Duguay said, “I need a piece. Something big. A .45.”
He would make it through the night. Make it until morning, when he could hit the bank and grab his rainy day money. With a gun in his jeans, he could make it all the way back to the streets of Montreal.
Twenty-One
It begins with the bass line to a new song, and the curtains part to reveal the first glimpse of the dancer. And so the ceremony begins beneath the dim lights, the stage cool to her bare feet, the funky scent of liquor and perspiration in the air.
Feeling unknown
And you’re all alone...
Bathed in steel moonlight, yes, the dancer moves liquid to the beat. Men watch, many of them believing they could find religion where her thighs meet, the delta of some deeper well. The prize they have sought for all time. Men pause with pool cues in hand, their eyes dialed in to the stage. This is what they have come for.
The girl with the coal black hair arches her back, rolls to her side and lifts her head. McKelvey stares into her eyes, and he sees only a girl, the girl his son perhaps loved, and this leaves him feeling lightheaded. The room begins to rotate on an axis, and he doubts himself, doubts his ability to follow through with all this. But the doubt is fleeting. The training comes back. The years of walking the beat, driving the streets of the division. He slows his breathing, focuses on the task at hand.
Lift up the receiver
I’ll make you a believer
Someone howls, then there is clapping as the dancer rises from the floor, a goddess come alive, and she slips back through black curtains. It is as though she simply dissolves. It takes a long time for McKelvey’s eyes to adjust to the dim lighting, or more like the absence of lighting. He is no stranger to these establishments, but it has been a while.
She is just a girl, just a kid. Somebody’s daughter, he thinks. He moves through the tables, past the girls on the stools touching their toes for private dances, through groups of young men with dozens of beer bottles on their tables, and he moves to the hallway at the rear that will lead him to the dressing room.
Experience had taught McKelvey that to be in command, a man must believe he is in command. “Fake it if you have to,” is how the old veteran cop had put it to him his first day on the job all those centuries ago. Now he had the .25 pistol shoved in the back of his waistband with his untucked dress shirt covering it, and he reached back and felt it, a slight comfort, as he slipped down the hallway and on past the set of doors for the washrooms, crossing the final threshold of his life. At the end of the hallway, there was a set of stairs. He took the only other route, a short hallway to the left. At the end of it he turned the knob on the door and pushed it open, coming into another long and blue-lit hallway. Now the music began to thump in his chest as the next dancer came on stage and the men clapped in half-hearted appreciation. He opened the door at the end of that hallway, and he was inside the dressing room.
It was very dimly lit. Three women were in various stages of dress and undress, they were all smoking, and only one of them, a tall and skinny blonde girl, seemed to take notice of him. The blonde eyed him while she brushed her phoney hair. McKelvey pulled out a cigarette from a package he’d bought just that afternoon after the nuclear devastation of the tattoo shop, his first transgression in months. That initial draw sending a dose of dope to his head, good old dependable nicotine. It made him feel guilty to give in, to surrender once again, but Christ, it didn’t really matter any more, did it?
He had just finished lighting the cigarette when the girl with the black hair came into the room from the stage hallway. Dressed in a short kimono now, carrying the blanket she used on stage.
“Jessie,” McKelvey said.
She squinted and gave him a look. She got closer to him, but not too close.
“Who are you?” she said.
“I’m Gavin’s dad,” he said then reached into the back pocket of his pants and pulled out the Polaroid from the tattoo parlour. She stared. She seemed transfixed, on the verge of breaking down, then suddenly her body language changed, and she was defiant, tough.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. But she was visibly shaken. He knew the truth without asking. Years of questioning drivers, crooks, garden variety assholes, had honed that sixth sense to a sharp edge. He saw her life and her connection to his boy in her eyes.
“It’s right here in the picture. You got matching tattoos. Because you were pregnant. The girl at the shop told me the whole story. Come on, Jessie, cut me some slack here. I just want to talk to you for an hour. Just an hour of your time.”
The other girls were listening now, pretending to curl their hair or apply thick mascara. Jessie tossed the comforter over in a corner and took a cigarette from the ashtray, took a haul.
“He was my son,” he said. “I only had the one. I just want to talk to you, Jessie. It’s been a rough couple of years. Would you do that for me?”
She looked at him, and as he spoke, she visibly softened. She liked him, just something about him. Then she knew. She knew the parts of her boy that she saw in this man standing there in front of her. The curly hair, the intense blue eyes, that handsomeness that was neither conventional nor easy to explain.
“Well, I’m sorry you came all this way,” she said, “but somebody lied to you. There’s no baby.”
“Come on, Jessie,” he said. “Don’t fuck with me, not tonight.”
McKelvey saw the expression change on the blonde girl’s face, and he turned to see a stocky man coming through the door. McKelvey did the calculations quickly. The man was about his height, but a good bit heavier, more solid. A bouncer or paid muscle.
“This guy bothering you, Jess?” the man said and wagged a thumb at McKelvey.
“He was just leaving, Gerry,” she said.
