No Quarter

by John Jantunen

  “Hey, buddy,” he’d said, looking over at Taylor, oblivious to the spectacle that had just played out before him, “you got a smoke?”

  And though Trevor had suggested that it would have been nice to end with a touch of levity, he’d finally agreed with Taylor that him hitting some emaciated teenage girl with a length of reinforced steel was hardly the way he’d want his audience to remember him.

  The screen hadn’t gone dark for more than a second when Garland Derby was plucking the iPad from the table.

  “I understand,” he said, skirting a look at Taylor, “the two young men who filmed that were present during the alleged assault at the cottage.”

  The way he’d emphasized alleged gave Taylor every reason to suspect that he’d drawn a fairly conclusive connection between the fight he’d just viewed and the one that had landed his client’s son in surgery for four and a half hours. Taylor didn’t know what to say in answer to that, so he played it safe and simply nodded.

  “What are their names?”

  He told him. It was the first time he’d spoken since he’d awoken, a half hour earlier, and the words felt like razor blades slashing at the stitches that were preventing what was left of his lips from dribbling down his chin.

  “Phone numbers?”

  “I—they’re on my phone. I—”

  “It’s okay, we’ll find them. We’ll need to get their stories straight anyway.”

  “Why do we need to get their stories straight? Taylor was the one who was attacked.”

  This from Celia Wane, sitting quietly until then in a chair under the room’s lone window. She’d been thirty-six when she’d had Taylor and hardly seemed to have aged a day since, though when she frowned—as she was doing now—the wrinkles splayed from the corners of her mouth placed her in the early forty range, still a fair clip from her real age, as carefully avoided a subject in the Wane household as the prenup Bryson kept in the floor safe secreted beneath the desk in his den.

  Garland paid her about as much mind as he would have a fly circling his head during a backswing. He was fishing a black notebook from his pocket. He flipped to a page near the middle and ripped it out, setting that on the table in front of Taylor.

  “I’ve already spoken with—” he started then looked down at his notebook. When he didn’t find what he was looking for he flipped a page back. “Monica Fornier.” Then looking back up at Taylor. “I understand she’s your girlfriend.”

  “Monica was there?” Celia asked, her scorn doing as good a job of flattening her features as any plastic surgeon. “I should have known that little bi—”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Taylor interrupted.

  “But I understand you were having, ahem, coital relations prior to the alleged assault.”

  Taylor could feel pins prickling the side of his face, and when he looked at his mother she was staring needles. It was a carbon copy of the expression she’d worn when Taylor was fifteen and she’d walked into his bedroom one night and caught Monica giving him a blow job.

  “She’s only thirteen!” she’d screamed then.

  “I—I—” Taylor stuttered, fumbling with his boxer briefs, trying to hide the still throbbing evidence of his indiscretion. “I was asleep. I—I thought I was dreaming.”

  It was the only time she’d ever struck her son out of anger, and the way she was looking at him now suggested she was thinking it would have done him a world of good if she’d let her hand slip a few, or a dozen, more times.

  “She said we were fucking?” Taylor asked, turning back to Garland.

  “I spoke to her not an hour ago. It’s all in her statement.”

  “Well, it’s a lie. We weren’t—”

  “Yes, you were,” Garland countered. “And you caught the alleged assailant playing peeping Tom. You confronted him and that’s when he went ape shit on you. It’s all in there.” He stabbed his finger at the paper on the table. “You’ll need to familiarize yourself with it before you speak to the police.” Then, checking his watch: “And you’ll want to be quick about it too.”

  Not more than thirty seconds later he heard his father shouting from down the hall, his vitriol, Taylor supposed, directed at one of the local Roscoes.

  “What do you mean you can’t find him?” he screamed. “He attacked my son. He almost killed him!”

  The Roscoe’s response was too faint for Taylor to hear, but he must have been offering his assurances that he had every available man on the hunt. After a brief pause his father was screaming again: “Your men couldn’t find a body in a goddamned graveyard!”

