Cut You Down

by Sam Wiebe

  “No reason, I guess.” She hesitated before saying, “We don’t really know what he’s been up to. I mean, maybe he’s—I dunno.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Okay. Back in Hamilton, at the church, when he refused to go inside. Remember?”

  “He was fucking with me,” I said. “It’s what he does.”

  “Sure. But maybe he didn’t want to be seen by the father, y’know? Maybe they’d seen each other before.” She forced herself to proceed. “Maybe he’s the person we’re looking for.”

  I was ready to scoff but I waited, let the idea play out. It was hard to stomach—the thought that I’d unknowingly hired the man I was trying to find. I could be stupid, but hopefully not that stupid.

  “It doesn’t work,” I said to Kay. “Tim’s not whoever Dana Essex met at Milton.”

  “But he might know that person, or know Essex some other way. I’m just saying, he was at the office right before the murder.”

  “Looking for work.”

  “Maybe,” Kay said. “Anyway, I hope you find him.”

  I called the wrestling promotion he worked for but the promotor said he’d no-showed. The promotor added, if I saw Blatchford, tell him there’d better be a good fucking excuse for blowing off his cage match with El Phantasmo.

  I drove to Blatchford’s address, a carved-up house off Renfrew. The house was squat but still taller than its neighbors, with a mansard roof that gave it the look of a beige-painted barn. Twenty years ago it might’ve been owned by a single family, who might’ve maintained it with something like love. No more of that in this neighborhood. Parked cars jammed the narrow street, but I was the only person visible. Together/apart, as only Vancouver could do.

  There was no outside staircase leading to Blatchford’s flat. I knocked at the door of the downstairs resident. I heard movement inside, and waited on the weatherbeaten patio, staring at the dead plants that hung from the chained box planters above the railing.

  The door opened. A barefoot man in sweats and an unbuttoned dress shirt stepped out, nodded, and lit a cigarette. I told him I was looking for Tim.

  “His place is upstairs but he’s not here.”

  “When’d you last see him?”

  “He got in late yesterday. He must’ve left early this morning. But that’s normal for Tim.”

  He was smoking Belmonts and offered me the pack. I managed to decline. “You know him pretty well?”

  “Sure.” Letting me infer from that what I wanted.

  “I’m a friend of his,” I said, “and his employer.”

  “Two things that don’t usually go together.”

  “I think he’s in trouble. I’d like to take a look at his place.”

  “Trouble.” The man smoked and considered the term. “What’s he done and who’d he do it to?”

  “He hasn’t been in touch and he was supposed to be. And yes I know he’s unreliable, but this is beyond that. I’m thinking he’s hurt.”

  He took a last long drag on his cigarette. “I got his spare set around somewhere. Let’s take a look.”

  Inside, up the stairs, a fumbling of keys. “Your name’s Wakeland, right?” He examined the key ring. “Think he’s mentioned you.”

  “All praise, I’m sure.”

  “I wouldn’t call it praise, exactly.” He forced the door inward to line up so the lock would turn. “Tim seemed happy to be working with you. Didn’t tell me what he was doing, but sounded serious about it. Tim needs that—without a goal he just flails about.”

  “I know the feeling,” I said.

  “He said you had that in common.” He got the door open, sighed in recognition of the effort. “Stuart Royce, by the way. Tim’s on-again, off-again, guess you could say.”

  Blatchford’s apartment shocked me in that it wasn’t a shithole. The long narrow room terminated in a shower closet, and had a cramped, lived-in feel. Hot plate and fold-down bed. Clothes on the floor, neither folded nor strewn. A stool next to the washstand served as a catchall for papers, flyers, chopsticks, and bills.

  Nothing on the walls save for a signed poster of Roddy Piper, sunglasses on, ready to kick ass and chew bubblegum.

  “It’s as he left it,” Royce said.

  “He didn’t say anything to you, where he was going?”

  “Let me think.” He stooped to tuck a tendril of bedsheet back onto the mattress. “Something about the Island.”

  “When was this?”

  “Yesterday night, after he got back from Creston. He phoned that guy and got into it with him, and then—”

  “What guy? You’re talking about Dale Petrie?”