“Now just wait a minute,” McKelvey said, but Gerry took steps towards him, and it was McKelvey’s experience that once the distance was closed, there was no going back. So he reached behind his shirt, pulled the pistol free and brought his weight down through his arm and his hand and cut the man across the head, a short and deep gash across the forehead that instantly opened up and flowed. Gerry blinked and staggered, but only for a second.
“Get Duguay!” one of the girls yelled.
Gerry put his hand to his face to wipe away the blood but kept coming on, all rolling shoulders and thick arms, and McKelvey absorbed a hard shot to the left cheek before employing a manoeuvre he’d been taught thirty years earlier, one he’d used on more than one occasion in the outdoor parks and graffiti-splashed hallways of city housing complexes, and he side-stepped a quick shuffle, got hold of the man’s neck and had him off balance and on the floor with a sharp knee to the back of the leg. He felt quickly for the cuffs at his belt, an old habit, then stepped off with his back to the wall, the pistol trained.
“Gerry!” Jessie cried, and went to his side, using her blanket to clean the blood that was rushing from the gash. She looked back up to McKelvey, hatred in her eyes, and she said, “He was just doing his job, you know. He was trying to protect me. We get a lot of creeps around this place. You don’t have to be such an asshole.”
“I need you to come with me,” McKelvey said, and he realized how drained he was from the brief scuffle, too old for all this. His heart was hammering, and he was winded. His cheek was beginning to throb now, and he could feel the flesh rising, tightening. In the excitement of the moment, he had failed to recognize the power of the punch.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Jessie said. “I told you, there was no baby!”
McKelvey was about to reach across and grab her arm when the side door opened and Duguay came in, the blonde girl behind him, her eyes hungry for a fight. The two men stared for a long moment. Duguay recognized McKelvey from the black and white photo he’d gleaned from a source, a shot of McKelvey in uniform, young and fresh-faced and unsmiling in his serious policeman’s pose. And McKelvey recognized Duguay from the file of
photos, from the very images, both real and imagined, that were scorched across his memory. All of the fantasies, all of the dreams of being alone in a room with this man, it was suddenly here and now, and McKelvey wanted nothing more than to take the girl and find his kin.
Duguay said simply, “I didn’t kill your son.”
“I didn’t come here to settle with you,” McKelvey said.
“She’s coming with me.”
Duguay shook his head. “No,” he said, “she belongs to me.”
McKelvey pointed the pistol at Duguay’s face.
“She doesn’t belong to you any more,” McKelvey said.
“Are you going to protect her like you protected your son?” Duguay said.
McKelvey’s eyes flickered, his jaw clenched, but he came back with a shot of his own, one that would hurt Duguay in the worst place: his street credibility. “You don’t know anything about me and my boy. You know what makes me sick about you assholes? You kill people, you steal from them, and you put little girls to work on the street, then when you get caught, you’re not even man enough to do your time. Your friends here know you turned over and made a deal with the Crown your last go-around?”
The dancers didn’t say anything, but they all looked over to Duguay. McKelvey knew the gossip would make the rounds, and the number who disbelieved it would matter not at all.
“I’m not making any deals, fucker. You’re already a dead man, so you might as well pull the trigger. Nobody shoves a gun in my face, not in my house. Come on. Do it.”
McKelvey pulled the gun back a little and said, “I’m taking her with me. I’m taking the girl. And if you try to stop me, I’ll kill you. If I see you again, I’ll kill you, I swear to God.”
“I will see you again, make no mistake,” Duguay said.
McKelvey motioned with his hand, but Jessie stayed where she was, holding the blanket to Gerry’s face. Duguay nodded toward the door. This girl he had lifted up, offered work to.
“Go,” he said. “You’re done here.”
Jessie rose slowly, confused, her arms wrapped around her chest. She glanced between the two men, the girls she worked with, Her fate once again and always completely beyond her grasp.
“Go!” Duguay hollered. “And take the fucking pig with you.”
McKelvey took the girl’s arm and walked backwards out the door.
Twenty-Two
In the little truck, the girl changed again, everything about her. Her body language gave McKelvey the idea of somebody who didn’t seem heartbroken at the prospect of being pulled away from the club. Duguay had said he was done with her. Perhaps she understood the finality of things in this life much more profoundly than other girls her age. When she did protest, he felt that she was going through the motions.
“This is fucking crazy,” she said. “He’ll come after you, you know.”
“Probably,” he said, and he drove.
“So what’s your plan now, Sherlock?”
“I just want to talk with you a little, that’s all.”
“What are you going to do if I jump out of the car the next time you stop?” she said.
“Handcuff you to the door.”
She looked at him. He stared at the road. He was staying away from the main streets. It was dark, everything turned a brown-yellow from the dim street lamps. He felt her eyes on him, his face illuminated each time they passed beneath a light.
“You wouldn’t,” she said. “That’s confinement or something. It’s a crime, right?”
“Yes, it’s a crime,” he said. “And yes, I would.”
