by Mike Knowles
I felt my jaw slacken and the rest of me soon caught up. I was still angry, but I wasn’t riding it anymore — the anger was fuelling me, not controlling me.
Steve pulled into the parking lot of a home improvement store and parked in a space near the back of the lot. I got out, thanked Steve, and crossed the parking lot to the Dodge Neon I had left there the night before. I had stashed the car in case I needed to make my own getaway. I didn’t tell anyone else about the car because no one needed to hear that part of me never fully trusted anyone else. The Neon was a close looking cousin to the Honda Civic I had boosted weeks before. There were so many Neons on the road that they attracted about as much attention as birds in the sky.
I took the key out of the wheel well and drove out of the parking lot in the opposite direction of the crime scene a few kilometres away. I drove through the city until the road hit a major intersection. I saw an independently run coffee shop on the corner and pulled into the lot. Inside, there was only a man behind the counter reading the paper. He was happy to get me two muffins and a tea without starting a conversation, and I took a seat in the corner where I could watch the lot outside with my back to the wall. I barely tasted the food as I thought things over. I had nine bullets left in the Glock and two spare magazines. The disposable cell was still in my pocket. I had shut it down and it would stay that way. Ruby knew the number and that meant I couldn’t risk leaving it on. A lifetime in the business meant she knew a lot of people; some of them would know how to follow a phone. It was clear that I had underestimated Ruby and Rick, and I didn’t want to do it again. I didn’t want to lose the phone because it was still useful. Ruby knew the number and she might try to call it. I would check the voice mail twice a day and then shut it down again to keep it untraceable.
The second muffin was as tasteless as the first — Ruby, Rick, and Franky were all I could think about. They had all of the money and a head start. Where would they go? They could get on a plane, but the money couldn’t travel with them. They couldn’t bank it so soon after an armoured car job. They had to sit on it or travel with it. I had no idea what kind of roots Ruby had, but a sixty-something woman had to know a lot of people. How many would she involve in something like this? Before I finished the last of my tea, I knew what I had to do. Ruby had too many advantages — I had to take all of them away.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I drove to a public library and accessed the Internet on one of the computers. I found what I needed in ten minutes. I copied the numbers and addresses off the screen, cleared the browser history, and got back in the car. I drove to a nearby college and paid for a spot in the student lot. It was just about lunch time and the campus of Iroquois College was alive with activity. Near the doors, there were crowds of smokers braving the elements to get a dose of nicotine. There were also crowds of students just hanging around. The young people laughed and talked loudly and were seemingly unaware of the cold air around them. I threaded through the kids and walked into the building. I asked a guy standing in line at a vending machine for directions and then joined the herd moving in the direction he pointed. The crowd was a mixture of aggressive scents. Young men and women smelling of way too much cologne or perfume were common. Once in a while, there was also the heavy scent of a pothead doused in too much patchouli oil. I had never had a formal education, but I had spent time in schools before. When I was younger, my uncle would use my age to get into places where he otherwise would stand out. My age let me go unnoticed while I scouted jobs where a grown man hanging around would be spotted and reported immediately. To make me better at blending in, my uncle forced me to socialize with kids my own age once a week.
“I don’t want you to get a best friend or anything like that. Friends are something that will get you dead. You just need to learn to blend into a crowd and sometimes that means being able to talk to people. Talking is a skill, like juggling, that can only be developed with practice. So get the fuck to the mall and practise.”
I did what I was told and I learned to talk with other kids. I stood at the mall, outside convenience stores, even in school cafeterias and I learned to become part of the pack. Being in the college brought back those memories of forced interaction. It also reminded me of how much teenagers love to sit around on the ground. As I passed classrooms, I had to constantly step over feet lazily extended into the hallway. Groups of students sat on the floor in front of lockers and outside classrooms just killing time. It was something unique to the young. You never went anywhere and saw a bunch of middle-aged executives sitting on the ground and having a conversation. I checked each group for what I wanted until I found a young girl sitting with a similar looking friend who looked like she could help me out.
The girl was blonde with buckteeth, too much eye makeup, and a nose ring. She wore old Converse and tapered black jeans. The plain shirt she had on had the top three buttons open and I didn’t see evidence of a bra. The friend was similar, just red-headed, better teeth, and a bra. The blonde had a sketch pad on her lap, so did the redhead.
I stopped in front of the two young women and their conversation quickly ended. The redhead looked me in the eye and turned up her lip like she was watching liposuction on the Discovery Channel.
“What?” the blonde said.
“You two want to earn a hundred bucks?”
“Ewww, gross,” the redhead said.
“I’ll fucking scream,” the blonde said.
“Not like that,” I said. I was calm and that calmed them down. “With your pads there. I need a few sketches drawn up. Can you do something like that?”
“You a cop?”
In my peacoat, cargo pants, and watch cap I looked nothing like a cop. But if the two girls thought I was, I would roll with it.
“Yeah, our sketch artist is busy so I need to find someone else. If you do a good job, there might be some steady work in it for you.”
“Cool,” the blonde said.
“Yeah,” the redhead added.