  “That sounds right.” Royce’s laconic indifference let up enough for a note of irritation to creep into his voice. “He told Tim to fuck off, and you know Tim. And when Tim called again, he said he didn’t know where Tim was from, but where he was from, fuck off meant fuck off.”

  Before Blatchford had even made the trip to the Island, he’d tipped off Petrie. “Why would he phone?” I asked.

  “If I had an answer for half the things Tim does.” Royce didn’t finish the sentence. I pictured Blatchford phoning while drunk, exhausted from the drive, thinking a quick wrong-number call would confirm that Petrie was the one.

  I thanked Royce and walked home. Inside my apartment the lights were on, the stereo spinning a Joni Mitchell album. The bathroom door opened and Sonia came out, pulling back her hair and threading it through an elastic.

  “Food’s on its way,” she said. “General Tso’s and some of those green beans you like.”

  For a moment it all seemed wrong, a cruel joke. This wasn’t what I came home to. It was what I wished to come home to. I allowed myself to be enfolded into the domestic fantasy, kissing her, feeling the heat from the shower roll over us as we stood in the hall.

  I explained to her what I thought had happened to Blatchford.

  “We could phone the Mountie detachment in Ladysmith,” she said. “Then head over tomorrow morning.”

  Again, that hesitation. It felt odd relying on anyone, let alone her. Now firmly entrenched in this fantasy, I didn’t want to lose my hold on Tuesday night Chinese, on curling up on the couch. But the truth wasn’t a choice between those two worlds. It was accepting they could co-exist.

  “We can eat in the car on our way,” I said.

  Thirty-Three

  The ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo weaves through fog-shrouded islands, crosses a gray body of water that bleeds into an equally gray horizon. We stood on the deck of the ship, forgoing the lounge and the crowded cafeteria. Above us, the charcoal-colored clouds parted in a long straight slice that exposed a seam of blue-black atmosphere. Gulls pumped their wings, arcing back toward shore.

  “My friends and I used to take the ferry all the time,” Sonia said. “First trip away from my foster folks, Nanaimo’s where we went.”

  “To do what?”

  “Drink and get laid, smoke dope, smash things on the beach.”

  “Bet you left that off your police application.”

  She turned to watch the western edge of Bowen Island diminish and slide into the gray. “I know so many people who see whales on this trip. Orcas. They come right up to the boat, they say. I’ve never seen shit.”

  In Nanaimo we got back in my Cadillac and headed to Ladysmith. I’d taken a pamphlet from the tourism rack on the ferry, and as Sonia drove, I read out the local sites. “An award-winning meadery and a glass-blowing workshop. We could move here, you know. You could request a transfer.”

  “Just try and hold me back,” she said.

  The drive took forty minutes, through the sleepy downtown core of Nanaimo, down the Island Highway that ran along the east coast of Vancouver Island. Petrie’s house was built sideways to the winding street. Three stories and bracket-shaped, the back yard concealed behind high hedges. Windows closed and curtains drawn, what looked like tinfoil peeking out from the other side of the glass. From the curb, we could hear cur
sing coming from around back.

  Petrie sat on a chaise longue beside an outdoor pool, lit by floodlights. He was reading a paper. His Hawaiian shirt was unbuttoned, tanned belly hanging out like a half-inflated beach ball. The red coils of a portable heater wafted warmth toward his face.

  He noticed us and put the paper down. Heaved himself out of his chair, staggered, steadied himself by grabbing the back of the chaise.

  “This is private property, fuckwad.” He walked over to us.

  I leaned over the gate. “I’m looking for a friend.”

  “Bet you are.” Up close I could smell beer breath. He was missing one and a half fingers on his right hand. Something in the palm of his left, black and metallic.

  “Can I ask if you’ve seen him?” I said.

  “You can take your faggot ass back where you came from, the bitch too, before I get really pissed and decide—”

  I grabbed a hank of Petrie’s hair and pulled him over the gate. The top hinge snapped. Petrie somersaulted, his face introducing itself to the gravel bed that was his lawn.

