Slow Recoil

by C. B. Forrest

  McKelvey said, “So what happened?”

  “She stopped answering her phone two days ago. She missed class on Wednesday night, and she hasn’t missed a class in six weeks. Something’s not right, Charlie. I’m no cop, but it just doesn’t feel right.”

  “You have a key to her place.”

  “No, but she has a key to mine. We didn’t spend the night together more than a few times, but when we did, she always stayed over here. She said her place was too small.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “She was in a unit off Blevins Place in Regent Park when she first came over last year. She said she had heard enough gunfire during the war, so she found a little apartment she could afford at Roncesvalles and Dundas, near the tracks over there.”

  Fielding gave the address, and McKelvey pictured its approximate location. On the edge or even within the boundary of the so-called “Little Poland” neighbourhood. But first she had lived in Regent Park, having come to this country to escape war and instead having found the darkest the city could offer in terms of social housing gangs, handguns going off like firecrackers in Regent Park, pop, pop, pop—where the tough boys of 51 Division did all they could to prevent young black men from killing other young black men while witnesses stood by with their mouths sewn shut for fear of reprisal.

  “Have you been to her place?” McKelvey said. “I mean her new place?”

  “Just inside the lobby. I picked her up one time, about two weeks ago.”

  McKelvey nodded, already working through the language he would use to somehow tune his friend into the workings of the big bad world out there without destroying this new ray of light that had entered his life. As far as he knew, Fielding had been on something like four dates since his wife’s death at the hands of a repeat drunk driver more than four years ago. The wrong woman, or the right woman, would see him as an easy mark.

  “So she’s gone for a few days,” McKelvey said. “Maybe she’s visiting a friend, a relative. You’ve been seeing each other what?”

  Fielding shrugged and said, “Four weeks, I guess.”

  “A month. Jesus, Tim. Maybe she’s screwed off for a few days and doesn’t feel like she owes you an explanation. Has that entered your mind?”

  Fielding removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the pads of his palms. He put the glasses back on. He sat back, exhaled a long sigh. “Something’s not right, Charlie. I know it in my gut. It’s not like her to just take off without a word. I mean, she missed a mid-term on Wednesday night. She could fail the course, and she’s put a lot into it. She’s trying to make a better life for herself. But there’s been something there that I could never quite put my finger on. Like she was waiting for something to happen.”

  McKelvey saw that his soft approach had missed the mark. “How well do you really know this woman, Tim? That’s all I’m saying. We can be friends with people or work with someone for fifteen, twenty years, then one day they do something that seems completely out of character. But is it really out of character? Or are we just shocked because we thought we knew every aspect, every angle to that person?”

  Fielding sat there looking into his coffee and didn’t say anything.

  “She could be in a hotel room in Montreal right now with her husband,” McKelvey said, and stopped his foul imagination from going further. “Or maybe she’s with her other boyfriend playing the slots down in Vegas for a long weekend getaway. Or anything else you can think of. You said yourself that you never stayed over at her place.”

  “She’s not married, and she doesn’t have another boyfriend. I believe that much about her. Her husband was executed by rogue Serbs in the war. Listen, I know you’re cynical, I know you think like a cop. That’s why I called you, Charlie, because I’m not stupid enough to assume I can place a missing person’s report on a thirty-two-year-old woman I met four weeks ago. They’ll laugh in my face. I thought if I told you about us, about her just disappearing, you of all people would believe me.”

  McKelvey sat there and ran his hand across his face, the extra day of stubble coming in rough as iron shavings. The things a man would do, would say, while in the throes of love or lust never ceased to amaze him. It was in this regard that all men were indeed created equally—pauper or prince, it hardly mattered: we all fall the same. He remembered this particular collar from his first year on the Hold-up Squad. Guy’s married and has four kids, starts screwing around with a girl at the office. The girl has expensive tastes, she likes the thrill of opening gifts, that ooh-aah moment. She wants to eat out at all the hot places, dance at all the cool clubs. The guy’s kids need braces and hockey equipment. His credit card gets maxed, he takes out too many loans that he can’t pay. When McKelvey finally had the poor bastard sitting there in the corner of the interview room—showing him a black and white single frame printout from the security video capturing him standing in front of the bank teller—McKelvey asked him what could possibly make a guy with no criminal record walk into a bank with a pellet gun on a Tuesday afternoon in May. The guy got this look on his face—a mixture of sadness and stoicism—and he said, “I had no choice, man. I couldn’t afford to keep her, and I couldn’t stand to lose her. Either way I was screwed. You know what I mean?”

