That was apparently my limit.
He was out of breath there and I hit him in the upper belly with the tips of my fingers and his eyes widened as he folded in with the blow. Then I was out of my chair and looking for a new target. Claire stood up too and backed up a little to circle behind Smiley.
For a heartbeat Smiley was shocked and for another heartbeat he was betrayed and then he pushed back hard to move away from a hammer blow I’d aimed to break his collarbone and end it.
“FUCKER!”
He wheezed but I said nothing.
Claire came in while he was distracted and aimed a kick from behind at his balls. Smiley twisted slightly and used the motion to scoop her leg up high.
The sound of Claire hitting the floor back first was loud and I feinted a combo to drive him back and then I followed him into the living room. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Claire catching her breath and then she palmed one of Fred’s wooden blocks and pitched it at Smiley’s face.
He ducked it easily but when he raised his head I was ready and moving and my kick took him square in the chest and drove him right through the front window onto the lawn. The rage inside me bubbled over, the feeling of having been controlled and manipulated, of his having put my family in danger and I took it all out on the man in front of me.
Outside I moved; left foot, right foot, weight centred over my hips ready to kick or punch. Watching for a knife or a club or a gun, wanting to take him out with the rage red and bright in my face and feeling that friendly coldness start somewhere deep inside, that happy glorying in pain.
“Fucker!”
He had his breath back and straightened up flipping his jacket into one hand. There are two theories to words in a fight. The first one is that if you use the right ones you’ll make the other guy mad and he’ll make mistakes.
The second theory is to save your breath.
In this case I saved my breath.
A fight is never one move. It’s never one kick or one punch. In a real fight each blow leads to another and to another and every defence has an offensive component and every offensive move has a defensive component. Until the other person is on the ground and you can heel stomp their throat flat and kill them.
Smiley punched with his right hand and I directed it away from me with my left forearm. And when he was open I tried to use the heel of my right hand to flatten his nose or break his jaw, either would have been fine. But he was very close and turned his head away and used his left elbow coming up to hit my chin and blur my vision.
Before I could recover, his jacket was somehow around my throat and he was behind me taking my weight on his back. If he’d finished the throw I would have landed with the jacket still in place and my neck and back broken or dislocated.
“That’s two for flinching!” I broke my own rule and muttered. Then I slammed an elbow into his kidneys, first on one side and then on the other. The pain was enough to make him drop the jacket and turn to face me as Claire yelled from the house that she was calling the police. Smiley just grinned at me and kept coming, “Bitch. Fucker. Chickenshit.”
He whispered it all, lunged for my forearm, and took a grip on my wrist. From there he could do many different bad things, but I turned my hand quickly towards the gap between his thumb and index fingers. Then I pulled my hand towards my chest and slammed an open-palm strike roundhouse into his ear. While he was still reeling, I put the flat of my foot back into the middle of his chest and drove him back to give me room. Before I could do anything more, though, he kicked at me himself and buried the tip of his toe in my gut. While I was backpedalling, he used a right-armed horizontal elbow blow across his body aimed at my throat.
Had it connected he would have crushed my larynx and killed me, but I leaned backwards and the blow missed.
Remember what I said about a fight never being one move? When I leaned back to avoid the throat shot he took the second shot and brought the same hand in from the side to clip me hard in the soft tissue below the base of my skull. In his perfect world it would have dislocated my neck but it didn’t and instead swept me down to his left knee, which rammed all the rest of the air out of my belly.
And I went down. The whole fight had taken maybe ten seconds … maybe less. And I was down on the ground and he was over me raising his heel just like he’d learned in the same schools I’d attended. Heel comes down with all the weight on the throat and the victim suffocates fairly soon.
It takes about two minutes to die that way.
Two minutes to think about everything you haven’t done in life and everything you wanted to do. Above me Smiley’s face was … ecstatic, and I’m not sure he could recognize or even see me. And then the sirens roared again, this time from much closer, like at the end of the block. He had to look, and while he was doing that, Claire reached the dining-room window and screamed “FIRE!” as she threw a box of toys to clatter and shatter in the grass all around us, which made him flinch.
At the same time I realized he was standing on his own jacket and that I had a sleeve in my hand. So I grabbed it tight to my chest and rolled away and he went up and down onto the grass and screamed as his ass smashed onto a solid steel Tonka dump truck. Which gave me a chance to reach my feet and gesture at Smiley, “Come on.”
He stood there with Claire screaming “FIRE!” and Fred screaming, the dog barking, and the neighbours yelling at us to please shut up! Smiley was frozen in indecision and confusion at the chaos that was filling the air around him.
And then he ran.
#39
The cops came two hours later, but I refused to press charges, which pissed them off. Six of them stood around for awhile and tried to figure out what to charge me with. They wanted to search the house and we told them to show us a search warrant because you never, ever let cops into your home unless they’re holding a gun on you. That made them even angrier. Finally they left, telling us over and over again to call if he came back, to be careful, that it was really our fault all this happened because we let him into our home in the first place.
