Tin Men
Page 22
“Julie’s baby,” Dennis corrected. “That kid is Julie’s baby.”
Silence took over the room. Dennis let the ice pack do its thing while Lisa stared at her feet.
“Why’d you do it?” Dennis finally said. “I mean I know you’re batshit, but do you know it?”
Lisa kept staring at her shoes. “You won’t get it.”
“Try me.”
“You ever wanted something with your heart and soul. I mean, really wanted something.”
Dennis nodded. It hurt.
“I don’t mean a new car or a fishing pole. I’m talking about wanting something down to your core. Every heartbeat pumping the same driving force. Now, imagine that and then hearing from everyone that what you want isn’t something you can have. You’re denied because you can’t trust your brain. You’re not cut out for it and you know it. Worse, everyone else knows it. But you just keep wanting it anyway. And after a while, you trick yourself into believing you can have it. That’s how much you want it.”
Dennis looked at the gun in his hand. He spent his whole life wanting to be a cop—to be his father. His old man told him he was too much of a girl to be a cop, but Dennis kept on wanting it. His dad died before Dennis got into the academy, but the looks from the other cops and the whispers and jokes he heard told Dennis that he didn’t belong. Dennis’s father was right, but Dennis kept going because he wanted it so bad.
“I knew what everybody thought, but I did it anyway. I lost eleven babies. Think of eleven people you know. It’s hard to come up with that many. I lost eleven people. It was like my body was telling me what I knew everyone else thought about me. I wasn’t meant to be a mom, because there was something wrong with me. But then I met Julie and she had it. She had it all. She was just like me, but not like me.” Lisa’s nostrils flared in a moment of anger. “She had my life— the life I wanted. I thought if I could just be her, I could have that life for myself.” Lisa wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and stared at the tears. “I did what she did. Everything. I ate what she ate, exercised they way she exercised. I copied her every move—”
Dennis pulled the ice from his head and looked at the blood that had been diluted a weak pink by the condensation on the surface of the ice pack. “Explains the boyfriend.”
Lisa ran her hands through her hair and fixed her red eyes on Dennis. “I copied everything, and you know what happened?”
Dennis knew. He copied his father every day on every shift. He knew how that life played out.
“I did everything right and it didn’t matter. It made no difference how hard I tried to be her, I was still me.”
Dennis said nothing.
“I lost the baby. Number twelve. I lost it. I don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl. I have to call the baby ‘It.’ I did everything right, and I still lost my baby. Julie was eight months pregnant. So happy off her medication. She didn’t struggle. She didn’t sacrifice. Not like I did. She was living my life! I deserved to be happy. I deserved to have a baby! I deserved this!”
Dennis understood better than Lisa would ever know. He stood up and waited to see if the room had stopped spinning—it had.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Lisa stood and walked ahead of Dennis. He put her in the back seat and got the first-aid kit out of the glove box. He pulled a gauze pad from the kit and put it against the back of his head. His hair was saturated with blood, and it didn’t take long for the bandage to get heavy. Dennis kept pressure on his head while he left Port Glen and got on the main road back to Hamilton. The snow was still falling in fat flakes and Dennis could no longer see the blacktop. There were only two dark lines on the road for Dennis to follow. He kept the car in the tire tracks and did his best to stay conscious.
31
It was eleven o’clock when Dennis walked Lisa O’Brien into booking. The old-timer behind the counter looked up from his newspaper and said, “What the hell happened to you?”
“She resisted,” Dennis said. “Book her.”
“What’s the charge?”
“She murdered a cop: Julie Owen.”
Dennis got ready for it. The praise was about to come, and then it would flow through the building until everyone knew.
“You hear about Woody? He killed Os Green.”
“Yeah, I heard,” Dennis said. “This one killed Julie Owen. I had to go out to Glen by myself to get her back.”
“I never knew Owen,” the desk cop said.
No one wanted to hear about the arrest. Dennis started up conversations with everyone he saw, but no one wanted to talk about Julie—everyone was more interested in Os and Woody. Dennis made sure Lisa got to a cell and then walked back to the car. He called Jerry, but it went straight to voicemail. No one gave a shit. Dennis found the killer and no one cared. It wasn’t what he deserved, but it was what he got. He thought about Lisa and what she had said. Then, he got in the car and drove home. He had a long day ahead of him tomorrow, and he needed some sleep if he was going to keep pretending to fill his father’s shoes.
About the Author
MIKE KNOWLES lives in Hamilton with his wife, children, and dog. He has written six novels in the critically acclaimed Wilson series: Darwin’s Nightmare, Grinder, In Plain Sight, Never Play Another Man’s Game, The Buffalo Job, and Rocks Beat Paper.
DISCOVER ONLINE
Gruesome murders, a northern secret, and a buried past
While working one afternoon on the Northern Divide, a young tree-marker makes a grisly discovery: in a squatter’s cabin near an old mill town, a family has been murdered.
An army vet coming off a successful turn leading a task force that took down infamous biker criminals, Detective Frank Yakabuski arrives in Ragged Lake, a nearly abandoned village, to solve the family’s murder. But no one is willing to talk. With a winter storm coming, Yakabuski sequesters the locals in a fishing lodge as he investigates the area with his two junior officers. Before long, he is fighting not only to solve the crime but also to stay alive and protect the few innocents left living in the desolate woods.
A richly atmospheric mystery with sweeping backdrops, explosive action, and memorable villains, Ragged Lake will keep you guessing — about the violent crime, the nature of family, and secret deeds done long ago on abandoned frontiers.
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Copyright
Copyright © Mike Knowles, 2018
Published by ECW Press
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Knowles, Mike, author
Tin men : a crime novel / Mike Knowles.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77041-422-8 (softcover)
ALSO ISSUED AS: 978-1-77305-1
92-5 (PDF)
ISBN 978-1-77305-191-8 (ePUB)
I. TITLE.
PS8621.N67T56 2018 C813’.6 C2017-906204-2 C2017-906205-0
Cover design: David A. Gee
Author photo: Danielle Persaud
The publication of Tin Men has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and by the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,793 individual artists and 1,076 organizations in 232 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.