Cut You Down

by Sam Wiebe

  She took deep breaths and stared at her feet. “I’m being followed,” she said.

  “You too?” When she looked up, I added, “Why do you think I’ve been trying to contact you?”

  “Were you followed here?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “I walked here,” I said. “Halfway over the bridge I paused to look down at the water. No one was around.”

  “No one else would be dumb enough to do it in the rain,” she said.

  “I like the rain.”

  “Do you know who followed you?”

  I nodded. “Guy named Nagy, works for Anthony Qiu. He did a craptastic job, too—which may have been the point.”

  “Intimidation,” she said.

  I nodded. Like I’d tried to explain to Jeff, people like the Hayes brothers and Anthony Qiu trafficked in fear, along with whatever else they were involved in.

  “Your partner works for Qiu,” I said. “After I visited his restaurant, he sent Chambers to suss me out. Chambers all but interrogated me on my plans for Qiu.”

  “Does Chris sense that you know they’re connected?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Did you recognize your tail?”

  “No,” she said, “but I got a license number. The car was registered to a Wong Jian Ye, also known as Winslow Wong. A couple charges for receiving stolen goods.”

  “Well dressed, slender build, acne scars?”

  Sonia nodded.

  “He’s another of Qiu’s. I saw him with Nagy when I paid my visit.”

  “They could be watching my place,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t want you coming up.”

  “Might be sheer egotism,” I said, “but I think they’re tailing you to find out what’s motivating me. They’re confused about why I dropped in on Qiu’s restaurant.”

  “So am I,” Sonia said. “I wish you hadn’t.”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “Which is what they’ll put on your tombstone, Wakeland.”

  Sonia bussed our empty cups to her sink and collapsed on the couch with a sigh.

  “When I started riding with Chris,” she said, “I lied to him. Well, he assumed you and I were still a couple, and I didn’t correct him.”

  “A girl’s allowed to dream.”

  “You don’t understand. When I partner up with someone, half the time they think I don’t belong. That I didn’t get here on merit, that I can’t do the job the way they can, that I’ll put them in danger. I don’t get the assumption of competence their privileged white male asses do. But Chris seemed to know you, and that made him more comfortable with me.”

  She sat forward on her couch, hunched with her chin on her fist.

  “I’m so fucking tired of having to prove myself,” she said. “Chris is part of that old boys’ club. What he thinks of me matters to others, it affects my career. If he tells someone I’m good police, or ‘she’s all right for a girl, I guess,’ that distinction matters. I hate that it matters but it does. I want to make rank, but I don’t want to be one of those paper bosses that none of the rank and file respect. I want people to know I earned it.”

  “I don’t know why Chambers would remember me,” I said.

  “You’re white. You’re male.”

  I thought about it. “Maybe he thinks I’m bent like him. He heard I was forced off the job. That’s the rumor around the cop shop, isn’t it?”

  No answer. Which was its own answer.

  “Chambers is dirty,” I continued. “He sees me as being the same. And if you’re with me—”

  “—then he can trust me.” Sonia’s eyes widened.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, not important.”

  “You have to tell me,” I said.

  She laughed mirthlessly. “Only you, Dave, could demand someone open up to you completely at the same time you dance around your own guilt.”

  “My guilt’s not the issue,” I said.

  “The last time we spoke you said you hoped there’d be a time we could be totally honest with each other. Hold nothing back.”

  “Right.”

  “I hope that comes soon,” she said.

  Thirty-Nine

  I got to the Narrow early, waited at the bar for a table to open up. Business was conducted around me, the circulation of dollars and beers. Mark Lanegan on the sound system, “Ode to Sad Disco.” I was watchful for Nagy or Chambers.