Less than an hour later, I had sketches of Ruby, Rick, and Franky. The blonde was better than the redhead. She got two done in the time it took her friend to do just the one. All three drawings were good enough. Anyone who looked at the pictures would have no trouble matching them to the real people.
I paid the girls and left the campus. I took another look at the address I wrote down at the library and turned left out of the lot. I pointed the car towards the Escarpment and the World’s End.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The World’s End was a pub for reporters. It was heavy on print, but some of the TV reporters slummed there too. I found the bar on the web when I looked up the newspaper softball team. The bar was the team’s sponsor, and they put their name on the back of the cheap jerseys.
At one in the afternoon, the bar was running on fumes. Whatever business came with the lunch crowd had gone back to work. I sat at the bar and ordered a Coke. The bartender rolled his eyes at me and slowly walked away, dragging a rag down the bar, to get my drink. Reporters drank more than cops, so a Coke was a sign that I wasn’t one of their kind. When my drink came back, I noticed it was in a short glass without ice — a hint that I wasn’t welcome.
The World’s End was dark and everything had some kind of dark wood on it. It was a dim hole where the rest of the world could be forgotten — a place where secrets could be told. I drained the Coke and people-watched. In a booth, three men spoke loudly about LeBron James and argued about his move to Miami. Anothertable had a man and a woman sharing a conversation that looked like it might erupt into a make-out session at any moment. I guessed it was an office romance. Three other tables had solitary men with hard liquor in front of them. I watched the three men closely. I wrote off the one closest to me when he began nodding off. The chubby man with the beard went next. He was spending too much time on his booze. The last man was reading through a file folder, pausing only to make a note or to have a sip of the drink he kept at the far end of the table. The man was in his fifties
with a white moustache and a long bald runway on top of his head. He was wearing leather shoes that had thick athletic soles. He was a guy who was on his feet a lot and was starting to feel it.
I ordered a second Coke and took it over to the man’s table. I took a seat across from him; he didn’t look up. His hand reached over, picked up his drink, and he took a sip without lifting his eyes from what he was reading.
“Who the fuck asked you to sit down?”
“My drink was getting warm waiting for you to offer,” I said.
The man sighed and looked up from his papers. “Excuse my fucking manners. How can I help you today, sir?”
“Television or print?”
“What?”
“You television or print?”
“I’m a newsman.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“The hell I didn’t. I told you I was a newsman and any journalist worth his pencil knows that the papers are the only real news. Television is just window dressing. Top story followed by some fucked-up American socialite’s latest escapade. No time is ever given to the real issues because real life doesn’t buy ratings or sponsors. It’s all big flashy shit until the flash wears off and something else spicy gets its place for a minute. That ain’t news, it’s Pablum for the brain-dead masses.”
“So you work for the Herald.”
“The Hamilton Herald is where I work. It’s where I ended up after the Globe retired me early.”
“How early?”
“A decade before I was ready to give up. Cheaper to hire young up-and-comers and run stories off the wire than to keep a real journalist on the books.”
“Had nothing to do with you drinking in the afternoon?”
“Does my beverage offend? By all means fuck off then. I didn’t ask you to sit down. If you have a problem with my literary process, keep it to yourself at another table.”
“I’m just trying to get a sense of who I’m giving my story to.”
“Story?” The reporter’s eyes changed. All of a sudden he looked more alert.
I nodded. “It’s too important to be handed off to some guy who drinks his lunch everyday. It needs to get out fast and where it will do the most good.”
“Let me guess, your boss is a dick who mistreats his employees, maybe breaks the law a little, and you’re ready to blow the whistle on the asshole. A little egg on the old man’s face to show him that he can’t push the little guy around.”
He was close. I did want to blow the lid off something, but I didn’t have a problem with my boss — I had a rat problem. Three rats hiding in a dump full of dark places. Trying to search through the garbage would get me nowhere. The rats would dig in deeper and wait me out. Better to burn the dump down and wait for the rats to come running out.
“You heard there was a robbery today?”
The reporter narrowed his eyes and gave me a hard stare. “I heard some things.”
“I know who was behind it.”
“Say that again,” he said.
“You heard me fine.”
“Why tell me? Why not tell the cops?”
“I have a natural distrust for the law.”
The reporter laughed. “Who doesn’t?”
“If you don’t want this, that’s fine. I’ll find someone else and you can get back to getting lit on your lunch break.”
“Let me hear it,” he said.
“The job was pulled by two people. A man and woman team. The woman’s name is Ruby Chu. She’s been arrested a bunch of times for fraud. She’ll be in the system. The guy is her son, Rick.” I slid the pictures across the table to the reporter. “This is what they look like.”
The reporter looked at the two pictures. “Nice drawings. You do these?”
“Sure,” I said.
“How do you fit into this?”
“Not important.”
“Sure it is. My boss will need more than the word of a guy I met at a bar during lunch.”
“Lunch was an hour ago,” I said.
“I’m a slow eater.”
“Un-hunh,” I said.
“I need more or this goes nowhere.”
“The old lady was in the grocery store while the truck was getting lifted. Her job was to hold up the guards.”
“You mean they got robbed too?”
“Hold up as in slow down. If you check the cameras, you’ll see her take the keys off one of them.”
