Down with the Underdogs

by Ian Truman

  Then reality hit. A wild car chase through the streets of Montreal? That was just bullshit.

  The excitement was so short-lived it should have been a joke. Wellington was jammed solid at the tracks because of the impossible gridlock on the former Bonaventure Expressway. That was our fucking car chase. Half a mile an hour in the cooking sun and nowhere to go but forward.

  What the fuck was I thinking? A car chase in the middle of a decade long construction nightmare?

  I saw Ducas about eight cars ahead, but neither of us was going anywhere.

  He was as stuck as we were. He was being forced left on Peel heading to the Ville-Marie Expressway, but Peel was a two-lane street, and traffic clogged both. Karl tugged at the wheel and pushed ahead the best he could, but there wasn’t much room to work with.

  I wished it could have been like in the movies. One of us would step on the gas and get up on the sidewalk, and pedestrians would run for their lives. Cabbage would fly off vegetable displays, and Karl would kick it into gear and smash into anything and everything, and no matter how much damage we’d cause, the car would fly.

  There was none of that shit. None.

  The city had put in so many damn dividers there was not a fucking inch to work with. The dividers, the traffic, the cement trucks, the constructions sites. Let’s be honest with ourselves. This was the slowest car chase in history.

  We were stuck on a red light, and Ducas was ahead, stuck on another red light, and it was just too much. “Come on!” I bashed my fist in the dash. I couldn’t fucking believe it. Karl didn’t complain, but he knew the fucking feeling.

  We were both inching forward and tapping the brakes like an old couple coming back from work. Karl clenched the wheel. I wiggled my fingers saying, “Come on, come on, come on.” We were stuck behind Ducas, a couple of cars away and four traffic cops at every damn street corner.

  It took twenty minutes to clear a hundred yards. You can’t make this shit up. Twenty fucking minutes of me thinking I should take off running after the guy. Twenty minutes of knowing the cops would stop me if I did.

  Twenty minutes of running scenarios in my head where I try to explain to a twenty-something officer who had probably been a fucking cadet three months earlier that you just want to drag that guy over there. That guy being a dick in his Audi? “I just want to snatch him out of his car and ask him a few questions with a hammer against his nails, you know? Can I just walk over there and do that, please, Officer?”

  Like that was gonna happen. I sighed and we waited. Karl navigated the lanes, gaining a car every chance he could. Eight cars’ distance became six, then five, then three. Then we finally made it to the end of this nightmare.

  This was the last light before Ducas would hit the expressway. If we couldn’t push through here, he was getting away and we might not get him out of his hole again. I looked ahead: four traffic cops, one per street corner. How the fuck could the city afford so damn many police?

  It was the most infuriating moment of my life. Two men, two cars, and I wanted to bash Ducas’ head in. I wanted Karl to run into him and push him in a fucking wall and then see his blood everywhere on the pavement. I wanted that, and we were stalled in fucking neutral. Couldn’t imagine how Karl felt at the wheel knowing that we were two cars behind and that that was enough to lose him.

  The light turned green and Ducas took off.

  “Argh!” I grunted.

  “Fuck it,” Karl said.

  He bumped one out of the way then squeezed between two more to clear our way to the tunneled on-ramp. We heard the honks of cars followed by the immediate whistle of traffic cops. Two of them looked our way, calling each other on their CBs.

  Karl was having none of it. He stepped on the gas and caught up to Ducas. He rammed Ducas’ car, and the Audi ground against the guardrail, then rammed the car in front of it. Karl pushed for seconds and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. We were getting somewhere now. This was finally getting fun.

  Then the access tunnel opened up to the five wide lanes of the underground highway. Ducas kicked it. The Audi’s engine roared and echoed in the tunnel. Ducas speeded up, cutting back and forth across the lanes, trying to escape.

  Karl shouted and stepped on the gas. I had every confidence in his old BMW, but the chase came down to blind fucking luck and pure fucking anger. Cars were everywhere and we somehow sifted through, but the chase didn’t go the way it was supposed to.

  This is where you imagined the lanes opening up and walls too close for comfort and the traffic cones bolting out of the way as cops lined up behind you, trying to catch up. Karl would yell, “Fuck you, motherfucker!” Or some other basic shit and I would scream, “You’re gonna kills us both!” The cars would weave among innocent bystanders, never hitting any, and we’d feel like DeNiro in fucking Ronin.

