The Vanishing Track

by Stephen Legault

  “Why don’t we talk this through?” Sean said, stepping toward Cole, glass breaking under his feet. “See . . .” he said, spitting a thick rope of blood onto the floor, “my old man there is the lawyer to a big developer. You and me, we’re on the same side. We should be working him over together, not scrapping with each other. What do you say?” He took another step closer, the tire iron dangling at his side.

  Cole could see his eyes now, dark and flat.

  “Come on, man, you and me, and maybe that other lawyer friend of yours, we should be partners. We could work together, put a stop to the builders, put them in their place. What do you say?” Sean asked, and as he did he lunged for Cole, swinging the tire iron in a neat arc at Blackwater’s head. Cole pivoted to sidestep the blow, and as Sean’s arm cut through the air, Cole grabbed it a few inches above the wrist. Cole drove his open left palm into Sean’s elbow. The joint broke with an audible snap. Sean’s right arm went limp, and the tire iron clattered to the ground. Cole balled his hand into a fist and drove it into the soft flesh of Sean’s ear. He stepped back as Sean fell to the ground.

  Sean writhed amid the broken glass and garbage. Cole stepped over him into the room. He bent over the man who lay tied on the floor.

  “Cavalry’s here,” said Cole.

  Livingstone looked up. “You a cop?”

  “Nope, I’m a—” What was he? Cole began untying the man’s hands. “We met at your office. Cole Blackwater.”

  “I remember now,” said Livingstone.

  Cole finished with the man’s hands and started on Livingstone’s feet. Livingstone put his hands under him and began to sit up. He yelled suddenly, “Watch out!” and Sean rushed into the room, his right arm dangling, the tire iron raised in his left hand.

  The first blow caught Cole in the left shoulder, the second clipped his ear. Sean had lost much of his strength and he swung the tire iron wildly. Cole kicked out Sean’s feet and Sean stumbled over his father. Cole stepped across Sean’s father to move in close to Sean, landing two quick jabs at Sean’s face.

  The tire iron clattered to the floor. Sean struggled as Cole pushed him down. Cole, knowing the boy’s strength was gone, held him down, keeping his own knees together to protect himself.

  “Do you know what this this was all about?” Cole asked the father, gritting his teeth with exertion. “About stopping the building of a condo?”

  Sean spit a thick stream of blood and phlegm into Cole’s face. Cole had a vision of driving his forehead down into Sean’s visage, mashing his nose. It might kill the boy. But he drew a deep breath instead.

  “It wasn’t about that,” said the boy’s father. “It wasn’t about anything like that.” He pulled his feet up and tried to undo the knots with shaking hands. “He’s crazy. He’s just crazy.”

  Cole could just make out Sean’s face in the light from the broken window. His face, bloody and bruised, seemed serene. For a moment Cole looked into Sean’s eyes.

  There was nothing there.

  THIRTY-TWO

  MARCIA LANE ANSWERED THE PHONE on the second ring. It was Friday morning, and three days had passed since the discovery of three people in the bomb shelter in the Salisbury Street home, and four bodies in Burrard Inlet. She was still finishing up the paperwork.

  “Lane, Missing Persons.” She listened a moment and then said, “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  When she arrived in Stanley Park, along a remote section of the sea wall, there were two dozen police and paramedics on scene. She was met by a constable who patrolled the park on horseback.

  “What have we got?” she asked.

  “Jogger found the body.”

  “Have we got an ID?”

  “Nothing. No purse, no wallet. But we’ve got a woman, middle-aged. Heavy set.”

  “Show me.”

  They walked to where the sea wall dropped off into the rough waters below. Lane noticed a man in running clothes sitting on a rock while two uniformed officers spoke with him. The constable led her down a rocky embankment to a mound covered by a black tarp. Several officers and two paramedics stood near by.

  “Looks like she’s been dead for four or five days. The coroner is on his way,” said one of the paramedics.

  “Let’s have a look.”

