Down with the Underdogs

by Ian Truman

  “I’m sure you’ll find a way, D’Arcy. You always have.”

  “I know.”

  I looked inside for my wife and kid. Couldn’t see them. “I just need to make sure I still have a family once I’m done.”

  “You cheating on her?” she asked. Took me by surprise.

  “No,” I said. I had one brief flash of the girl at the club that night, the one with the wasp shape in her tight black dress and those glasses. But that didn’t mean I was cheating on my wife.

  “She cheating on you?”

  I looked inside again.

  “I sure hope not. I don’t think so. What, you heard something?”

  “No.” She paused. I slapped a mosquito away from my calf. The air was cold, and winter would kill them all soon enough. “Maybe you should make some efforts with the wife and kid. I’m not gonna be around all the time to take care of them when you work.”

  “I work all the fucking time.”

  “Your dad worked all the time, too.”

  “Don’t compare me to him. I’m here every night.”

  “Not all night. I heard you coming in, D’Arcy. Those ain’t regular hours you’re keeping.”

  I took a sip and swallowed hard. I didn’t get to complain about a thing. So were the ways of the Celts. You complained about beer and food and all the mundane things of life. When things were important, like your wife and kid and your future, you bottled shit up real tight and shoved it ahead of you. Had been that way for centuries, was still that way today.

  “It’s not like I get to keep regular hours,” I simply said.

  “Family’s more important than work. I’m not gonna tell you what to do, D’Arcy. But you should quit if it’s going to make you miserable.”

  “It’s not gonna happen.”

  “Why the heck not?”

  I had no answer, so I said, “We’ll see at the end of this job I’m on.”

  “When’s that gonna end?”

  I found myself glancing over to the new-rich neighbours two houses down, and no amount of money in the world would explain the rage I felt towards them.

  Soon enough, I thought. I was bitter about it, too. Maybe she sensed that. Maybe she was done because I was angry now. She just got up and left, saying, “I’m gonna go home now. Go to bed early for once.”

  “Good night,” I said. She didn’t answer. She walked upstairs to her apartment with the seventeen romance novels. I tanked the beer and walked into my tiny kitchen.

  Staircases taking up too much space and walls that were in the way, and baby seats, too. I moved a bunch of kids’ toys to get to my fridge, then moved the toys back to make it to my living room. I crashed there on my couch that had doubled as my bed for months, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had slept eight hours. Ducas had come after me, tried to kill me, and now I was in a pinch with this Lauw guy, and I really needed the fucking apartment upstairs now.

  Liam was killing me. The job was killing me. I missed my brother at the moment and most of all, I missed my wife.

  “You can do this and still be a nice guy,” my ma had told me. I didn’t know if that was true. I looked at them through the open bedroom door. I could see her shape and I knew Liam was there, next to her. Surely she was still awake, but I didn’t dare talk to her right now. I was injured and tired, and it wouldn’t go anywhere.

  Sometimes I’d just squeeze myself in against her back and hug her. Sometimes she’d hold my arm against her for a while and fell asleep. There wasn’t enough room for me to sleep next to her like that, but sometimes I stayed there for ten, fifteen minutes, maybe, and that was enough.

  Tonight, I wasn’t getting any hugs or any love or anything at all in fact. It was the pain in my ribs. The way I wouldn’t walk properly for weeks, if not months, if ever. It was the way my ma wanted me to quit, and my wife needed me not to get hurt or killed. It was the way Sean Cullens had given me a job and got me in his sights at the same time. The way Lauw had come at me when I was down and got me on the hook. Trying not to bring that shit home turned out to be a fucking nightmare.

  Tonight I had brought that shit home, all right. I was locked into it with no way to get out. Someone was going to have to die soon. Ducas was going to have to die on this one. It was supposed to be hard to kill a man. Michael Cook had been so easy to kill it was still fucking up my head.