  Sonia’s words had stung. I chased a double Bulleit with a bottle of beer and wondered what exactly I’d expected out of helping her: gratitude, sex, an alleviation of guilt? It didn’t work like that. I thought of Shay, the woman I’d seen briefly last year. I’d wanted to help her, too. Shay’s demons had been different than Sonia’s, and no amount of care, of love, could rid her of them. Maybe Sonia was right, and I was addicted to playing savior. I wanted to believe there was more to me than that—but maybe that was the point.

  Dana Essex showed up on time, wearing a pleated skirt and a tawny jacket which she slipped over her stool. She seemed amused by the surroundings.

  “I’m not much of a beer drinker,” she said. She ordered a gin Collins and I bought another Kronenbourg.

  “You look like you’re surviving,” I said.

  “I’m enduring,” she said. “Like Dilsie’s family. My affection for Tabitha was a bit abstract, I recognize that.” She took a long drink and shuddered. “Tonight I’m going to enjoy myself.”

  Liquor loosens tongues. By the second round Essex was holding court on various authors, most of whom I’d never heard of. She seemed shocked my reading list hadn’t included Tomas Tranströmer, that my exposure to Atwood and Richler had been strictly compulsory.

  “But you do read?” she asked.

  “Sure—books on boxing, the odd crime novel.”

  She brought her lips together in what was either distaste or resignation. “Have you heard of Mo Yan? Elfriede Jelinek?” I hadn’t. “Nobel winners. And unread by almost all North Americans. Unless we’re giving an award to a pop singer, we pay it no heed. Why does the only truly international book award mean nothing to us?”

  “Why would you trust a book award given out by the guy who invented dynamite,” I said, “when none of the books involve people dynamiting things?”

  She shut her eyes, laughing. “You may have a point,” she said. “Tabitha never read anything but those eight-hundred-page fantasy novels—unless it was some anarchist tract assigned by Paul Mastellotto. And my ex-husband, if it wasn’t Restoration poetry or the contemporary English novel—which reminds me.”

  From her purse she produced a slim volume.

  “Ishiguro,” she said. “Slow-going but worth it.”

  “Thank you,” I said politely.

  “He writes with an English sensibility, Ishiguro, and yet his books build to these moments of sadness and recognition. You’re familiar with mono no aware?”

  “Will you think less of me if I say no?”

  She shook her head earnestly, happy to explain. It was a Japanese term, an apprehension of the transience of all things. I drank my beer and enjoyed listening to her digress.

  “In the West we ask impossible things from our artists,” she said. “Everything is disassembled and commodified. People take quotations from Shakespeare’s characters and repeat them as if they’re words of infallible wisdom. They miss the inherent irony of a line like ‘To thine own self be true.’”

  “Those rubes,” I said.

  “Sorry to drone on.” She took up her new drink and tasted it through the half-sized straw. “I must be a complete boor.”

  “No, it’s fine. It’s interesting. Tell me more about Shakespeare.”

  She thought for a while and abruptly resumed laughing.

  “I just remembered how a graduate instructor of mine referred to him,” she said. “It was after a few drinks in a bar similar to this. We were talking about the Anti-Stratfordians, the dullards who thin
k Shakespeare was too uneducated to be the writer he was.”

  “So who do they think wrote Hamlet and all that?”

  “There are a few candidates, all invariably drawn from the upper crust. My friend responded that they’d be horrified to know the real Shakespeare. And I of course asked what he was like.”

  “The answer?”

  “‘A tight-fisted, status-obsessed, alcoholic pussy hound with questionable sexual history’ is how she phrased it.”

  Around midnight Dana Essex complained of a headache. “It’s the air,” she said. “Mind if we walk a bit?”

  “There are other bars around, quieter ones.”

  “How far away is your place?”

  “Half hour,” I said.

  “And you have alcohol there?”

  As we walked she slipped her arm around mine and leaned against my shoulder. I thought of the first time I’d seen her, how indeterminate she’d looked. Now she seemed more sexualized. More playful, too. It was a costume she was trying on, one that didn’t quite fit. But then neither had the other.

