Evil Eye

by Michael Slade

  Tarr thought the shots came from the chair.

  He fired the SIG at the silhouette until it dropped from sight.

  In the Op Command van parked in the church lot, Zinc, the OC, and the others were glued to the telecom, visualizing the takedown from broadcast bursts and demands.

  "He's in behind! He's got a gun! Gimme cover! I'm going in!"

  "Oscar Charlie. Alpha Team. Alpha is secure. Three cold badgers. Two warm badgers. Belly down. Proned out. Cuffed up."

  "Copy, Alpha. Clear the air."

  "Jesus Christ!"

  "Bravo Team. This is Op Command."

  "EHS! EHS! We need 'em now!"

  "Copy."

  "EHS!"

  "EHS being called."

  "EHS Emerg! We got one down!" "A Member down?" "Negative! Members are okay!" "EHS ambulance coming Code three." "Oscar Charlie, we got a b-i-g problem here!" The OC took the mike. "What kind of problem?" As he listened, jaw muscles jumped and temple veins popped out. Then he said, *This is Swann. Im taking over this scene. Clear the air. No more transmissions. Secure the perimeter. I want Ident here now. I want Serious Crimes here now. I want Internal here now. I want VPD and HQ Media Relations here now. I want the Incident Commander here now. NOW! Is that clear?"

  POWDER KEG

  West Vancouver

  Ode To Teaboy Oh, to make a pot of tea. Some for you, and some for me. The kettle boils while teapot heats. Then add the bags, it's time to steep.

  Oh. then to pour the steaming tea. Into the Equaled, milky sea. Some for you. and some for me. Hand-prepared by boy of tea.

  Yes, there certainly had been changes around his home. DeClercq had worked all night on Jack MacDougall's killing, and now returned home with the first light of dawn to wake Katt up for school and grab a few winks' sleep before tackling the case again. His eyes caught the poem magnetically pinned to the fridge with a Happy Face the moment he stepped in the door. Weary though

  he was, a smile creased his jaw, while his mind recalled the close of the Ripper ordeal. . . .

  Snow billowed up as the helicopter entered ground effect. The Cowboy lowered the collective pitch lever to set them down. Indicating the overgrown tangle to the right, Craven shouted, "Someone's in the maze." The whup-whup-whup of the airfoils died to a whistle.

  Remington pump in hand, Heckler submachine gun slung over his shoulder, the Mad Dog opened the port doors and jumped down. Guns drawn, the others followed him, facing the maze the searchlight lit as bright as high noon.

  Two trees flanked the entrance to the labyrinth. About fourteen, with fear in her eyes, a girl wrapped in a rug stumbled toward them. DeClercq shuddered with deja vu. He was living the dream that had plagued him for years.

  In the Shakespeare Garden of Stanley Park stand two trees: "Comedy" lush as you like it, and "Tragedy" as stunted as Richard III. Between their trunks, arms outstretched, Janie runs toward him, her frightened voice crying "Daddy!" plaintively. No matter how hard she runs, she draws no closer to him.

  Then before he knew it, the girl was in his arms, teeth chattering like tap dancers from the cold, hypothermia seeking his warmth.

  She wasn't his daughter.

  But she might be.

  When sorrow is asleep, wake it not.

  "You're bleeding."

  "He cut me."

  "Who?" DeClercq asked.

  She gave him the name of the killer on Deadman's Island.

  "Your name?"

  "Katt Darke."

  "Where's your mother?"

  "Dead."

  "And your father?"

  "Don't have one. Now I don't have anyone in the world."

  Since that day a year ago Katt had lived with him, and for the first time in over twenty years Jane's ghost was at rest. His daughter and his first wife had been

  killed by terrorists in the Quebec October Crisis of 1970. Genevieve—his second wife—was shot ten years ago during the Headhunter case. Since then he and Napoleon had lived in a tomb . . . this tomb opened up to air and life by Katt. Katt, the poet laureate of his royal house, scribbling screeds to commemorate major home-front events, like how he brewed a pot of tea or "Dog's" return from the vet. Katt, who saved him from becoming a morose SOB.

  The "Teaboy Ode" was pinned beside "My Lo-mies & Me/'

  The first thing DeGercq did to bond with Katt was take her to Egypt. Nothing like travel in foreign lands to link inquisitive minds. Their second day at Mena House beside the Pyramids, he awoke to find Katt gone from their room. Climbing the Stairway to Heaven, the note on her bed read.

