Hazardous Goods (Arcane Transport)

by John Mackie

  “I’m thinking you guys are in the wrong business.” Even stunned, I could hear the word “business” come out as “beeznus”. I tried to reach out, but just stumbled forward into the panel of the elevator, everything spinning.

  Big Ugly smiled and set off across the lobby while I slid to the floor.

  “Jesus. Are you alright?”

  I was flat on my ass, the head-spins still out of control. Somehow I’d stuck a leg out to stop the doors from closing, probably the only reason the security guard from the front desk even came over.

  “Some guy mugged us. Check on my boss.” My double vision was brutal, and blood was dripping freely from a cut on my forehead. Clay was slumped over in the corner of the el­evator car.

  “Clay, are you okay?”

  The guard knelt before Clay, and I could hear him whis­pering. Clay gasping out a response, and the guard’s face paled. He turned and mouthed to me: “I think he’s having a heart attack.”

  CHAPTER 2

  I wanted to call for an ambulance. Call the cops. But de­spite the pain, Clay was stubborn. He asked me to flag a cab, and minutes later we were in the Emergency Ward at Toronto General. After they heard his symptoms, Clay went to the front of the line.

  The waiting area in Emergency was quiet by inner-city stand­ards. Amongst the wailing kids and drunk university students, a kid wearing a crop top and low cut denim shorts was slumped in a chair, the tracks on the inside of her arm visible from across the hall. Opposite her sat a businessman, a guy in his fifties wearing a rumpled suit with his tie tugged loose. He was cradling his left hand, a large pair of scissors buried to the handles into his palm.

  I thought about asking what had happened, but recon­sidered. Not sure I wanted to know, quite frankly. Instead I rubbed the palm of my own hand and tried not to think about why someone would do that.

  Besides, I was in no mood for talking. My head was throbbing, but the pain paled in comparison to the agonizing frustration I felt at not having done something.

  I’d always wondered how I would react if faced with a gun. Bat it aside, or wrestle it from the gunman’s grasp. But when faced with the real thing, I’d just stood there. Like a coward.

  My ruminations were interrupted by someone calling my name.

  It was Harper Jarvis, Clay’s wife. Silver grey feathered hair, slim and straight-backed. Her light blue eyes, normally bright and lively, wore the stress of the evening. She’d been in with Clay and his doctor for the last half hour.

  I joined her in the hallway.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He’ll be all right. But he has to calm down. I’ve never seen him so angry.”

  “Can’t say I blame him.”

  “No. But he’s not a young man anymore.”

  I smiled, but I suspect it came out more grimace than grin. The doctors had given me a couple of Tylenol 3s after cleaning the cut on my forehead and stitching it up, but the medication hadn’t made much of a dent in my headache. The bright lights of the ER weren’t helping, either.

  Harper grabbed a chair from the waiting area and sig­naled for me to sit down. I snorted in disgust at myself, having an old lady offer me a chair.

  Harper must have picked up on my mood, because she leaned over and spoke in a tone just above a whisper.

  “Stop being so hard on yourself, Donnie Elder. Why, if something happened to you, I don’t know what I would say to your mother.”

  Clay and Harper have known my mother for as long as I can remember – old friends of her and my long-departed father. My memories of them are like a slide show made up of annual glimpses into their life. The two of them dropping by for a barbeque one hot summer, Harper adding a pasta salad to the buffet table. Celebrating Thanksgiving at their old bun­galow, with Clay delighted to have two young boys around to join him in watching football.

  I didn’t know them well, but what I did know was that they were good people.

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “Well, they’re still doing tests. But it looks like a mild heart attack. They’re going to keep him for a few nights. Thank goodness you were there.”

  “Has he had one before?”

  “No.” Her voice cracked, and she pulled a stark white tissue from her purse to dab at the corner of her eye. “He’s had to watch his blood pressure, but nothing like this.”

  I sat quietly next to Harper, thinking I might be in shock myself. A few hours ago I was starting a new job, getting to know my boss. Now I was sitting in a sterile hospital wait­ing room, wondering what the hell was going on in the world.