  A moment later the door opened and Bryson Wane stuck his head through the crack. He himself had been fifty-one when Taylor was born and, like his mother, didn’t seem to have aged a day since, though that was hardly a compliment. His hair had blanched white in his early thirties. Between that and the chalky white hue lending his complexion a sickly pallor, he’d always seemed prematurely aged to his son. And he’d never looked older than he did now, the scruff of whiskers over the folds of skin hanging loose at his neck speaking to Taylor of a sleepless night.

  He didn’t say a word, nor did he look to his son, searching out his lawyer instead. Garland was already tucking the piece of paper into the pocket of his jacket, nodding to his client as he did so.

  “He’s awake,” Bryson said, glancing back into the hall.

  Opening the door, he stepped out of the way, letting the officer pass through. The bulge at his waist was of roughly the same girth as Garland Derby’s, though the shag of greying bush over his top lip made it appear he’d be more comfortable on an entirely different sort of range than the one behind the fifteenth hole at the Rosedale Golf Club. Meeting the fourth richest man in the country and his (once) famous wife had apparently inspired him to wear his dress blues, the tightness to the jacket’s fit making him look like it had been years since he’d done so. He scanned over the room. As was so often the case when a man found himself in the same room as Celia Wane, he seemed not to notice anyone else but her.

  Courtesy had him removing his hat, and static in the air stood his comb-over to full attention.

  “My apologies, ma’am,” he said, smiling apologetically as he smoothed the thin spire of hair over his balding crown. “My name’s Sergeant Marchand. I need a few words with your son?”

  His voice rose at the last word, as if he was leaving that up to her.

  “It’s okay,” she answered. “I was just leaving anyway.”

  She was already reaching into her purse as she rose from her chair, drawing from within a pack of Benson & Hedges Slims. She only ever smoked when she was angry at her husband, knowing how he loathed it so, and as she strode through the door offering him nothing but the click of her heels, it was clear that she was feeling the same towards her husband as she felt for the younger variant laying, broken and bloodied, in the bed.

  * * *

  Any concerns that Garland Derby might have had regarding the law holding Taylor complicit in the alleged assault were put to rest within two minutes of the sergeant’s visit. He’d already spoken to Davis Grimes and Monica Fornier and all he needed, given Taylor’s current condition, was for him to look over their statements and see if there was anything he’d like to add.

  Grimes’s was only a few sentences long. He introduced himself as a security guard for Wane Enterprises and explained that he was doing his morning rounds of the property when he’d heard someone screaming. He ran to investigate and that’s when he’d found what appeared to be an Indian trying to strangle his boss’s son. He’d pulled him off, and the Indian had slashed him in the arm with a utility knife. His training had then kicked in. He thumb-jabbed one of his eyes and would have done the same to his other if that tall fellow hadn’t distracted him long enough for the Indian to escape.

  Monica’s statement he recognized as the one that Garland Derb
y had given him only moments before. It explained that she and Taylor “were engaged in a rather intimate act” when she’d seen someone standing on a tree branch and peeping through the window. She was, she said, understandably shaken, especially since she recognized the man as the “scary looking Indian dude” she’d seen gawking at her while she was playing tennis with the victim’s sister earlier that morning. Taylor had made it to the window in time to see the man hurrying away and had gone out to confront him. “He was plenty pissed off, naturally, but no, he never laid a hand on him.” All he’d done was reach for his cell phone, so that he might have that “dirty little pervert” escorted off the property. “That’s when the Indian attacked him, and if Mr. Grimes hadn’t happened by I have no doubts that Taylor would have been lucky to get off with only a broken arm and a couple of missing teeth.”

  After Taylor read it over, he agreed that it was exactly what had happened, and the sergeant provided him with a pen so that he could testify as much at the bottom of both sheets.

  “Don’t you worry, son,” Marchand said, taking up the pages again. “We’ll get the son of a bitch who did this to you.”

  * * *

  Two hours later a pretty young nurse was pushing him in a wheelchair through the emergency room’s waiting area towards its exit.

