In Plain Sight

by Mike Knowles

Igor was going to take money from a well-sourced, dangerous group of people, and he had to do it without help too. His own crew would be as dangerous to him as the Fat Cobra Society, but worse than that, if someone figured out that Igor worked for Sergei, pride would dictate a gang war. Then it wouldn’t matter if Igor got the money back. Sergei would kill him ten times over for stirring up the Asian hornet nest.

  I waited around the corner for just the right kind of truck. There weren’t many big stores downtown that operated outside Jackson Square Mall. Most of the shops were mom-and-pop run, and they got stock in via the family minivan every week or so. I had to wait the better part of an hour for a U-Haul, the largest the company supplied, to lumber down the street. Traffic was slower than usual because of the people driving back home to their apartments in the core or driving through to their nicer homes on the fringes of the city. I let the U-Haul pass me and jogged into the temporary cover it provided as it rolled down the street. The angle of my body behind the U-Haul made seeing me impossible for the three men in front of the Secret Garden. The truck hit each pothole with a thunderous explosion of metal on worn out shocks. People ignored the sound and looked at something other than the orange and white truck with the large squid painted on the side that showed off the majesty of the aquatic life of Newfoundland. All of the U-Haul trucks had been painted recently. They each had images on the sides of the cabs that represented the different wild animals of Canada. The pictures were hideous, and they kept even more eyes off the truck in the same way a large facial mole forces people to look but not look.

  Three storefronts up from the Secret Garden, I hooked, unseen by the guards, into a vacant storefront. The dark doorway was sunk two metres in, and the glass door still advertised a foreclosed decorative bead store called Bead Craft and Beyond. The smaller print underneath told me that the store was once the city’s jewellery and decoration headquarters. The previous owner left notices up in the window about how-to beading classes and custom work that could be done to clothing. The store was like most others in the city — alive for a minute, then gone. The storefront would flicker with life a few more times over the next couple of years, I expected, until it finally became something more palatable to the city. When the vacancy was replaced by a Tim Hortons or a dollar store, it would finally stay occupied longer than a couple of months.

  The doorway went back enough to keep me out of sight while I waited for Igor to show up. On either side of me, display windows went out to the sidewalk. I was able to look through the panes of glass beside me to see the Secret Garden. Miller had told Igor that the money came every day around lunch. It was counted, bagged, and picked up by eight. There would be a lot of cash, according to Miller, because this was the only money-counting front the Fat Cobra Society had in the city. Igor planned to show up just before eight. That way, the money would be together and already set up to move.

  I spent a few hours in the darkness until I saw Igor, duffel bag in hand, walk past the Secret Garden. The leather-clad security out front didn’t look at him more than once as he passed. Igor, on the other hand, stared openly. He even stopped in front of the restaurant to look for the third guard, who was standing out of sight, on his own doorstep, just up the street. When Igor was done his shitty scope, he crossed the street and took a spot on a bench four storefronts away from where I stood. The vacant storefront was perfect camouflage — he never saw me. Igor pulled out his phone and dialled a number. He said a few words before closing the phone and putting it back into his pocket.

  I watched Igor sit for ten minutes until a wave of red light stabbed into my hiding place. An unmarked police car rolled down the street behind a large SUV. The SUV pulled to the curb, and the cop car pulled in behind, right in front of the Secret Garden. A huge man rocked his way out of the driver’s seat of the cop car. Sergeant Miller was doing a traffic stop downtown.

  Igor waited for Miller to get to the window of the SUV before getting up off his bench and crossing the street towards the Secret Garden. The three men out front saw him cross with the bag and enter the restaurant, brushing the arm of the fat cop as he walked over the sidewalk. Each guard stayed where he was, staring at the police lights and the fat cop. I could see through the window of the Secret Garden enough to make out Igor holding a gun. The guard closest to the restaurant saw it too, because he pulled a phone from his pocket and spoke into it using a walkie-talkie function. I watched the other two guards use their phones in a similar fashion. A rapid discussion broke out in Chinese. I knew what was on their minds. To stop the robbery, they would have to pull guns and rush past a cop to get inside. The cop would try to stop them, and that would cause them to break one of the only rules criminals have — never shoot a cop. You break that rule, and the whole weight of the police force will roll over you. Cops hold the line between the shit and everybody else, but if you go and make it personal, you’ll find out they play dirtier than anyone on the street. They’ll fuck you and make sure you get charged for not saying thank you. Everyone knows this, and it froze the Chinese men out front.

