Slow Recoil

by C. B. Forrest

  Why, he wondered? What was there to be afraid of?

  Especially now, Tim, now that you are tied and blindfolded.

  Now that you are going to die…

  TWENTY-THREE

  One down, one to go. This is what Kad was thinking as he walked along the street with the sunshine on his face. He wished the woman were alive to see the look in Bojan Kordic’s eyes in that final moment. Donia. She had played her role, however, and it had helped extricate them from the mess of this school teacher and his meddling police officer friend. Donia. Yes, he tried now to recall her real name, her birth name, but it was gone. He stopped walking. He stood there on the sidewalk and tried to remember his own name. It was there, yes, but it did not come forth immediately. It required a moment to pause and reach back.

  He resumed walking. He had employed Turner’s assistance in tracing the home number on the police officer’s business card. It was right here, just up ahead. Unit number four. He moved a hand to the inside jacket and felt for the case with the syringe. At his back, tucked into his pants, was the handgun. And lastly, snug alongside his ankle and held in place with his sock and a Velcro strap, was the four-inch jackknife. He felt he was ready for anything.

  He walked past the condo building and stopped a few doors down. He turned, and with his hands in his pockets, leaned against the bricks, looking back towards the building, just to get his eyes on it. It was no different than when he and the boys had cased a particular building in a nameless town, having on good authority that either Serb troops or paramilitaries were housed there. You wanted to mitigate the risk to the greatest extent possible. Note all possible exits, areas where a lookout or a scout might hide. To determine clear lines of fire that any sniper worth his salt would have previously mapped out. Operations were two thirds planning, one third action. The devil, as they said, was always in the details.

  Satisfied and ready, he took a couple of deep breaths and walked back to the condo. He opened the front door and stepped inside the small foyer. It smelled fresh, the scent of flowers, as though they sprayed the place with potpourri fragrance. There was a bank of chrome-plated mailboxes to the left. The names were etched onto the front of the mailboxes, giving a sense of expected permanency. Kad scanned the names. The last one.

  McKELVEY C—#4

  The second inner door, he noted to his surprise and good fortune, was propped open with a stone. His old trick. The oldest trick of thieves in the night. He marvelled at the laziness. He smiled and opened the door, moving the stone aside with the toe of his shoe.

  He climbed the stairs.

  McKelvey was deep in thought as he made his way east on Front Street. He looked over his shoulder, half expecting to see Leyden skulking back there. What this thing was, he was unsure—it was too convoluted to make sense of just yet—but whether love triangle, sex traffic, organized crime, it hardly mattered. He had to get to Fielding before the cops found him and he was charged with murder. It seemed likely, given the scant facts and his professional experience with the human animal, that sex or drugs, or perhaps both, were at play here. It was quite possible, he surmised, that Fielding had simply fallen for the wrong woman. Perhaps Hattie was right: Donia was a sex worker or a sex slave or otherwise “owned” by bad men with Eastern European accents. McKelvey knew half the strip joints around town were infused with a revolving bevy of women from Russia and Hungary and Croatia, these women working with so-called “entertainment visas”. Fielding had unknowingly stumbled into this dark new world, and now the woman was dead and Fielding was either dead himself or being held.

  Held why, though? There had been no ransom demand, no contact at all.

  They’re using Fielding as a red herring, he thought. Holding him somewhere long enough to give them time to wrap up their business and make a clean cut.

  He stopped walking. It was possible. Every Metro cop was looking for Tim Fielding. It was a good plan. And, quite frankly, the only plan to which McKelvey could realistically prescribe. The alternative was not worth considering. In the alternative, Fielding was dead, had been dead two days now. In the alternative, McKelvey was responsible for his young friend’s murder.

