Stung

by William Deverell

  From his repertoire of campfire songs, Wilson has chosen “Home on the Range.” What’s next? “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”? He seems in an amiable mood. But maybe he sings because he’s nervous in the dark.

  “‘Where seldom is heard a discouraging word.’” I’m guessing he’s maybe only a hundred feet from the staircase.

  Then, suddenly, a loud, ragged snore, causing Wilson to go wildly off key. Another snore from Ray, then a gagging sound, a snort, maybe from Lucy clapping her hand over his mouth.

  “Who’s there?” Wilson yells.

  “I am the avenger!” Ray calls in a ghostly voice. The rack collapses, helmets and ear protectors crashing to the floor.

  I am at a window now, Doc too, all of us. “Let’s fucking go,” Chase says in a fierce whisper.

  “Wait,” says Doc.

  Ray shows himself, a hostile from deep outer space, a wild explosion of hair, and he’s decked out in hard hat, safety glasses, two sets of ear protectors, red rubber gloves. He grabs a pry bar and starts smashing the levers and faucets at a bank of huge storage tanks. A stinky fluid gushes out.

  Wilson is goggle-eyed with panic, frozen in place as the first wave of Vigor-Gro sweeps over his feet. Turning to flee, he slips, takes a face-forward splat on the mucky floor, gags as a second wave hits, and gets up drooling, spitting, his legs spinning as he takes flight for the front door. Ray drops the crowbar, races after him, screaming: “You are the archfiend, the spirit of evil! I am the avenger, the enchanter!”

  We fly down the stairs. Lucy is standing there in the slop of Vigor-Gro, her mouth hanging open, like a zombie. Chase slings her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. As we scramble out the back door, I glimpse Rockin’ Ray gaining on Wilson as they slip and slide in the wash of poisonous neonics. As they barrel out the main door, Ray yells, “Lower the life rafts, this ship is going fucking down!”

  For what it’s worth, he has created a diversion that lets us scurry unseen to the fence. A last glimpse of the avenger shows him with his head still encased in all that gear, and he’s no longer pursuing Wilson but super-stoner Archie Gooch, who is screaming in terror.

  I get another glimpse as we’re taking turns crawling through the fence hole. Wilson has scrambled into the guardhouse with Fleiger. Ray is still yelling incoherently about the fires of hell as he sprints past Gooch, who staggers, as if caught in Ray’s slipstream, then collapses on the road in a faint.

  Ray disappears into the woods. Neither Fleiger or Wilson seem interested in pursuing, though they race out the gate and down the road, ignoring Gooch, who is sprawled prone on the pavement.

  We all pile into the van but Chase, who streaks across the street into the bush, hoping maybe to use his wilderness tracking skills and bring down the Devil’s Enchanter. I go up front with Doc, who jams the shift into drive and pulls away. He looks like the wrath of God.

  “What’s he hallucinating on?”

  “Acid.” A hundred micrograms. But I don’t tell him that, because he won’t believe it. I don’t believe it. More like six hundred.

  * * *

  The planned exit route is Highway 40 south, staying clear of Sarnia, connecting to the 80 east to Toronto. But we’re still on the local roads. There’s little traffic, no sirens so far. Doc is not one to leave comrades behind, and I know he’s in turmoil over whether to hang or cut and run.

  We’re not far along before Doc hands me his phone so I can read out a text from Chase. It says, “Scott Road near Christopher. Two blinks.”

  Google Maps locates us eight hundred metres away from there. Doc turns off a side road while I navigate. Fastest route, two minutes, says the screen, but we’re heading north again, perilously close to the scene of the crime.

  Semi-rural Scott Road is in deep slumber and we slow to a rolling crawl as we near Christopher Drive. From the bushes to the left, two flashes, and it’s Chase with his phone flashlight. I leap out to help him wrestle Ray into the back, sans helmet, earmuffs, and eye protectors. But babbling. “Save the bees. To bee or not to be a bee. Bee happy. Happy bee.”

  “He was crashing through the bush like a snake-bitten moose,” says Chase. “Let’s be gone.”

  “Be loose, man. Be there or be square.”

  “Be quiet,” Lucy commands, hugging him, tearful, because she loves that goof, and we are rolling down the road.