  Inside, Igor had pistol whipped the old woman in the clean apron. Miller stood outside, with his back to the restaurant, holding the SUV driver’s ID. He was moving the licence back and forth as though he were trying to focus his eyes without his glasses. Miller’s stall kept the men out front, but they weren’t standing still. One was still on his phone as he slowly approached the other two men and the restaurant entrance. Miller saw the men coming and went so far as to put his back against the glass for support while he wrote the ticket.

  Igor had worked fast. He had an arm around the woman’s neck as he headed towards the back room, gun pointed forward. He was following the plan he and Miller had devised back at his house. Igor would use the woman as a human shield while he took the money. Once he had the money, he would force everyone out the back door. He would lock them outside and then bolt out the front while Miller covered him with his bullshit traffic stop. As I crossed the street, Igor got a shoe inside the back room. When my foot crossed the median, I put three bullets, in one second, into Miller’s unmarked police car.

  The heavy .45 spit the slugs 250 metres per second, and the bang chased after the lead, shrieking a warning to everyone around. The sound of metal repeatedly piercing metal was obscured by the gunshots from across the street. Everyone looked around for the source of the sounds except Miller and Igor. Miller dropped the ticket pad from his hands and took cover behind his car while Igor spun his human shield around to face the street. I put two more bullets into the unmarked car’s tires before letting three more rounds chew holes into the Secret Garden’s windows. Drivers ducked their heads below their dashboards and stomped on the gas. Cars crashed into one another, and traffic ground to a halt all around the restaurant. I used one car — its occupants screaming on the floor — to crouch behind as I reloaded. As I took cover I pulled a fresh magazine from my pocket. The spent clip slipped into my hand, and I slid its replacement home. I pushed the spent magazine into my pocket, racked the slide, and came out from behind the car. The four seconds I wasted reloading gave the leather-clad Chinese men time to cross the street towards me. A bullet starred the windshield of the car I was behind as I stood. Another bullet, from a second shooter close to the first, shattered a window across the street behind me. I went to one knee and took a two-handed grip. Another bullet whizzed over my head and found the hood of a nearby car.

  The man in front of me was trying to pick me off without getting any closer. He was probably used to shooting at new-to-the-life kids or ambitious junkies taking a shot at a refund. He expected me to run away from the bullets and straight into one of his partners. He had no way of knowing that this wasn’t my first rodeo. I came up fast, sighted the man, and pulled the trigger once, then twice. Two heavy slugs punched him off his feet. The first hit centre mass, the second impacted high in the chest near the collar bone. As he fell, a mist of blood and bone fragments stained a white car behind him.

  I tur
ned and moved along the car, looking for the other guard who had taken a shot at me. Through the rear windshield I saw the man with the neck tattoo approaching. He held his gun in two shaky hands as he wove through the petrified gridlock. Terrified heads lifted enough to see the man moving, gun in hand, and then disappeared back below the windows. The guard was staying low and waving his gun with stiff movements in front, behind, and under each car he approached. I watched him advance on a small hybrid and waited for him to check the space in front of the bumper when gunfire got my attention. Thinking it was the third guard, I ducked back behind the car, but the shots weren’t at me — a firefight had broken out in the Secret Garden. Flashes could be seen from behind what was left of the starred and broken glass. Some of the shots came from an automatic, making me think that in the confusion Igor lost control of the situation and the men in back had enough time to get to a weapon. Within seconds of another burst of automatic chatter, Igor came running out of the Secret Garden — without his bag. His grey shirt was bloody, but he still managed a speedy getaway down the street. The guard near the hybrid saw Igor running away in his bloody shirt and turned his stiff-armed stance away from my direction towards Igor’s back. I rose off my knee, aiming just above the tattoo, and put a bullet into the side of his head before he could pull the trigger. The top of the man’s head came off, his scalp parting like leaves of cabbage.

