A Criminal to Remember (A Monty Haaviko Thriller)

by Van Rooy, Michael

  After awhile my eyes went into focus and I could see a wooden wall across the way from me. There were words written in flowing script a foot high, words in gold-coloured paint in a language I didn’t understand. It looked like Arabic but I wasn’t sure. Under the artistry were words in old-style English calligraphy about the same size:

  “In the narrow passage there will be no brother, no friend.”

  Then the rest of the room slid into my perception. It was over thirty feet long and narrow, about ten feet, with a fifteen-foot-high ceiling. Holding the ceiling in place were multiple six by six inch square wooden posts running from the floor to the ceiling. Everything I could see was wooden, walls made up of planks and panels, and there was dust everywhere. And there were strong smells, all sorts of them, chemicals and moist dirt and a kind of musk and animal smell. Acid smells and oil smells and electrical smells. Up against the far wall were low piles of something dark and hairy. My eyes focussed more and I saw that the floor was made of splintered old wooden planks and that the light was dim and seemed natural.

  The best time to escape from any situation is right after you’re captured. That’s when you’re the most alert and the least damaged. That’s what the rules say, but I looked above me to check the situation and sighed. It’s hard to escape when your hands are tied together with chains and ropes and are hung from an electric winch so your toes just barely touch the floor. It’s also hard to escape when your ribs are bruised and probably broken. I looked down to check my chest out and found a dinner-plate-sized bruise, purple and angry, in the middle.

  I figured I was probably concussed and in shock and I thought about that and listened to sounds of echoes and the hum of electrics and then I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

  That’s another rule of bad guys: if you can’t do anything else, sleep and recover energy. And with practice you can sleep standing up, although I do not recommend it.

  #48

  The Shy Man woke me up by throwing a bucket of cold water on me and singing out, “Here I come with a sharp knife and a clear conscience!”

  I didn’t react and he took another rag and dried my face. “I have to move you. If I leave you like this for too long your shoulders will separate and that’s bad. But I don’t want to have any shit from you either. For that reason I will be putting these ear muffs on.”

  He held them in front of me and they were big state-of-the-art muffs used by shooters. “And I will be covering your eyes with duct tape as well. You will move in the direction I indicate and stop when I tap you. If you fail I will cut you up a very great deal. Do you understand?”

  “Yesh.” I tried to act groggier than I felt and he put the muffs on, sealed my eyes and stuffed a gag into my mouth before lowering me to the ground with the engine. When I was unhooked he let me get to my feet at my own speed and then pushed me to the side until I hit one of the posts.

  I had been in some pretty bad situations before but I had never felt more alone and helpless.

  With more force he made me turn around until the post was at my back and raise my hands. Something cold went around my chest and was tightened. Then something around my waist and knees and ankles. Finally my hands were brought down and separated.

  I couldn’t feel either of them and he massaged them until I screamed and then forced them around the back of the post where something else cold went onto my wrists and secured them.

  Then the Shy Man went away and I was alone in the absolute dark of my very own skull.

  And I guess time passed.

  Most of my eyebrows left when the Shy Man tore the tape off my eyes and I screamed into my gag. In front of me the man took a clunky-looking tape recorder from his jacket pocket, examined it and put it carefully in a corner out of my view. Then he cut my gag free and pulled the muffs from my ears and I took a deep breath and coughed.

  The noise awoke a young man bound with broad strips of blue fibre tape over a railing in front of me. His arms and legs looked lumpy and I realized they had been broken. I could only imagine the amount of pain he was in.

  I stared at the young man. He wore a blue uniform and his hat was on the floor. He still had his gun in his holster and he began to yell into another piece of tape across his mouth.

  From where I was I could see lettering on the wall, industrial script that read “Lots A-G, mink and fox—commercial farm.” Then I started to recognize some of the smells as the musky, dusty smells of furs, but old ones.

  Between me and the cop a ladder led down onto a dim warehouse floor and we seemed to be in a loft overlooking everything. From where I was I could see that the dim light was coming through dusty narrow windows in the walls and ceilings. Down on the warehouse floor was a long, battered station wagon with a sign on the side that read “Antiques and Marvels.”

  The name resonated in my head. I remembered Alex and Claire at the Red River midway walking over to a booth with that sign above it. And in the booth had been the man who had shot me, wearing a smile and gesturing towards a tabletop loaded with expensive crap and antique china.

  I looked down and saw that I had a chain with a big padlock around my chest and the same around my waist, knees and ankles.

  The ladder shook and the Shy Man came up. He was wearing a transparent plastic raincoat and nothing else and carrying a roll of plastic sheet and the black glass knife tied in a bundle on his shoulder.

  Silently he began to unroll the plastic under the cop and then he pulled the knife out and checked the blade by cutting an idle gouge in the cop’s side.

  Then he looked at me and repeated the line, “And here I come with a sharp knife and a clear conscience.”

  I said, “Wait …”

  But he ignored me and took the cop apart.

  When he was finished the cop was still breathing intermittently, and the Shy Man had lost his raincoat and the knife had broken somewhere. He got to his feet breathing hard and pulled the cop’s pistol and examined it with a child’s wonder. The Shy Man was covered in dried and fresh blood, and other substances and flecks of meat hung in his hair.

