Mahoney’s Camaro
A Crime Novel
Michael J. Clark
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Mahoney’s Camaro Mixed Tape
About the Author
Copyright
For Carol
Chapter One
June 9, 1985, Winnipeg,
1:04 a.m.
Steve Mahoney didn’t like the way Unit 36 was idling. Although the source of the miss could have been anyone’s guess — a fouled spark plug, a gummy carburetor, maybe a cracked distributor cap — Mahoney already knew the answer: Unit 36, the ’73 Chevrolet C30 chassis cab, was the oldest member of the Hook Me Up Towing company fleet, with more than 300,000 miles on the odometer and at least 150,000 up-and-down miles on the Holmes 440 wrecker boom. There was little point in trusting the readings from the instrument panel. The jumbled odometer had ceased rotations at 52,375 and six-tenths. The speedometer worked on occasion, a bouncing red needle that never went over 25 miles per hour, regardless of the actual speed. The floor-mounted stick shift was doing its best to jump out of the truck entirely. Mahoney would keep his right hand firmly on the shift knob for the first part of his tour, which started at 9 p.m. The ensuing hand cramp would set in around one in the morning. When the pain had started to creep in, Mahoney checked his digital watch: 1:07 a.m. Right on schedule.
Mahoney and Unit 36 were next in line at Boondoggles on McPhillips Street, the only drive-through burger shack north of Inkster Boulevard that kept the lights on into the wee hours. Boondoggles looked more like a 1970s’ Fotomat than a mecca for the late-night munchies, strictly drive-through, with no walk-up service entrance. Patrons at this hour weren’t too picky; the purpose of the greasy offerings was to act as a sponge, an attempt at soaking up the booze that had flowed so freely just hours before. Mahoney fiddled with the one interior feature of Unit 36 that still worked, the cigarette lighter. As the metal coil warmed, he looked at the car ahead of him, a rusty Country Squire station wagon. The old Ford was at capacity, with at least four drunk, stoned, or drunk and stoned teenaged girls in the rear. Mahoney settled on drunk when the tailgate swung open for a vomit volley from a skinny brunette. Their eyes met after the second coming of the pizza, Old Dutch Rip-L chips, and at least half-a-dozen Labatt Lites. Mahoney was impressed that she still had enough spunk to lob a bird in his direction. She smiled after the gesture for about five seconds, which was right about the time the third queasy wave hit her delicate constitution.
The lighter popped. Mahoney brought the red glow up to his Old Port Colt. He pulled down the cheap add-on sun-visor mirror and rubbed at his chin as he assessed his face. His three-day beard was starting to overtake his attempt at a Tom Selleck–style moustache. His shoulder-length, dirty blond mop of curls could be only partially contained by a dirty company baseball cap. The beard helped to hide the pocked landscape aftermath of adolescent acne. His best feature was his eyes, a pair of deep psychedelic blue pools that made up for his nondescript, six-foot-two frame. Mahoney was thin, but he certainly wasn’t fit. The regular diet of Colts helped to keep his waist size from increasing past 32 inches, while the late-night cheeseburgers made sure that it never shrank below that measurement. He had strength, the kind you get from blue-collar lifting and stretching, without all that annoying definition.
Mahoney started to ease up on the clutch as the bags of burgers were passed into the drunk-girl station wagon. The driver seemed to be more involved with food distribution than moving ahead. At one in the morning, Mahoney knew that any revolving light in the rearview mirror was enough to get a driver’s attention, especially one who had passed the designated driver threshold some four beers ago. He flipped the switch for the oversized Mars amber beacon. The driver responded with a forward throttle blip that smeared a redhead’s face against the rear window. Mahoney smiled as he watched her distorted expression disappear into the night.
The attendant at the window wasn’t familiar with Mahoney, though she had memorized the company greeting from the training pamphlet. “Welcome to Boondoggles, home of the Triple Cheese Yes Please, can I take your order?” The chain’s signature sandwich, a double-patty greaser with heavily-processed versions of cheddar, mozzarella, and Monterey Jack. To the first-time late-night patron, it sounded like the second coming. Mahoney knew from experience that the only thing coming from it would be a phone call for a sick day.
“Gimme four single cheeseburgers and a chocolate shake, thin,” he said. “Thin” was important to anyone behind the wheel, especially with a jumpy stick shift. The Boondoggles thick shake was more like the chocolate malts at the Malt Stop, cleverly hidden in the basement of the Bay downtown. Attempting to use a straw to import the contents could result in a collapsed lung, or maybe even an aneurysm.
Mahoney handed over a 10-spot to the attendant. As usual, he was quietly concerned that he received better than three dollars in change in return. The paper-wrapped cheeseburgers were already starting to turn the brown paper bag translucent in spots. “Thanks for your gobble at the Doggle,” she said. Mahoney only heard about half of it clearly, as the phrase was partially swallowed by the sliding window and the crackle of the two-way radio. “Base to thirty-six, base to thirty-six. What’s your twenty? Over.”