  None of that shit happened. We made about a hundred yards into that tunnel before the cops caught up to us. Karl was kicking it hard, but the cops had better engines. Of all the times cops wouldn’t do their fucking jobs, this one time they were on top of their shit.

  They caught up to us and they knew exactly where to hit us to make us lose control. There was no back and forth, no getting away in a nick of time. One hit was all it took. One hit, and Karl just lost it.

  The BMW’s rear wobbled to the left. Karl fought to regain control, but the nose scraped the opposite wall. Karl tried to force us back into our lane, but he overshot it.

  Karl slammed on the brakes as hard as he could but there was little to be done by then. Before I knew it, my side of the car was running right into the concrete dividers of yet another construction site set up there to fix the walls of that goddamned tunnel. My body hit the door as the side of the car wrapped itself against the dividers. Then the airbags hit me as the glass shattered and the metal caved inwards against my feeble body. I felt a pressure hit my side, my ribs, my legs. I didn’t pass out, but I wish I had.

  I vaguely gazed to my left to see the lights of the cop car and two officers getting out, hands on their pistols and shouting.

  I remembered Karl swearing like a madman and my head heavy as shit. Felt like my ears were underwater, couldn’t get my eyes to focus either. I thought I saw more cops and more cops and then firefighters and paramedics after that. We ended up blocking traffic for miles and it made the news.

  I remembered Karl getting arrested. The BMW was a wreck, and the cops were pissed. Karl lost his permit right there. The car was being towed, lawyers were being called. This one was going to be expensive.

  “Reckless driving,” they said, with more charges on the way for sure.

  The firefighters pried me out of the car and strapped me to a gurney. I felt every inch of my right side flare up in pain as they moved me. They took me to an ambulance for my wounds. They told me not to move.

  “Les cops, y’ veulent te parler quand t’arrive à Saint-Luc,” I was told. The police would interrogate me once I made it to the hospital.

  They loaded me in, closed the two little back doors. Karl was gonna spend the night in prison. Not even two hundred yards into that tunnel. Ducas had gotten away, and the cops were on our backs. It was hard to think that this could get worse.

  I was wrong.

  Chapter 28

  They drove me to the emergency room. The waiting room was full. I was strapped to a gurney and coming in with paramedics so I was rushed right through. No wait. No paperwork. Felt like an asshole for it.

  I looked at everyone’s faces feeling like an absolute piece of shit. I saw kids not much older than my son. I saw them, faces buried in the crook of their mothers’ arms. Some were swathed in bandages and crying. I saw old men, sick or homeless, people that appeared to be in real pain.

  I didn’t think I was hurt that bad. I knew I wasn’t hurt that bad. I knew from the news and the hospital’s reputation that some of these people had been waiting for hours, maybe eight, maybe ten.

  I was rushed in
as a precaution after a car chase I was responsible for and a crash I had got myself into. That didn’t matter. A car accident, insurance claimed, trumped the young, the sick and the old, even for an asshole such as myself.

  They pushed me past a set of swing doors. I saw a twitching body on a stretcher in some treatment room. The guy was alive, but barely. The doctors and nurses going on about the fact that he was a John Doe found in some shady tourist hotel with several empty pill bottles by his side. Things like that just seemed normal to them. It really wasn’t to me.

  They rolled me into a side space in the corridor, pulled a curtain around me. The bruised ribs didn’t feel so bad. I could live with a limp. My neck was killing me, whiplash, but I could live with that, too. I had hurt myself worse on the job. All right, maybe not, but still.

  “Okay! Qu’est-ce qu’on a ici?” a young lady doctor asked.

  “Accident d’auto,” a paramedic replied. They discussed my injuries in French: lacerations to the right side of my body, bruised ribs, maybe some broken ones, a minor leg wound. There was talk of my stiff neck and the need for some X-rays to see for fractures or head injury.

  Then they switched to English, perhaps to make sure I knew the shit I had got myself into. “Police are on their way,” they said. “He was flagged for further interrogation so you should keep him around a while.” I heard every word.

