Never Play Another Man's Game

by Mike Knowles

  “Who’s upstairs?”

  “Fuck you.” There was little accent in the curse.

  “This just isn’t your day. You must have a black cloud above your head,” I said.

  “No, I just have a gun pointed at my head.”

  “You’re right. It’s probably not bad luck that got you in this situation. Your partner had enough brains to figure out the drugstore was still open and that someone might have seen something. You lacked the smarts, or maybe the initiative, to do something other than stay with the car.”

  “The boss said to protect the car.”

  “No doubt, but why you? Why not the other guy? You keep your mouth shut and your mind closed and you’ll be guarding the car until it finally blows up in your face.”

  “There’s a bomb in the car?”

  I sighed. “What I mean, genius, is that the ones who think for themselves get ahead and make money. The ones who worry about the car get treated like really cheap bomb-defusal robots. You need to be smarter starting now. Tell me who is upstairs with the doc before I decide that I should be dealing with your partner instead of you.”

  The Russian gave it some thought. “Why do you want to know who is upstairs?”

  “Don’t worry about that. Worry about the gun to your head. You have ten seconds to tell me what I want to know, or I’ll show you how little your brain is when I splash it out in front of you.”

  The Russian didn’t have to think as long. “Oleg is upstairs with Pavel.”

  “Not them, the other one up there.”

  “Other? There is no one but Oleg, Pavel, and the doctor.”

  Neither name made any sense to me. The Russians were under new management since I put Sergei’s lights out. The men who had stepped into power had made more changes by making quick promotions so that they were backed by loyal men. I didn’t know any of the new players, but I did know that the men pushed out of their jobs weren’t too happy about it. Russian bodies had been showing up in the streets over the past few weeks and doctors like the man upstairs were probably working more than usual.

  “The doc been there long?”

  “Since this afternoon. Oleg had him close early so that he could see Pavel.”

  The news that I had hit another dead end came just as the Russian’s partner walked into view. He circled the car calling out the name Josef.

  “That you?” I whispered.

  Josef nodded slowly. I could feel him push harder against the gun with each nod — he was building up momentum for a move against me. I put the sole of my boot against the back of Josef’s knee and put him on the ground. My hand left the collar of his coat and found his mouth. I put the Sig to Josef’s temple and waited for the smarter Russian to make a decision. He could stay outside, or go inside. From the way he shook his head after he said Josef’s name again, it was clear that he was pissed that his partner had left his post. I watched him look around the lot and call out again; I also saw him close his jacket tight around his neck. The cold was all around. Part of me felt it too, but it was a part my brain refused to acknowledge in the dark corner of the lot.

  After a minute, the Russian got fed up with standing around. I figured he was tired of waiting outside while the idiot he worked with was probably inside telling the boss some lie about how he had run off whoever broke into the car. The Russian took one final look around the lot and then walked towards the doors. I heard the door hit the wall again as the mobster went inside.

  “Walk,” I said.

  Josef hesitated a second and then got to his feet with his hands in the air. He was off balance without the use of his hands and I gave him a jab in the back of the head before he was able to get his footing. The blow was hard enough to make him stumble forward. He stayed where he was, waiting for me to tell him what to do next. I didn’t say another word. When he finally got the guts to turn around, he would see that I was gone. The six-foot-tall wooden fence was drilled into the bricks of the building. The posts didn’t creak once when my body went up and over.

  I ran out to the street and slid behind the wheel of the Neon. A few seconds later, I was rolling — where, I had no idea.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The only place for me to go was back to Sully’s Tavern. I parked across the street and went inside, bringing enough cold air with me to get everyone’s head to turn away from the television.

  Steve was behind the bar and Ox sat on a stool across from him. Steve was in his usual khakis and white V-neck. His shaggy hair hung down over his eyes and for a second I wondered how he got anything done. Ox didn’t look the same. I sat on the stool beside him and said, “Where’d you get the shiner?”

  Ox stared at the drink in front of him.

  I gave Steve a look.

  “Tried to leave,” he said.

  I laughed. Ox must have thought that the wiry little man behind the counter wouldn’t have been able to keep him inside. A lot of people had made the same mistake; just getting a black eye made Ox one of a lucky few.

  “You know Ox here knows everybody?” Steve asked.

  “He tell you that?”

  “Told me that he knew people who would make me sorry I ever lived.”

  “And all you gave him was the shiner?”

  “Figured you needed him.”

  If Ox objected to us talking about him, he didn’t say. The old man was still giving his drink his full attention.

  “You threaten him, Ox?”

  I didn’t get a response.

  “Can I get a Coke?”

  Steve nodded and walked away to get my drink. I leaned in close to Ox’s ear and he flinched a little. “You know everyone, so you should understand what I am about to say. That man there is what happened to Tommy Talarese. I would give some thought to what you said and how you want to leave things with the bartender.”

  Tommy Talarese was once a made man. He was violent without a hint of self-control or compassion. Tommy took an interest in Steve’s bar and when Steve wouldn’t play ball, Tommy kidnapped his wife. I followed Steve on the killing spree that followed. Tommy’s entire family died that night. Steve was something Tommy never understood. The little bartender had the restraint of a hand grenade. Without his wife to keep him in check, the pin was lost for a day.