Mahoney picked up the microphone and clicked. “McPhillips and Stardust, Dolores. Just grabbing the breakfast of champions. Over.” The voice at the other end of the transmission laughed and coughed at the same time, a damp smoker’s cough. “That cat food is gonna stop your heart cold one of these days. Over.”
“And four packs a day won’t? Over.”
“Fig you, Baloney, and your little dog too. Over.” As raw as the off-air conversation could get at the Hook Me Up office, Mahoney knew that the on-air banter for the two-way had to be kept PG, thanks to a few complaints that had made their way to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission. Someone was always listening, even if it was a fat kid in a basement with a RadioShack scanner and virgin ea
rs.
“Whaddya got, Dolores? It better not be some drunk rich kid’s Trans Am at Night Moves, cause I’m nowhere near it. Over.” Mahoney waited for the dispatcher to chastise him for his insolence with a few figs, maybe an offer to go multiply himself repeatedly. Instead, there was a pause. Dolores always paused when it was a bad one. Mahoney knew that the timing was right for a bad one. High school graduation season was in full swing throughout the city. Many schools were still trying to push the designated-driver concept, though the reality was that at least two teens would die that weekend in closed-casket crashes.
“It’s a cop call,” said Dolores. “North Main Street boat launch. Got a car in the water. Did you get that fiddling cable fixed on the fiddling winch yet? Over.”
“It’s as strong as your breath. Ever heard of a fiddling Tic Tac? Over.”
Dolores coughed. “Ever heard of a ritual killing? Over.”
“Got it, Dolores — thirty-six over and out.” Mahoney hung up the mic. He steered with his knees while he ate.
It took Mahoney about 15 minutes to get to the North Main Red River boat launch. It would have taken less than 10 if it wasn’t for the media blockade. Mahoney had attended to numerous bad calls where the reporters were the first on the scene, thanks to their constant monitoring of the emergency frequencies. The practice was becoming a sizable thorn in the side of the Winnipeg Police Department. Mahoney knew, like most Winnipeggers, that the force was still feeling the sting of negative publicity from a few high-profile cases in the last few years, cases that had been anything but positive in their outcome.
The third trial for Thomas Sophonow was under way, with many citizens quietly convinced that he had been railroaded into the role of the Cowboy Killer who had strangled Barbara Stoppel in the bathroom of the Ideal Donut Shop. Candace Derksen had been found in January, hog-tied and left to die in a shed within walking distance of her family home. Paul Clear had been murdered by two of Winnipeg’s not-so-finest in the summer of ’81. The pair was convinced that he had snitched on them for their on-duty burglary hobby. One of the cops was Clear’s brother-in-law.
At the entrance to the boat launch, a skinny rookie was keeping the reporters at bay. He signalled to Mahoney to head through as the respective news outlets snapped their pictures and filled their Betacams with the barricaded scene. The CKND van tried to follow Mahoney in, stopping quickly when the driver locked eyes with the rookie’s icy glare. The rookie motioned to another officer in an idling cruiser who quickly got the hint, blocking the gravel access road with two tons of black-and-white Ford LTD.
Mahoney looked ahead to the riverside activity. The road was thick with black-and-whites and unmarked detective units. An ambulance passed him on the left, looking to be in anything but a hurry, its emergency lights dark. Mahoney saw why as he started the decline to the Red River. The morgue-mobile. It was a nondescript, windowless black Ford Econoline, usually seen in the grainy pictures of the local papers. Mahoney could see the harbourmaster runabout in the water. The boat’s driver was talking to a police diver, who nodded his goggled head attentively before heading back down to the watery crime scene. The stage had plenty of backlighting, thanks to the side-mounted floodlights of the MS Paddlewheel Queen. The riverboat had practically been at its berth near the Northgate Copa dinner hall when one of the passengers noticed the red lights in the water. The previously upbeat River East Collegiate Class of 1985 had quieted considerably. The deck was lined with boys in rented tuxedos and girls in what would most likely be the second-most expensive dress of their lives. Most watched in stunned silence. Some girls were crying. Mahoney figured there was about as good a chance of these grads going all the way tonight as there was for the waterlogged car below to start its engine and drive away.
Chapter Two
June 9, 1985
1:32 a.m.
Mahoney had enough room to flip Unit 36 around to reverse down the boat launch. Even with his rear spotlights on, he couldn’t make out the car’s shape in the dark brown water. Mahoney hated pulling cars out of the Red; the brown silt would make a mess of the cable, which would need to be uncoiled and cleaned after his shift. Most of the cars retrieved from the river were freshly stolen, though every few years the water level would drop to reveal an impressive collection of muddy cars that had been there for some time. A car retrieved quickly from its watery grave might see the road again, after a considerable amount of cleaning and tear down.