  I still couldn’t believe it. The guy pulled a gun on us. My temper wrestled with its leash, desperate to go out for a run, so I took a long, deep breath and blew out slowly.

  “Should we call the cops?” The security guard had seemed in no rush to do so, probably more worried about his job than anything else.

  Harper sniffed, and straightened.

  “No. Clay was always insistent that when things happened we not involve the police. He’s been robbed before, but never at gunpoint. Once or twice his van’s been broken into. And someone broke into the offices a few years ago. He insisted, said the police wouldn’t understand. That it wasn’t the right thing to do for the customers.”

  No arguments from me. I’d never had any problems with the police, and I wanted to keep it that way.

  “Is there anything I should be doing?”

  She put on a valiant smile. “Well, Clay was asking to see you, so why don’t we go find out?”

  Despite being on the downward slope to sixty, Clay had always struck me as a robust and healthy fellow.

  Now, though, Clay’s skin had taken on a grayish pallor, and his eyes were watery. Mysterious wires and tubes ran from his nose and arms to machines that clicked, whirred, beeped and hummed. I already had a jaundiced view of hospitals, a result of watching cancer eat away at my aunt. This visit wasn’t going to change my views, though it helped that Clay was awake and lucid.

  “Caused a bit of a stir, did I?”

  “Oh,” Harper kissed his cheek and dabbed her eyes again. “You did that, you old fart.”

  “Sorry about that.” Clay’s eyes dwelled on hers for a long moment, then he turned to me.

  “How are you doing, kid?”

  “I’m fine. Just pissed off.”

  “I know how you feel. If I was twenty years younger—.”

  “Calm down, honey.”

  He did need to calm down. I could see from the mon­itors that Clay’s heart rate and blood pressure had both jumped in the few moments since I arrived. Mind you, I tended to do that to people.

  “I’m real sorry, Clay.”

  “Not your fault. I’m just angry at myself. Never had that happen before.”

  “Just makes me wonder, did I do something wrong? I mean, it was my first day – maybe I should have—.”

  “No, no. You did everything you could. This was planned. I just can’t understand why.”

  “Me neither.” Interesting. It did seem planned. “Kinda begs the question as to who was behind it, though. That big idiot didn’t strike me as a criminal mastermind.”

  “No, that’s for sure. But we need to call the folks at Sun, let them know. Maybe they’ll know why someone would want the package so bad.”

  “Let me sort that out. You need your rest.”

  “Thanks, I—,” Clay winced and his eyes took on a far­away look. It was something I had seen when I used to visit my aunt in the hospital, before she passed. When the pain kicked in, her eyes would wander, as though searching for some place of respite.

  Harper and I watched quietly as he worked through the rough spot. After a minute or so, his eyes cleared.

  “Quite the first day, huh?”

  “Ha. Yeah.”

  “Sorry for that. Knew you could handle the weird stuff, but that was a new one.”

  “I’m just sorry I wasn’t much help in there.”

  Clay shook his
head. “Without you, kid, I may not have made it to the hospital.”

  He glanced over at Harper and squeezed her hand.

  “Should I ask Kara to go in early tomorrow? Call the customers?”

  Harper’s question took me off guard. The clock on the wall said it was eight fifteen, but it felt like I had been up for days. Still, with a rest I should be okay. The doctor who stitched my cut had said it was maybe a mild concussion. The use of the word maybe diminished the subsequent suggestion that I consider staying overnight. I wasn’t that big a fan of Jello and bare-backed gowns.

  “Do you think she’d mind?” Kara was the office dis­patcher, though to hear Clay describe her, she could do it all. I hadn’t even met her yet... tomorrow would be her first day back from vacation.

  “She won’t mind at all.”

  “Well, we’ll watch over things, don’t worry.” I looked in Clay’s eyes, and saw there was one other thing. Something that I had on my to-do list anyways. “And I’ll see what I can find out about the idiot who robbed us.”

  “Not a good thing that he told us his name.”

