Orwell shot Bobby an under-the-eyebrows look of utter contempt that was missed by no one at the table except Bobby and Bradley. Oikawa, on his way back from the stalls, was clearly staggered by the sight of Bradley sitting in his chair. Despite his rank, Bradley wasn’t much good at bullshit or deception. Oikawa had recently fouled up a witness interview, and Bradley had let him know how he felt about it. Ducking his chin, Oikawa veered sharply towards the bar, where he unwisely tried to engage the duet of vice cops in idle conversation. The cops skittered away, warily eyed him with a mixture of suspicion and disdain.
Farley Spears said, “What’d you think of the McEwen verdict, Homer?”
Bradley shrugged. “The waiter’s dead, and he’ll be dead forever. Fatboy’s alive, for now. Is that an equitable situation? I don’t think so.” Bradley sipped carefully at his beer. “Maybe you should’ve pulled the trigger when you had the chance, Jack.”
“Pow!” said Orwell. “Case closed.”
Parker, the renowned soft-hearted liberal, said, “I hope you guys are pulling my leg.”
“I’ll pull your leg any time you want,” offered Bobby. He winked at Orwell, but Eddy wasn’t anywhere near dumb enough to wink back.
“In fact,” said Bobby, “I’ll pull both of your legs at the same time, and make a wish, if you want me to.”
Parker’s face was pink, but devoid of emotion. Her voice was tight as she said, “Farley, would you move over a little, please.”
Homer said, “Wait a minute. Let me get out of here.” He rested his free hand lightly on Parker’s wrist as he slowly drained his glass. Thumping the empty glass down on the table, he stood up and walked purposefully away.
Parker emptied her wine glass into Bobby’s smirking face.
The bartender glared across at them through the pale blue funk. His mouth fell open but no words tumbled out. He told himself — and he was right — that there wasn’t a bartender in the world stupid or gutsy enough to cut off a table of cops in a bar that was full of the bastards.
Bobby wiped his face with his hands. He said, “Did I deserve that?” He glanced anxiously around. “Maybe I better apologize.”
“Don’t bother,” said Parker.
Bobby stood up. The pain in his ankles made him wince. He rested a hand on Farley Spears’ unwilling shoulder. “No, I insist. I was out of line, Claire, but now I’ve stepped back over the line, and I promise not to cross the line again, and that’s no line.” He took out his gold-coloured rattail comb and ran it through his hair, sucked wine from the comb. A belch rattled his smile. He sat down. He said, “I think I’m gonna buy a Teflon hat.”
Dan Oikawa reclaimed his seat. Stomping all over the bartender’s feeble objections, he’d bought two fresh pitchers of beer, and a glass of red wine for Parker.
“Good man!” said Spears jovially. But the smile was wiped off his face when Oikawa handed him his wallet, and he saw that he was broke. Outraged, he said, “You spent all my money!”
“I thought you wanted me to.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Your wallet was on the table. When I got up to take a leak, you pushed it right at me.”
“The hell I did!”
“With your elbow. What’d you think, I picked your pocket?” Oikawa shook his head, slightly dismayed. “It was your round anyway, Farley. Jeez, it’s been your round since 1985.”
“Damn straight,” said Orwell. He added, “I didn’t even know the cheap sonofabitch owned a wallet.”
Bobby was going to stuff Orwell into the bottom of a dumpster, one of these days. He rested his elbows on the table and concentrated on feigning enjoyment of the dimwit repartee.
Parker wondered what Bobby was thinking. Look at him. All smiles and chuckles, smiles and chuckles. She sipped her wine, turned slightly so she could study Willows from beneath her regulation-length eyelashes. She was pleased that he hadn’t punched Bobby’s lights out when he’d made his brain-dead remark about her legs. But at the same time, a part of her wished that Bobby was crawling around on the floor right this minute, looking for his caps. Listening in, she discovered that Willows was discussing the McEwen verdict with Spears. Or rather, Spears was discussing the case with Willows, and Willows was working hard at being a good listener. Parker drank a little more wine. All cops were good listeners. When they were being cops.
As she sat there, covertly looking at Jack, it came to her, imperceptible as the dawn, that it wasn’t in his nature to let Bobby’s remark pass, and that he must have something in mind for Bobby, something worth waiting for. Serious grief.