“With a gun?”
“No.”
“How’d she do it then?”
“Get a hold of the tape and watch it close. You might catch it.”
“Will I see this guy on the tape?” he said pointing a yellow finger nail at Rick.
“No, he was wearing a mask. He was outside with a third man.”
“Where’s his picture?” The reporter actually sounded a little angry about a third picture missing. It was almost like he thought I had stolen something from him.
“I don’t have a picture of that man. Just these two.”
“How do you know all of this?”
I took a sip of my Coke and waited, letting the question evaporate.
“There’s more. Another angle.”
The old man looked giddy. He leaned in towards me, waiting for what I had to say.
“The job didn’t start at the grocery store. The old lady and the other guy kidnapped the armoured car driver’s wife. They left them in a vacant auto shop a klick away.”
“Why would they do that?”
“You’re the reporter. Figure it out. Far as I know none of that was released, so you’re already ahead of the game.”
“How do you know all of this?” he asked again.
“I’m just a concerned citizen trying to make sure justice gets served.”
“Well, I thank you, mister citizen. I’m sure when this breaks you’ll get that justice you wanted.”
“I hope so,” I said. “But don’t sit on it long. The TV news will know about it shortly. You wouldn’t want to get scooped.”
I stood up as the old reporter sprung to life. The afternoon drinking had made him slow and shaky, so hecompensated by cutting corners. He collected all of the papers on the table in a sloppy swipe and jammed them into his bag. I heard the paper crinkle as I walked away.
I watched the reporter leave the World’s End from a doorway across the street. He jogged to his car with his bag under his arm and his keys in his hands. The idea of being scooped had put an expiration date on what I had told him. He had to move fast or it would spoil. Any concerns about who I was or the truth of what I had said had taken a back seat to what if I’m not the first to tell the world.
I got in the Neon and drove across town to west Hamilton. West Hamilton was home to the university and a boarding school for immigrant students. Students at the boarding school usually spent a few semesters learning English before moving on to the university or other nearby schools. The dense student populations that lived around the schools spawned restaurants, bars, and convenience stores that catered to them. I walked into a convenience store that advertised mostly in Chinese and bought a new prepaid cell phone. I walked back to the car and leaned against the hood while I opened the phone. Once it was set up, I called a number I had gotten while I was online at the library. I dialled and then entered the extension of the news director for SC News. The call went straight to voicemail. When I heard the beep, I said, “The Herald has pictures of the people who robbed the armoured car. The police haven’t seen them yet. The story should run tomorrow morning on the front page of the Saturday paper. It would be a shame if you guys were left behind.”
I hung up the phone and made similar calls to the news directors of the bigger Toronto stations. I also called the Toronto papers and left messages at the crime desks. By tomorrow, the story would be out. The Herald wouldn’t be able to hold on to an exclusive for long when so many other bigger sharks were circling. The fire had started. Ruby’s and Rick’s names would be out along with their i
mages. Running would be impossible. I had left Franky’s picture out because he was the only link to Ruby I knew of. He wasn’t a pro, so I doubted he had any connections he could rely on. I had put five rounds into the van and I heard him scream. Bleeding from a gunshot wound, he would have few options. Ruby and Rick would either dump him or kill him. I figured they wouldn’t kill him, because if they wanted him dead they would have tried to do it when they went after me and D.B.
Letting him in on the plan to cross us meant there was a good chance that he was still alive. If the blood loss was severe, they would have to get him to a doctor. He couldn’t go to a straight doctor — gunshot wounds had to be reported. That meant he needed someone off the books. There were a few doctors around who would do that kind of work and a few more vets who would practise on humans. Most of those doctors had legitimate practices; the illegal moonlighting was just to pay for whatever vices had taken over the doctors’ lives. Franky was shot early in the morning, meaning any medical attention he got would likely take place in an office. Ruby and Rick would have dropped him somewhere. I had to find him before they picked him up again. More important, I had to find him before Ruby and Rick figured out they were famous. When that happened, Franky would be the least of their problems.
Ruby had planned her scam well. She had worked me and D.B. like a pro. But everything she did was aimed at one thing — getting her, Rick, and Franky away with the money. There would be no plan B for the end. Her plan ended with her rich and us dead. There was no way for her to fix the endgame going bad. My surviving meant she now had to plan on the fly. Putting her name and face out there along with her kid’s would amp up the pressure. She would have no choice but to lay low. That would give me a chance to catch up, but it wasn’t going to be easy.
The police would be behind me the whole time, looking for the same old woman. There would be bikers on the trail too. Roland had to already know what happened. The armoured car was already on the news and the Big Dawg would immediately understand where the holes in his lieutenant came from. He wouldn’t know Ruby was involved until her face and name were out tomorrow. When he found out about Ruby, the hunt would begin. The cops wouldn’t be able to keep up with the Thieves, who had the advantage of being full-time scumbags. They would start tearing up all of their haunts and contacts looking for a line on Ruby while the cops were still taking statements. The cops wouldn’t be looking under the same rocks as the bikers — that was where I would be. I had about eighteen hours to get ahead of both cops and robbers.
