Willows and Parker Box Set

by Laurence Gough

  Nash didn’t hesitate. “He was a jerk. Tell you the truth, Tracy’s better off without him.”

  The waiter came back with a shot glass full of rye and a dimpled pint mug, his ten-gallon hat casting the table in shadow. Frank drank an inch of beer and then dropped the rye, shot glass and all, into the pint and drained the whole thing down. He licked his lips and waved his hand at the table. “Bring us another round, pard. And half a dozen pickled eggs and a couple packs of pretzels.”

  The waiter jerked his thumb over his shoulder, down towards the dimly lit rear of the bar. “Pretzels in the machine down there by the pool tables. Need some change?”

  “No,” said Frank. “You do.”

  Frank waited until the guy had turned his back and then let Nash have a look at his new gun, a Magnum Research Desert Eagle .44 calibre semi-auto gas operated blaster with a fourteen-inch barrel. The weapon was almost two feet long, including the home-made noise suppressor that Frank had let Gary take down to the basement and paint matt-black with a spray can from the local Home Hardware store. Put wheels on it, the damn thing was almost as big as a tank. Frank figured the silencer was good for maybe five or ten shots before the baffles gave out. He lowered the gun under the table and held it between his wide-spread legs with the hard length of the barrel pressed up against the inside of Nash’s thigh. When Nash’s eyes were as big as they were going to get, Frank said, “Gary’s kind of disappointed in you, Pat. Way he sees it, he gave you some time and you been pissing it away.”

  Pat Nash wanted to look around, see if anybody was watching. But he was afraid that if he lost eye contact with Frank, that Frank might squeeze the trigger. Dump like this he could empty the clip, knock back a couple more beers and then make his getaway. No hurry at all.

  “Want to know what Gary said, exactly? ‘Splash the bastard.’ ” Frank grinned. “Sure can turn a phrase, can’t he?”

  Nash drank some Granville Island Lager. The bottle thumped down on the table. Nash didn’t let go of it, held on tight.

  “Rub me out, huh.”

  “Kill you dead.”

  “You sure, Frank? I mean, maybe you didn’t hear him right. It was nap time or something. Little dink had his mouth full of animal crackers and warm milk.”

  Frank threw back his head and cackled at the ceiling. His teeth looked like sugar cubes, unnaturally white and square.

  “So what’re you gonna do?” Nash said. He lifted the beer bottle to his lips and Frank tensed, but all he did was drink some beer.

  Frank dug the blunt nose of the noise suppressor into the soft meat of Nash’s thigh. “I do exactly what I’m told. Unless I feel like doing something entirely different. In which case I do that.”

  Pat Nash leaned back in his chair and waited. He wasn’t sure, but he thought Frank was probably having a little fun with him. The waiter ambled over with another Granville Island Lager, Frank’s beer and shot, a plastic bowl full of foul-smelling eggs, the pretzels. Coming towards them, he sounded like a reindeer. Nash looked down and saw the poor sap was wearing spurs as big around as the hubcaps on the old Pontiac that Oscar had died in. Jesus, what happened to the good old days, when a bar was a place you went to get drunk? The waiter put Frank’s drinks and the eggs and pretzels down first, then Nash’s beer. Frank gave him a twenty, waved away the change. Wasted money. Guy was so spooked he probably would’ve paid for the round, if Frank had asked him.

  “Thing is,” Frank said, “I liked the way you handled yourself the night we had to shoot Oscar. And I figure, why waste talent? Gary, on the other hand, his favorite thing is getting even with people. I saw a woman beat him to a parking space once, over at Oakridge, that big shopping mall? Gary waited three hours in the rain and then followed her home. She was driving a BMW 325CSi. Brand new. Fucking expensive car. Gary poured five gallons of diesel all over it, lit up with my Zippo, which I never got back.”

  Frank ate an egg, popped it into his mouth whole, chewed twice and swallowed.

  “I had that Zippo eight years. Got it down in New Orleans. It was so old the chrome was all worn off. You know how hard it is not to lose a Zippo? Something about those lighters, I don’t know what it is. Impossible to hold on to, they just disappear.”

