by Richard Cain
Despite the agonizing desire to breathe, Nastos noticed how colours were beginning to fade. The world was becoming a black-and-white pixelated place of suffocating failure. He was growing tired but never for a moment considered giving up. Unable to keep fighting the man, he instinctively stretched out under the mattress for the gun. Before he could reach it, the room became dark. Sounds of shouting and screaming became dull and faded as a curtain of warmth and darkness enveloped him.
“Nastos, up, move!” There was a shock of movement, a flash of red and blue as he saw the door approaching him on an awkward angle. “Move!”
He crumpled into the elevator, groggy and confused. Another moment of time was lost and he came to lying on the ceramic floor. He croaked, “What happened?”
“Your guy is one tough son of a bitch. I busted a lamp over his head, no effect. To get him off of you I had to wrap the cord around his neck.”
“How’d you take out your guy?”
“He was drunk, naked and in the middle of two girls.” Carscadden showed Nastos his fist. “Look at that. I think it’s broken.”
The middle knuckle on his right hand stuck out twice as far as the one on his left. The knuckle for the little finger was obviously dislocated. Nastos looked up to Carscadden’s flushed red face. He saw that his suit was ripped, smeared in drips of blood, and the buttons on his shirt were ripped open revealing his pale flesh. Slowly he staggered to his feet, shaking his head to clear out the cobwebs. “He must have hammered my ear. I’m so dizzy I can barely stand.”
“Yeah. That one guy was an animal. He rag-dolled the two of us. I’d be happy if I never met up with him again.”
Nastos noticed that the elevator was not moving. They were between floors. Carscadden put a hand up. “I pressed the Stop button. Take a minute to get ourselves sorted out before we walk out of here.”
“Good idea.” Nastos sucked in air. It hurt to breathe.
“I have bad news.”
He tried to straighten up, which made his head swim. He stooped forward, his hands on his knees. “What?”
“Our wallets. They took our wallets and my cellphone. You have your phone?”
“You’re kidding me. We were supposed to find out about them. Now they know everything about us.”
Carscadden was standing. He tucked in his shirt and straightened his tie. “Come on. We need to get out of here and come up with another plan.”
Nastos slowly straightened up. He put his back against the wall and tried to smooth out his suit. Carscadden came over and helped. He said, “We know they’re not cops, maybe we can —”
“I know who they are, or what they are.”
Carscadden looked into his eyes. “Who?”
“Dogs of War,” Nastos said. “Google it. It’s a biker gang. They’re out of Mexico originally. They don’t play nice.”
“No shit.”
Nastos felt his phone vibrate. “I still have my phone.” He reached into his pocket and pulled it out.
“Who’s calling?”
Nastos checked the caller ID. “You are.” He put the phone to his ear. “Hello?”
The voice on the other end was calm. “Steve Nastos. Kim Bolton Boulevard. That’s out in Scarborough. Google Earth. You have a nice place.”
Nastos put the phone on speaker for Carscadden’s benefit. “What do you want?”
“We’ll start with money. I want fifty thousand dollars cash by the end of the day.”
Carscadden shook his head to say “no.” Not no to the money, no to this can’t be happening. If they had Nastos’ address they would have his, the phone numbers of all of his family, their addresses. Biker gangs were international. There was no telling what they would do to protect themselves.
“I can do twenty grand but it won’t be easy to get it in cash that fast. You know what banks are like.”
The man laughed. “Sounds like you’re having a personal problem. You have a family, Steve Nastos? A wife and kids, that sort of thing?”
“I’ll go to the cops.” He felt weak delivering the line, knowing how lame it sounded as soon as it left his mouth.
“Go to the Pope for all I fucking care. I want my money.”
“And then you leave me alone?”
“No. Then I ask you for more money. And after you’re broke, you’re going to start doing things for me. Things to get me more money. You beginning to figure out how this is going to work?”
Nastos hung up the phone. “We’ll start with cancelling your phone and getting them to remotely wipe it clean.”
“My family, we can’t assume that it will work —”
“No. We can’t assume anything.”
Carscadden squatted down, running his hands through his hair. “Josie, Tara.”
“We shut the office and operate somewhere else. I can’t stay at home. Neither can you. We’re not just in serious trouble here. An international biker gang. Our lives as we have known them are over.”
Nastos rubbed his eyes. “Viktor’s place. There’s nowhere else to go.”
Nastos slid himself into the passenger seat of the car, reclining the seat and slowly buckling the seat belt. “I must be getting older. Everything hurts.”
Carscadden started the car and pulled away from the curb. “How you lasted as long as you did against that guy, I have no idea. If I had just put the computer somewhere else . . .”
Nastos flipped the visor down to appraise himself in the mirror. He had scrapes on his face but nothing that looked or felt like it was going to bruise. He glanced at Carscadden’s right hand. “That thing is swelling with each passing moment.”
Carscadden opened and closed the hand a few times. “It’s getting tight but it still moves. Maybe I dislocated it and it popped back in.”
Nastos leaned back, closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. “So let’s go to the office right away. You probably want to take out files —”
“Yeah. I can grab everything pretty quick. Hopkins can take it all to Viktor’s place. She can pick up Josie on the way.”