  He continued on. As he approached the condo, he caught sight of the old Italian from the first floor unit. Giuseppe was hobbling up the street with a plastic bag that McKelvey was certain contained links of Italian sausage infused with garlic. Giuseppe had explained in one of their brief and rare conversations how he had survived the war on bread, cheese, and a little bit of sausage, so why tempt the fates by changing his diet now? The only new element Giuseppe had added to his regimen was a single daily prune taken to coax some consistency from his weathered bowels. The St. Lawrence Market was closed, so the old man had gone across to the twenty-four hour grocery. McKelvey waited, holding the door open.

  “You should get delivery,” McKelvey said.

  Giuseppe squinted, and his face folded in against a sea of deep wrinkles. His hair was bone white and swept back, and his eyebrows were unruly, thick as jungle caterpillars.

  “Those l’il buggers always holding their hand out for a teepa,” he said, and because his accent was so thick, McKelvey didn’t get the gist right away. “I give them a teepa for free. I say, cut your goddamned hair and smarten you up.”

  McKelvey held the door while Giuseppe grunted and lifted his ruined legs across the threshold. The old man went to pull the second door, and he grunted again when it did not give as expected.

  “Ah, jesus, the stone is gone,” Giuseppe said.

  “I’ve got my key,” McKelvey said, and he moved in to unlock the door. “You know, Giuseppe, I’m not one to lecture, but…”

  “Listen to me, young man,” Giuseppe said, moving through the doorway, “someone wanna come in and kill or rob you, they gonna find a way, believe me. Locks, they for the honest people. And not many of those left, okay?”

  Kad stood inside the apartment. It was still and quiet. He slipped the locksmith’s tool back inside his wallet and looked around. It was spare, bordering on Spartan. Just the basics—something to sit on, somewhere to hang a coat. He thought perhaps he understood this man, the appreciation for simplicity, and he felt that they were really not so different. He wondered if this man, like himself, felt at odds within the context of these modern times. Kad often thought he should have been born in an earlier century. He took a few steps, and went into the kitchen, opened the fridge door and stared at the emptiness. Spare parts, leftovers, but nothing to make a meal. He closed the fridge and looked at the pictures that were stuck to the door with magnets from takeout pizza and Chinese food places. One photo featured a little girl with dark curly hair. There was another of a woman who appeared to be in her early twenties, olive-skinned, silky hair dark as coal. There was a page torn from a notebook posted on the door. It looked to be a grocery list which the occupant obviously had yet to fulfill. He looked in a few cupboards. They were stacked with plates and mugs, and there was an uncracked bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey next to a half empty bottle of red wine.

  It did not matter to Kad that the occupant was apparently a police officer. It mattered not at all. He was tainted by the work of the police back home, where bribery and family connections turned the wheels. There was the heavy influence of the Russian mob. No institution, no senior official, was to be trusted without risk. Most of the cops were former soldiers. These men no longer believed in the myth of law, justice, truth and consequences. After all they had seen and done, they were beyond the notion of working within a righteous cause. It was every man for himself.

  He checked all the rooms and came back to the kitchen. On top of the microwave he found a notebook from which a page had been torn in order to make the grocery list. He thought this was the best way to do it. This would prove to the policeman both the seriousness of the requirement for discretion, and also the ability for Kadro to come and go from his life as he pleased. There was the element of violation here, slipping in and slipping out.


  He found a pen and sat down to write.

  McKelvey took a few steps towards the staircase, but Giuseppe stuck his head out his door and said, “Come in, justa one minute. I show you something…”

  McKelvey went to say that he didn’t have the time, but he looked at the man’s weathered face, those eyebrows shrugging above rheumy eyes, and for an instant he saw a vision of himself at that age. Alone. He stepped inside Giuseppe’s apartment and was immediately assailed by the strange perfume of sausage, garlic and something else entirely—a strong scent of sharp fruit and yeast. He sniffed again and knew what it was. Fermenting grapes. The old bugger was making homemade wine.

  “You smell that?” Giuseppe said, and finally he smiled. McKelvey saw what the man must have looked like when he was younger. Handsome and steely-eyed back in the war.

  “Why am I not surprised,” McKelvey said.