  Around noon, Katt returned dripping with sweat. "Sorry/' she said, "but I was afraid you'd nix my idea. Wait till you see the pix I took from the top of the Great Pyramid."

  "You can't climb Cheops." DeClercq said.

  "Not can't, Teaboy. Mayn't is the curse."

  At each of the four corners of the Great Pyramid stood a guard with an automatic weapon. Katt recruited a Mata Hari for her plan: "This chick with boobs out to here," her outstretched arms explained. ("Chicks sharking muffins with dudical buns," Robert had learned was where women's lib led its latest generation. Ah, freedom! he thought.) Mata Hari approached Soldier Boy for a light, neckline gaping to her navel for cool air. and while Mr. Magoo's eyes bugged from their sockets, Katt darted behind him and scampered for the peak. Two hundred and one chest-high blocks later, she crowned herself Queen of the Nile.

  "What say you lend me some money. Teaboy, and we celebrate, my treat?"

  Celebration was a night along belly dancer strip. Katt among Arabs amused by how quickly she learned from mimicking them, shirt rolled up and jeans pushed down to bare her bowl-of-Jell-O tummy, Robert so flabbergasted he didn't know whether tc laugh or cry . . . decid-

  ing next day cry was the answer when King Tut's Revenge hit his bowels.

  "Great food, huh?" Katt yelled through the bathroom door.

  "Hurry up," DeClercq said. "My round thirty-three. I may die before the chemist gets here with drugs. Remind me next time—if there's a next time—Lomotil, not Imodium."

  The following day at breakfast, the poet gave a reading:

  My Lomies & Me Up the Nile, wearing a smile, we go My Lomies & me— From Cairo's markets dark and dank To Aswan's granite rocky banks Oh, Allah, we give thanks to you My Lomies & me—

  The chemists of this distant land Place this bowel-binder in my hand So we shan't defile these sands— Now shout one and all For three loud cheers I call God . . . Bless . . . Lomotil!

  True, it wasn't Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or "To a Nightingale," but in this day when schools turned out kids who couldn't read, let alone with any grasp of whom Keats was, DeClercq was content with Katt's poetic missives.

  Napoleon entered the kitchen as Robert reread both poems. When he crouched to nuzzle the shepherd's brindled face, he spied the honor guard of sneakers by the door. What was it with women and shoes? Were they foot fetishists, one and all? Walk down any street with either of his wives and he was yanked to every window with footwear on display. Was it genetic, or Pavlovian drooling from the torture of wearing spikes? Whatever the cause, Katt was afflicted, too. Witness her Docs, Shell Toes, Gazelles, etc. If women weren't commenting on someone else's shoes, they were adding to their own

  podagral collections, or complaining about the shoes currently pinching their feet. Call him sexist, but it was true.

  With Katt, it was shoes and hats.

  The Mad Hatter's room was down the hall on the left. Originally a guest room when Genny was alive, Robert had lined it floor to ceiling with bookshelves after she died, only to reconvert the library to a bedroom when Katt moved in. On her stomach with her mussed head to one side, the teenager slept soundly in her canopied bed. A dozen hats hung on hooks down the four posts, one of them the top hat she wore on Deadman's Island.

  Napoleon howled like a wolf baying at the moon.

  The Mad Hatter opened one sandman eye in her puffy face.

  "Couldn't we get a rooster lik
e everyone else

  •'It's Wednesday. Egg Day. Your favorite," he said. "Those not at the table in five minutes go without cholesterol for a week."

  "Drag me out, dog," Katt moaned.

  Robert returned to the kitchen and switched on the radio. Listening to news, he boiled eggs and toasted bread.

  " .. yesterday in Los Angeles, Damian Williams, the black man convicted in the widely televised attack on white truck driver Reginald Denny in last years riots, received the maximum sentence of ten years in prison. The attack, witnessed live by millions on TV, came to symbolize racial anarchy in the streets. The case began on May third, 1991, when black motorist Rodney King's beating by a gang of white police was captured on videotape. The officers' acquittal by a state court sparked the L.A. riots in which fifty-four people were killed. . . ."

  "Big end up," Katt said, padding into the kitchen, ash blond hair tufted above a blue bathrobe and sheepskin slippers. Theirs was the war in Gulliver's Travels over whether to crack a boiled egg at the big or little end.

