by Warren Court
Chapter 36
“So, you’re not coming up?” I said. There was a line forming behind me of cops who were on courses up here.
“I just can’t. Sally at work broke her ankle. I’m covering for her. Can’t you come home?”
“You know I can’t. I have to study or I’ll fail this thing.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’d be at work anyway,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s just one weekend,” I said. “Anyone from the squad call?”
“No. Why would they?”
“Just wondering. I feel isolated up here,” I said.
“It’s just another week and then you’ll be home.”
“Yeah, okay. There’s a good strip bar across the river in Hull. I might hit that with some of the guys,” I said, and grinned. No response.
“Look, I have to go. Call me mid-week, okay? Like Tuesday or Wednesday.”
I hung up and stared at the phone until I got an “Ahem.” A Mountie on a drug course was standing behind me, and behind him was an OPP’er I knew from Aylmer.
“She’s not coming up this weekend,” I said.
“Who cares?” the Mountie said.
“Said she has to work late.”
The Mountie pushed passed me and I laughed.
“Who are you calling, Big Chief Wiggie Wam? Your horse miss you?” I said, and went back to my class.
My studying on the weekend was sparse. I couldn’t focus. There was a lot of material to go over and I knew that failing a course like this could damage my career. I’d never go on another one.
Right now, though, my career didn’t mean that much to me. I mean, how could it? I wasn’t a real cop anyway. I was a gangster, a drug dealer. King of the street rips. I failed my first test on Monday, and that kind of snapped me out of it. I was allowed to retake it that evening, so I studied again through lunch and after dinner and aced it later on, but it was a hard slap to the face.
“Wise up,” I told myself.
Gloria and I talked for twenty minutes on Tuesday, but I could tell she was anxious to get off the line. I had that dreadful feeling that there was someone else in her life now. That whole cop “human lie detector” thing was coming back to life in me for the first time in a while. I had been so mired in ripping people off, scoring the next line of coke and getting a fat envelope from Macintyre that it had been switched off. But it was on now. Maybe it was my withdrawal from coke. Since coming up here I hadn’t done a single line. Word had been passed that the Mounties on course with us would like nothing better than to bust a city copper doing blow.
To my surprise, I passed the course and roared out of Ottawa, lights and siren on the entire way. I was dropping the unmarked loaner car off at the station when I ran into Rico.
“Yo, bud,” I said.
“Jack,” he said, and looked at me kind of funny. “How was it?”
“Okay, I guess. Lot of procedural stuff and paperwork. Little field training.”
“I got bumped,” he said.
“What?”
“While you were gone, I got made head of the team.”
“You took Estrada’s position?” It cracked in my head why I had been sent out of town. At least one of the reasons, anyway. They had promoted Rico over me. I had been next in line to lead the team.
“Congratulations,” I said, and we shook hands.
“Not going to affect anything, is it?” he said.
“No. Why would it? You’re good police. I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this, anyway. When do we go on?”
“Tonight.”
“Fine. I’m going to take a shower and come back down. Gotta see the wife.”
“She’s working.”
“How would you know that?”
“I ran into her yesterday,” Rico said without hesitating, and I sized him up. No. She wouldn’t. Not with little Rico. She’d once called him a greasy little worm. She couldn’t be banging him. I didn’t care so much about holding on to my marriage. What made me mad more than anything was the idea that the sacred covenant had been broken: you don’t bang each other’s wives.
I took a cab home instead of calling Gloria to come get me. I wanted to surprise her. She wasn’t at home, as Rico had predicted. I took a shower and grabbed a sandwich and headed back down to work.
We were sitting in a diner on the edge of town. Just six rather well-built guys in street clothes hunkered down over coffee. We said “cop squad” from a mile off.
“There’s a couple of Colombians in town. They’re trying to move a couple of bricks,” Rico said.
“Real live Columbians?” I said.
“Yup. Taylor’s got eyes on them down at the Days Inn on King. Plan is we pick them up and rattle their cages, see how they got into the country, who their contacts are, and then we take the keys and see if we can’t get some traction on them ourselves.”
I nodded my head, only half listening. I tried to picture Rico in bed with Gloria and it sickened me. My pager buzzed; it was her.
“I gotta make a call,” I said.
“I’m briefing you, Jack,” Rico said.
“It’ll just take a second.”
I went to the phone booth and dialled Gloria back. It was her work number.
