Cut You Down

by Sam Wiebe

“Right.”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I do know. I want to hear you say it.”

  “Say that I beat the piss out of that guy. A suspect. For no reason. You want me to say that.”

  “The truth, Dave.”

  “All right. I did. I could tell you he was a scumbag, a bad human being, but fact is, I wanted to hit him and I did. Killing him crossed my mind.”

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “Because I’ve never said it before.”

  “And it only took you seven years.”

  “The guy ended up with a concussion. I was called up to the fifth floor, asked if I wanted my rep with me. The bosses laid out how serious it was, how I should’ve been straight up fired.”

  “You told me you’d resigned.”

  “I tell everybody that. It’s a funny thing.”

  “What’s the truth? They forced you to?”

  “No. Exactly the opposite. A slap on the wrist, a probation period, plus I’d maybe owe a favor or two.”

  “So the truth—”

  “I resigned. My choice.”

  “Dave.”

  “I’m not a police officer, Sonia. I can’t be one. In my heart I don’t believe the rules apply to me. My saving grace, though, if I have one, is I recognized it. Saw that ten, twenty years down the line, I’d be Chambers. Worse—Qiu and his money controlled Chambers, aimed him. I’d be busting every head till someone killed me, looking for some kind of justice that probably doesn’t exist. I—Christ, I’m a weepy fucking drunk.”

  “It’s okay. It’s good.”

  “I didn’t understand it. Still don’t. Maybe it plays into my own parents not being there. But I’ll tell you, if I have kids of my own, I’ll cling to those motherfuckers like lampreys.”

  Sonia was laughing. It sounded strange. I realized I was laughing too. Laughing out all the hurt, the guilt. There were still tears on my face, but I was beyond the pain of memory. I was lighter than I’d felt in years.

  Sonia had her arms around my neck, in my hair. Holding me. I wanted to tell her I was glad but she shushed me with a kiss. Her arms tightened and I felt myself lifting her onto the desk, cupping her face, matching the warm hunger of her mouth. She broke the embrace long enough to shrug out of her jeans. I leaned her back, pushing papers to the floor and the revolver to the edge of the desk. I kissed down her throat, moving past the cumbersome clinging bra to her dark trimmed pubic hair and below.

  I had my face buried in pussy when they broke down the door.

  Twenty-One

  Triplett read my statement back to me while I sipped cold tea. I knew Sonia would be going through the same with McCurdy in the adjacent interview room. Or perhaps cops used a more welcoming environment with their own.

  “You and Ms. Drego—Constable Drego—were in your office talking prior to the incident.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “What were you talking about?”

  “Gardening. This and that.”

  “You noticed the men standing in the doorway. You recognized them.”

  Heard them first, their laughter. I turned my head to see Nagy holding the crowbar and Wong with an automatic rifle. I hadn’t heard them break the door at the bottom of the stairs.

  Disoriented, self-aware, still kneeling, I looked at them laughing at us. I froze. Then the gun went off, and I couldn’t hear anything after that.

  I told Triplett, “The caucasian, Nagy, and Wong, the Chinese guy, are known associates of a known gangster.”

  “Known by whom?”

  “Known around the way.” I added, “They worked with Chris Chambers.”

  Triplett had been writing in the margins of the print-out, but now she stopped, looked up at me.

  “You saw they were armed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Before or after firing upon them?”

  “Before.”

  “So you saw them, recognized them, opened fire, and then noticed the weapons?”

  “No. I noticed the weapons, then recognized them, then saw them raise said weapons to fire.”

  “Both of them. In the doorway.”

  “It’s a wide doorway.”

  She annotated the statement. “Did you say anything to them, or them to you?”

  “I believe Nagy said, ‘Get ready to die, bitch.’ Talking to me, I think.”

  “And you didn’t respond verbally.”

  “No.”

  “No warning, no attempt at discourse.”

  “There wasn’t time.”