  Igor ignored the shot and kept on running. He turned down the first side street he saw and vanished from sight. I turned back to the store front and saw Miller on his feet, police pistol in hand. His feet were spread wide, and one eye was closed. I dove left as the muzzle flash erupted. Behind the car, I felt my chest for any wet spots, but I found none. I shuffled back and tried the door handle to the car I used for cover. The handle moved, but the door stayed closed. I swung the heavy barrel of the Colt into the window and was showered by pellets of glass.

  “I’ll get out. I’ll get out. Don’t shoot!” the man inside the car shouted.

  I ignored his screams and came off the concrete enough to put my elbow on the glassless window ledge. The small white-haired man inside tried to slip out, but my left hand found his throat, and I held him up. The man gagged and went stiff; his pants became wet as he pissed himself. Over the shoulder of the human shield, and through the windshield, I saw Miller approaching with the same two-handed police combat stance. Miller hadn’t seen me behind the man in the car. I aimed wide and let three bullets go. The gunshots rang inside the car and etched a network of spider webs into the windshield. I let the white-haired man go, and he put his hands over his ears, sobbing wordlessly with pain and fear. When I came up from behind the car, Miller was out of his combat stance. He was hauling his fat ass back to his squad car and his radio.

  I kept my head down and ran down the street. I made the first left and opened the door to the Volvo. I had left the car under the cover of a low-hanging tree. The branches covered the car like probing fingers, making it hard to see from more than three metres away. I reloaded the gun using bullets I had packed in the glove box — and kept my eye on the corner for Miller. I saw something else entirely. The third Chinese lookout, the blond, rounded the corner in his tight leather jacket. In his hand he held a black pistol.

  Only two of the guards had made an appearance in the gunfight. That meant the third man ran either for cover or for a phone. The fact that he was here looking for me meant that he must have gone for the phone. A coward wouldn’t follow someone who had put two of his associates down; he’d stay put and cook up a story. The blond man didn’t let emotion or pride colour his actions. He let his friends get carved up in the street while he protected the front. He did what he was trained to do, and now he was making up for lost time. The blond was a pro who kept his head in a fight. That kind of man would get the make and plate of a car that sped away. I had to get out of the area before Miller’s backup showed up and the whole neighbourhood was locked down. I also had to keep anyone else from putting me on their shit list. That meant the last sentry had to go.

  I reached up, turned off the overhead light, then eased the door open. The blond guard had started down the middle of the street, gun in hand. He checked each car with a cautious lean from a safe distance. He never totally turned his back on anything he hadn’t already checked. This guy was by the numbers and dangerous. I opened the car door wide and stepped behind the tree trunk.

  The blond saw the door ten seconds later and slowly approached. I took the gun by the barrel and got ready to slip out from behind the tree. Too many gunshots had rung out; more from this direction would make it harder to slip away in the commotion and confusion. When the triggerman bent to look under the branches and into the car, I rolled out from behind the tree and closed the distance between us. The blond saw me coming at the last second. His gun was useless pointed inside the car, so he bent his head forward and turtled, trying to take the impact and stay conscious. The butt of the .45 glanced off the back of the Chinese man’s head with enough force to send him to his knees. I pivoted and swung the gun down on his wrist, sending his pistol into the darkness of the Volvo. My elbow drove back towards his face, but a kick met me halfway. The kick connected with my knee and hyper-extended the joint. I staggered back, using the car to stay up before awkwardly lunging back in. The blond was off his feet coming to meet me.

