Bump. HO-O-O-O-ONK!
When it was clear to the bald man that I was not going to let him drive away in that stolen car, he got out, leaving the engine running, and came toward me. Belatedly it occurred to me that car thieves are criminals, and as such are generally aware that most citizens oppose their actions, and for that reason will often bring to work with them implements designed to win arguments. I stopped honking my horn, slammed my transmission from reverse into drive, floored it, and of course the Accord stalled out. I looked frantically around its interior for something deadly. No luck. I rolled up my window and made sure all the doors were locked. I was reasonably sure he did not have a gun—we were in Canada—but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be holding a knife, or hiding a tire iron up his sleeve.
The bald man arrived, bent down and glared in at me. He made a roll-down-your-window gesture. I responded with a go-fuck-yourself gesture.
“What do you gotta be a prick for?” he called bitterly. “You think I picked this from a list of exciting career opportunities?”
I couldn’t think of a thing to say in reply. I tried to restart the car, failed, and waited to see if he would smash in my window, produce a weapon of some kind and kill me.
He looked as if he were thinking about it. But as he pondered, he glanced behind him, said, “Shhhhh-it.” and took off—in the same direction I was facing, and at considerably better acceleration than I would have been able to manage with the Accord.
He had reason to. She was right alongside me in the street when she decided it was hopeless and abandoned the chase—but running so fast, she was four cars ahead of me before she could manage to put on the brakes. I think she could have caught him, in fact, but made the reluctant decision that the prize would not be worth the energy expenditure. She stood with her hands on her hips for a few moments, breathing hard, then turned and trudged wearily back my way. I rolled my window down.
“Thanks,” the blonde woman said when she reached me. “That was nice of you.” Her breathing was already back to normal.
“You’re welcome.”
Her hair was cut short in what, back in my day (late Bronze Age), was called a pageboy, and for all I know still is. On a lot of women who wear it, that style looks just too goshdarn pixieish for my taste, but it suited her. The knee-jerk reaction would have been to call her butch. She was not, quite, but there definitely was a certain androgeny to her features, and to the way she was dressed—grey cutoff sweatshirt, blue jeans, black sneakers—and indeed in the way she carried herself. She could have passed for an extremely pretty boy. But only from the shoulders up. Even under a sweatshirt, her breasts were impressive enough that I knew I must not let myself be caught looking at them.
“I really appreciate it,” she said. “Really.”
By now I had noticed that her car was an Accord, like mine—a few years more recent, but in even worse condition. “Sentimental value, eh?”
The left corner of her mouth twitched slightly. Somehow I knew that meant she thought what I had said was hilarious. “It’s not the car. My badge and gun are in the glovebox.”
“You’re a cop!” I blurted.
“Police officer,” she suggested.
“Yes, of course, I’m sorry,” I said, flustered. “I was born in New York.” That sounded silly even to me. “Uh, so you’re a police officer.”
Her right eyebrow lowered a quarter of an inch. Somehow I knew that meant I had said something painful. “Sort of.”
“Well, I’m pleased to meet you. My uncle and two of my cousins are c…are police officers. My name is Russell Walker.”
“Nika Mandiç,” she said. Arm muscles defined themselves concisely as she offered her hand.
I shook it. Somewhere else, I might have said, “A pleasure, Nika.” But I might not…and a block away from the police station, and given the circumstances, I knew what she would find more comfortable. “A pleasure, Constable.”
I realized I was hoping I’d guessed wrong, that she would say, it’s “Detective,” not “Constable.” Then this movie would be back on the rails: I’d have located a sympatico detective. But no. All she said was, “The pleasure’s mine, Mr. Walker.” Oh well. Not much good a beat cop could do me.
“Let’s check the damage,” I said, and got out of the car.
But it turned out there was none to speak of. Though our Accords were of different years, the bumper heights matched.
