Wiggling through the window was easy and then I found myself in a little nest of dirt and broken wood, leaves, and shards of plastic wrap. The floor of the rear porch was six inches above me when I was folded in half, so I carefully cleared away some of the rubbish in front of my face and hunkered down to wait. There were spiderwebs everywhere but I focused my eyes on a narrow line of light coming in between the tops of the piles of trash and the bottom of the back porch.
Nothing moved so I carefully pushed the pipe into place and inserted the dart into the end with the tip of my thumb. When it was properly seated, I kissed the end and tasted the metal, which reminded me of fresh blood and electricity. I made a seal with my lips and inhaled through my nose until my lungs were full and then I held it. The pressure was uncomfortable so I only held it for a few moments and when I released it, I found myself panting.
Outside, nothing was happening. The dogs of the neighbors on both sides snuffled loudly and lay down with sighs audible over the sounds of distant traffic. The dogs were a familiar thing to me, every poor neighborhood has dogs, they’re burglar alarms and companions all rolled into one. It’s when you find a neighborhood with no dogs that you find real poverty, that’s where you get the true ghetto. Since the neighbors on both sides had dogs and Renfield was in front, the note passers could only come from the alley and across the yard in front of me.
About five yards away I could see the mirror I’d placed. It dimly reflected the rear of the house but I could not see myself in it at all. While I waited, I emptied my mind and relaxed all the muscles in my back and legs. Every few minutes I tightened everything, starting at my toes and moving up to my face and then I consciously loosened them again but I did not move.
A bird made a sleepy noise across the alley and I waited but it was not repeated. It was tempting to daydream or to think about food or sex or any positive thing but in that way lay inattention, so I just waited in the dark and the dirt and listened. A long time later, just when the sky was starting to turn light with false dawn, a car pulled up. It was a low-slung, four-door sedan with bright whitewalls and it was driving without lights, including interior ones. I watched it wait with the engine running and I gathered my breath, but a few minutes later it drove off.
To distract myself I laid the possibilities out. If there were two of them, I’d deal with whoever had a weapon first and if neither had a weapon I’d deal with whoever was biggest. I’d put three darts into each of them to get their attention. A four-inch needle wouldn’t kill, unless I aimed for the face and had unusual luck. Having said that, there were dozens of good targets on a human that would disable. Belly, groin, throat, those would all incapacitate a human quickly, and a dart to the back of the knee would drop anyone, if I could find the right angle.
From where I was, I would probably end up with a good shot, probably a series of good, silent, unexpected shots. I twisted my neck a little and stared some more into the darkness, stared until I started to see things that weren’t there, so I throttled back and went on to more idle thoughts.
I like blow guns, they’re instinctive, you don’t aim them, you point, and, with very little practice, you can put ten absolutely silent darts into a target the size of a human face at ten yards, and I had been much better than that not all that long ago. There were other targets on a human as well as the face. Just below the elbow is a large concentration of useful muscles like the supinator longus and the extensor carpi radialis and especially the extensor caommunis digitorum, which moves the fingers. Any of those would do in a pinch. And if I had a shot at a leg, well, there was the foot. Halfway through it was a big muscle called the flexor accesorius. Injure that and walking becomes problematic.
Before I could hit anything, I needed a target.
Ten minutes later one presented itself. The sky was slowly turning pale and opalescent when I heard a door slowly creak open in the neighbor’s house to the right of ours and a voice request that doggie sit and that doggie be good. Then there was silence interspaced with grunting, and a large head suddenly appeared over the whitewashed fence. The head swiveled left and right and vanished, to be replaced by a large rump wearing dark blue polyester.
“Shit.”
There was a pause and a short rip and then another longer one.
“Shit.”
One of my neighbors, a big, wide-bodied woman with blue hair, crouched there in our yard and looked left and right. In her hand she clutched a piece of brown paper.
I put the pipe to my lips and started to inhale. She rushed forward at a cumbersome trot towards the house and I could hear her panting and snorting. As she passed by, I could see that she was barefoot and her toenails were painted with some kind of glitter paint and I had to exhale to avoid swallowing the dart with suppressed laughter.
The stairs creaked as she went up and she grunted some more while attaching the note to the door. A few seconds later, she trotted back across to the fence and hoisted herself up. For one beautiful and shining moment I had an incredible shot at the right hemisphere of her ass but I was shaking too hard to take it.
When I’d recovered somewhat, I went back through the window and up to the kitchen to make coffee. I’d left the blowgun and the piece of wood downstairs and I had to turn on the radio to cover the sounds of my gasping laughter. That was how Claire found me.
“Sam? What are you doing?” Claire’s voice was full of sleep. I was still laughing and I tried to give her a hug but she pulled away sharply.
“You’re covered in dirt and cobwebs.”
“I’ll take a shower.”
She followed me upstairs. “Um, what the hell just happened?”
There was a big cocoon of some type in my hair and I combed it out with my fingers and looked at it curiously. “I found out our neighbor is one of the people leaving the notes.”
She shook her head in disbelief and then she nodded and said calmly, “I’ll kill them.”
“No.”
