Shutterbug

by Laurence Gough

  The ambulance’s siren wailed uncertainly. The vehicle must have been extremely well insulated, because Wayne couldn’t hear a thing. The ambulance moved forward a few feet, began to pick up speed, and then jerked to a stop.

  The paramedic attending him had a short, heated discussion with the driver, who was engaged in a heated argument with someone on the street. Both men got out of the ambulance to continue the argument with their unseen adversary.

  Wayne had always believed paramedics were supposed to be the kind of guys who never got worked up about anything. He was surprised at how loudly they were yelling at each other. It was easy to listen in on the argument. Apparently there’d been a spectacular car crash only a few blocks away. The driver was alive and conscious, but his vehicle had been crushed, and he was trapped inside.

  Wayne thought he heard the phrase, ‘Jaws of Life.’

  His leg was numb. The ambulance guys had left his towel in place, but applied their own tourniquet. It felt way too tight. Bending his gunshot leg towards him as much as he could, he wriggled and squirmed against the restraining straps.

  He got his fingers on the paramedic’s tourniquet. Velcro. He gave it a yank.

  There now, wasn’t that better? Wayne wondered who had been speaking to him, and then realized he’d been speaking to himself. He smiled, and shut his eyes, and daydreamed of a narrow, endlessly twisty tree-lined road, and the rolling thunder of his beloved Harley’s exhausts.

  Cresting a hill, Wayne saw earthmoving equipment, a wide channel that had been cut through the asphalt. Why hadn’t the work site been signed? Where was the damn flag girl, in her skintight jeans? He got the Harley straightened out and brought his foot down hard on the rear brake pedal. His right hand squeezed the handlebar-mounted front brake lever. The Harley’s tires laid down a string-straight strip of burnt rubber four inches wide and thirty yards long.

  He saw he wasn’t going to stop in time. He leaned on the brake pedal and the rear wheel locked up. The bike’s rear end tried to shake hands with the front wheel. Wayne had dumped a bike just after he’d started riding, and still remembered the pain.

  The Harley was on its side, shrieking, high-speed metal skidding across pebbly asphalt.

  The flag girl was sitting in the shade, drinking a Coke. She waved as he went by.

  The trench was a lot deeper than he expected. Bottomless, by the look of it. How could a harmless daydream go so terribly wrong? Was the Harley covered by his extended warranty? Dimly, as he rode the bike deeper and deeper into the endlessly black chasm, Wayne wondered if he had died, and gone straight to hell.

  Chapter 35

  April’s ribs were cracked, not broken. Even so, the emergency-room intern, an overly hirsute man named Robert Schwartz, insisted on keeping her under close observation for at least twenty-four hours.

  A sturdy uniformed cop sat in the gleaming corridor, just outside her door, drinking coffee and fending off nurses.

  April declined Parker’s offer of a court-appointed lawyer.

  ‘I don’t need a fucking lawyer. Look at me! I need a cigarette. So tell me, how’s Wayne?’

  Willows said, ‘Would you like to make a statement, April?’

  ‘Wayne’s dead, isn’t he?’ April concentrated on Parker. ‘He’s my husband, believe it or not. We were married in Greece, of all places. Don’t ask me the name of the town, because I can’t pronounce it. Nobody can, not even the people who live there. Anyway, I’ve got a right to know how Wayne’s doing, don’t I?’

  Parker said, ‘First we’re going to talk about you, and then we’re going to talk about Wayne.’

  April thought it over, shrugged. The thin hospital gown slipped off her shoulder but she didn’t seem to notice.

  She said, ‘But Lewis is okay, right?’

  ‘Lewis is doing just fine,’ said Parker.

  April chewed on her lip. She was pretty sure she could feel the diamond earrings speedily working their way through her intestinal tract. She’d been eating a lot of pills, for the pain. They must have slipped her something, some kind of drug, a laxative. She said, ‘Wayne murdered them all.’

  ‘Who, exactly?’ said Willows.