  Now McKelvey exhaled a long breath across the room, across the morning that had begun with such promise. The end of summer, the beginning of autumn. He had some grocery shopping to do before the girls came to visit him on Saturday. He had a good coffee to buy and get into his system—something that wouldn’t act as an instant laxative—and later still he had a stool at Garrity’s on which to sit and circle classified ads for used vehicles he would not purchase. Ragged and ridiculous, perhaps, but he had a life to live. But yes, at the end of it all there was no denying that he did in fact have the time to go through some motions here, to give Tim Fielding a sense that at least something was being done.

  “Listen,” McKelvey said, “I don’t know what you’re expecting from me. I’ll go on over there and check out her place. Maybe ask a few of her neighbours or the super, or something like that. That’s all I can do here, Tim. I’m not on the job any more. I’m not a private detective.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Fielding said, relief written on his face.

  “If and when it comes to that, I can put you in touch with someone on the force who won’t laugh in your face,” McKelvey said, getting up and moving for the door. “But that’s about all I can do here.”

  “I’ll get my keys,” Tim said.

  McKelvey got to the door then turned. He said, “Thing is, I should head over there myself, take a look around. I think it’s better that way.”

  Fielding stopped and took it in. He nodded as though he understood this was a requirement of police business, how things worked. McKelvey didn’t want to explain the fact that Fielding would be the first obvious suspect if anything untoward had happened to the woman, god forbid. Begin at the nucleus, work your way out. McKelvey saw the school teacher leaving his fingerprints all over the apartment…

  “I can at least give you a lift over there.”

  McKelvey smiled, pulling the card from his shirt pocket. “I’ve got a driver.”

  He used Fielding’s cordless phone to call Hassan. He asked the driver to meet him in front of the building. Then, against his better judgment, he shook his friend’s hand and promised to report back within the hour. In the elevator he shook his head at himself, at this whole thing, and dug his fingers into his pants pocket, where he found a half tab of the painkillers—he had broken a few of them in half, and he carried them around from time to time like loose change. In case the pain got too bad, or whatever. Maybe it was boredom, or maybe it was simply because they were there, and he could. Too much to think about, and anyway, he didn’t need to make any justifications here. He was far beyond the days of reporting to any sort of supervisor, real or imagined. He pressed the button for the ground floor, snapped his head back and swallowed the tab dry.

 
; THREE

  Hassan pulled his cousin’s cranberry-red Crown Victoria up to the front entrance. McKelvey watched the big boat swung in on a wide arc, just like an unmarked cruiser from the old days, and his mind spun back: him at the wheel and a partner riding shotgun, easing the unit up to the curb to put the screws to a crew of the usual suspects the morning after the armed robbery of a Mac’s Milk—where were you around eleven last night, Alexander? And what about you, Damon James? The inherent sense of authority and purpose that flowed through his being as he stepped from the car, sunglasses on, big gun slung in its holster. The Man, the 5-0, the Heat, the goddamned King of Kensington. It was the best and worst job in the world, and like the city itself, he wanted to be able to say that he could leave it all behind, just walk away, but it was a lie. He knew in his heart of hearts that a part of his identity had been forever altered: now that there was no squad room, no courtroom prep with an ambitious Assistant Crown looking to make a career case, no administration or backwards bureaucracy to buck and bitch about, no drinks with the boys after the late night shift, no stakeouts with bad coffee and cold pizza, no sense of pride at the making of a good collar, no shield, no more no more. Welcome to civilian life, Charlie. Ain’t it grand?

