by Sam Wiebe
Dixon seems to doodle in her notebook. Seems to be etching triangles, over and over, triangles within triangles, and doesn’t ask for elaboration.
Blaine says, “Digital photography, collage, cyber-manipulation. Cold kind of art, my dad called it. His name was Stan Burrows, maybe you’ve heard of him?”
Dixon shakes her head.
“One of yesterday’s celebs. Big in the photographic world, mostly landscapes. The old silver halide dynasty, black-and-white, chemical trays, red lights. Amazing how far we’ve come, hey? Too bad Stan didn’t live to see that my cold art is being published too. This fall. The collection is called City. That’s all. City. Lot of structure, not a lot of people shots, ’cause that’s been done to death. But they’re in there, like puzzle pieces, just part of the chain-link, right? Or the asphalt, or the puddles. Except for on the cover I’ve got an old guy. I met him on Alexander. He was sitting on the curb, mad as a hatter. Fabulous cover, ’cause it’s man as city, right? Bang, centered, all face, like this.” He crops his own face with his hands to show the detective his focus. “Pale-blue irises, shiny like moonstone, shocking against dark dust and wrinkles. Symmetric wrinkles, like a network of streets and alleys. Super super high-res with just a small glitch over one pupil. Titled the shot Pixelize. Play on words, right? Pixel . . . eyes.”
Dixon says nothing. Blaine watches her, but his mind is elsewhere, moving between the book launch and the shot he’s going to load tonight, highlights and shadows tweaked. His heart still hammers like he’s won the lotto. He’ll call it Threshold, back of the book, the visual he’s been looking for, the perfect exclamation point to end his five-year collection of urban blowdown. Threshold. A lead-in to Book II?
Dixon says, “So what brought you to this particular parking lot?”
“Chance,” Blaine says. “Was out at dawn, taking shots. Up on the overpass, scanning the harbor and tracks. Viewfinder caught what I thought was a body. An arm, anyway. Zoomed in, went, Oh my god. Drove right over and checked. Called 911.”
He smiles at her, wanting her to smile back. Even women of her age are taken by him, and flush pink when he turns it on. He’s a good-looking guy, and he knows it. But cold shoulders make him nervous, and he doesn’t like being nervous.
“What time did you first spot the guy with your zoom?”
Blaine blinks. He places his hand on his camera, as if to shield it from flying debris. “Just about sunrise. Sorry, I never thought to check.”
“Sure. Well, let’s do it this way. Your call came in at 5:54. That help?”
Blaine shifts in his chair. So he hadn’t called 911 as soon as he might have, and it hits him, the proof is time-stamped on the chip. But a minute here or there wouldn’t change the end result. The only difference was that he had seized the chance to immortalize a nobody. If anything, he should be thanked.
He says, “Took awhile to drive over, then to find him. I guess five, six minutes from the time I spotted him to making the call.”
Dixon makes a note. And then, oddly, she seems to drift. Big woman, yet light as a bubble. She’s watching him, but seems abstracted. Her face is more interesting than Blaine had first thought. He imagines her on the cover of Book II. Stark, artificial light coming in from the side. Maybe even backlit to shadow. The Soul of Authority.
But back to his immediate problem, he decides to protect himself with a little white lie: “The guy was dead when I got here.”
Her brows hitch without interest, like she doesn’t get it and doesn’t really want to. She’s jaded beyond care. She sits here, half-asleep on the job, thick as mud. He mentally throws a frame around her jowls and brows, cutting out the extraneous, keeping to the theme of face as metaphor. He’s nailing down the brand. He’ll run it by his editor when he’s done here today. Meanwhile, get on this lady’s good side, ask if she’ll sit for him.
She says, “You see anybody at or around the scene? From the overpass, say, or as you were driving in?”
“No ma’am. I only wish.” He slouches, hooking bicep over chairback, showing off his hard-earned muscles.
She almost smiles, finally thawing. He’s got her.
He says, “Detective, I know I’m being nosy, but any idea what his story is? Drug deal gone wrong?”
Dixon surprises him with a fairly concise answer: “Drugs, oh, for sure.” She closes her notebook, rubs her nose, and says in the casual way of shutting down, “Get any good sunrise shots?”
