Summer of the Gun

by Warren Court

  “Check the rest of the street too. We might be on camera as we speak.”

  Temple nodded. Like he needed Wozniak telling him how to do his job. Wozniak, the probable wife killer.

  Temple still had the three drivers’ licences and went over to a scout car to use its mobile data terminal, or MDT. Their own work cars weren’t equipped with them. Too expensive. They just had lights and sirens mounted in the grill. Some of them had police radios, but every detective now used his cell phone.

  Temple logged into the console with his own credentials and entered the licence details. Rap sheets on two of the males came up. Kim Luck had the longest: robbery, assault, drug possession. Associated with the Lucky Eight Society. Temple remembered now where he had run into Mr. Luck—a double homicide couple of years ago in an apartment block. Word on the street was it was payback by the Lucky Eights against the Mekong Delta Boys. Luck was brought in for questioning but released for lack of evidence. Temple was interested to see what Luck’s gun brought back now in terms of ballistic. They might be able to tie him to something else and close that out, too.

  Temple got out of the car and went back over to Wozniak. “Kim Luck and his boys there are members of the Lucky Eight Society.”

  Wozniak raised his eyebrows, and they both looked over as Mendoza came up. He was back from checking out the rear of the restaurant.

  “It looks clean back there. Well, not really; it’s dirty as shit. I saw a rat the size of one of those wiener dogs. But the door was locked from the inside. No shell casings, nothing discarded. We’ll keep combing it.”

  “What do you know about the Lucky Eight Society?” Temple said.

  Mendoza said, “They’re known players—drugs, women, guns. Usual stuff.”

  “So, this could be as easy as a retaliation hit,” Temple said. “Two shooters are hired, one white guy; they come in and order, turn and open fire on the bangers.”

  “And then do the restaurant manager and cook. They’re witnesses.”

  “Right.”

  “Why do you say ‘hired shooters’?”

  “One was white.”

  “That’s racist,” Wozniak said.

  Temple laughed. “Don’t get me wrong; it could be another gang, a non-Asian one. It’s something to go on. Let’s talk to someone in gangs, see who has a beef with the Lucky Eight Society. And I want to see the receipts. We can track down who ate here last by credit or debit cards. Hopefully they were in here just before the shooters arrived. Maybe it was the shooters themselves and they were hungry and ate first.”

  Forensics were bringing out the bags of evidence. It would be sorted and catalogued and then turned over to Guns and Gangs to work. In an ideal situation, the G&G team would funnel the info to homicide. Ideal worlds, though, didn’t exist in the macho environment of the police. Temple was used to it, prepared for it even. The clock was ticking. Those shooters were getting farther and farther away from the scene as the cops argued over jurisdiction.

  “Hey, Temple, what’s the word on this?” a voice called from the crowd. Temple recognized it: Vic Dellaware, a crime reporter with a Toronto tabloid.

  Temple nodded at the officer holding Vic back, and the reporter was allowed to cross under the yellow tape. Temple met him before he reached the crime scene.

  “Whoa, that’s far enough.”

  Vic had a large camera around his neck. He raised it to snap a pic of Temple approaching

  “Thanks,” Vic said. “You could have smiled for me.”

  “Give me a break, man.” Temple shook his hand. “How you been? You look like shit.”

  “I am shit,” Vic said. He coughed and shot an oyster out of his mouth.

  “Contaminating my crime scene,” Temple said. “We’re going to wind up getting your DNA.”

  Vic took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth.

  “You all right?” Temple asked.

  Vic Dellaware looked worn out; his skin was grey and his cheeks were starting to get that hollowed look to them. He was wearing his customary green army jacket. No matter how hot it was outside, Vic always had that on. Peace symbols and American and Canadian flag combo pins, and one for POW/MIAs. Dellaware was in his sixties and had been pounding the crime beat ever since Temple got on the force. Everyone on the job knew him. He was a pain in the ass but sometimes a great asset. He would confidentially drop the name of a source to them if the crime was heartbreaking, if it involved the rape of a young woman or death of a child. But he was a newsman through and through and was always on the hunt for a good story.