  Frank ate another egg. Nash studied the bubbles rising in his beer.

  “Gary burned that goddamn BMW to the ground. Came home and watched TV until three o’clock in the morning and then gave her a call. Told her if she ever tried anything like that again he’d sneak into her house a year or so down the road, inject strychnine into every piece of meat in the fridge, slaughter her whole goddamn family. Wipe ’em all out. The dog too, if she had one. And you know something? He meant every word of it, the dummy.”

  Nash reached across the table and picked up a bag of pretzels, squeezed until the air inside made the bag pop open. “Why are you telling me all this shit?” he said.

  “Guy got shot up pretty good at the Vance. Randy Des-Moines, you know him?”

  “Don’t think so,” said Nash.

  “Fella who splashed him said he found twenty keys of smack, needs some cash. Randy made a grab for the ring and got it stuffed up his ass. Shooter’s gone for now but he’ll be back. And the word is out, Gary’s the man to see. What comes around, goes around, right? Gary’s real eager to set up a meet. Get his drugs back and blow the fucker’s head off.”

  “You want me to do the shooting,” said Nash, and bit into his pretzel to hide his relief.

  “That’s right, only while you’re at it, I want you to waste Gary, too.” Frank paused, letting it sink in. “Then you and me can do a split. Percentages, I figure eighty my end and twenty for you. Sound good?”

  Nash nodded, liking the idea a whole lot. The trick would be to do Gary and at the same time keep an eye on Frank, because although Frank seemed straight enough, he had an idea Frank wasn’t the sharing kind.

  Still, his style had always been to take things one step at a time, slow and easy.

  He helped himself to another pretzel. Frank smiled at him. He chewed, swallowed, smiled back. Frank reached out and grabbed his third pickled egg, popped it whole into his mouth. His cheeks bulged. He drank some beer, swallowed. Burped. Scooped up another egg. Waved his hand at the bowl.

  “Dig in, don’t be shy.”

  “Thanks anyway, Frank.” Nash watched Frank’s jaws rise and fall. Gulp. Another mouthful of beer, a fifth egg. Nash sipped at his lager and kept his face blank. It was a weird situation, sitting there watching Frank stuff his face. Like he was watching a condemned man eat his last meal.

  Because what was on his mind was Frank’s store-bought teeth, how they’d crumble and splinter when he took his cannon away from him and used it to pistol-whip the shit out of him, just before he shot him dead.

  17

  The tide was on the ebb, and the swiftly-moving water, pushed by a fitful offshore breeze, was pale green and choppy, flecked with white.

  Willows stood on the dock with his hands in his pockets and his back to the weather. Parker and a Marine Squad sergeant named Curtis were standing about twenty feet away. Despite the distance and the fact that they were downwind, Willows heard every word of the sergeant’s argument as he tried to convince Parker the smart thing to do was not to come along for the ride.

  “Never seen a floater, have you?”

  “Not yet,” said Parker.

  Curtis had thick black hair combed straight back, a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper moustache. His dark gray eyes were very calm. “It’s not a pretty sight, young lady.”

  A detective is equal in rank to a corporal. Parker was outranked. She chose her words carefully. “It’s my case and I’m going to stick with it. That’s what I’ve been trained to do, sergeant. So why don’t we just leave it at that.”

  Curtis glanced at Willows, who studiously ignored him. He turned back to Parker and said, “The head’s belowdecks on your right. We just scrubbed the deck.”

  The body had been found in False Creek, foul
ed in the web of pilings of the huge wharf that supported the Granville Island Farmer’s Market. Granville Island is not really an island at all, but simply a fat isthmus of land that had once been an industrial site but was now primarily a mix of parkland, speciality shops, restaurants and theatres. The man who’d found the corpse had been fishing for crab. He’d had the presence of mind to note the slashed throat. The indication of foul play had resulted in a call to Major Crimes. Willows and Parker and Curtis were waiting at the Marine Squad’s Coal Harbor base for VPD 98, the squad’s thirty-one foot Uniflite, to pick them up.

  Parker moved down the wharf towards Willows. The wind tore at her hair.

  “Bit of a chauvinist, the sergeant.”

