Karaoke Rap

by Laurence Gough

  Ozzie and Lamonica had met by chance in a Vancouver bar a little over a year ago, Lamonica six feet and two hundred pounds of seasoned ex-con on the hunt for a mule, some po’ white boy to drive an eighteen-wheeler loaded with shrink-wrapped bricks of Lasquetti Island marijuana across the border into felony-happy America. Ozzie had taken a pass. He and Lamonica had gotten along okay though, exchanged cards. When Ozzie needed to arm himself for his first attempted kidnapping, he’d gone to Lamonica. And now here he was, back again.

  They walked past Dean’s truck and across the lot, Lamonica charting an eccentric course, bobbing and weaving among the parked cars and minivans and pickup trucks. His gold Lincoln Town Car was parked directly beneath a burnt-out light. Behind them, there was nothing but highway and the music of the highway, cars speeding past in the velvet night, the shrill whine of all-season tires and the soft rush of punished air, and every so often the subsonic, heart-battering thump of a passing radio, or the sudden blare of a horn.

  Lamonica wandered around, pointing his MagLite into nearby vehicles, startling black shadows and making them jump, the bright beam of light rippling across steering wheels, bucket seats, overflowing ashtrays, empty coffee cups, loose coins. A skinny black kid slouched low in the passenger seat of a black Mustang a few slots over. When the MagLite lit him up, he smiled and waved. Lamonica said, “You awake, Beebo?”

  Beebo slouched a little lower, but kept smiling. In the harsh glare of the flashlight, his gums were a bleached pink colour, and his teeth glowed a pale, silky blue.

  Lamonica, satisfied that Ozzie and Dean fully understood the situation, managed a devastatingly accurate Eddie Murphy imitation as he danced to the Caddy’s rear end. He popped the trunk on three identical dimpled aluminum suitcases. Slapping Dean lightly on the arm with the flashlight, he said, “Open ’em.”

  The first suitcase held a loose jumble of sheathed hunting knives, mostly survival-type weapons with black Teflon finishes, serrated edges, blood grooves. The second suitcase was stuffed with a wide variety of revolvers, from hideaway snub-noses to great long Dirty Harry models. A few of the guns were finished in blue steel but most of them were stainless or nickel plate. The third suitcase contained semiautomatic pistols.

  Lamonica’s hand moved negligently. “You be desirin’ a wheel gun I gots twenty-two and three-eighties, thirty-eights and three-five-sevens, a couple forty-four-calibre monsters, kill yo’ average po-lice vehicle with a single shot. The semis, I got nine-mils and forty-fives. All of these guns been made in U.S.A. or a bona fide ally of this great country. They in guaranteed good working order. The new ones are brand new. The others been checked out, they good as new.”

  “You field-test ’em?” said Dean. Lamonica gave him a blank look. Dean rephrased his question. “Try ’em out, go off somewhere and shoot ’em?”

  “I only shot a gun but two times,” said Lamonica. “The first time, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doin’, emptied the magazine. The second time, I aimed careful and shot but once. Bam! That was it. Since then, I ain’t had reason to pop no caps. I got no use for guns, tell you the truth.” Lamonica scanned the parking lot. He slapped the MagLite into the palm of his hand.

  There were three stainless Rugers, nine-millimetre pistols with spare magazines. Model P89s. Ozzie took two of them.

  “You breakin’ up the set, man. Whyn’t you take all three?”

  “Don’t need three,” said Ozzie.

  “You want bullets? Gun ain’t no good without bullets, I got some nasty mothafuckin’ hollowpoints, Winchester Black Talons. Those babies tear a man up pretty good ... Some asshole gotta get capped, might as well fuck ’im up real good, ain’t that right?”

  Ozzie nodded agreeably. But Lamonica wasn’t paying any attention to him. He had his calculator in hand and was pushing buttons.

  “The Rugers is three hundred apiece. You wants two of ’em. Let’s see now ...” Punch punch punch. “Six hundred sound right to you?”

  “A little steep,” said Ozzie.

  “Thirty a box for the hollowpoints. I got five boxes. Let’s see what the magic thaing be sayin’ is five times thirty ...”

  Dean sparked his lighter, sucked smoke into the basement of his lungs. The nicotine hit him. His body quivered like an arrow shot into a mighty oak. He sighed contentedly.

