Very Bad Deaths

by Spider Robinson

  “Anything else I can get you folks?” the waitress asked.

  We mangled each other’s fingers and turned together. She was no more than a few meters away; we hadn’t heard her coming. That’s why they call that kind of footgear sneakers. It was clear from her voice and face that she hadn’t heard us; nonetheless we felt like assholes.

  Nika recovered first. “We’re fine, thanks.”

  I thought about telling her I’d barfed in the original booth she’d seated us in. Fortunately she was gone before I’d finished thinking. Either she hadn’t noticed the booth switch, or she wasn’t nosy.

  “We’re good at this,” I said.

  Nika said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “We’d be fools not to.”

  On our way out I stopped at our original booth and added another five hundred percent to the tip under my saucer. It’s the sincerest apology I know.

  8.

  We weren’t ready to separate yet. We stood together for a while in the parking lot, leaning against our respective, nearly identical Hondas. In the lousy lighting, the only way I could tell them apart was by the chip on my windshield that had spent almost a year threatening to become a crack, after which it would soon become a hole where the windshield used to be. I could tell she wanted to say something but didn’t know how to start.

  I said, “I’ll call Zudie and find out which side of the road we want, and I’ll spring for a good digital camcorder with plenty of spare memory. I’ve been thinking of getting one lately anyway. What kind of shape is your car in?”

  She grimaced. “Not great. Two bald tires, and the brakes need work.”

  “Then we’ll take mine. When do you want to go?”

  She checked her watch. “I get off at 0600. About an hour from now. You said you usually work nights. Where are you in your cycle?”

  I was startled, but game. “You want to start right away?”

  “If we sleep, we lose most if not all of today’s daylight. Tomorrow is Saturday. Zandor says Allen was thinking ‘next week’—which could be as soon as Monday.”

  I was nodding. “And setting up a perfect ambush for a wild animal with clothes on might just turn out to be a nontrivial problem; the longer we have to cope, the better. Okay, well…I usually start finishing up work by 6:00 A.M., and get to bed by nine if I’m lucky. And it’s been a long night. But I guess…yeah, I’m good for another eight or ten hours, easy.”

  “You’re sure? Good to drive that long?”

  “Definitely.” I had a thought. “But I propose a compromise. I suggest we both nap somewhere until nine. I don’t know any place I can buy a camcorder much earlier than that anyway. It still gives us a good seven or eight hours of good light. I probably won’t be able to get the footage to Zudie before midnight anyway.”

  “I guess that makes sense.”

  “I presume you know a good place to coop.”

  For a moment she bristled automatically. I assumed it was because civilians aren’t supposed to know cop slang, and tried to fix it by adding, “I told you, my uncle and cousins are on the job.”

  She nodded, and relaxed a little, but her body language remained stiff. And she didn’t answer my question.

  “Well?” I prodded finally. “Do you have a good place or not?”

  She didn’t answer for so long I had decided she wasn’t going to, and when she finally did I could barely make out the words. “Yeah, I have a place,” she muttered. “Follow me.”

  Halfway there I got it.

  However lame, corny, dopey, cheesy or full of shit you may have imagined a Police Community Services Trailer to be, I assure you the reality is several orders of magnitude worse on all counts. I fell asleep on an air mattress under the dangerous drugs display, feeling genuinely sorry for her.

  Surprisingly, the awakening three hours later was not really all that horrible. For one thing, I’ve reached the age where three solid consecutive hours can constitute an achievement. For another, my nose told me Nika had a machine that produced coffee-like fluid, and sure enough it proved nasty enough to jumpstart my cerebrum. The only really bad part was the total bodily agony. I hurt in places I was pretty sure I didn’t have.

  When I had evolved far enough to construct sentences I told her, “I have good news.”

  She was still at the grunt stage. Well, so are we all.

  “When I went out to pee, just before I crashed, I phoned Zudie.”

  “Oh, was he back home yet?”