  Willows smiled. “He gave me the same speech, my first time out. Word for word, as a matter of fact.”

  “He called you a young lady?”

  “No, he called me a young man. And I was, believe it or not.” Willows turned up the collar of his black leather jacket. “Curtis has been around a long time, Claire. Remembering my first time out on the boat, I’d give you the same advice.” Willows grinned. “That is, if I thought for a minute you might take it.”

  They heard the deep throb of the engines first, and then the boat came into view, crawling along at five knots to minimize its wake. Parker moved away from the edge of the wharf as the constable behind the wheel swung the boat around, inched closer to the dock.

  “Lovely vessel, isn’t she?” Curtis said to Parker. “Thirty-one feet in length, a ten-foot, six-inch beam. Walk-through transom, swim grid. She’s powered by a pair of four hundred and forty horsepower Chrysler V-8 marine engines. Top speed of about thirty-five knots. But we won’t be pushing it, not today.”

  Curtis stepped aboard and offered Parker his hand. She ignored him. He winked at Willows. VPD 98 had a crew of two constables. Both men were dressed in dark blue nylon floater jackets, regulation pants and baseball caps. The seahorse logo on the jackets was incongruous with the police crests high up on the jacket sleeves. The constable behind the wheel, Hollis, had regulation shoes but the second man was wearing black Reeboks, white sports socks. Willows had seen him around. He tried to remember his name. Leyton.

  “Cast off,” said Curtis. He glanced at his watch. Twenty past ten. Coal Harbor was a cul-de-sac. They’d have to cruise all the way around Stanley Park and up English Bay, beneath theBurrard and Granville Street bridges. The trip would take at least twenty minutes.

  “More comfortable inside,” Leyton said to Willows.

  It was crowded down below. Curtis sat in a padded blue bucket seat that looked as if it had been stripped from a sports car. Hollis sat in an identical chair. He wrote a few lines in the ship’s log, a small, dark green, hardbound book, then put the log to one side and slowly eased the throttles forward. A bell rang shrilly.

  “Oil pressure,” said Curtis. The clanging of the bell stopped abruptly. The noise of the engines deepened and the bow rose slightly. Behind the control console there was a small Formica table and a narrow bench seat. Leyton asked Parker if she’d like to sit down. She said she preferred to stand. Leyton glanced at Willows, and then made himself comfortable.

  They cruised past the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club and Deadman’s Island, an Indian burial ground now used as a naval facility. Curtis passed out small white envelopes. To Parker he said, “Earplugs. We use them whenever engine revs exceed twenty-two hundred r.p.m. Union regulations.”

  The throttles were pushed all the way forward. The boat crashed into the sea. The earplugs were made of little tubes of white foam. Parker watched Curtis roll the foam between his finger and thumb, compressing it, then insert the plug into his ear and hold it in place while the foam expanded. She followed his lead.

  Willows saw a freighter from Vladivostock. Sleek, shiny black cormorants preening themselves on a buoy. A raft of buffleheads, small black and white ducks locally called ‘killer whale’ ducks. Off to starboard, a twin-engine floatplane thundered past at an altitude of no more than a hundred feet, wings flashing bright yellow as it sideslipped towards the air terminal on the south shore of the harbor.

  They rounded Hallelujah Point, the bronze statue of Harry Jerome, the Nine O’Clock Gun. The cannon had once signalled the end of the day to fishermen in English Bay. On one occasion a prankster had loaded it with a rock the size of a bowling ball, and blown a hole in the floating Shell gasoline station.

  “How fast are we going?” Willows said to Leyton. He had to yell, because of the earplugs.

  “About twenty-five knots. We can go faster, but only for short bursts. Too hard on the engines.”

  Off to Willows’ left was Brockton Point, a favorite parking spot for night-time lovers. The path along the seawall was busy with cyclists and joggers, even the odd pedestrian who was content merely to walk. All around them the water sparkled in the sunlight. The wind was in their face now, but the tide was speeding them along and they were doing almost twenty knots. They passed beneath Lion’s Gate Bridge, the cars and trucks and buses high above them seeming no larger than a child’s toys.

