Karaoke Rap

by Laurence Gough

  Melanie smiled dreamily, and drifted away to freshen his drink.

  Following the routine they’d established, Harold shed his suit and took a solitary shower. Melanie had laid out a change of clothes for him — a pale-blue shirt, tan slacks, a baby-blanket-blue cardigan, wheat-coloured linen jacket. The clothes were expensive but had been bought off the rack. Off the rack! Harold had a hard-earned reputation for flamboyant taste. The clothes were intended to lend him a certain degree of anonymity, when he was out on the town with his babe. But what a price to pay.

  Melanie, knowing how he felt, told him he was a handsome devil. She fiddled with the knot of his tie, helped him get his ponytail centred, tied down at an angle that was jaunty but not too jaunty.

  She handed him his drink. Harold slid open the wide glass door and they went out on the balcony, leaned against the rail. The balcony offered views to the south and west. Harold looked across False Creek at the drab, huddled architecture of the co-ops. The coops. Subsidized housing, on some of the most valuable land in the whole fucking city. Brilliant.

  He studied the ranks of sailboats moored at a small marina in the shadow of the Granville Street Bridge. There were fifty or sixty boats down there, live-aboards, mostly. He had never seen any of those boats move so much as a single goddamn inch. It was as if they were chained in place, rooted to the spot. He tilted his ear to the low hum of traffic from three bridges. His critical eye roved across the sparkly blue water.

  Melanie had made a reservation for seven o’clock at Monk McQueen’s, a seafood restaurant on Granville Island. Melanie drove her leased Acura. The payments were a little under five hundred a month, but Harold, unaware she was double-billing, didn’t begrudge her a penny of it.

  It was warm enough to eat outside, on the deck with its view of False Creek, the marina, highrises. Not that Harold was the outdoors type, a lover of urban scenery, the endless parade. The only thing he liked about being outside was the chance to burn a cigar.

  They finished dinner at eight-thirty. Melanie said she’d had a little too much wine, and insisted on taking a stroll along the waterfront before driving back to the apartment. They walked east for fifteen minutes, following the wide, meandering path along the seawall, until they came upon a wooden bench.

  She asked Harold if he’d like to sit down for a minute. Harold was too winded to speak. He shrugged casually. Why not? He sat downwind of her, puffed on his cigar and idly watched the endless stream of lights that flickered across the city’s bridges, listened with half an ear to the evening serenade of emergency sirens. Melanie was apparently in no mood for casual conversation. She seemed content just to be there, in his company. Fine. For now. Harold smoked his cigar down to the label and tossed it into the water. A gull dipped low to investigate the cause of the splash, flared away with an angry squawk.

  Melanie stood up. Harold took his cue. By the time they’d walked back to the car he was breathing heavily again, dripping sweat.

  She waited until Harold had fastened his seatbelt, then drove the Acura sedately back to the apartment.

  *

  Her apartment lit up at 9:27. She’d left the balcony door open a crack. She pulled the door shut. Ozzie’s fingers were perched like the legs of a large albino spider across the frame of his binoculars. He adjusted the focus, had a sharp picture of her for a split second, and then she turned and vanished into the depths of the apartment.

  Ozzie sat there in his truck, fuming. He rolled down his window and told an elderly man walking a Dalmatian that, if that ugly fucking mutt tried to piss on his fucking tires, he’d fucking rip the goddamn spots off it, and shove it right through that fucking chain-link fence over there.

  The apartment went black. By the grim green glow of Ozzie’s Timex, it was exactly 9:34.

  Ozzie was still sitting in his truck, still fuming, when Harold left the building at 11:23. The Rolls crept through the city at or below the speed limit, as Harold drove back to his Shaughnessy mansion. Ozzie found Harold’s habit of never signalling turns particularly annoying.

  It was 11:57 by the Chevy’s dashboard clock when Harold wheeled the Rolls’ blunt nose into the gently curving driveway of his Balfour Avenue home. He’d made it home a scant three minutes before the self-imposed deadline he never missed, no matter what luscious incentives Melanie offered to the contrary.

