Down with the Underdogs

by Ian Truman

  DOWN WITH THE UNDERDOGS

  A D’Arcy Kennedy Crime Novel

  Ian Truman

  PRAISE FOR DOWN WITH THE UNDERDOGS

  “A working class family man strikes a deal with the devil in Ian Truman’s fast-paced, volatile Down with the Underdogs. The result is class warfare on the streets of Montreal. Truman offers an unflinching portrait of a city caught in the throes of gentrification, and one person’s struggle to fight back. An excellent read.” —Sam Wiebe, author of the Wakeland novels

  “Truman captures life on the edges—of culture, of language, of the legal and illegal, of the sane and the mad. And he tells a great story in the process.” —Warren Moore, author of Broken Glass Waltzes

  Copyright © 2018 by Ian Truman

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by Yanick Trudel and Lance Wright

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Down with the Underdogs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  The Down & Out Books Publishing Family Library of Titles

  Preview from Once a Killer by Martin Bodenham

  Preview from Dirty Who? by Jerry Kennealy

  Preview from The Getaway List by Frank Zafiro and Eric Beetner

  To love and poverty.

  Chapter 1

  I was having a hard time on this one. It was four-thirty in the morning, and I was in the kind of shape where you needed to run a fist down your eye sockets for a few minutes to wake up. It wasn’t because of alcohol or a fight or anything that my former life had. I wasn’t out of a bar or plagued by a momentary hardship of life like an ex-girlfriend or a broken car. My problems were structural and far beyond fixing.

  The small house I had inherited and the warehouse where I worked most of my life had become prime real estate in the magnificent city of Montreal. The pressure had built up fast, faster than anyone could have anticipated. The developers had been insanely aggressive, and the rest of us were feeling it.

  When it came down to it, it was always about the fucking money. You had it or you didn’t, and if you didn’t you were fucked.

  I shook it off like I had to every morning now. I got up from the couch I was sleeping on for the past few weeks, shut the alarm of my cell phone. I got up and softly opened the door to my bedroom. Liam, my baby son, was sleeping next to his mother. You could see the shape of his tiny body wrapped up tight next to his ma. I looked at her next, her curves against the dim rays of light from the stove’s bulb out in the kitchen. I could hear them breathing, peaceful breathing, and I liked it. Sometimes it felt like that was enough to keep a man going.

  I made my way to the kitchen, made myself some breakfast as silently as I could. Two toasts and half a coffee later I shoved a few things in my pockets for later, and that was going to be that.

  I headed out the back door and through the side lane out of my backyard.

  I had learned not to live with any regrets. I didn’t regret Patricia moving in with me or us getting married. Contrary to popular belief that marriage was dead in this day and age, I actually enjoyed it. Gave me something to work for. I didn’t regret having a son. That gave me something to work for just as well.

  I had no regrets killing a man down in Hamilton to save the memory of my brother. I had found it surprisingly easy to live with and had no doubt I’d do it all over again if I had to. I was always a man who could live with his decisions.

  I headed north towards Wellington and started walking on my way to Bonaventure central station. The city was dead asleep, as this was still technically the middle of the night to most people.

  There were at least six major construction sites just beyond the small bridge that used to hop the tracks over the canal. A tiny fucking bridge that seemed to be the only thing stopping the realtors from razing this side of the neighbourhood.

  I had grown up in an era when the canal was known as the place to dump a body. Now it was the place to meet hipsters and go to an art show. Go figure.

  Six gigantic cranes and a few more holes in the ground around them where they would set up new condo towers. Only a few years earlier, you would never have believed this would happen. “No condos would ever make it past Queen Street,” you’d hear people say, then Queen became King, became the tracks, became Ann, and it wouldn’t stop there. Once you passed Ann, the floodgates opened and the real invasion began.

  The place I used to work at had disappeared that way, and that was the real reason my life had gone to shit. The owner was offered just under two and a half million for the warehouse and the tiny parking lot next to it. The papers were signed the next week, and they gave us three months to move out.

  A week later the bulldozers came in. A couple truckloads of waste was all it took. They made a neat little pile of rubble. Six white trucks lined up on Notre-Dame, each waiting its turn. Three hours later and decades of working-class history was gone. They got potted bushes lined up in front of that thing the very same night, and they started working on the sales office the very next day.

  I walked between the strong headlights of the cranes, looked to my left where I knew the “Garded” compound was. You could see some of the crews already at work. Garded was a private security business that provided money for ATMs all over the city. The handled deposits, bank transfers, security guards, armoured trucks and transport. They probably handled half the fucking money in the city, and even they were being told to move by developers. It made the news a few weeks earlier that the work, the crews, the trucks…all of it was too noisy, too early, too messy. The rich didn’t even want to be disturbed by their own fucking money moving around.