  Part of me expected kung fu. What I got was a boxer’s stance and a haymaker starting somewhere near the blond’s back pocket. I shuffled forward and erased the gap between us, making the haymaker ineffective. My hands took fistfuls of shirt and pulled him towards me. His hands were still set up for the haymaker when my forehead connected with the bridge of his nose. He grunted, and readjusted, sending an uppercut between my hands on his shirt. The punch grazed my chin, and my teeth cracked together. I was dazed, but I stayed in tight. Boxers need a certain distance to remain effective. Eliminate the distance and the referee separates you. When there’s no ref, the boxer is left somewhere unfamiliar. I introduced the blond to the new place by pulling down on his shirt with my left hand. His head came forward into my right fist. My knuckles compressed the soft cartilage of his throat, creating a gag and then no sound at all. The blow interrupted the flow of air and startled the blond. The effect was visible from head to toe. He was no longer fighting me; his body was instead fighting for air. My left hand pulled him in again, but my right hand stayed away. My head collided with his nose again, and it flattened like a balloon deflating. His body bounced off mine, but my left arm reeled him back in. My elbow came across my body and caught the gasping face in the jaw. I didn’t let his body fall, I shoved him into the car and got in behind him.

  I drove out of the neighbourhood in the opposite direction of the commotion. Miller’s call had gotten out fast, and the response was even faster. Ahead of me, I could see flashing lights; seconds later, I heard the sirens of the approaching police cars. I let my right foot sink to the floorboards and felt the Volvo purr in response as though the engine were thanking me for the chance to run head first at the police cars. The odometer hit seventy as I leaned across the seat and pushed the passenger door open. The emergency brake flatlined the odometer and sent the car into a long skid. I turned the wheel and released the brake, pulling out of the controlled 180. The blond’s body hit the pavement and rolled. Each limb flailed out straight like spokes on a tire as the body tore down the street at ten over the speed limit. Eventually, the broken limbs made slow, fluid, limp arcs as the body careened to a stop on the asphalt.

  The lights, now behind me, had a speed bump to deal with, and the cops inside had protocol to follow. Procedure dictated that they had to stop and help the body in the street before they followed in pursuit. The Volvo was already purring again as I made use of the diversion and wound around a corner to a side street. Two turns later, the sound of police sirens was barely audible as I drove away from the crime scene. I slowed the car down and became just another downtown car on its way out of the core.

  CHA
PTER FOURTEEN

  I drove out to Igor’s house but found the driveway empty. I parked the car and moved around the back of the house. All of the lights were off inside. Through the window, by the dim light given off by the digital displays on all of the appliances, I could see the burned and beaten dead body of Tatiana still on the floor.

  Igor had a head start and nothing else to lose. Holding up the Secret Garden had been his fourth-quarter Hail Mary. The plan failed, and now there was no way he could recoup what he had lost. I needed to catch up with him before he went to see his boss. If he got there ahead of me, he would disappear without a trace, and so would my chances of keeping my face out of the news. I didn’t know where Sergei Vidal operated, and I couldn’t ask Morrison. After he heard about Miller getting shot at, his conscience would force him to come after me. Morrison was the type to bend the rules to get the job done, but no cop would let a murder attempt on one of their own go. I had to find Igor on my own.

  I left the house and drove to my only other lead, the Steel City Lounge. I drove by the entrance and saw Igor’s car double-parked out front. The car was empty, and the engine was still ticking. I did a drive around the neighbourhood to make sure Morrison wasn’t still hanging around the club. His car was nowhere to be seen. I figured everyone played dumb when he first came to the club and he struck out. He wouldn’t have wasted more time on a dead-end lead, he’d have decided to go after Igor another way.

  I parked on a side street and waited under a burnt-out streetlight for the right moment to move. At 12:15 a.m., the street was bare. If Igor was watching his back, he’d see me coming. After twenty minutes, my patience was rewarded. A Hummer limousine pulled up out front and belched out a rowdy bachelor party. The groom had a jail-striped shirt on and a foam ball and chain around his ankle. The group chanted “Whores!” as they walked into the club. All of them were too drunk to notice that their party picked up one more member at the door. I broke from the party inside, took a corner table near the bar, and scanned the room for Igor. He wasn’t hard to find.