  “I was just down the street. Surprised I didn’t hear the shots myself.”

  “You see anybody race past you in a black SUV?”

  “No, I was at that little noodle shop down there.” Vic started a racking cough again. “Fucking Agent Orange,” Vic said. “Cancer.”

  Temple looked at him, startled.

  “My ticket is punched, kid. I don’t have a lot of time.”

  Temple was about to offer condolences but Vic waved him off. “What’s happened here?” he said.

  “Three Lucky Eight Society members gunned down as well as the owner of the restaurant and his assistant.”

  “Can I snap a pic?”

  “Course not,” Temple said “But I do have three ID’s here. You know any of these guys?” Temple handed Vic the drivers’ licences.

  “Yeah, this little punk, Kim Luck. I know him. The Lucky Eights, huh? All three dead? Good riddance. They’ve been a scourge on these people since they were out of diapers.”

  “You cover Chinatown a lot?”

  “Almost exclusively back in the eighties. Man, it was bad. Machine guns in the streets, lighting it up. I thought things had calmed down. I still hang out a lot down here.”

  Another round of hacking and Vic handed the drivers’ licences back.

  “Okay, you gotta move behind the line. The other journalists see you in here, they’ll all want in.”

  “We can’t have that. Goddamn vultures. You get a lead on anything, you let me know, okay? I need an exclusive. Haven’t had one in—”

  “Since the nineties,” Temple said.

  Vic laughed. “Up yours, rookie.” He went back behind the yellow tape.

  4

  It was a long night for Temple and Mendoza. The cops who’d secured the scene were swapped out as the next shift came on, but homicide was there the whole night, canvassing what few witnesses there were. Most of the places were restaurants and stores closed for the day. There weren’t a lot of tenants, but they managed to find a few. All of them, except for the old lady up the street, claimed they’d heard nothing. She was gold, and Temple knew she was probably in danger. Either gang could take her out; the assassins would want to shut her up, and the target gang would want to keep her from spoiling their revenge. Just part of their never-ending battle for turf.

  Temple spoke to Wozniak and their boss, Inspector Munshin, about putting someone with her. They agreed, but couldn’t see it going long term. It was a money thing.

  It wasn’t until the morning that they caught a break. Just as they were wrapping things up and going to take a couple of hours off, Temple got a call from a Sergeant Piller on the Peel Regional Police, the force to the west of Toronto, responding to the alert for gunshot wounds. “We got a guy with a gunshot wound to the leg,” Piller told him. “He’s at Brampton Memorial Hospital.”

  “Right. We’ll be out,” Temple said.

  Mendoza and Temple grabbed some large double-doubles from a Tim Hortons and headed out of town. Brampton was home to a large Indian population and Toronto’s airport, Pearson International. It was a wasteland of modern housing subdivisions, two-story goliaths crammed together, but it was clean and orderly.

  Temple and Mendoza met up with Sergeant Piller at the hospital’s front desk.

  “Where is he, surgery?” Temple said.

  “No, the morgue.”

  “He bled out from a leg wound?”

  “Not exact
ly. Follow me.”

  Temple was in no mood for theatrics but kept his cool. They took the elevator down to the basement. The morgue was bright and cold. There was a wall of metal doors and in the centre was a cutting table for autopsies. On it was a lump covered by a sheet. Temple noticed that the drains that ran along the sides of the table were bone dry.

  “There’s your guy. At least we think it’s a guy.”

  “Huh?” Mendoza said.

  “His genitals got ripped off. Here—see for yourself.” The sergeant pulled the sheet back fast to reveal a mass of flesh and hair and bone. It looked like something out of John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing.

  Mendoza ran to a sink and tossed the double-double and anything else he had left in him in to it. Temple resisted the urge to do likewise. He’d seen some bodies in his time, but this was almost unrecognizable. There was an arm and a leg for sure. Everything else was like a can of ravioli.

  “He got hit by a train,” Piller said.

  “I’ll say,” Temple said.

