straps.

  Rhodes echoed my own thoughts.

  “And guess who’s in the middle,” he said.

  Everett stared at me and nodded. He looked past me at his boss and his boss’s bodyguard and three of his own. His eyes settled on the dogs at Rhodes’s feet.

  “Put one of those around his wrists,” Rhodes said to Skeet. “Another on the feet and you connect ’em with a third.”

  Skeet didn’t move. His eyes flitted to Everett.

  “Kenny Boy,” Rhodes said. At the back of his voice, maybe for the first time, was fear.

  Everett tilted up the gun and pointed it toward Rhodes.

  “Fuck the whole lot of you,” he said.

  He pulled the trigger and shot a fist-sized hole through one of the dogs.

  In the narrow enclosure of the hallway, the blast hit my ears with a painful slap that killed my hearing. Everything that came after played out in silence.

  I saw Rhodes throw the leashes and move back behind his men. Holy leapt over his dead brother and bounded toward Everett. The three lackeys flattened themselves against the kitchen wall. And Charles Gains smiled and stood his ground.

  I heard the gun go off again but I didn’t look. I was out of the hall, scrambling into the living room, crouching. The living room windows were covered over by screens. Both staircases were on the other side of the house.

  I saw a dark shape back into the room and crouch. Rhodes. He looked up in time to see my fist land right on his eye socket, total follow-through. He fell backward onto the floor and I landed on top of him, taking the breath out of both of us. He had an iron grip but my right hand was free and I hit him in the face, thinking Pacquiao, thinking young Foreman, how he could jolt the heavy bag clean off the hook unless his trainer steadied it. I couldn’t hear anything. I broke my fist on Rhodes’s face.

  Something like a concrete vise seized me around the neck and ripped me off of Rhodes. It was the arm of Charles Gains, cinched into my throat.

  No air. Wavy patterns overlaid my vision. I hit him in the ribs with my elbow but it didn’t earn me any give. I tried it again. Falling back, he wrapped his legs across my stomach from behind. I couldn’t move.

  Goodbye movement. Goodbye air. The wavy patterns grew into waves, loud ones that buffeted the breakwaters of my skull, smashed over it in loud hissing sprays. Then it was too dark to sense movement. A watery
blackness and nothing more. And then goodbye to even that.

  33

  Chelsea.

  I gave it a try, darling.

  Maybe there was more I could’ve done.

  It sure didn’t feel like it.

  I failed you

  Just like the city failed you

  And failed however many more like you.

  They’ll never find the book,

  I’d never give it to them.

  It’s all that’s left of you.

  Overman, Palfreyman, Knowlson, Kazz

  A dance of johns

  A line of pricks and predators

  And you the one breaking the law.

  Chelsea

  I’m sorry

  I failed you

  I tried.

  Wanted so badly to find you

  Alive

  Older and at peace

  Perhaps on the Island

  Some douchebag artist’s colony

  Making sand dollars into mobiles

  Or frying bread and pemmican for German tourists.

  If I’d found you

  (And it’s easy to say now it’s over)

  I would have told you who I am,

  What I was here for,

  Who loved you enough to want you found.

  I would have listened

  And if you’d said no,

  Leave,

  I would have listened.

  But

  Maybe

  I

  Just

  Want

  To

  Believe

  I’m

  Not

  Like

  All

  The

  Rest—

  34

  HOODED LIKE A FALCON. It took me a long while to comprehend that. I was trussed up and on my side, with some sort of fabric shielding my face. My knees were against something inert that could have been someone else. One knee felt warm and wet, which meant I’d probably pissed myself. We were travelling.

  I rolled forward, taking pressure off my hand. I flailed out with my legs and head, trying to map the dimensions of the trunk, if it was a trunk. I was jostled. We seemed to be moving at an incline.

  I could hear April Wine and then Bachman-Turner Overdrive. The Stampeders, “Sweet City Woman.”

  Maybe this was Purgatory.

  The incline remained steady. The tires spun on gravel instead of pavement. I was jostled. The person behind me shifted. I called out but no one answered.

  I got used to breathing again, to having time move forward. The pain in my hand and the darkness became facts rather than universal laws. I even slept a little.

  The vehicle slowed and bounced along. It stopped. Two doors opened and slammed shut. A key scraped the metal below the lock before the trunk opened. Cold air flooded my nostrils.

  I was lifted out and set down on gravel. The other person was heaped next to me.

  “Dig now?” a voice said. The stout, laughing Filipino man.

  “We dump them in the cellar,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Wait for Terry, see if they find that book. Save the digging for later. Right now it’s beer o’clock.”

  “For us.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not so much for them.”

  He cut the trusses, leaving my wrists and ankles bound separately. I was hoisted to my feet. They steered me inside. We went down a staircase. I waddled, leaning on the rail.

  “Have a seat anywhere,” one of them said. I felt a boot to my back and I spilled out onto dirty cement. I heard laughter.

  The door closed and locked. I found a wall to lean against.

  When the door opened I listened for footsteps on the staircase. There weren’t any. I heard the voice say, “On three,” and count to three. There was a grunt of exertion, a second of anticipation, and then something landed near me with a meaty thud.

  The door locked once again. I shrugged off the bag. I stared at Ken Everett. He was dead all right. We were both soaked in his blood.

