Mahoney knew his fuzzy recollections of the late Heather Price wouldn’t be part of any legitimate investigations. “Yeah, if only you could talk to their ghosts.”
“I do,” said Milroy. “Every goddamn night.” He flicked his cigarette butt onto the pavement, then remembered that he’d scolded Mahoney. “Don’t mention that, and I’ll let the jaywalk slide.”
“Thanks for the pass,” said Mahoney. “See you around.”
“See you around, Tow-Job.”
Mahoney watched as Milroy started up his Buick. Whatever was under the hood, it sounded pretty great.
Traffic had thinned out considerably after Mahoney’s cop chat. The weather was looking a little iffy. It always was when the Red River Exhibition was in town. Mahoney had mentioned it to Diana as a possible second date. The Ex was set up at the grounds for the Winnipeg Arena, the Winnipeg Stadium, and the Winnipeg Velodrome. He was pretty good at Skee-Ball — good enough to win an over-stuffed bear for Diana, which would probably send her into Full Spastic in appreciation. Apart from beating the carnies at their own game, there were only three things that Mahoney liked about the Ex: the oversized Ferris wheel, the little fried doughnuts, and the Kin Kar Raffle. The Kinsmen Club had been raffling off new Corvettes for the last few years. This year it was a blue ragtop. Mahoney always sprang for the three-tickets-for 10-dollars pack. The digital dashboard on the newer ’Vettes looked a little too much like the Trans Am on Knight Rider, but he knew that even he couldn’t turn down a 10-dollar sports car. Most of the new Corvettes sold in Winnipeg never turned a wheel on a city street, ending up on transports headed for Toronto. Mahoney figured it must have been ex-Winnipeggers who had moved to Toronto and refused to pay marked-up GTA prices.
There were two messages on the answering machine at home. The first was from Diana, agreeing to Friday night at the Ex, if the weather wasn’t “too shitty.” The second was from Rick Scheer, reminding him about Thursday night. Mahoney couldn’t believe that he had almost forgot about it. Thursdays were almost as important as Sundays to Winnipeg’s gearheads. Garage doors would rise throughout the city, in back lanes and suburban driveways, revealing cars both completed and in pieces. Friends would start to arrive around seven in the cars they cared about, with just enough beer to enjoy each other’s company and still get to work on time and headache-free Friday morning. The crew would rotate locations each week. Tonight’s open garage door was at Howard Petkau’s place on Highway 44, the former Highland Glen School. The school had only been open for a few years when it closed in the early ’70s. A previous owner had tried to make a go of it as a gas station, adding a shop with an in-floor hoist. Petkau had plenty of room for working on cash money jobs, as well as building up his hot rod, a primer-sprayed ’64 Ford Falcon Futura, with a 351-cubic-inch Cleveland V8 block that was mocked up in the engine bay. The running joke was that Petkau had got the idea for the Falcon build when he was working on Jaguar V12s, that he somehow liked working in the tightest of spaces under the hood.
Mahoney debated which car to take that night. He knew that the crew would be curious about the Camaro and any concerns that may have presented themselves after the completion of the build. Mahoney doubted that “haunted” would be anywhere on that list. He thought about the recent broadcasts through the Supertuner before turning the key. He pulled its fuse just to make sure, or as sure as he could be, that the radio still observed the basic principles of electrical current. He stowed the Adidas bag in the trunk.
The Hot Rod enjoyed the Highway 59 run, about 25 minutes’ worth, heading north from the city. Mahoney was glad he had opted for the Hot Rod. Scheer had brought his pale-blue 1960 GMC short box, a Pontiac Super Duty 455 under the hood. Fiddler had his Mopar, a dark green ’69 Dodge Coronet 500 that had more Super Bee between the front fenders than most stoplight challengers would expect. They were looking under the hood of the Malibu sedan that Petkau had cut himself on and picked up for cheap at Bridgeway. What was good for Iraqi mechanics didn’t translate into quick resale for local Winnipeg used car lots. Petkau had scooped it up for dead cost.
Mahoney steadied his six-pack of Black Label on the Malibu’s fender, his Number Two beer when Club was warm or sold out at the vendor. Scheer immediately brought him into the conversation. “Whaddya think? Pull the six and put in a V8?”