  Ozzie cruised slowly past the house. He was rewarded with a view of the garage door engulfing the Rolls. He cruised along Balfour, made a left on Selkirk. If there was a street in Shaughnessy that followed a straight line for more than a hundred yards, he’d never found it. Gleaming Volvo or Saab station wagons squatted in the driveways of many of the well-tended acre and half-acre lots. Ozzie had observed that these vehicles were usually driven by the family nanny. The home-owners tended to drive glossy Mercedes, Jaguars, the odd Lexus.

  Everywhere Ozzie looked, the lawns had been recently cut, the gardens were trim. Flowers were abundant. Trees grew straight and tall. Houses in this neighbourhood were priced at anywhere between two and thirteen million dollars. As he idled his truck slowly down the tree-lined street, he thought about what it must be like to roll out of bed in a joint like that. Know that your world was in order and that everything was taken care of.

  Dull.

  He drove back to his apartment, slouched down on his grungy second-hand sofa, drank some beer and watched a little TV, and then went to bed.

  *

  The next morning the alarm woke him at eight. He lay there for a few minutes, scheming, then got up and had a quick shower, shaved. He dressed in black jeans and a black golf shirt, white socks and a pair of almost-brand-new black Reeboks with white stripes.

  He left the apartment, drove to the Denny’s on West Broadway, bought a copy of the Province from a metal box on the street, and went inside and was promptly led to a table near the window. He ordered coffee, a small glass of orange juice, scrambled eggs, sausages and pancakes, whole-wheat toast and extra peanut butter. The waitress told him she’d bring him a selection of jams and jellies, he could choose whatever he wanted.

  Ozzie said he didn’t want any jams, he didn’t want any jellies. All he wanted was peanut butter. Lots of peanut butter. He leaned back against the plum-coloured upholstered booth and told her this was a special day for him, and he was starting it the best way he could think of, with breakfast at his favourite restaurant. The last thing he wanted was to eat his way through all that food and then have everything spoiled right at the last moment because of a lack of something as basic as peanut butter. Toast without peanut butter was like Bogart without Betty Joan Perske. The waitress eyed him. Lauren Bacall, explained Ozzie. Did the waitress have a special problem with peanut butter, an allergy, or something along those lines?

  And could he have some coffee right away, please?

  After breakfast, he drove home to find Dean perched on the concrete retaining wall in front of the building. Dean wore a dark blue windbreaker, mud-brown pants, taupe Hush Puppies. His hair was combed. He hadn’t cut himself shaving. He looked up at the sound of the truck’s engine but made no move to shift his ass off the wall.

  Ozzie cut across the road and pulled up to the curb. He tapped the horn. Dean bounced a bright orange tennis ball, fwap, off the sidewalk. He reached out and caught it, barely, windmilled his arms as he struggled not to tumble off the wall. He had the look of a man who’d just wet his last pair of underpants. His face was as long as a train.

  Ozzie said, “Nice ball. Where’d you get it?”

  Fwap. Fwap. Fwap.

  Ozzie pushed open the truck’s door.

  Dean said, “I took it off a dog.” Fwap.

  “Yeah? What kind of dog?”

  Dean shrugged. Either didn’t know or didn’t care to talk about it. A small dog, Ozzie thought to himself. Ugly little yappety-yap cockapoo, one of those.

  He said, “Somethin’ wrong, partner?”

  Fwap.

  Ozzie eased down out of the truck.

&n
bsp; Fwap.

  He stepped onto the sidewalk. Fwap. Dean was like a spoiled little kid, refusing to speak up, answer a simple question. Ozzie snatched the ball out of the air, held it up in front of him and squeezed hard. The ball shifted into a shape that was somewhat less than spherical. He squeezed harder. The ball resisted him. He rolled it around in his hand, working the seams.

  Dean said, “I phoned in like you told me to, first thing in the morning. Said I was sick. The bastard fired me. Fired me, Ozzie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I told him, ‘Fuck you, asshole. I quit.’ ”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Erika’s got a private phone in her bedroom. On her own private line, so dad can’t listen in? I gave her a call, asked her did she want to drive up to Whistler with us.”

  Ozzie stood rock-still. The tension flowed out of his hands and into his lean, dark-tanned face.

  Bitterly, Dean said, “She told me she couldn’t make it.”

