The skimmer was shaped like a giant enclosed snowmobile—a cross between ovoid- and cigar-shaped. It had a door on each side that swung up, so that with its doors open it resembled a futuristic hornet. Half the size of a cruiser, it could go where a car could not, and since it skimmed along its merry way eighteen centimeters on top of the surface, it was immune to the crudities of terrain, making it a hybrid of the horse and the bike. As usual, the Japanese had beaten the Americans in Detroit to the punch, and the department had ordered twenty-five as test models from the Honda plant at Alliston. Given Toronto’s absurd winters, they were a much sounder investment than the mythic Harleys. Still, convenience wasn’t everything, Mitch pondered irrationally, remembering the feel of the throttle in his hand.
For one-man night patrol, the skimmers were ideal.
Mitch was cruising in his skimmer now, hovering almost soundlessly down the service lane for the stores on the north side of Danforth. The lane ran for kilometers, intersected every block by a residential street; it was the same lane he had been on the night he had procured the laser.
The laser. It was still beside him, in the bottom of the duffle bag that had become a permanent part of his accoutrements, wrapped in a doeskin-soft piece of velvet mat he had found in Elaine’s sewing drawer. His Barking Dog was firmly attached as well, the electrode snug beneath the Silent Guard. Bulky as it all felt, Mitch nevertheless liked the sensation it afforded. He felt like he was finally equipped properly to do the job handed him—something he had never felt before. To serve and protect, that was the force’s motto, emblazoned prominently on the sides of cruisers and skimmers. It would be a lot easier with appropriate fittings, Mitch had thought often, as had every other cop in the city. The age of high-tech is here, and we’re still playing bang-bang with our .38’s. Read them their rights. Get them a lawyer. They don’t have one? Well, then, appoint them one. But, Captain, we know he did it. A dozen people saw him. They’re afraid to testify, though. Can’t we hold him?
No.
What can we do then?
You can do your job. You do the best you can. You can take pride in your own integrity. Then you can go home to your families and lead the best life you can by your example. That’s what you can do. That’s all you can do.
Mitch had heard it more than a few times. And it had always made a certain kind of sense. Until Mario hadn’t been able to go home to his family anymore. That’s where it broke down.
That’s all you can do.
But it wasn’t.
It was 10:35 p.m. when he saw him. A drunk, he thought at first as the edge of his headlight illuminated him from the knees down. Stopping the skimmer beside the prone figure, he reached for his flashlight, clicked it on, and shone it full onto the man.
He saw the blood-soaked front of the man’s shirt and felt his flesh tense. Shit! The thought burst into his suddenly alert consciousness. Goddamnit. A wave of nausea, compassion, and anger engulfed him momentarily. Without even having to think about it, he cut the engine and activated the silent, flashing red light atop the skimmer. Then he let his beam of light sweep slowly in a wide circle around the perimeters before illuminating once more the man propped like a scarecrow against the wall, his head bent at a grotesque angle. There was no one else around. Reaching into his bag, he withdrew the laser and clutched it tightly. His door slid silently upward as the skimmer touched down. Mitch listened, his eyes searching.
Nothing.
Stepping out, he strode briskly to the man. Mitch felt the bile rise, then settle, as he gazed down at the gutted figure. Kneeling, he felt for the pulse of life in the neck. There it was: a throb. Another one. Very weak. Now nothing. Come on, hang in there. Got to get an ambulance. Fast.
Without warning, the man’s eyes opened, and Mitch stared into the pitiless knowledge that a man has when he knows he will die, into the chasm that would be left when this man’s final, frail struggle ended. The man tried to speak. Mitch leaned closer.
“I would’ve given him my money.” The voice was a whisper, blown scratchingly along the pavement like dead autumn leaves.
“Who did this to you?”
The eyes wavered, darted. He was unable to speak.
Mitch, sensing the end, became more desperate. “Where were you going? Where were you coming from? Who did this?”
The lips closed, but no sound issued from them. The man tried again. Mitch put his ear against his mouth.