  McKelvey got in the back of the taxi with the nagging sense that a mild depression was settling in, this imperceptible autumn frost. He had no idea what he thought he was doing here, pulling some part from a Spenser for Hire episode. Maybe Hattie wasn’t so far off the mark when she accused him of “reckless meandering in retirement”. She said the point was to slip out of his uniform and into a whole new life, a new world—but he was stuck, a man without hobbies, a man without a plan, without a family. He saw the coffee mug again, “World’s Best Teacher’.” The world needed all the Tim Fieldings it could get, the ones who, despite all evidence to the contrary, still believed the promise of the advertisement. McKelvey knew it was the string that held their friendship together—the chasm that fell between his own bleak view of humanity and the school teacher’s unflagging investment in the future generations. He saw something there within the younger man that he either wanted or knew he ought to want. Right now, the half pill was performing at half duty, confronting the impending depression with a small smile. Perhaps it was a smirk.

  McKelvey gave the address, and Hassan said, “Thank you sir, for calling back.”

  “My truck died a couple of weeks ago,” McKelvey explained. “I’m having trouble finding a replacement. Who knows, maybe I’ll become a regular until something turns up.”

  “Try Auto Trader online,” Hassan suggested, like they were old friends now.

  “Online, sure,” McKelvey said. “I don’t have a computer at home.”

  “They have it for free, sir, the internet. At the public library. That is where my children use it for their schooling. We can’t afford a computer of our own. Not yet.”

  “I guess I’ll need to apply for a library card first,” McKelvey said.

  The guy on the AM sports station was going on about the Blue Jays, how Clemens took the loss last night in a tough game against the Yankees. The bastards, McKelvey thought. He hated the New York Yankees not for winning all the time, but for winning the way they did. They were just a hateful team, overpaid braggarts and loudmouths—so perfect in their prancing starched pinstripes. Tonight Pete Walker would hit the mound for the Jays, and McKelvey had his money on the home team. Walker was the sort of guy who could keep his cool and get himself out of a tight spot. It was a characteristic that would have made the man a good cop.

  Hassan pulled up to the curb outside the low-rise apartment. It was a working class neighbourhood, the fringe of so-called Little Poland. As the metropolis grew, these self-proclaimed neighbourhoods seemed to blossom from beneath the sidewalks as though the roots had been there all along, defining themselves by block and intersection. Little Italy, Greektown, Chinatown, Portugal Village, Koreatown, the Gay Village, there was something for everyone, for that was the essence of Toronto, the heart pumping blood through this massive body: a hundred different languages, a million different stories, the past preserved and the future a shared dream. This new city, it belonged to everybody, the last best frontier.

  “Here,” McKelvey said, getting out and handing the driver a twenty. “Wait here for me for ten minutes, will you?”

  Hassan took the bill, folded it once and set it on the clipboard at his side. “I am at your service, sir.”

  McKelvey made his way up the walkway to the four steps that led to a set of double glass doors. Suddenly he was filled with a sense of foreboding, the cop’s instinct that gave his stomach a quick flip. He thought he was probably going to walk in on the woman and another boyfriend, or maybe her and a whole crew of reprobates holed up in the love shack with the phone turned off and poor Tim Fielding sitting across town going crazy. The whole thing was a misunderstanding. Inside the foyer was a wall of mailboxes to the right, flyers and coupons for pizza and carpet cleaning scattered on the floor. To the left was a listing of tenants set in a glass case next to a keypad and speaker intercom. He ran his finger down the list until he came to D. Kruzik. He pressed the buzzer and waited. Nothing. He pressed it again, this time for a full minute. Nothing. He pulled at the main door, found it sloppily unlocked, and slipped inside.

  The apartment was on the top floor of the eight-storey building. He rode one of two elevators, noting the drastic difference in design and upkeep compared to Fielding’s newer building. This elevator was small and the carpet was stained and marked here and there with black cigarette burns. It smelled like the inside of a cab mixed with something else he couldn’t quite put his finger on. As the doors opened, it came to him: boiled cabbage.