  ‘The drug dealers. He had their pictures in his pocket, didn’t he? You bet he did. He carried them with him everywhere he went. Like trophies. He was so fucking proud of himself.’

  ‘How’d he kill them?’

  ‘He overdosed them, what d’you think?’

  Parker said, ‘Can you remember any of their names?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Melvin Ladner, Russ Green, Ralphie Lightman, a guy named Warren…’

  April named eight victims. Willows and Parker were unfamiliar with one of the names - a man named Norwood Adams.

  Willows said, ‘This guy, Norwood. D’you happen to know where he lives?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Despite the drugs, April felt a little twinge of pain. She let it show. ‘But he’s in the book. Off Victoria, below Sixteenth Avenue? Somewhere in there. Ask Wayne, he’ll give you the address.’

  ‘Good idea, thanks.’ Willows smiled. ‘So the idea was, Wayne would keep bumping off people in Jake Cappalletti’s organization until Jake came after him, and then he’d take Jake out. Is that what was supposed to happen, April?’

  ‘Far as I know. Or maybe he was hoping Jake would offer him a partnership. Wayne wasn’t the kind of guy who liked to share his innermost thoughts.’

  ‘But you and Wayne were partners. Weren’t you?’

  ‘No way. I did what I was told, that’s all. Wayne would’ve killed me, if I’d messed with him.’

  Parker smiled. ‘You were an unwilling accomplice.’

  ‘Yeah. No, wait. I was unwilling, but I wasn’t an accomplice. More like his slave.’

  Willows had been standing by the foot of April’s bed. He went over to the window and looked out. April’s room was on the sixth floor. He tried the window to see if it would open. It did, but not enough to let April slip through. Not that he considered her a potential suicide. April was an optimist, for now. By the time she got out of prison she’d be something else entirely: a pensioner.

  Willows said, ‘Did Wayne tell you to kill Rodney McGuire, April?’

  ‘What kind of question is that?’

  ‘McGuire died of a drug overdose. The heroin was uncut, April. It was a heavy enough load to kill one of your neighbour’s horses.’

  April was shocked. ‘How did you find out my neighbour owns horses?’

  She was so transparent, that Willows almost felt sorry for her. He said, ‘Your fingerprints were all over the syringe that killed McGuire, April. Your prints were all over the camera, and the photographs. The way the evidence stacks up, your choices are extremely limited. Did you kill McGuire because Wayne told you to, or because you wanted to?’

  ‘Maybe I should talk to a lawyer.’

  ‘Good idea, April.’

  ‘But you should know that Wayne made me do everything. I used to be a stripper. A lap-dancer. I made good money, I had a boyfriend, I was happy. Then Wayne came along, and screwed everything up.’

  Willows nodded sympathetically.

  April said, ‘Wayne’s huge. I weigh a hundred and eleven pounds; Wayne weighs three hundred and twelve.’

  ‘Why didn’t you leave him?’

  ‘He watched me all the time. Ask him. Or, better yet, ask Lewis. He’ll tell you what it was like, living with Wayne.’

  Willows nodded. He didn’t know why he was in such an agreeable mood, but he wasn’t going to worry about it. Lewis was in another wing of the hospital. He was being weaned off heroin, and it was going to be a slow and ugly process. So far, Lewis had proved an unreliable witness. Willows doubted they’d have even identified him, had an alert cop not recognized his description from a recently filed missing-persons report. The report had been filed by an attractive young woman named Elizabeth Bell, who claimed to be Lewis’s fiancée. Her story was that Lewis had disappeared while they were shopping in the Eaton’s Mal
l. They’d been browsing in the Gap clothing store, and she’d decided to try on a skirt. Lewis had said he was thirsty, was going to get himself an Orange Julius and would be back in a few minutes.

  Miss Bell had denied any knowledge of Lewis’s recent activities. Showed photos of Wayne and April, she failed to recognize either of them. She insisted Lewis had not dabbled in illegal drugs of any kind, and certainly had not been a heroin addict.

