Richmond smiled wide then, and Mousey knew that he was wrong. That the young cop had the goods. Richmond standing there looking like a sad, sweet black bear who’d accidentally wandered into a blueberry jam factory. Mousey decided to poke the black bear, see if he could knock him off stride a little.
“So how long do you want to feel pleased with yourself before you tell me what it is you’ve got? What you think you’ve got, anyway.”
The smile went away, and the young cop reached into his pants pocket, fished out a crumpled .38-calibre bullet, and tossed it into Mousey’s chest. The kind of crumpled only bullets thinking about trees can get.
“I think I’ve got about six more of those, Lieutenant Mouse, so you can keep that one. I dug ’em all out of that nice big tree in your yard. I think I’ve got a half-dozen noise complaints from your neighbours to explain how I got ’em. And I’m sure I’ve got two more I can pull out of Glass Jar just like ’em.”
Mousey used a cheap smirk to buy a very small amount of time. “I guess you’re getting invited inside after all.”
At a certain time of night, a time that changed by just a little each day, a light would fill Mousey’s house that made everything look different from reality and nothing like a dream. Dreams, for Mousey, were always tilting and swirling around in a long, slow forgetting, even as he had them, or grasped at them in the morning. This light, for a few minutes at some point in the evening moving to night, bathed his glass house, his small, sad life, in illusory clarity, a layer of what dreams could be if they were real. Mousey didn’t like to waste this light, especially not when he had the back end of a come-down opiate buzz gliding gently out from behind his eyes. So he didn’t look at Richmond as the young cop exulted, pathetically, with his half-baked, half-smart boy-detective story. Mousey looked instead through the window at the rocks he hadn’t paid to have destroyed to make his view better. Rocks covered in a moss that had the decency to stay the exact depth and thickness of a haircut the day you get it.
Finally, a slightly suspenseful interval after Richmond finished talking, Mousey turned his stare, lazily, to a small acne divot between the young cop’s eyes, to give that slim impression of straightforwardness so valuable to small-timers like Richmond. He spoke slowly and reluctantly, as if spitting out a mouthful of particularly well-flavoured toothpaste. “You didn’t call in the body. Good for you. Good for you, Mike. Didn’t think you had that in you.” Mike just smiling, eyeballing him back, knowing he had it regardless, knowing that the murder beef might hold, and if it didn’t there’d be an audit and they’d seize the house, just to start. Mousey held Mike’s stare, not moving his hands at all. “What’s to stop me from maybe plugging you a few times, dumping your body in a deep grave, take my time taking care of Glass Jar? A little something like that.”
Richmond went to his magic evidence pocket, dug out his cellphone, and slid it across the table. Mousey turned on the screen, and the video was already teed up. Glass Jar’s shack in higher definition than seemed right to film the place, like watching a toe amputation through very expensive opera glasses. A camera right on the entrance. Mousey moved his face around a little without finding a definite expression.
“Yeah, that’ll do it. How’s that going to hold up in court, though, warrant-wise? I’m not sure how it works up here.”
Richmond motioned for the phone back; Mousey wiped a fingerprint off the screen with his pant leg, then accommodated. “Yes, you are. And it absolutely would not hold up. But that won’t really matter to a retired public official living about half a million dollars over his means who happens to be on tape at a murder scene, will it? Maybe the charge sticks, maybe it doesn’t; either way, they find my body, Reubens gets these bullets . . .”
“I guess you’ve got it all figured out.”
“See, all that stuff you’ve got. The career to look back on, the house, the law-enforcement carry permit, the pension. All that Freedom 55 loveliness that just up and evaporated in time for me, it ties you down. Gives you a lot to lose . . .”
Mousey would ruin this kid. Kill him maybe, wreck him for sure. He already had a pretty good idea how too. A little finesse, and it could be done. Mike Richmond would get got. “Sure. Bullets for the Marlo collar, easy peasy. You cross me, I drop the dime on your procedural fuckery, Mike, and maybe that sticks to you, maybe it doesn’t.”
“Fair deal.”