  ". . . last night in a suburb just outside New York, a gunman randomly shot commuters as he walked down the aisle of a packed rush-hour train, killing five and wounding sixteen. Armed with a nine-millimeter pistol he had to reload twice, the gunman was subdued by passengers. Police identified him as Colin Ferguson, a U.S. citizen from Jamaica who brimmed with racial hatred. Those

  shot were white or Asian, races he disparaged in four pages of seized notes. . . ."

  "Teaboy," Katt said, feeling the cold pot, "you're falling down on the job."

  "Sorry, Lady Katt."

  Robert DeClercq was addicted to tea. It used to be coffee—seven cups a day—until he discovered tea has caffeine without the jitters. Katt coined "Teaboy" from the number of pots he brewed. Last June, they drove to Seattle—"A trip into Darkest America" in Katt-speak— to catch the Blue Jays/Mariners game. When they stopped for breakfast next morning before heading home, sure enough, the diner served cups of hot water with bags on the side.

  "Must be some weird subliminal Boston Tea Party thing," said DeClercq. "Americans refuse to grasp tea results from a shower, not a dip in the pool."

  "In Darkest America," Katt said, "one must be prepared." From her shoulder bag she extracted the Brown Betty from home, plunking the earthenware pot in a cozy down on the table.

  "Be wanting vinegar on your fries, eh?" the waiter said.

  "... after three centuries of white monopoly rule, South Africa's black majority got its first real say in governing with Tuesday's inauguration of a multiracial council to oversee running the country until elections next April. The dismantling of apartheid, Africa's last and harshest white racist design, came quietly when blacks joined whites in the former Good Hope Theater, a building next to Parliament and not far from Table Bay where Jan van Riebeeck and ninety other Dutch settlers landed in 1652. ..."

  Katt turned off the radio when Robert served their eggs, his little end and hers big end up. As they carried their plates and cutlery down the hall to the dining room she said, "You and your CBC Radio news. How archaic and quaint. May I introduce you to the joys of picture news on TV?"

  Until the kid moved in, Robert had no TV. He considered the medium a homogenizer of minds, which killed appreciation of arts refined over ten thousand years. Katt groaned she'd shrivel up and die without MTV rock videos and Beavis and Butt-head.

  "Alakazam," she said, punching the remote for the living room tube from the breakfast table. The screen was suddenly filled with the face of an anguished, hysterical black woman screaming, 'They killed my baby!"

  In the background, Chandler, the Mad Dog, and Wayne Tarr stood by the duplex door.

  REDCOATS

  North Vancouver

  Lions Gate Bridge—the gateway to the North Shore— takes its name from The Lions. From west to east, the three North Shore mountains are Hollyburn, Grouse, and Seymour. Bearing real resemblance to a pair of crouched lions, The Lions—two peaks behind—stare through the gap between Hollyburn and Grouse. Early white colonists called them Sheba's Paps, presaging Sheba's Breasts in Rider Haggard's African classic, King Solomon's Mines. Renamed The Sisters for more respectability, The Lions were dubbed around 1890 when Judge Gray noted the royal profiles justified calling the entrance to Vancouver's harbor The Lions Gate.

  The windowless room was in a log cabin dubbed the Lions Den, an early forest fire lookout perched high on Grouse Mountain at the end of a logging road. This room was ringed by other rooms to insulate it from the cold. Leased, the pioneer hideaway was furnished with three tables and a chair. Flickering on one of the tables, since there was no power up here, an oil lamp burnished the walls bronze and cast the shadow of Evil Eye restlessly pacing the floor. Pictures spiked to the log walls were of Redcoats then and now.

  Here lay Wolfe mortally wounded on the Plains of Abraham after defeating Montcalm's French to win Quebec for Britain in 1759. The Redcoat comforting him was John Craven.

  A pair of prints captured the American Revolution.

  Redcoats fired on Colonists in 1770's Boston Massacre, and General Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown in 1781. Though not in either painting, John Craven was there.

  Fripp's jingoistic 'The Last Stand of the 24th at Isan-dlwana" was here. Raging around a stalwart sergeant and heroic Drummer Boy, the battle reflected Victorian fantasy of the Thin Red Line.

  Dual canvases of Rorke's Drift caught Rex Craven winning his Victoria Cross. A view from the storehouse, Alphonse de Neuville's painting showed Craven helping a patient escape from the burning hospital. Lady Butler's famous 'The Defense of Rorke's Drift" had Chard and Bromhead center, with Craven bayoneting a Zulu over the mealie bags. Commissioned by Victoria, the original was in the Royal Collection at St. James's Palace.