  The physical evidence backed her up. The medical opinion was that Lewis had been shooting up intensively, but for less than a week. He had no old scars, no indications whatsoever that he was anything but a short-term addict.

  The majority of his mostly healed puncture wounds were in his right arm. Lewis was right-handed. He’d insisted that, to the best of his recollection, April had shot him up. Despite his misgivings, Willows tended to believe Lewis’s story. The kid was an unreliable witness, but he was faultlessly cooperative. Unfortunately his most vivid memories were a lot of nonsense - lush green fields and vast, sandy deserts, tables piled high with dead frogs.

  Lewis had stopped hallucinating, but all his memories were of his hallucinations.

  At least, they seemed to be hallucinations. One of Lewis’s memories had involved a couple of ‘spotted dogs.’ Dalmatians. He’d rambled on about steel pens, and endless barking, disembodied tails that wagged much too slowly, as they drifted through the air…

  There’d been two dalmatians in the house, guarding a garage full of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and boxes of spare parts, aftermarket bolt-ons.

  They’d tried the pound and then the SPCA. A volunteer named Cynthia remembered Lewis. She’d thought he was a deaf mute. It took her a few minutes to find April on the computer. She’d paid cash for the dogs. Cynthia was absolutely certain that April and Lewis were alone during the hour or so they’d spent at the SPCA. They’d taken the dogs for a short walk, to make sure they were companionable, and that they all got along with one another. Cynthia accompanied them, to make sure everything was all right. Sometimes people tried to steal the dogs. She was sure she’d have noticed a bearded three-hundred-and-twelve-pound man, if there’d been one lurking in the weeds.

  If Wayne kept April on such a tight leash, where was he when she and Lewis visited the SPCA?

  It was just one of many awkward questions that April would be asked in court, before they gave her life in a maximum-security federal institution.

  Willows said, ‘April?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I really don’t think I should talk to you any more.’

  ‘Okay, fine. I just wondered, how old are you?’

  April considered the question carefully, before deciding there was no harm in answering.

  ‘I’m twenty-two.’

  A life sentence added up to twenty-five years, maximum. She’d be eligible for parole in fifteen years. Willows wondered if he’d be retired by then. Not if he and Parker had children. Christ. Maybe he should switch to the commercial crime squad, put in a few years, and then try to get a lucrative job in the private sector. An ex-homicide cop he knew, Ralph Kearns, had started his own business and was doing pretty well, driving a Jag…

  Willows wanted to drop in on Lewis, just for a minute. Parker was too tired to argue. They found him sleeping peacefully. Parker lingered in the doorway, but Willows went over to the bed, and stared down at him as if he was searching for something, the definitive answer to an unasked question.

  For the next week or so, Lewis would be subject to withdrawal symptoms that included fever, aches, tremors, chills, sweating, and chain-sneezing.

  He’d suffer from bottomless apathy, self-loathing. He would struggle against a huge psychological craving for heroin. Lewis’s circumstances were highly unusual, but the average cold-turkey addict experienced an overpowering desire for the drug that filled his every waking minute for as long as six months.

  But Willows had high hopes for Lewis, because he was a special case. Elizabeth had insisted he was not an addictive personality. Willows hoped she was right. The fact that his girlfriend was sticking with him was a big plus for Lewis. What happened to Lewis, in terms of crime and punishment, was, theoretically, still very much up in the air. But Willows and Parker both saw him as pure victim. From their perspective, April and Wayne had worked hard to set Lewis up as a fall guy.

  Willows doubted he’d be charged, much less do any jail time.

  Parker lingered in the hospital doorway. Lewis was already on methadone. He looked so tranquil, though his dreams might rage. He’d had no visitors. She wondered if he had any family, if anyone loved him or even cared about him, aside from Elizabeth Bell.

  Parker was exhausted. Too little sleep, too much work. She wanted to go home, to fall into bed and sleep for a week. How much longer did Willows intend to stay?