  Lamonica’s head was down as he concentrated on the calculator’s tiny buttons. “So, what’d we say? Five boxes of Black Talons at thirty a box?” Punch punch punch. He aimed his flashlight at the calculator’s screen. “Only a hundred fifty? Must be some kind of mistake.” He ran the numbers again, frowned. “Yeah, I forgot the six hundred for the guns. Hit the plus button, I be okay. There we go. Now the other button. Yeah! Yeah!” Lamonica’s broad face alternately expressed unbridled joy and sheer horror. Sweat blistered his skin. He smiled. “Be lookin’ at a grand total of seven-fifty, Ozzie.”

  Ozzie pulled his wallet, counted out eight one-hundred-dollar bills. He offered the money to Lamonica. “Got a fifty?”

  “You want change? What am I, the Bank of America?” He blinked his flashlight. Beebo climbed out of the Mustang and shambled bonelessly over, looking concerned. Lamonica said, “Got a fifty, man?”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Beebo yanked on his T, exposed the tiniest belly button Ozzie had ever seen, and the butt of a chrome-plated semiauto. He reached deep into the crotch of his pants, grunted as he fished around down there, finally came up with an inch-thick roll. “Sorry, man, alls I gots is hundreds.”

  “Gots no twenties?” said Lamonica. He frowned. “Ain’t I seen a few twenties, in the heart of that fat roll?”

  “I might gots some twenties, two or three.”

  “Fives?”

  “What I do with itty-bitty fives? Wait a minute now. One five. I gots just the one.”

  “Singles?”

  “Ain’t I lookin’?”

  Lamonica was punching buttons again. “My friend Ozzie needs a pair a twenties and the five, and ... hold on now, this’s getting awful fuckin’ complicated ... five singles.”

  “I ain’t gots but three.”

  Lamonica considered the situation. A constant stream of headlights swept across them as hundreds of cars flowed out of the parking lot.

  Dean lit a fresh cigarette from the stump of the first.

  Finally Lamonica said, “Okay, seems to me like we approximately two dollars short. Beebo, how you fixed for change?”

  Beebo told Lamonica he never carried any change, that it was too hard on his pants, and he didn’t like the noise. He said, “You try sneakin’ home late wit a pocketful a nickels and dimes, see where you get hit.”

  “What about you gotta make a phone call?”

  “I breaks a bill at the bar.”

  “Then what?”

  “I make the call ...” Beebo saw where Lamonica was going. He said, “I leave the rest of the money on the bar. Or if I at a payphone, just throw it away, whatever ...”

  Lamonica eyed him, openly suspicious. “I never knew that about you, man. What other secrets you gots, that I don’t know about?”

  “Nothin’ much.” Beebo hesitated. “ ’Cept I been screwin’ yo’ wife, on Monday nights when you be watchin’ football ...”

  Lamonica laughed until he stopped. He pointed at Ozzie. “You gets no fuckin’ change, man.” He waggled a hand heavy with gold at the trunk. “Help yo’self to a blade, take whatever you want and get yo’ ass outta here.” He jerked his head. “That Chevy, what kinda mileage you get? Pretty bad, huh?”

  “Twelve to the gallon,” said Ozzie, fudging a little.

  “Lookin’ at thirty-point-six miles to the border, that’d be about two-point-five-five gallons times a dollar thirty-two a gallon, return trip’d cost you about three dollars and thirty-six cents.” Lamonica slammed the Caddy’s trunk, narrowly missing Ozzie’s fingers. He had spat out the numbers at lightning speed, off the top of his head. Smiling, he climbed into the Town Car and started the engine. Beebo sashayed back t
o his Mustang. The alarm chirped.

  Eight hundred U.S. dollars lighter, Ozzie walked away with the two Ruger semiautos, spare magazines, five boxes of ammunition and a carbon-steel knife with an eight-inch blade and a genuine cowhide sheath.

  *

  Half an hour from the border, he exited the highway, turning onto a secondary road that wandered into the countryside. Dean asked him where in the world they were going. Ozzie cranked up the radio.

  They drove several miles to a T intersection in the middle of nowhere that was lit by a single streetlight. Insects had gathered. Bats swirled in and out of the light. Ozzie pulled onto the lumpy grass, killed the Chevy’s big V-8. He showed Dean how to load his pistol, told him to get out of the truck, explained how to line up the Ruger’s sights.