  The worst was not Ducas’ anticipated death. That part I was fine with. It was losing everything I had worked for that was getting to me. The pressure was just too much at the moment. I felt it right in the middle of my chest up into my fucking throat. Pressure was a goddamned bitch, all right.

  It never came when you expected it. It never happened when there was a guy chasing you or even at the point of a gun. Ducas ran into us with a car, and I reacted right away. When these things happen survivor’s instinct kicks in. Nothing to it. The adrenaline kicks in, and you react like it isn’t even real. Sometimes you do things you don’t even think you really did. It’s never that big either. It’s in the way you punched or blocked or dodged something in a fight, like there was some grand fucking power of the universe that decided to look your way for a moment.

  Real pressure doesn’t come in those moments. The real pressure comes late at night when there’s nothing going on to distract you, when there’s nothing around to occupy your fucking mind. There are no chases, no one too look for, no bad guy to pin down or good guy to avoid.

  There’s no work to do or cleaning up to keep your mind off it. There’s alcohol and sleep sometimes and the weight of your choices. That’s, when real pressure gets to you. You felt it in your ribs. It’s there, all right. You look over to your sleeping wife, you think about the ways she hates your guts at the moment, knowing she has a right to that anger.

  You glance over at your sleeping kid and resent him for not sleeping enough, crying too much. You resent him for taking the wife away on some downward spiral where you can’t do anything about it anymore and the amount of money you throw at a wall doesn’t seem to make a dent in it.

  You need money to live. Only the poor can truly appreciate that fact. But even money came at a cost, and it was getting to me. If only the city hadn’t decided to raze my neighbourhood. If only I could find the guts to accept it and move away. If only I wasn’t so fucking stuck in my ways and resentful of the rich and the city and the past. If only I could find a way to say, “I’m done” and walk away from the Pointe.

  But money had a price, and I couldn’t escape it just yet. I was down with the underdogs, and there was no one in my corner ready to throw in the towel for me just yet.

  I looked into my bedroom one last time, imagined Liam lying next to her with his tiny clenched fists. Saw the curves of my wife and remembered I still loved the damn woman.

  The pressure was hard, but I had a strong fucking back. I was Irish, was I not? We were brought here to dig the fucking Lachine Canal, and it’s still here today, isn’t it?

  Carry that stone till you die. Just make sure you don’t fucking hand it down to your children. Don’t you dare hand it down to your children.

  Chapter 30

  I got called into the office the next morning.

  “Great, great work,” my boss said.

  Sean Cullens was there too. He even came up and shook my hand. “Turned out some good shit, man.”

  “Still got an eye out for me?” I asked.

  “Oh, now more than ever,” was his answer and like most times Sean spoke, you couldn’t tell if it was praise or threat. I tried to shrug it off. Sean was going to have a knife against my ribs the rest of my fucking days, and that was the truth. I just had to learn live with it.

  “Come over, we’re on a conference call,” my boss said.

  “This the guy who snuffed out those assholes?” the voice said on the phone. There was a thick accent, lots of French mixed with Creole in the back of the English.

  “Saint-Michel?” I asked.


  “Nah, Straight RDP,” the voice replied.

  It seemed as if we were building bridges with the other side of town. I looked at Sean, then at my boss, wondering what was going on.

  “Non-aggression pact,” my boss told me. “Seems the organization you uncovered had been trying to poke holes in other people’s businesses as well.”

  “CTL?” I asked.

  The guy on the phone replied for everyone. “Let’s just say we just bought a controlling share in this one particular used car outlet, you know?”

  I hadn’t leaked CTL or ATL to anyone else so I had to assume my boss was in on it. This had come out of left field.

  “Well, that’s gonna complicate my search,” I said.

  “How so?” Sean asked.

  “The guy smashed his car, and he had bought it at that ATL place. I had people staking out the dealership in case Ducas showed up.”

  “We got Lorient,” the guy on the phone said. “You need me to ask him where Ducas is, I can ask real nicely if you want me to.”