  I nodded. I’d had the same thought.

  “I’ll be careful.”

  Clay mouthed a thank you, though his eyes started to glaze again. The drugs must be kicking in – morphine or what­ever was the painkiller du jour.

  “Anyways, you need your rest. Harper, do you want me to call Kara, or—.”

  “No, I’ll call her. She would want to hear from me about Clay. And I’ll touch base tomorrow, in case you have any questions.”

  “Okay.” I patted Clay’s shoulder, but the older man was drifting off. “Take care.”

  “You get some rest too, Darnell.” I winced at the use of my proper first name, something few people know. “If your mother hears we asked you to go back to work right away, why I—.”

  “Don’t worry about my mother.” I could do that all by myself.

  The lobby to the Lakeview was much like the rest of the place – gloomy, outdated, and with no view of Lake Ontario (or any other lake, for that matter). A leather couch and two chairs sat on one side of the unwelcoming entrance. On the other was a bulletin board crammed with posters and notes, and a bank of buzzers for visitors. “Elder” was listed across from the buzzer for Apartment 302.

  I’d lived in the Lakeview for four years, since my Aunt Nicolette passed away. A branch manager at the local bank, Nicolette was my mom’s younger sister. She was also a regular volunteer, a member of a local choir, and a great sounding-board for my brother Ted and I. Though never married and without children of her own, Nicolette was like a second mother to us.

  When she died, much of what she owned went to the two of us. The Lakeview condo, a ten year old silver Ford Taurus that Ted still drove, and most of the ninety grand in her savings accounts. The rest went to my mother.

  Ted and I split the cash and shared the condo, though Ted kept his own apartment for the rare day when a woman consented to spend the evening with him. Most of my share of the cash was now in Clay’s hands, the first payment on my partnership stake in the business.

  The mailbox was bunged up with the usual drivel, two pizza coupons and a Reader’s Digest “you’re a winner!” letter. I passed by the elevator – a death trap if there ever was one – and headed to the stairs. After a brief trudge up several flights, I entered the apartment to the sight of my brother flopped on the sofa, watching the Raptors on TV.

  A Raptors forward missed on a drive down the lane. The Heat took down the rebound and launched their own fast break.

  “What the hell happened to you? Mom called, yelling at me to keep you up all night, make sure you don’t have a con­cussion.”

  “I’m fine. I’m going to sleep. Tell you about it to­morrow.”

  Ted huffed, staggering to his feet. At six two and two hundred and twenty pounds, my little brother is a bigger, younger and paunchier version of me. The sofa moaned in audi­ble relief.

  “You had to get stitches?”

  “Six.” I slipped out of my shoes and moved to the full-length mirror on the back of the front closet. “Dunno what it looks like.”

  Peering into the mirror, I slowly pulled away the tape fixing a square of gauze to my temple.

  “Ouch. That was from a punch?”

  I leaned forward to inspect the cut. My temple looked like I’d tucked half a golfball under the skin, the flesh an angry red. About two inches long, the cut ran from just above my eyebrow to the hairline at my temple. The stitches zigzagged back and forth.

  “Gun. He hit me with it.”

  “Shit.” Ted’s big head loomed over his shoulder. “Still, looks like they did a good job.”

  “You think so?”

  “Absolutely. A few months, you’ll barely see anything. Like the cut on my lip, remember?”

  I remembered. Grade Three. Four stitches from a split lip when Ted slipped on the monkey bars. He was right, you could barely see the scar anymore.

  “Better than the butcher who did Chili’s knee. You see that mess?”

  I was about to respond when the door to the apartment swung open and a woman blustered in.

  Five foot four, wide of bust, hip and thigh, curls white as fresh-fallen snow. Where some mothers inspire warm feelings of adoration, my mother inspires one thing and one thing only.

  Fear.

  “He had a heart attack?”

  I flinched. How my mother finds these things out, I will never know.

  “Yes. But he’s OK. He’s over at Toronto General. I flagged a cab down and we were there in no time.”

  “Does Harper know?”

