The Weight of Stones

by C. B. Forrest

  “My dad was a good man, it’s true,” he said. “He was just never comfortable as a family man. But then neither was I. You see things a little clearer as you get older. I don’t hold anything against him. He was just a jackass like me trying to make it through the best he could, putting one foot in front of the other. He got up every day, though, and got back in the game.”

  With that he raised his glass in a toast and downed it. Jessie shook her head. “Fuck, you’re a box of giggles, aren’t you? Gavin said you could be pretty intense.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I never should have said that about fathers. You’re right, I don’t know what it’s like not to have a father.”

  “Apology accepted,” she said.

  “So what about your mom?” he said and did not want to reveal the fact he had information on her background, the social workers, the involvement of an aunt.

  “She’s a loser,” she said. “Useless. End of story.” She took a drink and said, “Were your parents proud of you being a cop?”

  “I don’t know about that. My dad was a miner, and he wanted me to be a miner. Where I grew up, the boys were miners, and the girls were miner’s wives. I took off for the city and joined the force. My dad and I never really talked too much after I moved away. We had less and less in common.”

  “What did your mother think?”

  “I broke her heart, moving away like that,” he said. “But I think she was proud. She’d tell everybody back home about where I was working, show them clippings from the Sun that I’d send her.”

  McKelvey finished his drink and thought about another. He knew without a doubt that Duguay or some of his guys would make a run for him. He had known that the moment he brought the gun out, the moment everything turned sideways, that they would make a play for him. The thing was to get a step ahead. He and the girl would leave at first light, and if they made good and steady time, they would be on Manitoulin Island by late afternoon. A call to Hattie with the details. She could put a cruiser on his house. And the dog. Jesus. He’d forgotten about the dog. He’d call Seeburger’s daughter again, for the fifth or sixth time, and leave another message. He was beginning to see the truth, that Seeburger wasn’t coming home again, and the daughter was long gone. Seeburger’s last laugh from his deathbed. Well played, old man.

  “Help yourself to another if you want,” he said, and indicated the bottle. “I think I forgot to feed the dog. The owner gave me a little food, but it ran out. Do you know anything about dogs?”

  Jessie poured herself a drink and took another long swallow.

  “We had some dogs at my aunt’s place,” she said. “Retrievers and labs mostly. What have you been feeding him?”

  “I gave him some toast this morning, that’s about it.”

  “Toast?”

  She looked at him with a curled lip, the look of disdain that only a teenage girl can muster. McKelvey shrugged. He got up, moved to the fridge and held the door open. He read out the contents. “Some eggs, cheese, an onion, half a loaf of bread, olives, yogurt...”

  “Do you have any canned tuna?” she said.

  He went to the cupboard, rummaged a moment and pulled out a can of the budget tuna they sold for a dollar at the grocery store. He got the can opener out.

  “Dogs like tuna?”

  “They’ll pretty much eat their own shit, but yeah, they like tuna. It’s good for their coat.”

  “This dog’s a purebred or something. I can’t believe how quiet he is. Starving like that. It must have been the other dogs that howled all night. This guy is as quiet as a mouse. I almost like him.”

  McKelvey dug the chunks of dark grey tuna from the can and mixed it into a bowl. He set the bowl on the floor, and Rudolph walked over, tail wagging. He sniffed the food then sat there. He looked at the bowl, then he looked at McKelvey.

  “He’s well-trained,” Jessie said. “He’s waiting for you to give him the okay.”

  “Eat up,” McKelvey said, and snapped his fingers. He motioned to the bowl, and the dog finally moved to it, leaned in and began to eat, tentative. The bowl was clean in less than a minute. Rudolph licked his chops, turned and sat beside the table.

  The girl went to fill her glass a third time, but McKelvey sat down and took the bottle from her hand before she could pour more than two fingers’ worth in her glass. He emptied the bottle into his glass and took a mouthful. It burned, and it was good, crawling in a slow warmth from his stomach to his limbs, spreading the false sense of ease which had steered humanity through shit storms for two thousand years. He needed it, something to help bring him back down. His mind was moving too fast, his body still tensed from the fight at the club.