  Aside from Ray’s continued soft mumbling, we remain silent for a long while, the van reeking of our anxious sweat. Then Lucy says, “Archie Gooch may want to lay off the ganja after this.”

  I can’t help but chime in: “Maybe Ray scared him to death.”

  We’re all laughing now, even Doc. As a further mood lightener, I start singing a tune I can’t get out of my head. Chase joins in, then Lucy and Joe. “Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play . . .”

  Chapter 6: Maguire

  1

  Tuesday, September 11

  Inspector Jake Maguire hefts his bulk from his cruiser, moving slow, weary from a long drive and an interrupted sleep. His breadbasket is roiling. He’s got to do something about his intake, too many sneak attacks into fridge and pantry, too many furtive visits to the food dispensers. He can barely look in a mirror at that paunch, his baldness, his florid face poorly decorated with a woolly, untamed moustache. He used to be called handsome.

  He makes his way to the open doorway of the sprawling Chemican plant. It’s an old building, thick wooden posts, wood doors, wood siding, a fire trap. He watches sourly as a cleanup crew swabs the floor. Gauze masks, rubber boots. “Is that stuff toxic?” he asks.

  “Only to bugs, apparently.” Gaylene is her name, Detective Gaylene something, Sarnia pd. She’s been briefing him, all efficient and over-eager. Tall, with blond hair, an unruly thatch that doesn’t want to stay in place.

  “Smells like cat piss. Can someone get me a coffee?” They dragged Maguire out of bed for this. He arrived at dawn after a bleary-eyed hour’s drive from London, the coffee shops still closed.

  Gaylene doesn’t exactly jump to it. “They have coffee in the lounge. We’ve got Fleiger in there.”

  “Which one is he?”

  “Guardhouse duty.”

  “Where are the other two guys?” Wilson and Gooch. They hired hysterical cowards to guard this joint. First responders had to waste two hours looking for a bomb because of them.

  “They’re both in Sarnia General.”

  “For what?”

  “Shock.”

  “Shock? Fuck.”

  “Gooch keeled over in a faint. He’s still out. They can’t seem to wake him. Wilson’s hooked up to a dripper, some kind of sedative. That nutter came after him with a crowbar, so—”

  “Get him down to the detachment.”

  “Which detachment?”

  “Mine. Lambton County OPP.” He spells it out: “Ontario Provincial Police. Our show.” In case she has any ideas.

  “Yeah, well, meanwhile those are our Ident people.” Half a dozen from Sarnia PD in there, doing prints, taking pictures. “Want them to stop?”

  Already, Maguire doesn’t like her attitude. In the good old days, you’d never see a lady cop. Now they’re everywhere. It’s the influence of all those TV cop shows, where they have to demonstrate gender equality. “They’ll work with a team we got coming in from London.” OPP’s regional HQ. “Where’s this coffee lounge?”

  “We can go in the back door. They’ve got boards to walk on.”

  Gaylene detours him to the wire fence to show where it was cut. Lots of scuffle marks on either side. An officer is on knee pads, poking around for butts and buttons.

  “Any wire cutters found inside?”

  “Yeah, one,” she says, “but identified as company property.”

  “The crowbar?”

  “He abandoned that, it was lying on the f
loor, in the goop.”

  The delivery bay at the back of the plant is open, as is the door, to alleviate the stink. “This how he got in?”

  “Has to be,” Gaylene says. “No forced entry. The plant super swears it was locked. ”

  A keypad. “They must’ve had the code.”

  “They?” she says.

  “The nutter wasn’t alone. Maybe he wasn’t so crazy. Performing. Creating a diversion.”

  Gaylene shrugs, brushes the strands of straw from her eyes. “Maybe a stoner. One of my guys picked up a fresh marijuana butt in the grass over here.”

  “Fresh?”

  “Clean. Smelled fresh.”

  Amazing that she can tell. Must have a nose for pot. He walks stiffly over the two-by-tens laid out as a walkway to the lounge. Vigor-Gro: he remembers something about it from the TV news. A demonstration in Brazil, a protester chaining herself to a truck or something. Mass arrests. A talking head interviewed about bees.