  Ox remembered Tommy. He knew all of the stories. Hearing that the man who killed that monster was the one he had just threatened made his lip quiver.

  When Steve came back with my Coke, Ox blurted out, “I’m sorry. I lost it for a minute and I said some things I shouldn’t have.”

  Steve gave him a long look. The bartender’s shaggy hair was in front of his eyes and it was impossible to tell exactly what he was looking at.

  “It’s cool, Ox” was all he said before walking away to leave us to talk business.

  “Any luck out there?” Ox asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Can’t say that I’m sorry about that.”

  “You really tell Steve that you know everybody?”

  Ox nodded and drank a little.

  “Do you?”

  He took another sip from his drink and set it down. “I know a lot of people.”

  “You know Ruby Chu?”

  The question tickled something inside Ox’s brain. He turned his Cro-Magnon head away from his glass and gave me his full attention. “Sure.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Do you know her well?”

  “Well enough. How well can you really know a con woman?” Ox spoke the truth.

  “Let’s say Ruby was in trouble and needed a doctor.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “The bloody kind, Ox. She needs someone who can patch someone up and who will keep their mouth shut. Who might she go to for help?”

  Ox stared at me. “What, no threat?”

  “The threat is implied, Ox. If you need proof, I’ll hurt you,” I gestured at Ox’s black eye, “but I won’t be as good to you as the bartender. Now th
ink. This would have to be someone she knows. Someone she trusts who can do the work.”

  “Give me my phone back.”

  I handed over the BlackBerry.

  Ox saw me still looking at him. “Now give me some time to think.”

  I took a seat and spoke with Steve while Ox scrolled through his phone. After a couple of minutes, he came up with something. He tilted the phone and showed me a name. I had never heard of Ken Parish.

  “Did you call him earlier?”

  “No.”

  “Why not, Ox?”

  “This guy isn’t a doctor. He was an army medic. You asked me for doctors; besides, he doesn’t do any medical stuff for cash. He used to hire on to jobs as a driver. It’s been a while since I’ve talked with him, but he’s still out there, as far as I know, and he and Ruby were tight back in the day. Last I heard, he retired and bought an old place in the country. I guess Ruby might try him if she was in a bind.”

  I had Ox draw me directions to the Ken Parish’s farm on a napkin.

  When he finished, he sighed. “We done?”

  “Almost,” I said. “Steve, watch him a bit longer.”

  “You motherfucking cocksucking bas—” Ox shut up when Steve leaned an elbow on the bar and tilted his head so that Ox could see his eyes.

  “No problem,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I pulled into an Esso three blocks from the bar to gas up the Neon. The pumps had a line three-deep at eight o’clock in the evening — everyone was gassing up for Friday night. I played with the radio station until I caught the end of Miles Davis playing “Basin Street Blues.” The song ended too soon and it was followed by some woman doing her best impression of Ella Fitzgerald. The vocals on the cover were in key, but she didn’t have the same emotion lurking behind the words. In jazz, like everything else, attitude was what counted.

  Once the tank was full, I went inside to pay. I handed over the cash and then stepped over to the Tim Hortons counter that had sprouted up between the magazine rack and the refrigerated glass shelves. It wasn’t until I walked back out into the cold air with two bagels and a milk that I saw the two cops giving the Neon a once-over. Without breaking pace, I angled to the right and stepped onto the sidewalk. The cops didn’t pay any attention to me; they were getting back into their car. They backed the cruiser across the lot and parked next to the air pumps, giving the Neon their full attention. I had boosted the plates and changed them with the originals. The police had obviously run the numbers and come up with an alert. They would wait until someone got in and then run them down before the next light. I crossed the street and lost sight of the police; they would be waiting a while.

  It took five minutes for me to get back to Sully’s Tavern and another thirty seconds for me to get Steve’s keys.

  The bartender laughed at me when I told him what happened. “You let Fuckin’ Bruce in the car.”

  I shook my head. “He rested his elbow on the door when he was talking to me,” I said.

  “Lucky you didn’t let him in,” Steve said.

  Ox broke into the conversation. “Not for me.”

  Steve flashed Ox a look and the old man went back to staring at his drink. Steve threw his keys to me and I went behind the bar to the rear exit. The windshield of the Range Rover in the rear lot was covered in a layer of hardened frost that took me a few minutes to scrape off. The engine shrugged off the cold without trouble, and it didn’t take long for the heaters to start thawing the air inside the old SUV.