  “I waited for her to show. And I passed Willis on my way out.” Willis was Clay’s nephew.

  “Poor Harper. I need to get over there and make sure she is alright.”

  For a moment I thought I was going to escape any fur­ther harassment. No such luck.

  “And you? You could not stop this thug?” It came out sounding like ‘dis tug’, her French Canadian accent butchering the “th” sound, one not used in her native language.

  Ted snorted, and she went after him, her big purse swinging in an arc towards his head. I sighed and took a seat. This was what love looked like in the Elder family.

  It was a short outburst, followed by her usual tour of the apartment, critiquing the state of disorder and the lack of nu­tritious food in the kitchen. Ted attempted to defend his precious Pop Tarts as a good source of a great many critical vitamins, which resulted in a look of disgust.

  After her brief tour, she inspected my stitches.

  “No girl will ever want you now.”

  “Oh my God. Thanks.”

  “Well, do you think I will live forever? I want to see my grandchildren before I die.”

  There was no real answer to that one, so I sat quietly, tolerating her examination.

  Finally, she turned away and began sifting through the mound of sundries on the hall table, a signal I had learned to interpret some time ago. I picked up her glasses from the kitchen table and handed them to her.

  “I’ll get flowers on the way.” She perched the glasses in her hair, where she would no doubt forget them later in the evening.

  “He’s going to be alright. The doctor said it was a small one, and they’ve got him on medication now.”

  “What is a small one? The man had a heart attack on your first day of work! Now he may never work again. Mon dieu, si vous—.”

  Nightmare. Now she was rambling in French, an ac­cusatory tone in her voice. At the same time, her eyes were tearing up – the only sign of her true feelings.

  “It’s okay. It’ll be okay. Go check on them at the hos­pital. Tell him I’m sorry.”

  She stopped suddenly, staring at my lips. A quick turn and she was moving to the door, her leather bag/weapon over one shoulder and a silk scarf wrapped around her neck.

  “Sorry? Why would you be sorry? It was not your fault. Just make sure you’re up early. Don’t leave Clayton won
dering whether he should head in to the office.”

  “I’ll be there first thing.”

  “Do you have clean clothes to wear? You’re going to be representing the company, you need to—.”

  I rolled my eyes skyward, seeking some respite from the hurricane that was my mother.

  As the door closed and the clack of her heels carried down the hallway, I said a little prayer. Please God, let me have been adopted.

  CHAPTER 3

  Some people are morning people. They erupt out of bed, smiles already entrenched on their faces. They have big hot breakfasts, go for morning runs, read the paper, watch a morning talk show, play with their kids, and go to work.

  I, on the other hand, am not a morning person. On a good day, I’m able to shave, brush some or all of my teeth, shower, get dressed – sometimes in clothes worn on prior days – and depart for work.

  So when my alarm went off at five o’clock, my heart did a little hop and a skip to signal its displeasure. I managed to pry open an eye despite gummy yellow stuff having more or less sealed the lid while I slept. I just couldn’t get out of bed, though. That took a blaring radio alarm, my ringing cellphone alarm and, in the end, Ted hollering profanities.

  I arrived at Arcane at a quarter to six, fumbling my way through the security code and taking way too long to find the light switches. Before I had left the hospital the night before, Harper had called Kara to tell her about the “incident” and ask that she come in a little early to make sure I didn’t destroy the place. I had fifteen minutes to render the building unfit for habitation.

  Reception seemed in good order. A solid black leather sofa – worn, but still presentable. Pair of matching leather chairs. A square table with a glass top displayed a map of the Greater Toronto Area (the GTA, also known as the “Big Smoke” or the Centre of the Universe by those less fond of the city.).

  Every driver was supposed to check their vehicle daily, but Clay had told me that he checked them himself, just in case. So after my inspection of the front office, I pulled open one of the loading doors and popped the hoods. Oil and fluids seemed fine. Tires seemed fine. No new dents or scratches. I pulled the hose out from below the dock and gave the vans a quick wash, then slid inside and wiped down the main sur­faces.