Nastos put the car in Drive. It hurt to learn forward and crane his neck to check for traffic. “I should never have dragged you into this.”
“Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Nastos took King Street eastward and waited for a chance to get northbound to circle back to the office.
A dull ache began to spread over the back of his head. He wondered how tight his body was going to be the next day.
“I just had a thought.” Carscadden grimaced as he slowly pumped his hand open and closed. “The two cops. Maybe we need to communicate with them before the bikers. We need to get back on the offensive here.”
“In what way?”
“If the bikers tell them that we are close to exposing them, it might convince the cops to do something rash when they see us.”
“You really think so?”
“Two young scared caged animals with a lot to lose.”
Nastos had to think for a moment, “Us or the cops?”
“My point exactly. Look, Hopkins can clean the files and get Josie. Maybe we need to get the cops on our side. We can’t do this alone.”
Nastos envisioned calling Jacques, who would storm the hotel room and find no trace that anything had happened there, just a fake name in the registry. If he was going to call in the police he needed more than ghost stories. “I’ll call Radix and Morrison to meet us somewhere.”
Carscadden replied, “They’ll want to meet someplace neutral. You’ve said it before, cops are paid to be suspicious.”
Nastos started to dial Jacques on his cell, then hung up, remembering that they already had all of the contact information for Radix and Morrison stored in the glove compartment. He opened it and flipped through the pages. Looks like Radix was calling the shots. Ma
y as well call him. He checked his watch. They would be working the afternoon shift and might not answer an unknown caller. He dialed the number and on the third ring a man answered.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Radix? This is Steve Nastos calling. I’m a private detective.”
“Perfect. What do you want?”
“Listen. I have good news and bad news. I know you’re working right now but it’s important that we meet up within the next half hour.”
He heard wind noise and muffled speaking before Radix replied. “I don’t know, man. We’re kinda in the middle of police work here. Is this some kind of insurance thing?”
Nastos wanted to be careful in case Radix was being monitored by Professional Standards or wasn’t talking in private. Professional Standards could have gotten a warrant and be monitoring Radix’s phone conversations on the slightest of suspicions. He played along. “Listen, Radix, I don’t want to say what this is about on a cellular telephone. Maybe I’m paranoid, but I don’t trust cops, no offence. I don’t even trust my neighbourhood tattoo guy, and I’ve been going to him for years. I’m sure you know all about the tattoo guys.” The phone was silent. Nastos plugged an ear then held the screen away to see if it was still active. “You know what I mean?”
“Sorry, you cut out there. . . . Okay, I might have a bit of time to help a private investigator with an investigation. Where did you have in mind?”
“You pick the place. You and Morrison, me and my partner, Carscadden. Noisy, quiet, dark, bright, public, private, think it over and give me a call at this number when you decide.”
18
Vince had the two women sitting next to each other on the bed. They were still half naked, covering themselves with the bed sheets. He never said they couldn’t get dressed, all he had said was Sit down, shut up and listen. The rest they figured out all on their own.
“You two didn’t see anything. No coke, no guns, no fight, nothing.” He pulled out his phone and took their pictures. “I can find out your real names and hunt you down.”
They kept their eyes down.
“Now get your clothes on and fuck off.”
They did what he said and were out in less than thirty seconds. When the door clicked shut Vince turned on Christian. “If you weren’t so drunk and stoned, I wouldn’t have had to fight them off myself.”
Christian stood up. “You better remember who the fuck you’re talking to. I make one phone call and your number gets called in.” Christian took a step forward, a bravery fueled by cocaine that otherwise would be tempered by a Darwinian instinct for survival.
Vince struggled to hold back the pent-up hostility that had been building for months. “You’re the one that wanted to spend a few hours at the peelers when we could have taken care of Walker. It was you who wanted to puppet-master the cops. That little game is over. Today. We’re going to turn them against the assholes who were just here, then that’s the end of it. You’ve had your fun and snorted most of it away. Now it’s over.”
He turned his back on Christian, passive-aggressively attempting to draw him into the first punch. Here’s a perfect opportunity, asshole, make my fucking day. He dialed a number and waited. “It’s me, asshole, now listen. I’m going to ask you to do two last things and you are out of this thing clear, hear me?” He reached for the wallet that he had recovered from the fight in the room with the intruders. “Guys’ names are Steve Nastos and Kevin Carscadden. Kill them and this is done.”
Carscadden parked at the Cherry Beach Park. There were dog walkers and high-school kids who should have been in school. The sun was strong and it was beautiful out. They had arrived there first. Nastos slid out of the car and leaned against the passenger door. He stared out over the water to the horizon. Between the blue sky and blue water there was a serrated line of waves glinting in the sun, separating the two by the thinnest, sharpest margin. Carscadden slammed his door shut and joined him, arms crossed, his head tilted up to the sky.
Nastos watched him as he stood there, his eyes shut, meditating. “If you’re beginning to wonder if we’ve finally crossed the line and gotten ourselves into serious trouble, I gotta tell ya, buddy, I have a bad feeling about this one.”
