Grinder

by Mike Knowles

  I pulled the car onto Upper James and drove north, admiring the economic prosperity the Hamilton mountain enjoyed. Everything was different a few hundred metres in the air. The cars were sleeker and quieter, and the stores were bright and busy. As I drove closer and closer to the core, the stores got smaller and smaller, as though they were tightening in preparation for the city's assault.

  Eventually, as I neared the escarpment access, I found a used computer store that had spawned from a decades old two-storey house. I parked the car on a side street and made my way around front to the door. The original front door had been replaced by a glass door encased in a heavy mesh with thick reinforced bars. The door had “Cam's Computer Den” stencilled at eye level. I pushed it open and immediately felt the heat of multiple computer hard drives and the warm bodies of several cats. The warm stale air rushed at the door like a genie escaping from a bottle.

  A voice came out from behind a counter piled up with old computer keyboards and monitors. “Hep you?”

  “What?” I said as I approached the counter.

  “Ken I hep you?”

  I saw a man hunched over a desk; he wore a headband that held a magnifying lens in front of his face. The desk light in front of him beamed an impossibly bright light down on the soldering iron in his right hand. He was a heavy man in the way that refrigerators were heavy. The back of his neck had a roll of fat that bulged out as though it were going to burst. His plaid shirt was a vast tight expanse over his back, stretching the pattern into something that resembled a magic eye poster. He sat on a stool with his legs spread wide apart. I imagined his almost-splits was only possible because it was necessary — he had to have a place for his stomach to rest while he was off his feet. His garbled speech was because of a piece of metal he was holding between his pursed lips.

  “I need to use the Internet,” I said.

  The man barely turned. “Don't do dat here, I dust fix compuders.”

  “You have to have Internet access here. I just need it for a few minutes.”

  “Go find an Internet café.”

  “Twenty bucks for five minutes.”

  He turned all the way around so I could see his face. His goatee pushed itself out of the heavy fat folds in his face. One of his eyes was huge in the magnifying lens. He pulled the piece of metal out of his mouth with a fat hand, its skin straining like a full water balloon.

  “You think I'm fucking stupid?”

  I stared at him, unmoved by his question.

  “I'm not leaving you alone with my equipment so I can be on the hook for whatever shit you wanna download.”

  “Listen —”

  “No, you listen. Take your money and go look at your sick shit somewhere else.”

  I had had enough of the fat man. It may have been sitting with Paolo and taking his threats, or the stunt Johnny pulled on the island. Whatever it was, I was tired of assholes. I walked around the counter towards the fat man and his headband. As I got closer, his magnified eye twitched faster and faster. Finally, he put his hand up to his face and lifted the monacle. His fat hand obscured his vision for a second, hiding my rising palm. I gripped his nose and squeezed. Immediately his eyes watered and his huge paws enveloped mine. The fact that he worked with his hands all day made his grip on my hand like a bear trap. I didn't mind losing my hold on his nose; I let go so I could get my left hand on his Adam's apple.

  My fingers dug deep into his fleshy neck, finding the small cartilage box in his throat. His voice involuntarily squeaked, and his huge hands rushed to mine again. His grip was powerful, but mine was better, and this time I had no interest in letting go. All the time spent on the fishing boat made my grip like a pit bull's jaws. The fat man's hands slid came away empty as he pawed at his neck. His hands continued to work at my fist, but they slackened when I applied pressure. The fragile cartilage in his neck bent under the strain, and his throat closed, sending the fat man to his knees. The immense pain was nothing compared to the lack of oxygen. His enormous body required a vast amount of air to stay vertical; I imagined it was supplied in huge gasping breaths twenty-four hours a day. Cutting off the air was a viscous shock to his already weak system.

  As his face reddened, I leaned in close. “I'm no pervert, I just need to use the Internet for five minutes. You can stay in the room with me if you don't believe me.”

  I let go of his throat and listened to his breathing start again. It sounded like a steam engine starting to move. “Forty,” he said between gasps.

  “What?”

