The Weight of Stones

by C. B. Forrest

  He took a deep breath to quell the butterflies in his stomach.

  “Were you brought down to the station and interviewed?”

  “Nope. I called the number they listed in the paper and talked to that one cop. We met in a coffee shop up there at Jane and Finch. He didn’t even take any notes or anything. He wanted to know if I was home when Gavin went out that night, and I told him he had sent me away. And that was about it. He said the best thing I could do was leave town, start over somewhere else. Fucking asshole was even going to give me some money, can you believe that?”

  McKelvey blinked and tried to retrain his focus. An image was emerging here. “Would you recognize the cop if I showed you a picture?” he said.

  She shrugged and said, “Sure. I think.”

  He went to the bedroom and took down the box with his scrapbook and the spare .25 shells. He opened the box of shells and spilled a dozen into his palm, slipping them into his front pocket as he returned to the kitchen with the book. He stood there and flipped through the pages until he found the one he sought. A black and white photograph taken of the boys at the old division. He turned the photo so that she could see it and put a finger beneath one of the two dozen faces. “Is that him?”

  “Yup,” she said. “That’s the asshole. He’s uglier now, fatter, but that’s him.”

  He gritted his teeth and held himself upright as he stared at the face of Detective Raj Balani.

  “Are you guys friends or something?” she said.

  But he didn’t answer. Instead he closed the book, pushed it across the table and finished the last of his drink.

  “Listen,” he said, “it’s late. You can sleep in the master bedroom.” “Where are you going to sleep?”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll take the chair in the living room.”

  She looked tired the way children do, with her eyelids dropping.

  “What are we doing in the morning?” she said. “I have to get all my stuff.”

  “Let’s just worry about tonight,” he said.

  Duguay moved across the city in the middle of the night, the window in the borrowed car rolled down to let in the air. He thought of calling Danny to ask him to meet up at the shop first thing in the morning but chose to let his friend sleep. When he was finished with this, he would wait outside the auto body shop until the sun came up, then he could say his goodbyes to Danny and head up to Midland to collect his cash. From there it was wide open. Another new start. It was getting harder to imagine. Thoughts of roots and a home, some place to leave and come back to. Streets you walked down half asleep, corners you turned without even thinking.

  He reached out and turned off the radio just as the news was coming on of an explosion in the east end. An industrial complex. Firefighters were on the scene. There were reports of casualties, but details were few.

  He drove and thought of how he had been willing to let the cop McKelvey off the hook, how he had tried to convince Bouchard to let it slide. And he was rewarded for this softness with what? A fucking gun in his face? On his territory? In front of his girls? There were no further negotiations to be held. The man had left him no choice. It was beyond pride and street reputation; McKelvey had made it personal. And he moved backwards in his thoughts as well, from McKelvey back to Leroux and from Leroux to Balani. Allowing the crackhead Leroux to saddle up with the dirty cop was his only major error in judgement in an otherwise solid career. Just like you, Duguay; if you’re gonna fuck up, go big.

  His dog rode in the back with his snout to the window, watching and breathing and waiting to please his owner.

  Twenty-Five

  McKelvey woke in the earliest hours of the morning with the clear knowledge that someone was coming into his house. He lifted up, immediately awake, and reached beneath the chair cushion for the pistol. Rudolph rose with him, a sleek and silent shadow, and followed without hesitation. The training kicked in, and McKelvey slowed his breathing as he made his way down the darkened hallway, all of the moments of his life converging to this one point. He stopped at the bedroom, where the girl was sleeping. He crept up to her and put a hand over her mouth. She startled and let out a muffled noise, her legs kicking in protest.

  “Shhh,” he said, “stay in here with the door locked. Don’t come out, no matter what you hear. Use the phone on the desk to call my friend Hattie. Her number’s written on the pad there.”

  She nodded and stared at him with wild eyes, but she did as he said. She was curling the blankets around herself as he backed out of the room and closed the door.