  “There’s the wound on the leg. Looks like a through-and-through gunshot.”

  Temple got closer to the mass of flesh and agreed with the sergeant. “Could be our guy,” he said. “What train? Where?”

  “On the tracks northwest of us, towards Milton. Last train out of Union Station. It hit the body at...” Piller consulted his notes. “Approximately twelve forty-five a.m. Caused a massive delay. Maybe you heard about it.”

  “Nope,” Temple said, and stepped back. The man’s head was gone. Where it had been was a tangled mass of flesh.

  The sergeant said, “The train was going close to a hundred clicks when it hit him. Again, we’re assuming it’s a man.”

  “Look at that leg, how hairy it is.”

  The sergeant shrugged.

  “Only one arm was still attached to the body, but the hand was gone, sliced clean off. The other arm was just a stump. No fingerprints to take.”

  “Train hits them, spins them up under it and chews them up good. It’s not so bad if the back of the train hits them. That’s just a passenger car with a conductor at the front of it.”

  Temple knew what the sergeant was talking about. When the GO Transit trains got to the end of the line, they didn’t bother switching the engine around; they just ran it in reverse. A conductor sat in the front of the lead car and was in radio contact with the engineers at the other end.

  Temple could remember this idiot one time had tried to kill himself by parking his truck over one set of the double tracks and waiting for the train to come along. But the train had been running with the engine at the other end, so only the lead passenger car had hit his truck. It was not heavy enough to destroy the truck and the occupant; instead, it bounced the truck over onto the other tracks and caused a derailment. Several people in that passenger car had been hurt; one later died of his wounds. But the guy in the truck had survived, and had been charged with bodily harm causing death. If he had planned it out properly, he would have put his truck over the other set of tracks; in that direction, the 200-ton engine always led. It would have smoked him as bad as this body on the slab.

  “Interesting. No ID on him?”

  “Nope. We scoured the surrounding area for hours. We’ll go back out now that it’s light. We might find something.”

  “Okay. Cover this up,” Temple said and went over to Mendoza, who was wiping his mouth with a paper towel.

  “You okay there, buddy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thought maybe we’d grab some lunch. I’m thinking pulled pork sandwiches from that place on Dundas,” Temple said.

  “Fuck you,” Mendoza said.

  The sergeant came over to them.

  “Sergeant, you’re going to continue forensics on this body?” Temple said.

  “As much as we can.”

  “Okay. Let me know if you find anything else out.” He handed the sergeant a card and took a pale-faced Mendoza out of there.

  5

  On the way back to the station Temple and Mendoza discussed the case.

  “Call the GO Train. Find out if they took that engine down to the yard in Mimico,” Temple said.

  “Why?”

  “I want to go over it. You heard what the sergeant said: body parts get chewed up and caught up in it. They have to take the train out of service and clean it out. I want to get to it before they do that. Call Sara Chang in forensics.”

  “Your ex-girlfriend?”

  “We dated for a month. But she’s the best—in forensics, I mean. We’ll take her out to work the engine.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m going to follow up on that report from Guns and Gangs, find out who the Lucky Eight guys are banging against these days,” Temple said.

  By the time they’d got back to homicide headquarters, the identities of all five of the Beautiful City victims had been released and next of kin notified. Already the online and television news were reporting the incident as a gangland slaying. Profiles of the Lucky Eight Society and their past deeds were being discussed, and reporters were busy reminding the public about how, decades ago in Chinatown, Asian gangs had regularly massacred each other. They all ended their stories with the hope that the dark days of those gang wars were not being revisited.

  There was a copy of the Toronto Star on the desk in Temple’s cubicle when he got back. The front-page headline read Gangland Shootout Leaves 5 Dead. There was a grainy long-distance shot of the taped-off crime scene and Temple coming out of the restaurant.

  “Nice pic,” Dalupan said. “Thought you’d like that.” Twenty-nine-year-old Detective Constable Francis Dalupan was a part of Homicide Team Two. A junior member like Mendoza, he worked mostly with Detective Wozniak. Tracking down witnesses, running to fetch reports from forensics or the coroner, all the shit work. Dalupan was not a hard-charging cop like Mendoza or Temple; his soft skills came in handy when trying to get a description of a shooter out of a reluctant witness. And he worked those computer keys like nobody else on the team.