  I didn’t like the implications and took a deep breath. Part of it was having to deal with the unknown of this new guy, part of it was his immediate need for violence. I had nothing on Lorient to justify hurting him just yet. Maybe he would talk easy, maybe he wasn’t really deep into this, maybe he’d bail out and never bother us again. Part of me always wanted to give a guy the chance to redeem himself.

  “I don’t think he’ll know,” I said. “Ducas knows that we’re after him and that you took over his contacts. He’ll most likely hide.”

  “Or run away,” the guy on the phone said. “Do we still care? We have the guy’s money, his contacts, his companies, his boss.”

  “My guys will care. Phil’s got a broken leg, Karl lost his car and licence. The guy tried to ram us, kill us. In front of your place, too,” I said to my boss.

  “Don’t take this too personal, but the guy’s a pawn, ain’t he?” the voice said on the phone.

  “I don’t mean to piss anyone off,” I said. “But I don’t think this investigation is over.”

  “Guy talks like a cop,” the guy on the phone replied. “You a cop?”

  “Trust me, I’m not.”

  “What makes you say we ain’t done?” Sean asked.

  “Ducas got away. It’s not good publicity if Ducas gets away.”

  “We got the money and his contacts,” the guy on the phone insisted.

  “In Montreal, yes,” my boss finally said. “But whoever is financing Ducas and Lorient might send someone else. I need it to be loud and clear to anyone: invest somewhere else or your guys will get shot.”

  There was silence on the line.

  “Do I get access to Lorient?” I asked. “His papers? His companies?”

  “He’s above your pay grade now,” my boss said. He seemed bitter about it. Felt like the guy on the phone had gotten to Lorient before we could and we were stuck with him now.

  “So what do we do?” Sean asked.

  “I find Ducas.”

  “Combiens d’temps?” the guy on the phone said. “I mean. I got pressure from my peeps here, man. Faut que j’men occupe, tsé.”

  “He’s in deep enough to be worth keeping around for a while,” my boss replied. We were on the same page. Only he had the authority to say that, but we were on the same page. “You’ll get a text with an address in a few seconds.” He nodded to Cullens, who took out a burner phone. “Safe house is on me.”

  “Good business sense,” the voice replied.

  “We’re not in bed just yet,” my boss replied quickly.

  “Fair enough.”

  “How long till the pressure’s too much on your end?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, man.” He smacked his lips. “Two days, maybe.”

  “Anything you could do to extend that?” I asked. He knew I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have to.

  “Got any ideas?” Sean added.

  “A few, but nothing quick. At this point we have to scratch around for something, but I know where to start.” I was vague on purpose. I needed the guy on the phone to believe me. I didn’t need them to know I was onto something. This felt like the final round.

  “Your guy up for it?” the man on the phone asked my boss.

  “I found them all so far, haven’t I?” was my answer. That should have been enough to shut him up. All that was left was Ducas, the one fucking piece that I couldn’t quite grab. If he had run his car into a pole during the chase, then it would have been said and done. But he was close, all right, I could feel the motherfucker just out of reach one last time.

  “Let me tell you this,” my boss said, “I’ll put fifty thousand a day aside just to keep Lorient alive for the moment. We find Ducas in two days, the money comes back, anything more, and you get to keep the retainer.”

  He fucking meant business. A lot was resting on my shoulders all of a sudden.

  “Third party will handle the money?” the guy on the phone asked.

  “I’m a professional,” my boss replied with no effort to hide just how irritated he was.

  “A’ight. A’ight. J’te feel yo. Sorry, man.”

  “We’ll be in touch,” my boss said, and he hung up. He looked at me and said, “Two days at fifty thousand each. I like you, Mr. Kennedy, but that’s steep. You better make sure you need the days if you use them.”

  “I’ll be right on it.”

  “Hurry up, will ya? I got three more guys asking for favours because of this clown.”

  “Sales killing you?”

  “It used to be easier,” he admitted after an honest sigh.

