by Trevor Clark
He thought he caught her glancing at his grey T-shirt as he pulled it on, either at the half-dried sweat stains or at the faded writing that said WITNESS RELOCATION PROGRAM, and wondering if it was serious.
Marva reached for her panties and asked, “Well, are you coming back?”
“I don’t know.” He straightened his bandanna as he looked around for his socks. “Probably.”
“Well, I’m going to sleep, so if you’re coming back you should knock loud so I wake up. It’s after two. I don’t know how you’re going to have time.” Marva got off the bed. She pulled out a dresser drawer and picked through some lingerie. Pulling out a pink nightie, she asked, “And what’s with all these guns? You’ve got friends in shootings in the middle of the night. This is like living with Tyrone.”
Lofton didn’t mind the analogy. Trying to remember what he’d told her as he lit a cigarette, he said, “I explained I do PI work. I’m licensed to carry a gun. The guy we’re going to see is in security.”
As he pushed the sheet aside and went into the washroom, he tried to piece together the details Rowe had given him. The only thing that was clear was that the shit was hitting the fan.
Twenty minutes later, Lofton was climbing into the Firebird. “So, let me get this straight,” he said. “Robert actually killed those guys with one of our guns, and he’s still got the bodies in his fucking house?”
Rowe put his cigarette in the ashtray. “Looks like it. Leave your beer outside the car.”
“Fuck, that’s the last thing you’ve got to be worrying about.”
“Just leave it. We’ve got enough problems.”
He sighed as he upended the bottle for a final swallow. When he opened the door and put it on the sidewalk, it fell with a hollow clink, and rolled. The night was quiet. Lofton could almost see the humour in the situation, but Rowe looked grim as he pulled away from the curb.
Lofton pushed in the lighter on the dashboard, and took out his Camels. “I told you he was a fucking moron. You know what we’ve got to do, don’t you?”
“What?”
“We’ve got to shoot Robert with the Beretta.”
Rowe smiled tiredly as he put on his indicator and slowed down at King. He checked traffic but didn’t come to a full stop before turning east.
“Think about it. You’ve got the murder weapons from the bank, plus what’ll look like three dead bank robbers. Some of the money will be there too. Get their prints on everything. Case closed. Maybe there was some kind of Mexican standoff. But even if that doesn’t add up, it doesn’t fucking matter; the cops are still going to have the three guys they’re looking for. Maybe there was a drug war or something. They’re not really going to give a shit.”
As they drove past the string of bars and closed restaurants at Dufferin, Lofton looked at the people in the vicinity of the intersection. There was the odd homeless person, what looked like a hooker, and a few brothers in touques and hoods. A police cruiser was parked in the McDonald’s lot.
“The Beretta’s still in the ravine,” Rowe said. “There’s no way I could find it in the dark.”
Lofton didn’t think he’d been paying attention. He smoked as he looked down the dark streets of warehouses and factories to the south, before they drove under the railway trestle. There was a stadium, a Chrysler Dodge Jeep dealership, open land, boarded-up buildings. He tapped his cigarette on the ashtray, trying to think it through. “So we go and pretend to clean up a bit, get hold of the Glock or Ruger . . . It’d be better if the Beretta was there, too; maybe we can find it when the sun comes up. You said that chick of his doesn’t live there, so he’ll be alone.”
“Aside from the fact that I don’t want to be shooting Robert,” Rowe said, “there are too many loose ends. Times of death might be close enough, but neighbours will start coming out of the woodwork, saying how they heard what they later realized were shots, but at different times. Or if they didn’t hear the first ones, maybe they’ll hear the next one, and we’ll still have cops at the door. It’d be too risky to go back to the house in the daylight even if I found the gun. Also, we don’t know if he’s spoken to those friends of his, who’ll probably say that we were involved with him. I told him not talk to anyone, but he’s flipping out. Or those people will just go over there anyway, looking for coke or whatever.”
“Just think about it,” Lofton said. “We’ll see how it looks when we get there.”