  Dean hit a bat with his second shot. Beginner’s luck. Crouching, the two men examined the wildly flapping wings and the bloody strings of flesh that were all that remained of the creature’s body. Dean let off a few more rounds, and might have obliterated a moth or two. He hit his intended target — the streetlight — with his twenty-third shot. The huge glass bulb bloomed like a nuclear crocus, and then the landscape was plunged into what might easily have been mistaken for eternal darkness. Jagged chunks of glass rattled on the asphalt but missed the truck, thank God.

  Dean was pumped. Shrieking, he danced maniacally around the starlit intersection.

  Ozzie climbed back in the Chevy, switched the lights on high-beam and swung the truck’s blunt nose around on Dean. Dean kept shooting his new Ruger into the sky. He didn’t seem to mind being in the spotlight.

  Staring disdainfully at him through the windshield, Ozzie quietly said, “Enjoy yourself while you can, moron.”

  9

  By the time the rising tide finally reached the ex-Rottweiler-owner’s two-hundred-and-ten-pound corpse, the bullet-riddled body had settled deep into the gluey, toxic muck of Coal Harbour.

  The briny sea lapped at the dead man’s heels, darkened the material of his jeans, soaked his leather jacket. Saltwater rinsed the blood from his mouth. Wavelets lapped at his dead, unseeing eyes. His hair swayed in the gentle currents.

  The water continued to rise. It gurgled and chuckled against the cut granite stones of the seawall. Forty-odd minutes after it had first touched the man, he had been swallowed whole.

  The hours crept slowly past, and the ocean continued to roll in, until finally, at high tide, the body lay under six feet of water. There was a brief period, slack tide, when the harbour was so quiet that reflected security lights from the nearby marina lay still as death upon the jetblack surface.

  But soon the tide was on the ebb, tons of ocean pouring with increasing speed from the little harbour’s gaping mouth into Burrard Inlet, and out to sea.

  The ex-Rottweiler-owner’s body shifted restlessly, as the currents worked at it. There was air in the lungs and the belly was full of fetid gas. Water flowed at right angles across the length of the body with increasing urgency. The leather jacket billowed like a sail. The corpse’s hair stood on end. A hand rose up, puffy white fingers splayed wide. The body shifted, rocked from side to side. The left leg came unstuck from the muck, and a flock of tiny bubbles scooted towards the surface. A few minutes later, the right arm lifted up. The body jerked and twitched as if tugged by invisible strings. The other leg came free, and then, reluctantly, the left arm disengaged from the muck. The corpse tumbled across the slime. It rolled over so it lay face up, and drifted slowly away from the shoreline.

  With agonizing slowness, it began to rise towards the surface.

  Resurrection.

  10

  Sex was good. But sometimes the refreshing sleep that followed was even better.

  The bedside phone rang at a few minutes past one. Willows snatched up the receiver. The hot-red numerals of the clock came into sharp focus. He spoke softly into the phone, listened quietly for close to half a minute, disconnected.

  Parker had been sleeping on her side. She rolled over on her back, as Willows pushed away the sheets.

  “Jack ...?”

  Willows reached out for her. His hand touched her bare shoulder. He shifted his weight, moved towards her. He held her hand in his.

  Parker said, “Jack, what is it?”

  Willows took a deep, shuddery breath.

  He said, “Sean. It’s Sean. He’s ...”

  Parker turned towards him. She reached out, and touched his arm.

  Willows’ voice broke. He sat there on the bed, concentrating, working hard to hold himself still, push back the shriek of anguish that was rising up inside him.

  Parker threw aside the blankets. She said, “We’d better get dressed, Jack.”

  A decision had been made to transport Sean to St. Paul’s, even though UBC Pavilions was marginally closer. The university was, relatively speaking, a violent-crimes backwater. At St. Paul’s there was a much better chance that there’d be an emergency-room surgeon experienced in gunshot wounds.

  By the time Willows and Parker arrived at the hospital, Sean was in surgery. All Willows could get from the duty nurse was that he’d been shot in the chest and that his injuries were not believed to be life-threatening.

