Down with the Underdogs

by Ian Truman

  Ducas had run over Phil, so that gave Phil first dibs on the beatings. Karl had lost his licence, so he was next. I took a turn just to be a part of it, and Ryan enjoyed violence so much, there was no reason not to involve him.

  We kept him alive, all right. He probably never felt more alive than after we were done with him. We didn’t even ask him one question. We were well beyond wanting information.

  There was no need to go into details of what happened next, but there was fair yet gratuitous use of fists, punches, kids, wrenches and pipes. When Karl came back for seconds with a blowtorch, things got a little weird.

  The kid was still there, still sitting at his desk. He looked at me, wide-eyed, disgusted and terrified. I handed him the money I had promised, but he hesitated. Maybe he was going to talk, maybe he wasn’t going to talk. One way or another the word would get out but I had no doubt this would never make it to court.

  I wish I could say that was the end of it. Ducas was on the floor covered in his own piss and shit and blood. Burnt skin added to the smell of it. All the engine grease in the world couldn’t cover that up.

  The garage door opened, and I saw guys I had never seen before back a CTL van into the garage. You couldn’t fake that kind of arrogance.

  Two guys I assumed were with bikers hopped out of the van, dragged Ducas over to it, and dumped him in. Sean Cullens walked up to the pool of blood with a ten kilogram bag of absorbent.

  “Hose that shit down,” he told us. Ryan and Phil got to work while I tried to see what was happening in the van.

  The two guys looked my way and closed the door on me. Not a word, not a fucking sentiment either. Cold, calculating men without passion in their eyes. I was tough. These guys were hard.

  I didn’t know if they were going to kill him. I didn’t know if they had a reason not to. I thought about the fact that Ducas’ was the second life I was taking. The weird part was that I didn’t even feel I had a thing to do with it. It had been the same as with Michael Cook. I’d barely pushed Michael Cook into the lake. I let the weights drag him down and let the water do the work. I didn’t really feel it.

  This time I had brought Ducas to a couple of hardened criminals who probably didn’t have any moral high ground to worry about. I still didn’t feel it, and that was getting to me.

  Part of me wanted to go in there and stab him once or twice, just to see if I really had it in me, just to be able to say I did it for real. I fucking killed a man. I didn’t. Maybe the Catholic guilt was still too strong. Maybe I was just a coward. I still didn’t like the idea of killing people, I just wanted to know I’d be able to.

  It wasn’t happening.

  The CTL van drove away. I stood by the garage door, across the street from two duplexes that looked like they had seen better days. I saw trash bags from days earlier, gutted on the sidewalk and spilling their contents to the wind and the flies. There was a closed electronics shop next door, its neon sign broken and dangling. A hairdresser’s shop was in the spot next to it, a hand-painted sign above its only window.

  Maybe I had it wrong. Maybe people were still poor and struggling. What the fuck was one small neighbourhood in a city of four million people?

  That’s when a black biker came up to me and my life was about to change all over again.

  “I heard you were looking for a place for your mom,” he said as he handed me a bunch of legal papers. It was clearly the voice on the phone the other day at the office. “That’s your pay, man. I was told to make it good, so I made it good.”

  It was a notarized form that granted me the ownership of a condo on Notre-Dame around Peel. Eight hundred square feet in my name, built in 2009, and valued at two hundred seventy-five thousand dollars. When I asked how in hell he knew I needed a place for my mom, he just looked at me. It was just a glance really, a look that said, Open your eyes, motherfucker.

  That’s when I saw it, right in the title: Contract between Lauw, Catherine, realtor, and Kennedy, D’Arcy Keenan. There was no way to make any fucking mistake about it. Russell Lauw had a hand in this all along. Catherine must’ve been his sister or his wife or a fake fucking name, but this was his doing.

  I tried hard not to laugh. It was really hard not to laugh. Maybe it was the fucking obscenity of it all. It had to be the obscenity of it all. Ducas’ burnt skin and the drugs smuggling at the border and the kids selling dope instead of going to school and the people I almost killed running wild in a car chase in the street or the old man I had kicked out of his apartment, only to find that the cops had known everything all along. It was really hard not to laugh.