  Ozzie resumed throttling the ball. He said, “Probably the first smart thing she ever said in her whole life.”

  “Told me she didn’t want to see me ever again.”

  Ozzie laughed.

  “Told me I was too old for her.”

  “But not too mature, I bet.”

  “So I tried Monika.”

  Ozzie looked at him.

  “Left a message on her machine, told her to get back to me, if she was in the mood for a big adventure.”

  Ozzie said, “Get in the truck, Dean.”

  Dean put the palms of his hands down on the concrete and lifted himself easily off the wall, swung his Hush Puppies over the narrow strip of grass and onto the sidewalk. He started towards the truck. Ozzie waited until Dean had his back to him, then reached into his jeans and pulled out his knife, pushed the blade deep into the tennis ball and then put the knife back in his pocket. As he climbed into the truck he stuck the index and second fingers of both hands into the slit and yanked hard. The cut widened to a length of about two inches. He fitted the slit ball over Dean’s nose. The ball stuck, clamped in place. Dean’s face turned a shade of red that did not go well with the orange.

  Ozzie slammed his door. He said, “Nobody likes a whiner.” Dean lifted his hand to his face. Ozzie slapped the hand away. He said, “Leave that goddamn thing right where it is, until I tell you to take it off.”

  Dean took his time lighting a cigarette. He sucked smoke into his lungs, looked hard out the windshield.

  *

  The drive to Whistler took a little less than two hours. Coming into the village, it didn’t seem like much at first. Metal-roofed houses high up there in the trees. A golf course. A few hotels, restaurants. The town looked like an elaborate set for a medium-budget movie. It had been three years since Ozzie had worked in Whistler, but it didn’t seem to him that the place had changed all that much.

  Dean said, “Why don’t we get something to eat, maybe a couple beers ...”

  Ozzie drove past the village, continued north towards Pemberton for the better part of a mile and then crossed the highway and turned down a narrow asphalt road, past a sign carved in a thick slab of wood, GREEN LAKE. There was nobody behind them, no oncoming traffic. On either side, alternating every hundred feet or so, a narrow driveway vanished into scrub forest. Here and there a roofline took a bite out of the sky, or a window reflected a spear of sunlight through the spindly trees. It was very quiet. No dogs barked. No foolish birds sang.

  Dean said, “How come there’s no power lines?”

  “Underground wiring,” said Ozzie. It was weird, the things Dean noticed. Power lines. Easily victimized dogs. Under-age nymphets. They were getting close. He lifted his foot off the gas pedal. The truck lost momentum. He tapped the brakes. Was this it? He spun the wheel, hit the gas. The truck surged forward. They drove down a driveway that meandered unconvincingly through a stand of fir and cedar that suddenly gave way to half a football field’s worth of uncut grass. On the far side of the lawn stood a shingled house with a red metal roof, red brick chimney.

  There were no cars in the driveway, no toys in the yard. The windows were shut tight, the curtains drawn.

  The netting that hung from the basketball hoop above the garage was in tatters.

  A birdhouse with a roof made out of a rusty licence plate had fallen off its pole and lay at an angle in the dirt.

  Ozzie cut across the driveway until the truck’s left front wheel touched grass. He backed up in a semicircle, got them pointed back up the driveway for a lickety-split getaway.

  Dean was perplexed. He said, “Where we going?”

  “Wrong house.”

  Ozzie drove back to the main road, turned right. He made another right at the next driveway. This time, they drove down at least a hundred feet of road before the scrub trees gave way to another miniature clearcut. Or, yard.

  The house was a full two storeys high, fashioned of peeled logs, with a hand-split cedar-shake roof. The mullioned windows were trimmed in hunter green. The local building code required a concrete foundation, but the cement had been faced with local river rock. The same stone was used in the house’s three massive fireplaces and the several stepped retaining walls that led from the rear of the house down to the placid shore of Green Lake.

  Ozzie parked in front of the detached log garage. He killed the engine, dropped the key in his pocket.

  Dean said, “We here yet? What if somebody moved in since you checked the place out?”