When they were gone Claire put ice on this and that and we cleaned up the toys in the yard. The Tonka truck had taken a beating, though, and had to be pitched, and a few other things were broken, but in total the damage wasn’t that bad. When the doors and windows were all locked and nailed shut with scraps of lumber and alarmed with glassware gimmicked precariously at the entryways to give us warning, we went to bed. Fred was tucked in between us, a dresser was in front of the door, Claire had the bayonet and I had the crowbar.
She looked at me. “He’s gone now?” It wasn’t a question.
“Yep.”
“Do you think he was ever really trying to go straight?”
I shook my head. “Maybe a little. Probably not. And it doesn’t matter shit.”
I locked the house down and we went to sleep and I cancelled babysitting for the immediate future. After a few days I got Claire to lock down the house and divided my time between Marie’s operation and home, but I couldn’t find Smiley anywhere.
I didn’t tell Marie about Smiley. I didn’t want to worry her. Maybe I was just being selfish or maybe I was using her as a lure for Smiley. I just told her to be extra careful. After a day I got both Claire and her to hole up with the doors locked while I expanded my search to every dive in the city. But I could find not the least trace of Smiley and I started to hope he’d run off.
And then the shit started again.
The scene was played over and over on the television, both locally and nationally, eventually even making it onto the cheesier hardcore news channels in the States. Finally I saw it. Three days after Smiley had left I was in the kitchen, doing laundry in the sink, watching Smiley’s TV picking up bad reception.
The film came from a grainy camera in the basement garage of the Health Sciences Centre. It showed an elevator door opening and a couple coming out. A medium-sized brown-or blond-haired woman was limping a bit and pushing her boyfriend in front of
her in a wheelchair. He had a cast on his pelvis and a cell phone in his hand.
His phone call was recorded by fluke, a conversation with his mother about when he’d be home. “On my way now, Ma, no I’m fine …” The conversation was picked up and recorded by a strange little man in Winnipeg’s West End who played with scanners and listened to all sorts of things. When the news came out he realized what he had and gave a copy of his recording to the police and a second one to the CBC.
As the two figures approached, the door to the parkade itself opened automatically. A medium-sized man in black with a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, trench coat and gloves came into view. About ten feet away he raised his arm. There was something silver and white in his right hand, and the woman reached for something in her purse, but she was too slow.
“No, no, no!”
The curiously dead popping of small-calibre gunfire filled the cell phone. The narrator counted down: six shots into the couple; four into the woman who was pushed back away from the wheelchair and two into the man who slouched forward, bowing to the impacts.
“Charlie? Charlie? What was that?”
The figure, his back still to the camera, held the gun up, barrel to the ceiling, and fiddled with the extractor until the cylinder opened to the left. Then he shook out the brass and you could hear it on the cell phone, a cheerful tinkling sound over the panting breaths of the man and woman. The figure reloaded the cylinder one chamber at a time as he walked forward. When he was right in front of the wheelchair, he brought the gun forward again and squeezed two shots into the forehead of the man. Then he stepped to the side and put two more into the face of the woman.
The shooter never showed his face and the pictures of the couple coming out of the hospital were so grainy as to make them unrecognizable. But the voice … that I recognized. On the recorded cell phone call you could hear his voice, calm and disinterested: “And that’s two for flinching.”
I watched it to the end and then left running to find Claire, leaving behind a sink full of half-washed clothes.
#40
Claire listened without interrupting.
“Smiley hunted down Sam and her boyfriend as they were coming out of the hospital.”
“Dead?”
“Dead.”
“Oh.” Claire swayed and for a moment I thought she’d fall. “I thought he might make it. Even after everything.”
“I hoped too.”
She picked up Fred and we both went to his room and started to pack, first for him and then for her. When that was done I handed her the bayonet and helped her tape it to her arm for a quick draw. Then I called for a cab and we finished packing. The last thing I did was pull on my thief’s coat and, on top of that, a grey-lined windbreaker.
“What happens now?”
I wondered about what to do with the dog. Claire saw me and offered, “I’ll take him with us. What do we do now?”
“We get you safe. Then I find Smiley and deal him out.”
“Okay.”
“He’s after Marie’s route and that’s what I’m being paid to protect. And I’m a threat to him so he’ll have to take me out. And he’s my responsibility.”
She said sweetly, “I never should have given you that book.”
I just stood there and chewed my lip and repeated, “He’s my responsibility.”
Claire snorted, “Fuck that. You just want to deal with him yourself.”
I couldn’t argue.
We were heading out the front door with the dog on a leash and Fred in his stroller and got into the cab. I was ready for it to be Smiley but it wasn’t; instead it was a fat South American who drove carefully and precisely downtown. While we were travelling I kept an eye on our trail but saw nothing. Her comment finally sank in.
“What book?”
“Of Mice and Men.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The moral of the story.”