  There was traffic from two radios; a ship-to-shore unit and a Motorola that broadcast the regular police band. Willows noticed that the boat was also equipped with an MRDS, or Mobile Radio Dispatch System. The value of the unit was that it transmitted data on a miniature TV screen, effectively preventing the interception of information by radio and television reporters. Willows knew there would already be camera crews on the scene. If there had been foul play, there’d be footage of the body’s recovery on the six o’clock news. If it was a suicide, the public would never find out about it.

  The water off Spanish Banks was crowded with sails. The sergeant brought up his binoculars. “Lasers,” he said. “The different clubs at Jericho get together, set up a figure-eight course.”

  Parker thought about the slim, graceful hulls cutting across the surface of the water. She thought about the body caught below. And found herself wondering, how many corpses, in all the seven seas? It didn’t pay to think about it. A flock of crows swirled like dead leaves high above a copse of maple trees in Vanier Park. The bow of VPD 98 dropped as the revs were cut back. Curtis removed his earplugs. They cruised slowly past the Civic Marina and Coast Guard wharf, beneath the Burrard Street Bridge, dull thunder of traffic. Parker went out on deck.

  A deep-sea tug slipped past. For a moment the two boats were very close. A seaman waved at them, but no one waved back. The wake of the tug made the Uniflite sway vigorously. Willows gripped the back of Curtis’ chair.

  Hollis turned the boat towards the small dock at Granville Island. The dock was used primarily by a fleet of small, electrically powered ferries that catered to people out for a short pleasure ride, or who wanted, for one reason or another, to approach the Island by water.

  Constable Leyton went out on deck to attend to the mooring.

  “Can you give me a hand with the stretcher?” Curtis asked.

  Willows followed him to the bow of the boat. The stretcher was about six feet long and perhaps twenty inches wide, galvanized wire on a frame of half-inch metal tubing. There was a varnished slab of plywood for the body to lie on, a sort of rudder made of wood to keep the corpse’s legs apart. The stretcher was held in place against the hull by two short lengths of nylon rope and two bands of thick black rubber. The sergeant worked on one end, Willows on the other.

  “Smell anything?”

  Willows sniffed the air, shook his head.

  “It’s been a couple of months since the last one, so I guess it’s faded. But it’s the worst stench on earth, believe me. Gets into your hair, your clothes. It’s a nice tour, the Marine Squad. Until we have to pull one out of the water.”

  They lifted the stretcher off its brackets. Curtis flipped open the lid of a white-painted box. He removed a pair of surgeon’s masks. “Think you can handle the stretcher, Jack?”

  “Sure.” Willows braced himself against the thin fiberglass hull. He could feel the gentle mot
ion of the boat, the coolness of the water against the palm of his hand.

  The sergeant removed a pair of disposable surgeon’s gloves from a cardboard box fastened to the bulkhead. He pulled on the fragile gloves and then put on another pair of gloves, made of thick black rubber. The gloves and surgeon’s mask were considered a necessary precaution. No one jumped off a bridge unless he had a reason. The threat of AIDS was always present.

  They tied the stern of VPD 98 to the western end of the wharf, the bow to one of the pilings. Up on the dock, there was an unmarked Body Removal station wagon, a squad car and two uniformed policemen to keep the crowds away. The fisherman was waiting for them. He pointed out the location of the body, caught beneath about five feet of water.

  Curtis took the man’s name and address and telephone number, gave him one of his cards and sent him on his way. Let a civilian get a peek at what they were about to pull out of the water, next thing you knew you had a lawsuit on your hands.

  Willows peered into the depths. He became aware of Parker standing beside him, leaning over the rail.

  “What’s he caught up on?” Curtis said to Leyton.

  “Beats me, sergeant. Want me to fish him out?”

  “In one piece,” said Curtis.

  Leyton slid an aluminum pike pole into the water. He used the piling for leverage. The body drifted away from the piling and then back again. All Willows could see was a vague, pale shape. The light was uncertain, like dusk on a dull and cloudy day. Leyton got a fresh grip on the pike pole. The aluminum bent in a graceful arc as he put his back into it. The body slipped away from the piling and then returned to embrace it once again.