  They barely looked my way. He just handed her the board for her to sign them off and the paramedics were ready to move on to their next call. They switched me to a bed and left without a word. I didn’t matter to them. Felt like no one mattered to them.

  “So, car accident, hey?” the doctor said.

  “I’m fine.” I tried to get up.

  “Nuh-uh,” she said as she laid her hands on my shoulders. “I strongly advise you stay down.”

  “You got seventy other people more important than me to take care of.”

  “As true as that may be, I can’t let you go anywhere at least until the police arrive.”

  “Trust me: that’s not why I want to leave.”

  “A car accident is something serious. Even if you think you’re fine, you could wind up back here tomorrow with complications, and then the real fun would begin.”

  She was really nice, but I needed to get the fuck out of there. I tried to get up again.

  “Don’t make me call security, okay?”

  The pain in my ribs was killing me, but I got up.

  “All right! Osti! Secu—”

  “I got it.” Someone slid the curtains open. It was my federal guy. “Russell Lauw.” He showed the doctor his badge. “This is my suspect now. He says he’s fine to walk, I’ll sign him off from you.”

  “That’s not how it works. You’re not his doctor, I am his doctor. That’s my call, not yours.”

  Lauw turned to me. “Say you’ll refuse treatment, and she’s got to let you go.”

  “Hey!” she shouted.

  “I refuse treatment,” I simply said. She looked at me, and she was pissed. She was pissed the way only French women could look at you pissed. I saw my girlfriend Patricia the way she looked at me when she was angry. Lauw wasn’t going to wait for my ribs to heal. “It’s fine,” I added as nicely as I could. “I really am okay.”

  “You don’t know that. I don’t know that. You need tests and X-rays to know that.”

  “I’m leaving now,” I said.

  “And I’m still telling you it’s a terrible idea.” She turned to Lauw. “And you? My hospital’s not your effing playground.” She signed something and shoved it at Lauw. “Now, get out of here, both of you. I have patients who actually need me. De l’osti de niaisage,” she shouted as she got out of there.

  Lauw waited a moment, then turned to me. “That went better than expected.” He looked at my release form, crumped it into a ball, and threw it in a biowaste disposal bin.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I had a flag on your name. When Montreal police entered you in the system, I automatically got a text. And I made sure they’d get you here.”

  “That’s really fucking sneaky,” I grunted. It was good, though. “Cheap and fucking sneaky, coming at me when I’m down.”

  “Would you rather me call you in front of your boss?” I didn’t have a reply to that so I looked down the hospital corridor, Saint-Luc, the old Saint-Luc. They were building a new version next door, but for now we were stuck here. Old walls, broken chairs, patients packed so close, you wondered how the doctors worked.

  “I’ve had my eye on you. Car chases, broken ribs, leg wounds, lacerations,” Lauw said. “That’s just today. Do you need me to get into your professional life and what I can only describe as difficulties at home.” He paused. I said nothing. The motherfucker was letting me know he was on my case, all right. It was working.

  “Are you in over your head yet, Mr. Kennedy?”

  I didn’t know, but for a moment, doubt was enough. Any other time, any other day, I would’ve handled him differently but I was tired and busted up and had lost Ducas again. I was fucking done for the day, and he knew it. I looked past him.

  “Wanna have a drink, maybe a word? Talk about the game?” he said.

  “You’re pushing it a bit.”

  “Oh, this is me being nice.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Absolutely. If I wasn’t nice, I could say I saw a man admitted as a pedestrian who was hit by a car even though I know for a fact that you were responsible for that crash.”

  “So?”

  “So. SAAQ fraud is a serious offence.”

  “You’re just fishing.”

  “Would be enough to get you in the system, start a nice little paper trail on D’Arcy Keenan Kennedy.”

  My middle name meant he fucking meant business. No one ever used my middle name, not even my mom. “I could put in a word against you,” Lauw said, “make sure a bunch of pencil pushers up at Revenue Canada ask about every penny you make for the next ten years.” He leaned forward. “I don’t need you dead, Mr. Kennedy, but I do need you on the hook.”

