The fire was ravenous. Smoke billowed along Hastings Street in all directions. A group of destitute street people had migrated a couple of blocks northeast from the squalor of Pigeon Park and lined the sidewalk in front of The Emerald Shillelagh, laughing and getting drunk on Listerine while watching the inferno destroy the establishment. I pushed my way past them toward the pub, but the heat from the blaze was so searing my skin hurt when I got within twenty feet of the flames.
“Get back,” ordered a firefighter. I ignored him and charged toward the entrance. The flames were so high I couldn’t see through the windows or doorway.
“I said get back,” barked the firefighter, as he grabbed me on the shoulder. I snapped his arm down and twisted it, putting pressure on his elbow joint with my palm. The firefighter yelped and dropped to his knees. I pushed him aside and started screaming for Declan and my pop while trudging through the unbearable heat toward the pub’s front door.
Three firefighters converged on me and pulled me back. I was about to start swinging when I heard someone call my name. Billy was wrapped in a blanket and sitting on the bumper of an ambulance, waving frantically from across the street. Beside him were two paramedics loading an occupied gurney into the back of an ambulance. I broke free of the firefighters and raced over, my heart sinking when I saw the person on the stretcher. Declan. He was shirtless and unconscious, with an oxygen mask strapped to his soot covered face. Blood-soaked gauze covered wounds on his upper chest.
“Are you family?” asked a paramedic.
“Yes. What happened?”
“Gunshot wound.”
“Will he live?”
“He’s lost a lot of blood but is stable now. We won’t know more until we get him to the ER.”
“St. Paul’s?”
“Yes.” The paramedics slammed the rear door shut, blipped the siren, and drove off.
“Jed?” Billy said softly. I took a long look at the kid. His eyes were puffy and red and his cheeks were streaked with tears.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I think so,” he replied, wrapping himself tighter in the blanket.
“Where’s my pop?”
“They took him.” My stomach knotted up and I tasted bile rising in the back of my throat.
“Describe them to me.”
“I didn’t get a real good look. It all happened so fast. But they weren’t like those punks who jumped us the other day. These guys were hardcore.”
“Let me guess. They were wearing leather jackets and vests.”
“How’d you know?”
“They’re a biker gang. And they were after me.”
A Coroner’s van arrived on scene and only then did I notice the two, blanket-covered bodies that had been placed on the ground in between two fire trucks. The street was a swirling cacophony of emergency sirens, spraying fire hoses, and excited chatter, and even more lookie-loos had come out of the woodwork since I had arrived.
“I need you to tell me exactly what happened.”
“Like I said, it all happened so fast,” he replied. “One minute I was reading about the lymphatic system, then the next thing I know these guys come storming in shooting up the place. I, uh, hid under a table. I’m sorry, Jed. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You don’t have to apologize, kid. You did the right thing.” Billy nodded and continued.
“So then this one huge guy, I mean, he must have been almost seven feet or something, he runs upstairs to your dad’s office with a shotgun.”
That had to have been Lance Dennings. As tough as my old man was, even he would have had a hard time going toe-to-toe with a guy that size. Nevertheless, my pop kept a revolver locked in a safe in his office, and if there were shots fired he would have gone for his weapon immediately.
“Did you hear any gunshots come from my pop’s office?” Billy shrugged.
“I don’t know, Jed. As soon as that huge guy went up the stairs everything went crazy.”
“Declan,” I said, knowing there’s no way my cousin would not have pulled his Browning 9mm and returned fire.
“He was unreal, man! All of a sudden he leapt up from behind the bar and shot this one guy, like, three times square in the chest before the rest of the bikers even knew what was going on. Declan ducked back down again just as those guys turned and shot up the bar for like a minute straight.”
“How many were there, not counting the big guy upstairs?”
“Three, I think. I don’t know for sure.”
“What happened next?”
“I thought Declan was dead. I mean, he had to have been after the way they had blasted the bar to hell. So while one of the bikers started to douse the place with gasoline this fat guy walked over to the bar with his gun drawn. He pointed it downwards as he peered over, when all of a sudden his fucking head exploded! The guy’s brains splattered everywhere and suddenly Declan slid out from behind the other end of the bar. The rest of the bikers were still watching their fat buddy tip over and didn’t even see him. Declan was about to shoot them all when the huge guy blasted him from behind with the shotgun. Declan collapsed on the floor and your dad started screaming until the huge guy cracked him over the head with the butt of the shotgun and threw him over his shoulder. Next thing I knew they were all gone and the pub was on fire.”
I brooded silently as I imagined the scene in my mind.
“What are you going to do?” Billy finally asked.
I didn’t have an answer. I put my arm around Billy to give him a squeeze, but he turned into me and wrapped me up in a hug. It caught me off guard, but after a moment, I hugged him back. I promised Billy that I’d check in with him later then marched back across the street toward the dying fire, which had finally been contained. A sharp looking businessman in a three-piece suit asked me a question as I walked by, but I ignored him. He muttered something under his breath before striking up a conversation about the blaze with a jazz hippie in a beret holding an armful of vinyl records and a one-legged vagrant in a wheelchair. Only in Vancouver.
