by Mike Knowles
I nodded and got in the car.
* * *
The Steel City Lounge advertised thirty dancers, but I counted only twenty on rotation for the dinner crowd. The seats in front of the long stage were full of beefy looking men with short haircuts and faded tattoos. Each seemed comfortable with the close proximity of the man beside him, making me think that they were guards from the jail winding down after a long shift. The girls were the opposite of everything they looked at all day, and they watched with a carnivorous interest.
I took a corner seat and scanned the room. Igor wasn’t on the bottom floor — he was in the second floor VIP area talking to a topless waitress and playing it cool, judging by the look on his face. Around him were four pale men in dark suits and sunglasses. They spoke to random girls who weren’t talking to Igor and kept their eyes on him at all times. Igor said something over the head of the owner of the tits he was looking at, and all the men laughed loudly enough for me to hear them over the music. The attention and fake laughter meant Igor was important to them.
The strip club looked to be Igor’s haunt. It was clear he was the man in charge from his free movement in the VIP lounge and the number of cold-looking sycophants he garnered. How much business went down in the club was up in the air. Igor claimed to be doing what a neighbourhood boss named Mikhail did before him. I figured that meant he collected money from all of the blood-stained hands of the mob in the area and passed the dirty currency on to his boss, Sergei Vidal. Igor wasn’t enough to get Morrison off me, but he knew who I was, so whatever went down had to include him. I had to find out what Igor was into and how it got back to his boss, because Sergei was no fish — he was a whale, and he’d definitely get me off the hook.
CHAPTER NINE
I sat in the strip club for six hours. I steadily ordered drinks from the waitresses and poured them on the floor a bit at a time. The carpet under my feet was dark and industrial grade; it was probably used to getting wet, and it hid my drinks just fine. I tipped well enough to stay seated but not well enough to get any company. The club was full of plenty of other men looking for an eyeful and more than willing to pay for a handful. The girls almost instinctively avoided me. They knew which men had money to spend like bees knew which flowers had pollen.
Igor was big man on campus in the Steel City Lounge. People showed up with heavy duffel bags over their shoulders and left with them empty under their arms or crumpled in their fists. Whatever was in the bags never came down the stairs — there had to be a safe upstairs in the VIP lounge.
Loud thunderous music pounded out of the speakers and moved my glass across the table a millimetre at a time whenever it was empty. I was seen, but never noticed, not even by the waitress. I was part of her route. She brought me a new drink when she came by like a robot. No one else looked my way — I was in a pocket between the action. On one side, the stage dazzled lonely men with lights and implants. On the other, the bar hummed with customers ordering food and drinks. Igor never looked down unless it was to order one of the stage performers up to his lounge at the end of her set. When the dancers began to leave, and not get replaced by another Stepford whore, I realized how long I had been in the club and the toll the time took on my bladder. I took in the room and waited for my spot. I had to wait for the room to cough so I could move in the space provided by the spasm. I moved when a drunken customer got handsy with a girl and a bouncer had to deal with him. No one’s eyes followed me; they were all glued to the beating. I was part of the room, the background no one pays attention to, just like my uncle had taught me to be.
The bathroom was disgusting and empty, but I used it all the same. I took my time drying my hands, timing my exit. I left the bathroom in tune with a loud entrance of another girl from the speakers. I waited outside the bathroom for the peeler to hit the audience with a tease. Within a few seconds, both of her clear heels left the stage as she slid upside down on the pole towards the floor. Men hooted and hollered as I moved under the VIP stairs and out the door.
I pulled the car out front and killed the engine. I let the back window down to avoid clouding the windows and waited for Igor.
One by one, drunks stumbled out empty handed and alone. Igor left, unaccompanied, at 3 a.m. with nothing more than what he showed up with. He got in his car and peeled away.