  This shit-show guarantees Maguire all sorts of pain. He’s six weeks from retirement. They’re going to bully him into hanging in long enough to close the file. He and Sonia have their thirtieth coming up. They have plans for Hawaii, her idea, not his, to celebrate three decades of marriage. Maguire has to go along with it but shudders at being trapped in a tube in the sky for umpteen hours for the reward of a sunburn, sand in his crotch, and the horrors of the ukulele.

  Gaylene goes to the coffee maker. “Cream and sugar?”

  “Just enough milk to lighten it. Thanks.” He’s hungry, but there’s only a chocolate bar dispenser in here. Sonia will kill him if she finds another Oh Henry! wrapper in his pocket. She’s a retired nurse and is always on him about his health.

  “Service with a smile, sir,” says Gaylene as she passes him a filled mug. The smile is sardonic. Why would someone name a girl Gaylene? They’d call her Gay. Gay Gaylene, which she probably is, the way she doesn’t groom her hair. Pretty good to look at just the same, despite the smallish boobs. Kind of a waste.

  Irwin Fleiger is a flabby, pallid dude in a kind of uniform with a security tag. A loaded ashtray in front of him, smoke curling from a cigarette which Maguire butts out. He sits across the plastic table from him, turns on the little recorder he carries everywhere, and introduces himself.

  “From the top, Mr. Fleiger.”

  “I already told . . .”

  “From the top, please.”

  “Well, this terrorist . . .”

  “Terrorist?”

  “One of them environmental activists is my bet.”

  “I don’t need you to bet.” Maguire sips his coffee, makes a face. Bottom-shelf Nabob.

  “Okay, he came out the front door chasing Barney Wilson, and just then the fill-in guy came around the corner. Gooch — Archie Gooch. Anyway, when Barney piled right into the guardhouse with me, this freak went after Gooch, right out the gate to the road, and I saw him collapse there, in the middle of the road.”

  “You saw who collapse?”

  “Gooch. The freak just ran past him.”

  “Describe him.”

  “Who? Gooch?”

  “The freak.”

  “He was wearing all this gear from the shop, helmet, goggles. Tall, skinny, long blond hair, that’s about all I can say. Dark clothes. Gloves.”

  They all wore gloves, Maguire assumes. Ident can forget about prints. “You had a camera? Take any pictures?”

  “I got distracted because I had a handful with Barney, he kind of cracked up.”

  “Was this skinny longhair carrying anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like wire cutters.”

  “No, he was waving his arms, shouting.”

  “Shouting what?”

  “He yelled, ‘It’s going up!’”

  “What did you take that to mean?”

  “Explosives. I figured a time bomb. I got the hell out of there, practically had to drag Barney, and we split down the road.”

  Maguire wouldn’t hire these clowns to guard his dog. “You saw the perp run into the bush out there?” He points out the window.

  “Yeah, where that black-and-white just parked.”

  An OPP cruiser. They finally got here, two members heading into the scrub with a sniffer on a leash.

  “See anything else? Any vehicles?”

  “No.” Fleiger’s nicotine-stained hands are getting all fidgety. Maguire quit twenty years ago, Sonia always on him. Now he’s a crusader.

  “What else did you do?”

  “Called 911.”

  “No other Chemican employees around?”

  “Just the three of us. Like I say, Archie Gooch was filling in. The normal guy got a tooth pulled yesterday.”

  “Any idea how our long-haired friend got in here?”

  “That’s the mystery of the century.”

  A uniformed constable leads in a civilian in a lab coat. They confer with Gaylene.

  “What?” Maguire says.

  “They got into the laboratory upstairs,” Gaylene says. “Whole bunch of files are missing.”

  “Means of entry?”

  “Unknown. Access is by a keypad code.”

  Inside job, Maguire decides. “Who’s the director of security for this hillbilly fire drill?”

  “That’ll be Mr. Griffin,” Fleiger says. “Howell Griffin.”

  To Gaylene: “Bring him in.”

  2

  It’s just after ten a.m. as Jake Maguire rolls into the Lambton County OPP office, which sits forlornly out in the farmland north of Sarnia, your basic one-storey detachment you could mistake for a turnip farmer’s ranch house except for the black-and-white sitting outside.

