Down with the Underdogs

by Ian Truman

  I started eating my food. This was going somewhere, all right. Better be ready for it.

  “I asked around,” he continued, “and found out your brother died a little under two years ago. Accidental, I’m told. The officers I spoke to assured me that it really was an accident. I asked around some more. Turns out you showed up with your friends asking questions in bars on the Indian reserves. I’ve heard of known militant hangouts, known narcotics resale points, a certain house up in the Laurentians. Then nothing, cops lose interest in you, or you lose your interest in police work. You vanish for months. A kid on the way, I figured. So I’m thinking, He’s done, you know? Some women made him fly fucking right.” He had me there. “But you pop up at the border, on my radar, and you’ve been making too much noise for me too look away. That car race through Griffintown, I mean. If it goes viral, then we have to move on you guys. It’s that simple. Still, I don’t think you’re a bad man. So let me work really hard to find a way out for you.” He looked at me. “Is this still about your brother?”

  “I haven’t found the guy.”

  “Still think it was murder?” I didn’t answer. “And you’ve been looking around?”

  “Windsor,” I lied. It just came out. Windsor was just as shitty as Hamilton, so that made it plausible. “Last lead I had was pointing to Windsor.”

  “That’s where the guy lives? The man you think killed your brother?”

  “I don’t have proof. That was just a maybe,” I said. He seemed to like that.

  “Just a maybe.” He grinned. “See. That I can work with. That I can wrap my head around. Brother dies, you get angry, think it’s murder. You go on a witch hunt that leads nowhere. You give up, move on, start a family. That I will believe. The death was ruled an accident. Drowning while on drugs, I’ve been told.”

  I took a deep breath. This was pissing me off, and he knew it. “My brother was fished out of the Lachine Canal,” I said. “He was pale and bloated and disfigured, and the first thing this idiot Montreal cop says is that it was an overdose.”

  “So, maybe it was.”

  “My brother was working out twenty hours a week at the gym, drank unhealthy amounts of protein shakes. If he’d died ODing on some training pill or whatever, then maybe I would have believed it. But heroin?”

  “Wait,” he said. “He died of a heroin overdose?”

  “Technically, he drowned. But the report said he would have died from the overdose anyways.” Lauw didn’t answer. “You look surprised.”

  He sighed the way you do when you call a coworker’s bullshit on the job. “Well, it’s just that heroin’s not really that popular anymore,” he said. “People take crystal meth, people take cocaine, crack, GHB. Heroin’s not exactly an epidemic these days. Fentanyl wasn’t an issue in Montreal back when your brother died, so I don’t know.”

  “They found Ajax in my brother’s blood stream.”

  “Huh!” was the only answer I got about that. He stopped eating, appeared to think about what I’d said. His hands were crossed against his mouth, elbows resting on the side of the table. His face seemed to agree with me. The dots didn’t connect. The Montreal cop was an idiot. There could have been some righteousness to the story I was giving him. It felt like that to me anyway.

  “So what makes you think this guy in Windsor had anything to do with it?”

  “Third-tier MMA fight. Really shitty leagues, you know?”

  “Gambling involved?”

  “That much I don’t know.”

  “Did you take this to the Montreal PD?”

  “Yes and no. Not really. No.”

  He took another bite and thought for a minute. That was the moment of truth.

  “What makes you think I’m not going to take this and contact the SPVM?” he said. “Or why not see if I could look into this murder case myself?”

  “You could do that,” I said.

  “What’s stopping me? I’d have a good night of work. I got you talking. I could get you in court. I could use what you’ve just told me to move a case, piss off some city cops and please my bosses at the same time.”

  “You could do that,” I repeated.

  “You seem convinced that I won’t.”

  “You won’t because you want me on the hook.”

  “Exactly.” He seemed happy and willing to give me some leeway for a minute. “If you found the guy, you think you’d really kill him?”

  I didn’t need to answer that. Michael Cook’s body was still at the bottom of Lake Ontario for all I cared.

  “It’s there, man,” I said, pointing to my chest. “No fucking doubt about it.”

  “That’s just not the way it works, and you know it.”

  He looked at me and laughed. Then he started eating again. What a piece of shit. He was cutting his food, dipping it in mayo, taking bite after slow bite as if I wasn’t there. He looked absorbed by the truth of the universe, and that got on my nerves.

  The motherfucker had me exactly where he wanted and I hated that. I was gonna need to fucking bend and pry and dance myself out of that one. This was one of those moments that would define my life from now on. Was I a snitch? Was everyone a snitch? Was this part of the life? Was I really good at this? I didn’t know what was gonna happen, but it was happening, all right.

  We sat there in silence for a long time, eating, listening to the radio and the humming of neon lights. I could feel the bruises under my shirt, pictured the blood spreading under my skin. It was throbbing and aching, goddamnit.

