by Ian Truman
Chicken scratch, I swear to God.
Hugo had me sit down, pressed the harp drawing on my skin. This was a big one, probably eight inches across, and it sat well with the size of my arm. He pulled the paper, leaving a perfect, purple tracing of it.
He dipped the needle in the black ink and pressed twice on his pedal. The machine’s familiar hum filled the quiet room. He leaned in and started working on the first line. The pinch of the initial line hit me and then the burning afterwards. There was the smell of blood and the iron in the ink and the antiseptic all around.
I loved tattoos, the old-school way of tattooing, the way they were done when no one but bums and underdogs got tattooed. I missed the day society looked down on it because it made you want to fight back at nothing and everything all at once.
It was the fact that you couldn’t come back on that moment. Sure, you could always get laser removal, but people like me never went for that. You lived with your fucking decisions, and that seemed like a rare thing these days.
The first set of lines was done in a few seconds. Hugo leaned back, dipped the needle in ink again, and the buzzing resumed. We didn’t talk at first. No music, no radio, no small talk. That was the way things were supposed to be. You heard the distant noises of the city in between two loud buzzes, and that was it. A few moments later and the outside of the wing was done. Sixty years of my life I’ll be carrying this thing around. Ten minutes, and it was already shaping up.
I don’t know why I started talking right then. I don’t know why I asked him about her, but she just popped up in my mind. “Wasn’t there an Annie chick working here?”
“She’s still around, yeah.”
“Cillian seemed to be into her.”
“Yeah.”
“They were dating?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“When he died?” He didn’t answer. He dipped the needle again and got back to work.
“Is her ass really that good?” I asked. I was half-joking, but I kinda wanted to know all the same. Cillian had made an incredible case about it.
He looked up from the tattoo. No surprise, no reaction—again.
“I don’t know if I want to answer that,” he said, and then of course he did, “but yeah, her ass is really that good.”
Three seconds of awkwardness, and we were both laughing.
“Cillian told you about Annie’s ass?”
“The only detail I knew of her,” I admitted.
“Sounds a lot like your brother.”
“Yeah! I said. I remembered the little bastard’s fucking smile and I smiled, bittersweet about the memory. “Yeah!” I sighed.
Hugo switched machines to a faster one, pulled at my skin and got back to work.
“You happy with the job?” he asked. He wasn’t talking about the ink.
“You heard about that?”
“It’s not exactly a secret.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Phil came in for some work.”
I hesitated. “I think so.”
“You think so?” He looked at me. Dipped the needle into ink and sighed before adding, “Listen, I don’t want to be quoting Mobb Deep, but there’s no such thing as halfway crooks. You know that, right?”
“I like it. I like the job, yeah.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“What else am I gonna do?”
“That’s better,” he said wiping away my blood before smearing Vaseline on a fresh set of lines. “If you’re stuck in something you didn’t really choose, then you always keep it in your head to get out some day.”
“Can you really leave?”
“Not in the middle of a job.”
“Can you ever really leave for real?”
He hesitated long enough for me to wonder if Hugo still had a foot on the business.
“I just pulled a really shitty job,” I admitted.
“You messed it up?”
“Nah, the job’s done. It was just shit, is all.”
“That explains why you’re here.”
It did, so I said, “Yeah.”
“Not so fun when people get hurt for real.”
“Most of the time I don’t give a fuck. This guy didn’t have anything to do with anything.”
“Wrong time, wrong place?”
“If you want to call it that, sure.”
He didn’t pry. Instead he said, “You know? Irish mob’s not a bad place to land.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you don’t have to kill a cop to make it in. You don’t have to gang rape a woman or get a face tattoo or cut off a finger if you mess up. There’s no ceremony.”
“You mean the Irish aren’t as serious as the rest of them?”
“Oh, no. You’re plenty serious. But to you guys it seems like it’s just a fucking job. Nothing more.”
“We’re the working class of the criminal world?”
“Yeah. Well I guess you could say that.”
I liked that. I smiled and I nodded. I really fucking liked that. That was exactly what I needed to hear.
“What about your people? Close ones. I mean.”
“What about them?”
“You got people you trust?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“All of them?”
I hesitated, and he noticed. I didn’t need to tell him about my doubts regarding Karl Anderson.
“Don’t worry.” He grinned. “It’s expected. It’s damn near impossible to trust everyone you meet. You’ll be lucky if you have two or three people in your life you can trust.” He paused. “The daily grind not killing you?”
“Sometimes I feel like I’m handling five different girlfriends at the same time.”
He laughed. “It feels a lot like that, yeah.”
“And I don’t even get to sleep with them,” I joked. He laughed again.
“Aren’t you married?” he asked.
“Yeah. Kid, too.”
“She’s okay with everything?”
“I thought it was all right. I think it’s going to shit real quick.”
“I know what it’s like.” He reached for more paper towels. “It’s not the same once you’re in the middle of it.”