  I failed to hear the question. In fact, I had caught him just as he was going to bed himself after sailing home to Coveney Island. But if I allowed Nika even a rough estimate of sailing time from Spanish Banks to Zudie’s home, it would greatly help her narrow down where that would have to be. That was why I’d gone outside to make the call. “He told me the turnoff will be on the right-hand side of the road, and just past one of those ‘Passing Zone: slower vehicles keep right’ signs.”

  Her face did something I found oddly charming: her eyes lit up with excitement at the same time that her eyebrows frowned in skepticism. “Great. There can’t be more than half a million of those on the Sea to Sky. How much past it, did he say?”

  “Well, he said when the turnoff first comes into view in the distance, the sign is also in the picture. So not more than…what? Half a kilometer?”

  She nodded. “Five hundred meters is possible. And it could be ten meters. He have anything on just what the turnoff will look like?”

  I made a face and finished the last of the liquid in my cup, which was backwards. “Like nothing at all, unfortunately. A gravel road that’s just barely there, obscured by overgrowth. There’ll be almost as many of them as Keep Right signs.”

  “Probably.” She was in civilian clothes, the first time I’d seen her out of uniform. I had to suppress a grin. Pale gray shades. Pale gray baggy sweatshirt with the sleeves raggedly cut off, showing workout arms. Dark grey baggy jeans. White no-brand sneakers, clean yet not new. She was what Susan used to call me: a fashion paper plate.

  She also looked fit enough to run the length of the Sea to Sky Highway and back. She could feed herself along the way by punching out the occasional caribou and gutting it with her nails. She was so perfect a classic caricature of the butch dyke that I could easily see how her heterosexuality could—dare I say perversely?—infuriate some lesbians.

  I asked, “Have you signed out from your shift already?” She nodded. “Then let’s get rolling.” I put my shoes on.

  She checked her watch. “Still time before camcorder stores will have opened up.”

  “I know,” I said, “but there are already places open that sell coffee.”

  She said, “Oh, we have plenty of coffee here,” and brandished a Mr. Coffee pot.

  “No, we don’t,” I told her, and went outside.

  “God damn it,” she said behind me a few moments later.

  “Hey, it’s not one of our tires,” I said, zipping up and turning around. “And it’s not my fault VPD doesn’t equip its Community Relations Trailers with a toilet. Exigent circumstances.”

  “Did you have to pick that particular vehicle?”

  “No,” I said happily, “I went to extra trouble.” It was the Chief’s car. It said so on the side.

  But my grin faded and died under the withering blast of her glare. I could see she was really angry. “Look,” I said, “it goes with my job. I’m a professional iconoclast, okay? That’s someone who—”

  “—attacks settled beliefs or institutions,” she said. “Literally, ‘image destroyer.’ I understand the term, and the kind of mind that needs to do that all the time.”

  “Now wait a damn min—”

  “You wait,” she said. And I did, chopping off in midword, because she did not raise her volume or speed to top me, but spoke so softly I could just barely make it out, and somehow I knew that was very bad news. “You, Russell, have put me in a situation where I am going to have to spend the next few days systematically pissi
ng on some of the most important things I live my life by.” If she had been speaking in a normal voice, I would have tried to interrupt here. “So I am going to ask you, please.” Her voice got so soft I had to fall back on reading lips, so slow I was able to. “Don’t you piss on any of the things I live by. Okay?”

  I felt sweat on my forehead. I could hear the things dogs hear, though not of course as well. “Okay,” I agreed meekly. “That’s fair.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, loud enough now to be heard clearly.

  I had to admit she had a point. But it seemed a bad omen for the whole enterprise. If we were starting out without even a sense of humor…

  I thought about some of the things she might live by, and opened my mouth to ask a question, and experienced a sudden rush of brains to the head, and closed my mouth again. Plenty of time to climb those stairs.

  We found a Bean Around the World outlet, and I tried to teach Nika the difference between what she had been drinking and fresh-ground Cuban peaberry. She didn’t get it. Both were hot, black and bitter; what was the big deal? Rupture is what I call moments like that: a sudden unexpected gulf across which no communication is possible. I don’t think it’s as simple as just men being from Mars and women from Venus: I think so-called humans must come from at least nine different planets. It’s a wonder we can interbreed. And a shame we don’t, much.