  “Forty for the Internet. You said twenty. I want forty. Forty gets you the Internet, and I won't call the cops about the choking thing.”

  “I could just finish the job and shove a buffalo wing down your throat. The cops would buy that.”

  “Then you wouldn't have the password for the Inter-net. You'd have to go somewhere else. Be a pain in the ass killing me and then having to drive around town to find an Internet connection and a buffalo wing to bring back here. All that work for forty bucks.” He seemed to smile under his hands, which were rubbing his nose and throat simultaneously.

  I pulled out two twenties and put them on the counter. “Show me the computer.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The fat man told me his name was Louis while he pulled off the headband and unplugged the soldering iron. He said he'd always been into computers and after his parents died he just moved up from the basement into the rest of the house. The shop sprung out of the constant piles of circuitry he accumulated around the house. He locked the front door and flipped off the open sign then led me into the back room to a desktop computer.

  Louis brought the computer out of sleep mode with a fat finger. He opened an icon and entered a password I noted to be a random sequence of letters and numbers. He was right, if I had choked him out, the computer would have been useless. Once Internet Explorer was working, Louis took a step back and opened his hands in a gesture that said, “It's all yours.”

  I stood in front of the computer and called up the site Paolo had scribbled on the piece of paper he gave me. A black box appeared on the screen with a play button in the centre. I clicked the button and watched the file load, and do something it called buffering, in a matter of seconds. Beside the loading screen, I saw thumbnails of other posts by the boys — there were at least fifteen. Fifteen times at least, Army and Nicky had put themselves out on the Internet and let their mouths run.

  “Fast connection,” I said.

  “Oh yeah. Once you go high speed, there's no going back. I can download a song in thirty seconds —” The computer interrupted him as it began to play the file. “Who are they?”

  Two teenagers appeared on the screen in the little play window. Army and Nicky were brothers who were only a year apart, but they could have passed as twins. Both boys had tall over-gelled hair that stood in shiny triangular peaks. Their white teeth gleamed in their almost identical acne-speckled faces. Both boys got their father's pointy nose and their mother's full lips. The boys were pretty, not handsome.

  All of their prettiness ended when their mouths opened. They spoke in loud profane street language that all at once sounded inauthentic. It sounded as though they were mimicking the way they thought a real hip-hop gangster might speak.

  “Holla at your boyz! The Donati crew is back on the air,” Army said. “We still be bringing the thug to the world and ain't nobody going to stop us, ya heard.”

  “Nobody gonna stand in the way a tha' Donati crew, we gotz mad guerrilla tactics, yo.” Nicky brandished a gun, which came into view when he added his two cents.

  Army went on, “We got the roots everywhere — in the Hammer, even in the U fucking S. We the princes of the city. All of it gonna be ours. It's ours by blood. We own this rock.”

  “I'm gonna get me a blinged-out crown,” Nicky chimed in while mimicking putting a crown on his head.

  “Those goombahs won't be able to hold on ta what is rightfully ours. Fuckin' Bombedieri thinks he's big shi
t running numbers. Oh the ‘Bomb' is the man all right . . . with his calculator. Dom the Bomb is a real Texas Instrument kind of gangster. He's got a long way to go before he gets respect.” Army made a gun with his index finger and thumb and shot the camera when he mentioned respect.

  Nicky spoke up again, building on Army's revelation about Bombedieri. “Shit, Perino thinks he's big time 'cause he pimps shit out of that store of his.”

  Both boys stopped and did a silent sign of the cross, their faces suddenly angelic, before they started laughing.

  Nicky continued, “He hasn't pulled a trigger on a gat since he killed Carerra four years ago. He thinks he's gold 'cause he shot that fucker into his soup. But gold gets tarnished, yo.”

  “Bitch,” Army yelled.

  “Bi-atch,” Nicky confirmed.

  “Rosa is tough,” Army said. “I hear that boy pulled the trigger nine times last year.”

  “I hear that boy pulled a lot of triggers last year . . . with his teeth.” Nicky delivered the joke with all the glee of a child telling his first knock-knock joke, and then both boys laughed at their apparent outing of Rosa while making dick-sucking gestures with their hands and cheeks.