  His eyes were expressionless as he took his glasses off and licked the lenses clean.

  Then he shot the cop in the back of his head.

  The noise echoed as he re-holstered the weapon on the corpse and climbed back down the ladder.

  He left me with the body until it got dark outside. Then he came back from behind me and held a new black glass knife in front of my eyes. “Obsidian is a fascinating material. Volcanic glass and capable of holding an incredible edge. Some surgeon even performed an appendectomy with one. A little brittle perhaps but still …”

  He held a plastic bottle in front of me. “Thirsty.”

  “Yesh.”

  “Well. I want you to read out a message for your wife into a tape recorder. Then you can drink.”

  “Fuck you.”

  His face became still. “What?”

  “Fuck you.”

  He lost it and started to hit me. But he wasn’t that strong and he never used the knife. He also hit me most of the time in the stomach, almost never in the face.

  But I never said a word. I did not cooperate. I didn’t give him any words he could string together on a tape to make a message to Claire.

  I gave him nothing and I took the beating and in a way I kind of enjoyed it.

  He was punishing me for getting caught.

  So I took the beating and I laughed and that made him hit me harder.

  Finally I gasped, “My wife. Why my wife?”

  He screamed, “SHE’S MINE NOW!” Like a switch he calmed down. “At the fair, she picked my mother’s favourite china pattern. It shows great taste and talent. It was a sign from God.”

  He nodded solemnly and I laughed at him for real. Which made him lose his patience and start to hit me again. Eventually I became unconscious.

  My mind drifted in shock. I went back to the first time I had ever been arrested, the cop looking at me from a great distance. His
face melted until he became the young guy the Shy Man had taken apart.

  And he said, very slowly, “Everything not compulsory is banned. Everything not banned is compulsory.”

  He squeezed my testicles and twisted and the pain spiked right past where I should have passed out but there are limits to pain.

  The endorphins produced by the brain define those limits. Those wonderful drugs that are oh so close to opium, to heroin, to codeine, to all my old and true friends.

  And I enjoyed those too.

  I travelled to a steak dinner with Smiley outside Kansas City. A dinner neither of us planned on paying for because we were going to rob the place. A dinner served in the velvet room by a naked forty-year-old woman wearing high heels and stockings that tied into dents beneath the line of her pubis.

  I had come back to the restaurant years after the diamond job and I had come because I remembered the rich men in the place and the way they paid in cash and wore good jewellery. I had told Smiley and he had agreed.

  He always agreed.

  In my memories Smiley was saying words I had never heard.

  “And then of course there is my friend who shot himself in the head to avoid a tequila hangover.”

  “You made that up!”

  “Probably.”

  And the woman brought us hundred-year-old brandy in snifters a foot across. And you could cut the steak with the edge of your spoon. And the smell of the woman was not perfume. And the weight in my pocket was the most expensive pistol I’d ever stolen, a $5,000 Korth-Waffen revolver.

  And I knew someone was going to die that night. And I was right.

  I drifted in and out of consciousness and I laughed when I could and the Shy Man grunted and screamed and started to use the tip of his knife to cut me but that was nothing.

  I remembered a beating by cousins with bicycle chains and the pain of a meth explosion. I remembered a cop shooting me in the face and the powder blinding me. And I remembered a girl saying, “Let’s not ruin our special friendship …”

  The first dinner with Claire after months of chasing her.

  “I have severe mental problems dealing with garnish. You know, this little sprig of parsley that looks so lonely sitting on the plate next to the hamburger. What’s the point? It’s too damn small to have any nutritional value. And it looks so forlorn sitting there next to the grease so it can’t be there for visual reasons. Just one of those things God didn’t mean for us to understand.”

  Claire waited until I was finished, then she reached over, took the parsley and chewed it up. “It freshens your breath, you asshole.”

  “Ah. That was my second guess.”

  The Shy Man had worked himself until his mouth foamed and he spat as he grunted and kicked and swung. The pain was a fucking joke.

  It was a friend.

  And inside the pain I remembered being alive and I loved that and smiled and that made the Shy Man even angrier.

  I used to have a girlfriend who believed, really believed in magic. She used to make love and then crouch over me and whisper, “To bind Fenris the gods spoke to the dwarves and told them to make the chain Gleipnir from six things: the noise of the footfall of a cat, the beards of women, the spittle of birds, the breath of fishes, the nerves of bears and the roots of stones.”

  Now I understand she was trying to hold me. At the time I thought she was nuts, a great lay but nuts.

  She believed in magic though and whether I did or didn’t was unimportant.

  The Shy Man finally stopped like his batteries had run down.

  #49

  I woke up still chained to the post. The Shy Man was painting my cuts with iodine and the pain had brought me round.

  “I had a dream last night. I have it every night. I was looking at a pencil drawing on a museum wall. It reads for me from right to left.”

  He had recovered his voice and had cleaned up. He was methodical in his motions but I kept my mouth shut and he went on.

  “First it is a recumbent women, her face blocked by her left elbow, hand behind her neck. Her right hand is on her belly, her left knee blocks her sex and her right leg is straight. Her breasts are full with erect nipples.”