  I watched Nagy stumble, knocked back onto the stairs. I didn’t hear him fall, but I felt the vibrations through the old wood flooring. Wong grabbed the door frame and managed to stay on his feet. He’d lost his grip on the rifle, but it was attached to a shoulder sling, and his hands grasped the barrel as he processed what was going on. His lips might’ve been moving, but I was focused on the rifle, the barrel swinging up toward me.

  “The Smith & Wesson revolver is owned by you?” Triplett asked. “You have a permit for it?”

  “I have a restricted firearms license and an authorization to transport.”

  “Not to carry.”

  “I wasn’t carrying it,” I said. “It’s stored at my office.”

  “You store it loaded and within reach?”

  “Never,” I said. “When Constable Drego arrived I was in the midst of cleaning it and inspecting the ammunition.”

  “You two did some drinking.”

  “A memorial toast. Her partner passed away recently.”

  Triplett ignored that and said, “You didn’t think it was prudent to store your firearm before enjoying your drink?”

  “In retrospect it seems a poor choice. Although to be fair, it’s the reason Constable Drego and I were able to defend ourselves. Lucky, huh?”

  “Lucky,” Triplett said.

  Wong was still raising the barrel when Sonia shot him. He didn’t fall. He bounced against the doorframe and fired two shots into the floor. By then Sonia had both hands on the revolver and squeezed off a second shot which caught him in the breast bone, and a third that likely hit his heart. He teetered and then fell. All told, maybe six seconds had passed.

  It was a clean story, and close enough to the truth. I didn’t know how much of it Triplett believed. Hopefully she’d be swayed more by the knockoff AR-14, the pistol and knife found on Nagy’s corpse. Down the hall, Sonia would be telling McCurdy the same story.

  “Just to clarify,” Triplett said, readying her pen. “What was Constable Drego doing in the moments of the shooting?”

  “My attention was on the guns, and the men carrying them.”

  “She seems to be favoring one of her arms.”

  “You’ve worked patrol,” I said. “You know how heavy all that equipment gets. Probably pulled a muscle.”

  “And yourself? Constable Gupta noted that you had blood around your mouth when he arrived.”

  “Might’ve bit my tongue,” I said. “That gun has a hell of a recoil.”

  Alone afterwards, sitting in my apartment, I told Sonia that it had gone all right. A clean shooting, unofficially. If Triplett didn’t believe I’d pulled the trigger, she couldn’t prove otherwise.

  I asked her if she was okay.

  “I don’t know,” Sonia said. “I just need to be alone with this for a while.”

  Us or them. It couldn’t’ve been more clear cut. And yet after she’d fired, I’d approached the stairs cautiously, taken a few steps down, saw Nagy lying beneath Wong’s corpse. Nagy’s eyes were open. He gurgled, his arm reaching up, palm open. Afraid of me. I’d watched him stop breathing.

  There was no lesson to take away. He’d been a danger to me and his death made things easier. If he’d shot me I doubt he’d’ve thought twice. That he’d gone out childlike and fearful shouldn’t have mattered.

  So people die. Some instantly and others gasping on their own blood. And the rest of us run on for as long as we can.

&nbs
p; Twenty-Two

  Tim Blatchford’s report was about what I’d expect from someone nourished on sleeping pills, whiskey, and chair shots to the head. When we met for updates he consulted frayed napkins and the backs of receipts. His e-mail correspondence was usually late, often lacking punctuation and capital letters. That was if he bothered to compose more than one sentence.

  Even so, his work brought Dana Essex into focus. So much that when she phoned, it was difficult to feign ignorance when she embellished events from her past.

  She’d grown up in Gatineau, near Ottawa, just over the Quebec border. Her parents still lived on the Rue des Invalides, working-class and stubbornly anti-French. Blatchford had visited them, been served coffee and ginger snaps in their living room. He’d told them he was with a reunion committee. Everyone was wondering what happened to Dana.

