Mike turned down three drink offers as Mousey spent almost an hour studying the folder Mike had assembled at the office. He accepted the fourth offer and bolted his entire drink nervously before Mousey was finished with the file. Mousey looked different than Mike had seen him before, more serious, his eyes focused instead of doing that half-present junkie scanning. Mike was busy looking out the window through the bottom of his glass when Mousey finally slid the folder back across the table. It passed in front of Mike, off the table, and landed with a thick slap on the ground.
Mousey closed one eye and held up both hands in apology. “Sorry buddy, you’ve got me a little juiced up here.”
Mike put the glass down and picked up the folder. “So what do you think?”
“About what?”
“The case.”
Mousey shook his head and moved to stand. He paced in front of the reading nook. “There’s no case. What you have there is a situation.”
“About the situation, then.”
“You don’t want me in on this, buddy. I’m sorry, but you don’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“So this Marlo cat, he starts out his adult record with a strong-arm robbery in Montreal, and he has a juvie file from out here. Suspicion, suspicion all over, but nobody bothers to pick him up. He’s a purse snatcher with a half-a-brain. He’s a known associate in real guys’ files. Dumb enough to get picked up, smart enough to skip his bond and stay skipped for a few years. Not a high achiever, but he’s a survivor. Never thrives, because he’s got the warrant and skips town pretty regularly. He’s stealing computers, probably a decent gig a few years ago, but it’s getting played out now. He moves west, hemorrhaging money. So he’s in Victoria, he’s broke, he steals a laptop. Looks for credit card numbers, or whatever, and somehow he stumbles onto a money stash. I’d guess he’s not a hard junkie, but he’s probably a lifelong substance abuser. If he was a citizen, he’d be barely holding down twenty hours a week at a grocery store, something like that. Whatever load he likes to get on, he gets that on and, without thinking about it too much, he knocks off the stash. He’s smart enough not to take an accomplice, too stupid to think about what the money’s actually for. Y’know, like maybe the club isn’t just leaving a hundred grand lying around behind a gas station on a whim.”
Mousey was on a roll, and Mike wanted in on it. “Stupid enough to mess with the club.”
Mousey paused and tilted his head to either side, then kept pacing. “He’s broke, probably pretty desperate, and I bet, because his half-a-brain’s taken him this far, he’s got a plan. Skipping town, skipping the whole country if he can figure out a way. He’ll have a hundred-K head start and maybe he’ll clean up his life and get work, or whatever it is he thinks. Kid like this, he’s never gonna get another shot at that kind of money. Anyhow, his plan gets fucked up because half the money is covered in green paint. Now it’s a fifty-K head start, and he’s so hot it’ll probably cost him half that just to get out of the province. Instead of leaving the country he changes his plan, and now he’s coming to an island. So he’s got someone on Quadra, girl he’s fucking, guy he’s fucking, or a family member he ain’t fucking. And judging from the look on your huge, adorable punum, you know who that is, and nobody else does. That’s your card here, right?”
Mike scratched his head. Mousey, all appearances aside, was no joke. “You got all that from the file? Fine, fine, but what do you make of him killing the super in his building?”
“How does that timeline feel to you?”
“Uh . . .”
“He didn’t kill the super. If he was around in Victoria that long, he wouldn’t be alive. And we know he’s alive because the club would have run his body up a flagpole by now if they’d found him. Wasn’t him killed the super, it was the hitters they sent after him. Which would be why he’s ‘missing’ and not, y’know, a really gross corpse doubling as an object lesson about the consequences of fucking with criminal motorcycle clubs.” Mousey sat back down, bent back his hand and cracked three knuckles, shook out the hand, and waved Mike off. “Continuing, you know who Marlo’s heading for, and you got that li’l nugget a sketchy way. What? Worked a deal? I know you don’t have informants, so you did something fucked up. You’re keeping it from Reubens, and you have dreams of running Marlo in solo, taking the glory. As opposed to being a good civil servant and taking this up the pole and doing your best to get nobody killed. But it’s your first time, you’re driving home, and you feel this swell in your tummy like maybe you aren’t ready for a thing like this, so you come to me. Am I right?”