Mousey stood briskly, motioned to his car through the windows. “Good. Let’s go get him.”
Richmond stood up just to look down at him, coming on subtle as a spin-class playlist. “You think I’m stupid. You drive me out to the woods, you know where we’re going, and I’m along for the ride. Nope. I might be a rookie, Mousey, but I’m not stupid. I’ll follow in my car.”
“No go. I set him up in a spot with a vantage on the road. He sees two cars, he’s gone. Into the forever of the forest. Like a sasquatch.”
“So I guess it’s on you, then. Isn’t it?”
Mousey slumped silently back into his chair. “Mike. Mike. For a long time, like everybody else stupid, I thought that expression ‘have your cake and eat it too’ was redundant. Like, having cake, that’s eating cake, y’know? But then I came to understand it. You want the cake, you want to gobble it into your greedy mouth, to taste it and shit it and wipe it off yourself. But you still want to have it. Want it to be there for you, so you can know it’s around. Use it, but never use it up. And you don’t even realize how disgusting that is to someone like me. Someone used up. You know what they say, Mike: sometimes you’re the cake, and sometimes you’re the fork. And either way, all anyone cares about is . . .” Mousey didn’t even have to sell looking defeated. The bonus to being a burnout. “Cute sayings.”
48
Because Mike was a man with an undergraduate social sciences degree who’d gotten mostly B-pluses he had, until pretty recently, known but not quite understood the meaning of the word ambivalence. What Mike thought was that the word referred to a kind of medium-negative feeling. Like you had misgivings. What he’d learned recently was its real meaning: you feel many ways. Like feeling you’re a terrified rookie staring down a smart and dangerous and dirty operator. Like feeling you’re a smart, brave, ambitious person staring down a dead-eyed burnout zombie you’re just about to put back in the ground. Like both of you are all of those people and zombies, and all of those things are happening, and you couldn’t be happier or more confident, and your foot is vibrating so hard you have to squeeze your thigh painfully just to keep up appearances. That’s what ambivalence really is: being totally sure, every way the wind blows.
Mike’s voice came out a bit shaky, but still almost as low and slow as he’d hoped. “So lay it out for me, Mousey. Tell me how you’re going to save yourself.”
The tumbleweed shrugged, snorted, and stretched his arms towards the ceiling. His voice coming out clear and firm and only as muffled as the harsh realities of time and his horrible accent mandated. “See, that’s a sad thing, Mike. At your age, at this moment, that you just want it to be over. That’s what you want, right, Mike? You want me to give you the answer, and you want to write that answer down and get your pat on the head, and you want to go home and dream of a slightly more comfortable life. And that’s sad, Mike. In your line of work, that’s sad. To want time to pass over you like that. Take a breath, my man. Take this time, these next few hours, own them. Learn something.”
Richmond had learned, finally, that going back and forth with Mousey was no way to handle him. “I’m pretty sure I’m the least sad thing that’s ever been in this house. And I’m not the one that needs anything right now. I’m the one sitting in my chair, counting options. Last chance: when and where can I pick Marlo up?”
Mousey hauled a notebook wearily out of his pocket and wrote a very short note. He tore the page out in one violent motion, folded the paper and held it aloft; then Mousey closed his eyes, and spoke suddenly clearly. “He will be here, on this piece of paper. Nine a.m. He won’
t be there before then, and I doubt he’ll stay much after. He thinks he’s meeting his ride off the island. I’ll make sure he isn’t armed. As long as you show up on time and with your cuffs ready, it’ll be easy as pie. I don’t think the kid has much fight in him. Door won’t even be closed. You can walk right in.”
Mike grinned. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
Mousey opened his eyes again. He wasn’t crying, but his eyes had more water in them than was standard. “I’ve got one more cop story for you, Mike. One more that you should probably hear, that I can tell you without that fat idiot around. You want to hear it?”
Mike almost felt sorry for the guy. Almost sorry enough not to hate him. “Sure. If it’s short.”
