Down with the Underdogs

by Ian Truman

  “Do you fucking know who owns this place?”

  “I can guarantee you that kind of line will not work with us,” I said as calmly as I ever said anything. “I can assure you that if you find me standing here it’s because you’re not the one running the show.”

  “Just get the fuck outta here,” he said, swinging his arms around. He had the blade in his hands but I didn’t move an inch.

  “Trust me. I’m as nice as this gets.”

  “You sure you want to go up against the Irish?” Ryan asked.

  “You sure you want to go up against Puerto Rico?” he replied.

  “Third world fucking country,” Ryan snapped back. “Any day, any time.”

  “Hey, fuck you.”

  “Should I call the cops,” the blonde said. She lifted her phone to us to snap photos or a video.

  “It’s unlikely you want to do that,” I said. “Be serious.”

  “It’s okay,” the boss told her as he asked her to lower her phone. “I got this. These guys are just leaving.”

  Jesus Christ. I really had to go there. I stared him in the eye. “Are you sure you want to go there?” I sighed. He didn’t answer so I said, “Ryan.”

  Ryan emptied his pockets. First he took out one of those eight-inch metal rods that acted as “key chains,” then a box cutter he had and some brass knuckles.

  “Pick one,” he told the boss.

  The girl bolted to the back room, saying “Oh my God!”

  “Whitey can wait his turn,” Ryan continued. Whitey wasn’t moving. “So come on now. Pick a weapon. No?” Ryan seemed legitimately disappointed when the owner didn’t move. “That’s what I thought.”

  “Phil,” I said.

  “Quoi?” he replied. He wasn’t paying attention. “Ah, okay!” he added. He just picked up some laptop from a table, snapped the cord from the wall and rolled it around the computer.

  “You leave that right there,” the Latino said.

  “Va chier,” Phil replied, laughing. Phil was making it a terrible habit of stealing laptops. I was going to have to talk to him about that.

  “This is getting old,” I said. I looked at the owner. “Five hundred, in an envelope, in your front mailbox at eleven tonight. The five hundred is there, you just enjoy your business and go on with your life.”

  “It’s fucking extortion?”

  “Yeah,” I laughed.

  “The price you’re fucking charging for a haircut,” Phil said, “it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Yeah!” Ryan continued. “Warwick was broke as fuck and he still made payments. We should be charging you more.”

  “Expenses,” I added with a grin. I told him the exact same way my boss had to me only days earlier. “Can’t do business without them.”

  Ryan picked up his shit one by one, looking at the owner with such arrogance, you wouldn’t believe it. Phil had a new laptop and they both walked out without a second thought. Me, on the other hand, I was nervous about getting hit with a razor between the shoulder blades on my way out. No matter how calm I looked, the stress was there, the tension in the shoulders until the door closed behind me and I was safe.

  After that, the day sort of just went by naturally. It was strange how easy it was to switch from extortion to normal life. It had been a simple job and I kinda just walked home from there, like I was on my lunch break on any other shift. I kissed my wife and gave her a fun little slap on the butt cheek. She slapped me back as I made my way to the fridge. I helped with the food and we sat and had supper like any normal family who was not making their first steps in organized crime. I bathed Liam and played around in the water then read him a story he cared nothing for and let Patricia put him to bed next to her.

  And then I just went right back to work. Just like another day, another shift. It really felt the same.

  When 11 p.m. came around, we checked the mailbox at the barbershop to find it empty. So we walked around the back alley with a sledgehammer and a crowbar, ready to bust down the door.

  To our surprise, there was a security car there from some company we didn’t know about. Maybe the barbershop had some protection or decided to waste some money on guys like these, we didn’t know but there was a guy there all right.

  Then the security guard got out of the car and said, “Mr. Kennedy?”

  How the fuck he knew my name, I had no clue and why he called me mister, I didn’t know, so I looked at him sideways and answered, “Yeah?”

  “Nice to meet you, sir,” he replied, to my surprise. “Mr. Cullens said you might need assistance.”

  Phil just started laughing. Ryan just started laughing. I was smiling. Jesus fucking Christ I loved my new life. We looked at each other. This was absolutely perfect. Sean Cullens was a fucking beast. Never failed at anything, ever.

  The security guard blocked the alley, ready to tell anyone who might show up to wait on the street as they were answering a call. We were busy busting the door. We walked in there and started roaming the cupboards, tool drawers, chests and workstations. Ryan got “creative” with some of the artworks around while Phil was set out to steal two more computers.

  “Leave them,” I told him.

  “Why?”

  “The place needs to stay open if we want to make money off of them,” I said. “Sean’s exact words.”

  “Okay, criss, mais j’pars avec un coffre de’bords,” he replied, saying he was gonna go home with one of the tool chests.

  “Fine,” I replied. He opened one of the tool chests, dumped everything on the floor to the wrecking sound of blades and razors and other metal things like scissors planting themselves in the vintage wooden floors. Then he wiggled the drawer around to see it if was light enough now and started rolling it back to the alleyway. It barely made it through the corridor.