  “Is someone coming to pick you up?” she asked as they approached the sliding door.

  Through the door’s window, Taylor could see his father’s Cadillac stretch limo parked over both spots reserved for “Emergency Vehicles Only.” He answered her by motioning his good arm in its direction.

  Craning her head, she took long enough to scan over every inch of the vehicle before she said, “Then I guess you won’t be needing the chair anymore.”

  The tone of mild indifference in her voice suggested that she wasn’t nearly as impressed as Taylor might have assumed. Pushing himself to his feet, he turned back to thank her but she was already whisking the chair away—Taylor just one more inconvenience in a day already filled with its fair share.

  His father’s driver, Jules, was opening the limo’s rear door by the time Taylor had reached the sidewalk.

  He was the nephew of Bryson’s previous driver, a man Taylor had known since he was a baby and had called Uncle Harley from the time he could speak. He hadn’t had any kids of his own due to his wife suffering from Lupus and her not wanting to pass that burden onto her kids. As such, he’d treated his nephew like his own son ever since Jules was eight and his brother Charles—the boy’s father and an RCMP constable—had been shot through the front door of a house where he’d been answering a domestic abuse call. Before enrolling in the RCMP academy in Regina, Charles had risen to the rank of lieutenant during the six years he’d spent in the armed services. Jules had made to follow in his footsteps, enlisting in the latter right out of high school and doing two tours in Afghanistan. The same day he’d filled out his application to attend the former, Uncle Harley had taken him out to lunch to celebrate, and while they waited for their sandwiches, Jules’s desire to become a “bulwark against the chaos”—his father’s words—had evaporated right then and there. The story goes that Harley had placed two slips of paper on the table. There was a number written on each and he explained that the lower of the two was the starting salary for an RCMP constable and the higher what he’d be paid as the driver and personal security guard for the fourth-richest man in the country.

  Taylor had been on hand when Harley had related that to his dad, on the day he’d brought Jules in for his interview. He’d finished it off by saying, “I asked him to choose the piece of paper he’d prefer and if he’d have paused more than half a tick I’d have known it wasn’t the job for him.”

  It was a Sunday morning, and he was driving Bryson and Taylor to the golf course, the wife of one of their foursome having called that morning to excuse her husband who had thrown out his back while bending down to retrieve the morning paper. Through the rear-view mirror Taylor could see a twinkle in Uncle Harley’s eye to match his sly grin. He’d clapped his twenty-five-year-old nephew, in the passenger seat, on the knee before adding, “Yes, sir, he’s the man you’re looking for, there’s no doubt in my mind about that.”

  Never one to take another man’s opinion for his own, Bryson was scrutinizing Jules’s resumé in his lap with the attention to detail that had branded him, in a recent profile in Business Weekly, as “The King Of The Micromanagers.”

  “It says here,” he said after a moment, “you were top of your class in defensive arts.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jules replied with military precision.

  “You know, Taylor’s not so bad in the defensive arts himself. If you’re looking for a sparring partner, I imagine you could find worse.”

  Jules opened his mouth to give his no doubt equally precise reply, but Harley beat him to the punch.

  “With all due respect, Mr. Wane,” he said, “I’d as soon put my nephew in a cage with a hungry lion as pit him against Young Master Wane.”

  “How’s that?” Bryson asked, for it had been years since he’d taken the time to attend any of his son’s tournaments.

  “He’s a right beast when he puts those gloves on. No, sir, I wouldn’t wish that fate on my worst enemy.”

  That “Uncle” Harley was only trying to curry favour with his boss—in hopes, perhaps, of padding the retirement bonus he’d been told to expect on his next cheque—was evident to everyone in the car but Jules. The smirk Jules had given Taylor as he’d opened the door for him at the clubhouse steps spoke plenty of how he thought Young Master Wane would have measured up against him. And it was a facsimile of that smirk that he was feeding Taylor now as he watched his boss’s son easing into the rear seat, looking very much like he had gone a round (or two) with a hungry lion.