Just being polite, but the question galls Blaine, pulling him out of his reverie. He straightens. “No sunrise shots, no. They’re kind of done.”
“Done to death,” Dixon murmurs.
It’s an echo of his own words and it startles him. Now she’s the one doing the flirting, a twinkle in her eye. She says, “Take any pictures of the dead man?”
Blaine hesitates.
“It’s just, I see you don’t have your telephoto on.” She’s pointing at the Nikon. “Not much distance with those 50 mils, is there? I take it you switched lenses, sometime between the overpass and now.”
Her stare is piercing into him, and for the first time he’s afraid.
“You got me,” he admits with a boyish shrug. “While I was waiting, I got a shot or two. Hope that’s okay.”
He won’t tell her it’s going in a book. He doesn’t know the legalities at this point, and doesn’t want her to shut him down before he can talk it over with his copyright people. He’s also having second thoughts about putting her on the second book’s cover. Sometimes ugliness reaches a certain bar . . .
She has extended a palm, and at first he thinks she wants to shake, but it’s a demand. “I’ll need to take the card.”
He stares. “What? No. Why?”
“You’ll get it back safe and sound, Mr. Burrows. You want to give it to me now, or do I get a warrant?”
Scowling, Blaine hands over the SD card from his camera, with its shots of the golden God-seeking eyes. “I get to keep the images, right? There’s a whole week of work on there.”
“Long as there’s nothing incriminating on it.” She gestures impatiently. “Let me see the camera too.”
He hands over the Nikon, still sulking about the chip. Of course there’s nothing incriminating on it. Ghoulish, maybe the cops would think—they wouldn’t recognize art if it waltzed up and spat in their faces—but hardly criminal. And disrespectful, but respect for what? As un-PC as it might be, cops have their priorities. They know what’s what and care accordingly. This dead man’s true name to them is One Less Drug-Dealing Shithead.
Dixon has studied the camera’s settings and made a note, and she hands it back. She deals with the paperwork of the seized chip, then both she and Blaine are on their feet. She’s so tall that they’re eye to eye. She says, “Got anything else you want to tell me, Mr. Burrows? Now’s the time.”
He doesn’t. He hoists camera bag to shoulder and stalks out.
* * *
Dixon stands looking at the blackberry bushes and the dead man. He has been eased free from his cradle of prickles and laid out on a stretcher, eyes now closed. The coroner has told Dixon how skin-of-the-teeth close they were, that the Lang kid just missed the train. Lost too much blood. “Betcha five minutes sooner, we’d have kept him here in this mortal coil.”
Five minutes.
Dixon bows her head, studying the area around the body. No weapon found, that would be too obvious, but all the proof she’ll need is here somewhere. Between trace evidence and autopsy table, the evidence will point unerringly to the killer: Harrison, a fifty-three-year-old hard-nosed pile of shit, known to police for his temper. His weapon of choice is the butterfly knife, fairly rare in Canada, being illegal, and therefore the perfect signature. It’ll be found on or near him, crudded with the dead man’s DNA. Harrison, Dixon knows, is somewhere in the city. His body will surface in a day or so, stuffed in some back-alley grotto, and both cases will be neatly shut.
Or will they? She grimaces at the unexpected complicatio
n. Five minutes. Who the fuck recruited Harrison, who for all his talk couldn’t leave a man properly dispatched? Those murders he’d claimed ownership of, were they nothing but hot air? Had he ever actually used that fancy knife for anything besides yo-yo tricks to impress his drinking buddies?
The team continues at their tasks, mostly silent now. Clouds have blotted out the sun and a light rain is starting to fall.
“Okay, Dix?” someone asks.
She waves her fingers like the pope. She watches as the body is enclosed in poly, zipped up, hoisted into the back of the removal van. The vehicle’s doors bang shut, and she reflects that the dead man, Andy Lang, is—was—a windbag just like Blaine Burrows. Burrows’s fixation is art, while Andy’s—when he wasn’t busy blowing whistles and ratting out his partners—was forensics. Infrared-this or 3D-that, technology as investigative tool. Trouble is, distracted by magic, young Detective Lang forgot that he’s only human, and that like any human, he bleeds.