  I could have punched the guy right there. Took everything I had not to do it. It wasn’t the threat itself; who gave a fuck about pencil pushers up in revenue? It was the motherfucker’s attitude. I wanted to land one quick jab just to teach him some manners. “You’re a special kind of shithead, you know that?” I said instead.

  “I get the job done. Believe it or not, this is still me being incredibly nice.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Trust me,” was his answer. Oh! I trusted that, all right. I really did. I really had the RCMP up my ass now.

  “You hungry?” he asked.

  “I don’t know if my ribs would take it.”

  “You look hungry,” he insisted.

  I could use some food. I was too tired to fight anymore. I finally caved in and said, “All right.”

  He helped me off the bed and waited for me to button myself up. The paramedics had cut open my pants to see what my leg looked like. There was blood on my T-shirt, but the hoodie wasn’t half-bad so that was that.

  Lauw walked us through half-demolished hallways and construction zones covered in blue tarps, navigating the maze of detours to the exit. He seemed to know the place well enough. He crossed Saint-Denis almost on instinct to a diner across the street. Seemed like I wasn’t gonna be the first informant to have lunch there with him.

  The place was decent: deli counter, comfy booths, old-school metal chairs with red cushions on them. A young FedEx woman sat alone at the counter. The waitress was chatting with the cook about the state of the building down the road and the traffic and how the weather was bad for business.

  The occasional truck drove down Saint-Denis to the mega-hospital site a hundred yards away. The old making room for the new, and I couldn’t escape it. That was the truth of Montreal.

  We sat by ourselves near the rear. I flipped the menu open. They
served breakfast twenty-four-seven, and you could order pretty much anything, anytime. Eggs, bacon, smoked meat, Montreal bagels, poutine, pizza or a combination of all.

  “Is it too early for supper, or is it too late for lunch?” I asked.

  “You know, you’re buying,” he told me.

  “Am I?”

  “The way things are going, I’d say you need my help more than I need yours.”

  The waitress came around, a young women in her twenties. She wore black pants and the purple shirt of the deli. She didn’t make a case of my bandages or the dried blood on my clothes.

  “Let me start you with some ice-cold water?” was all she said.

  “Coffee for me,” Lauw said.

  “Sure,” she said and poured it. No comment about the blood or the cop or my Irish ass. Nothing. I would never get used to that. “Do you need a minute to look at the menu?”

  So much blood should have been an issue. It really wasn’t to her. Hospital people scared the living shit out of me. “Get me an all-dressed pizza,” I said.

  “And you, sir?” she asked Lauw.

  “Club sandwich with fries.”

  “All right. Soft drink?”

  “Coke.” he said.

  “Pepsi,” I replied.

  “It should be twenty minutes or so.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Lauw said, looking at me.

  She went away. We sat in silence.

  He poured two creamers in his coffee, added a sugar and stirred. He didn’t say a word. Not a single word for fifteen, twenty minutes. We waited in silence for the food to arrive. He was working me, all right. He was good at his shit, too.

  His sandwich arrived; so did my pizza. I didn’t touch it at first. I needed something to happen, but Lauw said nothing. No snarky comment, no question. He took the top slice of toast from his sandwich, opened the small cup of mayo, spread it over the meat. He did that twice, then closed the sandwich, took an enormous bite, and chewed slowly.

  Not a single fucking word.

  Only after he had swallowed that bite and taken a sip of water did he speak. “So, I’m stuck here with a dilemma.” He looked at me, I was listening. “D’Arcy Keenan Kennedy,” he said. He wiped his mouth. “Let’s just make it clear what the situation is here, so you don’t get it in your head that you’ll get out of this because of sleep deprivation after a long day and a car accident.” He put his napkin down. “On one hand, there’s not much going on with you—yet. Maybe you started acquiring the means to commit certain crimes and you developed a plan and made contacts and started to make a name for yourself. That alone is enough to get you convicted of certain charges. Illegal assembly, reckless driving, maybe racketeering and potentially gangsterism. I’m sure I could throw in a few assault and batteries plus anything else I could think of when I write that report. No priors, though, so you might get the court’s sympathy and maybe just a slap on the wrist if you bail out of the game—right now. What I can’t understand is why an otherwise ordinary man such as yourself, with no criminal background and a family life, started popping up in places where he shouldn’t have been in the first place.”