Our own heights nearly did as well. I’m six foot one, but she came within an inch or two of me. (I’ve lived in Canada long enough now to have copped to the metric system in most things—it really is a more sensible scheme, generally—but here I make my stand: I am not 185.5 centimeters tall, I’m six one, and she was five eleven, not 180.5, and there’s an end to it.) And there was no question which of us weighed more. I’m bony and frail, and she was neither. But all her extra weight appeared to be muscle; the more I saw her move around, the clearer it became that she was fit enough to run up the side of a building and kick in a third floor window.
And almost agitated enough. She seemed mad at herself for not having been fast enough to run the perp down. When she discovered that her rear bumper had not fared quite so well as the front one, and she would be talking with ICBC after all, she pulled a flat of Pepcid, the antacid nostrum, from her shirt pocket with a practiced gesture. It comes in rectangles of stiffened foil, on which a dozen little pills lie sealed under individual plastic bubbles; when you want some, you push on a pill until it bursts through the foil and pops out. As she did so now with the last pill on the flat, I could not help but notice that on every one of the previous eleven holes, the little leftover flap of torn foil had been pulled completely off and thrown away. I’ve never done that in my life. She did the same with the twelfth as I watched: peeled off the scrap of foil, rolled it into a tiny ball, and dropped it into her shirt pocket along with the now-empty flat. I was sure enough to bet on it that all eleven previous foil balls had made it as far as an approved garbage receptacle. This woman was so tight-assed she probably broke wine glasses every time she farted.
So she was exactly the wrong sort of person to try and sell a story as wacky as mine to. And even if I did somehow convince her, she’d be little help; there simply wasn’t anything in her book of rules and procedures—the software she ran on—to cover the situation. And finally, she had minimal clout. She was a mere constable, a uniform cop, probably a beat walker—somewhere in her first five years of service, and for all I knew fresh out of the academy. What I needed, at minimum, was a detective constable, a senior investigator, ideally from Major Crimes. A sergeant or an inspector would have been even better.
On the other hand, Constable Mandiç was here, she was talking to me, and she sort of owed me a favor.
As Bill Clinton found out, a bird in the hand is worth two George Bushes. If you can’t be with the cop you want, cop to the one you’re with.
Next question: would the logistics work? People who live on islands tend to keep track of the tides; I thought about it, worked the math, and it seemed to me that low tide tonight would come around 3:30 in the morning.
“Are you coming off duty, or about to go on?” I asked her, as she was taking down my particulars so I could be her witness with ICBC.
“I come onshift tonight at 1900 hours,” said Constable Mandiç. For some reason saying that made her glower. “Why?”
“I seem to remember you guys…excuse me, you officers…work eleven-hour shifts. So you’ll be on until six A.M., right?”
She nodded grudgingly.
I took a long deep breath—and decided to go for broke. “Constable, I’d like to ask you for a favor. It will require that you trust me a little bit. I need about twenty minutes of your time tonight…and I can’t tell you why just yet.”
Her shoulders dropped slightly. “Mr. Walker—”
I tried to hold her eyes with mine. “I’m asking you to trust that I’m not an idiot, not a clown, that I’m not wasting your time.
After twenty minutes, you’ll understand why I had to play it this way…and you’ll be glad I did, I promise.”
She tilted her head slightly and looked me over. “What do you do, Mr. Walker?”
“I write a column for The Globe and Mail,” I said proudly. Then, seeing her expression, I said quickly, “I’m not a reporter, honest. I’m barely a journalist. I just comment on the stuff reporters dig up—the national and international stuff, at that. I’ve never yet had occasion to say a single bad thing in print about the Vancouver Police Department. I have often had unkind things to say about the Toronto Police Department.”
As I’d hoped, that got me another of those quick corner-of-the-mouth twitches. But no more. “Mr. Walker, I am grateful to you for your help. But you seem responsible enough to know why I can’t be doing personal favors while I’m on city time.”
“Constable,” I said, “I’m responsible enough that I wouldn’t ask you to if it wasn’t really important. And not just to both of us.”