  Then he took a sip and finally said, “This life can get to you pretty fast. Adds a few years in a few weeks. I know you can vouch for that. Gets you tired very fast.”

  I couldn’t disagree. He sure as shit wasn’t talking about my sleep patterns. I looked at him, didn’t want to answer, but there was no lying on that one, I was fed up all right. I was fed up and tired, and maybe Russell Lauw was that open door Hugo had talked to me about.

  He waited a few seconds. Then he said, “Are you getting tired now, Mr. Kennedy?”

  I was gonna play his game, all right. This is it, man! He’d need something. I’d have to work through the mob and the cops and sift through the bullshit to get ahead and stay alive. I sure as shit knew I would need Hugo’s advice for real one day, but I was here now, so I said, “Yeah. I am tired.”

  “Good. So tell me: how is it that you know Sean Cullens?”

  I looked straight at him. He wasn’t gonna get me there. My eyes said, Come on! He accepted that.

  “All right then, what can you give me?”

  I had this one card up my sleeve; maybe it would be good enough for him. That kid, Hervé with the good ideas about apps and the way we should organize things.

  “I have something. Not gonna help you now, but probably will help you down the line.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “There’s this kid, low-level pusher.”

  “What about him? He’s headed up?”

  “Not really. Not now, but there’s something to him. He’s an IT student, had a few good ideas about running his own app instead of piggybacking Instagram and shit.”

  He took out his phone and started taking notes with a stylus. “I like where this is going.”

  “If I push him to develop the app, he presents it up his chain of command. You just need to make sure you got a backdoor to that thing.”

  “Give us all the details of who’s selling what and where.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And the kid?”

  “The kid’s not cut out for this. He’s just having fun while waiting on a good-paying tech job.”

  “Got a name?”

  “Hervé.”

  “Last name.”

  I didn’t have it. I swiped at my phone looking for the info.

  “He’s some undergrad at UQAM, computer science. That’s all I got.”

  “That’s not exactly a lot.”

 
“A back door to every sale for a year? That’s more than a lot.”

  “Of legal substances.”

  “You know damn well they’re gonna use that for other things.”

  “It’s not enough,” he tried.

  “It will have to be.” I was willing to play, but I wasn’t no fucking pushover.

  “How do you intend to move this?”

  “Last consultant they went for turned out to be an asshole. Hiring from inside could be a good idea.”

  “All right. I can buy that.” He got up. “Next time won’t be so cheap for you. You need to be aware of that. Push the app, I’ll work on the kid. Don’t contact me, ever. This is a one-way street, all right?”

  “Yeah?” I said as seriously as I could. “Just don’t expect this kind of talk too often.”

  He seemed to agree. “My job is to ask the questions. Your job is to not answer them, Things always happen somewhere in the middle.”

  Chapter 29

  “What the heck happened to your face?” That was my ma asking me how I was doing with all the subtlety of the Irish ways.

  “Car accident.” Phil had gone home with a broken leg, Karl was fuming over his licence and his car. Ryan had walked away without a scratch, so I sent him on a stakeout for a while to even things out with the rest of us then I called it a night for myself.

  I was sitting on my back porch and it must’ve been eight. Ma was coming in from the library with a stack of books no one in their right mind should ever read. Harlequins and other cheesy romance novels. They all had shirtless men who had too many abs for their own good. I used to wonder who the fuck would read those things. I knew better now. My ma was in one of those book clubs, had been since retirement. She got a box of them every week and swore she could read them all before the next batch arrived.

  “Scoot,” she said, looking for a spot next to me. The old stairs creaked under our weight, but she felt so tiny next to me.

  I had yet to buy a decent patio set for the house or renovate the balconies. It wasn’t about money, it was about enjoying the place as it was. My ma still had the green AstroTurf on hers, half torn and rubbed clean in several places. We were still using the old plastic table and chairs from five or six years before. Two houses down, they had set up one of those fancy decks with wooden panels as walls and potted bushes for privacy and a garden planted inside a fucking shipping skid. I looked at my patchy yard. It wasn’t so bad. Matter of fact was that I felt right at home, and no amount of money would ever change that.

  “You want a beer?” I asked as I was pulled one out of the cooler for myself.

  “Patricia with Liam?”

  “Yeah, inside.”

  “You guys all right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The accident?”

  “Among other things.” I took a sip. “I don’t know. The kid, the space, the money. We were broke for so long and I was gone so often, we didn’t really talk for a while.” I handed her a beer. She took it but didn’t care for a sip. “And then the other night you take care of the kid, and there are some friends over, and she’s all better, and she’s joking around, and it’s all fine, and I’m thinking maybe we cleared things up, you know? But now I’m back to the silent treatment. I don’t know. Maybe she needs people around to be happy. Maybe things are better, maybe they’re not. Maybe she just hates me now. I don’t know.”