Well, okay. Let him do what he felt was required, as long as he didn’t get caught. It wasn’t as if Bobby hadn’t stuck out his chin and asked for it. It wasn’t as if Jack didn’t have every right to belt him one. Almost every right. He and Parker were practically engaged, after all. Living together. Tossing and turning in the same bed every night. But. She still kept her rented apartment, and in three months she’d have to renew her lease, or walk. She had already decided that if it came down to it, she’d walk. Walk away from her apartment, Jack, her badge. She’d been spinning her wheels long enough. She wanted a husband, babies. All of that and nothing less.
Jack, sitting beside her, raised his arm as if to give her a proprietary hug. But he was at his most affectionate when there were no witnesses. He’d signalled the waitress.
Willows hadn’t paid the woman much attention. Close up, he saw that she was young enough to be his daughter, old enough to be his grandmother. A do-it-yourself blonde, she wore her hair in a falling-apart French twist. Her neck was encircled by a black velvet collar studded with bits of coloured glass. Her abbreviated tank top was made of a material that looked like stretch Mylar. Raggedy fishnet stockings clawed their way up her pale legs and just failed to make it to the hem of her pleated black skirt. The lifeless, mechanical way she moved, Willows decided not to be surprised if she made a right-angle turn and there was a big key sticking out of her back. The woman looked down at him, looked right through him. A walking pharmacy, she was wired like forty miles of prairie fence. You could drop pennies in those eyes, the coins would keep on falling long past forever.
Willows decided he’d had enough to drink after all. He took Claire’s hand and led her out of the bar, into the city’s frazzled, crackly, splintered light.
Bobby Dundas stared at Parker until long after the door had swung shut behind her. More to himself than anyone else, he said, “I wonder where they’re going.”
“Somewhere you can’t,” said Orwell.
Bobby said, “Don’t bet on it.”
An hour or more earlier, Orwell had ordered a basket of chicken fingers and fries, thinking it wise to put something in his stomach before he started the long commute home. Now the food had finally arrived, along with paper tubs of plum sauce, cute little plastic bags of malt vinegar, a large plastic squeeze bottle of ketchup. Orwell snatched up the ketchup. Oikawa and Spears both went for the plum sauce.
Bobby flinched and cursed, twisted away.
Much too late.
5
Quitting time didn’t come a minute too early.
Another day older and deeper in debt, Ozzie and his good buddy Dean washed away the dust of their labours with pints of draft beer at a bar on Marine Drive that featured non-stop strippers and, weirdly appropriate, no cover charge. More important by far, the joint had a satellite dish.
It was fight night. The dish provided a direct live feed from Las Vegas to the bar’s wall-size screens. The evening’s main event was a championship bout between a talented Canadian fighter named Billy “The Kid” Irwin and a top-ranked slugger out of Detroit who’d recently had his name legally changed to Muhammad something or other.
Ozzie said, “Yeah, Muhammad Opponent. Or, more likely, Muhammad Chump.”
Muhammad looked good, had a well-defined body and no fat, except perhaps between his ears where it was not so easily detected. His manager advertised him as ow
ning a record of fifteen wins and zero losses, but as the freshly shaved TNT sports jacket duly noted, most of those fights had taken place in small towns in Mexico that could only be reached by four-wheel-drive vehicle. As the fight progressed, it became apparent that Muhammad’s arsenal consisted of one potentially lethal punch, a knockout roundhouse right. It was also clear that his corner’s no-nonsense strategy was to allow him to absorb as much gruesome punishment as was required to put him in a situation where he might deliver that punch.
By the time the fight entered the third round, Ozzie was deep into his second pint. Muhammad had already been floored twice. In Vegas there is a mandatory eight count. Soon, for Muhammad, it would be the mandatory ten. The Detroit slugger’s legs were wobbly. His eyes were made of the stuff of marbles. Ozzie offered Dean ten-to-one odds but Dean laughed him off. Their burly waiter dropped two more pints on the table, hovered expectantly. Ozzie ignored him. A little clock in the bottom right corner of the screen said there were eleven seconds left in the round. The waiter moved in, said the beer was $7.50. Ozzie nodded, kept his eyes on the screen. Why shouldn’t the waiter be kept waiting? He was a waiter, wasn’t he? Persistent, too. He asked Ozzie, did he want the beer or not? Ozzie reached for his wallet, fat with small-denomination currency.