  The paramedic carefully pulled back the tarp.

  “That’s Beatta Nowak,” said Lane. She had the woman’s photo on her bulletin board from the missing person’s file. “We’ll have to get someone in to do a positive ID, but that’s her.”

  “We don’t have a bullet wound, not that we can see. But the coroner will look for other signs of a struggle,” said the paramedic.

  Lane let her gaze rove from the morbid scene before her to the span of the Lion’s Gate bridge to her right, its arch hundreds of feet above the choppy waters of the Inlet.

  THIRTY-THREE

  BY THE FIRST DAYS OF December, winter had descended on Vancouver and its inhabitants. Rain fell steadily for a full week.

  The emergency shelters in the Downtown Eastside were filled to overflowing. Denman Scott stopped to drop a few coins in a man’s hat, to say a few words, and to touch the man’s arm. Cole paused with him.

  “That’s what they need the most, connection,” said Denman, limping along with the help of a wooden cane. “It may have been half a lifetime since someone touched them in a way that made them feel human. We don’t look them in the eyes for fear of what we might see there. We don’t even see them. These people are on the vanishing track right before our very eyes.”

  “How do you do it? How does Juliet?”

  “We’ve gone a little crazy, a long time back. We passed through it. Now we’re on the other side of crazy, and we can allow ourselves to feel love for these people as kin, and not be overwhelmed by the hopelessness that some people feel. Because there is hope. This problem is a human construct, and we can solve it.”

  “Not with paper tigers, like Don West’s ‘New Vancouver,’” spat Cole.

  “Don West didn’t really want to solve homelessness. He wanted to sound like he was going to solve homelessness. He was a stuffed shirt. Always was. Always will be.”

  “I hear he’s going to bow out,” said Cole.

  “That’s what I’m hearing too,” said Denman.

  “You think Ben Chow will run?”

  “I absolutely do.”

  “Even after being tarred with the Lucky Strike Manifesto?”

  “People have short memories. Plus, the people he needs to win the nomination for his party loved that document. They held their nose for the unpleasant talk about resettlement and applauded wildly when they read about rezoning the Downtown Eastside and sweeping the streets clean of crime. For some, homelessness still falls into that category. A crime.”

  “If Chow becomes mayor, we’re going to be in a heap of trouble.”

  “Can you keep a secret?” Denman asked.

  “Depends on how good it is.” Cole smiled.

  “It’s pretty good,” said Denman. “Macy Terry is going to run.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup.”

  “That is great news.”

  “Will you help us?”

  Cole didn’t miss a beat. “Damn right.”

  They walked a block in silence.

  “Hey,” said Cole. “It seems like Juliet is doing fine. We really liked seeing her the other night at dinner.”

  “She is great,” said Denman, smiling.

  “So she’s not going back to that Salisbury Street place?”

  “She’s pretty happy bunking with me, actually. She was back on the street after a few days’ rest, and has really been showing her stripes as a leader on the homeless issue. The attention that came with this whole Sean thing, as tragic as it has been, has forced all levels of government to get together. She’s really stepped up.”

  “Which is more than can be said for others.”

  “You mean Andrews? Well, I’m sure he’s going to just love bein
g on the Kelowna Police Force,” quipped Denman. He stopped.

  “So about this lunch thing . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “You are up for this?”

  “Oh, sure. You know me . . .”

  They walked another half block and stopped outside a familiar landmark, the Golden Dragon. “After you,” said Denman.

  The room was nearly empty. It wasn’t yet eleven in the morning. A few wait staff hustled about, preparing the spacious room for the lunch rush. One of them came to the two men and explained they weren’t open until eleven-thirty, and to please come back.

  “We’re here to see Mr. Fu,” said Denman in Mandarin.

  The waiter nodded and disappeared into the back. A moment later one of Fu’s bodyguards appeared and escorted them up the stairs, Denman putting his weight on his cane.

  Cole looked around, searching for possible exits and trouble.