  “It’s sad,” she said. “Always I thought you guys had something special. I’d hate it for you to lose it because it was something. Back to when you were teenagers smoking weed right here in this yard and didn’t think we’d notice. Why the heck did it take you so long to go after that woman, I’ll never understand.”

  “She made the move.”

  “About damn time, too.”

  I looked inside and couldn’t see Patricia or Liam, but knowing they were there was good enough for me.

  “We’ll be fine. Don’t worry,” I said as I leaned back for a sip.

  “If you say so.”

  I laughed a nervous laugh. “It’s not exactly the kind of thing I need to hear right now, ma!”

  “Well, it’s the sort of thing you need to hear if you want some sense slapped into that thick head of yours. Take care of your wife a little. One date in eight months is not enough. Don’t you think I actually want to take care of my grandson?”

  “You could use a date yourself,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “Freakin’ tell me about it.” She took a sip. I laughed. “You know your dad cheated on me once?”

  “Well, he kinda upped and left.”

  “I meant before that.” I looked at her, wondering if I should be asking for more details. She lit herself a smoke and took a drag. “That’s all right. I cheated on him, too.”

  That was both funny and unexpected. Probably shouldn’t have been funny, but it was funny.

  She looked at me. “Oh, please! It was the seventies. People were messing around like a bunch of horny freaking rabbits, AIDS didn’t exist, LSD took care of any unwanted pregnancy.” I tried hard not to laugh, or cry. She took another sip. “God, I hate beer.” She handed hers to me. “Here, you can have it.”

  I took it and put on the ground next to the four empties I’d put there.

  “Wish you had weed instead of beer,” she said.

  “You know that weed now is not the same as weed back when you were young.”

  “I’m old, D’Arcy, but no one’s that old. I knew Matticks, ya know?”

  “You knew Matticks?” That seemed far-fetched.

  “Well, we all kinda sorta knew Matticks. I lived here all my life, D’Arcy. You can’t be surprised at that.” She took a drag. “And The Gazette was screaming, ‘Oh, the Irish Mafia,’ and all that, but when you were broke, and just going for a walk out on Mill or the Old Port, and if you ran into them all the way out there, that big brown building at the end of the piers where the tracks start again…” She took another drag, as if she didn’t know what to make of her own story. “Well, they were always nice if you ask me.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m saying I have a pretty good idea what you’re doing, D’Arcy.” She looked at me. “I’m saying you can do all of that and still be nice to your kin.”

  I tossed a bottle cap in the cooler and said, “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “You’re having a hard time with it?”

  “Sometimes,” I admitted. “Some of the jobs, I’m really down with them. A few others not so proud of.”

  “You ever killed anyone?”

  “No,” I lied. She seemed to buy it, thank God.

  “Then what?”

  I took a sip. Picked up a small rock from the ground that was lying there right between my feet and tossed it at my fence.

  “Had to evict an old man from his apartment the other day. Condos wanted his lot, and I was the guy to clean house. Social case, hoarder kinda guy.”

  “Ugh!” She shrugged. “Hate those kinds of people. Hate them.”

  “Wouldn’t take money, wouldn’t take a clue, wouldn’t take a threat. It got weird. And I mean weird. He ended up getting stuck under a pile of his own crap, and I had already smashed the locks going in so he couldn’t hide anymore. It just smelled like death, and I walked at least one block before calling the firefighters on the place.”

  “Smoked him out?”

  “Nah, they send the firefighters first now.”

  “And you’re having a hard time with that?”

  “I was. But today I figured something out about myself.” I looked at my cell phone for the time. “About five hours ago, I learned something really interesting about myself.”

  “What was that?”

  “I figured I’d evict twenty of him tomorrow morning if it meant taking care of us,” I said. “All of us.” I remembered what Hugo had said: There’s no such thing as halfway crooks. I was in the middle of it for re
al now whether I liked it or not.

  “The building’s paid for,” she said. She never considered that we might be in trouble. She had spent part of her youth sharing a bed with four sisters. This small building was paradise to her.

  “I’ve seen them work. You stay poor around here, they’ll take it from you one way or another.” I pointed to the back terrace two blocks down. “See how it works? Sometimes they just buy you out. Sometimes you don’t give in, but the repairs and the taxes get to you. Sometimes you manage to make it, but then some fire destroys your place. Your job moves,” I said, as I looked at her. “Other times an Irish guy threatens you, and some shark realtor with a trust fund buys you cheap and revamps the place to sell it. Some professional buys it and spends his lifetime paying back a bank that’s got him by the balls, and the circle of life goes on.”

  She took a drag and stared at the cigarette. She was used to shit and maybe didn’t want to have to go through all of that again. Not in her sixties. Being tossed around from one bottom of the barrel to another…well.

  “We winning so far?” she finally said.

  “So far,” I admitted.