  I planted a knee on his back and shook the weapon out of his hand. A fold-out knife, wood-handled and dull.

  Petrie sputtered and cursed. He looked up at Sonia, who stomped on his hand with the heel of her boot.

  “Answer his question, shit-turd,” she said.

  “I haven’t seen anyone. You two know the people you’re fucking with?”

  “Mmm-hmmm. Can we check out your place?” As he formed his reply I added, “Thank you so much, won’t take a minute.”

  I pulled him to his feet and Sonia cuffed him. We marched him through the broken gate, shoving him back onto the chaise.

  “You talked to my friend on the phone,” I said.

  “Did not.”

  “You didn’t tell him that fuck off meant fuck off?”

  “That guy?” His mouth pursed in distaste. “So what if I told him to fuck himself? Shouldna fucking phoned me in the first place.”

  Up close, his pool was a floating collection of leaves, feathers, garbage bags, and beer cans. “You didn’t see him?” I asked.

  “No.” He looked between us. “Swear to fucking god.”

  The sliding door opened onto an apartment, hot and humid like the Amazon Room at the Vancouver Aquarium. Petrie’s apartment décor: ashtrays and ancient stroke magazines, empty cardboard flats of Old Stock and the odd two-six of Stoli. A big chrome .45 on top of the fridge.

  “I’ll watch him,” Sonia said. She had her own pistol concealed beneath her coat, but I handed her Petrie’s. I went back inside.

  Up the stairs, into the foyer. I saw why the heat. Every other room in the house had been gutted, plank shelving installed, hydroponics and tin foil for wallpaper. Rows of pot plants, hundreds to a room. Water jugs and pails of nutrients everywhere.

  A pro operation, the Exiles or one of their rival gangs. And Petrie tending things for them.

  No Blatchford, no Essex, nothing on Tabitha Sorenson.

  I heard a groan and a scream from outside. Rushing down the stairs and out onto the lawn, I saw Petrie fetal-positioned next to the chaise, his forehead sporting a spiderweb of blood.

  “Bitch,” Petrie said.

  Sonia had the gun pointed at him, breathing heavy. “He’s lucky he’s not in the fucking pool right now.”

  I checked his storage shed, which held bags of chicken manure, a few gallon jugs of Dyna-Gro, and little else.

  “Are those department-issue cuffs?” I asked.

  “They’re a spare pair. I’ve got others.” She blushed slightly.

  “Nothing linking us to him, then.”

  “We’re clear.” She handed me the pistol. Petrie seemed very interested in it.

  I shot the glass of the sliding door and ventilated the siding. When the gun was empty I tossed it in the pool. We walked out to a refrain of Petrie’s curses.

  In the car, speeding back to the ferry, I said to Sonia: “Shit-turd?”

  “Like you could’ve come up with better.”

  Thirty-Four

  At Departure Bay we stopped for coffee and waited for the next ferry. The coffee shop was between the help desk and the car rental office. Travelers milled about, watching through the glass walls as the lights of the ship approached in the dark.

  “You’re sure Tim was coming here?” Sonia asked.

  “That’s what he said. Seems like he didn’t make it to Petrie.”

  I had a thought. At the help desk I asked if any cars or trucks had been left at the ferry parking lot. The clerk had to track down a supervisor, but eventually returned with the answer. A black Grand Cherokee. Blatchford’s vehicle.

  “Left this afternoon,” the clerk said without looking up from her monitor. “It already went to the impound lot. The vehicle is yours?”

  “My employee’s,” I said. “Which parking lot was it left in—long or short term?”

  “It was left on the ferry, sir. Our people caught it during unloading. No one claimed it and it was taken in. Delayed the sailing thirty minutes.”

  In the coffee shop, Sonia had the Late Start files on our table. Dana Essex’s comments on Henshaw, Crowhurst, and Dale Petrie.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “She has nice penmanship.”

  I told her about the car.

  “They rolled it off here,” she said. “On the Island. Meaning something must’ve happened on the trip over.”

  She brought out her phone, searched “ferry attack,” “ferry stabbing.” Nothing relevant.

  I thought of the control with a knife the killer had displayed with Tabitha Sorenson. “Try ‘ferry accident,’” I said.