“She never complains. Maybe that’s the problem.”
“Money’s good though?”
“Best I ever had.” That was true, but it didn’t sound like it. “She doesn’t seem to appreciate the implications of my work. The consequences.”
“You can’t blame her for that.” That sounded more like a statement than advice.
“No,” I admitted. He’d made me realize many things. I was bringing my work home, and that was a problem.
“You want out yet?” he asked.
“No.” I couldn’t lie about that.
“One day you might. When that time comes, you come and see me, all right?” Hugo offering to help out was a huge deal. Considering the state of the South-West when he grew up in it, that meant a lot. “And don’t think I’d mention this to just anybody.”
“I don’t. I really don’t.”
“I actually liked your brother.”
I sighed and grinned. “Yeah. So did I.”
He switched machines and took out a larger needle. Five wide this time, for the shading.
“Found the guy who did it?” he asked.
I looked at him, not sure if I should answer that. The way he asked, I couldn’t fuck around with him. For a moment Hugo felt like the centre of a very dark universe.
“Yeah, I found the guy who did it.”
He didn’t reply to that. He seemed quietly satisfied and got back to work. Dipped the five needles in ink, worked on some shading on the harp. “The Maid of Erin” they called her. She was supposed to represent all things Irish, the mother of us all. Twenty silent minutes, and the shading was done. The guy really was good at his shit.
“We’re gonna
let it bleed out a bit before I wrap you up,” he said. He threw away his gloves. I moved my hand, trying to get some feeling back in the forearm. I looked at her, that angel against a harp, the way her wings spread out backwards, her naked breasts for the world to see.
“The tattoo’s three hundred bucks,” Hugo said.
“Sure,” I replied as I reached for my wallet.
“The get-out-of-jail card is on me.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Yeah,” he said as he looked straight at me. “Just make sure you don’t waste it.”
Chapter 23
That CTL company wasn’t much to work with, but it was something. There was nothing else to get out of Boulay about Ducas anyways, and I was getting tired of the chase. This had been fun, and the money had been amazing, and it turned out I was good at it, but I was getting tired. I was as tired as any man can be working day shifts and swing shifts and graveyard shifts. Not getting enough sleep at home from the kid not sleeping wasn’t helping.
We knew more about what we were up against, but that information had been expensive because Ducas knew we were after him now. My time would be better spent looking into this CTL business until something else fell into my lap. Felt like I was starting all over again and the job was getting to me. Another day, another meeting, inching forward on the investigation.
This was becoming routine, and it shouldn’t have been. I was still the new guy, and I was sitting at the table now. I knew I should have learned to appreciate that. This time it was me and the boss along with Sean and two other guys from sales. We sat ourselves in the boss’ office. After the presentations were done and I figured I could forget their names, the boss took the floor and ran us through what was going on. I knew most of it already.
Obviously, there would be a round of warnings among the resellers to be more careful about their social media and who the fuck approached them, but it wasn’t enough. Social media was the way to sell now, and for better or worse, the landscape was changing as far as who would approach who and why. If this one trust fund was serious about getting a share of the weed market, then that meant old money was going to find one way or another to get its foot in Montreal.
Everyone sounded very serious, very professional. It was boring.
The boss continued with his presentation, saying Trump had pushed legalization in the States back a few years, even in blue states. If the U.S. government was serious about keeping weed illegal, we could still make a decent profit from the border crossings. It was getting riskier as border budgets increased, but most of the attention was focused on Mexico, so we were fine.
Then the boss asked to see if we could inch margins ahead a little bit, try, “playing in the corners.” About twenty minutes into this thing, I realized we could have been sitting in a board meeting back at my old supply warehouse, and it would have sounded just the fucking same.
Now, that was a sign of changing times. When organized crime starts to count its percentages, you know the world is fucked.
Then the pressure came down to me. The faster I could find this guy, the more they could learn about how he was planning to unfold his shit and we could learn how those trust funds expected to inch us out.
Problem was I only had this CTL thing going for me at the moment. I Googled it on my phone and found nothing useful. Too many hits for me to work them all just now. If the guy had a unique company name, things would have been easier. This was so generic and common that I was gonna need some time.
I would need to dress up a list and split it among the guys, see which ones were likely suspects. Ducas was gonna disappear for a while, but this was a company, and you can’t vanish a company that easily. At least that much was good news. Then I realized Sean, my boss, and the two guys were looking my way.
“This too boring for you?” Sean asked.
I looked at him, pointed at the two guys and said, “Their job is to sell shit. Your job is to collect. My job is to find who’s behind these guys, and I’m doing exactly that.”
“See,” my boss said to Sean. “I still don’t know why you don’t like him. Straightforward and straight to the point.”
“How long?” Sean asked.
I looked at my screen. Three hundred ninety-six hits for CTL.
“Not gonna lie. I’ll need time on this one.”