“Forensics will check powder burns, angles of entry, anything inconsistent with . . .” Rowe seemed to be talking to himself as he lowered his window.
Lofton considered it. There was a good plan in there somewhere, one that might give them Robert’s share of the take, whatever coke was lying around, and clear them of the robbery at the same time.
They passed an old hotel, lofts and townhouses under construction, a donut shop, market, lighting and electrical supply company, old buildings. Rowe turned left at Niagara, north to Queen, and headed east another two blocks. As they drove up Euclid, everything was silent and deserted. Leaves were blowing across the street. There didn’t appear to be any police cars around, marked or unmarked, when they slowly passed a semidetached house with ivy, trees, bushes, and a small porch with a wrought iron railing. It was dark except for a light over the front door.
“Sure you got the right address?”
“He’s around the back. Nobody else is home.”
“I think it’s parking-by-permit at now,” Lofton said. “We don’t want to get placed at the scene by a ticket.”
Rowe put the car in reverse and began backing into a space. “That’s a chance we’re going to have to take.”
Lofton glanced around as they got out. He took a last drag, and stepped on his butt before following Rowe along the sidewalk and down a pathway at the side of the house. Around the corner, a light was burning by the screen door at the bottom of some cement steps.
When O’Hara opened the door, he looked like he’d gone through a windshield. His hair was drenched with blood from what seemed the crown of his head, and had soaked through bandages on either side of his face. He might have been crying. His face looked puffy, out of alignment.
“Christ,” Rowe said.
Holding some stained toilet paper to his nose, O’Hara took a drink of beer as they walked past him, and closed the door. “I’ve gotta go to a hospital.”
“What’d they want?” Lofton asked.
“Money, coke, to kill me—I don’t know. They were fucking nuts.”
The three men walked through a hallway to a tiny living room with white plaster walls, shabby furniture, and a ghetto blaster with detachable speakers on a side table. A lamp had been knocked over, and there was blood on the rumpled rug.
“You didn’t call anybody else, right?” Lofton said.
“No.”
He surveyed the surroundings. Rowe was too close to the situation to make an intelligent assessment. Lofton squeezed past him in a doorway to see a man lying twisted in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, with a knife in his back.
Rowe followed him in as he stepped over the body. The black and white tile was smeared red, and the place smelled like puke. Chairs were overturned, and there was a big motherfucker on the floor who looked gut-shot and had a hole in his head. The wall and floor behind him were as sprayed and clotted as an abstract painting. Lofton hadn’t expected this from O’Hara, and was reluctantly impressed. It cancelled the standoff scenario, however. “You got another beer there, Capone?”
“Give me one too,” Rowe said, crouching by the heavy one.
O’Hara’s face looked bad, and his tangled hair was stuck together. He pulled out a bottle and passed it back. “So, what do you think?”
“Well, they seem pretty dead,” Lofton said, twisting off the cap.
Rowe took a beer and walked over to crouch beside the guy close to the doorway. “F
irst, you’re going to have to tell your old man that two of his guns were stolen. And you’ve got to—” His fingers were pressed to the man’s neck. “Fuck, this one’s still alive.”
“What?” O’Hara’s mouth was open. “I don’t believe—”
Lofton put his bottle on the counter and lit another smoke. Snapping his lighter shut, he said, “All right. Give me your gun.”
Rowe didn’t move.
“This dick’s a witness to everything: Murder Two during some kind of drug thing, with a gun that was also used to kill someone during the commission of a felony that ties you and me into it. You want to go to prison for twenty years?”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Rowe said.
“Oh, is that how it is? I had to save you. And you’re still an accessory to murder, and an armed bank robber.”
“I know what the fuck I am. Don’t be giving orders.”
Lofton picked up his bottle and took a drink. “Well, you know what we’ve got to do.” He sensed Rowe had blinked, and he was now in charge. “Robert, where’s the gun? You got a pillow or anything?”