That was the story behind Jerry “Wallbanger” Waller’s Corvette, a beige ’75 Stingray ragtop that had been the victim of a seized parking-brake adjuster. The owner had been distracted by a working girl’s services when the brake slipped, near the Alexander Docks. Legend has it that he finished during splashdown. Luckily, the top was down at the time, and both blower and blowee were able to escape. Waller saw the whole thing; his truck was Unit 32 and he’d been parked at the end of Alexander, keeping an eye on the transaction. Waller was the senior pimp and drug dealer at Hook Me Up. Mahoney would reluctantly provide transportation services for the prostitutes on occasion, leaving the job of muscle to Waller, a regular at the European Health Spa. Waller used to be as skinny as Mahoney, until he had his “Charles Atlas Moment,” when a fellow spa patron turned him on to black-market steroids. When he wasn’t pumping iron, Waller concentrated on the distribution of Talwin and Ritalin from his truck cab. The combo was better known to junkies as Poor Man’s Heroin or Ts and Rs. Low-grade coke, shrooms, and weed rounded out the mix.
Mahoney got out of the truck and let out enough slack in the cable to toss the hook to the diver. He retrieved a small boat fender from the bed of the wrecker, attaching it with a carabiner to the cable loop at the base of the hook. This made it easier for the diver to grab the hook when it hit the water and the fender quick to remove and toss back to the shore. Mahoney grabbed his rubber boots from under the tow straps strewn across the bed. As he approached the river’s edge, the diver poked his head above the water. Mahoney lobbed the cable towards him. It never went well when the police divers tried to return the boat fender, because it always fell just short of dry land. The edge of the boat launch was constructed of long concrete beams that had been secured into the riverbank with steel rebar. Mahoney knew they would be slippery, which would result in one of two things: wet pants or a full-on booter. He swore out loud when his right boot slipped, filling it to the brim and soaking most of his pant leg. Two for two.
He stood at the water’s edge, balancing on one leg as he dumped out the contents of the rubber boot. He could hear the hook at the end of the cable clanging on the submerged car, an attachment that was never an easy task in the Red. Visibility below the water line was arm’s length at best, by feel when the current was swift. Helping the situation was something unexpected for an underwater parking job: the lights. Mahoney squinted, trying to figure out what kind of car it was by the headlights. He was so deep in thought that he hardly noticed the veteran plainclothes detective who had ambled up next to him. “You’d think they would have shorted out by now, wouldn’t they?”
The question startled Mahoney, though he felt that he had managed to conceal it, until he spoke. “Shorted? Shorted out what?” He realized what the detective meant as the words left his mouth, feeling even more foolish for saying them. “Yeah, must be one hell of a battery, I guess.”
“Made the difference in finding this one fresh,” said the detective. Mahoney gave him the quick once-over: mid-forties, salt-and-pepper buzz cut, probably ex-military, probably a career cop since his mid-twenties. The detective reached into his blazer for a crumpled pack of Player’s. He offered the pack to Mahoney as he lit the cigarette with a swift click from a red Bic lighter. Mahoney shook his head, and the detective stowed the pack. “Trying to quit, eh? Well, good luck with that.” He pointed at the water as he exhaled. “Shit like this doesn’t tend to allow for the dismissal of your favourite vices. See enough of it, and you might even start some up y
ou didn’t know you had.”
“What do you mean exactly, finding it fresh?”
“Fresh?” The detective chuckled as he rubbed his eyes. “That just means a lot less gross to look at when they come out of the water. You should see what some of the spring thaw stuff looks like. About the only way you know that it even is a body is the hair or the clothes. The rest of it just looks like a goopy mess. A big, stinky, goopy mess.”
Mahoney felt the Boondoggles bounty shift to the left of his stomach as the visual possibilities of the current victim entered his mind. The detective gave him a nudge. “I think he’s ready for you.”
Mahoney looked at the water and saw the diver was giving him the thumbs up. He headed back to Unit 36 to winch up the submerged car. The cable spooled up lazily as Mahoney watched the swirling water. The lights of the mystery car were starting to flicker as the cable tightened. The car lurched to the left from its underwater parking spot. Mahoney knew that there was little that the police diver could do to attach the cable underwater. Judging from the lurch, the diver had decided on the lower control arm on the driver’s side. The winch laboured. The car’s front tires reached the first piece of submerged concrete when its lights went dead, its pedigree still hidden from view. Mahoney twisted the floodlight closest to him towards the emerging form. What the hell is it? he thought. The tires started to work their way up the ramp when the lights began to flicker again. They were dimmer now, though Mahoney didn’t need them to know what the car was. As the rest of the car rolled onto the boat launch, his thoughts were immediately made audible.
“Holy shit, man,” said an unseen teenage motorhead from the deck of the Paddlewheel Queen. “It’s a fucking Camaro!”
1:48 a.m.
Mahoney kept his distance as the crime technicians, uniformed cops, and the salt-and-pepper detective descended upon the scene. Some of the media outlets had decided to shoot photos and reporter video commentary from the nearby North Perimeter Bridge, out of reach from the rookies who stood guard. The lights from the emergency vehicles mingled with the Paddlewheel Queen’s party-boat display. Some of the students were waving at the bridge, hoping that a zoom lens might pick them up for the Sunday night news broadcasts. Many of the girls were still crying. There were flashbulb bursts from the crime techs as they documented the scene. Mahoney didn’t see the body inside, just the hands handcuffed to the top of the steering wheel. There was only one body he was interested in. That was the one wearing a Camaro script, dressed in a coat of factory Royal Plum. It almost looked black in the twisted sources of artificial light.
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