I didn’t follow. Instead, I waited outside. I wanted to see if he left moving the contents of whatever was in those duffel bags to one of his guys. I saw three of the VIP’s leave together, but none of them carried a thing. I got out of the car and followed them on foot down the street. Like Igor, they’d parked in the lot behind the strip club. They were loud and boisterous as they walked around the building. They didn’t turn their heads once to see me two metres behind them. I let my footsteps fall in the same tempo as theirs, and I slowed my breathing down. I moved closer and put my hand on the butt of the .45. It would have been easy to put a bullet into each of the three men. I was so close I could do it before any of them turned around to see who it was that was killing them. It was clear that Igor didn’t work with pros; he had men on staff who were sloppy like he was. They were probably childhood friends or the only people who didn’t laugh at him. I stopped following when the three men turned off the sidewalk and stepped into the lot behind the building. I had learned enough about Igor’s business and the help for one night.
I got back behind the wheel and watched the rest of the employees leave. No one left with anything larger than a purse. When the windows went dark, I drove out to Igor’s house on Bay Street and made sure the yellow car was there — it was. I drove back to the motel for a couple hours of sleep and was back behind the empty ice cream shack at 6 a.m. with a bagel in hand. I ate, drank, and pissed in a bottle in the car until 2:30. Then I followed Igor to a salon to watch him get his hair cut and his nails done. He went from the salon to Limeridge Mall, where he bought shirts and pants at Urban Behaviour while I watched him and pretended to shop at a nearby HMV.
Igor was back home at five. I noticed that someone had picked up Tatiana’s shoe while we were gone. I left the car behind the vacant building and jogged across the street. The blinds in the windows were all turned. No one saw me as I ran down the driveway, past the yellow car, to the side of the house. The side of the house was all brick, and there were only two doors to be found. One leading to the garage, the other into the house. Neither door was unlocked, and both seemed to have a handle lock as well as a deadbolt. I moved around the back of the house, where a deck sat below a long row of kitchen windows. There was no way to pass unseen to the other side of the house, so I retraced my steps and crept around the front of the house to the other side.
On the other side, I found a basement window unlocked and screenless. I crouched and examined the dimensions of the window. I figured I could wiggle my way through the small space with little trouble. Around the corner to the backyard, I found myself on the other side of the deck below a kitchen window; it was up, and I could hear voices coming from inside the house.
“How could I take you to the salon? I told you I had a 2:45 appointment. You don’t get up till 4:30!” Igor was screaming in heavily accented English.
“You could’ve woken me up!” Tatiana slurred when she spoke, but she seemed to be holding her own in the loud conversation.
“Do I look like a fucking alarm clock? I am the one who makes the money, I put food on the table, now I am to wake you up too? Nyet. Do you clean? Nyet. Do you sleep all day and get high? Da! That’s what you do!”
“Maybe it’s because I am bored. You don’t take me out. You don’t talk to me. If you could get it up, at least you could fuck me.”
There were loud stomps building in intensity and force. “What did you just say to me?” Igor demanded to know.
“Igor, I . . . I . . . I am sorry, Igor. I didn’t mean it. Please don’t!”
Sounds of domestic violence trickled down through the window into the backyard.
“I am a man, you treat a
man like a king, you junkie! Clean my house and clean yourself up. You talk that way to me because of the shit you put in your arm. You’re high already. You’re lucky I don’t cut it out of you.”
It was only 5:00. Tatiana had only been up thirty minutes, by Igor’s clock, and she was already in the early stages of being high. It was a regular thing, judging from the similar state she was in at the funeral. Tatiana was sobbing loudly between the slaps and crashes.
“You want to be my wife and you act like this? How can I marry a junkie? You were high at Marko’s funeral, for Christ’s sake. Everyone saw you. They saw me holding you up. How can I marry you?”
“Who said I want to marry you?” Tatiana’s voice was more distant and slurred from the beating and the growing effects of whatever she injected. “At that funeral, I had to get high. I am so sick of listening to the jokes behind my back. They all say them just loud enough for me to hear. All those wives and fucking mistresses laughing at me. They all think you’re a fag, you know. You spend all that time at the strip club, and you fuck no one. Imagine if they found out that you don’t even touch me. Imagine if they found out you can’t even touch me with the help of that Viagra. Maybe you are gay, and I am what they call a beard.”