He let the threat of handcuffs hang there while his mind tallied the half-dozen charges he was already facing. He shivered through one of those very rare moments when it becomes glaringly clear that your life has taken an entirely new direction. He saw himself from a whole new angle; saw something that had perhaps been there all along, maybe just beneath the surface. Who knew. It was a question of environment. Working as a cop in the city had changed him. In ways that he couldn’t even fully articulate for himself, let alone for Caroline. It didn’t matter; unless you had been shot at in the middle of a lonesome night by a seventeen-year-old with a stolen handgun, unless you had hurt men and been hurt by them in the course of wearing a badge, unless you had been The Law in a city like this with its immigrants and its extremes of poverty and riches, unless you had done it, there was just no way you could understand how the job changed a man from beginning to end.
He pulled up the driveway and shut the engine off. They sat there, the engine ticking. He looked over at her. Just a girl. A child. The last person to love his son.
“I’m going to get out of the truck and head inside. I’d like you to come and talk to me. But I’m too old, and it’s too late at night for me to run after you. That’s the truth of it. So it’s up to you,” he said. “I do have some clothes you could wear. And I make a pretty good grilled cheese.”
“You’re an asshole,” she said, “hurting Gerry like that.”
“I wish I hadn’t done it,” he said.
She glared at him for a long minute.
“I only like grilled cheese with the yellow kind,” she said.
She was so serious. Tough.
“Cheddar, sure,” he said. “It’s the only way I make them.”
The girl named Jessie Rainbird was a walking contradiction. She was small, yet she seemed a large presence. She was scared, yet she was aiming for threatening. In her hazel eyes there was a fierceness that McKelvey thought he recognized. The defiance, the smouldering anger in his boy’s eyes. It was there. From where did this originate, he wanted to know. Was it something inborn, or was it developed? Was it generational angst that was beyond comprehension or explanation? Was it his fault, his poor parenting, or was it an inevitable character trait? His boy had always been stubborn, strong-willed. His favourite phrase was “no, me do” by the time he was three. But still, there had been a child there, a happy child…
“Gavin told me a little about you, you know,” she said. “How you’re a cop.”
McKelvey was standing at the stove, flipping a grilled cheese. She was seated at the table dressed in a pair of his jeans, the legs rolled up and the waist cinched with a belt. She wore one of his T-shirts and a fleece over top, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail. Rudolph was sitting there watching.
“I bet he had lots to say about that,” McKelvey said.
“I think he wanted to be one some day. He said it would have made you proud.”
“I wouldn’t have liked it very much,” he said. “It’s not a job I’d recommend.”
“He never really said anything bad about you, in case that’s what you want to know. Just how you guys argued all the time, and it got to the point where he couldn’t stand being in the house.”
He gave the frying pan a flip with his wrist and shot the sandwich onto a plate. He used the spatula to slice it in half on the diagonal and presented it to Jessie.
“Can I get you a drink?” he said, then doubted he had any fresh milk in the fridge.
“You have any rum?” she said and levelled him with stone eyes. Unblinking.
He looked at her for a moment and thought he was looking into the eyes of a fifty-year-old. He had to remember that she took her clothes off for rooms full of strange men, and who knew what else. Those charges which had sent her to rehab were for prostitution. This was no innocent angel. A rum in the grand scheme of things?
“Why not,” he said. He went to the cabinet in the living room and came back with two glasses and a bottle of Captain Morgan’s dark rum that was a little less than half full. It was what he and the school teacher had gotten into that night. After the wine. Now he measured out two shots. He pushed her a glass then took his own and brought it to his lips, smelled the rich woody scent, hoped the stuff would steer him clear of the usual sadness tonight.
“Sorry, no Coke,” he said.
She shrugged and said, “Just waters it down anyway.”
“I wasn’t the world’s best dad, but...” McKelvey began. He cleared his throat, started again. “We didn’t see eye to eye on some important issues, and...well, you know how it goes.”
“It was dope at first,” she said. “The dope and the skateboarding and the whole lifestyle. Gavin changed when he was out there, though. He wanted to get off the drugs. And he did. And then...”
He waited. Had been waiting a thousand days to hear this. But it was too much, and she changed subjects like throwing a switch.
“I never knew my dad,” she said, then took a bite of the sandwich. She chewed. “He was a hockey player. He was good at it, too. A goalie. I wish I could at least remember something about him. It’d be nice to have something to try to forget.”
“Did he play in the minors or the NHL?”
“I don’t want to talk about all that,” she said.
He drank, and the booze burned his throat. The sting of the hard liquor reminded him of winter nights spent in cold patrol cars, that good belt of rye or rum waiting at the bar at the end of a shift. He looked down into the glass and thought of the nights he had gone to the bar straight after work, killing a few hours before heading home. Hell, more than a few hours. Just like his father. The nights he kept looking over at the clock, his buddies roaring about something, always finding a reason to stay another five minutes. What was he avoiding? What had he missed all those years?
“They’re overrated,” he said.
“What is?” she said.
“Fathers.”
Jessie finished half the sandwich then took a long drink of the rum. She barely winced, and McKelvey knew without a doubt the girl could drink him under the table. He was already softening at the edges from the meagre mouthful of rum. So this is what had become of the young man hanging on until closing time, grasping at a shot at immortality.
“That’s not very nice to say,” she said. “I bet you got to know your dad, that’s why. Or else you wouldn’t be saying that.”
The Weight of Stones Page 17