  “I have bottle just for you,” Giuseppe said, and he hobbled over to the kitchen. He bent down with some difficulty and opened the cupboards beside the dishwasher. “Old Giambi family recipe. We work the soil in them hills of Umbra, see, making the Torgiano.” He set a plain brown bottle on the counter and pulled himself back up. “Till the fucking Tedeschi came, that is. And then we fight in them same hills, through the vineyards, the same boys who picked grapes with their grandfathers.”

  Giuseppe got a faraway look in his eyes, and McKelvey wondered what images played across the back of his eyelids at night. If he himself startled awake at times, shivering through the memory of some violent encounter from his patrol car days, visions of suicides and stabbing victims, he couldn’t imagine the variety of scenes that were scorched into the veteran’s brain screen for continual replay.

  “You take,” Giuseppe said, and held the bottle out. “You’re a good boy.”

  McKelvey accepted the bottle. “I’ll save it for a special occasion,” he said.

  “Today is special occasion,” Giuseppe said. He straightened his back with a long, deep breath. “You above ground, ain’t you?”

  McKelvey laughed and patted the old man on the shoulder. He had turned to the door and had his hand on the doorknob when Giuseppe said, “I have a teepa for you, my friend. If you don’t mind.”

  McKelvey turned back. He said, “Shoot.”

  “That woman, the redhead. She’s too young for you. You gotta marry her, or, you know, set her free like a little bird. One day soon you be old like me… ”

  McKelvey was taken aback, not just by the honesty of the remark, but the fact that the old man who hardly ever left his apartment was aware of the particulars of his personal life. The old Italian was just full of surprises.

  “Thanks for the wine,” McKelvey said.

  McKelvey was three steps from the second floor landing when he looked up and saw a man coming down. McKelvey stopped there on the stairs. Their eyes met and locked. McKelvey’s mind clicked. It came back to him in a flood of images.

  The face, the shaved head, the build, the jacket…

  Kad stopped, too, but just for an instant. He used the advantage of gravity and momentum. He rushed forward, using his shoulder like a ram as he came down the stairs. McKelvey was pushed to the side, but he didn’t go down, and he turned and gave chase.

  Kad jumped the last few stairs to the first floor landing, grabbing the banister pole with a hand and, like a gymnast, using it to speed his turn on the pivot. He landed with heavy boots in the foyer, pushing the door with both hands.

  McKelvey came around the landing and caught sight of the man’s jeans and boots halfway through the inner door. He got to the middle of the stairs and, looking to avoid a race down Front Street—a race he certainly had no hope in hell of winning—he gripped the wine bottle like a football and cocked his arm. But the man was already out the doors, and McKelvey had no choice but to push his way through.

  The city closed in on McKelvey, cars and trucks and taxis and pedestrians. Sounds shut out as he looked left and right, finally catching sight of the man running across Front towards the Market Square near the grocery store. A car honked and screeched to a stop as McKelvey dashed across the street, eyes on his target. He would not slip away this time, he would not leave McKelvey sprawled on his back in an empty apartment…

  The man jumped into a parked car. White.

  McKelvey squinted as he ran flat out, trying to get the make and model, the license plate. He was going to die out here, his heart and lungs and guts and everything else ready to burst open.

  The car started and the driver backed up a few inches to make his escape from the curb. He jockeyed enough space between the other parked vehicles and was set to pull away as McKelvey came within six feet of the driver’s side. He gripped the bottle again and launched it with all of his strength. The bottle exploded against the window, which shattered, broke apart and crumbled in a thousand pieces. The driver had a hand up to protect his face, but they made eye contact again as he hit the gas and tore away.

  Next time, fucker, McKelvey thought. Next time…

  He was left standing there on the street with this taste of acrid bile rising in his throat, then sure enough, he stumbled on a wave of dizziness and set his hand on a parked car to steady himself. Pins and needles, blurry vision. He bent and put his hands on his knees, sucking air, then he felt his stomach clench, and he turned and spat a mouthful of watery vomit beside the curb. He wiped his mouth, feeling suddenly better, and straightened up. People on both sides of the street had stopped to watch the scene unfold.