  “Let me see that,” Jessie said, as though reading his mind. She leaned across the table and touched his cheek where the bouncer had struck him with a hard right. He winced when she touched it, pulled away. It hurt more now that he was sitting, the adrenaline ebbing.

  “It’s all right,” he said. It felt as though he’d taken a sledgehammer to the cheek.

  “Gerry was a boxer,” she said. “You’re lucky he didn’t get hold of you. I saw him beat a guy pretty bad one night out behind the club. Some rich asshole who thought he could get a blowjob for the price of a table dance.”

  “I believe it. He has a good jab,” he said. And he thought, one more like that, and I would have had to shoot him.

  She looked at him with her strong eyes. The eyes, he thought, of an old soul. She was such a pretty girl, so pretty in such a natural way, that he could see what she would like when she finished growing up, the woman she would become at thirty or forty. If she let herself get that far.

  “Have you ever shot anyone?” she asked.

  “I’ve shot at someone. And had someone shoot at me.

  Missed on all counts.”

  “I’ve seen things,” she said. And that was it.

  He had a drink, and he watched her. She was gone somewhere, looking into her glass, suddenly morose. Then she began to cry, and her shoulders were heaving. He moved a hand across the table to touch her hand, but it wasn’t enough. He got up, went around to her, crouched beside her chair and put an arm around her. She allowed it for a moment, then just as quickly pulled herself up, wiping the wet makeup away with the sides of her thumbs, drawing back into herself. Then she sprang from the chair like a cat. She was halfway to the door when McKelvey caught up to her and got a hand on the loose bulk of his sweater. He stopped her and held her shoulders. He looked into her eyes and held her there.

  “I told you,” he said, drawing some air, “I’m too old to run after you. Now what’s the problem? Was the grilled cheese really that bad?”

  Jessie almost laughed, but she held it back. Then she was crying again. “What am I supposed to do now?” she said. “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “You’re hanging around a very dangerous man. Pierre Duguay is not a nice guy. He was involved in Gavin’s death. You must know that much.”

  “Duguay?”

  “Sure he was, sure. Listen...”

  “He helped me when I needed it, that’s all I know. Now I have nowhere to go, and no one to protect me. I have some money saved up, you know. Now I’ll never get it back. And anyway, there was no baby. Okay? Get it through your head. It’s what you want to believe. But that doesn’t make it the truth.”

  “I’ll help you, Jessie,” McKelvey said, and he was suddenly overcome with emotion, new ones and strange ones, and everything was right there in front of him, the mother of his grandchild, just a single degree of separation from the blood of his blood. “Let me help you. You can start over again. Wherever you want. God, you’re just a kid. You have the rest of your life to look forward to. Don’t waste it on some asshole like Pierre Duguay. You saw how quick he was to cast you aside.”

  “I loved Gavin, you know. I loved him,” she said, then she broke into tears that became silent, shaking sobs, and he pulled her close, and he put a strong hand across her back and felt t
he beating of her heart.

  “Well, we have that in common,” he said.

  Twenty-Three

  Amouthful of cotton, a taste of iron in the back of his throat. Danny Madill sat there at his cluttered desk holding an old rag to his head to staunch the bleeding. They had knocked first, and when he slid the deadbolt, the metal door had swung open with the force of a sledge. He found himself sprawled, dizzy. They were on top of him before he could get his bearings. He was lifted and dragged to the back office, any trace of his perpetual buzz lost to the surge of adrenaline. So much for locking the door…

  “Call him,” the bodyguard said. The same monstrous goon who had accompanied Jean Bouchard on his visit to the shop to see Duguay after his release. This time there was no Bouchard, just the former wrestler and a dark-skinned accomplice, a man who looked to be of Indian descent. This second man stood with his back to the door, arms folded across his chest, watching.

  “Fuck you,” Danny said.

