Down with the Underdogs

by Ian Truman

“So he had to get some help to expand the list.”

  “You think this Ducas guy is poaching my designer, too?”

  “Whether the designer was in from the start or jumped ship midway, it doesn’t matter at this point. He talked before, or he talked after. Ducas went straight to his warehouse, so we need to get on this.”

  “What are you gonna do about it?”

  “Karl asked to take the lead on this one.”

  “Karl?” he said. He didn’t like the sound of that. “Is he gonna handle it right?”

  “Have you ever met Karl?”

  “Only heard about him. Shitty reputation.”

  “I’m scared of him. That should be proof enough.”

  “That’s what I meant by shitty.” He paused. Then he asked, “He respects you?”

  “I don’t know why, but he does, yeah. Don’t worry. I’ll figure it out. All of it.”

  “Good. Well, good. Then—” He seemed shaken again. You can’t say that was common for an old-time Irish guy like that. “Ah, medical marijuana is soaring in the stock market, and I’m seeing my fucking livelihood swept from under me.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for moping so I said, “It’s just late, go to bed.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted.

  “I’m working on it.”

  “You better.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but then he added, “For both our sakes.” That just added a load of unanswered questions. Was he the last guy up the chain of command? Was someone else coming after us and I didn’t know about it? Was his leadership in question? Turf war coming? Competition from other mobs, or were the trust funds really taking over everything we were working for?

  I didn’t know everything that was going on, but I knew this much: that was the game, all right, and I was right in the middle of it.

  We made our move the next day at nine. Three of us were in my company Impala. I popped two wake-ups on the way there and grabbed a large coffee to go. I had five hours of sleep in my body. I was going to do just fine. The guys were having breakfast in the car, crumbs spreading all over the floor and a stain of cheap coffee that could get me in trouble with Tony. I sighed and was chewing some bagel when Karl showed up in a rented U-Haul, barely looked our way and backed the truck up against Boulay’s loading dock in the distance.

  “What’s he got in there?” Phil asked with his mouthful.

  “Bunch of dead whores sounds possible,” Ryan said.

  Phil turned to look at Ryan. “Ouch! You’re cold this morning.”

  Ryan shrugged.

  “Harsh,” Phil insisted.

  “It’s Karl,” Ryan joked.

  “Still.”

  I got out of the car.

  “What?” Ryan said. “Oh, you’re offended now?”

  “Come on,” I said. It was too early for bullshit.

  I walked into the store, snapped my fingers at the garage door. Phil moved quickly towards it. Ryan followed me to the back of the showroom.

  “Check if there’s a backroom to this place,” I told him. I could see Boulay hunched over a hardwood desk about two thirds inside the room, in what was meant to be sort of a of a lounge area for sales.

  “D&B Designs,” I shouted. My tone was sharp and unforgiving. I fucking loved it. “Mr. Boulay,” I added. That startled him. Hell, he almost started running. But he stopped himself, got back to his desk and tried to play it cool. “We seem to have a problem.”

  “Let me just finish this e-mail here,” he said. He looked away from my stare. “I’ll be right with you.”

  I snatched the iPad out of his hands and shouted, “Phil?”

  “What?”

  “Want an iPad?”

  “Sure,” he said as I swung it his way.

  Boulay started to protest, but stopped. There was no sneaking out of this one. I looked around at some trinkets, metallic cupboards and lamps made out of fucking washers.

  Come on, I thought.

  There was a wide, white lounge chair across from his desk. I leaned into it, arms wide against the backrest, and waited in silence.

  “No one in the back,” Ryan said has he came out of the backroom.

  “Start loading it up.”

  “Which parts?”

  I looked back. It all looked like shit to me.

  “Anything you want. I don’t really care.”

  “Hey,” Boulay said. I looked at him, and he stopped himself again.

