Your Friendly Neighborhood Criminal

by Michael Van Rooy

  “Drop the cane, too.”

  “I need it to walk.”

  I shrugged; time to be a bad guy. “If you don’t drop the fucking cane, I assure you you’ll never walk anywhere again. If I need you to walk, I’ll give it back. Drop the cane.”

  He dropped it and I risked glancing at the object he’d dropped. It was a short-barrelled cop’s flashlight; good for beating someone’s head in or shining light. Either/or.

  “We need to talk.”

  “Fuck you.”

  He said it mildly and without passion, and his eyes glanced all around the parking lot looking for someone to help him. But there was no one. I tried the carrot. “I’ll give you a thousand dollars.”

  “What?”

  “A thousand dollars for you to talk to me, right now.”

  “Cash?” He didn’t trust me.

  “Cash.”

  “That’s not a lot.”

  That was bullshit on his part. A grand was a lot of money to a penny-ante bad guy, so I showed him the wad of money I’d pulled out of Samantha’s yard. “A grand. Half in US funds, half in Canadian. Nothing bigger than a twenty. Nothing marked and nothing funny.”

  He looked at it and swallowed. “What do you want to know about?”

  “Smiley. What he’s doing right now.”

  His face soured and then he nodded and reached for his cane without asking. Had I been a little less trusting I would have shot him but he never even realized that.

  “Okay. But not for a grand.” And now, the bargaining. “I want two grand.”

  If I paid him that I’d only have about eight hundred left. Which really didn’t matter to me, because if I ran low I could always find more. There’s too much money in the world, they print more every day, and that was always a comfort to me when I thought of my eventual old age.

  “Sure. Give me the keys, I’ll drive. We’ll go someplace quiet.”

  He did and I dropped my bags in the tiny luggage area behind the seats. Then I drove us just out of town heading west to the Assiniboia Downs race track, which was closed for the season. When we were in the parking lot I gave him the money. He licked his lips, and I could see anger and sneakiness at war in his eyes.

  “And the gun… I want the gun… I don’t trust you. If I’m holding the gun, that means you don’t have any plans to turn on me.”

  So I handed him the gun and sat there, turned in the seat to face him with my right hand on the steering wheel and my left in my jacket pocket. The hockey player checked that the chamber was loaded, although it was hard to do with only one hand. Then he rested it on his knee and pointed it at the centre of my stomach. I inhaled involuntarily.

  He gloated, “You dumb fuck.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You cockless bastard.” He was enjoying this.

  “Sure.”

  “You ignorant, spineless freak.”

  “Sure. Now about Smiley …”

  “I’m not telling you anything … after what you did to me I’m gonna pop a cap in you. I’m gonna cash you out.”

  Rappers. Love their influence and deep reach into culture. “Okay. You’ve got me. Why don’t you tell me about Smiley first, you know, to torment me with all the knowledge you have. Show me you’re way ahead of me.”

  “I’m just going to kill you …”

  This was getting boring. “No, you’re not.”

  He looked a little confused, “I’m not?”

  “Right. Because of this …” I pulled my hand out of my coat pocket and showed him the hand grenade I was holding. “See? No pin. You shoot me and the bomb goes boom.”

  He still looked puzzled so I went on, “… and I’m wearing a bulletproof vest, so the gun won’t work.”

  The hockey player’s hand twitched a little and I went on, “… and if you try to point it at my face I’ll drop the grenade anyway and take my chances. Bet ya everything you own, will own, and have owned, that I can move faster than you can. Considering you’re in an assortment of casts.”

  Very carefully he put the gun on my calf and withdrew his hand while smiling like a beaten dog. When his hand was in his lap I let go of the steering wheel and reached under my left arm.

  “Hey!”