  Lauw was putting me in the middle of the game for sure. The black biker was RCMP, undercover or a snitch. I didn’t know. But he was RCMP, all right.

  “You paid for it or he did,” I said, hinting at my boss.

  “He did. I’m just the notary,” he said, putting on his sunglasses.

  “You a notary for real?”

  “See you around,” was his only answer. He straddled his bike and started the engine. The roar of the vintage Harley filled the street and he headed east. Just like that.

  “That guy for real?” I asked the boss.

  “Son of an Apostle. As legit as it gets.”

  “You told him to make it good?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, he did.”

  I handed him the paper.

  He laughed. “Jesus Christ, not that good!” The guys were gonna ask for a raise, have me empty my account on that one, but that didn’t matter. The obscenity of it all. This had been too easy to be normal. No one was supposed to get away with all of that. But we did.

  We closed the door, the last kid working there still gazing our way, not daring to make a single fucking move. Me and my guys packed ourselves in my car as the boss climbed into his truck along with Sean and the rest of his guys.

  We were done for a while. The pressure had left me just like that. The Pointe was twenty minutes away, and we were done.

  Karl was driving, I sat shotgun looking out. Montreal was fucked. There was no way around it. Montreal was just fucked. Corruption was too thick. Crime wasn’t even considered crime anymore. Honest people didn’t have a home here anymore. The working class was leaving fast, but I had a place in it. I was a crook and a liar and an asshole, too, but I had saved my home and had one for my mother now. No one was going to take that away from us.

  It was hard not to feel rich with so much going on for me. It was also hard not to feel poor. Maybe it was the state of the highways or the old bricks falling down, the decaying graffiti on the Turcot exchange that would still be around for a year or two. Maybe it was the gigantic steel mills lined up along the highway back to the Pointe, their rusty walls and towers unmoved by time, acting as a constant reminder of Montreal’s working-class blood.

  I didn’t know how to feel, but I knew it wasn’t what I expected it to be. I looked at Karl, then at Ryan and Phil sitting in the back. Then I looked at the city again. I thought about Pat and Liam. Ducas was gone and I could take my family on vacation now, be at home a little. Work things out with the missus, maybe? It was in the cards now at least. I had money, plenty of it, and I had time too.

  I should have been happy about that, but I wasn’t. I should have been ecstatic. I should have been relieved. I should have felt like a job well done, or I should have been terrified.

  It wasn’t hitting me. How slow could I really be about these things? I was an RCMP informant now. I was both Irish mafia and RCMP now, and I was in so fucking deep and I knew it, but that wasn’t even the problem. I wasn’t feeling any of it. No joy, no fear, no worries. It was something else entirely, something more visceral, something more cynical, maybe. I was so fucking neutral it should have scared me. It didn’t. I was untouchable.

  I had about a million dollars’ worth of properties in my name now. I hadn’t paid for any of it. A million dollars, I kept telling myself. The words resonated in my head
as if they couldn’t even be true. Greed was a terrifying thing. It truly was. Greed and mankind’s everlasting need for more. A million fucking dollars, I just kept thinking.

  And I didn’t even feel rich.

  Back to TOC

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks and appreciation goes out to:

  John, Peter, Beverly, Warren and Sam, plus Eric and Lance at Down & Out, of course.

  Anh, Isa, Mark and the rest of the staff at Theatre Sainte-Catherine.

  Special thanks to Benoit Lelièvre, always.

  Back to TOC

  Ian Truman is a novelist, poet, and visual artist from the East-End of Montreal. He is a fan of dirty realism, noir, satire, punk, hardcore and hopes to mix these genres in all of his works.

  A graduate of Concordia University’s creative writing program, he won the 2013 Expozine Awards for best book in English (A Teenage Suicide). His latest works include Grand Trunk and Shearer (Down & Out Books) and a story in the Montreal Noir anthology (Akashic Press).

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  BOOKS BY IAN TRUMAN

  The D’Arcy Kennedy Crime Novels

  Grand Trunk and Shearer

  Down with the Underdogs

  A Teenage Suicide

  Montreal Noir (Anthology)

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