  The bodyguard swung his huge arm like a pendulum, belting Danny across the head with a backhand. Danny toppled off the chair and took a moment to shake it off, on all fours down there on the cold concrete, timing a move for the middle drawer and the old .38 Duguay had given him all those years ago. He cleared his throat and spat a mouthful of blood on the floor, pulling up. He took his seat again. He saw clearly where things were headed.

  “Get Duguay out here, and you can go home,” the dark-skinned man said. He was tall and broad-shouldered, the beginnings of a pot belly hanging over his pants, and he was sweating, puffy-faced.

  “You must have the wrong guy,” Danny said. Then he laughed, his tingling lips already swelling, a line of dark blood drying on the side of his face. No, he was the right guy. He was exactly the right person for this.

  “What’s so fucking funny?” the bodyguard asked.

  “You remind me of a guy I knew once,” Danny said. “A guy named Meat.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well fuck you, asshole. I’m giving you one last chance to make the call.”

  The bodyguard reached into his jacket and produced a buck knife. He spread the blade wide open with his thumb, a flash of death, the tempered steel thick enough to split ribs. There was an understanding of great lengths exceeded, limits pushed and barriers broken. The room closed in, and everything—the tool charts and girlie posters on the wall, the ashtray stuffed with roaches, the old coffee mug with the greasy fingerprints—took on a new importance. Danny was all there.

  “Let’s just settle down here a minute,” the dark man said, stepping forward now, a mediator. “There’s no reason we can’t do this like men. I need to see Duguay. I need to talk to him. It’s important. I need you to call him and ask him to come out here, okay?”

  “Who the fuck are you?” Danny said.

  “This is who I am,” the man said and reached inside his jacket. He pulled out a police badge on a neck chain and flashed it like a crucifix. His eyes were red, disconnected orbs. The pallid, candle-wax flesh. Danny well recognized the effects of a cocaine binge.

  Danny saw the plot line, made the connections. The grooves and the slots all fit together. The dirty cop Duguay had brought into the fold. Balani was the name. Everything all mixed together, Leroux and the dirty cop cutting their side deals, the cop’s murdered son, all of the heat which had fallen on Duguay as a matter of sheer circumstance. Duguay was innocent of all this, and yet he was guilty through association, for he had introduced the elements. And in the end, nobody would care. It was his word against the word of a cop.

  “You want to talk,” Danny said, nodding. “Just tying up some lose ends?”

  “Something like that,” Balani said. “Now are you going to call him, or are you really that stupid? Your friend Duguay is going down one way or the other. Why go down with him? His own friends think he’s making a deal with the Crown, and he’s drawing heat for the murder of a cop’s kid. I know you Irish can be rock-headed, but do the math, fuckhead.”

  Danny saw the .38 in the drawer, buried beneath old invoice pads. It would require a few seconds—open the drawer, get his hand on the gun, bring it out ready to fire. Would he even make it to drawer? Would it even fire after all these years? He hadn’t fired a gun in fifteen years, not since his older brother Mick had leant him a stolen .22 to shoot bottles down by the river. It left him with the last remaining option, the backup plan Duguay had put into motion, the favour he’d asked. I’ll need a place to draw them in if they come for me...get them in one room together.

  “Okay, enough. Jesus. Let me try his number,” he said and moved a hand slowly to the pocket of his coveralls. He was sweating now, something that came on like nausea, and everything was as clear as it needed to be, the flash of himself and his brother down by the water, his older brother smiling before all the years of prison and violence that were to come, back when they were just kids, and they whispered back and forth across the room long after their mother had turned the lights out… The bodyguard stepped back and kept his eyes locked on Danny’s hand. Balani stepped to the side, a hand moving on instinct to his sidearm. Danny drew a deep breath, all sounds shut out, and there was only this—the hum from inside.

  “Easy,” Balani said.

  Danny took the rigged cellphone in his palm, recalling the three digit code Duguay had given him. Always covering the angles, that was Duguay. Always a back door. A charge wired in the filing cabinet against the far wall. A cellphone linked to the detonator. Tricks learned and passed along during the war in Quebec. Cars and warehouses and beds and toasters— anything could be used as a gateway to the great beyond.