  When he heard the locks slide then the chain rattle free, he took Rudolph by the collar and stepped just around the corner into the living room. Suddenly the door was open, and the pit bull was charging into the house, nails digging for purchase across the slippery hardwood, the big man just a step behind. Rudolph tore from McKelvey’s grip, all musculature and momentum, and the two animals were at each other’s throats in the hallway, their toothy snarls and growls too sharp and too loud in the small space, the sounds of a fight to the death.

  McKelvey gripped the small pistol, and for the first time doubted his choice of weapon. The lazy choice, because it had been there all along, but now it felt too small in the palm of his hand. His service Glock was what he wanted, the weight of it. Everything was slowed down, surreal. He stepped into the hallway as the dark figure passed by, and he called out, a word or a command, and the intruder turned, coming around, his hand moving behind his back, reaching for a weapon. They were swathed in shadows, but McKelvey could make out the man’s face, the whites of his eyes. Duguay. He set his legs, drew his bead, and fired. The gunshot was a sharp crack, and the noise rang, a stink of cordite in the air.

  Duguay fumbled, still reaching, pulling a big black pistol out of his waistband, but McKelvey got off another shot, and Duguay slipped or lost his balance, and he went down, squeezing off two shots as he fell. The higher calibre shots thundered like artillery in the small room, deafening. McKelvey was winded, stunned, and by the time he got his bearings, he was not standing but slumped against the wall, with no recollection of how he got from there to here. His back against the door frame, he reached down with a hand and felt the inside of his right leg, close to his crotch. It was sticky with blood. Warm. The wound was numb, then it began to sting, and it buzzed with full-on pain. He needed to tie his leg. A tourniquet. Elevate the leg, slow the bleeding...

  The dogs were in the kitchen now, and the noise was from hell itself, the awful sounds of two beasts fighting for their lives. Then just as quickly, there was only the sound of low whimpering, murmurs. Duguay made a sound, trying to pull up or move, his heel against the hardwood. McKelvey grunted and gritted his teeth and, keeping his back against the door frame, used his good leg to pull himself to a standing position. He was woozy, and he felt like he might get sick. He had the pistol in his right hand. He brought the weapon up, checked the safety, and moved to the wounded man in his hallway. Duguay’s gun, a thick Browning automatic, was held loosely in his palm, too heavy to raise, and McKelvey kicked the hand then kicked the pistol free. It slid down the hallway. He looked down upon Duguay, aiming the .25 at the man’s head. Duguay had taken a shot to the neck. He was attempting to speak, but there was only the buzzing of blood forming bubbles at his lips.

  The rage and the adrenaline spun, and McKelvey was down on a knee, his hand working across Duguay’s face, the butt of the pistol hitting bone and flesh like a hammer, but Duguay was out, and McKelvey was drained, and the blows petered out like a car running out of gas. McKelvey’s heart was hammering, and with each beat it sent a spasm of pain through his leg. He needed a tourniquet, he needed to get the girl and get out. Somebody would come looking for Duguay, of that he was certain. Had to call Hattie. He rose and gave Duguay a final hard kick as he limped up the hallway and stooped to release the clip from Duguay’s handgun. He slid the clip in his pants pocket and continued on, his ears still ringing.

  The girl was crying in t
he closet when McKelvey came through the door. He went to the dresser, found one of his old neck ties, and tied it tightly around the top of his thigh. He sounded as though he had run a marathon, his chest heaving, his hands bloodied.

  “It’s okay,” he said, “it’s okay. Come on, we have to get out of here.”

  “Where are we going?” she asked, and her voice sounded like a little girl’s now, all of the street smarts and attitude vanished in an instant. She wanted a teddy bear, she wanted her blanket.

  “Home,” he said. “I’m taking you home.”