“Ballpark.”
“So you want my advice?”
“I’d appreciate it, yeah. Yeah, maybe an extra pair of hands would help too, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“I’m a generally stimulated man, Richmond. And I quit this shit for a reason. You get advice from me one time. And you’re not going to like it.”
“Let me be the judge of that. I’ll give you the connection, right now.”
The old cop dropped his hands to his sides, letting them hang like apples clinging to the end of a broken branch. “Do not tell me that, Mike. This is the whole point of what I’m saying to you here. Do not tell me who he’s here for. I have no reason to know, and I don’t give a shit.” Mousey looked away. He let the pause float a long time. “Your instincts aren’t bad. Cutting out Reubens, that’s a good move. Sitting on your informant, also good. Getting your research in, okay. You did the right things to make a run at this. And you realized you’re not ready. That’s absolutely correct. You don’t want this, Richmond.”
“That’s your advice?”
“It’s the best you’ll ever get. Drop this now. You are looking to put yourself between a cornered, desperate man and a large, ruthless criminal organization with its ass hanging all the way out. That’s not a good spot to be in.”
“You don’t think I know that? I know it.”
“You might know it, buddy. But you don’t get it. You hear the words, and you say the right words back, but the gravity of this is not working on you. You are floating. On a thing like this, when you take it on yourself, what are you doing? The only advantage you have as a cop is resources. You have no resources on this. You have a full-time job. You can’t follow anyone. You can’t talk to anyone. You can only work this for like two hours a day. In case you forgot this part, Marlo, the button-men they send after him, and your snitch, could all, easily, be in a spot where they have to kill you if you do somehow get within sniffing distance of Marlo and the money. And if you want to keep your job and life, you might have to kill one or all of them and bury their bodies in the woods and never tell another person you did it.”
“I don’t think so. I think you’re wrong about that.”
“You don’t think so. Based on what? This isn’t about thinking. This is about being ready. You run Marlo in, he’s dead in a day. You run whoever kills Marlo in, they’re doing life. Your informant gets nervous and tells the wrong person he talked to you, he’s killed and you’re killed. None of that will be wrong. If you’re putting someone in line to have their life wrecked or ended, they can do whatever they want to you, and the last thing it’ll be is wrong. These are the stakes you’re playing, and you’re playing them alone. You come to me for help on this. Why? Are we friends, Mike? Am I your dad? No. I’m just some guy with big-case pedigree, and you flocked to me like you were a fly and I was some shit. And you wanted to bring me in. If I come in on a thing like this, big boy, I’m coming in hard. If you’re not ready to handle everything on your own, you’re not ready to handle anything at all.”
Mousey flopped loose-limbed back into his chair, and now it was Mike’s turn to stand and pace. He shook his head at Mousey, and a sparrow flew into the window with a hollow thud, falling either dead or stunned between the house and the rock face. The young cop flinched, reaching his arm across his body to cover his neck.
Mousey jogged his eyebrows, pointing aimlessly at the ce
iling as he began talking. “Oh, you’re mad at me now.” Mousey held his hands up to the light, twiddled his fingers, and then lowered them to drum on the table. “You came for advice, and I’m giving it to you. I wish somebody had told me way back in the day. That feeling you had in your car, telling you to get help, it wasn’t. It was telling you to quit. Just hope the whole thing blows over. Pray your name don’t come up. It’s your only option. Coming to me, telling a soul about this, that’s a headshot mistake. Done. You’re just lucky you came to me this late in life. In my prime, I’d have eaten you for a snack.”
Mike stopped pacing. Eventually, for no good reason, he reached up and held one of Mousey’s globes of light in his huge, flat hand, the cord slackening in the middle. He let it drop and bounce. “I’m not mad, Mousey. I just can’t wait until all of you boomers fucking die.”