  “Relax, Cole. We’re not going to get rubbed out today. Not here,” said Denman with a smile.

  Cole said nothing. They reached the end of the hall and the bodyguard opened a set of curtains and nodded them into the room beyond.

  Hoi Fu rose from a low bench. He bowed slightly to each of the men. Denman nodded in response. Cole tilted his head awkwardly. Fu stepped forward and shook their hands.

  “Good of you to come, Denman. Thank you. And this must be Cole Blackwater. You’re developing quite the reputation, Mr. Blackwater. I hope only half of what I have read about you is true.”

  “Almost none of it is,” grinned Denman. “Cole uses a stunt double.”

  They sat and Fu looked at them. “The last time we spoke, we addressed your concerns that maybe the people who were disappearing from the Downtown Eastside had run afoul of the drug trade. As your friend Mr. Blackwater discovered, that was not the case. I am happy such a nasty piece of business was put to bed.”

  “Three men and two women died, Mr. Fu,” said Cole, looking straight into the man’s eyes. “Two more narrowly escaped death. They suffered torture at the hands of a psychopath.”

  “This is most unfortunate. But as you know, it had nothing to do with my legitimate business interests in the area.”

  Cole shrugged.

  “You seem to doubt the veracity of my claims, Mr. Blackwater. Please, tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Cole was about to speak when the bodyguard reappeared with a tea service. Fu turned to him and said in English, “Just leave it. I will honor my guests by pouring for them.” Fu poured each of them a cup of tea.

  Cole began, “No doubt, the guy was a psychopath. There is no direct link between his crimes and your—what did you call them? Legitimate business interests?”

  Fu nodded.

  “Sean has been very forthcoming about his reasons for what he did. As insane as he was, he targeted homeless people who lived in or around the Lucky Strike as some kind of attention-getting behavior. The attention he wanted, he says—as sick as it sounds—was not for him. He wanted people to look at his father’s business interests in the Lucky Strike and the Downtown Eastside.”

  “He told you this.”

  “He told Nancy Webber.”

  “Your journalist friend.”

  “Yes,” said Cole. “Sean said that he came up with the idea when he overheard a conversation between his father, a man named Frank Ainsworth, and a third man whose name he can’t remember. What I came here to ask you is this: we don’t know who the third man in the room was. It stands to reason that he was involved with the Lucky Strike Manifesto.” He stopped and held Fu’s eye. “Do you know if Ben Chow was in that room with Livingstone and Ainsworth?”

  Fu was silent for a long while. “What difference would it make? The past is in the past. The Manifesto is over and done. The social housing it would have built is off the table. People have been shamed. The City is no further ahead than it was six months ago.”

  Denman spoke up. “It matters because Ben Chow is still on City Council, and he is positioning himself to challenge Don West for his party’s nomination for mayor. If Chow becomes mayor after orchestrating something as underhanded as the Lucky Strike Manifesto, it will be disastrous for this city.”

  Fu smiled. “You are a principled man. I honor that. I do not know if Ben Chow was in that meeting. I had nothing to do whatsoever with this so-called Manifesto. I run restaurants. A grocery store. Some laundromats. That is all. Nothing more. But hear me on this: Ben Chow is going to be the next mayor of Vancouver. He will announce he is challenging Don West very soon. Don West is a buffoon. A grave disappointment. He will step down when Ben Chow steps forward.”

  “You’re going to back Chow?”

  “I will vote for him.”

  “Donate? Organize?”

  “Gentlemen, please,” Fu said, opening his hands. “We are having tea. This is not an inquisition, is it?”

  “Let me get one thing straight,” said Cole. “You can sit there and protest all you like that you are a legitimate business man, but everybody on the east side of the city knows you’re dirty.” Cole stood up, his hands flexing. “You’re backing Ben Chow? That tells me that Chow will have to be defeated. You’re looking at the guy who is going to take him down.”