  He found the unit—801—at the end of the hallway on the left. A narrow rectangular window on either end of the hall let in the only daylight, and it was a good thing, because the whole place had the feeling of 1960s Eastern European Cold War modesty. He knocked and waited. He put his ear to the door and listened. Nothing. A door opened up the hall, and a woman in her mid fifties, dressed in a dark coat with a kerchief tied over her hair, glanced at him quickly. He fished his own house keys from his pants pocket and pretended to look for the right one. When the woman was inside the elevator, he knocked again, put his ear to the door, closed his eyes. Nothing. And then something. What, a sound of movement? The subtle resonation of human presence on the other side? He reached out and turned the doorknob. It was unlocked. He took a step back and gave it a moment. He stepped in and listened again. Nothing. He turned the doorknob quietly in his left hand.

  “Hello,” he called.

  He was startled to find the apartment empty save for a few papers scattered across the top of the kitchen counter, old direct mail flyers. Tiny and spare, a one-bedroom for eight-fifty a month. But it was empty. He left the door ajar as he stepped quietly into the hallway that opened on the right to a small kitchen and continued straight ahead into a living room. He surveyed the emptiness, and spotted a single magnet stuck to the fridge, an item of information stored for later testimony perhaps.

  “Hello?” he said. “Donia? I’m a friend of Tim’s…”

  He listened. Nothing. And then it was there again, the sense of human energy. It wasn’t a sound, not quite, it was some frequency coming through on the channel of the sixth sense. He had entered enough rooms and vacant buildings in his day to trust in the feeling, to believe in its root. In an earlier life he would have reached now, hand hovering above the holstered sidearm at his side. But he was unarmed now, standing there alone in a stranger’s apartment. What a fool’s errand. What the fuck had he been thinking…

  He was turning back to the door when the rush came upon him, the kinetic surge of a body in motion. From a bathroom down the hall, four fast strides—McKelvey turned, pivoting at the knees just in time to catch something thick and hard across the side of his skull, heavy metal: explosions of pinwheels scorched across the blackness.

  McKelvey twisted,
falling sideways, reaching out, hands curled into fists, and he saw his mistake—goddamned rookie patrolman’s mistake of turning his back before every single room, every single closet had been checked and cleared—and the son of a bitch was right there, combat jacket and jeans, hair shaved close to the bone—and McKelvey caught a sledgehammer of a blow square in the centre of his face, an atomic detonation.

  He was splayed on the floor, a beetle turned the wrong way.

  The door slammed shut.

  He squinted through the tongue-thick ether. Numbness spread across his face, a dull pulse knocking from behind his eyes. Then his hearing went garbled as though he were under water. He could taste blood down the back of his throat, iron and copper, and he knew, even before he sat up, that his nose was broken, his fucking nose was broken.

  The taxi driver was pulled up to the curb listening to callers on talk radio share their opposing views on the so-called “War on Terror” when he noticed the big man in the green army jacket come bursting through the main doors. He ran across the street— mere feet in front of Hassan’s car—and jumped in a silver Honda Accord (probably a ’94 or ’95, Hassan thought). The car peeled from the curb, gone. Hassan strained to make out the plate. APVB and three digits, maybe a nine in there. These were the details he provided to McKelvey once his passenger had also come stumbling from the building, a clutch of bloodied paper towel held to his face, a darkness crawling beneath and between his eyes.

  “What happened, sir? Are you all right?” Hassan’s wide eyes told McKelvey all he needed to know about his own condition.

  “You see a guy come out of there the last few minutes, which way he went?” McKelvey said, his voice thick, nasal.

  A lifetime on the force, and he’d never been punched in the face with such velocity or precision. Kicked, spat upon, stabbed at, and yes, even shot at on two occasions—once at the deadly shootout intersection of Jane and Finch, the other time in the hallway of his own home as he and Duguay drew like gunfighters—but this, this was otherworldly. He had come as close to blacking out as his fragile male ego would allow. Held on there to the tassels of faint hope, pulled himself up through sheer stubborn determination, an ode to his Celtic ancestry. It was the fucking pill, that little half tablet that had dulled his edge. As bad as taking a drink on duty, for Christ’s sake. Rather than being ashamed of himself, he was angry and embarrassed and wanted to get this asshole face to face in a fair fight, no sucker punches thrown from the dark.