  He grabbed a knapsack from his closet and threw in a pair of jeans, then added a pack of bandages and gauze from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. He paused long enough to wash the blood from his shaking hands. Jessie followed him without a word. He put the pistol in his waistband, covered it with his shirt and limped out past the carnage in the hallway, and it was strange and it was horrific, and the scene suddenly reminded him of a call to an armed robbery he’d taken years back. How he’d come through the door of the Korean’s convenience store, a place where he bought coffee now and then on the midnight shift, how he’d found the old man sprawled by the tumbled display of potato chips, a pool of blood at his side. It was amazing how much blood the human body could hold, and spill.

  Jessie was crying and confused, and McKelvey had only a moment to look in on the dogs. He saw the bodies beneath the kitchen table, all of the chairs upturned, the matted fur, the streaks of blood, and understood it had been an epic battle, and now both the combatants lay mortally wounded. He looked at Rudolph, the dog’s face turned to the side, tongue hanging slack between blood-stained teeth, his eyes open and glassy, seeing everything and nothing all at once, and McKelvey was filled with a sense of gratitude. You were a good dog.

  McKelvey told the girl not to look as they passed down the hallway, but she stole a glance, and he heard her draw a sharp breath as he guided her past the body.

  “You killed him,” she said quietly, a statement of the facts.

  He tightened his grip on her arm and said, “Don’t stop. Don’t look back.”

  Footsteps, voices, then a door slamming shut. Duguay opened his eyes. Blinked. He stared at the blurry ceiling, at the walls, then he moved a hand to his face, and he saw the blood, his blood on his fingers like grease. His face swollen, his throat closed. It was there now, like the fragments of a dream recalled in the confusion of morning. He touched his face, and his jaw was numb. His tongue. Thick. He could not open his mouth properly.

  Not like this, he thought. Not like this. On my back. I want to be standing up...

  The prison psychologist had wanted Duguay to talk, always to talk, asking him about his childhood and his crimes and his victims and how the scores on his IQ tests suggested he was too smart for the life he had chosen.

  “Maybe I should be a doctor or a lawyer,” he said. “Or a shrink like you.”

  “With your intelligence, I imagine you could be anything you want,” the doctor said. “But as with everything in life, it takes hard work. You have to apply yourself.”

  Duguay laughed. He looked at the psychologist, a man of forty dressed in a cable knit sweater and khakis, his hands as soft as butter, his face as smooth as a baby’s ass cheek.

  “Have you ever been in a fight? I mean, a fist fight?” Duguay said.

  The psychologist’s face screwed itself into a knot, unaccustomed and uncomfortable with the roles being switched here. The interviewer becomes the subject.

  “I got in my first fight when I was about seven. I mean, my first real fist fight with bloody noses and black eyes. It was an older kid named Lameroux. They were a tough family. Real tough kids. I was scared, you know. This Lameroux kid was going to kill me. But it wasn’t the pain that scared me. It was the idea of getting beaten in front of my friends. That’s all it was ever about for me. Maybe it was pride, I don’t know. I just had to win, no matter what. And I did. I beat the crap out of this Lameroux kid. I mean, I messed him up pretty good. It was awful for him going home with a broken nose and a missing tooth. Some seven-year-old down the street kicked his ass. I heard his old man busted his collar bone, he was so pissed at him for losing the fight... I was too busy trying to make it out of the street, man. I didn’t have time to look through those fucking glossy catalogues they got for the colleges. But I think I did pretty good. I did pretty good for myself.”

  “You’re in prison, Pierre. I don’t see that as success.”

  “I’m alive, right? I made some good money.”

  “But you’re not a free man.”

  “Neither are you. Not really.”

  This frustrated the doctor, and he scrawled a long note in his pad. Duguay didn’t tell the doctor the truth about his life, about the time his mother slit her wrists and he found her in the washroom, drunk and dying and still crazy and crying. He didn’t tell the doctor about the man he had killed behind a bar in St. Luc, the way the man’s eyes went when he turned and saw the gun, the sound of his death. There was so much to tell, but there was no point. There were no textbooks, no videos, no courses that could properly educate on the life he knew, the birth lottery.

  “Nobody’s going to look after you,” Duguay said. “We all stand alone...”