She looked frustrated. “Does it have to be tonight? While I’m on duty?”
I nodded. “It needs to be three things. As soon as possible. Between midnight and four A.M. And at low tide, which is a little before four tonight.”
“Why low tide?”
“Because I need to show you something you can only see then.”
She actually turned her head and looked from side to side, as if to catch some Internal Affairs spook photographing her in the act of thinking about doing a civilian a favor while on duty. Failing to find one, she still hesitated.
I tried to think what argument might reach her. The promise of a major bust? Fame? Career advancement? “Constable, look,” I said, “I give you my solemn promise. If you do this, lives will be saved.”
She sighed. “That doesn’t leave me much choice. You sure you won’t give me an advance hint.”
“I can’t.”
Very slowly, she nodded twice. “Okay. Where is it you want me to meet you at low tide?”
“Spanish Banks,” I told her. “Down at the far west end of it, the last parking lot. Call it 3:30.”
She squinted at me. “Is this some kind of drug landing? Or illegal immigrants landing? Or what?”
I spread my hands. “All will be revealed at 3:30 A.M. But you won’t be needing backup or firepower.”
“Okay, Mr. Walker,” she said reluctantly. “This better be good.”
“It will be,” I promised.
As I drove away I was frantically figuring out the logistics necessary to make this work.
6.
Low tide did indeed turn out to be a little after 03:30, which was nearly perfect from my point of view. A lucky break.
It was far from my last one that night, and I needed every one. The plan was complicated by the fact that Zudie didn’t own a cell phone. Well, why would he? He did have a radiophone on his island, but it wasn’t portable. His internet connection was portable…but mine wasn’t.
So I had to go to Spanish Banks early. Out of sheer pessimism, I allowed a full hour and a half. That was my second lucky break.
At 2:00 in the morning, the shore was as deserted as I’d hoped, and the weather was pretty near ideal, overcast enough to hide the moon but not damp, cool but not quite cool enough to call for the leather jacket I’d fetched in case; I left it in the car. Spanish Banks is the name given by Vancouver to the last westernmost series of beaches that face the Harbour. Each has its own parking, and every couple of beaches there are washrooms and concessions. After that you can leave your car in the final parking lot, and keep following the rocky shore west on foot a ways—if the tide is low enough—until eventually after half a klick or so you round the point and come to Wreck Beach, Vancouver’s famous clothing-optional beach and anarchist beachhead. It faces west to the sea rather than north to the Harbour, at the bottom of a near-vertical cliff with a rickety wooden stairway that leads up to the campus of the University of British Columbia. You’re apt to find people on Wreck Beach at any hour of the day or night, albeit naked people, testing the latest batch of acid. But the sanitizing stretch of sandy shoreline between the alfresco anarchists and Spanish Banks doesn’t really exist at high tide, and even when it does, is very sparsely populated by day—and pretty reliably deserted after midnight. Anyone coming on foot or by dune buggy can be seen from a long way off.
The last parking lot was the only one that wasn’t at sea level; the road had begun the climb up to the UBC campus by the time you reached it. So instead of there being houses immediately across the street from the beach, here they didn’t begin until several hundred meters further uphill, behind thick trees. That last lot in line was nominally closed after dark, but the barrier preventing entry had been destroyed by a drunk years earlier and never replaced. I was not worried about being rousted by the wrong cops—in the dozen years I’d lived in Vancouver, staying up pretty much all night every night, going for long walks, I had never once seen a police car or officer on patrol.