  I turned to Ryan and said, “You’re just gonna smear every piece of art here or are you gonna steal something too?”

  “This is an original Obey,” he replied.

  “Is it worth something?”

  “I don’t know, maybe a hundred, maybe more.”

  “Steal every Obey in the place then.”

  He did. I opened a display case full of shiny things that looked expensive. Things like vintage switchblades and carved or golden straight razors. They seemed to praise these things the way tattoo artists loved their custom-made machines.

  I stashed all of that shit in a velvet bag that was underneath one of the blades. All of it: wooden display cases, little cards with serial numbers on them that read “guarantee of original goods.” I took out a piece of paper from the receptionist’s desk and wrote “$500 a month in an envelope and you get these back. I’m an asshole but I’m not a monster.”

  And then I said, “We’re good.” And that was that. I was happy about it too.

  Ryan and I walked to the back door. Phil was nowhere near gone yet. In fact, Phil was still struggling, pushing the tool chest in the dirty, gravel and cobblestone alley of the old port.

  He sure as shit wasn’t gonna roll that thing back across the bridge and down Mill Street. I snapped my fingers at the security guard and pointed him towards Phil. He helped load the drawer in the back of his Prius, tied it down the best he could and Phil got himself a ride home at the same time.

  I could picture it from here: security car driving around Wellington at night with stolen merchandises strapped in the open trunk. It was perfect.

  “Give the guy some money for the ride, all right?” I said to Phil.

  The security guard replied, “That’s not gonna be necessary, Mr. Cullens—” he was saying.

  “Take the man’s money, I insist.”

  The security guard almost bowed to me, overly polite to the point of downright terror. It felt weird to me that a man could see me that way but he did. I got me wondering how much he owed Sean Cullens and how high he thought I really was in this whole operation.

  “That was good wo
rk,” I said. “I’ll make sure to tell Mr. Cullens.”

  The job was done clean and the job was done well. We could go home satisfied.

  The next day, I lived up to my promise and slipped in a good word to Sean about the security guard. When I asked if the barbershop ended up on the payroll, he said, “No, but then, yes.” He sounded happy about it so I asked.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  The barbershop had called in a repairman to fix the door. The repairman was in the loop on the whole thing from the start. There were only half a dozen companies “authorized” to work the old port. So he started chatting with the owners of the barbershop about the place and the neighbourhood being secretly hard to work in.

  “People here are rich, that attracts a certain kind of scum,” he said. Then went on to talk about this one security company was “really good and everywhere that called them, you can see they have clean windows, no graffiti, no nothing. No break-ins neither.”

  The security firm was Old World Security. The same guys who had helped us bust the place the night before and the fucker called them.

  The rep walked in the place, sold them a three-year plan at three hundred fifty dollars a month. “It’s an expensive neighbourhood, the old port, lots of rich people around, security’s very much in demand. I could be at three different offices right this moment,” the salesman said.

  The barbershop signed the plan.

  I started laughing out loud about how clever the whole thing was. Three-fifty wasn’t five hundred but maybe that’s where they expected to land anyways. Then I looked at the loot bag full of custom blades and expensive things I had on my desk. I smiled to myself. They did look insanely good and, well, technically, they never agreed to pay up the money, so why bother returning these?

  I was a bit of an asshole sometimes. Maybe just a little.

  Chapter 9

  “I need you to find a man,” my boss said to me. He had called me to his warehouse office and said, “It could take some resources.”

  This one wasn’t going to be fun. He wasn’t smiling or walking around with that unbreakable spirit of his.

  “How important is this?”, I asked. He just looked at me. It was important. “I’m happy for the vote of confidence, but don’t you have people with more seniority than me to handle it if it’s that important?”

  The mood was just heavy. If you had asked me, I would’ve said the guy had been overly optimistic about the way the politics of the world was changing. Whatever this was, he hadn’t seen it coming and that said a lot. He looked worried and talked slowly.

  “You found and killed a man, haven’t you?” he stated. That much was true. I didn’t need to answer to that. “You tracked a man all the way to Hamilton, discovered where he lived, staked his home, burnt it down, dragged him to the lake and killed him.” That was true as well.

  As far as I was concerned, only the people involved could’ve had so many details. If the cops hadn’t shown up on my door, that meant none of them had spoken to the police, but how did the Irish mob know about it if Karl or Ryan or Phil hadn’t told him? I had no idea.

  “You have found and killed a man,” he continued, “bringing with you three close friends, none of which had asked you for anything in return.” He looked me in the eye and added, “None of them ever flinching or feeling guilty in any way.” He nodded his head twice. He looked impressed. “Friends like that are a rare gift. It’s true. A really rare gift.”

  I agreed.

  “Killing someone, I got people for that. Busting some doors, I have people for that as well. I have lawyers if the cops or the city ask too many questions. I have cops if the lawyers get too expensive. In this case I need you. I need you to sniff him out, burn his house and drag him to the river.”

  “What’s going on?” I said. I was trying to ease up the mood with the confidence of my tone. It seemed to work because he leaned forward and sighed.

  “The world, it seems, is going one place while we are quickly getting sidelined.”