Mousey scrunched his face, somehow managing to make it even craggier. “Boomers? How the fuck old do you think —”
Mike barrelled through. “Sure, you’re right. I don’t know you and you don’t know me. I came to you because I was thinking — stupidly, I guess — that the saddest, most bored-seeming person I’d ever met might be up to give me a hand. Help out a young person who needs help, who you have no reason not to. But that was stupid. Because nobody your age wants to lift a finger to help anybody my age, you just want to sit on your little toilet seats made of easy cash and shit on everyone coming up. Sorry, but my bosses aren’t going to have the decency to clutch their chests and keel over as they water the rose bushes, like yours did. So I’ll do it alone, with no help, and no chance, and get called entitled by the most entitled generation in the history of the world. Thanks for the reminder and thanks for the drink.” He turned to leave and Mousey hopped to his feet, stopping Mike before he reached the stairs. He patted Richmond sturdily on the back and chest and softened his dry, collagen-deficient face.
“Listen, Mike. Listen. I’m sorry, and I really can’t get involved. I can’t. But I will give you some advice. For real, I’ve got advice.”
Mike was still pissed but wavering, so far out of his depth and just wanting to be told rather than decide what to do. “What?”
“It’s by way of analogy. Just up front.”
Richmond shook his head and looked over Mousey’s shoulder, but eventually nodded him along.
“For real, man. For real. I don’t tell this too often. But, uh, my dad was a barber. And he died before my junior year of high school, and before that I used to work in his shop. He was a very old-school barber-type guy. So he had a horsehair broom. Legit. He was that much of an Old World shit-for-brains immigrant barber. So I used to sweep up the hair he cut with this hair broom. Like an asshole. All day, I’m just sweeping up after razor-cuts, right? Sweeping away the leftovers of leftover sixties army haircuts. And then my pops died, and I became, like, a person. A person of interest in a seedy way but an important way. For a minute there. And I never thought about hair too much, because fuck hair. Right?”
Mike looked down at Mousey. Is it still called pity when you desperately need something from the guy?
Mousey continued. “So once I retired and thought back about my life as a person who had been a little important for a little while, I saw that I ended up really, really far from my dad’s shitty barbershop, but that job I had when I was twelve was all I ever did. I cleaned up hair with more hair. And even as I cleaned it, it was growing back. Because that’s all hair does. It grows, or it goes away because it’s just tired of growing. So what I’m saying, Mike, is don’t ever get too fuckin’ righteous, because it’s all just hair, man. The broom, the mess on the floor, it’s all the same. You’re the same as what you’re after. It’s all just hair.”
Mike snorted and twirled his big, clumsy-feeling body towards the stairs then back to Mousey. “So that’s your advice. Just twenty-five seconds of boring nihilism. Great. Thanks.”
Mousey reached out and tapped Mike’s collarbone twice, and Mike felt the hollow thud of it in his chest. “Good word, constable. Nihilism. Good word. Now do me a favour and spell it, you fuckin’ millennial piece of shit. Run on home and jerk off to some Facebook pictures of girls you went to high school with. This business is for grown-ups. And no matter how much you hope and pray to the god of your parents’ home equity, that’s the only advice, help, counsel, or mentoring you’re getting out of me.”
Mike fished a card out of his uniform’s breast pocket and flipped it onto the table. “Call me if you change your mind. And try not to commit too many felonies on my beat in the meantime.”
Mousey smiled genuinely for the first time since the conversation started. He rubbed the tips of his left fingers with the pads of his right. “I won’t call you. But since you’re feeling strong, I’ll give you one more piece of free information: if you step on my toe, I’ll step on your head.”
17 Campbell River, British Columbia
In the four days since Tommy had thrown away the stained bills (leaving the perfectly distinct fingerprints confirming his identity to the RCMP), he’d managed to lay out a bread-crumb trail of witnesses who remembered him clearly because he had looked homeless while dropping hundred-dollar bills at restaurants and convenience stores and chatting pleasantly but for a touch too long (as was his habit). He realized from a gaping, remote distance that he had been fortunate to avoid arrest, and he attributed his successful avoidance of the RCMP more to the hitchhiking strategy he’d come up with in the four and half hours after the girls left that it took to get a ride (only trying to get picked up within town limits, and with truckers or people with boats on top of their cars), and his willingness to resort to vagrancy in the form of sleeping in the woods behind rest areas rather than taking a bad ride.