Mahoney’s beer cap flew off his Black Label, thanks to his Bic lighter. “Why bother on a fucking four-door?”
“That’s what I say,” said Fiddler. “No amount of money fixes that.”
Petkau went to close the hood, making sure that Mahoney moved his beer before he did. “It’s just for back-and-forth to work. I might put the F41 cop bits on the suspension, but that’s just because I hate slowing down for off-ramps.”
“Or on-ramps,” said Fiddler. “Actually, when do you slow down?”
“For ten-dollar blow jobs on Higgins,” said Scheer. “That’s when he slows down.”
“That reminds me,” said Petkau. “Your sister says, ‘Hi.’”
“HEYYYYYYYY!” said Scheer. He started to laugh, then paused. “Wait a minute. I don’t even have a sister!”
“And could you get her to shave her moustache? That stubble stings, you know.”
“That sounds like his brother,” said Fiddler. He took a swig of beer, then acknowledged Mahoney’s arrival. “How’s she running?”
“Well, she made it here.” Mahoney walked towards his Hot Rod. Scheer had already raised the hood, looking at the usual places that transplanted dormant engines might start to leak. The small block was bone dry. Scheer was impressed. “Wow. It hasn’t barfed up anything yet.”
Fiddler and Petkau strolled over to the Camaro for the inspection. Fiddler pulled a Mag-Lite out of his shirt pocket and crouched down to check the mating point for the engine and transmission. “No pee-pee out the main seal. Howie?”
Petkau was on his knees, looking underneath the Hot Rod. “Tranny pan is good; output shaft seal looks good.” He scurried to the rear of the Camaro. “Rear end looks good.”
“This is so . . . so . . .” Scheer couldn’t finish the thought.
“Weird?” said Mahoney.
“Yeah,” said Scheer. “Fucking weird. Mahoney’s incredible No-Drip Camaro. Didn’t it always leak when it was in the SS?”
“All the time,” said Mahoney. “If it didn’t, I used to get worried.”
“Why’s that?”
“I worried it was empty.”
As the crew sipped, Mahoney opened the trunk. He looked at the Adidas bag, a bag that wasn’t his, a bag he didn’t feel like explaining to the crew. “Hey, Rickles.”
“Hey what?”
“What size jacket you wear?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
Mahoney pulled the leather jacket out of the Adidas bag. He gave the pockets a quick check before tossing the coat to Scheer. He told him the lie that made the most sense. “Some guy left it in a Garage Keeper’s Act car.”
Scheer tried it on. It fit. He smiled at Mahoney. “That’s what happens when you don’t pay your fucking bills!”
Chapter Nineteen
June 20, 1985
10:47 p.m.
Steve Mahoney had two bottles of Black Label left. He’d placed them with the empty bottles in the six-pack, stowing the box behind the passenger front seat. He listened to them clink with the surface breaks as he headed south on Highway 59.
The Supertuner was back in play. Mahoney had popped the fuse back in while at Petkau’s. Maybe it’s all in your head. He hoped that was true. The Black Label was doing its best to convince him. The Rolling Stones did the rest with “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” Mahoney drummed his fingers on the top of the steering wheel. He tapped his left hand on the outer sheet metal of the driver’s door. He decided to join in on the backup portion. He figured Keith and Mick wouldn’t mind.
Mahoney was
getting ready to sing the line for a third time when he looked in the rearview mirror. Heather Price was looking back at him. It wasn’t her sexy version. She was covered in Red River silt, her eyes missing their pupils. She finished the line for him, in her own special way.
“Could you help me, baby? If you’re not too busy.”
Mahoney mashed the brake pedal into the carpet. The Hot Rod was under full lockup, the back end swinging out to the left, then continuing to spin around on something greasy, possibly deer guts from the many night collisions with wildlife near Birds Hill Park. The Camaro came to a stop just shy of the centre ditch, its headlights pointing at oncoming traffic. A few frantic honks, some evasive manoeuvres, and at least two birds were thrown at the Hot Rod. Mahoney waited till the last car had passed until he pointed the car in the right direction and pulled over to the side to catch his breath. He didn’t get a chance to do it for long. The late Ms. Price was now in the front passenger seat. Mahoney almost jumped out of his seat, hitting the horn for at least five seconds until he realized it wasn’t going to scare her away. Mahoney was scared. He was also pissed.