A short path took me down to the water. The tide was just low enough to let me continue past that last beach without getting my feet wet—another bit of luck as I had no spare shoes or socks or pants. The wind murmured insistently in my ear as I walked, but failed to dispel that familiar potpourri of iodine-y smells which the landlubber thinks of as the sea and the seaman thinks of as the land: the smells of land’s end. The footing was lousy, this was where God kept his small rock collection, but I had a Maglite. Thanks to the overcast I failed to spot Zudie’s little boat coming. Then as I was beginning to wonder whether he’d screwed up his navigation I heard its engine chuckling softly, and it was just there, no more than a few hundred meters offshore, moving very slowly east to west. I signaled with my Maglite, twice, and he signaled back with his, twice then once, as prearranged. So it was him for sure. His bow turned, and he started in—
—and the next ten minutes or so were an extended Abbott and Costello routine, sidesplittingly hilarious but only in retrospect, which ranged back and forth along the shoreline, and involved furious attempts to whisper at the top of our lungs to one another, and ended in our mutually conceding that we were not going to be able to beach that goddamned boat. We came within about eight meters once, three me-lengths, but that was our best shot, and we were too dumb to stick with it: in the end we had to settle for about fifteen meters. Across which Zudie looked at me and I looked at Zudie.
So then Abbott and Costello changed to Buster Keaton: see the funny skinny guy with the sad face walk like a cartoon ostrich through fifteen meters of surging icewater in his clothes, trying to scream in a whisper and brandishing a cell phone above his head. When I was still a good six meters from his boat, the water—or was it liquid nitrogen?—reached my testicles. I abandoned radio silence and called “Catch!” at normal volume, and it was as the phone was leaving my hand with what I could already tell was superb accuracy and I’d begun my turn back toward shore that I heard him say “Don’t!” at the same volume.
Ever try to reverse a full-speed 180 on uncertain footing while crotch-deep in water? Here’s what happens. You end up falling over backwards, watching helplessly as: your cell phone hits Baby Huey on the top of his balding head—rebounds, then falls—meets his hands coming up to help him say ow—is batted back up in the air—he sees it, tracks it, makes a wild grab at it on its way back down, misses it by a meter with one hand and a centimeter with the other—it comes down just inside the boat—he lurches forward, thinking it has fallen overboard—the phone, caught between the tip of his shoe and the side of the boat, squirts up into the air one last time, hits him in the mouth and drops into his shirt pocket—startling him enough that he falls over backwards and disappears from view, lands with a crash—and says softly, after a perfect Chuck Jones pause, “Got it, Ruffell. Fun of a bitf’!”
There’s no way you’re going to miss a frame of this, naturally—and a good thing, too, because the overwhelming impulse to laugh you’re left with is what keeps you breath
ing as the arctic cold tries to paralyze your diaphragm and stop your heart. But by the time the sequence has finished unfolding you’ve been floating on your back in ice cold, faintly greasy salt water for long enough that there’s really no hurry at all about standing back up again.
Eventually we both got to our feet together, and looked at each other for a moment, trying to think of something to say. Almost at the same moment we shrugged, waved silently, and turned away from each other. His engine began chuckling again, then burbling, then receding. And I began groaning and shuddering and chattering as the wind chill started to hit, while wading then walking then running with exceptional stride at high speed, and swearing artistically and obscenely whenever I could get a breath. It left little to spare for sobbing.
As I said, it was very lucky I had allowed an hour and a half. I needed every minute left to me. And some further luck. I happened, for instance, to have enough gas in the car to keep the engine running and the heater roaring full blast the whole time. Once I was safely inside, out of the wind, and the windows were starting to steam up, I stripped naked, hung the items of clothing I deemed most crucial by the vents, and did the best job I could of drying myself with the lining of my leather jacket, an old scarf I’d found in the trunk, and half a box of kleenex. Then I put on the jacket, composed an extended castanet solo with my teeth, and rehearsed it until I could make it sound improvised, while smartly and repeatedly slapping every inch of skin I could locate until so much blood had risen to the surface I was in danger of organ failure. I remember wondering what I would say if the wrong cop came along before I was done drying my clothes. Not that the right cop would be all that much better. But at least there’d be an explanation I could give her, even if it was ridiculous.
Very Bad Deaths Page 11