“The Bleeding Ban—”
The words just stopped. There was no dramatic spasming, no last sigh or gasp. They just stopped. And he died.
It was Mitch Helwig who sighed. He sighed because all his modern paraphernalia—his body armor, his Barking Dog, his imported laser gun, his skimmer—none of it was enough sometimes. Sometimes shitty things happened in the world, no matter how well prepared you tried to be, no matter how much you steeled yourself against their happening. He sighed because this man had died, and he hadn’t even known him, but what had happened was wrong.
He thought of himself in his space-age projectile skimming through back alleys, a knight in the king’s army, seeking dragons to slay. But the dragons would not confront him. They had ceased to be dragons. In their stead, ferrets and jackals, sharks and vultures had sprung up, scuttling away into the neon and gaudy night.
Karoulis’s words came back, hauntingly. Then you can go home to your families and lead the best life you can by your example. That’s what you can do. That’s all you can do.
Mitch’s eyes narrowed. It wasn’t true, he knew. He could do more. And he would.
He knew what the dying man had tried to say. He knew the place—knew all about it.
The Bleeding Bandit.
“It must’ve just happened, not more than a minute or so before I got there.”
“What makes you say that?” Karoulis asked.
“Because he was alive when I got there.” He paused. “He died as I was bending over him.”
“He opened his eyes?”
“Yes.”
“Did he say anything? Anything at all?”
“No.” Mitch paused again. “Nothing.”
Karoulis stared at Mitch, uncertain why he felt uneasy about his officer’s statements. But there was nothing he could put his finger on.
“O.K.,” he said at last. “Fill out your report, Mitch. We’ll see you tomorrow.” Now it was his turn to sigh. “There’s nothing more you can do.”
Mitch’s jaw tensed at this last statement.
9
Karoulis slumped back into his chair and ran a hand through his graying, receding hair.
“I don’t know, Huziak. I just don’t know anymore,” he said, addressing the burly desk sergeant who was still shuffling papers after depositing a hefty sheaf on his captain’s desk.
“Don’t know what, Captain?” His attention was mostly elsewhere. The Tigers and the Jays were playing at the stadium tonight, and he had tickets. Baseball, he was thinking. Now there’s something that makes sense.
“I’m getting to the point where I don’t even know what I don’t know.” He frowned. “I thought you were supposed to get smarter as you got older.”
Huziak chuckled. “Ever read Heart of Darkness?”
“I don’t read.”
Huziak paused, staring thoughtfully at a spot somewhere on the wall off to his left. Then he tried again. “There’s an old video with Marlon Brando in it that pops up occasionally on the Retro Channel, between midnight and dawn....You watch TV, don’t you?”
“My wife says I watch too much.”
“Everybody’s wife says that. Anyway, in it this guy travels down this river into Vietnam or someplace. The guy who introduced it said it was inspired—that was the word he used: inspired...nice, huh?—by the book Heart of Darkness. The movie was really weird, and I wasn’t sure I understood it all, so I picked up the book at the library that weekend.”
Karoulis sat back, staring at Huziak, half-listeni
ng, half-remembering something.
“Apocalypse Now.”
“Yeah! That’s it. You’ve seen it?”
“Yes.”
“What’d you think?” Huziak asked.
Karoulis looked drawn, haggard. “I didn’t understand it either, Huziak. But it upset me...it upset me a lot.” He glanced sharply at the sergeant. “What about it?”
“Not sure myself. But it seems to me that the river is, like, you know, day-to-day, and the jungle is everything around us, and instead of everything getting clearer the farther we go, it just gets weirder, hazier. Like you said, I’m not so sure we get smarter either, the farther we go. Too much jungle. Too many crazies. You know?”
“Yeah. I think I know.”
Huziak nodded. “The book...the book was O.K. But the movie...it had great music!” He paused. “Anything on that guy that Helwig found last night?”
“Nothing we can go on. Just that he was a working Joe who went out for a few beers somewhere on the Danforth. Somebody knifed him for his wallet. We don’t have much manpower to pursue it too far, unless something really clear shows up.”