“Hey,” she said.
“Don’t you mean welcome home?” I said. “My dear,” I added.
“Sorry. Tied up with work. I don’t even know what day it is.”
“When are you off?”
“Um, six, I think,” she said.
“All right. I’m not sure when I’ll be home,” I said.
“Heard that one before,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Means when we finally do run into each other we need to talk.”
I hadn’t had the “We need to talk” line from a girl since I was in my twenties. Even though I’d been expecting this, I felt a bowling ball drop down into my gut at the prospect of losing Gloria. I loved her deeply, and I knew it was mostly my fault our marriage was going down the tubes. My coke use, my long, unpredictable hours. I wasn’t going to take all the blame, but I’d take the lion’s share.
“Fine,” I said. “Whatever it is, I’m sure we can work it out.”
“Okay.”
“Can’t we work it out, partner?” I said. I used to call her partner when we first got married.
“I’m not sure. Talk to you tomorrow.”
Later, in the car with Rico, I said, “Man, what happened while I was gone?”
“What do you mean?” Rico said.
“You get promoted, my wife starts screwing some other guy. You don’t know who it is, do you?”
I saw Rico swallow hard.
“What are you talking about? No, I don’t,” he said.
“It isn’t you, is it?” I laughed.
He laughed too, but nervous and high and short. “No. It ain’t me. I could if I wanted to, you know,” he said, and looked at me and winked.
“Nah, my Gloria doesn’t like you greasy Latin types.”
“Easy. You’re talking to your boss,” he said.
I changed the subject. “What’s the plan with the keys if these guys are who they say they are?”
“The Colombians? Yeah, they’re the real deal.”
“Who says?”
“Garigue.”
“That little rat—he ought to know.”
“He says they Scallas told them to keep on moving, sell it in Toronto or Ottawa, but they got family here.”
“There are Colombians in Hamilton? Really? Relatives of yours?”
“I’m Cuban, man. I hate Colombians more than anything. What did Scarface say—‘Don’t trust them’?”
“So Enzo Scalla feeds us the info through Garigue. He wants the dope.”
“We’re just going to lock them up. Put the keys in storage. Word has come down the team has to lay low for a while, just keep doing regular police work.”
“That from Macintyre?”
“He think we have a rat in the house?” I said.
“He’s not sure.”
The night turned out uneventful; we couldn’t get a lead on the Colombians. We were pretty sure what room they were in, but either they were already out for the night or decided not to come out. The room window was dark the whole night. This was not uncommon. For every good lead we got, ten turned out to be bupkes.
We wrapped it up at 4 am.
“Try again tomorrow,” Rico said to us in the parking lot of an Esso station a block from the hotel. No way we could put in for overtime on this without even establishing the Colombians were actually real, had the coke, and were trying to sell it.
It was late and I headed by the hospital. As I walked in, I saw Gloria from a distance. She was behind the large curved admitting desk, talking to a male doctor while filing something. The doctor left her, touched her arm and disappeared through another set of swing doors. She looked up and saw me and was surprised, and then she smiled.
“Hey,” she said, when she came over.
“You have time for a coffee?”
“Sure,” she said. No kiss or “Hello, honey.” She lifted a wooden barrier and I went behind the desk and followed her deeper into the hospital. There was nothing open this late at night except the staff room with its coffee maker. We drank shitty hospital coffee and placed ourselves as far as we could get from a team of nurses in coral-pink surgery scrubs who were sitting in green vinyl club chairs and chatting and laughing.
When we were seated across from each other, our coffees steaming on the table, we just stared at each other.
“Who is it?” I said finally.
“I’m not going to say.”
I sucked in wind and cocked my head down to the floor.
“So, it is someone on the job? A cop?”
She sipped her coffee.
“Does he know what he’s doing? It could hurt him worse than it would hurt me.”
“I don’t think he cares.”
“Is it serious?”
“He’s asked me to marry him.”
“You are married. To me.”
She grunted and looked over at a wall-mounted TV and then back at me.
“So that’s settled, then. I should expect a package in the mail soon—the divorce papers?” I said.
“My lawyer said by the end of the week.”
“You were going to surprise me with it?”
“I knew you knew. I knew that you would know as soon as you got home.”
“I’ll come by tomorrow and collect my stuff. I’ll get a hotel room tonight. I just thank god we don’t have kids.”