Immediately after the creepy-but-not-in-a-directly-sexual-way crab fisherman (whose children had moved to Dubai and Arkansas and forgotten all about their old man, etc.) finally dropped Tommy off just inside the town limits of Campbell River, Tommy almost stepped straight in front of a sixteen-wheeler and decided that he would have to give in and get a hotel room for the night and sleep properly before the last leg of his journey to Quadra.
The young woman behind the counter of the Days Inn was friendly and very good at typing. She looked at the screen rather than at Tommy, and he looked at the way her tongue peeked slightly over her lip in concentration as she checked if it was possible for him to register without a credit card.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Simmons . . .”
“My name’s Tommy.”
She looked up at him, and seeing his smile, matched it.
“Tommy. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”
“Let’s go back to Mr. Simmons, though. It’s, uh, less common for people to call me that. Fancier. You seem like a unique person.’
“Mr. Simmons,” she was pretty cute, now that she was smiling a little and he was actually paying attention to his surroundings. “Thanks, but I’m sorry, I can’t check you in without a credit card.”
“What about bitcoins, I have a bangin’ bitcoin wallet, not to toot my own horn.”
She stilled her hands for the first time since they’d talked. “What exactly is a bitcoin?”
“You caught me, I don’t know. I just thought that was, like, a funny way to go with it.”
The clerk moved from smile to smirk. “You did, huh?”
Tommy laughed and slump-turned to check the empty, fluorescent-buzzing lobby. “How about we do it this way . . . How much do you make a month?”
“Uh, I don’t . . .”
“Sorry, sorry.” Tommy turned to face her and held her gaze while he talked. “That was a weird and aggressive way to ask that. You seem like you work hard and, um, people don’t appreciate work nowadays, right?” He cocked his head back and crumpled the skin around his eyes and mouth in a way that he hoped women still found adorable. “Actually, I have no clue what bosses like or value or whatever. I’m a bum, Stephanie.” Name tags are great. Stephanie laughed. “Just a bum with $3,000 f
or you, and the idea that if you close off a room that nobody’s going to check into anyway, and you just put, say, a maintenance flag on it that you take off when your shift’s over, I’ll be out before cleaning.”
“And if — due respect, Mr. Simmons — if you sleep in, like a bum might?”
“Then I’m a bum who got caught in a room I snuck into after you turned me away right as we’re talking on security camera right now.”
She turned her head suggestively to the security camera over the desk. “I’ll see you in the parking lot in twenty-five minutes. And you better have that cash, Mr. Simmons.”
She had to look serious to sell it to the cameras, but Tommy got a companionable feel off her eyes, which were that shade of blue that the people they belong to will insist is grey, because most people don’t feel confidently about how they look.
He thanked Stephanie, and she told him to call with any problems, before clicking her mouse six straight times and, noticing her tongue, tucking it back into her mouth.
Tommy banged the counter and tried to look mad before gliding sleepily into the parking lot.
Ø
If someone had asked him, Tommy would have told them that he was going to Quadra to hole up with his mom for a few days or, if she didn’t want him staying, maybe settle down in a hostel until things blew over. He definitely would not have told them that he just wanted to see his mom again, even just once, before he died, even though that was true.
Tommy had not responded to his mother’s most recent letter, but he’d been glad to hear she’d moved to Quadra. He remembered their trip there so clearly, the swimming and the camping. She’d bought him a kayaking class and Tommy had learned to roll the boat. He’d seen seals from five feet away and she’d seen them from the shore. This was before Tommy had quit music classes and taken up with his friends. Before his mom had lost her temper and thrown a small plate at him. Before he’d stolen her wallet so he could go halves with his girlfriend on buying that half ounce. He knew that there’d been time after that trip, a good two years, where he’d still been, mostly, a kid, and his mom had been fine. Strict and nuts about his music classes, but for the most part fine. Those years had been a buildup, nothing had happened, but it was all snowballing. The pressure of the singing, the boredom with it. That trip was the last solid memory Tommy had of getting along with his mom, and knowing her as he no longer really did, he was pretty sure she’d remember it like that too.
MARRY, BANG, KILL Page 10