“Shut up, you filthy junkie. Shut up!”
“Homo. Queer. Cocksuc—”
There was a sudden gurgling and then the sound of Igor screaming. Water sloshed inside, and a mist sprayed through the screen on the kitchen window. Igor was drowning Tatiana in the sink. After half a minute, I heard a gasp and a wet cough.
“You watch your mouth. Just watch what you say. I want you clean when I get home. Clean and with dinner in the oven. You know what that is, right? It’s where I’ll put your head next time you talk to me that way.”
There was more coughing and the sound of the front door slamming. I hurried around the side of the house and saw the yellow car reverse onto the road before rocketing out towards the core.
I ran across the street and got in the Volvo. Within a minute, I was at a light, three cars behind the yellow BMW. I was used to Igor’s erratic driving, and I let him get ahead knowing I would catch up at the next light. No amount of speed would get anyone through all greens downtown — the timing wasn’t there. As I drove, I thought about Igor. Tatiana let slip the fact that he was impotent. That jived with everything Igor had said in the hospital room and everything I had noticed about him. His life was all one big masculine front. The yellow sports car, the aggressive driving, the strip club office he had. Everything was an attempt to convey a message of masculinity. Tatiana said wives and mistresses thought he was gay; that meant Igor’s facade wasn’t fooling anyone. But he wasn’t gay; he wasn’t always like he was, he was mind-fucked from being shot in the shoulder and left to die. Being in a gunfight and losing had hurt something inside him, something he believed he needed to kill me in order to get back.
I had met men like Igor before: pros who lost control of a situation and could no longer cope with the job. Soldiers and cops called it post-traumatic stress disorder. Problem was, our job didn’t have benefits or a retirement plan, and none of us had a shot at a real job and an ordinary life. Most of the people like Igor either went down on the job, or they did it to themselves. They didn’t even need to pull the trigger most times. They just showed the wrong people that they couldn’t be trusted, and it would get done for them. No pro was going to let some cracked egg take them down. If they already knew too much about a job, it just made sense to kill them before they compromised the workers or the paycheque. There were no retirement parties or gold watches, just a loud send-off moving at a few hundred metres per second.
Igor went another way. He got some kind of insight into himself and learned about closure. He figured killing me would reboot him. Missing a second chance at murdering me must have pushed him even closer to the edge.
Igor’s mental state aside, it was clear that he was an earner. The bags coming into the strip club were numerous. Enough for Sergei Vidal to keep a squirrely maniac on the payroll. Money trumps crazy every time.
For a few seconds I was a car length behind Igor and saw a phone to his ear. He was still on it when he parked behind the Steel City Lounge. I waited on the side of the road, watching through the chain link fence for him to get off the phone. Seventeen minutes later, Igor hung up and walked to the club. I reversed up the street and found a spot on a side road near where I had parked the day before. I caught up to Igor and joined the ranks of a rowdy softball team, ten feet behind him, who had decided to celebrate a win with beers and g-strings. Igor glanced our way, but he never made me. I was invisible within arm’s reach.
I spent seven hours inside the Steel City Lounge. More bags came in, and even more flesh jiggled by. Igor never looked my way, and no one bothered me in my spot. Igor left late and alone again, and his crew left a bit after him carrying nothing.
I didn’t follow anyone home. Instead, I drove out towards the Flamboro Downs Racetrack. A few years back, an unlicensed veterinarian patched my arm up after I got tagged by a bullet. She was a down-on-her-luck drunk, and she would do almost anything for money.