  I drove up the Mountain past Stoney Creek on my way to the rural town of Binbrook. Binbrook had once been nothing more than farmland, but over the past few years housing developments had started to take root and grow. The new houses with their identical facades spread like weeds, erasing acres of fertile land each year. Ken Parish’s house was off the main road in what could only be described as old-school Binbrook. Instead of being separated by small patches of manicured lawn, the houses had acres of grass and trees between them. I found the house when I passed by a mailbox mounted on the street with his name painted right on the side. I pulled to the side of the road a little up the street where a group of trees would conceal the Range Rover from anyone in the house. The property line separating Ken’s land from his neighbours was marked with a dense row of trees and brush. The neighbour had given up on farming a long time ago and had just committed to letting everything grow over. I stepped into the dense growth and wove my way through it until the lights from the farmhouse were visible. Someone was definitely home — there was smoke coming from the chimney and an old red Ford pickup parked in the driveway. The house was set on a big rectangular plot of land that stretched back a long way to more overgrown trees and brush. The field behind the house was empty and I could see a lone scarecrow up on a cross, guarding nothing. The front lawn was almost equally barren. Ken had let only grass grow outside his door. There were no trees or hedges to block his view. He would be able to see all the way to the road, without trouble, from any room in the front of his house.

  I didn’t want to risk just walking across the lawn to the front door. Ox had said the man inside the house had been an army medic before becoming a wheelman. A guy like that would be good with a gun. He would be on edge if he had Franky in there, and I didn’t feel like getting picked off before I got inside. I kept moving through the trees until I was parallel to the house, and out of view from the windows. To be safe, I moved behind a tree and powered up the BlackBerry — the trunk would block the light given off by the screen. I pulled up Ken’s number and touched dial. I took off as soon as I heard the first ring. Wherever Ken was standing in the house, his attention wouldn’t be on the windows — it would be on the phone. By the second ring, I had covered the fifty metres between the trees and the house. No one had picked up the phone yet. As I passed the kitchen windows, I took a peek inside and saw no sign of anyone. I left the window and had made it to the back door when a man picked up.

  “Hello?”

  The owner of the voice sounded old and a bit drunk.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I think I have the wrong number. Is this the Davis residence?”

  “No, I’m sorry. It’s not.”

  “Oh, my mistake,” I said as I looked in the back window. “Could I trouble you to tell me what number this is? I don’t want to disturb you again if I have the wrong number.”

  Ken rattled off his digits with only a little slurring while I tried the knob — it turned and the door opened. God bless the country life.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I hit a six instead of a five. Sorry to have bothered you. Goodnight.”

  I heard Ken say, “Goodnight,” but not in the phone. His voice came from somewhere on the first floor.

  I was standing in a mud room connected to the kitchen. The voice had come from beyond the kitchen — probably the living room.

  I powered down the phone and exchanged it for the Glock. The mud room was a small rectangular space with a mat beside the door for shoes. I saw dirty workboots, old running shoes, and a newer looking pair of Crocs. All of the footwear was the same size and they suggested that Ken was the only one in the house. As I stood in the mud room, I began to notice the background noises of the house. I heard the faint sound of a television — something with a laugh track. I also heard a clock beating out a relentless annoying ticking in the kitchen. Ken coughed a few times until he got something up and then he sighed. I waited in the room beyond the kitchen, watching the doorway that led into the kitchen from the living room in the reflection of the microwave door. Seconds lapsed into minutes, and minutes turned into an hour. Each breath I took stretched longer and longer until I was breathing in only four times a minute. The house continued to make its sounds — I was silent as the grave. When Ken had gone twenty minutes without making a noise, I stepped into the kitchen. I moved over the white-and-black checkerboard tile, careful to keep my feet close to the wall. Structurally, the floor was strongest near the walls and therefor
e least likely to creak and warn Ken that I was in his house.

  I made it through the kitchen without making a noise, but when I stepped on the hardwood floor of the living room the boards responded with a whine. I froze where I was and watched the sleeping body of the man on the couch. Ken was about six feet tall, judging from the way his legs dangled over the arms of the loveseat. He had white hair pulled into a braided ponytail and a thick goatee. The moustache was stained yellow with nicotine. He wore cargo pants and an old T-shirt that was too faded to read. In front of the man, on the coffee table, was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. There wasn’t much of the coppery liquid left. Ken snored quietly and if I had been his wife, I might have covered him with a blanket. Not being his wife, I walked past him, deeper into the room, barely lifting my feet to avoid making noise. The floor handled my presence without further complaint and Ken’s snoring didn’t change.

  The stairs were just to the right of the front door and on the mat were a pair of high-top running shoes. They weren’t the same size as the shoes at the back door and they didn’t look like the kind of shoes a man like Ken would wear — I had seen the shoes before. I started up the stairs. It didn’t matter how hard I tried to be silent, the wood under me crackled like wood in a campfire. I took the steps two at a time and Ken did his part by keeping his eyes shut and his ass on the couch.

  I moved from empty room to empty room until I found the one guest in the house. Franky lay in a small bedroom on a pullout couch. His shirt and pants were off and I saw bandages all over his core. Judging from the blood stains on the gauze, it looked like the bullets had messed up his left lung and abdomen.

  I stood over Franky watching him take shallow breaths. He was sleeping peacefully until I slapped him across the face with the side of the Glock. The gun immediately opened a gash on the side of Franky’s face. His eyes opened first followed by his mouth. Only his eyes got to register the pain. My hand covered his mouth hard enough to make the springs underneath him compress.

  “How you doing, Franky?”

  Suddenly, my hand fell away. There was a searing pain on the back of my head and I heard someone say, “He’s better than you’re going to be, boy,” before I heard nothing else.