  The smell of the iodine mixed with the reek of my waste, as my bowels and bladder had cut loose at some point. He ignored that and kept talking as though we were having a conversation.

  “Her legs end in a mess. From the mess is a falling female dropping back. She uses her left hand to unbutton her shirt and her right to throw away her tie. She has pants on and a belt. Her hair is straight and falling forward and it shades her face. Her legs end in a mess.”

  There was a rhythm to the way the little fuck was talking. It was poetry.

  “From the mess stands a third woman. She faces me with braced legs and a policeman’s uniform and hat. No jacket. In her hands is a revolver in a two-handed grip pointing at me. Her hair hangs free in wisps and frames a perfectly blank face. She has just killed me.”

  He looked up at me. “What do you think it means?”

  My voice was rusty. “That you’re a fucking loon.”

  The accusation didn’t bother him. “I prefer to think of it as a warning. An anti-entropic pulse message sent winging down the wires from the future me to this me. It’s telling me what to look out for.”

  When he was done he just stared at me, confused. “Actually I don’t know why I told you that.”

  Then he left and I was alone again.

  The math in my head was relentless. Without food I would die in roughly a month, and it would probably take longer. I would suffer from weakness, confusion, irritability and so on and finally hallucinations, convulsions and so on. Without water I would die in a couple of days, probably less, and I would suffer from exhaustion and rage and finally slide into shock.

  Or I could bite through my tongue and bleed to death in about five minutes. That was my last card though. My version of “You can’t fire me, I quit!” And I didn’t want to do it unless I had too.

  In truth death takes care of itself.

  What I wanted was one clean shot at my friend with the knife.

  If I died getting that shot that was just fine. Indeed it struck me as being a pretty fair trade.

  He came back with a very old Polaroid camera and some flat packs of film still sealed in plastic.

  “Mr. Montgomery Haaviko. Are you wondering how I found you?” I shook my head but he kept talking. “I simply called your assistant Dean and claimed to be a photographer and he told me when and where you would be. It was that easy.”

  I tried to wiggle but the chains were too tight, stainless steel does not give.

  “I hate to lie so I am going to take your photograph.”

  His smile was bright.

  “And are you wondering about Officer Morgan?” I shook my head again but he still ignored me. “I knew the police were watching you and your wife and I needed you so I gave them something to worry about. It was easy. I found a cop car and took my LeMat with one teak round and used it on the driver through the window. Then I switched to the revolver barrel and shot the other one and then cut her up some. So very simple.”

  The Shy Man stared thoughtfully into the distance. “So very easy to distract the great unwashed. If you know how. So easy to get them to react emotionally.”

  He loaded the Polaroid and pointed it at me. “So now I’m going to send these to your wife and see if she’d like to come have our date.”

  I shook my head and the Shy Man was amused. “You don’t think she’ll come?”

  The camera flashed over and over again.

  “I think she’ll come. She loves you very much and would do anything to save you. And if she doesn’t come then she’s a bad woman and deserves to be punished.”

  #50

  Claire came.

  The Shy Man explained how he had sent the pictures to Claire’s work along with a new cell phone so he could give her instructions.

  He had thought it all through
. He knew the cops could track a cell by triangulating the receiving towers. And he explained how he would make Claire disrobe at one point and change in a hotel room into clothes he had provided while he watched her through the phone’s camera. That way she could bring no weapons.

  He knew about the cops watching our place. And he knew that everyone in the city was on edge looking for the cop killer and the kidnapped cop, and he relied on that fear and tension to eventually make everyone tired. Because then they’d start to make mistakes.

  No one can be alert all the time.

  I stared at him when he said he knew about the cops, and he shook his head violently. “Do you think I am some ass? Some impatient child? I always watch very, very carefully. And I never act until I am sure. It wouldn’t be honourable. But now I know she loves me! And I love her because I am a gentleman.”

  Fucking loon.

  Sometime on the second day I could hear the elevator start up on the floor of the warehouse and then Claire came into my view. Her hands were held in front of her, linked with heavy iron manacles that looked like more antiques.

  She was wearing a white silk dress with brocade across her breasts and on her neck.

  Behind her was the Shy Man in his black wool suit with the LeMat in one hand and the obsidian knife in the other.

  His eyes were dilated as Claire stepped forward and kissed me.

  “Hey!” The Shy Man was outraged.

  In the kiss Claire pushed a square of metal into my mouth. It took a second before my numb and swollen tongue recognized it. A double-sided razor blade, a throwing star for the poor.

  Good girl.

  She was crying as the Shy Man pulled her back and hit her in the back of the head with the heavy barrel of the revolver. My wife wobbled and the Shy Man wrenched her arms up and attached them to a rusty iron hook hanging from an engine on the ceiling beam near the wall ten feet away from me.

  Then he turned the engine on until Claire was on her tiptoes.

  He turned to me and took my manacles off and re-fixed my hands in front of me. Since the chains were still on I could do nothing. The manacle looked like hers, heavy, iron and square. He had fixed a second engine above me and he looped the manacle through that and undid my chains, one-two-three-four.