  The Cold Steel knife slid out of its sheath easily and I brought it up and down fast. His scream filled the empty parking lot as the knife punched through the meat of his hand and pinned his left hand through the back of his hand to his left thigh. There was surprisingly little blood and I waited a moment before pulling the knife out. I wiped it carefully on the lapel of his leather jacket and put it away before picking up the pistol. When he stopped screaming I shook my head: “Now, don’t do it again.”

  “You bastard …”

  “Shut. Up.” He shut up and I went on. “Now talk to me about Smiley.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Or I’ll hurt you some more. And take the money back. And then you’ll talk to me anyway.”

  He swore at me for awhile and then finally thought it through and decided to talk.

  #48

  The hockey player’s story.

  “Okay. Okay. Smiley tracked me down at the hospital and told me that he was taking over from Sam.”

  “Was this before or after Sam was killed?”

  He paused for a second and touched the tip of his tongue to his upper lip. “After.”

  “Bullshit. Try again.”

  He looked at me and opened and closed his mouth, “How did you …?”

  “Simple. He wouldn’t kill Sam until he had everything set up.”

  “Oh. It was before. He just showed in my hospital room before I was released and gave me some money …”

  The hockey player froze for a second while he tried to figure out whether to lie about the money on the plus side or on the minus.

  “Don’t bother lying. Just go on.”

  “… anyhow he gave me $5000 cash and told me Sam was out and he was in. Then he said he could either shoot me in the face or I could work with him, then he showed me a gun and told me to choose. So I made my choice.”

  “Fine. What did he want you to do?”

  The hockey player tried to shrug but he’d forgotten about his injuries and screamed briefly before starting to whimper. At his insistence I opened the bottle of Tylenol 3’s he had in his jacket pocket. He took six dry and choked them down with difficulty. As I watched, his pupils became really big and he started talking faster and faster.

  “The same thing as before, nothing changed. I was going to boss the Saint Boniface house, he was going to set up new routes to the States, and everyone would make a mint.”

  The hockey player was stoned and maybe in shock, too, from the knife in the thigh. He took more pills and I waited for them to kick in before gesturing for him to continue. “What kind of route?”

  “He was talking about a new one in the eastern corner of the province. Run by some do-gooders.”

  I didn’t want to ask any more questions. He might put something together and then contact Smiley.

  “Okay, that’s it then.”

  The hockey player had big eyes. “I won’t talk to anyone.”

  Right. Once a guy started to betray people, it was hard to stop. Something to do with a self-fulfilling prophecy about how bad and worthless they were maybe, or that’s what some cops thought. Most cons just had the opinion that you never trusted a rat, never, ever, not once you found out what they were. And that was why the prisons had things like protective custody, jail within jail, to keep the rats from getting shanked, burned, or turned. Shanked meaning stabbed, burned meaning Molotov cocktail, and turned meaning rape and prostitution.

  “I know, man. You won’t talk to anyone. You won’t say a word.”

  He looked at me with hope and fear and I thought about Smiley and my booby-trapped house. And I thought about the right decision, which would be to kill the hockey player and dump his body in the river with a couple of hundred kilos of iron weights wired in useful spots and
some punctures to vent the gas build-up. And then I thought about how hard it would be if Smiley knew that I knew about the route he had inherited.

  “Yeah. Ask anyone. I know how to keep my mouth shut.”

  I laughed hard at that and used the barrel of the pistol to shatter his lower jaw into pebbles.

  I dumped the hockey player out on the sidewalk by the Children’s Emergency door of the Health Sciences Centre on William Street. I wasn’t a complete prick, though; I left the two grand in his wallet just to keep him honest and focused on his end of the deal. Five minutes later I sprayed the inside of his car down with a bottle of industrial cleaner I picked up at a 7-11 and left it parked, unlocked, in a handicapped spot in front of a restaurant. From whence it would soon be towed away to the nearest impound lot to further screw up any kind of forensics. With that done I walked away.