  Fu shook his head slowly. “So sad,” he said softly, “So sad. I thought that you had learned to control your temper, Mr. Blackwater. I do hope that you will come again for tea. I would very much like to continue this conversation when you have calmed down.”

  “I’m perfectly calm, Mr. Fu. Understand this: you back Ben Chow and I find out about it, you’ll be reading about it on the front page of the Vancouver Sun the next day.”

  Cole left the room without shaking hands. Denman bowed slightly to Fu, who started to speak, but Denman shook his head and left after Cole. He caught up with him on the street.

  They stood silently outside the Golden Dragon for a minute. Then Denman asked, “You okay?”

  Cole exhaled a long breath. “Fine, just fine.”

  “You’ve got a way with people,” said Denman. Cole looked toward the downtown office buildings, cloaked in mist.

  “He had Beatta Nowak killed,” said Cole. “No doubt about it. Chow was his puppet and Andrews was Chow’s. I know it. He had her killed, and he used those two goons I beat up outside Nancy’s place to do it. I know that, too.”

  “So what do you want to do about it?” Denman asked.

  “We get proof. We take those goons down. We take Ben Chow down. We take Hoi Fu down.”

  “And just who is going to do all this taking down?” Denman asked, smiling.

  “Well . . . you and me, of course. And Nancy, Juliet, Macy Terry, and a hundred others. A thousand others. But we’ll start with just you and me.”

  EPILOGUE

  JOHN DAVID EDMONDS SAT ON the park bench and surveyed the buses unloading the morning’s commuters. He had been one of those once. John was the sixth of ten children. He had been born in Moncton, New Brunswick, in 1952. His father had to work two full-time jobs: six days a week, sixteen hours a day, and on Sunday he dressed in the same suit he had owned for two decades and took his burgeoning family to church. Afterward the old man would change, cut the lawn, and then disappear into the tool shed for the afternoon, where he listened to baseball on the radio and dreamed about what might have been.

  Even at a young age John David knew that his father drank during those long afternoons in the shed. The term alcoholic wasn’t widely accepted during the 1950s, unlike today. He was a functional drunk. The children all learned in time to avoid the shed, but sometimes trouble found them regardless of where they hid.

  John David left home when he was fourteen and hitchhiked to Saint John where he sold newspapers and lied about his age. He lived in a hostel. By the time he was sixteen he’d been to jail twice and had twice been returned to his family home, where he received tremendous beatings from his father and faced the pitiful tears of his helpless mother.

  After leaving home for the last time at sixteen, h
e never spoke with his father again. He didn’t correspond with his mother for years, and then only once a year at Christmas, the first letter coming to announce that his father had died at his own hand the previous fall.

  John David’s big break came when he was eighteen. He had been hanging around the newsroom in the evening, bringing the reporters coffee, when a cub reporter who wrote filler for the entertainment section was hit by a car on his way into the office. The man wasn’t seriously injured, but twelve column inches needed completing that night, and no one was around to fill the space. The entertainment editor knew that John David liked movies, so he asked him to write the copy on whatever film he had most recently seen. A year later the paper was helping John David through college and in 1973 he had a regular column for the entertainment section. And like his father, he was a functional drunk.

  In 1978 he was offered a position with the Victoria Times Colonist. He and his young family moved across the country where he became the editor of the paper’s entertainment section. He had big dreams, but bigger obstacles.

  In 1980 he moved again, to Saskatoon, and then to Winnipeg. And Calgary.

  By 1984 the pattern had become clear. The young man from Moncton, with the quick wit and the biting commentary on movies and culture of the day, performed well for the first year or two at each paper, but he soon began to disappear and would be found sleeping off a week of binge-drinking on the couch of a stranger. John David’s wife left in 1989, taking their three children with her, proclaiming they deserved better. And he knew they did.

  In 2001 he attended his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. He stayed for fifteen minutes and then walked two blocks down Eighth Avenue in Calgary and drank himself unconscious. He spent the night in the drunk tank and the next thirty days in a detox program. Then he found a job with Fast Forward magazine.