Rowe was silent as O’Hara took the Ruger from the cutlery drawer and handed it to Lofton, then went into the other room and came back with a sofa cushion. The others stepped back as Lofton approached the unconscious man. Despite his pounding heart, he looked calm. With the cigarette in his mouth, he placed the cushion against the back of the man’s head, and was raising the barrel when his arm was grabbed.
“Wait,” Rowe said. He pulled the knife out as he turned the man over, and took the cushion from Lofton. He put it over the upturned face and leaned down to put some weight into it. O’Hara wiped away some hair, and slowly righted a chair to sit down. After a moment, Rowe examined the body. “We didn’t want any more noise. And you’re positive nobody’s home.”
O’Hara, gingerly touching his nose with index finger and thumb, turned from the corpse to look at him. “Yeah. How am I ever going to clean all this shit?”
Lofton picked up his beer and left to find a washroom. There was a trail of blood in the hallway, more around the sink and toilet, even drops on the roll of paper. The place looked like a slaughterhouse.
When he walked back out, they were laying the stained living room rug in the hallway outside the kitchen. Rowe nudged it straight with his boot, and said to him, “Let’s carry the big one out first.”
Lofton stepped around the first body and put his bottle on the counter. With one last drag, he laid his cigarette along the sink before turning and slipping on some vomit. He went down with a crash. He swore as he raised himself onto an elbow, before Rowe put a hand under his arm to help him up. Lofton looked himself over. There was puke and blood on his leather jacket, his hip and the side of his bad leg. “Fuck!”
Rowe reached for some paper towels. “We don’t want that crap in the car.”
After that they lifted the first man by his arms and legs and lugged him from the kitchen. Lofton and Rowe rolled him up in the rug, and with O’Hara supporting the middle, carried him outside and along the house to the street. Lofton watched the neighbouring windows while Rowe unlocked the trunk.
Back in the house, O’Hara changed his bandages. There was seepage from his earlier scalp injury. They sliced through the bottom of some green garbage bags and pulled them over the midsection of the other body, taping them together, and put two more over his head, feet and legs, and secured them with string.
“I don’t know if they can dust for prints off this plastic,” Lofton said.
“We should wipe it.”
They’d already handled the other sides of the bags, but Lofton didn’t want to start over. “We ought to be wearing those dish gloves.”
“Look,” O’Hara said, “I’ve really got to go to the hospital to get my nose fixed, and get some Demerol or morphine or something.”
Rowe stood up. “Later. Give me the roll of towels. Jack, we should wipe off whatever we’ve touched around here. We can clean the bags when we’re dumping them. Robert, don’t forget to pick up the casings and wipe them before you throw them out, somewhere far away from here.” He took a drink. “You have to seriously clean this up before you go to the hospital, in case the police want to talk to you. You’ve got Mr. Clean or something?”
“I can’t do all that shit now,” O’Hara said, touching his face again. “Aren’t you two going to help clean this? I’m in bad shape.”
“We have to move your boyfriends the fuck out of here,” Lofton said. “And you better wash this place enough for the cops in the fucking space suits looking for DNA.”
“Another couple of hours aren’t going to kill you,” Rowe added. “We’ll come back later with some bleach or something. Get a mop; don’t wait for the blood to dry. Our footprints are on the floor, so we might have to get rid of our shoes if we leave tracks outside.” He picked up the Ruger. “And I need this too.”
“I can’t—”
“The fucking Glock too; there were casings on the floor of the bank. Tell your old man that the guns were stolen, because we’re clearing everything out of here. And the ammunition. Don’t tell Betty or anyone about any of this, even a year from now.” He looked the room over as he finished off the bottle. “The cops won’t need bodies, just forensic evidence. We’ll be back in a while to go over it a second time. “
O’Hara gathered his hair behind his head, as if to wring it out. “Where you going to dump them?”
“I don’t know yet. Listen, give me a blanket. This guy’s probably got to go on the back floor.”