Dust and more cobwebs fell.
“We’ll have them over for a barbecue.”
“Huh? You’re not making sense.”
“Sure I am.”
“Oh. When they come over, then I kill them, is that the plan?”
“No, that’s not the plan.”
“So I can’t kill them?
“No, but we’ll make them wish they were dead.”
23
I had to wait until 10:00 the next day for the hardware store on Main Street to open. While I was waiting, Claire made me do the exercises the doctor had recommended, and after that I had to take an extra shower just to get rid of the sweat. When I was done, I made myself a second breakfast under Claire’s disapproving eye.
“You’re going to get fat.”
Fred was busy trying to build something with oversized wooden blocks in the living room, while Renfield was trying to knock them down. They both thought this was great fun so we let it go on, despite the increased decibel level of calls and howls.
“A second breakfast was common in the British Navy of the early eighteen hundreds.”
“It’s not the early eighteen hundreds.”
“It could be. Maybe we’re in some kind of time warp.”
She ignored me. My eggs were done so I slid them onto the toast and ate standing up by the sink.
“What did you mean last night when you said we were going to invite our neighbors over for a barbecue?”
“Exactly what I said.”
I finished the food and dumped the crumbs into the sink and washed them away.
“Can we afford a party?”
“Yes, if we keep the whole thing cheap.”
She poured herself a cup of coffee. I was trying to obey the doctor and avoid caffeine so I just looked longingly at the black, hot happiness. She ignored me, made sure I knew she was ignoring me, and then agreed with herself. “Yes, we can afford it. Especially if the guests bring something.”
I forgot the next question I was going to ask and asked a n
ew one.
“Why would they bring something?”
“Oh, it’s just common courtesy.”
I filed that away. Thieves don’t do that. If someone invites you out, then they pay, it’s only right. “Can I also get about twenty dollars from you, right now?”
She gave it to me and I explained. “It’s for our neighbors. The next time they want to come over uninvited, I want to give ’em a treat.”
The sun was only starting to cut through the clouds when I reached the hardware store. It was an oddity, a small store still owned by a person and not a corporation. When the door swung open, a small bell made a cheerful noise and the owner, a slim, white-haired man with prominent teeth, came out of the back room. When he saw me, he blanched and started to recoil, but when he recovered he came forward much more aggressively and stopped only a few feet from my face. “I don’t have a job here for you.”
I stared at the old man and put my hands behind my back. “I don’t think I asked for one.”
The shop was full of racks and shelves of tools and fasteners, strange devices and spools of wire and chain. When I looked back at the old man, he was biting his lower lip.
“You mean you’re just here to buy something?”
I walked past him and he put the countertop between us. As I wandered the aisles I could feel his eyes on me, peering myopically from the big mirrors in each corner of the store. It was kind of funny as I watched him watch me keeping a careful watch on him. As we did that, I filled a shopping basket with odds and ends: some heavy-gauge wire, a pair of cheap wire cutters, two pounds of two-inch-long roofing nails, some flexible lengths of plastic designed to be used for trim, and a big ball of twine. At the register, the old man spoke harshly, like his throat had been burned. “Will that be all?”
He kept jars of glue behind the counter and I pointed at the rack. “A jar of an epoxy resin.”
When it was in front of me I read the instructions and the old man tallied up my bill on a very new cash register. He mumbled something I couldn’t quite hear so I smiled and asked, “What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh. It sounded like sniffer.”
The old man glared some more and I paid him.
“Have a nice day.”
That was too much for the old man. “You too, Mr. Haaviko, you too.”
Outside, I thought about heading home but turned the other way. Where had he learned my name? To check out a theory, I went to the bakery, where the young waiter I’d met before was making change for an ugly lady with a big box of Danishes. When he saw me, his face shut down and he muttered in a dull voice, “Oh.”
I nodded to him and sat down at one of the tables while he vanished into the building. After five minutes I went back to the counter and yelled. “Coffee. Please.”
It took five minutes before he slopped the cup down in front of me and turned and trotted away.
“Curious.”
I ran a finger around the edge of the cup and felt the cracks and chips and finally dipped my finger into the liquid itself to find it cold. When I tasted it, I discovered it was bitter as well. I glanced up to see the waiter’s head pull back into the doorway.
I left exact change and walked back home. Claire greeted me with another letter.
“We got a notice to evict immediately. What do you want to do?”
I brushed past her and laid the stuff I’d bought out on the kitchen counter. “Call her up. Tell her I have to go to Brandon but I’ll be back soon.”
“And if she presses . . .”
“Be evasive. Tell her I had a relapse.”
When she asked a relapse of what, I blew her a kiss. “Make something up.”
The bus for Brandon left at 1:15, I’d checked the schedule. It cost me twenty-three dollars and a few cents for a round-trip ticket. Just outside of town I went up to the driver and crossed the yellow line beyond which passengers are not supposed to go.
“Can you let me off here?”
The highway was empty and he pulled over.
“This isn’t Brandon, you know.”
“Are you sure?”
The driver let me go. Five minutes later the bus to Winnipeg showed up and I waved it down with my ticket and wallet in hand.