  Ozzie got out of the truck. As he walked down the artfully winding brick pathway to the front door, he separated the long-ago-stolen brass door key from the other keys on his chain. He took the porch steps two at a time, slipped the key into the lock and rotated it counter-clockwise, felt the deadbolt slide back. He pushed the door open and stepped into the big entrance hall.

  An outsized sofa upholstered in a dark-green fabric had its back to him. On the far side of the sofa was the largest of the home’s three fireplaces. Ozzie had built and faced that fireplace all by himself, almost. It had taken him six weeks of, to be truthful, not exactly backbreaking labour.

  The fire was set, balls of yellowed newspaper tucked under a pyramid of kindling and split logs. There was no sign of smoke discoloration anywhere on the stones or the slab of granite that served as a mantel, and he felt a sense of quiet satisfaction. There weren’t a whole lot of masons who could design and build a one-off fireplace, no specs.

  The room darkened as Dean stepped into the doorway. Ozzie said, “Get rid of that cigarette. Wipe your feet before you come in. And leave the door open, air the place out a little.”

  A voice much deeper than Dean’s said, “Yeah, okay.”

  Ozzie spun around so fast his heart lagged behind. Silhouetted against the door was a large man in a uniform, peaked cap. Ozzie stuck his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, fingered the haft of his knife. He told himself to be calm, inventory the situation. What he saw were epaulettes perched on broad shoulders. A tall black mass, outlined in rich midnight blue. Scattered bits of metal gleaming dully. He blinked rapidly as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the light. The way the guy was standing there, so erect, his hands on his hips, legs slightly parted, reminded him of someone.

  That TV guy.

  The bald TV guy. Not Telly Savalas, the other one.

  Mr. Clean.

  Ozzie’s mind skittered every which way. Where was Dean? Hiding in the weeds, probably. Ozzie smiled, said hello. Moving cautiously towards the dim figure outlined in the doorway, he took solace in his experience with the tennis ball.

  How it had seemed so tough but cut so easy.

  18

  Willows called the hospital from an East Hastings payphone. Sean’s condition was still listed as stable. Willows was asked to hold for a moment. He stood there with the phone pressed to his ear, idly admiring the way Claire Parker’s hair was backlit by the sun. The nurse was gone only a moment. She told Willows that his son was resting peacefully. He thank
ed her and cradled the receiver, passed the news on to Parker. He glanced up and down the sparkly street. It wasn’t a great neighbourhood for restaurants. But then, Parker probably wasn’t hungry anyway. He checked his watch.

  Parker said, “Want to get something to eat?”

  Willows managed to look mildly surprised. “You hungry?”

  “Not really.”

  Cruising, they passed on several chain restaurants, and then came upon a mom-’n’-pop operation that Willows had driven by countless times, and never given a moment’s thought. There was an OPEN sign in the window. Parker noticed that the glass was clean. Willows parked at the end of the block and they walked back. Gaudy clusters of yellow and purple pansies overflowed a flower box by the window. A bell tinkled merrily as Willows opened the door. There were three booths to his right, the cash register and a five-stool counter on his left. Nobody at the counter. Three men sat in the booth closest to the kitchen.

  A voice from the back, somebody’s grandmother, cheerfully said, “I’ll be with you in a minute ...”

  Willows had a view of the backs of two heads, one of them bald. The third man, curly black hair, heavy black eyebrows, unshaven, a black sleeveless T-shirt, heavy gold chains, sat facing him. The man glanced at him, dismissed him, returned to his conversation. Parker walked over to the middle booth, and sat down. Willows would have preferred the booth nearest the door, but let it pass. Parker picked up a menu. Willows sat opposite her. He was facing the restaurant’s entrance. The three men were directly behind him. Uncomfortable with the situation, he eased over so he was sitting at an angle to Parker and had his back to the wall.

  A miniature jukebox, heavy chrome and marbled plastic, squatted by his elbow. He flipped through the available selections. Roy Orbison. Elvis. Jerry Lee Lewis. Ricky Nelson.

  Grandmother came out of the kitchen carrying three heavy oval plates. Willows studied the order. A fat clubhouse sandwich, hamburgers, French fries, tidy domes of coleslaw. His mouth watered. He checked the menu to see if the restaurant was licensed. No such luck.