  A droplet of sweat fell from the cop’s puffy face.

  Danny sighed. He was glad it was him.

  He pressed the third and final number. He didn’t feel anything at all.

  Then they were gone, all of them.

  Twenty-Four

  She told him her life story, or a version of it, and McKelvey guessed he could tell the true parts from the lies, the embellishments. The cop sitting there at the kitchen table playing a role, switching his stance when required in order to draw the information out of her. It was, for the most part, a story he’d heard a hundred times before. And Hattie was right, at least about the runaway girl part, and the part about getting lost in the city. For a time Jessie had wandered and fallen to trouble, lessons learned the hardest way. Then there was Gavin.

  “He was putting posters up on the poles along Queen Street,” she said, “getting paid twenty bucks cash to staple five hundred flyers advertising a rave. I was bumming change on the strip there. I thought he was cute, and we started talking. Just like that. The way it happens in the movies.”

  “You guys kept it a secret?”

  “We didn’t have to, really. Gavin was getting me out of a life,” she said. “I got in with the wrong people, and I made a few mistakes. But he was getting me out of all that. We were making a life. He was going to stop selling dope and get a straight job. But it was hard, because he was making a lot of cash for these guys.”

  “What guys?”

  “Bikers. The Blades.”

  “Does the name Marcel Leroux mean anything to you?”

  She shrugged. “Sure. He got the street kids to owe him something. You owe him, and you have to pay it back. Everybody’s got something they can sell. The boys, it was fronting dope, the girls it was...well, you know.”

  “Did Gavin work directly for Leroux?”

  “Leroux always had different guys around. You know, wannabes and hammerheads. After Gavin got enough money together to rent us a little apartment, Leroux wouldn’t leave him alone. He wanted Gavin to deal from the apartment, and Gavin was trying to go straight. He had that prescription, and he was talking all the time about saving enough money to open a skateboard shop on Queen Street.”

  “What was the prescription for?”

  “He went to a walk-in clinic through the shelter on Yonge, and they sent him to another doctor. A specialist. He didn’t talk about it mu
ch. He’d just say how the pills were going to help control his mood swings so he could get clean and get a job, a real job.”

  “Leroux was coming around and muscling him?”

  “Him, yeah. And the other guy too, probably.”

  “What other guy?”

  “I told all that to the cops, but they didn’t do anything about it. This guy came around in a car one time with Leroux, and Gavin was down in the lobby finishing a smoke, and he saw this guy sitting in Leroux’s car, and he recognized him or something. I’m not sure. When he saw Leroux, he called out to this other guy he had seen in the car. The guy in the car followed them up to the apartment, and they were all yelling. I hid in the bathroom closet because I was...I was too high to go out. I heard them talking to Gavin, like they were trying to convince him of something. Then Leroux and the other guy took off, and Gavin was, I don’t know...I’d never seen him like that before. He wasn’t even high, he was just freaking out. He was paranoid. I couldn’t make any sense out of him. He told me to take a bag and go to one of our friend’s places for a while until things cooled down.”

  Then she broke and began to cry again. He reached out and touched her hands, but she pulled them away to wipe her eyes.

  “The next day I heard on the radio. On the fucking radio,” she said. “He was found in that field by the overpass. He was right, you know. To be paranoid. It wasn’t just the drugs or whatever. He was right.”

  McKelvey exhaled a long breath. He had seen everything, the crime scene photos and the body itself on that cold table, but hearing her speak of the impact, the human impact of that single action made everything fresh again. Like a wound coming open, splitting stitches, the blood beginning to flow once again across the scar tissue. He breathed, and refocused.

  “Listen, I told the detective all of this stuff, and nothing ever came of it. I asked the investigator before I went into rehab if Leroux was going to go down for this. He said he was still working the angles. Bullshit. Cops don’t know their assholes from their brains.”