  She did, and there it was: “Unidentified Man Removed From Ferry Following Below-Deck Accident.”

  He’d been found unconscious on the car deck, a deep puncture in his side that had bled out, presumably from an exposed edge of jagged steel somewhere amid the restricted nooks of the hull’s interior. Discovered during unloading on the mainland, removed from the ferry by ambulance.

  Essex’s warnings came back to me, the note of fear in her voice. Blatchford had run into danger, and I’d pointed him in that direction.

  The news site didn’t say which hospital Blatchford had been removed to. “Easy enough to find out,” Sonia said.

  By the time we were back at her apartment, she knew Blatchford had been taken to Lions Gate Hospital. The receptionist confirmed over the phone that he’d been admitted after suffering some sort of industrial accident aboard the Queen of Nanaimo. He’d had cocaine and tranquilizers in his system, and might have stumbled somewhere he shouldn’t have. He’d lost a significant amount of blood and been unconscious upon arrival, and had been in and out for the last few hours.

  Once she hung up, I told Sonia we’d have to drive back to North Van and check out the hospital. She vetoed.

  “Is Tim someone who could take care of himself?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t’ve picked him otherwise.”

  “So he’s capable,” Sonia reiterated. “And this person surprised him and stabbed him. Just like he stabbed Tabitha. That should tell you he’s patient, and might have done this just to lure you out.”

  “I can’t leave him there.”

  “That is exactly what you should do,” Sonia said. “Let me handle this. I’ll go and see him. I’ll make sure he’s safe.”

  The sound of her leaving, her locking the door, felt like being submerged underwater with no guarantee of surfacing. It was all I could do not to call her back.

  Instead I called the crime desk of the Sun to find out what the paper knew about Blatchford’s incident. Next to nothing, it turned out. “The only thing anyone talked about was the amount of blood,” the journalist said. Her name was Holinshed. “You wouldn’t think a person could hold that much. Are you thinking it’s foul play?” Excitement in her voice. “Is this connected to that Sorenson thing?”

  “Not sure,” I said. “But if you can wait two da
ys, I’ll give you the exclusive.”

  “Exclusive,” she scoffed. “One major news corp left in the city. Who else would you give it to?”

  But she agreed. I asked if she knew anything about the Anthony Qiu killings at the Monte Carlo.

  “Drugs and turf, what else? The Leung family was getting weaker and their rivals pushed them out. League of Nations, maybe, or the Exiles. Hard to say till we see more bodies.”

  She added, “You know we’ll have to start looking into the connection between Sorenson and Blatchford. I’ll be expecting an interview with you. The full sordid tale.”

  “I’ll get to work on an ending,” I said.

  Thirty-Five

  Sonia didn’t come back until three. I stayed up watching an Eastwood marathon, Firefox followed by Two Mules for Sister Sara. Not having cable at my own flat, I found the commercials and the bowdlerized films a comforting parade of colors.

  She patted my neck to see if I was awake. I sat up and made room for her on the couch. “He’s alive?”

  “Recovering,” she said, “though it’s slow. I watched him for an hour or so to see if he’d wake up. I didn’t see anyone suspicious, and I checked the entire hospital.”

  “By yourself? At night?”

  I hadn’t meant to say it out loud. She pushed away slightly on the couch.

  “You need to find a way to accept that I know what I’m doing. You helped me, Dave, and now it’s my turn.”

  “You’re right,” I said, with little to no sincerity. Her look told me she’d caught the subtext. “I shouldn’t be afraid for you?”

  “Afraid is okay, but you have to have faith. Otherwise”—she spread her hands—“we can’t go on.”

  “Makes sense. Going to bed?”

  “Unless there’s something on.”

  “Eiger Sanction’s coming up. Eastwood as a mountain-climbing hit man.”

  In the morning I woke up to find her at the kitchen table, rereading the Late Start files.

  “You and Blatchford had it narrowed to three,” she said. “Henshaw in Creston. Crowhurst in Washington. Petrie on Vancouver Island. One of them is likely the cut man.”

  “Or put Essex in touch with the cut man,” I said.