  “It's our time,” Army said. “It's time the Donati crew showed the Hammer how real thugs do.”

  Nicky pulled off his shirt to expose a tattoo across his chest. It read “gangster” in big black Gothic letters. “We ain't into playing, we into being. 'Cause that's how we roll.”

  Both boys high-fived. “It's our time,” Army said again and then he reached forward off the screen. Suddenly, booming rap music pounded out of the computer speakers. The music was too distorted with bass to be understandable. After a minute of music and on-screen posturing by the boys, the screen went black. The site offered the option to view the other postings by the boys. I scrolled down the screen instead of opening more of the videos. There were comments from viewers all the way down the screen. Most thought the boys were a joke; many were scathing in their hatred of Army and Nicky.

  “What a bunch of douche bags,” Louis said. I nodded in silent agreement. “I mean . . . they're white kids. They look like such posers. No one could take that crap seriously.”

  This time I didn't nod. Louis was wrong; someone took these boys real serious. These two morons crossed a line. Crossed it so far that even genetics couldn't save them. They didn't just slip up and say the wrong thing at the wrong time; they broadcast names, crimes, and gossip for the world to hear. And here I was having to put it all on the line to find these two jokes.

  “Why did you pay forty bucks for this?” Louis asked.

  “I had to see it before I started,” I said as I clicked the tools folder and erased the browser history.

  “Started what?”

  I didn't answer Louis's question, I just got up and walked to the door.

  “Do you know those kids?” Louis asked.

  I didn't answer as I opened the door. I didn't know those kids, and after seeing the video I was pretty sure no one who did would ever be able to recognize them again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In the car, I sat with the air conditioning on while I fiddled with the radio and used my thumb to loosen the muscles in my jaw. The rough massage gave me a break from the constant grinding of teeth I had since I met with Paolo. I passed stations pumping out unfamiliar music by even more unfamiliar groups. Music had become even more artificial since I dropped off the radar. I spent too much time on the boat listening to the rhythmic beat of a fish finder, out of range of anything that could transmit the changing popular culture. I turned off the radio, realizing it was keeping me in place when I should have been moving.

  I pulled the car back into traffic and drove the Hamilton mountain. I found Stonechurch Road, which ran the length of the city, and settled into its stop-and-go rhythm. While I sat at a light, I powered up Johnny's phone and called Paolo. He picked up without saying a word.

  “Can you talk?” I asked.

  “Not now.”

  “I'll call back in ten minutes,” I said. I heard an animal grunt before the line disconnected. Paolo was angry that I gave him an order. He was even angrier that he couldn't do a thing about it. Once Paolo was off the line, I dialled another number from memory; it was a number I knew would still work.

  “Sully's Tavern,” Steve's voice said after two rings.

  “Do you ever take the night off?” I asked.

  The reply came immediately. “Some of us can't pick up and leave at a moment's notice.”

  “How you doing, Steve?”

  “Good.” His surprise was over, and he was back to his usual short responses. “You in town?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I have your money and those tools you told me about. I took it all after Sandra and I cleaned the place up.”

  “You took Sandra to clean up the office?” I asked.

  “I told her where I was going, and she said she wanted to come.”

  I marvelled at Steve and his relationship with Sandra. I spent every waking moment trying to stay off the grid, trying to keep every interaction transient, and here was my only friend, a person connected at the hip to his wife. He told her everything and didn't even think about a need for secrets. For a quiet second on the phone, alone in my car, I envied his attachment like a paraplegic envied a sprinter.

  “Any problems?”

  “Nah, wife thinks you need help decorating though. You working?”

  “That's why I called.”

  “Where?” Steve was ready to meet me, to do whatever. In his mind he could never repay the debt he thought he owed me.

  “It's not like that. I got found, and someone we know pulled me back here for a job.”