  Jesus fucking Christ.

  People in the Pointe had accepted they were fucked. People in St-Henri, hell, people in Montreal had accepted they were fucked. It was going the way of Vancouver, the way of Toronto and Manhattan before that.

  I headed north on Peel, where the Ville-Marie expressway cleared some much-needed breathing space in front of the Downtown core. I was fifteen minutes away from Bonaventure station where I was to catch the first available bus towards the South-Shore at five-fifteen and then ride that bus for forty minutes, only to get out at some lamp post bus stop next to an empty field way out in the suburbs. The warehouse, my job, had moved five hundred yards into that field.

  I was to get up, walk to the station by five thirty, ride the bus for forty minutes, take a transit to a local line and walk, only to be just in time at seven. I should have taken the bailout, but it was too late now. Besides, I had factored in transport against unemployment and the kid: damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

  Cost of living was on the rise, and the kind of jobs I could actually work were being expelled from the city to be replaced by tech jobs I knew nothing about.

  Ten minutes out of the station we were southbound on the Champlain Bridge. I was in the back, maybe three other guys in the bus. I pressed my face against the window, fighting sleep and looking
out to the waters of the St-Lawrence River. The waves were small and the water was dark. Out in the distance, beyond the bridge and the endless rows of suburban houses, the first rays of the sun had started to appear.

  I glared at the faint reflection of myself in the window. I stood at that tiny shade of myself where I couldn’t make out the shape of who I really was anymore.

  My shit’s not working out, I was thinking. My shit’s not working out at all.

  “What are you gonna do?” Patricia asked me the next morning. It was Saturday, a goddamn bliss.

  She was holding Liam, trying to feed him a bottle as I was busy with days-old dishes. Neither of us had slept much in weeks. The stench of it was lingering in the apartment, the smell of sweat and dishes and garbage full of diapers mixed with the tired, dry taste in my mouth. My bloodshot eyes didn’t help either.

  I had never expected having a kid could take such a toll on your body. My knees felt like they were gonna leave from under me if only I let them. I could have fallen asleep right there on the dirty cold floor. I’d swear to God.

  Patricia was in no better shape. She was doing most of the heavy lifting with Liam, feeding him, bathing him. I wanted to think I was doing my fair share, but I just knew she was doing more. It was hard to tell. We weren’t talking much anymore. There was no fun anymore, that was for sure. We talked about problems that needed some fixing. There was plenty of that going around and not much else.

  “What are you gonna do about it?” she had asked. It took a moment for me to register.

  “I don’t know,” I replied to her. “So far I found things like night-time janitor downtown. There’s shit like forklift driver or anything related to warehouses, but all of them are in Ville Saint-Laurent or Anjou or the South Shore. La Salle sometimes but not that much of it.” I slammed a pan into the small plastic rack on my counter.

  “They’re saying the unemployment hasn’t been this low in twenty years.”

  “I believe that. But not jobs for guys like me. Who would’ve thought all the industries in the Pointe could move away so quickly?”

  “I know, babe. I know. But how are you gonna get to work in Ville Saint-Laurent?”

  “I’ll get my license. I’ll find a way.”

  “You wanna go back to school instead? Get into some classes?”

  I thought about it. Thirty-six-year-old dad going back to school, come on! “That’s just not gonna happen,” I said. “Anyhow, I’ve got a few months’ worth of money set aside. I’m not gonna cook at the local diner for a living, you know that.”

  “We don’t have a few months’ worth.”

  “We could make it a few months.”

  “D’Arcy,” she pleaded with that soft, sad tone in her voice. Liam was pushing the bottle away from his face as she was trying to give it back to him.

  “We could,” I insisted.

  “I know, but I mean, I have so little income right now and I know the place is free, but we need to move, D’Arcy, you know this. The windows are due for a change, the water tank is too old, and God forbid the city decides to change our water main.”

  “And charge us for it,” I said. I didn’t even want to tell her about the property tax hike. “I know,” I admitted. “I know. I’ll find something. We’ll find something. But you know the way the housing market’s going these days, there’s not much I can do.”

  “Why do you care so much about this place? We could sell and move.”

  “And move where?” I had been told Why don’t you just move? too many times in my life. She was about to say South Shore or Trois-Rivières. She had family there, but I didn’t need her to say it before I added, “I was born in this fucking neighbourhood.” I was bitter and angry and I slammed another pan in my plastic rack. Doing the dishes always helped with the anger management.

  The argument was about to go in circles, so I stopped talking altogether. I knew she was right, or at least I knew she could be right. You just didn’t know how to enjoy the space you had until you didn’t have it anymore. I had lost a brother and gained a wife and a son. How the fuck did things get so complicated, but most of all, why?