  —

  The cellar, as they called it, had a high ceiling and cement walls. The ceiling was unfinished, with slabs of pink insulation stapled to the wood. The staircase was raw lumber with no guard rail. It had flooded before, leaving a smell of must and rot. Dead leaves had been swept into the corners.

  One of the pillars had a sharp-looking edge. I backed into it, rubbing the plastic of the zap strap vertically until the friction frayed it. My wrist was sore but didn’t look infected. I’d need it set soon.

  I wondered how badly I’d hurt Rhodes. Probably not at all.

  I unbound my ankles. There was a light fixture, but the switch was on the other side of the door. No tools around. I went through Everett’s pockets. He had cigarettes but no source of fire. His wallet was there. Fifteen dollars, a driver’s licence, a photo booth snapshot of himself with his daughter balanced on his knee.

  It hit me who I was looking at. What he’d tried to do for me.

  No teeth or claw marks on him. His neck had been snapped. But maybe that had happened when they’d dumped him.

  I took the stairs and tried the door. There wasn’t a handle on this side.

  The cellar had no windows, but I could tell it was late afternoon. A million tiny slivers of light shone through the wood. Those slivers dimmed and it was late evening and then night.

  Maybe they wanted me to cry out and beg.

  I was thirsty. I kept thinking of a nice double bourbon and ice water. A few hours after the sun went down the temperature plummeted. I stripped off Everett’s jacket and draped it over myself. An hour later I took his shirt, too. I pushed the leaves into a small bed and sat down in them, leaning against the wall.

  So. What. Next?

  —

  In the late morning two men came down the stairs, the stout man and one of the tall white thugs. They looked amused, seeing me swaddled in the dead man’s clothes. Both had guns and the thug had a shovel balanced on his shoulder.

  “Get up.” The thug toed Everett’s corpse. “Pick him up and take him up the stairs.” To the stout man he said, “Stay behind him, Freddie. You see him drop the body it means he’s trying something.”

  “Or he’s tired,” I said. I stooped over. The body was dead weight, the joints rigored. I put Everett’s arm across my shoulders and dead-lifted. It was a good way to lift the weight without putting pressure on my hand. Everett’s feet dragged on the lip of each stair as I carted him up. Each step required finding a new fulcrum, lest we topple over the side.

  At the top the thug held the door and I hauled Everett over the threshold. Freddie stepped through, drawing the door shut without aiming the gun away from me.

  “Out to the back,” the thug said.

  The cellar was beneath a one-storey cabin, all vinyl and plastic but finished with a wood veneer. As I dragged Everett out through the sliding door I saw other cabins. I counted four plus an aluminum shed. They were arranged in a semicircle, around a gravel turnaround that led out to an access road.

  Behind the cabins was a thick undergrowth of blackberries and ferns that sloped down and seeped beneath a dark green canopy of Douglas fir. Beyond that an escarpment. Below us a long green valley. We were on the other side of one of the Coast Mountains.

  It was warmer in the sun. Freddie instructed me to drag Everett’s corpse. We moved through the brush to a clearing bordered by a rotten section of fallen tree. Freddie hacked at a few tendrils of encroaching blackberry.

  The thug mimed dropping the body. I did. He pitched the shovel at my feet.

  “Six down and three across,” he said.

  I picked up the shovel, gripping it left-handed and using my right to steady it. I broke ground.

  “Fling the dirt over there.” He pointed to the other side of the log.

  I began work. The sun kept rising. By the time it was at its apex I was lathered with sweat and more than two feet into the ground. My shovel clanged off something harder than soil.

  Freddie left
and returned with a deck chair, a bottle of fruit juice for himself, and a Coors Light for the thug. They took turns sitting and standing. Freddie left again and didn’t return.

  I tried widening the hole but I couldn’t work the spade further. “Rock,” I called up.

  “So pick it up and move it,” the thug said.

  “It’s too big and I got a busted hand.”

  “Christ,” he said, making it sound like an exasperated sigh. “How big are we talking?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He swore. “Climb out of there. Leave the shovel.”

  I did. He stood over the hole, looking down at the exposed clump of rock. He kept the automatic trained on me, but used the other hand to bring out his cellphone. He dialed with his thumb.

  “Freddie. Who do you think? It’s Cody. Yeah, we got a problem with a rock here. What I need is you to watch him while I take care of this. Right, the rock problem. I don’t know, shoot it? You’re the digging expert. Well, how long? Can’t you pinch it off and come deal with this? Christ. No, I’ll do it myself.”

  He tossed the phone onto his chair. I asked for permission, walked a few paces and pissed on some ivy.

  When I turned back he motioned for me to stand near the hole. He aimed the gun down at the rock.

  “That’s a bit dangerous,” I said.

  “Thanks, Safety Minister. What’s your idea?”

  “If we can dig under and leverage it, the two of us could lift it out.”

  “That’s stupid,” he said. “Cover your ears.”

  I turned away and ducked. He shot off three rounds. When the smoke and dirt had floated off, the rock was much the same as it was.

  “Fine,” he said. “Leverage it or whatever.”

  By widening the hole I could get the shovel under it and loosen it. Cody climbed down and tried to pick it up. He didn’t bend his knees. I told him to rock it back and forth and I’d feed the shovel underneath.

  It would be easy to brain him with the shovel, I thought. I looked up and saw Freddie perched on the edge of the hole, thinking the same thing.

  I wedged the shovel underneath, and together we pried the rock out and heaved it up onto the lip of the hole, where Freddie helped roll it out of the way.