  At my door she kissed me. We stumbled into the dark apartment and as I reached for the lights I felt her hands ensnare mine. Her lips moved over my face and neck.

  “Bedroom,” she said. I nodded in the direction.

  Unbuckling my pants she said, “This isn’t payment. I don’t want you to think I’m thinking about it that way.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “I’ve been thinking about this since I first saw you. I felt the same way about Tabitha. You’re both strong and self-assured. I want this to be perfect. I want this to please you.”

  “All right.”

  “Tell me what to do. What you want, how and where. Tell me, Dave.”

  In the end I didn’t need to say anything.

  Later, with the morning sun making overtures through the blinds, she got up naked and retrieved the book. She wanted to read to me. I liked the sound of her voice and the play of her free hand over my body. We made love again with the reading light above us. After, lying on our sides, I saw someone looking back at me, a person, a woman I’d never seen before.

  It was noon before I could summon the energy to fall out of bed. She was still asleep, her breathing cool and measured. My phone was vibrating in the pocket of my jeans, which had been abandoned in the kitchenette. I put water on the stove, slid into the pants, and afterwards decided I should answer.

  “It’s Kay,” she said. “I’ve been hitting your buzzer for the last twenty minutes.”

  “Come around the patio side.”

  She did. I opened the sliding door. We stared at each other from opposite sides of the screen.

  “You’re not gonna let me in?”

  “Company,” I said.

  “Ah.” She smirked. “I was wondering what I’m supposed to do, now that Tabitha’s found.”

  “Good work on that,” I said. “You can relieve Greg from out front of the house.”

  “Sure. Or I could just hang out here for a little while—”

  I shut the door.

  Dana Essex emerged from the bedroom wearing a T-shirt. She smiled awkwardly and maneuvered around me to the washroom. In the mirror she inspected the love marks on her shoulders and throat. “You wouldn’t have an extra toothbrush?”

  “Under the sink,” I said. “Breakfast? I make a pretty decent instant oatmeal.”

  The kettle whistled and I took care of it.

  “Thanks,” she said between rinses. “I have proposals to mark and a lesson plan to write. But I enjoyed that.”

  “Some other time,” I said.

  “I hope so.”

  Forty

  At one I walked to Hastings. Before I could enter the building, I heard someone hail me.

  Chris Chambers was approaching, waving at me. Out of uniform, suede jacket over turtleneck and cords, the jacket halfway zipped up, bulky enough for a shoulder holster.

  “Time for a brew?” he asked.

  Seated in the basement at Steamworks, over a pitcher of house lager, Chambers pitched a job to me.

  “I’ve a friend who’s looking for a top-notch PI,” he said. “After our whiskey session the other day, only one name came to mind.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “You’d be on retainer, ’case something came up. He’s a pretty high-profile businessman, but generous to his friends. All you need is discretion and a willingness to make money.”

  “This wouldn’t be Vincent Leung, would it? Anthony Qiu’s father-in-law?”

  Chambers’s mouth formed a worldly, confiding smile. “He’s thinking of appealing his sentence again. There’d be canvassing and re-interview work. Plus all types of corporate gigs might come up with his other businesses.” He reached into his suit pocket and withdrew a folded check. “Best of all, here’s the retainer.”

  I looked at it. High five figures. “And that’s yearly,” Chambers said, “on top of the bread you make now.”

  “Chris,” I said, pushing the check back to him, “how deep are you in with these people? You know how they operate?”

  “Mr. Leung is a good businessman.”

  “He’s a lot of things,” I said. “But he’s not good and he’s not a businessman. If he has something over you, there are ways to get shut of it.”

  Chambers’s mouth opened. Whatever his response would have been, he killed it, snapping his jaw shut. His gaze lost its warmth and became clinical, an appraisal.

  “This is going to get ugly,” he said. “Answer your own question, Dave—do you know what these guys are capable of?”

  He smoothed out the check.

  “Now. We have a mutually beneficial way out. Everybody gets paid and everybody gets left alone.”