The round ended with a flurry of action, Irwin cool, not a hair out of place. Ozzie watched with frank admiration as Irwin encouraged his opponent to drop his hands by administering several hard smacks to the kidney. That task accomplished, the head unprotected, he bounced a quick left-right-left combo off forehead, cheekbone, nose.
Muhammad staggered off in the general direction of his corner, flopped onto his stool. His arms rested on the ropes, always a bad sign. His head was low. Blood oozed from both nostrils. When he ejected his mouthpiece, his teeth flashed red as any vampire’s. His left eye was horribly swollen, squeezing shut faster than a subway door. His chest heaved. Sweat poured off him in sheets. Everything about him shouted loser.
Ozzie paid the waiter, tipped him a dollar and incidental change. He lit a cigarette. “Know why you and me get along so good, Dean?”
Dean shook his head, his eyes still on the big screen, watching the babe in the pink bikini strut around the ring holding up a square of cardboard with a big black 4 outlined in some kind of glittery stuff, sequins ...
Ozzie snapped, “Dean, I’m talkin’ to you!”
Dean reluctantly looked away from the woman.
“The reason we get along so good,” Ozzie said, “is real simple. Know what it is? It’s because neither of us get along with anybody else.”
Dean pushed the ashtray a little closer to Ozzie, a little farther away from himself. What Ozzie said was true. The truth. He’d moved to Vancouver eight months earlier, on the run from child-support payments more brutal than anything you’d ever hope to see up there on the screen. Still sleeping in the back of his station wagon, he’d bumped into Ozzie at an eastside bar, let him buy a few rounds and ended up telling him all his troubles.
Ozzie might’ve had wings sticking out of the back of his plaid flannel shirt. The guy was such an angel. He’d bullshitted his boss at StoneWorks into giving Dean a job, had loaned him a couple of hundred bucks, no interest. He’d let him crash at his apartment until he earned his first paycheque, and even helped him find a cheap furnished room in a house just off Main Street, only a couple of short blocks from a liquor store and a McDonald’s. Such a nice guy, but he was friendless except for Dean. Which was fine with Dean, who’d never been much of a mixer. As Ozzie frequently pointed out, they were both pretty much loners, at heart.
“A loaner?” Dean had said touchily, the first time. “What d’you mean, ’cause I split from the wife and kids?”
Ozzie thumped him on the biceps, slugged him a shade harder than the occasion warranted. Putting him in his place. “A loner, asshole. A guy who’d rather be all by himself, than spend time in bad company.”
Dean rubbed his arm, still not 100-per-cent sure why he’d been punched ...
In the opening seconds of the fifth round, Billy Irwin took a low blow, a hard shot to what the TNT guy euphemistically referred to as “the groin area,” or what might alternatively be called “the groan area.” The referee separated the boxers, called time out, and instructed the judges to deduct a point from Muhammad’s scorecard. Muhammad scowled fiercely, but his anger was a sham. The Detroit pugilist’s foul strategy was intended to take the wind out of Billy’s sails. Since he was being thoroughly pummelled anyway, the lost point was of no consequence.
Billy crouched down by the ropes. Fighters wore a cup, naturally, but blows to the nether regions could be so excruciatingly painful and debilitating that bouts were often stopped as a consequence of a single punch. Even so, Billy showed nothing. His face was calm, emotionless. He was clearly a man of guts and dignity, who knew how to handle himself. The cynical Vegas crowd applauded loudly as he stood up. The referee asked him if he was okay. The fight resumed.
Billy moved in, feinted with his right. Muhammad shifted to his right. A thundering left hook caught him on the point of his chin, snapped his head back at a near-impossible angle. A spherical cloud of sweat hung in the ring beneath the lights, as Billy’s fists smashed Muhammad’s ribs to splinters. He had caused the Motor City slugger to drop his arms again and now he hit him with a flawless overhand right. Muhammad sprawled, apparently lifeless, on the canvas. The referee started the count and then took a closer look, and called for the ring physician. The sound of the fight’s last blow continued to echo throughout the room.