I was genuinely confused as we exited the cab and went inside an office building. I’d wandered most of the downtown and knew that it was possible to move across whole blocks without ever crossing a street. We kept our heads down and scuttled from a hotel to an office building and then via walkway into the Convention Centre. There Claire withdrew $500 from the bank machine and handed me the card and two of the casino cheques worth $2342.25. I could cash those at a payroll company if I needed the money. Other than that I had about sixty dollars saved from babysitting and a Swiss Army knife in my pocket, so I was ready.
Finally I asked Claire, “What moral? Don’t make friends with big, slow people who like rabbits?”
“Oh shut up. Hmmm. Bus, train, or plane?”
“Bus, it has flexibility. We can lie about the ID on a bus. We can buy you tickets to Regina and then reroute you to wherever you want to go at the last minute. Call your folks.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
We bought peanuts, bottled water, and chocolate from a Morden’s chocolate shop that advertised the best chocolate in four provinces and eighteen states. Then Claire went to the nearest phone and started to dump quarters. While she was distracted I repeated the question about the moral of the stupid book while watching for anything suspicious. Finally she answered me.
“Oh, that moral? The moral is that you have to shoot your own dog. You can’t farm it out, it’s unethical.”
“Oh. Really? Is that true?”
“Probably. It’s a moral, maybe not the only one … Hi, Dad!” Her voice suddenly became much more chipper. “No, I’m still in Winnipeg … no, I’m still with Monty … no, everyone’s fine … no, he’s not in prison again … no, everything’s still fine … it’s all fine, Dad. We were thinking maybe Fred and I could come visit you in Banff. Spend some time around your grandson.”
There was a long pause and then she went on. “No. Monty can’t make it. He can’t exactly take the time off work right now. He’s kind of busy. It’ll just be me and Fred and a dog and a mouse …”
Strange watching your wife turn into someone else’s daughter. A minute later she hung up and we went out the main doors of the Convention Centre and into a fresh cab. Ten minutes later we had navigated the confused series of one-way streets to the nearest pet shop, where we bought a carrier for the stupid dog and another for the stupider mouse (whom I had been carrying in a half-empty margarine container with air holes punched in the top).
Ten minutes after that we reached the bus station. While Claire went in to buy tickets she was in a room with about thirty people, including three cops. I took a chance and went to a sporting goods store on Portage Avenue. There I bought a pair of cheap leather gloves, two big canisters of pepper spray (advertised as dog repellent), four highway flares (a most excellent and underused hand-to-hand weapon), a cheap backpack, a whetstone, and a Cold Steel Spike knife. The clerk was distracted, so I pocketed a pair of Simmons mini-binoculars from one display and a cased set of three steel-tipped tungsten Nodor darts from another. After I paid she looked me carefully in the eye.
“Is that everything?”
In clerk that meant she’d seen me steal the darts and the binoculars. I looked her in the eye and answered, “No.”
I reached over to her side of the counter and picked up a twine cutter she’d been using, a viciously hooked razor about an inch long worn on a ring and used to open packages quickly.
“That’s not for sale.”
I handed her a twenty. She pocketed it and stared at me while I made the cutter vanish into my pocket. It would make a fine last-ditch weapon and I needed every edge and gimmick I could beg, borrow or steal. I looked the woman over and waited for her to make a decision. Was she willing to accuse me of stealing? She was a lot smaller than me. I was feeling kind of mean. And it wasn’t her money.
Finally she rang up the bill minus the darts and binoculars and let me go without comment.
At the bus station I gave Claire one of the cans of pepper spray and two of the highway flares to put
into her purse. She gave me half of the peanuts and water and I put that into the backpack. Then I kissed her.
“And if I see Smiley?”
I took a deep breath.
“Use the pepper spray to make sure you have his attention, then set fire to him with the flare. While he’s burning use the bayonet and stab him in the belly, chest, and groin. Twist the blade as you withdraw it to speed bleeding. Bury the body at the crossroads and hammer a stake through his heart. As you leave, salt the earth.”
Claire didn’t smile. “Right.”
“When you get to Banff, is there a computer you can use, one with Internet access?”
“Why?”
I thought quickly. “I’ll e-mail you every day, but if there’s anything important I’ll phone you.”
“Okay. I can think of one or two I could use.”
“Computers that can’t be traced back to you?”
She seemed insulted. “Of course.”
“Okay. I’ll open an e-mail account with the address—what would you remember?”
“How about … inthebeginning?”
“That works but it’s probably in use by some Christian group somewhere. What if I preface it with a prime number, if the first is in use, then the next one?”
“Like 1-2-3-5-7 …”
I asked, “Two is a prime number?”
“You bet.”
“Really?” I was positive she was pulling my leg.
“Really.”
“You’re so smart.”
Claire nodded. “That’s why you married me.”
I corrected her, “No, that’s one of six reasons I married you.”
“Six?”
“Uh-huh.”
Her brow was furrowed. “Which six?”
The bus was already there so I kissed her and helped her to a seat in the middle and on the right side with Fred between her and the window. From there she had the greatest number of options if Smiley found her and got on.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Criminal Page 20