  I picked up the check and stared at it.

  “Call it a consultancy fee,” Chambers said. “Your partner doesn’t even have to know.”

  My phone buzzed, Kay texting me. Van trouble.

  “I’ve got to deal with this,” I said. “Are Qiu’s guys going to keep tailing me?”

  “That really depends on you, Dave.”

  I refolded the check and put it in my wallet. A broad relieved grin spread across Chambers’s features.

  “You’re making the right call. Knew you’d see that.” Chambers emptied his glass. “I gotta ask, though, what made you rattle Tony’s cage the other day?”

  “Honestly? Sheer fucking boredom.”

  Chambers laughed and bought himself another pitcher.

  Forty-One

  “Van trouble” was company code for “assistance needed ASAP.” I sped away from the restaurant, hoping I hadn’t tipped as much to Chambers.

  I drove an erratic route to Quebec Street. Over the Burrard Bridge, through the parking lot of Vancouver General Hospital, weaving down side streets and alleys. I parked on Ontario, walked a long circuit to the van.

  Kay sat on the milk crate in the back, watching the front of Gill’s house through the tinted glass. Greg sat on the floor next to her. Both jumped when I opened the back door.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  Kay looked at Greg, who seemed to defer to her despite being more experienced. “We think something’s up,” she said.

  “Based on what?”

  “It just feels wrong.”

  “Did you see Tabitha or Sabar Gill leave? Or anyone else enter?” Both shook their heads. “Then what?”

  “We think the house is empty,” Kay said.

  “I didn’t see anyone last night,” Greg said, nodding. “No movement at all. And I didn’t fall asleep, sir, I swear.”

  I leaned against the back door. “Why are you still here?”

  His face reddened. “Just thought Kay could use some help. Gets boring doing this yourself.”

  “But neither of you actually saw anyone.”

  “Think about how weird that is,” Kay said. “It’s three o’clock and no one’s left or come home since last night. If they haven’t gone away, then
something has to be wrong.”

  “We don’t know that,” I said. But I reached into the front, found my flashlight where I’d left it. “Might as well know for sure.”

  I told Kay to follow me, Greg to wait in the van. We walked up the steps and knocked on the front door. There was no answer. I couldn’t see through the curtained windows.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Kay said, with as much conviction as she could summon. “Everything’s probably fine.”

  Leaving the porch, we walked around the side of the house. There was no path. Leaves covered the neglected lawn, crunching under our feet.

  Around back we found a gray sagging porch, bolstered with a skeleton of fresh timber. No guardrail on the weather-warped staircase. The property looked different in daylight, its disrepair in stark contrast to its professionally maintained neighbors.

  Newspapers and empty cans were piled near the back door. I unlatched the outer screen and reached for the handle. The door swung inward at my touch.

  “I knew it,” Kay said.

  Gill and Tabitha could have left out the back at night, if they’d been careful. With the blackout curtains drawn, the lights dimmed, they could have packed what they needed into Gill’s Mercedes and been gone before anyone noticed. Why they’d do that, and how they’d been tipped off, was anyone’s guess.

  The kitchen was cold, painted yellow, the counters spotted with grease. Trays of wheatgrass arrayed along the windowsills. Empty mason jars on the floor near the heater. A doorway led from the kitchen to a dining nook, Formica table matched with lawn chairs. A small library, its shelves made of cinder blocks and planks.

  Kay uttered a grunt of shock and disgust. A body was sprawled on the floor, head against the baseboard, legs threaded between the table’s. Sabar Gill. A coin-sized slick of blood had formed on the floor, issuing from the side of Gill’s head.

  “Our father in heaven,” Kay said, the prayer breaking off in a shudder.

  I crouched and turned Gill on his back, shoving the table aside. “He’s still alive.”

  Crossing herself, Kay knelt on her heels and took Gill’s hand. She found his pulse, her shock abating as she watched the slight rise and fall of his stomach.