“Didn’t I say so,” Dixon tells him as the van begins to roll. “All the high-tech foofaraw in the world won’t be worth a nickel if you come face to face with a real-life bullet.” Or blade, in this case.
The ambulance is gone. Another VPD SUV rolls in and idles. Inside are colleagues, Detectives Khan and Purley. Dixon heads over and stands by the lowered driver’s window. She doesn’t speak right away, but her shrug says it all—things are not good.
Khan in the passenger seat looks like he’s been crying. Purley is grim. Both men are staring at her. Purley says, “What’s happened?”
The SD card in its small exhibit bag, not signed, sealed, or logged, is clutched in Dixon’s fist, fist jammed in pocket. She’s thinking about Andy Lang lying there, possibly alive, while Burrows pulls off his artsy shots. The chip’s time stamps—she’s already confirmed them on her laptop—establish opportunity. The photos themselves—not bad, actually—have told her Lang was indeed alive. She could see it in his eyes. Cognition. And he was looking right at the photographer, like they were engaged in conversation. About what? The weather?
Probably nothing, but it left enough of a doubt to foul her day.
If Burrows wasn’t such a fuckhole, she wouldn’t worry. But he’s complicated, his mind ticking away behind weasel eyes as he babbles about his dead father or some scrapbook project he’s working on. It’s a nervous babble, like verbal thumb-twiddling. What was he thinking about, staring at her, smiling like a third-rate actor? Whatever he had to say, he kept it close to his chest.
Why not share the victim’s last words with the cop who’s questioning him? Because those last words had spelled out loud and clear to Mr. Burrows that not every cop can be trusted, that’s why.
The day is in full swing around Dixon, the port noisy with commerce. Trucks roar by under darkening skies, and the cranes are shifting containers like there’s no tomorrow. She imagines the happy snapper back in his apartment, looking at his phone, wondering, If you can’t trust the law, who can you trust? Sooner or later he’ll make a decision.
Meaning time is of the essence.
She hands Purley a piece of paper, name and address. Blaine Burrows.
“Soon as fucking possible,” she tells him.
Purley takes the piece of paper, looks at Khan, looks at Detective Dixon. The window rolls up and the SUV pulls out. Dixon gets a final glimpse of Khan in the passenger seat. He’s staring back at her, and he looks scared shitless.
And so he should. He’s here on the threshold, after all.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Carleigh Baker is a Cree-Métis/Icelandic writer who lives as a guest on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Essays and The Journey Prize Anthology. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings, was published in 2017.
Kristi Charish is a scientist and writer from Vancouver. She is the author of Owl and the Japanese Circus, about a modern-day “Indiana Jane” who reluctantly navigates the hidden supernatural world; and The Voodoo Killings, about a voodoo practitioner living in Seattle with the ghost of a deceased grunge rocker. Kristi writes about what she loves—adventure-heavy stories featuring strong, savvy female protagonists, pop culture, with the occasional RPG fantasy game thrown in the mix.
Don English’s stories and essays have appeared in Medium, Poetry Is Dead, and the Vancouver Courier. Born and raised in Vancouver, he has spent his life under dark clouds and on rain-slicked streets.
R.M. Greenaway lives in Nelson, British Columbia. Cold Girl, the first in her BC Blues crime series, won the 2014 Unhanged Arthur Ellis Award (Best Unpublished), and went on to be released by Dundurn Press in March 2016. Undertow followed in 2017, Creep in 2018, and Flights & Falls is up next. The series, a character-driven police procedural set in North Vancouver, is ongoing.
Dietrich Kalteis is the award-winning author of Ride the Lightning, The Deadbeat Club, Triggerfish, House of Blazes, and Zero Avenue. Nearly fifty of his short stories have been published internationally, and he lives with his family in West Vancouver.
Sheena Kamal holds an HBA in political science from the University of Toronto, and was awarded a TD Canada Trust scholarship for community leadership and activism around the issue of homelessness. Kamal has also worked as a crime and investigative journalism researcher for the film and television industry—academic knowledge and experience that inspired her debut novel, The Lost Ones. She lives in Vancouver.
Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including I Am Providence and Hexen Sabbath. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Hard Sentences: Crime Fiction Inspired by Alcatraz, Long Island Noir, and many fantasy, horror, and literary venues. He coedited the Locus Award–nominated Japanese mystery/science-fiction anthology Hanzai Japan with Masumi Washington, and the hybrid cocktail recipe/flash fiction anthology Mixed Up with Molly Tanzer.
Linda L. Richards is the award-winning author of fifteen books, including three series of novels featuring strong female protagonists. She is the former publisher of Self-Counsel Press and the founder and publisher of January Magazine. Richards divides her time between Vancouver, Phoenix, and Paso Robles, California.
Nathan Ripley is the pseudonym of Naben Ruthnum. Ripley’s first novel, Find You in the Dark, was published in March 2018. Ruthnum writes fiction and criticism, and Ripley is almost finished with his next thriller.
Robin Spano lives in Lions Bay, British Columbia, with her husband and daughter. She writes the Clare Vengel mystery series, serves on the board of the Lions Bay Arts Council, and spends as much time outdoors as possible. She’s a member of the Green Party and a peaceful activist against climate change.
Timothy Taylor is a Vancouver writer whose first novel was Stanley Park. He’s since published a collection of short fiction, Silent Cruise, and two other novels: Story House and The Blue Light Project, which won the CBC Bookie Award. His latest book, Foodville, is a memoir about his life as a food critic, and his newest novel is The Rule of Stephens.
Yasuko Thanh is the author of the novel Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains, which won the 2016 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; and the collection Floating Like the Dead, winner of the Journey Prize. In 2013 the CBC hailed her as a “writer to watch.” Her work has been translated into three languages. She lives in Victoria with her two children and plays in a punk band in her spare time.
Sam Wiebe is the author of the Vancouver crime novels Last of the Independents, Invisible Dead, and Cut You Down. His work has won an Arthur Ellis Award and the Kobo Emerging Writers Prize, and he was the 2016 Vancouver Public Library Writer in Residence. His short fiction has appeared in ThugLit, Spinetingler, and subTerrain, among other places.
S.G. Wong, an Arthur Ellis Award finalist and Whistler Independent Book Award nominee, writes the Lola Starke series and Crescent City short stories: hard-boiled detective tales set in an alternate-history 1930s-era “Chinese LA,” replete with ghosts and mag
ic. She speaks four languages, usually only curses in one of them, and can often be found staring out the window in between frenzied bouts of typing.
Acknowledgments
To the contributors—thanks for your artistry and professionalism. To Ibrahim Ahmad and Johnny Temple at Akashic Books, for the chance to put this collection together. And to Eden Robinson, Emmet Matheson, John McFetridge, Hiromi Goto, Ivan E. Coyote, Jim Christy, Mercedes Eng, Steffi Grey, Shay Wilson, Lisa Jean Helps, Carly Reemeyer, the Wiebe family, Mel Yap, Peter Rozovsky, Charles Demers, Aaron Chapman, Naben Ruthnum, William Deverell, and my agent Chris Bucci at the McDermid Agency. It would have been impossible to put this together without your help, and a lot less fun.
BONUS MATERIAL
Excerpt from USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series
Also available in the Akashic Noir Series
Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition
INTRODUCTION
WRITERS ON THE RUN
From USA NOIR: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, edited by Johnny Temple
In my early years as a book publisher, I got a call one Saturday from one of our authors asking me to drop by his place for “a smoke.” I politely declined as I had a full day planned. “But Johnny,” the author persisted, “I have some really good smoke.” My curiosity piqued, I swung by, but was a bit perplexed to be greeted with suspicion at the author’s door by an unhinged whore and her near-nude john. The author rumbled over and ushered me in, promptly sitting me down on a smelly couch and assuring the others I wasn’t a problem. Moments later, the john produced a crack pipe to resume the party I had evidently interrupted. This wasn’t quite the smoke I’d envisaged, so I gracefully excused myself after a few (sober) minutes. I scurried home pondering the author’s notion that it was somehow appropriate to invite his publisher to a crack party.
It may not have been appropriate, but it sure was noir.
From the start, the heart and soul of Akashic Books has been dark, provocative, well-crafted tales from the disenfranchised. I learned early on that writings from outside the mainstream almost necessarily coincide with a mood and spirit of noir, and are composed by authors whose life circumstances often place them in environs vulnerable to crime.