  But Taylor was too tired and sore to care how he looked.

  All he wanted to do was fall into his own bed, go to sleep, maybe never wake up. He’d be sorely disappointed on that count for when the limousine reached Tildon’s Main Street, Jules hung a hard right. He wasn’t driving Taylor home at all, but back to Hidden Cove. Undoubtedly, he had his orders, and if the twenty-­minute drive from the hospital to the Wane’s summer retreat was any indication, they also included a firm directive to make the return trip the first lesson in what Taylor had begun to suspect would become a full curriculum on paternal acrimony.

  They didn’t pass a pothole the entire stretch that the back wheels couldn’t locate—the jolt of the car tha-wunking over each, radiating electrified shocks up Taylor’s arm. And every hairpin turn on the winding road provided Jules with ample excuse to push the gas pedal all the way to the floor, causing the back wheels to slide, careening, off the asphalt, leaving Taylor no recourse but to grit his teeth and hold fast to the leather strap hanging from the ceiling with the zeal of a man clinging to a life preserver as a stretch of rapids led him towards a waterfall.

  The rock wall passed him by but he barely registered it.

  A short while later, the limo slowed as the highway wound down towards Maynard Falls. The reduced speed offered him some respite as the road dipped into a valley and led them through several blocks of tourist shops and cafés, accelerating again as they neared the general store that marked the village’s western perimeter. Two hundred yards past that, Jules turned off the 118 onto Hidden Cove Road. Taylor had since let go of the handhold and the resulting fishtail catapulted him against the far door, the grit to his teeth replaced by a stifled whimper approximating the sound a toddler might have made if it were being smothered by a pillow stuffed with broken glass.

  Hidden Cove Road hadn’t been graded since the last rain and all four wheels battered over its mottled tarmac with the fury of a baby hammering away at a xylophone. Each note struck at the pins in his arm like a tuning fork, pain cascading in needle points throughout his body, each successive wave pressing further afield so that by the time they reach
ed the gate even his hair—the only part of his body that didn’t hurt by then—was bristling with thoughts of revenge.

  Their driveway was softened by cedar chips so Taylor, at least, had thirty seconds with which to grapple with his composure before the car was pulling to a stop in front of the cottage’s front door. Jules took this—the end of their journey—as an excuse to call that break. The slow deliberation with which he chewed at the first bite of the apple he’d fished from his lunch bag left Taylor little recourse but to reach for the door handle himself.

  There were only three other vehicles parked in the circular driveway—his mother’s limousine, identical to her husband’s but with pink trim, his sister’s Prius, and a black Navigator. On the matter of where his own Lexus had ended up after Davis Grimes had driven him to the hospital, he could only speculate. Given the rough ride he’d just experienced it was a good bet his father had had it towed back to the city, The Reaper sanctioned in its passenger seat, the two-hour drive and the corresponding subway ride to follow all that stood between the life of affluence he’d so fleetingly glimpsed and whatever hole Bryson had enticed him out of.

  Cold comfort to Taylor now as he stepped out of his father’s limousine.

  His gaze meandered past his mother’s car to the Navigator, at the back of which stood four men Taylor had never seen before. All of them were wearing matching charcoal-grey suits and dark sunglasses, three of them as big as linebackers so that seeing them standing all bunched together put Taylor in mind of a huddle, the fourth man about the size of your average quarterback. He had just reached a plausible conclusion regarding why they might have been there when his mother came sauntering out of the house. She was dressed in her sailing outfit—an oversized collared white blouse with blue trim and matching pants—and was smoking a cigarette with the urgency of a fire alarm.

  As his mother passed the four men, she flicked her butt at the smallest, hitting him square between the shoulder blades. The man didn’t seem to notice the obvious slight, but when she turned towards the thirty-two-foot Catalina sailing vessel tethered to the end of the dock, the man’s head cocked slightly in her direction. So maybe he had or maybe he just wanted to catch a glimpse of the way the high curve of her slacks seemed to be winking at him as she strode towards the dock.