The drive took just under an hour. I pulled into her driveway at 3:30 a.m. and pounded on the front door. The knocking woke up several neighbourhood farm dogs, and I heard horses from the barn neigh and snort. I pounded again, thinking I had to rouse Maggie from a drunken sleep. What happened next I wasn’t prepared for. A man opened the door.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“I need to see Maggie,” I said. I said it with confidence, like I had an appointment. Most people will overlook almost anything if it seems official, even being woken out of bed at three in the morning. This guy wasn’t one of those people.
“That’s not what I asked you. I asked who you were.”
“I have business with Maggie.” I stopped trying to sound confident and turned my shoulders. My right hand hung near the .45 holster. There was a chance that Maggie could be patching someone else’s bullet wounds. I looked the man up and down and checked the blackness behind him for any movement. The man was shirtless, soft, and wearing only Toronto Maple Leaf boxer shorts. Both of his hands were empty and visible, and he had an erection. I had woken the guy up, and he was no pro. Anyone getting a bullet patched by Maggie would make her open the door while they stood inside with a gun on her. They would get her to send me away. They wouldn’t open the door with only their boner pointing at me.
“Charlie?” a woman’s voice said from inside, breaking the tension.
“You get back to the bedroom. I’m dealing with this.”
“But, Charlie, who is it?”
“You do what I tell you. I have this.”
“I need to see Maggie,” I said.
“Me?” I heard her say.
“Damn it! I’m calling the police.”
Maggie appeared over the man’s shoulder, and I could see things were different. As her eyes widened and remembered me, I saw the lack of broken blood vessels in her face, her healthy hair, and her thinner body. She had cleaned herself up. I ground my teeth realizing she wasn’t what I needed her to be anymore.
“Charlie, this is just an old client. He probably needs something for his horse. You put that phone down and go back to bed. I’ll be back inside in a sec.”
“Banging on the door at this hour, he’s lucky I didn’t shoot him.”
“I know, baby. Go back to bed.” She walked outside in her bathrobe and closed the door. “What do you want?” Her tone was cold and flat.
“You look good. Being clean agrees with you,” I said.
“What do you want? I don’t do what you need anymore.”
“Doesn’t change a thing,” I said.
“It changes everything.”
“No, it doesn’t. What you did is what you do. That kind of work never goes away. You’ll still do it, just maybe not for money.” I opened my coat, and she saw the .45.
“Oh, my God.”
“
He’s not here. It’s just you, me, and Charlie.”
“Charlie,” she whispered.
“I need one thing, and I’m gone,” I said. “This time I’ll stay gone. I understand you’ve changed, I accept that. But I’m here now, and that is something you have to accept.”
“Charlie doesn’t know what I did. The things I done.”
“Get me what I need and he won’t learn it from me.”
She sighed, and her shoulders sagged. “What do you want?”
“Ketamine and a syringe,” I said.
“You on the stuff? That shit ain’t for fooling around with. It’s dangerous.”
“I need it and I’m gone.”
“I don’t feel right about this. I’m no drug dealer.”
“You were a lot of things. I just need you to be one thing for a few minutes more.”
She looked at the house, then at me. “Come on out to the barn,” she said.
Maggie threw on some shoes from behind the door, led me out to the barn and into a room filled with stainless steel. She opened a cabinet and gave me a vial along with a syringe in a sterilized paper packet.
“Here, now I’m a drug dealer.” She started to cry.
“If I were to inject an animal, where would be the best place to bury the needle?”
“What? An animal?”
“A two-hundred-pound animal that needs to be out cold fast.”
I couldn’t fool her. “Oh, no. You can’t. It’s too dangerous. You could kill a person.”
“Without this, that will be the only option.”
She thought about it. “A quarter of the bottle will put a man down if you get him in the neck.”
“How fast?”
“Twenty seconds. He’ll be limp, and he’ll hallucinate terribly while he’s under. Too much and you’ll put him in a coma . . . or worse.”
I put the vial and syringe in my pocket. “You look good. I hope it’s permanent,” I said. “I promise I won’t be back.”
I left to the sound of Maggie sobbing. I was back at the motel by 4:30 and back at Igor’s by 9 a.m.