  Phil, Ryan and Karl laughed and started loading the U-Haul with lamps, tables and other overpriced furniture. Karl seemed particularly happy. It was weird to see him so emotional. I was going to peg that one on his profound hatred for all things hipster.

  I nodded Boulay towards his chair. He sat down and asked, “Why the punishment?”

  I started playing with the price tag of some lamp. I said, “Right now I’m thinking you’re regretting saying yes to a contract with certain people who also happen to employ me.” He didn’t answer. I didn’t expect him to. “You see, you tried to do that contract and still sell your services to someone else.”

  “I—” he interrupted. I raised a finger.

  “Maybe the guy was cute,” I continued. “Maybe he had an accent. Maybe you were lonely at night and he promised something special.” I looked around. “Maybe the square footage on this place here is just killing you and you couldn’t bear to stop living the Mile End lifestyle.”

  “If you think I ever did—”

  “See. I don’t need to think. I’m pretty damn sure I know you did something wrong.”

  “Well, how can you be so sure?” He tried to sass the way only entitled rich white guys knew how to sass.

  “Oh, kid, in your case doubt is enough.”

  “All right! All right! What do you want to know?”

  Phil dropped something made of glass. The noise of it shattering was quickly followed by Phil laughing his ass off. Boulay looked way in over his head with us.

  “So, how is it you know Emmanuel Ducas? Don’t bullshit me.”

  “The guy is an investor.”

  “An investor?”

  “In this place here? What’s his share?”

  “No share. Nothing like that.”

  I said, “No bullshit.”

  “He buys a lot. He might as well have invested.”

  “But no paper trail?”

  “Invoices.”

  “Any official ownership?” I had to emphasize with this guy.

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “He buys a lot.”

  “Yes.”

  “Before or after you got the weed design contract from us?”

  “From before. Long time before. The guy works for some holding and has money to spare.”

  “And you told him about the weed job?”

  “It may have gotten out.”

  Now that was some bullshit. “Hey, Ryan!”

  “What?” he yelled from inside the U-Haul.

  “This guy says it may have gotten out.”

  Ryan laughed that laugh of his, that deep, single burst, arrogant as could be, then he shouted, “Hey, when you take a job with something that’s still illegal, you usually want to keep your mouth shut about it.”

  “I’m sorry. All right. I’m sorry. For real.”

  “Sorry is not gonna be enough.”

  “What more do you want. You’re emptying my store. This is my life, man. I made all of these,” Boulay shouted.

  “The tag says, ‘Made in Bangladesh,’ asshole,” Ryan said.

  “T’es vraiment cave, toé, hein’” Phil added, calling the guy an idiot.

  “Put out your hand,” I ordered Boulay.

  “What?”

  “Your hand. Put it up, palm down.”

  He didn’t know what to expect but did it anyway, put out his hand, shoulders tense and expecting a blow. I just leaned in and slapped it the way you scorned a small fucking dog
.

  “That’s the last time you get to be stupid today.”

  It was just a little slap, like you gave a kid. It was just meant to humiliate him. I was having some fun. “So you guys got it into your head to take a part of the market while you were at it?” I said.

  “Wasn’t my idea.”

  “You helped.”

  “Not really.”

  “You talked.”

  “Again, I’m sorry.” He sounded more impatient than humble, like I was standing between him and his next fucking latté. That was not the attitude he should have gone for. Maybe he really was stupid and didn’t know the mess he was in. That was about to change.

  “I truly believe it’s in your best interest to tell me everything you told Ducas.”

  “I only had the names of two guys.”

  I held up three fingers.

  “All right. I had the names of three guys.”

  “Why don’t we just beat his ass?” Phil said.

  “Yeah. I mean, why does this guy get a pass?” Ryan asked.

  “He’s not getting a pass,” I replied.

  “Sure as fuck looks like it,” Ryan said.

  “I don’t need the guy weeping and crying and pissing all over the floor while I’m trying to get answers out of him.”

  “You might have to,” Phil said.