  Her parents were wondering the same. Essex had gone from a sullen, poetry-obsessed high school senior, a straight B student, to making the dean’s list her first semester at Carleton. Scholarships and merit awards followed, a four point et cetera GPA. She’d met a research assistant, Graham, and married him, her first real relationship. They intended to apply to grad school together.

  They made plans to leave . . . and Dana never left. Her parents didn’t know when or why she’d divorced Graham, but Dana was accepted into the graduate program and moved closer to campus. From there the story muddled.

  She’d never matriculated, was still technically ABD—all but dissertation, her doctorate unfinished. Then she’d taken the job at Surrey Polytech, moved without talking things over with her folks.

  Blatchford had asked and they’d flung excuses at him: Politics. Poor job market. Change of scenery. Met somebody. Enough excuses for him to believe that her parents didn’t really know what had motivated their daughter to move west.

  Next Blatchford had visited Essex’s graduate supervisor, a professor whose specialty was “Poetry and the Long Eighteenth Century.” The faculty webpage showed a photo of Dr. Tillie Metcalf, a birdlike, veiny-throated woman whose meek smile Dana had echoed the first time I’d met her. I wish I’d been present to see her reaction to Blatchford, to witness that meeting of the minds.

  Metcalf told him that Dana simply lost focus. Her graduate work had been on Mary Darby Robinson, whose contributions to the literary canon were finally receiving critical reassessment. Dana had presented a brilliant conference paper on the subject. While the brains of students and faculty alike were being turned to mush by deconstructionism and semiotics, Dana Essex represented a bright new critical voice. Someone in love with poetry, with close reading, someone ready to take up the tradition of the life of the mind.

  And then it had all crumbled.

  She’d stopped working on her dissertation. She’d missed meetings, under-delivered when asked to revise passages. Metcalf had taken on other students and moved on.

  Blatchford asked what caused that rupture. Metcalf had seen it before in other promising students. Pressure could make them crack, as could money troubles or an ailing relative. It was important to remember this period was also a transition into adulthood.

  It was also around this time, Metcalf remembered, that Essex started her other teaching job. Dana had found working with those people fascinating.

  “Those people?” Blatchford had asked. He’d spent the day wandering the campus, eating soup in the cafeteria, watching a down-with-something-or-other rally on the lawn. If Metcalf meant students, then Essex’s definition of fascinating didn’t jibe with his.

  “Prisoners,” she had replied. “Dana volunteered for two years at Milton Correctional. She was part of a group working with inmates on core learning skills.” She added with a rueful smile, “I might’ve even recommended Dana for the job.”

  Twenty-Three

  “Things certainly have taken a turn,” Essex said.

  She was referring to Chris Chambers’s suicide, but she could just as easily have been talking about herself. Her call had come less than an hour after I’d booked my tickets, making the decision to defy her.

  I stood on the balcony of Sonia’s apartment, the phone propped on her wedge-shaped patio table, set to speaker. I wasn’t above leaning over the railing, trying to aim my expectorate at the crest of the green awning below. I spat and missed.

  “Those men who attacked you,” Essex said. “They were friends of Chambers?”

  “Associates. I don’t know he had real friends.”

  “But dead now, same as Chambers himself. You must be relieved.”

  “I must be,” I said, thinking of the night before. Sonia waking up under a perspiration-soaked blanket, bolting to the bathroom and barricading herself inside. I’d waited for her, held her when she came back. Our first night together in years, shared with the ghosts of the men she’d killed.

  “She seems like a remarkable woman,” Essex said. Her thoughts ran close to mine, always a discomfiting experience. “How much have you told her?”

  “Everything,” I said.

  “Really.”

  I spat again. Bullseye.

  “It’s a funny thing,” I said. “You spend so much energy keeping up this idea that you’re self-sufficient, unique. No one can possibly understand. Then once that falls away, and you find yourself trusting somebody, it’s a relief.”

  “So she knows about us?”

  “She knows.”

  “And about Tabitha? She can be trusted not to speak of it?”

  “I didn’t swear her to a vow of secrecy,” I said.