  *

  Willows was thinking about his son, Sean, who had been wounded in an armed robbery about a year earlier, and was still recovering from his wounds. He guessed Lewis was not much older than Sean. The two men would never meet each other, but they had a great deal in common. They were both victims, plucked at random, subjected to violent forces beyond their control.

  They were unlucky, because they had been brutalized. They were lucky, because they had survived. He knew nothing about Lewis. What sort of person was he? How had he travelled from the Orange Julius into April’s clutches? Would Lewis’s brush with death turn him into a better human being, or would he fail to shake his addiction? Willows stared down at Lewis’s sleeping face.

  He hoped Lewis got lucky, and made something of himself.

  Willows turned and moved towards Parker. His face was drawn.

  She slipped her arm through his. Together, they walked slowly down the corridor towards the bank of elevators.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she and Willows and Sean and Annie had shared a meal. She and Jack had neglected the children at a time in their lives when it was the last thing they needed. How was Annie getting along with her new boyfriend, the one Sean so thoroughly disapproved of? How was Sean coming along? Lately, because he didn’t feel he was making any progress, he’d been skipping his physiotherapy appointments. The house was going to be a mess. Or Annie would be in a foul mood, because she’d been doing all the cleaning…

  They still hadn’t signed the mortgage papers.

  There were a stack of overdue bills to be paid.

  The garden was overgrown.

  A mile-high pile of clothing, hers and Jack’s, needed to take a trip to the dry cleaner’s.

  They stepped outside. A bitter, stinging rain slanted down from behind the hospital’s roofline. She felt the cold and damp seeping into her bones.

  Willows put his arm around her, sheltering her. ‘Want me to drive?’

  Parker nodded, too tired to speak.

  Epilogue

  A thousand willing hands yanked Jake Cappalletti downtown for questioning. It had been an intensive but short visit. Jake declined to be interviewed. Palsied but stolid, he sat on his tongue until he was sprung by his team of burly, overdressed lawyers, who heatedly explained that they could not allow Jake to be interviewed due to his considerable age and rapidly deteriorating state of health.

  ‘Anyways,’ barked Jake, ‘I don’ know nothin’!’

  In truth, Jake was too busy consolidating his hold on his fractured drug empire to waste time chatting with the cops. He had vacancies to fill, job interviews to conduct. Some guys deserved promotions. Others deserved considerably less.

  Harvey, for example.

  A pal of Harveys who spent a lot of time wandering the halls of 312 Main had informed Jake that Harvey had been perusing a magazine when Jake Willows and Claire Parker jumped him.

  ‘Perusin’!’ screamed Jake, ‘What da hell kinda woid is dat?’

  The pal said that Harvey had turned the Humvee’s radio up so loud that he wasn’t even aware that McGuire’s condo had been the scene of sustained automatic-weapons fire.

  Jake had hung up, done
some serious thinking.

  That night, he asked Marty to take him for a ride in the Rolls. They’d cruised slowly past the scene of the crime. The exterior walls of Rodney McGuire’s condo had been perforated by dozens of bullets. The well-tended grounds were littered with wood chips and fragments of dirty pink plaster. Jake marvelled at the damage. It was not much short of a miracle that no one outside the condo had been shot.

  Harvey’s bail had yet to be determined, despite constant pressure from Jake’s battery of hard-charging lawyers. Jake had a hunch the cops smelled a weak link, and were mercilessly grilling Harvey in the hope that he’d collapse, and implicate Jake in the bloody Fairview Slopes shootings.

  No matter how high Harvey’s bail, Jake meant to cough up every last penny. He was perplexed. How could Harvey have been so unaware of what was going on inside McGuire’s condo?

  As soon as the poor sap was released, Jake meant to find out.

  If you enjoyed Shutterbug, please share your thoughts by leaving a review on Amazon.

  For more free and discounted eBooks every week, sign up to our newsletter.

  Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.