  The TV was now on a wall mount above a changing station. My clothes were piled on a chair in a corner because we couldn’t find a way to fit a new dresser in the place. Nothing in there was cutting it anymore. Top of my head, I was going to take my ma’s apartment and turn the place into the small house it was when I was a kid. But moving my mother into something as shitty as a studio apartment in this neighbourhood would still cost me a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in today’s market. I didn’t have a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

  Selling meant moving, meant giving up. Selling meant paying fees and getting lowballed by some realtor and then fucked by another realtor down the line. Most of all, selling felt like failing more than anything else.

  I didn’t want to go there again. Patricia and I had had this discussion almost every day ever since Liam was born. Dishes were done, and I had nothing left to keep busy with.

  I looked at myself in the shitty yellow mirror above the sink. I found myself thinking about the days, almost two years earlier now, when me and my friends started looking for my brother’s killer.

  Somehow, I looked back at it and I missed it. Running around in the city, questioning people that didn’t need that shit in their lives, breaking into buildings, beating up skinhead kids. The brawls and the threats and the smell of blood when it mixed with sweat. Was that something I wanted to go back to? A righteous man would say no. I still had my doubts about it, and maybe I still had my faith in the world. But If I had to be honest with myself, I’d have to admit I liked it and I knew it.

  I closed the taps, set the last plate in the drying rack, and simply said, “I’m gonna have to go.”

  “Go? Go where?”

  “I need to find work.”

  “You mean like, right now.”

  “I just need to go, yeah. I always find a way, babe. You know how I am.”

  “Moins!” She said in French. That meant she agreed, but it didn’t take a genius to know when the French came up, you knew she was pissed. I was about to say something, but she let me off the hook. “C’est correct, fait toi en pas.”

  I reached down for a kiss and she gave it to me. She had put her perfume on, and it beat all the rest of the crap the apartment smelled like. Sometimes that was enough to keep a man going too.

  No matter how hard things got, I loved that woman. I loved that fucking woman, and that was the truth.

  I kissed Liam on the head, put on my hoodie, and walked out the back door and onto the street from the side lane.

  It was true what I said. There wasn’t anything around that would hire me anymore. The local diner maybe, but I wasn’t gonna be flipping burgers and making poutines at minimum wage for the rest of my life. Fuck that! I took a left on Shearer and started walking towards Wellington.

  Griffintown was gone. The Pointe was next. I was headed to Verdun, instinctively at first, but I was headed to Verdun and I knew it.

  I knew a guy who knew people both from my teenage years in the Pointe and that Pitt Street crackhouse we busted as we were looking for Cillian’s killer.

  I remembered from back in the day that he played rugby, and the club had a game or a practice every weekend in the afternoon. I could still call in a favour, ask for some work. He could find me a job, send some money my way. I didn’t know much, but I had met his boss once. I had killed Michael Cook, a clean job too, and gotten zero comebacks from it. That ought to amount to something. It had to.

  It was probably not going to be the kind of work I had hoped to get now that I had a kid, probably would not become the calm, poised and responsible figure one would want from a father, but at least we wouldn’t be broke anymore. White trash dad wasn’t exactly a prizewinning title, and kids needed money to fucking eat. That was the truth right there.

  Maybe there still was a plac
e for me in the South-West districts of Montreal. There was no way around it. The working class never made real money from honest labour, so I was ready to dive in now. I was ready to work.

  If that was to happen, I needed that guy on my side. Something deep inside me that was telling me I needed to go to Verdun. There was no way around it. Something deep inside me was telling me I needed to talk to Sean Cullens.

  Chapter 2

  The first thing I remembered was two guys locking me, side by side, arms over each other’s shoulders so tight I couldn’t fucking move. You’d never know the power of rugby until you find yourself in the middle of a scrum.

  We felt like a goddamned wall, and I knew that was the point.

  It took ten seconds for Sean to know I had walked there to ask him something. I had never shown any interest in the sport before. He saw me get on that field and right off the bat, he said, “We’re playing rugby and it’s the only time I got for ya so you either get right in the middle of it or you can go home right now.”

  He was smiling. He knew I wasn’t going anywhere, and you could feel that accent of his taunting you. He was pushing the Irish side on purpose, especially for a Montreal kid, and he had some sort of hissing sound in his voice you couldn’t imitate. It was hard to describe but when that guy talked, you fucking listened.

  I told him I couldn’t kick a ball for shit so he said, “Well…playing the back’s out of the question then.” He grinned and put me in the pack. “No. 5 lock. You’re not that tall, but you should be big enough. Besides,” he said, rubbing his hands together as he was looking at the other team, “these guys are fucking pussies.” He laughed. “I kick their ass all the time,” he added as he put his mouthpiece between his teeth and walked on the field. I looked at my team, looked at the other team. Sean must’ve been crazy. There were no pussies anywhere out there.