  “Karl’s gonna take care of it later.”

  “You will?” Phil asked Karl.

  “Oh, yeah.” Boulay might have pissed himself right there. I didn’t bother to check.

  “I gave him the two younger resellers,” he said. “The other guy wouldn’t answer me. They’re just kids. I needed to know how the younger demographic would react to the changes.”

  “You needed to, we needed to. Ducas didn’t need to.”

  “Again. Sorry, câliss!” he tried.

  I stared at him.

  “What’s next?” he asked, much humbler now.

  “Karl?”

  “Oh, you’re in for a severe beating,” Karl said. He stood next to me. It was like having an attack dog at my command.

  “No,” Boulay pleaded. “I mean, no. That’s so unnecessary. Come on, guys.”

  “Anything else you got for me?” I asked.

  Phil slammed the U-Haul shut, the bang making us look towards it.

  “C’est loadé,” he said. No more room in the U-Haul.

  Karl told Phil and Ryan to wait in the car.

  “All right!” Boulay said. “Hey, I got something for you. A name.”

  “A name?”

  “Yeah. We were talking one day and Ducas, he mentioned he had approached other people.”

  “Around Mile-End?”

  “Not Mile-End, no. He said they were his guys in the north. CTL it was called.”

  “North like Rawdon north or north of Montreal?”

  He raised his hands. He didn’t know.

  “CTL, that a company?”

  “Absolutely, yes.”

  “Front?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do they do?”

  “I don’t know. Just heard the name.”

  “That’s not a lot,” I said.

  “It’s really, absolutely, absolutely all I got.”

  “It’s not gonna be enough.”

  “Ah, come on!”

  “You gonna take these kinds of jobs again?”

  “No! Absolutely not. I swear to God.”

  “You’re saying absolutely a lot.” I got up. Karl walked over.

  “Come on now, no way around it,” I said as I walked away. I saw that look in Karl’s eyes. “Don’t kill him, all right?”

  “Wasn’t going to.”

  I looked him in the eye. “He’s gonna be on the hook for a few thousand a month now,” I said. “I’m serious. This is going to Sean’s list later.”

  “All right,” was all he said. I was still fifty-fifty on the not killing him part.

  Karl told Boulay to get up. Said it simply, nicely even, as if he just had to clean the floor under him. The guy was crying. He just didn’t move. Karl wasn’t so nice the second time. “Get up!” he shouted.

  Boulay got up but barely. He was hunched forward as if his spine couldn’t hold his weight anymore. Karl punched him hard. Boulay staggered, stood up, and Karl hit him in the jaw. He went down, hard, and smashed his head on the side of his hardwood desk. Made a hell of a snap, too. I could feel Boulay’s brain bouncing around his skull all the way inside my head. The kind of snap that got you shivering no matter how tough you were.

  I didn’t enjoy the violence. Karl fucking lived for this shit. This one was called for, but I didn’t enjoy it. I walked out knowing it would get uglier. I was either losing my taste of violence, or Karl was getting more brutal every year.

  I didn’t know but I flipped the sign to “closed.” Boulay was going to need a day or a week or a month to recover from this one.

  Chapter 20

  “Where the hell is he taking us?” Phil asked from the backseat.

  We had no idea, but we had been driving for a while now. We had no idea how badly Karl had beaten Boulay, but he had hatred in his stare like I had rarely seen when he got out of that building.

  It was the way he swung the truck’s door open. He drove right in front of us with that hundred-yard stare in his eye as he looked down the road. I still didn’t know if Boulay was alive or dead. I wasn’t gonna ask. It would have been important for me to know, but there was no asking questions now. I had given him the lead on this one, and you don’t back down on Karl.

  So I shut up and tried to keep up with him the best I could. He headed north to the 40 and then navigated the mess of the Decarie Exchange better than anyone in a U-Haul should be allowed to. I could imagine all the crap we had piled up in there, smashing itself all together. I just felt glad I managed to keep up without ending up in Laval.