“I’m glad you stopped.”
The driver, a short Native woman who was slowly turning from muscular to obese, didn’t say a word while she took my sixteen-dollar fare.
I sat down in the seat behind her, where I could hear if she used the radio, and said brightly, “I almost ended up in Brandon. Can you believe that?”
She didn’t say a word and a few minutes later I was back in Winnipeg.
24
The building that housed the Residential Tenancies Branch was downtown on Edmonton Street, about ten minutes at a real slow walk from the Greyhound bus terminal and about twenty minutes from the library. I was thinking about the persistence of old habits, which was brought about by the fact that I was wearing clothes more suited for stealing than any honest endeavor. I had on a black denim jacket with extra pockets sewn into the reinforced inner lining, the left arm heavy with handmade chain mail around the forearm in case I ran into a dog, and a hidden inner pocket in the back that used to hold handcuff keys and a Gem razor blade in case the cops used plastic cuffs. Even the jeans were gimmicked, they had extra long pockets, good for loot or a gun, and they also had big leather patches sewn into the knees and ass for protection against skids and scrapes. To top it off I was wearing a black baseball hat with a broad bill to deal with security cameras. All this and I had absolutely no intention to do anything against the law, although there was a brisk snap in the air, enough to make a young man’s fancy turn to theft, murder for profit, and casual arson.
“Spare any change?”
It was only a short distance to walk and three people panhandled me. The first was a man in his late fifties with scars from bad acne all across his cheeks. He smelled minty fresh but I shook my head and kept walking. “Sorry, tapped out.”
I considered the term ‘tapped out.’ I seemed to remember that the term came from bartenders who drew from the big kegs of beer. When they were opened, someone would have to drive in a spigot, thus tapping them. When they were empty they would be ‘tapped out.’ Of course, the same ideas and terminologies also applied to maple trees but that didn’t strike me as being very romantic.
Halfway to Edmonton Street I veered into Portage Place, a big shopping mall, and then down into the parkade underneath. I’d left the house without a weapon except for my Swiss Army knife, on the off chance someone searched me, but being unheeled made me a little nervous. The knife had been a wedding gift from Claire’s parents, they’d given it with the file extended and they’d had the handle engraved with the motto ‘cake to follow’ and it vaguely annoyed me each time I used it. In the parkade that file served to cut off a telescoping radio antenna from an older model Chevrolet sedan. When it was free, I pushed the antenna shut and then tucked it into my right-hand jacket pocket.
I headed up the stairs out of the parkade, put my knife in the left-hand pocket, and whistled cheerfully. No one suspects someone who’s whistling because nervous people don’t whistle, their mouths are dry. Therefore, my theory is that when you whistle, people will not suspect you of anything. Although it’s probably a lie, it does make me feel better.
The stairway emptied onto the main floor, and I went to the information kiosk and asked the guard for directions.
“It’s just across Portage behind me and then you head to your right for about a block.”
Behind the guard I watched a bank of TV monitors and saw two guys wearing black pants and white shirts with Sam Browne belts walk up to a car that looked familiar. I realized that the car they were approaching was the one that had donated the antenna, so I thanked the guard and left.
“Uh, right.”
There was some kind of huge sale going on, which packed the whole area in the center of the mall with people
scrambling for footwear, and I felt much better outside. Before I’d gone six feet, though, another person panhandled me, this one a pale woman with dark blue hair and blond roots. I stared at the snake tattoos on her face and shook my head.
“Well, fuck you.”
She said it politely enough so I kept on going and thought about other stuff. I didn’t think I’d actually get into a fight but if I did, then the antenna would give me a long reach to bring an opponent in close for the knife. Although the blade was only three inches long, it would serve. It was as sharp as a razor, perhaps sharper, and three inches in the right place would kill anyone. The antenna was longer but it was just for dramatic effect, somewhat annoying but mostly distracting. It was the knife that would kill.
It was uncommonly warm downtown and the buildings blocked out some of the wind. The clouds were very high up and scattered. I passed by a bookstore named Book Fair and made a mental note to stop back after I’d done my business. Claire could use something new to read. As I walked past the store, the idea of using the pocket knife as a weapon triggered a memory and finally it came to me that Lawrence Sanders had written a book about a pathetic female serial killer who’d killed using a Swiss Army knife. There was something else, though . . .
A panhandler, a new one, interrupted me.
“Could I have a dollar for coffee?”
The request chased the idea from my mind and I stopped in mid-stride. The panhandler was in his twenties with dark skin and brown eyes. His hair had been cut short and he was fingering a stocking cap as he talked to me.
“No.”
I started to walk on and then I turned back. “Why don’t you just work?”
“Don’t want to.”
“Then why don’t you steal?”
“Okay. Stick ’em up.”
He said it listlessly and I walked on, trying not to smile. It was when I was about three doors down from the short and squat office building that housed the residency office that the other element of Sanders’s story came to me. The killer had worn a bracelet that read ‘why not?’ With my memory satisfied, I went up the stairs happily and into the reception area, where a secretary took an interest.
An Ordinary Decent Criminal Page 14