I approached the Coroner from behind as he uncovered the two bodies and began his inspection. The skull of the dead, obese biker had a hole in it the size of a toonie. The Coroner did his best to maneuver the corpse into a body bag while minimizing the amount of brain matter and bloody goop that slopped out of the cranium, but it was a losing battle. The blubbery remains jiggled with each movement, particularly the dead man’s enormous man-boobs. No wonder I had nicknamed him Bitch Tits during my meeting with Sankey. I noticed the extensive jailhouse tats on his arms, and they reminded me that Bitch Tits had done hard time before serving as a weapons smuggling enforcer for the Steel Gods. Declan didn’t just take down some punk — this guy had been a serious badass.
I didn’t recognize the other dead man beside Bitch Tits. I ran through a mental checklist of Damian Kendricks’ associates that Sankey had briefed me on, but none of them resembled the deceased young man before me. I made him for early-to-mid-twenties, with smooth, tattoo-free skin and milky white hands that were anything but calloused. The guy looked more like a preppy dressing the part than an authentic biker. A new recruit maybe? Not that it mattered. Damian Kendricks himself could be lying dead at my feet and it still wouldn’t make me feel any better about the fact that my cousin was in the hospital and my old man had been taken hostage.
Some uniformed cops tried to remove me from loitering around the crime scene, but as soon as I explained that I was Frank Ounstead’s son they let me be. The last of the flames that had ravaged The Emerald Shillelagh were finally extinguished and the firefighters diligently went about their clean up. I was still staring at the charred remains of the quaint Irish pub that had been the lifelong dream of my parents when Rya and Inspector Cornish arrived.
Rya immediately embraced me, and Cornish awkwardly look
ed the other way before grumbling his condolences. I recapped for them my experience and what I had heard from Billy, but was careful to leave out the parts where I obtained Johnny Mamba’s murder weapon and facilitated the mangled death of one of the members of the Steel Gods biker gang.
“Do you have any idea why they would come after your father?” asked Cornish.
“No,” I lied.
“They took him alive, so it must have been for a reason,” said Rya. “That gives us hope.”
“Hope?” I snapped. “Are you kidding me? Look at what they did, Rya. Why should we have any hope at all?”
“I fucking warned you about this,” growled Cornish. “I told you to stay out of the pool but you just had to go and take a piss in it.”
“Just tell me what you’re going to do to get my father back,” I pleaded.
“Everything we can,” said Cornish. “Shepard, I want you to bring Sankey and the GCU in on this right away. Ensure somebody takes Ounstead here back to the station for an official debriefing. We need to piece together every last detail in order to figure out what the Steel Gods are after. Kendricks really screwed up this time. Nobody fucks with one of our own. We’ve got him now.”
Cornish and his bravado strutted off to take control of the scene, leaving Rya and me alone. A cold gust of wind blew down Hastings, and a light stream of smoke funnelled out of the pub and in between us.
“Where were you?” I asked, batting at the smokey air with my hand. “I’ve been calling you all afternoon.”
“I’m sorry, I was in a meeting so my phone was off.”
I stared through the pub’s shattered front window at a smouldering pile of wood that used to be a bar stool.
“Jed?”
“This is all my fault.”
“You can’t blame yourself.”
“Yes, Rya, I can.”
“You lied to Sankey. You know why Kendricks targeted you, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I found Remo Willis.”
“Shepard!” bellowed Cornish, waving her over to a group of cops huddled by a squad car.
“Shit. Just wait right here, okay?” I shook my head.
“I have to get to the hospital. You can debrief me there.”
“Five minutes, Jed.”
“I’ll be with my cousin,” I said, before leaving the scorched and blackened remnants of my family’s business behind.
THIRTY-FOUR
I ignored the text message at first. Declan had just gotten out of surgery and the nurses had finally let me visit him in the ICU. His upper torso was bandaged with gauze that was seeping with spots of blood. He had a tube inserted down his throat and was much paler than usual, which was saying something. I sat silently beside him and held his hand for I don’t know how long. My cell phone chimed again with a text message alert. It was inside the pocket of my jacket, which I had taken off and slung over one of the chairs. I didn’t move to get it. I just kept squeezing my cousin’s hand.
I still don’t know how to explain what I felt in that moment. The closest I can come to describing it is to say that something inside of me was slipping away. It was like I could feel myself being hollowed out, leaving me empty except for the gnawing, pulsing pain of my stomach being twisted into knots. I tried to convince myself that Declan would pull through. I tried to reassure myself that I’d get my pop back safe and sound. It didn’t work.
If Declan’s surgeon hadn’t come into the room to talk to me at that minute, and if she hadn’t distracted me from my despondent thoughts by updating me on my cousin’s condition, then I’m not sure I would have been able to keep the crippling panic of what might happen to my family at bay any longer.
“Mr. Ounstead?” asked a stout, female doctor with an Eastern European accent.
“Yes.”
“It looks like your cousin is going to pull through.” My eyes became wet and blurry. When I tried to speak it took me a moment to find my voice.