  We agreed over coffee that even though mine was the best car to take, Nika was the best qualified driver. I gave her the keys and rode shotgun with the camcorder.

  The Sea to Sky Highway seems like a perfectly normal highway until you’re past a town irritatingly spelled Caulfeild. (It doesn’t irritate the locals a bit: until Mr. Caulfeild moved in, the area was called Skunk Creek.) Then, with inadequate and confusing signage, the road suddenly splits in three—and the center lane is the one that suddenly comes to a dead stop, at the toll booths for the huge B.C. Ferries terminus at Horseshoe Bay, which serves several major and minor ferry routes including the one I would have been taking home to Heron Island, if I’d been lucky enough to be going home that morning. The left lane enters the tiny town of Horseshoe Bay itself, and only the right lane forges on, relentless in its quest to unite sea and sky.

  The next fifty kilometers or so of highway serve to separate the men from the helplessly screaming objects plummeting from great heights. Those fifty kilometers carry you through some of the most splendid scenery to be found anywhere on the planet, and ensure that you will not be able to spare a single second’s attention to appreciate it. They seem to have been carefully designed by a crack team of brilliant sadists to provide every possible driving challenge…over and over, often in combination, and always by surprise. There are blind curves, double switchbacks, incorrect banks, inadequate shoulders overlooking horrific drop-offs, vanishingly rare passing zones, frequent avalanches—and on the rare stretches that do let you get a little speed going, there’s usually a scenic-lookoff turnout feeding low-speed traffic back into the stream.

  In fact little of this is bad design, it’s mostly enforced by the terrain: you’re basically clinging to the side of a cliff overlooking Howe Sound. It’s a “dancing bear” sort of situation: it’s so ridiculous for a road to be there that to demand it be a good one would be unreasonable. The only really dumb design decision was to build it in the first place; everything after that was inevitable. The pressing reason for building it was to allow enough people to move up inland so that there will always be some jackass behind you in a great hurry who is vastly more familiar with the road than you, cannot forgive your criminal ignorance, and expresses his contempt by tailgating.

  You would think this would be much less of a problem when the person behind the wheel is a police officer. But no. Nika refused to wear her uniform hat, even though she had brought one—and without it she was just a woman in a cutoff sweatshirt. This being decidedly not an official investigation, she was determined to stay as low profile as possible. I understood the point, and agreed she was being prudent. But I couldn’t have done it. Hell, I’d have pulled my gun. But then, I was born in America—which has ten times the population of Canada, and something like a thousand times as many gunshot deaths per year.

  Even so, I was glad I had let her drive. The Sea to Sky intimidates the hell out of me. Nika treated it like a sustained high speed chase. She was good; the lack of lights and siren hindered her not at all.

  Unless you need to pee very badly there are few reasons to get off the highway during that first fifty klicks of the Sea to Sky, and the only sensible one is Shannon Falls, a remarkable series of cliffs about forty-five minutes out of town in which water from something called, swear to God, Mount Sky Pilot falls 335 meters—call it a thousand feet. (And it’s only the third highest waterfall in British Columbia.) It’s a breathtaker at any time, but if you’re ever near there during a very cold winter, don’t miss it. Once every few years, the waterfall freezes. Whereupon enthusiasts come hundreds or thousands of miles to climb it, with axes and screws, and no way of knowing just when the whole giant icicle will suddenly detach from the rock face. Not a sight easily forgotten.

  But that’s about all the road has to offer besides McNuggets until it reaches the city of Squamish. Some claim the name is Indian, but I think it’s just that by the time you’ve ridden the Sea to Sky rollercoaster that far, most people are feeling squamish. There Howe Sound ends, and Highway 99 finally puts the “sea” behind, and begins heading for the sky.