  And just like that, I saw an opening that would change my life. Moments like these are few and far between, and you need to recognize them. My boss had stuck his neck out on my behalf. He had my ear now more than ever. Maybe I was too enthusiastic about it. You get excited about something, and that’s when you make mistakes.

  But I did see this as my chance to get Lauw off my back and maybe get away with it. Moments like these didn’t happen twice, and they sure as shit were risky. It took half a second for my brain to weigh the pros and cons, then I crossed the Rubicon.

  “I know this ain’t my field,” I said, “but that kid you sent me to first, Hervé, he seemed to have a few good ideas about how to sell more online.”

  “You know anything about the internet?” Sean said. He didn’t like it when people didn’t keep their heads down. He hated the fuck out of me at that moment for sure. I could hear his voice in the back of my head: I got my eye on you now more than ever.

  “I don’t, but he did,” I said.

  “What are you getting at?” my boss said.

  “You don’t need to trust your pushers if you see everything they do. Keep track of who they sell to and how much, swap pushers around if you need to.”

  “I don’t like it,” Sean said.

  “I’m not sold either, man,” my boss said. “I don’t care much for micromanagement.”

  “All I’m saying is that when you’re done piggyback riding Instagram, then you have someone on your team who actually knows about this shit. That Hervé kid seemed to know his shit.”

  The boss was considering it for a second. He grinned, rubbed his beard and looked to the side for a second. I felt I had earned his trust when it came to finding people. This was out of my jurisdiction. Had I moved too quickly? The seconds went by. Doubt set itself in the back of my head.

  Part of me wished to God Lauw would disappear, but that was wishful thinking. Lauw was still around, and somewhere down the line, someone high up was going to have to take a fall. I just hoped I was out of the way when it happened.

  “Stick to what you know, a’ight?” Sean snapped at me. That was definitely a threat.

  “Understood,” was the only answer he would hear. I made sure my tone let him know I had learned my lesson, but I was in trouble now. No way to escape it.

  H
e turned to the boss and added, “If there’s anything going down, I want to be in charge of it.” The boss seemed to agree.

  Sean Cullens was breathing down my neck now more than ever.

  Fucking great. Ducas and Lorient didn’t count for shit anymore. All the work I had put in, the wounds and the chase, none of it mattered to Sean Cullens. Between him and Lauw, I felt like I had better odds in a federal prison. I’d take a few guys with shivs in a cold cement hallway over Sean Cullens any day.

  “Just find the guy, and we’ll handle the rest,” my boss said. Sean was staring my way, not impressed with anything anymore.

  Find the guy, and we’ll handle the rest, I thought. Simple as that, right?

  Chapter 31

  I spent the day on it, then the night on it and then the morning as well.

  That’s when Pat said, “We’re going out.”

  I decided to tag along but I was getting the silent treatment. She hated me for getting hurt. Her first husband died in a war; she didn’t need her second husband to die from a life of crime. I could’ve told her I was fine and it was no issue, but my side was killing me and I couldn’t hide my limp or the bruises on my face.

  She resented me for it. I’d tell her I was almost done, but she read that as “Someone was going to die,” and she wasn’t wrong. This wasn’t Michael Cook-type business. Cook had killed Cillian and that justified the chase last year. This was blood money, and she was making me pay for it.

  She walked me around even though the pain was killing me. We stopped at one of those fancy bakeries up at Atwater Market after shopping for some antiques she’d like in the house. Notre-Dame Street had a few shops she seemed to like. I just wanted to sit my ass down at a deli. She wanted new things to signify the start of a new life.

  The message was clear: Get out before you get killed, and buy me a real home. All right, the buy a real home part could have been me. I didn’t really know anymore.

  She picked some designer lamps and a love seat to replace the old couch I had been sleeping on for weeks. The place reminded me of Boulay’s place. She spent twenty bucks on a simple wooden plank from 1977 with peeled paint all over it.