“Really?” She nodded.
“Mr. St. James is quite a fighter. One of the lead shots from the shotgun nicked an artery and he lost a great deal of blood. But he responded extremely well to the transfusions and he stabilized very quickly.”
I nodded and cleared my throat. “That’s good,” I mumbled dumbly.
“Has your cousin seen military combat?”
“Uh . . . yeah.”
“I thought so. He has quite a bit of shrapnel inside him.”
“You should see him go through a metal detector at the airport.”
“He might want to consider having surgery to try and remove it in the future. For now, I’m positive that we were able to get all of the lead shots from the wound out.”
“Thank you, doctor.”
By the time she was gone the crushing weight that had been pressing against my chest had lightened. Declan was going to be all right. The world didn’t seem as grim as it had moments before. My phone chimed again, and this time I left my seat to retrieve it. I opened a text message from an unknown number. The crushing weight returned, and with greater force. The text message was a photo, one that showed my father beaten and gagged. His arms were handcuffed behind him around a gleaming life-sized metal-art statue of RoboCop. I zoomed in on his face. My pop’s eyes and nose were swollen and bruised, and his cheeks were streaked with blood.
I screamed. My body coursed with rage and I felt like I was about to explode. Before I realized what I was doing I had punched three holes in the wall. The only thing that snapped me out of my fury was the combination of my throbbing fist and ringing phone. Powdered drywall floated around my head like fairy dust so I stepped into the hallway in order to see my phone’s display. I accepted the incoming call.
“Hello, John,” said Damian Kendricks.
I took a deep breath and tried to compose myself. “Let me speak to him.”
“No.”
“I need to know he’s alive.”
“You saw the photo.”
“Either I talk to him or I give the cops the knife.”
“You seem to be confused about who has more leverage because — ”
I hung up. Was it a risky move? Maybe. But it was exactly what my pop would have wanted me to do.
At one point in his storied career my old man served on the Emergency Response Team, the Canadian version of SWAT. He participated in hundreds of ERT operations, including hostage negotiations and rescues. He used to tell me how in every negotiation there were always two types of criminals: those who needed a calm voice to reason with them and talk them through the stand-off, and those who only responded to bold and aggressive action. I had just bet my old man’s life on Damian Kendricks fitting into the latter category. I knew the only reason he would hold off on executing my old man would be if he thought he needed my pop alive as a bargaining chip. My refusal to deal without definitive proof of life showed Kendricks that. I also wanted him to think I was dangerous and unpredictable. The more uncertainty Kendricks had about what I was capable of, the more likely it was my old man would make it through this ordeal. I had held my breath for exactly nineteen seconds when the phone rang again. I exhaled forcefully and answered the call.
“Hang up again and I put a bullet in his fucking head,” threatened Kendricks.
“Let me speak to him.” I heard rattling then muffled voices.
“Son?” croaked my father.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he declared, the bluster returning to his voice.
“I’m so sorry, Pop.”
“Not your fault. Don’t ever think this is your fault.”
“I will get you out of this. I swear on Mom’s soul.”
“Listen to me, son.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Give the evidence you have to my boys in blue. I want each one of these pussies locked up so they can all get the multiple butt-fuckings they deserve.”
Kendricks bellowed in the background.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” I heard the phone clatter to the ground followed by distant thuds and grunts of what could only have been biker fists striking my old man.
“Stop it!” I screamed. “Kendricks, I’ll deal! Do you hear me? Kendricks? I’ll deal!”
A frightened elderly woman picked up her pace as she wheeled her IV pole past me. I clutched the phone to my ear, desperate for a response. More muffled voices and sounds.
“We meet tonight,” said Kendricks finally. “Two AM.”
“Where?”
“You’ll receive a text. Follow the instructions exactly. If you breathe a word of this to the cops I will know, and the old man dies. Try anything cute and I swear to God I’ll cut his heart out of his chest and send you the video.”
“If I don’t see him alive there will be no exchange. Understand?” Kendricks was silent for several moments.
“Two AM,” he said again, before ending the call.
THIRTY-FIVE
Kendricks warned me that if I went to the cops he would know. Maybe he was bluffing. But it also wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that he had strategically placed contacts within the VPD. No police department was immune to corruption and Damian Kendricks had managed to remain invisible despite a full-blown investigation into his criminal network by the Gang Crime Unit. It certainly reasoned that a little inside information could go a long way in helping him stay one step ahead of some of the city’s finest investigators.
I simply couldn’t take the chance of involving the VPD. I desperately wanted to call Rya but wasn’t sure that I could convince her to help me without police knowledge. Although I knew she would do anything for my pop, her loyalty to the badge was such that it was difficult to imagine her not wanting to strategize with the GCU. Their involvement would lead to the use of the Emergency Response Team during the exchange, in which the VPD’s joint objectives would be to recover my father and take down the illusive criminal organization that they had been trying unsuccessfully to build a case against for years. That was the difference between the police and me — my only concern was getting my father back. I was going to have to do this on my own. Even worse, I had to do it without the help of Declan and his lethal skills and combat experience.
Cobra Clutch Page 19