  “One might think you’re making her a target.”

  “You already said she was a target.”

  “With more reason now than ever.”

  I turned, my back against the rain-dampened railing, and looked at the phone.

  “My feeling is, Dana, you’re more worried about yourself, where you stand with your friend with the knife. I’m the least of your worries.”

  No reply.

  “Adding another victim to the list won’t help you get out of this.”

  “Who says I want out?” An adolescent petulance had crept into her tone.

  “If you don’t,” I said, “then why are we still talking?”

  A day earlier, Blatchford had visited the “Milton Hilton,” a medium-max prison, old and gray with high chain-link fences and ramparts full of armed guards. Undeterred, he’d met with the warden and asked about the program.

  “It was called Late Start,” Blatchford relayed to me on a video conference. “What it was, a local priest decided to start an outreach program for felons with learning disabilities. There’s a high school equivalency program inside, but he felt a lot of people got left behind. So he and a few other churchies, and some interning college kids, worked it out to meet with the felons one on one, teach them the three R’s or whatever.”

  “Did you get to speak to him?” I asked.

  “The priest? I’m getting there.” On my laptop screen Blatchford popped pills and swilled beer against the backdrop of a dark motel room. His face was blue from the glow of the monitor, eyes roaming over the mess of papers on the desktop.

  He yawned and said, “I got all this from the warden. She said the crusaders were put out of business. There’s a proper bureaucracy now, the”—he checked a note—“Western Ontario Correctional Education Bureau, which reports to the—let’s see—Ministry of Correctional Services.”

  “Dana Essex’s time would have been before the change,” I said.

  “Right. The priest, Father Darian, he’s still around. Operates a parish in Hamilton. Guy gets a community service award every couple months. He’s in his seventies now.”

  “Can you get in to see him?” I asked.

  “I had a thought on that.” He coughed and covered his mouth with a wad of brown paper napkins, which might have been part of his notes. “Maybe somebody else would be better for that interview. Like Jeff, maybe, or Kay.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The father’s a bit up
scale. Guy likes to golf. Not really the type who’d open up to me.”

  “Meaning you got yourself kicked out of his church,” I said.

  “I fucked up a bit, yeah.” Blatchford grinned sleepily. “Got there early and dozed off during the service. When I woke up the place looked empty. I go upstairs, check his office. But here he comes up the stairs, catches me, says no one’s allowed up here. Had the guards toss me out.” He shrugged. “Just bad luck.”

  “Bad luck which occurred to you stone-cold sober?”

  “Finger-pointing will get us nowhere,” Blatchford said. “Important thing is, what do you want to do now?”

  Confront this, I thought. Do what I couldn’t do weeks ago. Accept my failure and my fear. Find Essex and her unknown partner, then figure out how to bring them to justice. Tabitha Sorenson deserved the attempt. I felt I owed it to her.

  “You’re still in Hamilton?” I asked Blatchford.

  “Till you say otherwise.”

  “Wait there,” I told him. “Kay and I will come to you.”

  Twenty-Four

  Father Charles-August Darian had a sharp-planed face below a frosting of silver-white hair. His gray beard swept out to a point, improving on his chin. The pockets of his cardigan were weighted down with golf balls and a cell phone, which he showed me to make the point that he was busy, couldn’t spend all day, but would gladly spare a few minutes for someone in the education business.

  He received me in his office, a high-ceilinged, wood-paneled affair with a latticed window that looked down on the softball diamond across the street. An avid Blue Jays fan, the father had found space for a pennant and an autographed picture of himself and John Olerud, amid the commendations that dominated his walls. My impression of him was of someone very comfortable with being well thought of.

  Once we were seated and he’d rung for coffee, he asked what he could do for me.

  I took a deep breath and said, “I work for an attorney who’s handling the paperwork for a teaching institute doing outreach to prisoners.” As proof I placed one of Shauna’s cards on his desk. “We’re interested in the Late Start program you pioneered. We believe there are advantages to your model over the current ones.”