  “We’re getting sidelined?” I asked.

  “It’s starting to feel that way.”

  “Cops?”

  “Cops are rarely ever a problem.”

  “Got any threats?”

  “No threats per se.”

  “Law isn’t going your way?”

  He didn’t look like he wanted to answer that.

  “Inside job?”

  He didn’t look like he wanted to answer that either.

  “I’m in the ballpark?”

  He nodded. “Ballpark, yes.”

  “On which one.”

  He tossed himself backwards in his chair, slouching in it as he was rubbing his hands in his face in what seemed to be the most satisfying gesture in the universe. He released a long “Aargh!” and then, slapping his arms back down, snapped back out of it and exhaled heavily.

  He didn’t look so sulky anymore. He just looked fed up and looking for a way out or for a smoke and a beer, enough of it to get shit-faced. I could relate to that. He looked the way I did at the end of managing a warehouse shift where the guys kept fucking up the jobs for no apparent reason.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “This is something new, feels like something new. Back in the day, and I mean, shite, only a few months ago, we would’ve handled it like we know how to. Now it seems every idiot around’s got a trust fund and we’re in their way. So! As it seems this is still a life of crime we are sharing, there is apparently always going to be someone coming after us.”

  “The rich don’t like criminals?”

  “They don’t seem to mind the trade.”

  “But they have to be cute?”

  “I hired cuties left and right. That’s not the problem. The problem is new players coming into play. It seems that as marijuana is about to go legal, some people who would have otherwise never dared to come across the likes of you and me are beginning to believe that we are simply gonna yield one of our largest grossing products to some corporation and just walk around sniffing the flowers like it’s a rosy Sunday.”

  “You’re not a fan of Justin Trudeau?”

  “I like the guy as much as the next liberal, but I’m not going to sit down and wait for my market to be cut from under me. Legal or not, I’m the one who’s gonna be selling this shit.”

  “What’s your end game on all of this? I mean, the big picture thing, if you don’t mind me asking. What if the province takes over the sales?”

  “We have lobbyists for that if anything’s gonna move on that front. What do you think our end game is on this?”

  I leaned back and gave half a nod thinking about it. “Best case scenario,” I said., “the government will sell it too expensive, satisfy the separatists who always ask for more money for Quebec, satisfy the leftists who want to save the poor and the rest of us. You end up as a supplier on that front, selling overpriced weed to people who would not have smoked it otherwise. Then you sell the rest of the weed at a price somewhere between black market days and the new benchmark. Market expands, the margins go up, you make more money in the end and everybody’s fucking giddy about it.”

  “And Trudeau thinks crime’s gonna go away,” he said with a satisfied smile. “I knew I hired you for a good reason.”

  “Do you really need the legal market?”

  “I want the legal market.”

  I nodded and approved. “All right, so, who am I supposed to be looking for?”

  “Some rich asshole. And I mean trust fund baby kind of rich.”

  “Got any idea who he is?”

  “Enough to start looking into it, yeah. I need you to stay at a distance from everything, look at what’s going on at arm’s length and ask for things others might forget otherwise.”

  “So this is a PI job?”

  “I guess so. If you want to call it that.”

  “I’m gonna be the Irish mob’s PI?”

  He seemed
to like that. He wasn’t so grumpy anymore. He nodded twice, looking sideways as he was leaning against his desk again.

  “I think you could do a lot worse,” he laughed and added, “I think that in the grand spectrum of all the things going on in the fucking universe, you could have way worse jobs than being a PI for the Irish mob.”

  “I can’t argue there. I had those jobs. I don’t want them anymore.”

  “Guy calls himself Jacques Mesrine,” he said.

  “Mesrine? Ain’t he dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So this guy’s co-opting the name?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “That is so fucking disrespectful,” I said.

  “I know. I agree. He’s been going around on the internet, looking for some of my resellers, asking them to jump ship as soon as pot goes legal. Says he’s rich and he’s got European investors backing him. He just plans to swoop the market for himself and run away with the clientele. He’s been promising RRSPs, paid vacation, kickbacks and sick days.”

  “Sounds like a union gig.”

  “Yeah, leave it to the French to unionize a fucking drug market.”

  I laughed a little. Couldn’t bring up the fact that the Irish were pretty heavy on unions as well so I just made a joke about it. “So now you’re gonna have to pay sick days too?”

  “Only in Quebec, ta-ber-nak,” he said to spite the Province’s long-standing reputation for asking too much out of businesses. You could see he was pissed about it. I was still a union guy at heart. I really was but that was not the time to remind him of that.

  “Soon some of them will even ask for dental,” he sighed. “I know they ain’t gonna be joking about that when weed goes legal. Anyhow. News came up to me, one of my student pushers texted me everything he knew, that’s how we got the name. Only then did a few of my other resellers come clean. Some of them even met with the motherfucker. They’re just dismissing this as nothing serious but I know I got me a certain amount of, let’s call it human resources, to do ahead of me. Find the asshole and what he’s up to, will ya? I need to stop the bleeding before the company goes to shit.”

  “Should I ask you what to do with him or would you rather not know?”