21
When Lofton left her apartment, Marva Johnson called Jacqueline. The sister usually went out clubbing after her shift at Burger King and stayed up late, especially since her kids had been put into foster care. She said she and her boyfriend and another girl from the Jane-Finch corridor had been at the Bamboo to see the Reggae Cowboys. Marva could hear them laughing in the background as she told her about Jack’s friend getting shot. When Jacqueline asked her how, and by who, she pulled her nightie out from under her and rolled onto her back. “I don’t know. I asked him but he wouldn’t tell me any details. His friend came and got him, and he just left.”
“Hey,” Jacqueline shouted, half-muffled, “I can’t hear. So what are you gonna do? That sounds fucked up.”
“Tell me about it.”
“You’ve had the worst luck with men.”
Marva drank some water. “He’s all right. I just don’t know what’s going on right now.”
“So is he coming back, or what? Tonight, I mean.”
“I think so. Oh—I didn’t tell you who I saw yesterday.” She turned onto her stomach and propped herself on both elbows. “You’ll never guess.”
“Who?”
“You know the guy in the movie RoboCop? I don’t remember his name, but the robocop.”
“Where—in the bar where you dance?”
Marva laughed. “No, in a shoe store on Bloor, near Yorkville. He saw me looking at him, trying to figure out if it was him or not, and he turns and says, ‘Yeah, it’s me.’ He was acting cool. He must be up here making another movie.”
“What’d you say?”
“I just said, ‘Oh, yeah, it is.’ He looked busy, so I didn’t really try to talk or anything.”
After she hung up, Marva used the toilet and thought about calling somebody else, but decided to watch TV. She walked back out to the living room and sat on the sofa, flipping past infomercials about hair weaves and acne cures before she found a movie, but it was an old musical with white people in tuxedos and shit. After that she landed on a flick with Tupac Shakur and Samuel Jackson, which she remembered had Tupac tripping out on his friends, with Jackson in the background as some kind of older influence before he got really big.
Marva was about to go to bed when there was a knock on the door. It was too dark to see anybody on
the driveway through the half-drawn curtains. She flipped the latch and turned the handle.
Tyrone was standing there with Rasheed and Ice up on the steps behind him. “How you doin’?” he asked, deadpan as he looked past her, a hand inside his coat. Before she could say anything, he was coming in.
“Hey,” she said, “wait!”
The others pushed past her, Rasheed last. “What up?”
Tyrone walked through the living room with his gun drawn, and checked out the bathroom and kitchenette, then pushed aside the sheet to her bedroom. “Your white-ass boyfriend ain’t here no more?” At the end of the hallway he opened the door to Tony’s room and looked in. “Whose shit is this?”
“My roommate,” she said, going into her bedroom for a housecoat. “What do you want?”
When she came back out, Ice was in the kitchen looking in the refrigerator, his gun on the counter. His sunglasses were hooked over his ears in reverse, as if the back of his bowling ball head was a face. He was big and looked uglier than the last time she’d seen him, wearing his designer jeans low and baggy, half off his ass, a red nylon jacket over a black sweatshirt.
“You trying to find something?”
He glanced back at her but didn’t say anything.
“Who’s this roommate you got here, living in my space?” Tyrone walked out to the living room ahead of her with his gun shoulder-holstered, and stopped in front of the TV. “Hey, my man—Tupac. What the fuck is this?”
“That one where he an’ this other brother are gunning for each other,” Rasheed said, throwing out an arm in a downward swing. “You know, man, where Tupac’s a wild motherfucker, killing other homeys and shit, and fucking somebody up for leadership.”
Marva thought he was one of the better friends, even if he was a bit loud, but he had what looked like a submachine gun in his lap as he sat with his legs outstretched, rangy body twisted on the sofa, pumped-up Converse hi-tops on the coffee table. He was wearing his black touque pulled down, marked X, and his jacket collar turned up. The stubble around his heavy lips looked like the beginning of a goatee.