“What’s the big draw today?”
“The usual bunch of disgusting stuff, plus a big one. We’ve got a seventeen-year-old girl who was dragged into a car as she stood on the corner of Danforth and Greenwood, about six a.m. She was taken to a nearby apartment and beaten and sexually assaulted. They punctured her eardrum when they let her go, and told her that if she gave them any trouble, they’d do the other one, and that’d be the last thing she’d ever hear. The only reason we know about it at all is that the mother called. The girl won’t say a thing, though. We’ve got a seven-year-old girl who was playing in the lobby of her apartment building on Cosburn Avenue last night when a man asked her for help in finding his dog. He took her to a second-floor stairwell and molested and assaulted her. She was treated at East General and released.” He paused. “Should we consider her one of the lucky ones?”
Huziak pursed his lips grimly.
“We picked up a guy in an apartment on Woodbine for sexual assault and using a knife on a twenty-seven-year-old woman who lived three floors below him. The jackass had a stocking over his head, but she recognized him nevertheless as a tenant in the building. We picked him up. Turns out he’s the same character we were looking for last April—the one who attacked the twenty-three-year-old woman in the wheelchair in the same apartment block.”
“A real sicko, Captain.”
Karoulis indicated his agreement with a look of sour distaste. “Those are bad enough, Huziak—but listen to this.” He picked up a sheet of paper from the pile on his desk and read from it. “Kay and Kay Enterprises, owners of Video Delights, retailers in erotic (and pornographic) videotapes on Broadview Avenue, were fined twelve hundred dollars yesterday in provincial court for renting a pornographic ‘snuff’ tape depicting a woman being dismembered and disemboweled.” He looked up. “A ‘snuff’ tape. A depiction of real sexual murder. And they fine the owners twelve hundred dollars. I wonder what the judge would have done if it had been his daughter? Eh? What do you think?” He dropped the memo into the wastebasket.
Huziak looked suddenly older himself. “A twelve-hundred-dollar fine.” The words slipped weakly from his lips.
“Boy, we really know how to stick it to them, don’t we?”
Huziak nodded knowingly. “That’s why the courtroom cheered when they sent Rodgers up for life, last month.”
“Yeah. But how often does that happen? And how often do we have evidence of that type, all videotaped, down to the last, minuscule atrocity?”
“Not too often.”
Karoulis grunted his assent.
“And they’re on me about the drug situation, as if I can do anything about it—anything that’ll really count. Jesus. The streets are floating in anything you want that’ll get you high—that’ll pump your courage up enough to do something disgustingly barbaric so that you can get the bucks to get your next hit. It’s a circle, and we’re running around inside it.”
Huziak sat down in the beaten leather chair opposite the desk. The captain, he realized, was really worked up this morning. He was always passionate about the need to do one’s best, but it seemed to have slipped beyond that this morning. Something was bubbling to the surface from some deep, dark well. Perhaps, thought Huziak, I shouldn’t have mentioned that Brando movie.
“They clamp down in Miami, so the boys in Bogotá reroute it through Toronto, where it filters down into the States. You plug one leak, and it springs out somewhere else. I really wonder what the hell we’re doing. You know?”
Huziak gave him a minute to control his breathing, to let him simmer down. The captain wasn’t that far from retirement, he knew. And from what he was seeing and hearing this morning, it might be sooner than he thought. “Was that the big one you mentioned, Captain?”
“Huh?” His eyes focused once more on the sergeant.
“You said there was the usual assortment of worms, and something big.”
“Oh, yeah. Christ. I almost forgot. How could I forget?” He put his hand to his forehead. “Listen to this, Huziak. This one’s a beauty. A dilly.” He was breathing heavily and shaking his head. “It’s war, now, Huziak. That’s what it is.”
Even Huziak, used to the exaggerations of his captain, felt worried about what he was seeing and hearing this time. “What is it, Captain?”