“Well, that makes me feel better.”
“I’m just saying, we owe each other one hundred percent honesty here. If you want to bail out and call the cops, if you want to leave town with Hopkins until I can sort this one out, if you —”
Carscadden turned to him aggressively, sticking his finger in Nastos’ face. “Shut up. Jesus Christ.”
Nastos backed up, his hands reflexively raised in surrender.
Carscadden continued. “What the hell does it take to get through to you? We’re in this together. Trust me, I wish that ex-bitchfriend of yours never dragged her boney ass into our office but what’s done is done. Hopkins and Josie are with Viktor, that’s okay for now, but we’ve pissed off a violent biker gang, Steve. There’s no telling how this is going to end, but one thing is for sure. Josie needs her dad. So we don’t have much of a choice on what to do here. We have to find some way of taking these guys down. And the only way that’s going to happen is if we keep our heads and work together.”
Nastos dropped his hands to his sides and turned briefly back to the water before answering. “You know the cops aren’t going to be able to protect us. They sure as hell didn’t do much for Ann Falconer or Rob Walker.”
Carscadden stared at the ground, arms crossed again. “Trust me, with my life in danger the last thing I trust to protect it is a government bureaucracy.”
“Okay then, the solution is the solution. We’re going to have to kill them before they kill us. It’s that simple.” Nastos sat in silence repeating to himself what he had just said aloud.
Carscadden balled his hands into fists and pressed them against his forehead before releasing them. “Okay, then. Forget the investigation. Let’s just get out of this one alive.”
Carscadden locked eyes with Nastos before turning and leaning back against the car. His eyes watered up. He squeezed his eyes shut, turning his face to the sky again.
Nastos left him to his prayers and made a few of his own. Josie, I promise you right now that I’m going to make it out of this. And Maddy, if you’re out there somewhere, if that’s really you I feel behind me sometimes, if that’s you, Maddy, that Josie giggles with in her sleep, help me through this, baby. I’m listening.
He felt a thick hot tear roll down his face and his nose was getting congested. He quickly wiped away the tear and sniffed.
Carscadden opened an eye. “You know, people in the park see two guys on the brink of tears and they’re going to think we’re breaking up.”
Nastos averted his eyes. “I was thinking of Maddy.”
“Yeah. I know.”
A pickup truck turned into the parking lot. Nastos and Carscadden turned to face it. Two men were inside: Radix and Morrison. The truck jerked to a stop next to them and the window rolled down.
Morrison was in the passenger seat. “Get in the bed.” He thumbed backward.
Carscadden put his hands on his hips, defiantly. “Are you kidding me?”
Morrison burst out of the door, getting in Carscadden’s face. “Listen, man, just get in the truck. We don’t know who you are or what you think you know about us but if we do this, we do it our way.”
Nastos stepped forward. “Let’s get this over with.”
Radix drove north to Commissioners Street, then swung south again behind a factory. It was secluded from the public, bordered by tall grey walls and rusted garbage dumpsters covered in fresh graffiti. Nastos noted the busted, black-framed windows that had littered their broken glass on the asphalt. The truck backed up to a corner alcove, the entrance to one of the buildings. The thick metal doors that had been protected from the natural elements didn’t stand a chance against the jacked-up crack
-heads and homeless who had apparently used bricks and pry bars to peel the door back far enough so they could get their scrawny weather-ravaged bodies inside and out of the summer heat or winter chill. Litter on the ground was a collection of hyp0dermic needles, orange caps, rubber tying bands and Band-Aids from harm reduction kits.
The engine stopped, the smell of exhaust dissipated. Radix and Morrison hopped out of the truck cab and approached the back. Carscadden straddled the lip then jumped down, straightening his suit. “Nice spot. Smells a little like piss, though.”
Nastos stepped down more slowly. A quick glance from Radix to Morrison showed which one was running the show. He turned to Radix. “We know about the druggie in the park. Rob Walker? And we know about Ann Falconer, his girlfriend.” There was some kind of non-verbal exchange between Radix and Morrison, something like a shrug but not as obvious. When Nastos turned back to Radix he saw the gun pointed at his head. His hands shot up. “Hey, wait, we’re on your side.” He felt his heart begin to thump and he became dizzy.
Carscadden took a step back. “Whoa, whoa. Easy, easy. Jesus Christ.”
Nastos tried to take a step toward Radix. “Listen, give me two minutes, that’s all I need to explain.”
Morrison said, “Okay, two minutes. It better be good.”
Radix grimaced. Nastos figured that Radix didn’t want to pull the trigger and knew it would be harder for him to do with each passing moment.
“We know about the men following you. We know about the bikers.”
Radix and Morrison exchanged a glance. Radix asked, “Bikers?”
“We were spinning you at the tattoo parlour. While you were taking care of business, two men were watching and recording everything you did. We followed them to the King Edward Hotel. They were bikers. We know they have something on you. I guess they’re blackmailing you to do things.” Radix began to lower the gun. Instead of pointing it at Nastos’ head, it was now down at his chest. “We want to help.”