  “Is he leading us to where I think he’s leading us?” Phil asked once we hit the West-Island suburbs.

  We had all heard of Karl’s “cousins,” out around Cornwall. We had never met any of them or had no idea if they were family or just business partners. But you combined Cornwall and Karl Anderson, and that opened a world of possibilities.

  Let’s just say we were glad to be on his side. I looked at Ryan, and he was smiling that wide, satisfied smile of his in anticipation of greatness.

  Things could get glorious, all right, and it was contagious. I was feeling it, too. Heavy machinery could be involved, metal crushers or, even better, guns and maybe even explosives. He had talked about lots of bullets, so anything was on the table now.

  This was the kind of thing that you only heard happened around Cornwall, Ontario, or shitholes like Joliette up the 40 highway.

  We got off the highway just past the Ontario line. Headed for a farmer village named Alexandria. It was one of these vaguely distant places that was unequivocally Canadian. So close to a city of four million, but we could have been a hundred miles away and it would have felt the same. There was no one around here. No one. Thirty-five million people in the great white north, ninety-nine percent of the damn place was empty.

  This time it felt like a blessing. I looked at the scenery. The field had been abandoned a long time ago. Grass was tall in thick blotches, and small trees grew here and there. The dirt road leading to it was messy, barely manageable, in fact. The truck dangled ahead of us. I could feel the car struggling in some of the mud. The thick wall of forests surrounded the field now, and not a plane in the sky to disturb us.

  Karl backed the truck at the end of a clearing. He walked out, and so did we.

  “How many bullets are we talking about?” I asked Karl.

  “Oh, it’s gonna cost you.”

  Phil and Ryan laughed. I just smiled. I was footing the bill after all.

  Karl’s cousin showed up a few minutes later in an ATV along with one of his friends. They were pulling a
small trailer filled with about twelve guns of all sizes and calibres. A few handguns, hunting rifles, and one or two that looked like automatics which was a rare fucking sight in Canada.

  These guys smiled and laughed. Karl pulled one of the larger cases; I assumed it was his competition rifle. He opened it and checked the cross and barrel, looked into the scope for smears and then the action for dirt.

  “Can you bring these two out in the field?” he said to his cousin, pointing to a pair of lamps he seemed to dislike more than the rest. “One at three hundred, the other at four. And use this thing here at two hundred, too. I need to adjust my scope for next week.”

  “Sure.” Karl was gonna demonstrate to us just how dangerous he was as a long-range shooter. He had a spotter’s scope and two sets of books that read The Hornady Reloading Handbook and a box of bullets with tips of different colours lined up inside.

  I looked at that and looked at the way Karl was focused on whatever he was doing. I looked at the busted knuckles on his hands and how they didn’t seem to faze him. I watched him take out a cleaning kit, remove the bolt action from the rifle without a second thought. I watched him run a brush through his barrel exactly four times and then four times with a little piece of cloth that was dangling from a long stick. I watched him fold the brushes and sticks back into their case as if it was the most important thing in the world right that moment. The rifle said SAKO on its edge.

  “TRG-42,” one of the cousins said. “There’s a twelve-month waiting list on these.”

  Karl looked my way and smiled that proud smirk of his.

  I was then handed a much less fancy .30-06.

  “I expected it to be heavier,” I said as I got a feel for the rifle.

  “It’s a light barrel, so it’ll kick like a mule,” the cousin said.

  I looked at Karl one last time, then looked at the rifle in my hand. It felt good. Why was it that a gun felt so fucking right? I was handling it as if on instinct. It was the way my hand fit on the handle, the way the rubbery end of the cross sat naturally against my shoulder. You’d never believe it was the first time in my life I was handling a rifle.

  I had never shot a gun in my life. My youth had been fist fights and brass knuckles and broken bottles thrown into a wall. This was new, but it didn’t feel like it.