  The next morning, after another night in another cheap hotel, I woke up with a vague disquiet in the back of my mind. After half an hour I remembered that this was the earliest day that the Province of British Columbia might be sending Smiley his birth certificate. That thought made me feel a little guilty and also rekindled my rage, which stayed with me as I ate a very toxic breakfast at the diner attached to the hotel. Then I took a cab to the Cabelas sporting goods store in St. James and bought an olive green duffle bag, a cheap compass, and a Beeman break-open air rifle with an already installed 4x32 power scope. Since it fired tiny 4.5-millimetre pellets at speeds under 150 metres per second I didn’t need a firearms licence, it went into a cheap plastic gun case which also held a tin of 500 lead pellets. As an afterthought I also bought a ridiculously expensive sleeping bag, just in case I had to make a night of it. From that store I went to a Government of Canada office to buy a full-sized 1:50,000-scale map of the border. As I did so the guy behind the counter joked, “Smuggling, huh?”

  “Yep. Is that illegal?”

  “I don’t think so, not anymore. Laws change every day.”

  I remembered a shirt a friend had bought out of the back of a National Lampoon magazine years ago. It had a drawing of a clipper ship crewed by topless women and surrounded by floating bales of grass and the caption read, “Smuggling! It’s more than a job, it’s an adventure!” I told the counter guy that and we both laughed.

  Outside I looked the map over. It was detailed enough to show houses and barns in some locations and it was recent, only two years old. Then I was back at another downtown hotel for some packing. With careful work I managed to empty both bags and store everything I’d been carrying in the new bag. And those bags, which someone might be remembering if I was unlucky, went into the garbage bin behind the hotel. With that done I unpacked the sleeping bag and glared at it. It had cost over $180 with tax and theoretically it was rated as good to down to minus thirty degrees. I had cheated and bought some chemical heaters as well, the kind you twist to activate and then they keep your hands warm for an hour or two. Mostly I had bought those because I did not trust the sleeping bag.

  Also they were cool.

  When it was all I packed away I ordered some fast food chicken and went to sleep while watching another documentary, this one about skyscrapers in Singapore.

  #49

  It’s an important rule, if you want to be a criminal: don’t be one at night; it’s too obvious. That was a rule I broke a lot. However, don’t be one at night if you can avoid it. Instead do as I do and commit your felonies at ten in the morning. Which theory forced me into the driver’s seat of a stolen Jeep Cherokee parked across the street from the Saint Boniface drug house Smiley had probably inherited from the dead Sam at ten in the morning. My luggage was all back at the hotel, except for the fully loaded SKS carbine, which sat on the floor of the truck, covered by a copy of the Winnipeg Sun. I waited for a school bus to pass and then pressed the electronic window controls, lowering the passenger’s side window, and pointed the carbine out, braced with my gloved hand around the top of the receiver to absorb the kick.

  Boom!

  First shot through the front door but way high. I adjusted and fired three more shots. Then two through the small window on the right and four more through the one on the left.

  And then I drove away as the neighbours, cell phones in hand, were still rushing out and phoning 911 as fast as they could.

  When the cops arrived they’d go through the house automatically to check it out and they’d be sure to find something incriminating. Drugs or weapons or something else. That would give Smiley a couple of extra headaches and, maybe, result in the arrest of some of his new crew. Either that or they’d run off and hide somewhere quiet.

  I could dream, right?

  The Jeep I left in a side street two blocks away with the gun back under the newspaper.

  As for me, I took a bus back to the hotel to collect my things and went to visit Marie.

  When I climbed off the bus near Marie’s house I made a quick call and she answered on the first ring. “Marie? This is Monty. How are things?”

  “Things are great. Just great.”

  There was a long pause and then I asked how her work was going.

  “The work is going great.”

  She didn’t sound right. She didn’t ask how Claire was. She didn’t ask about Fred. She didn’t want to tell me in detail about what was happening.

  Finally she said reluctantly, “Maybe you should go out to the cabin. See how Don and Al are getting along.”