  “Mommy, is that man drunk?” McKelvey heard a little boy’s voice over his shoulder. The mother said something in a hushed tone and whisked the child away.

  Not drunk, he thought. Just ancient. He exhaled, squared his shoulders, and walked back across the street to his condo.

  Maxime sat in his rental car yawning, trying to stay awake. He watched as the two men came rushing from the building, darting through traffic like a couple of shoplifters. The wine bottle had been unexpected. Who was this second man, and what was his connection to all of this? Rather than follow the target in the white Corolla—he would rely on the embedded GPS later— Maxime wrote the details of the activity in his notebook then got out of the rental and stretched and yawned. He looked both ways, waited for a hole in the traffic, and walked across the street towards the condo building.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The torn page was posted to the centre of McKelvey’s fridge door with a magnet from a Chinese take-out place. The note was printed in large block letters, the careful writing of a child:

  McKelvey;

  Your friend is safe.

  I will call you tonight to arrange for you to see him.

  Do not involve the authorities. If you do, you will not see your friend again.

  Stay by the phone.

  McKelvey’s mind swirled as he collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table. His hands were shaking from the run across the street—he hadn’t hoofed it like that in years, not since working patrol. As a dick on the Hold-Up Squad, he had left the chasing up to the foot cops who were young and looking for any excuse to expend some energy. The note shivered between his fingers. What was this, an upping of the ante in this game? And it was a game, wasn’t it? Him against them. McKelvey against the clock. He sat there for a long time just thinking. Holding the note, reading and re-reading the instructions. How had this man made the connection, found his address? He scoured his mind. And then, like tongues fitting a slotted groove, it was there: the superintendant at Donia’s building. McKelvey had given the man his business card. Hadn’t Leyden said the man had died of a heart attack the next day? Jarko’s Automotive, too. Burned to the ground. He’d been traced through his visits to these places, and these contacts had been erased in his wake. So he was no longer chasing a ghost in his search for Tim Fielding—the tables had been turned. He was now the hunted. They wanted McKelvey and Fielding in a room together.

  He went to the phone and dialed Hattie’s number. She answered on the fourth
ring. The line was immediately filled with background sounds, voices and music.

  “Hattie?” he said.

  “Sorry,” she said in a loud voice, and he heard her walking away from the sounds, trying to find a quieter spot. “We stopped in at this pub. Place is packed. Everybody’s sucking the last few drops out of the long weekend.”

  He wanted to ask her about the “we” she was referring to, but he had no right. He pictured Anderson sitting there with his platinum hair and some fruity drink with a goddamned umbrella.

  “Davis Chapman works for the government,” Hattie said, reading his thoughts. “That’s all I know. There’s a level three security block on his ID. Must be a heavyweight of some sort.”

  “Does Detective Kennedy know about Chapman?” McKelvey asked. He held the note from his fridge and tried to think of a way to let her in on this. He had kept one too many cards against his chest, and now he was backed into a corner.

  “What’s to tell? The guy might as well not even exist in any system. He could be RCMP, CSIS, JTF2, anything.”

  “Peter Dawson, the executive director of the resource centre, he’d have Chapman’s address on file,” McKelvey said. “It might not be the correct address, but he must have something. Christ, even a phone number.”

  “So give Peter Dawson a call,” she said, and McKelvey understood by her tone that he had managed to reach the end of Hattie’s patience, perhaps her goodwill, likely even her trust or belief in him.

  “Listen, Charlie, Kennedy gave me something about a half hour ago. I think he expects me to pass it on to you. Maybe he’s hoping it means something, I don’t know. But this is definitely on the down-low. The media has been blocked out on details. Leyden and Kennedy are working this murder in the fashion district now, on top of the Donia Kruzik case.”