  He was staring up at the barrel of a big gun, a red-headed woman behind it.

  “Don’t even think about it,” the woman said. Only a cop would say something like that.

  Think about what, he wanted to say. The cop saw the Browning further up the hallway and stepped over the bloody footprints, the wads of dog hair, and examined the weapon. The clip was missing. McKelvey.

  Duguay went to speak. To ask about his injuries. How long? he wanted to know.

  He thought about his father, how the man had died in a stairwell at the prison. What was it like to be stabbed that many times? Did it feel the same as this? Pain and the absence of pain all at once...did his father think of him then, lying there with the life leaving his body? Did he think of his boy?

  He thought of his mother and what she was doing, and what would she say when she got the news—would she be sober enough to care? Thought of how all the anger and the love withheld seemed so worthless in the end, how he wanted to see her one more time...his mother. Tell her that she’d done what she could, and it was better than what she’d had.

  He wondered about his dog.

  He heard the woman calling in on her cellphone, calling for “a bus”.

  “An ambulance is on the way,” she told him.

  She was pretty. A girl cop. Soft in the face like an angel. Sent just for him.

  His luck. It sort of made him smile.

  If Danny could see him now, he’d say something about Duguay always ending up with the girl. Danny and his crooked smile, the juvenile detention centre, the days of the old Camaros and those first little bikes, the Hondas and the Kawasakis.

  Duguay. That’s me. I’m supposed to live forever.

  It’s okay...

  Twenty-Six

  McKelvey and the girl headed up Highway 400, passing a growing stream of commuters moving like drones toward the steel grey metropolis at the first burning of the dawn. It was a choreographed show, wave after wave of rolling yellow headlights rising and falling across the lay of the land. Jessie drifted off for a while, and McKelvey called Hattie on his cellphone. She answered on the first ring.

  “Where the hell are you?” she said. “Your house is on City TV.”

  “Balani,” he said. “He was mixed up with Leroux.”

  “What are you talking about, Charlie?”

  “He’s dirty,” he said. “The girl identified him. He’s in with Leroux. Or he was. Maybe Gavin recognized him that night. He would’ve seen the son of a bitch at police picnics, for Christ’s sake.”

  He heard her speaking to someone else in the room, and there were muffled voices, then she came back on.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

  “I don’t have time to exp
lain everything. Is Duguay gone?” McKelvey said.

  “No, he’s not dead.”

  “He looked dead.”

  “You clipped his neck, and he lost some blood, but other than that... He must have been knocked unconscious when he fell back. He had a large gash on the back of his head. You messed his face up pretty good. He’s up at the hospital now under guard. Tell me where you are, and I can send some help.”

  “I can’t do that, not yet.”

  “You’re going with the girl,” she said. “To find the baby.”

  He didn’t say anything. He looked over at Jessie. She was asleep with her head against the window. Her face was puffy from lack of sleep.

  “This is crazy, Charlie. You’re scaring me. You need to stop while you’re ahead here.”

  He didn’t say anything. He drove, the leg wound pulsing.

  “What if there is no baby?” Hattie said, softer now. “What then? Everything to this point can be explained or at least dealt with. Duguay came into your home, we can work with that. But stop and think this through, Charlie. How it looks, you taking off like this.”

  McKelvey said, “It can’t be any worse than it is already. I’ll take my chances.”

  “You’re wanted for questioning. A girl at the club reported the girl missing. Or kidnapped. They said a gun was involved. A man was assaulted…”

  Jessie sighed and adjusted herself, folding her arms across her chest. She looked to McKelvey like someone who was not entirely unused to sleeping in strange places, strange positions.

  “You’re on the way to Manitoulin,” Hattie said. “Thinking the aunt has the baby. That’s what I’d be thinking, too.”

  “Give me a couple of hours. I’m not asking you to lie, Hattie. I’m just asking you not to volunteer that information just yet.”

  Hattie was quiet, background noises filling the dead air.