  “How did you get pulled?” It sounded as though Steve was suddenly speaking through clenched teeth. Steve knew what I was like; he knew there was very little that could force me to do anything. He knew he and Sandra were about the only leverage someone could use on me. He was starting to see red, and I had to derail him before he put down the phone. Steve had the capabilities of a dirty bomb. He could absolutely destroy everything around him, but worse than that, the carnage left from his explosion would be felt for years to come.

  “Steve,” I said to no response. “Steve . . . Christ, Steve, listen to me. I'll tell you how I got pulled back, but you have to hear me out. Are you listening? You can take care of this but you have to hear me out.”

  “Tell me.”

  Steve's quick response fazed me for a second. He was listening more than I thought. Maybe things had changed since I had been gone.

  “I thought you would have been out in the street by now.”

  “Things change,” he said, reading my mind.

  “So you'll cool it and let things play out my way?”

  “Things haven't changed that much. Tell me.”

  “A guy came to see me; he told me to come home. After a long talk, I found out why.”

  “Tell me straight — no one is listening.”

  “You don't know that,” I said, thinking of Paolo.

  “I do, Wilson. Now tell me straight.”

  I figured I owed Steve the truth. “Paolo found me,” I said.

  “You were fishing on film.”

  I pulled over to a chorus of honking horns and punched the dashboard. “That fucking picture,” I said.

  “Ben saw it. He loves fishing and he showed me the fish when he saw it on the front page. Big guy didn't even know who the politician was. I saw the fish and I saw you. The beard looks good.”

  Ben was a giant of a man who grew up on a farm in rural Ontario. He still clung to his roots, often wearing overalls to tend bar. Steve hired him after Sandra was kidnapped. Ben's job was to keep her safe when Steve stepped out. Ben was capable; I had seen him break up brawls alone. The brawlers weren't punks either — they were hard men. Ben blasted through them with giant fists like Thor with two flesh-and-bone hammers.

  “Paolo saw the picture and sent a guy out to
see me.”

  “He dead?” Steve asked.

  I didn't answer the question. “I got in touch with Paolo, and he told me he needed me for a job.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Job doesn't matter. What's important is he said he had a man watching you.”

  “Yeah?” Steve's answers were getting shorter. Soon it would be grunts then blood.

  “Whoever it is, he's watching you to make sure I play ball.”

  “When?”

  “Over the next day or two.”

  “No. When can I deal with this?”

  I smiled. “You have changed. Two years ago you would have your hair up, and you'd have been in the street already.”

  “I am in the street — phone's portable.”

  “Don't do anything yet. I can fix it.”

  “When?”

  “Give me a day, two max. Find whoever's watching and keep tabs on him. Wait for my call before you do anything. I can fix this, and then he'll be gone and everything will be cool.”

  “I think I already found him,” Steve said.

  I pressed the phone harder into my ear out of fear that Steve could instantly make the situation infinitely worse. “Will you wait for my call?”

  I heard traffic digitized through the phone lines. Then Steve sighed and answered. “Two days. Any more, and I can't promise anything.”

  “This guy can't get beaten to death on the street; that will just bring more heat. If he goes, it's got to be quiet, like he didn't exist. Once I handle my end, no one can know what your stalker was up to. That means no one can find him.”

  “Call me when I can move.”

  I said goodbye and hung up the phone. I nosed the car into traffic again, hearing fewer horns than when I pulled over, and moved back towards Upper James and the Mediterranean restaurant I was at an hour before. Traffic had come to life since I had been online. The roads were clogged like the tunnels in an ant farm. It was like the mountain was channelling downtown just for me. I looked around at the frustrated commuters and smiled. I enjoyed the feeling of being back in the city. With each breath, I felt like I was uploading what I was, one file at a time. I felt more like myself than I had in a long time. The only problem was the scraggly reflection in the rearview. I didn't look like me — which wasn't a bad thing — but I didn't look like anyone else from around here either — which certainly was. I would stand out in a crowd to almost anyone, and I wasn't about to go up against just anyone; I was going to tamper with the lives of dangerous men. Dangerous men who would notice an unkempt loner in their periphery.