I could hear her foot tapping against the metal pole of the coffee table.
“How are we going to split things up?” I said.
“Split?”
“Yeah.” It dawned on me. “Oh. I get squat? You take everything?”
“Whatever you get will go up your nose.”
I laughed at that. “You know, you’re probably right. I hope this guy is worth it. I really do.”
She stormed out, throwing her full coffee in the waste bin. I looked over at the group of nurses, half of whom were attractive. I shrugged and smiled. At least one of them smiled back.
I spent a week at the Mountain Motor Inn. There was at least one other copper there who had broken up with his wife or girlfriend. We’d wave at each other in the morning but neither of us was in the mood to commiserate. If my mind hadn’t been so muddled with drugs and corruption, I might have seen this coming. But then again, it was probably those exact things, which I was sure Gloria knew something about, that had caused the situation in the first place.
The papers were sent to my work address and when she was at work, I slipped into our house and picked up a bundle of clothes and a couple of paperbacks to tide me over. I locked the door and put the house key in the mailbox. I knew she’d get the locks changed, but I could always pick the new one. I had taken a course on it, courtesy of the HPD, and they had even thrown in a set of lock picks and a nifty lock-picking device that looked like one of those plastic guns that shoot rubber bands. Leaving the key was just a smoke screen. I wanted her thinking I would go along with this without a fight. But honestly, I wasn’t so sure I would fight. Maybe it would be a smart thing for me to move on. Start on wife number two like the rest of the guys in the squad.
The illegal stuff at work cooled down. We still did drug busts, but they were low level and not worthy of us pinching either the stuff or the money.
I was still using coke, but I made a concerted effort to ease off it. Rico was working out pretty good as a manager; I had to give him credit for that. He was up to his neck in bureaucracy, though, and I smiled every time I left the station and saw him hunkered down over his new computer.
Rico, being the good manager, fobbed every crime-related bit of paperwork off on us, but there was a hell of a lot of managerial stuff he had to take care of personally, for which we were thankful.
I tried to find out who Gloria was banging, but gave it up after a couple of days. I was sure I would find out eventually.
I was coming off shift and going into a weekend on my boat when things took a bad turn. I was on board and was checking out the engines; the timing had slipped on one of them and I was resetting it. I was going to take her out for a good run when I saw two people, a man and a woman, approaching me on the dock.
The man I didn’t recognize, but the woman I sure did: Imelda Journey. She was wearing a finely tailored dark blue suit and mirrored shades, and the confident way she came up the bouncing jetty told me what department she was in: Internal Affairs.
Chapter 37
“Morning, Jack.”
“Imelda. So that’s where you went.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“I heard a rumour or two. Boys in the squad thought you might be undercover working on some international pussy-eating syndicate.”
Imelda laughed. “This is Chief Inspector Larson.”
I recognized him now: head of the Internal Affairs investigative unit.
Imelda stepped over the railing and onto Wave Dancer. Larson grabbed awkwardly at the chrome railing for support.
“Let’s do this down below.” I opened the cutty cabin door and ushered them in.
“It’s nice in here,” Imelda said.
“Second home.”
“I heard you lost your first,” Imelda said. “Didn’t like the Mountain Inn?”
They’d been tailing me. Damn cocaine was dulling my senses. I thought it was supposed to make me hyper aware and even paranoid. I wondered why she had tipped her hand about them being set up on me. It was probably a well-rehearsed play, letting me know who was in charge without revealing all that they knew.
“It’s a dump up there. I’m just another cop statistic. Divorced. I guess all that’s left is for me to eat my gun.”
“Don’t do that, Jack.” She looked at me closely. “You’re not thinking of doing that, are you?” Imelda said.
“Not at present.”
“You know I have to report that. It’s grounds to have your badge and gun taken away right now as a precaution,” she said.
“You’re interested in saving my life?”
“You better believe it. That’s why we’re here,” Imelda said.
“It was just a joke.”
I squeezed into the booth surrounding the dining table. Neither of them moved to join me.
“Your days are numbered, Jack. I’m not talking about the big dirt nap, but I am talking about your days of freedom. Which is kind of ironic, seeing as you just got yourself free from Gloria,” Imelda said.
I noticed that Larson bristled at almost everything she said but never took his eyes off me. He looked like he was ready to blade off and put his hands up in a defensive position like they teach rookies.