  The day shift has been taken off traffic duty to help out at the Chemican plant, leaving only a constable shuffling paper back of the counter while keeping an eye on Barney Wilson in the waiting area. Still in his grey Chemican uniform, looking rattled, jumpy.

  “He’s all yours, Inspector,” says the constable. “There’s coffee and tea in the back.”

  “I’m good.” Maguire had stopped on the way to grab bacon and eggs and a proper coffee and was feeling more human, less stressed. His heart was last clocked at one-forty-five over ninety-five, and he has ordered himself to gear down.

  Gaylene, whose last name is Roberts, Detective Sergeant Roberts, is supposed to join him here but is, thankfully, late. Can’t be much over thirty, how does she get the three stripes? Maybe it’s regarded as politically correct to promote the token lesbian.

  Wilson’s rumpled uniform is stained yellow, maybe from slipping in the Vigor-Gro, maybe from pissing himself. He’s staring into space, and for no accountable reason has taken off his boots. “Morning, Barney. I guess it’s been a long night. I’m Inspector Maguire, I’ll be serving you today.” Not a crack of a smile. “How’re you feeling?”

  “I got a headache. I get dizzy when I walk. My feet are swollen. I think I got some kind of allergy.”

  Those feet had run through the slop. Maguire wonders if the Vigor-Gro was a factor. “Grow Fast with Vigor-Gro” said a sign in the Chemican lab.

  Wilson limps on sock feet as he follows along to the CO’s office, but somehow misjudges the doorway, and ricochets from the frame, stumbling sideways. Maguire grabs him by the arm, carefully deposits him on a padded chair.

  He tries to get him at ease with chit-chat about his security background and his job. But that doesn’t work — the Boy Scout leader is robotic, needs a brain enema to help him excrete an account of the night’s events. About all he remembers is hearing a crash and the intruder coming at him out of nowhere with a bar. Yelling he was the avenger and Wilson was the archfiend from hell.

  Finally, Gaylene wanders in. “Sorry I’m late. Had to get my kids to school, my husband is on a job out of town.”

&
nbsp; Husband. Kids. Maguire does a quick reassessment. Okay, occasionally he’s wrong. “This is Barney Wilson. Barney has memory issues. Sometimes that’s because people aren’t trying hard enough. Or they’re holding back.” He leans into him. “How did you let them in, Barney? Through the back door?”

  It takes a while for him to pick up the implication. “No way, man!”

  Gaylene shakes her head. Maguire has to agree — this hoser is too dumb to pull off something like that.

  “There’s a Howie Griffin out there waiting to see you,” Gaylene says.

  “Let him sit.” He works at Wilson a bit more. Gets out that he finds the plant creepy, doesn’t like being the inside guy. Sings campfire songs as he does his circuit. “Home on the Range” that night. When pressed he kind of remembers hearing someone snore, which Maguire finds off-the-wall implausible. Can’t remember how his uniform got stained in front, vaguely remembers taking a nosedive into the flow of Vigor-Gro, can’t remotely identify the perp, except he concurs with the long blond hair.

  He recalls seeking refuge in the guardhouse, and the freak chasing Gooch and shouting something about a bomb, the exact words he doesn’t remember, and then not much more, just running.

  “Can I smoke in here?” Fiddling with a pack of Winstons.

  “Outside. Don’t forget your boots and don’t wander too far. We’ll arrange a ride.” Maguire sends the stiff away, and again he bumps into the door frame. The constable has to help him to the front door.

  “Jesus fuck, Chemican hired Curly, Moe, and Larry.”

  “Who?” says Gaylene.

  “Never mind. How did this Griffin guy get here?”

  “Flew in from Toronto, picked up a renta.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Kind of a dork.”

  * * *

  “So what’s your take, Howie?” That’s what he wants to be called. Big, hale, glad-handing guy halfway through his forties. Appropriately pissed off at what happened, but maybe masking nervousness behind the bravado, the way he keeps shifting and sniffing.

  “Can’t be an inside job,” Howie says. “The pass codes are only given out to six plant staff, all highly vetted. We change the codes every Friday. Front entry, back door, and lab.”