“I’ll be concise. I had a snitch, name of Darnell Revis. Slung a little rock, knocked off the odd white kid came down to buy drugs. Nice guy, funny. I liked him. So, early November, and this is Chicago November, Darnell’s just hanging out on his corner, drinking a Colt, holding down his spot. This Narco cop, Roberts, rolls past. Old-school, beet-red, dad-was-a-mill-worker-so-he-knows-struggle, shit-kicker-with-a-sap-in-his-front-pocket type, he drives by. Roberts is one of those fire-hose racists, the real deal. Everybody knew — shit, I knew it — that Roberts’ll make a few good collars, but you gotta put a leash on him where the blacks are concerned.
“So he drives by Darnell, no reason to stop, he’s headed somewhere else, he has shit to do. But he doesn’t like the way Darnell’s standing, spitting on the street. So he pulls over. It’s cold, so his partner stays in the car while Roberts rousts Darnell. Darnell was wearing his winter coat, which, just for context here, had this, like, Christmas-card-type picture of a kitten on the front. Darnell thought it was funny. And Roberts walks up on Darnell, and he starts, he starts to say: ‘Hey, boy,’ calls him boy like that, y’know, says: ‘Hey, boy, where’d you get that co—’ and before he even finishes the word Darnell says: ‘Yo daddy’s asshole. It’s a big outlet store. They got all the brands in there.’”
Mousey drummed a short tune on his stomach, tented his hands over his eyes to shade them. “Darnell doesn’t even see the sap. Doesn’t even have time to stand up all the way straight. Roberts catches him clean. It would have just been a rough concussion, probably. Except Darnell had just started to push himself off the streetlamp, and he fell back into it, which spun his neck the other direction so bad it almost broke. Darnell loses a bunch of mobility in his legs.” Mousey made a clicking noise with his mouth.
“Roberts is a cop, and as you know, if you fuck somebody up that bad, they must have done something. So the DA files assault-with-a-deadly charges, says Darnell went at Roberts with the bottle. Bottle broke when Darnell dropped it. Public defender pleads Darnell out, he gets two-to-five, does a month in hospital, twenty-nine months in state prison. Shit. I am talking too much again. When did that start? When did I start being somebody like that? I wonder.”
“I’m tired of you. And I want to sleep. Just tell me the rest of it.”
“I made a bit of a fuss over it, but I was living pretty hard back then, working red-ball cases, running bag. So I decided it wasn’t . . . it wasn’t worth spending all my cards on. So I didn’t. A couple years after all that — Darnell is still in prison, mind you — I catch a homicide. Home invasion turned rape-murder of a seventy-six-year-old woman. Roberts comes down to my office, no mention of the kid he’s fuckin’ paralyzed, and he says he’s got a couple of shittums in mind for it, offers to help me. So I say sure, we run down his leads, couple of junkies who’ve been knocking off stash houses, got bored and started doing normal houses, including our old lady. Don’t remember her name. Anyhow, Roberts helps me, we crack it, put these two shittums down for murder one. After we book them, Roberts stops me outside and he apologizes. He doesn’t profusely apologize, but he says he’s sorry, says that was a fucked-up situation. Situation, he calls it.”
Mike’s leg had stopped shaking. It would only be a few more hours. A few more hours until he would have beaten Mousey, without having to be anything like him. Without having to turn himself into a thing so hard and so brittle. Without having to turn himself into anything at all. “What did you say?”
“I said what I always say when someone apologizes: ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I say that every fucking time someone apologizes to me. It’s like some kind of . . . I say it every time. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ And then we went to the bar. He bought me a few Jameson and we talked about the 1998 New York Yankees. We were both Chuck Knoblauch fans. Which is a bond, y’know? That’s a really weird baseball player to like. I guess what I’m saying, Mike, is it’s inhuman. That’s what I’m telling you. The world of it. The deals you make, the things you say are fine, what we’re doing right now. It’s inhuman.”
“What ended up happening to Darnell?”
Mousey closed his eyes and then put the thin edge of his hand between them. “I won’t tell you that, Mikey. It’s too depressing.”