  All the paintings had once been in Ted Craven's trunk. Also stolen from the trunk were two photographs of Ted in the "Four Circle" and "Wagon Wheel" formations of the RCMP Musical Ride. Like the paintings, these, too, were nailed to the hewn logs, joining a snapshot from another source: Nick Craven in a Color Guard saluting the Queen. The faces of both Mounties were defaced by X's, crisscrossed thin red lines of blood.

  One of the tables was draped with Ted Craven's Red Serge, also from his trunk. On it sat the Rorke's Drift trophy box. Pacing, Evil Eye listened to African hatred whispering through the lid, urging the zombie to wreak revenge in Redcoat blood.

  A sea of blood.

  To that end, Evil Eye was plotting.

  SUSPECT

  West Vancouver

  Giil Macbeth awoke to a bout of morning sickness, scrambling from her bed in which Nick was still asleep,

  to begin the day retching over the toilet. A week past her period and three weeks from conception, yet already the pregnancy was an ordeal.

  The news was on the clock-radio when she returned to the bedroom. Nick, up and listening intently, put a finger to his lips to keep her quiet. The lead story on the news was about the duplex shootout and the death of the boy.

  "Are you okay?"

  "Yes," Gill said. She had yet to tell him. Fatherhood could wait until he laid his mom to rest. "Must be something I ate."

  "Up to going to work?"

  "Once my stomach settles. I phoned Dr. Singh. The autopsy's at nine. He put your mom on the first shift to accommodate me. Think an hour's enough to get to New Westminster?"

  "Sure. After the bridge, rush hour's coming your way."

  "And you?"

  "There'll be hell to pay over this shootout mess. I'm off to HQ for an update on it all, then to engage a funeral home to take care of Mom. I'll see you at Royal Columbian for lunch."

  Traffic approaching Vancouver was at a bumper-to-bumper crawl as bedroom communities emptied their beds for work downtown, but heading east with the sun in her eyes, Gill made good speed. Reversing the route Bert and Ernie drove yesterday at five, she took the off-ramp to the Royal City as an unmarked RCMP car crested the overpass from Coquitlam and fell in behind
. When Gill parked in the Royal Columbian Hospital lot, the ghost car tailed her and parked beside.

  The white got out and walked to the morgue.

  The black got out and followed her.

  The two met a half hour later over Dora Craven's corpse.

  A morgue is a morgue is a morgue.

  This morgue was fittingly in the basement of the hospital, off the delivery area where modern-day Burke-and-Hares with the Body Removal Service spirited in

  the stiffs. Each corpse was weighed with an overhead scales before being stored under a sheet in the walk-in cooler or, in the case of murder, in a locked crypt. The crypt keeper was kept busy last night, as first the two deputies were carried in, then Dora Craven after them, then Jack MacDougall after her. Now, pairs reversed to convenience Gill, the latter were wheeled into the theater for dissection.

  The autopsy theater was institutional beige. The window in the south wall looked out at the Fraser. The dais at that end was used for storage, with steps down to the floor where the cutting was done. Here, a stainless steel table crossed the room. Off it were side-by-side dissecting stations. Each unit was equipped with a sink, garburetor, and water supply. Overhead, a microphone recorded findings. The gurney that rolled in Jack MacDougall was locked feet-to-sink into the unit manned by Dr. Kahil Singh. Singh had done the autopsy on Helen Grabowski in the Headhunter case, and now was chief pathologist at Royal Columbian. The gurney with Dora Craven was locked into the other unit, where Gill Macbeth and Rachel Kidd met face to face. The rest of the room was empty working space, with stainless steel sinks holding brains in formalin.

  "Gill Macbeth," Gill said, introducing herself. "A VGH pathologist, here to help out."

  "Rachel Kidd," Rachel said. "Investigating officer with Coquitlam GIS. Corporal," she added.

  The exhibit woman, Ident tech, tool marks examiner from the Forensic Lab, and morgue attendant confirmed their presence. Wearing surgeon's greens under a green plastic apron down to her ankles, Gill stood in the angle of the L-shaped station, Dora's body to her left with the dissecting unit on the other side. Usually cadavers are examined faceup. Here the trauma was to the back of the head so she reversed the procedure. Using her handheld Philips recorder instead of the fixed mike, she scanned the body from head to toe with a powerful light, moving down one side, then up the other, noting bruises on the flesh and, after unbagging the hands, a Band-Aid on one finger.