  In jeans and a black cotton sweater and scuffed sneakers — no shirt or socks — Willows strode briskly up and down the corridor outside the emergency room. His eyes ached. The corridor was too shiny, too bright. A trio of interns in signature short white lab coats walked by, laughing too loudly at a private joke. He wanted to snap their necks.

  Parker had walked with him for the first half-hour or so, lengthened her stride to keep up with his manic pace as she constantly talked to him, tried to calm him despite her own mounting sense of desperation. Finally, exhausted, she abandoned the chase.

  Willows continued to stride up and down the corridor. He was almost running. His skin had an unhealthy translucent quality. His eyes were fever-bright. The black sweater clung to his sweaty body. He asked Parker for the tenth time if they should have wakened Annie.

  “She needs her sleep, Jack. For now, let her sleep.”

  The uniform who’d answered the first of the 911 calls dropped by as a courtesy. He was just a kid, not much older than Sean. Willows buttonholed him. Staring into the cop’s tired eyes from less than a foot away, he cross-examined him at breakneck speed.

  It was obvious to Parker that the cop didn’t like the way he was being handled, that his initial sympathy was fast turning to wholehearted resentment. “Back off, Jack,” she said. “He isn’t going to make a break for it.” Willows blinked. He moved laterally, one small, reluctant step. Parker offered her hand and introduced herself. The cop’s name was Ken Gregory.

  Parker said, “You were first on the scene, Ken?”

  “Yeah, right. Can we go outside for a minute, so I can catch a smoke?”

  They walked down to the end of the corridor, through the old-fashioned wood-and-glass doors. Outside, several people stood close by, smoking. An elderly man cried softly into a young woman’s arms. The grass in the area around the exit had been trampled to mud. Dozens of cigarette butts littered the ground. Gregory lit up. Willows stood where he could see through the glass panels of the double doors, into the building. If somebody came looking for him, he wanted to be found. He said, “Okay, what’ve you got?”

  The cop shrugged, smoke leaking from his nostrils. “I took the call, the dispatcher had a robbery at the premises where your son works.” He smiled apologetically. “Not that I knew that at the time. Anyway, the call came in around twelve-thirty. Armed robbery, shots fired. I arrived on the premises at twelve-thirty-three. Backup got there a few minutes later, a corporal named Bob Jennings.”

  Gregory sucked on his cigarette, exhaled. “Okay, so the store’s empty. At least, we can’t see anybody. We go inside, slow, take a look around. They got those big convex mirrors, for shoplifters. We use the mirror to check the place out. There’s someone down behind the counter. On the floor. It’s your kid. Excuse me, your
son. Jennings calls it in. The paramedics are there in two minutes flat, stabilize your son, bring him here.” He shrugged. His badge glittered in the light from the door. “That’s all I can tell you, that I can think of.”

  “He was shot where, in the chest?”

  Gregory looked startled. “No, the arm. His left forearm. Chest? No, there were eleven shots fired, nine-mils, the casings were all over the place, on the counter, cash register, the floor. But I’m pretty sure he was hit just the one time.” Gregory frowned, taking it seriously. “Somebody said in the chest? I don’t know, maybe. I guess I could be wrong.”

  Willows stared at the ground.

  Parker said, “Thanks, Ken.”

  “Yeah, sure. The kid, he going to be okay?”

  “He’s going to be just fine,” said Parker, more forcibly than she’d intended.

  It was another hour before Sean came out from under the lights. The surgeon’s name was Fisher. He had the body of a lightweight boxer, intense, dark brown eyes. He was losing his hair. There was a thin diagonal scar on his upper lip. He said, “Okay, he’s off the table, we’ve got him in intensive, and he’s probably going to be there two or three days, but he’s out of danger.”

  “I want to see him,” said Willows. He felt no sense of relief, only a mounting anger. He shoved his hands into his pockets.

  “No problem,” said Fisher. “He’s still under the influence of the anaesthetic. When he comes out of it, he still isn’t going to make a whole hell of a lot of sense, because he’ll be heavily sedated. Earliest you can hope to talk to him, late tomorrow morning.” Fisher turned away. “Third floor, they’ll give you his room number at the nurses’ station.”

  Willows said, “Wait a minute.”

  Fisher glanced at a big clock over the waiting-room doorway. “I’ve got to get back in there ...”

  “Sean was shot in the arm?”