“What . . . the FUCK . . . is your problem!?” He tried to calm his breathing. He didn’t know how Price would take the question. He braced himself. She responded by slowly changing out of her freak-out persona. The transformation wasn’t too otherworldly. She looked normal. She looked not dead. Her eyes looked like proper eyes. The only thing pushing her hair was the summer breeze. She wore a loose emerald green knitted sweater. Her jeans were extra baggy, acid-washed, something she must have bought recently, when she still bought things. Her red ankle boots didn’t exactly mesh with the outfit. She wore no jewellery. Mahoney wasn’t sure if she was wearing any makeup. He thought it best not to ask. She didn’t look too impressed, which matched how Mahoney was feeling at that moment. He put on the hazard flashers before he spoke. “So was there . . . any particular reason you tried to get us . . . killed . . . back there?”
“You killed,” said Price. “I’ve already had my ticket punched. Besides, you’re fine.”
Mahoney wasn’t sure about that. He checked the steering wheel, making sure he hadn’t cracked the horn button. Price rolled her eyes, the way most women do when a man is worried about his machinery. “And your precious car is fine. Nothing’s busted, nothing’s leaking.”
“Don’t be so sure,” said Mahoney. “I think I just about pissed and shit myself back there.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know. I can’t smell anything.”
Mahoney was curious. “Why, is that like a ghost thing?”
“Why, is that like a ghost thing? Boy, you’re a right-fucking genius, Steve-Oh. You must have seen Ghostbusters like, what, three times?”
Mahoney was doing his best to adjust to this snarkier version of the ghost in his Hot Rod. He was about to say that he had only seen Ghostbusters once, when the inside of the car was bathed in red and blue lights. “Shit. Look what you did.”
Price would have none of it. “If you weren’t such a chickenshit, you wouldn’t have spun out and attracted all kinds of attention.”
“If I wasn’t . . . listen, just shut the fuck up for a few minutes.” Mahoney checked his side-view mirror. The RCMP officer was getting out of his blue-and-white Malibu, the one with the cop suspension bits that Petkau wanted. “You think you can do —”
Mahoney looked at the passenger seat. Heather Price was gone.
Peter Scrapneck was still new to this. He warmed the spoon of heroin over the candle flame on his coffee table. The rest of his house was so dark a wandering deer had been resting in his backyard for over an hour. The house was a complete mess. At least the grass was cut, thanks to a neighbourhood kid who he had paid 20 dollars a month for a weekly trim, three months in advance.
Scrapneck had opted for an injection point between his toes, a tip from Heather Price. She had told him that it would keep him from doing the obvious jonesing scratches that would draw the wrong kind of attention at work. Price knew plenty about opiates. She’d started abusing painkillers after getting hit by a car in front of her Silver Heights apartment. The escalation led to her being fired from the accounting pool at Great-West Life, after she was found passed out in a bathroom stall with a needle in her arm. Her habit had reached the point of needing a better stream of revenue and accounting practices that were best termed as “creative.” She got the idea of approaching car dealerships from a friend at a large Chrysler franchise that was bleeding about 50 grand a month, thanks to a planned expansion that wasn’t going according to plan. Scrapneck became a client, a junkie, and eventually, a casual lover. He talked a different game in the showroom at Commonwealth. There were no ladies of the week, as he had told Loeb, which also meant he didn’t have anyone to write a suicide note for Price. He had written it himself, using his left hand to disguise his handwriting, a tip he had seen on an episode of Columbo. The overdose was a bonus gone wrong, a balloon’s worth of 90 percent pure heroin that Scrapneck’s Minneapolis connection had thrown in during negotiations for the coke. Price, like most junkies, was used to 30 percent purity.