It wasn’t the answer they wanted to hear, Sean especially, but that’s the only answer I had for them.
“Why didn’t you bring Ducas in when you had him at the club?” Sean asked. The implications were not so subtle.
“Ducas is just this one guy.”
“Would send a fucking message, though.”
Sean was sending me a fucking message at the same time. No doubt about it: I couldn’t be perceived as a pushover, so I got serious.
“You didn’t even have a name to start with. I took the little you had to your pushers, got the info I needed out of them. I found his ex-wife, found his name, found his car, found his apartment. I even found who your leak was.”
“He did find that snitch,” my boss said, trying to hold Sean back.
“Boulay wasn’t even a snitch,” I said. “He was just a fucking idiot.”
My boss laughed. Sean wasn’t happy to be shut down, but I needed to go there. “And now I got you a company he’s working with or working for,” I said. “You take down Ducas, that sends a message, sure. But things are not the same on this one. Things are going legal now; this will be public. Old British hags from Westmount will be investing in this shit before we know it.”
“No, they won’t,” one of the guys said.
“Their accountants will. They’re gonna see an income and a dividend and some fucking growth, and it’s gonna be another number to them. What you want is this company, these CTL guys, to try and fail so badly that others won’t even consider investing in this market of ours.”
My boss told Sean, “I knew I had hired him for a reason.” And that was the end of the meeting.
That wasn’t necessarily good news for me. Sean was working his way to the top. Sean wouldn’t suffer me when the boss would retire. I didn’t know whether he’d go as far as to kill me but I knew I didn’t have much leverage with him. Playing the “Cillian’s brother” card would feel fucking cheap but I worried it would have to come down to that.
I stuck around the office to work on my CTL list. Narrowing it down to Montreal addresses helped a lot, then cutting out those which had seemingly legitimate businesses. There was really no process to this, so I went with my gut. Construction, warehouses, transport, cement, car dealerships, things like that.
The logic was flawed but simple: Ducas was the new economy looking to build himself on the foundations of the old one. I ruled out all the new telecom and coding companies; most were busy eating up the land around my home anyways, and only one was in what would be considered the city’s north end.
A couple hours of work, and I had managed to narrow the CTL list to about twelve suspects I was happy with.
Then I got out for a break and I was having a smoke and hating myself for taking up smoking, but I had two ideas running through my mind. First, I needed the fucking cigarette now, so fuck guilt. Second, I had to ask the construction guys in the towers if they knew about the company. At this point if CTL and Ducas didn’t know I was after them, they were either too stupid for this business or too proud to admit it.
So I just got this idea in my head to cross that empty lot on the other side of the street and just waltz onto that construction site. I had dressed neatly that day. I had money. I looked the part of a PI; why wouldn’t I fucking cut to the chase?
So I did. A bunch of workers were right there, and I walked up to them. I used my best Montreal Irish accent. Better than my ma’s. Hell, better than my boss’. I dug that motherfucker straight out of motherfucking Black Rock.
“CTL?” I said. “Ring any bells?”
Two of them shook their heads
no. All of them looked at me, sideways and a little scared. Maybe they had heard of that job I pulled on Ann Street. Maybe some of them were across the street when it happened. Maybe I just looked like a guy you don’t fuck with.
“No?” I insisted. One of them answered. Didn’t know about it. “What about you?” I asked another. He hadn’t heard of CTL, either.
“You guys like the job?” They looked at one another. “Big construction site one after the other, a few years’ worth of work there for ya? Overtime, too?”
They didn’t answer.
“It’s pretty good, yeah?” I insisted.
“Yeah, sure,” one of them said, so I pushed.
“What about it then? CTL?”
“Sounds like a company.”
“It is a company. What kind?”
“Never seen their trucks around.”
“Where are you guys from? Verdun?”
“Nah, man, South Shore,” one said with a thick Franco accent. None of them was holding back now. They were fucking scared, and that was the truth.
“Anyone from north of the city?”
“RDP?”
“Montreal-North, RDP, Villeray maybe.”
“I know a guy from Villeray. Let me text him,” the guy with the Franco accent said.
I took out my wallet. I had thirteen hundred bucks in there. I stopped myself from looking at the money. I hadn’t realized I was walking around with thirteen hundred bucks in my pockets. There were a couple of hundreds and a few twenties, and I was about to hand them out.
The old-poor part of me was screaming Are you kidding me? The fed-up part of me, the one that wanted Ducas gone, wanted some down time for the wife and kid or a vacation. That part of me didn’t give a fuck about thirteen hundred bucks anymore.
As the saying went at the old shop: There’s another check coming in two weeks. I pulled out a few hundreds, handed them around.
“Start texting,” I told them. “CTL.”
They had their phones out in three seconds.
Then a man in a dress shirt asked, “Heille! Qu’est-ce qui se passe icitte?” Wanted to know what the fuck was going on.
“You union, or the foreman?” I asked.
“Foreman.”