  The next stop of consequence, quite a ways up the road, is Whistler. Forty years ago there was nothing there but mountains and trees. And a few people who liked it that way. Then a handful of rich imbeciles decided it would make a great Olympic Village, if only there happened to be a village there, and a road to it. Today there are thousands of rich imbeciles there, skiing—and waiting with barely concealed eagerness for the 2010 Winter Olympics to come destroy the ecology, economy and tranquility of the region forever for their aggrandizement. As a fair man I try to despise all sports equally, but it is hard not to feel an especial contempt for an allegedly athletic pursuit which combines high speed and zero protection, and whose one and only possible achievement is to not fall down. I like to think the late Senator Sonny Bono sums up skiing: evolution in action.

  9.

  We started looking for NO PASSING signs and scrutinizing a few hundred meters before and after them just as soon as we cleared Horseshoe Bay, but we were neither surprised nor disappointed that the first fifty klicks to Squamish had produced only a few even longshot maybes. Both of us were fairly sure that our target killing field lay somewhere in the stretch between Squamish and Whistler—or if anything further up, between Whistler and the old Gold Rush town of Lillooet. It just seemed to me, and Nika didn’t disagree, that if you were engaged in activity that was going to result in people screaming at the top of their lungs, and you didn’t want them to keep their voices down because you liked applause, you would want to be a lot more than half an hour or so away from a major city.

  Nonetheless, Nika adamantly insisted I carefully video every even remote possibility. Each time, she slowed to 50 kph to assist me in panning, enraging the drivers behind us even though by definition we were in the slowpoke lane. Once when in her opinion I was sloppy about it, she actually turned around at the next scenic lookoff and doubled back and made me do it again, no small pain in the ass on that road. But all in all there really wasn’t much to do but talk. So Nika put on the radio, and we listened to CBC. One day the scumbags and traitors who are systematically leaching every good thing about Canada into anemia so they can feed on the bones will finally succeed in cutting the budget of the Canadian Broadcorping Castration so far that it can no longer produce better radio than any station in America, any day of the week—but it hasn’t happened yet, by God. So far the main focus of their attention has been dismantling our health care, education, and military. When they can spare the time to ruin a merely cultural industry it’s usually film or television.


  Once past Squamish we began hitting pay dirt. For one thing, there could be passing zones now that the road was no longer carved out of a cliff. When they occurred, the right-hand slowpoke lanes didn’t always have curbs that would make a curb cut obvious. The terrain and soil became more hospitable to the sort of thick leafy scrub growth that might obscure the mouth of a dirt or gravel road. I became fairly proficient in the business of panning across a swath of country. It helped a lot to be able to see exactly what I was getting, both live and in instant playback. The technology is starting to get pretty slick. I can remember a time when I thought Super 8 was a great improvement over ordinary 8mm film. I still have a vagrant memory, from about age six, of the family’s very first color TV. Today, laptops have larger screens, with much better color.

  I had asked the kid-clerk at the camera store that morning how much I might save if I opted for just black and white. He didn’t know what I meant. Apparently even the ATMs shoot color, now. I’d ended up getting a midprice Sony model, and was quite pleased with it.

  By the time the crisp mountain scent of money alerted us that we were approaching Whistler, about three hours after we left Vancouver, I had nearly used up a whole cassette—one hour at high speed, which I was using—and had exhausted the first battery pack through lavish use of the LCD screen. The clerk had offered me a car cigarette-lighter adaptor that would let me either run the camera or charge the batteries…but since I knew Nika’s car was a Honda the same vintage as my own, I had presumed correctly that her cigarette lighter didn’t work either, and sprung for a spare battery pack instead.

  So I was still operational, with enough juice and extra cassettes to take us as far as Lillooet if necessary, when Nika pulled over into a tiny gas station on the outskirts of Whistler proper, shut the engine, and said, “I’m having trouble believing he’d go this far north, just to get guaranteed privacy. I’m thinking he’d stop way short of here. If he’s a rich guy he knows other rich guys, and this is where they hang out, year round. His comings and goings would be noticed. Even remembered.”