  “Where’s Tim?” Temple said as he dropped his keys and notebook on his desk.

  “In with the boss.”

  Temple said, “Get me a couple more copies of that, would you?” He pointed to the Star. “I want to send one to my mother.”

  Dalupan nodded and sank back down into his cubicle.

  Inspector Munshin’s door was open. Temple rapped his knuckles lightly on it as he entered.

  “John,” Munshin said. He was in his shirtsleeves and sitting on the edge of his desk, his massive arms wrapped around his torso. Tim was in a chair. They were having an afternoon coffee break. Temple had worked for Moonshine, as the troops respectfully called him, for five years now, and he still could not get a measure of the man. There was a wall up around him as wide as his shoulders.

  A competitive weightlifter for many years when he was in uniform, Munshin still had a body-builder’s frame, and his gleaming bald head looked more muscle than bone. He wore a friendly smile on his face most of the time, but it turned to an almost maniacal grin on the rare occasions when he lost his temper. He had a Mr. Spock–like control over his actions and emotions. Self control was his religion—that, and putting killers away for the maximum amount of time that could be had.

  Temple said, “Just got back from Brampton. They got a lump of meat out there; might be one of our shooters in the restaurant thing.”

  Tim’s eyebrows went up and Moonshine grinned.

  “Yeah. Guy with no head, no hands, run over by a train. But he has a bullet wound in his thigh that looks like a nine-millimetre. Close to the artery.”

  “No hands?” Tim asked.

  “One of his arms is ripped off. The other one is still attached, but I think someone cut the hand off with a saw. The coroner is checking on whether it’s post mortem or not. It was pretty surgical for a train engine, considering the rest of him.” Temple shuddered. “It was nasty.”

  All three cops laughed.

&n
bsp; “I want to go out to Mimico, where they house the GO Train engines,” Temple continued. “Go over the one that hit this guy with forensics, see if they can find anything.” He deliberately did not mention Sara’s name; both Tim and Munshin knew of his past dalliance with the city’s top forensics investigator. He hoped they trusted him enough not to let it interfere with any investigation, but he didn’t want to put it in their minds by mentioning her name.

  “Bit of a fishing expedition?” Moonshine said.

  “Might find something. Also, we’re getting a brief from Guns and Gangs. I want to see who the Lucky Eights had a beef with.”

  “What about the stabbing thing, in the bar you were working?” Tim said. “Any updates there?”

  “Sergio and I spotted a witness we want to talk to last night, but he gave us the slip.”

  “How so?”

  “He ran into that shantytown under the Gardiner. Can’t see in there at night. I almost got hit by a brick. Then the call in Chinatown came in.”

  “That stabbing has everyone up in arms,” Wozniak said. “A bar in the village. Everyone is walking around on eggshells with the gay community. We have a lot of work to do to rebuild their trust.”

  “Did we ever have it?” Moonshine said.

  “Doesn’t this latest thing warrant that too?” Temple said.

  “It does, but it’s gangland. The victim was a defenceless woman. That trumps Asian gang-bangers every time.”

  “What about the restaurant owner and the cook? They were innocent. I’m going to guess they’re both immigrants, trying to eke out a living in this city.”

  “Hardly even mentioned in the papers,” Tim said. “The cook’s family sounded off, but the daughter of the owner of the restaurant already wants to claim the body and move on. She hardly said a peep about bringing the perpetrators to justice. I went out with victim services this morning. She just wanted us out of there.”

  Temple dismissed that with a wave of his hand. “If this was a professional hit and they took the time to dispose of their wounded comrade, then I want these guys. That stabbing thing—that was a mental health issue. Guy was probably off his meds. You read the witness reports. They tried to pin it as a homophobic hate crime, but it wasn’t. We track down that little twerp, Tommy Wilson, who knows who did it—case closed.”