“The government was storing six thousand—did you get that: six thousand—laser guns at the Moss Park Armory at Queen and Jarvis. Westinghouse, GE, imports, you name it, they were there.”
“Were there?”
“They’re not there this morning.”
Huziak’s eyes widened.
“They disappeared overnight. Six thousand of them. They found seven guards locked in a room there. All dead. All with a neat burn-hole in their foreheads. Four trucks are missing. It was a professionally executed, streamlined operation.”
The two men stared at one another.
“There are six thousand lasers out there this morning, Huziak. Six thousand that weren’t out there yesterday. Where do you think that leaves us?” A vein in his temple throbbed visibly.
For a moment, Huziak could think of nothing to say. “I don’t know, Captain. I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.” He sat down, touched his index finger to his cheekbone, let his eyes dart nervously around the room, and exhaled like a man who has gone too far down the river into the jungle.
10
Mitch Helwig was on a four-on, three-off rotation. He had waited for Thursday to come along, waited with an intensity that had not been noted at the station by any of his colleagues. But Elaine had picked up some of the vibrations, and so had Barbie. There was no disguising it at home.
He squirmed and scratched, skimmed through newspapers and magazines without taking in anything, had to be dragged jokingly into conversations, and picked at his food. But it wasn’t until dinner on Thursday, on his first of three days off, that it came to the fore. Elaine had gone to elaborate pains to produce a fine meal-pork roast, potatoes, candied carrots, salad, even a bottle of white wine—and was assiduously, yet tentatively orchestrating a solid attempt at a traditional family dinner and discussion.
Mitch was in another world.
“Daddy!”
He stared at Barbie, seeing her for the first time that evening. He had summarily answered questions, and metronomically smiled and nodded in most of the right places. But he had finally been caught at it. Looking into his daughter’s face, he realized it—realized that the adult will tolerate the blandness of procedural etiquette, beaten into the formless mold of societal and economic dictates, but the child will not. At least not this child. And just as suddenly, he felt a rush of warmth for the pixie figure that was his eight-year-old daughter, smiled, and knew that at this moment, she was right and he was wrong. He was wrong to have ignored either or both of them. He had to give them this much. He had to.
&
nbsp; She was frowning, doing her best to imitate her mother’s most exasperated expression.
“What is it, sweetheart?”
She sighed and rolled her big eyes around helplessly. “You weren’t even listening, were you?”
“I guess I wasn’t. Not really. I apologize.” He glanced sideways and caught Elaine’s eyes on him, a puzzled look on her face. “But I’m listening now. Really—I am. There’s just so much going on at work that I’m not with it sometimes, dear.” He shook his head theatrically, as if clearing cobwebs. “Now...You were saying?”
“I was telling you about the circus. You said you wanted me to tell you all about it. Remember?”
“I remember. Did you think I could forget?”
She looked at him suspiciously. He smiled disarmingly.
“Well,” she continued, “the whole thing was kind of incredible. I mean, all those animals and everything. How do you get to be an animal trainer?”
He looked surprised. “You don’t know? Why, you enroll in an extension course at Humber College. You can learn anything there—duplicate bridge, self-hypnosis, Japanese finger-pressure massage, lion-taming...”
“Daddy’s teasing, dear,” said Elaine.
“In the old days,” he continued, “you had to run away and apprentice yourself to someone with a heavy Austrian accent and muscles of iron...and a brain to match.”
Barbie giggled.
“But it’s so much easier nowadays. Everything’s so much easier. Just take a course.” He sipped his wine, glanced across at Elaine, who was relaxing, pleased at the fact that he was with them once more.
“Sure, Daddy, sure. Right.”
“Actually, the training for dealing with wild animals starts by being a parent. If you can get your kids through to age sixteen, lions are nothing. Pussycats.”
“It starts by being a wife, Barbie. If you can get through sixteen years with your husband, lions are a delight,” added Elaine.
“I’m beginning to think it starts by being a kid. If you can get through sixteen years with your parents—especially you two—you’d be ready, that’s for sure.”
Barking Dogs - A Mitch Helwig Book Page 4