The tumbleweed placed the paper gently on the table, leaned forward, and because that tumbleweed had once been a person with a lot of style, blew the note across the table into Mike’s open hand.
49
The boatman had the red, gently lined face of man whose skin has taken a continuous beating from a relatively mild sun for his entire life. He still had most of his hair, all of it white, the front swept to the left in a way that disguised one half of his widow’s peak and overexposed the other. He was neither fat nor slender, with a double chin and thin cheeks. He stood in a neutral posture, his hands neither crossed nor directly at his sides. He was not a type of man that looked or smelled or acted a thing like Mousey, but he was a type of man with whom Mousey could deal comfortably and well.
Mousey dispensed with any of his usual flourishes of gait and speech, walked simply up to the boatman with both hands visible. “Are you Mr. Wu’s friend?”
Smile lines gouged pleasantly into the tough skin around his eyes. “I’m Mr. Wu’s friend with the boat.”
The boatman extended his hand, and Mousey allowed his hand to be firmly shaken by it. “Nice to meet you.”
“So you’ve got one man’s worth of passenger for me?”
Mousey nodded and counted off items on his fingers. “Yes, one passenger. A nice, able-bodied, calm male. He needs to get to Powell River. Tomorrow a.m. he’ll be where we are right now. Tonight at 2100 I need you to go to this address.” Mousey gave the boatman a slip of paper, and the boatman took it, stared at it, then crumpled and tossed it behind him without looking. “Pay this two thousand for the shitty blue Toyota Tercel I bought for your passenger.” Mousey slipped a slim white envelope with a blue marker stain in the top left corner to the boatman, who moved it casually to his pocket. “And stow it where you plan to dock with the passenger. For this service, you will be paid this three thousand now” — Mousey handed over another slim white envelope, this one marked with yellow, and the boatman moved this one swiftly to his other pocket — “and another three will be with the male passenger, and he will give it to you after you have ferried him over safely and he is sitting in the driver’s seat of his shitty blue Toyota Tercel. Are all these details clear?”
The boatman took a thoughtful second and then said yes.
“And are the financial terms acceptable?”
This time he said yes immediately and once more stuck out his hand. Mousey shook it. The boatman said: “It’s a pleasure doing business with a professional. And I can promise you Powell River’s a lot closer, and a nice, able-bodied, and calm male is a lot better cargo, than I usually have to run.”
“Good. I might be here to see him off, I might not. And I hate to break the professional vibe and all, but take care of him. He, uh, he’s a nice kid.”
The boatman again studied the distance past Mousey’s shoulder for a reasonable period before speaking. “I’ll see him over. You’re talking to a man with six children and seven toes. That doesn’t mean anything specific. But it does mean something.”
/>
Mousey smiled at the boatman in the same surprised way he smiled at clean babies.
50
Greta finally realized that she was hungry and returned to the bar to pay her tab and start another one, buying and devouring a huge serving of curry, and then she left to go feel the breath of the wind in the bountiful outdoors again.
Greta decided to lie down on the cool grass by the chess board. Her shoulder holster dug into her ribs in a softly painful way, and she leaned into it, like finding and holding an edge in a Yin Yoga class.
She didn’t hear, or see, or instinctively sense Alan Mouse’s approach until he sloppily muttered hello. And staring up at the stars with her belly sleepily full, she felt good about that. She missed being spacey. Wandering around distracted, always surprised by other people’s bodies coming close to her body, surprised by sounds and bumps and missed bus stops, and never really minding the misses because she was distracted by herself. Her own silent mind. And that, really, was what she missed. Her world as it had been — a world where she gave attention to details she liked, not one where she owed it to every detail, to every bump and creak and footstep. She rolled over and smiled up at him, and he seemed surprised and charmed by it. He slouched to the ground next to her, looking out across the water as he spoke.
“I just wish we didn’t have to make a deal. I wish you were a person I could talk to, not deal with, y’know what I’m saying?”
Greta happily did not try to figure out what he was talking about. She would listen to him, and it would feel good to listen.
MARRY, BANG, KILL Page 22