  I said sure and there was another long pause and then I said good-bye and hung up. Two minutes later I was outside her house in the back alley with the Bionic Ear pointed at her kitchen window. The blinds and curtains all served to dampen the sound, but I could hear the conversation fairly well because it practically involved screaming. In French. First Marie and then Eloise. After a few moments I heard the name Smiley repeated twice and then a new voice spoke quite calmly, this one a cultured, somewhat upper-class English male voice. “I don’t understand. Why can’t you tell your friend about that animal?”

  Marie spoke and I could barely hear her, “Because he’ll kill Don and Al.”

  “So you’ll let him walk into a …”

  The voices became more indistinct as they left the room but that was fine with me. I could fill in the last word myself and it was “trap.”

  With option number one cancelled I went downtown and walked two blocks to a drop-in centre for maladjusted teens, where I borrowed a computer and wrote Claire and told her that I loved her.

  When I was done I typed the word love and realized how ineffective it looked. There were all kinds of love: a man loves a cigar, a woman loves her shoes, a dog loves his bone, the politician loves to argue, and a barfly loves to fight. There was Agape and Eros, spirit and sex. There was the Christian god who loved man so much he sacrificed his only begotten son and there was the Indian Shiva who loved the dance. And then there were the other kinds of love …

  I had to leave. Another block away was a food store cunningly hidden in the basement of the Hudson’s Bay. After stocking up on bottled water, crackers, corned beef, batteries, and toilet paper, I was ready to party. As a final treat I ate a big meal of steak and eggs at a nearby hotel and then started looking for a new ride, which I found down towards the river where the big, expensive condominiums grew like mushrooms in shit. Most of the inhabitants were at work, earning the lucre to pay for their condos, and I slipped into the garages easily, waiting for the drivers to leave and then entering as the doors shut. In the third garage I found what I was looking for on the second level down, where a rack of motorcycles were arrayed, wrapped in tarps and waiting for better weather. And all of them racked neatly far away from the nearest security camera.

  I could pick and choose and finally selected a BMW K1200S bike, a big monster with legs, enough to outrun most cops if I had to do so. The bike could pull 275 kph on a good road. BMW made great bikes, and the one I picked had a multigear transmission like a car, not the chain assembly that most bikes had. That meant that the bike
was a lot quieter than normal bikes. It was silver in colour with all sorts of options, most of which I was uninterested in, but it also had an antitheft device that puzzled me for six minutes and a huge pannier in the back which was locked and took me eight seconds to open.

  Inside the pannier the owner had thankfully left a helmet (kind of him or her), a map of Manitoba, and a spare set of keys, because people are stupid like that sometimes. With the tarp tucked away I fired the beast up and backed out slowly. The nineteen-litre gas tank was almost empty but there was enough to take me away from downtown if I could make it out of the garage.

  So I parked the bike and broke into the next car. It was easy enough because the owner had forgotten to close the passenger’s window completely and had left the access card tucked into the sun visor, so I borrowed that, closed the window, locked the door, and left. Five minutes later I pulled up to a decrepit gas station in Saint Boniface, an older one not owned by any of the big companies. A few minutes later the tank was full and I was gone, blowing down the highway with the duffle bag strapped across the back of the bike and the helmet firmly in place over my face.

  #50

  Twice on my way I stopped at rest stops and examined my map. On the reserve, north of the fishing camp (as far as I could tell), was an access road that led to a burned-out homestead, which was my target. From there it was about three klicks to the camp. When I reached the homestead I found the burned-out ruins of a farmhouse and two barns, with the ground packed flat by tires and feet over the years. As I drove through the yard I saw lots of empty beer cans, used condoms, and cigarette butts, the signs of young love. I passed a pair of underwear knotted together, a pair of Fruit of the Loom Y-fronts, very small, and a battered pair of lavender panties in size extra large, both baked into the mud.

  I tried not to think too much about whatever story they told.