Scrapneck hadn’t been at Price’s apartment when she overdosed. When his knocks went unanswered, he tried the doorknob; it was unlocked. Price was on the floor, the needle in her arm, passed out cold. Scrapneck did what most men with a drug habit would do in such a situation: he panicked. He took the file boxes from her makeshift dining room office out to the car. He went back to the apartment to check on the scene, and that’s when the paranoia kicked in. What if the cops found something Scrapneck had missed? Something connecting Scrapneck to the coke? He moved Price to the Dodge with the dealer plate, shielded by the dim of a rear parking lot that was in desperate need of replacement light bulbs. He covered her with an old sleeping bag from her closet. His paranoia, and his Columbo recollections, made him write the suicide note with yellow dish gloves from under Price’s sink. He put the note on her nightstand and her plastic SIN card in her pocket for eventual identification.
The car. That stupid, fucking car. Scrapneck had seen the Sentinel’s front-page shot of the late Guy Clairmont on Thursday morning, covered with a sheet. He hadn’t got around to contracting with another “retrieval expert” yet. He wasn’t sure if there was a need to do so. The cops had written off Heather Price’s death as a suicide. Perhaps that was the end of it, perhaps not. All he knew for sure was that the car that he had put Heather Price into, the one that Jerry Waller had handcuffed her to, was still on the road. Something kept telling him that he had left something inside. He didn’t know what.
The heroin was finally starting to mellow out Scrapneck’s coke bumps. It was time to get to work. He walked to the dining room, which was now full of the boxes he had taken from Heather’s apartment, and flicked on the light switch that sent the deer running from the yard. He had found the Commonwealth files, knowing which accounts he would need to reactivate for Loeb’s phone venture on Monday, when the next shipment of American cars would show up, along with the second kilo of coke. He retrieved another folder from one of the boxes. It was stuffed with articles from various American magazines on the rising use of crack cocaine in major urban areas. Scrapneck flipped past the images of drug-related deaths and urban decay, feeling nothing. He focused in on the yellow glow from his highlighter. He smiled as he read about how addictive the drug was. He knew that he could have easily had the traditional coke cut down by his cook, still being able to double, perhaps triple, his initial investment. The problem was that the size of the market was limited. Winnipeg had its share of recreational cocaine users, mostly middle- to upper-class types who would dip in on the weekends. Few could be considered addicts, which meant the numbers had little chance of increasing. Crack had been proven to change that.
Scrapneck went over to a City of Winnipeg map taped to the wall. It was a festival of pins, highlighter touches, and coloured marker dots. The pins were used to denote Manitoba Hous
ing projects. The highlighter swaths were used for the areas that had the worst levels of economic depression. The coloured marker dots were used to identify various schools in the target districts: red for high schools, blue for junior high, and green for primary. Community clubs were circled with a black Sharpie. Next to the map was a calendar from one of Commonwealth’s auto parts suppliers, with pictures of different classic cars for each month. Scrapneck looked at the large red X on the 28th of June. He smiled as he looked at the date. Under it was a notation, written in the same red marker.
“LAST DAY OF SCHOOL.”
Chapter Twenty
June 21, 1985
12:01 a.m.
Steve Mahoney rolled down his garage door, securing his secondary locks. He turned around to look at the Hot Rod. He remembered what Freddie Rondeau had said at the Autopac auction. “Why don’t you just go buy a decent Camaro for four grand?” Why indeed, Mahoney thought.
Heather Price wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Mahoney knew she wasn’t far off. He remembered a story that his Uncle Mike had told him, about an old house he had bought in a foreclosure sale. “The place made all sorts of weird noises for about a week after I moved in. Then one night, and I don’t know why I did it, I just sat straight up in bed and said, ‘Hi. My name is Mike, and I own this house now. I hope we can all get along.’ After that, I never heard those noises again.” Mahoney figured it was worth a try.
He walked around the car a couple of times, trying to figure out where the best place would be to address the late Heather Price. He decided on the last place that she drew breath. He walked over to the driver’s door, and he opened it. Better make sure she hears you loud and clear. He cracked his knuckles. He felt the need to steady his legs, fearful that Price would leap from the car and cause him injury with his burgeoning request. He took a deep breath, hoping that his voice wouldn’t shake. “Heather Price? This is Steve Mahoney. I own this Camaro now. My name is on the registration. I have a bill of sale from the Manitoba Public Insurance Salvage Department. I paid twelve hundred dollars plus tax for it.”
Mahoney's Camaro Page 11