Game over.
Ozzie loitered over his third pint. Dean was working on his fifth. Ozzie lit up. He said, “It’s almost a done deal, kid.”
“What’s that?” Dean’s head came up, but not much.
“The groundwork,” said Ozzie.
“Yeah? You serious?” Dean lowered his voice to a whisper. “We really gonna do it?”
Ozzie nodded. He’d been softening Dean up for months, using words to pound away at him, bring down his guard and set him up for the knockout punch, since the day they’d met. In the early rounds, he’d felt Dean out, got to know him, find out what he could do, was capable of. What buttons made him jump in what direction. How far he’d fall, if you pushed him hard enough.
Ozzie was planning a snatch. He was going to nab a stockbroker, a guy named Harold Wismer, who was a zillionaire. Ozzie was confident things were going to work out just fine, because this was his second kidnapping, and he had learned a lot from all the mistakes he’d made the first time out.
There was a post-fight interview, Billy quick-speaking and articulate. Then the screen went dark and the first of the strippers followed her breasts on stage. A blonde. The woman stood there, waiting for the DJ in his glass box to crank up some music. Losing patience, she started taking off her clothes without the benefit of a soundtrack. A pro.
Ozzie said, “There’s some things I gotta do. I’ll see you later, about eight. Okay?”
Dean’s eyes flickered over the woman. Top to, uh, bottom. Ozzie aggressively mussed his hair. “Eight o’clock, Dean. Be there.”
Dean nodded, transfixed by what he saw up there on the stage.
Ozzie turned his back on him, and walked away.
*
His one-bedroom apartment was a top-floor, no-view unit in a drab three-storey stucco on Twelfth Avenue, a few blocks off Cambie. The apartment was furnished with a table and two chairs he’d bought at Ikea, a couch the previous tenant had left behind, a queen-size mattress and box spring from Mattress City.
He’d bought the twenty-inch TV second-hand at a garage sale, paid cash for the VCR at A&B Sound. The pocket-size battery-powered tape recorder and audio and video tapes had been purchased at London Drugs. His intention was to copy snippets of film dialogue from the VCR to the tape recorder, and to stitch these short pieces together to make an irresistible demands note he could play over the telephone.
He’d rented a few of the movie
s he’d needed from Blockbuster Video but had to go down to Videomatica on Fourth Avenue to get most of his material, because he had a weakness for the older stuff, black-and-white films starring guys like James Cagney, men who knew how to deliver a gangster’s lines. Not that he wasn’t flexible. He’d used a single word from a television series called “Law and Order,” added a few words sputtered by a pissed-off Donald Duck. Just for laughs, he’d even tossed in a line from Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run.
Using scissors and a glue stick and sheets of plain white paper and individual letters and words culled from magazines as disparate as Playboy and Town and Garden, he’d put together a cute little note that politely informed Mrs. Joan Wismer that, if she wanted to get Harold back in less than five pieces, it was going to cost her an arm and a leg.
He switched on the tape recorder and played the first of the messages, hearing it for at least the tenth time, still feeling it achieved a kind of horrific politeness that struck him as exactly right. Heartened, he turned on the TV, slid a movie he’d rented on a hunch, Demolition Man, with Stallone and Snipes, into the VCR. He hit the play button. He was putting together the last of the audio tapes. Stallone had such a wonderful cheese-grater of a voice ...
While the credits rolled, Ozzie put on the kettle, dropped a teabag in a chipped white mug. Since Stallone films were mostly stuff blowing up, and not too much dialogue, he estimated he could zip through the movie in forty-five minutes easy. Once he found the word he was looking for, all he had to do was dub it from video to the portable tape recorder. If he got the work down before he left to pick up Dean, he could get the movie to Blockbuster on time, save himself a few bucks in late charges.
The kettle boiled. He made a cup of tea, tossed the steaming bag into the stainless-steel sink.
He checked his watch. A little over an hour until he had to pick up Dean for the gun run. He lit a cigarette and stretched out on the lumpy couch. All sorts of stuff was blowing up. Numerous fifty-gallon drums of gasoline, buildings large as a city block.
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