When I’d recovered, I went into the place and used some of the last of my cash to buy an assortment of hats, some better quality hand tools, and a cordless electric glue gun. There were racks of lockers near the information kiosk so I put my purchases there and kept looking. All through the mall I found things I could use but nothing to help my central problem, which remained money.
A song from the creepy movie Cabaret went through my mind. “A mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound . . .”
Or Pink Floyd. ’Cause it’s all about the Floyd and the Dark Side of the Moon.
“Money . . .”
I bought ten yards of rocket ignition fuse from a hobby store. The clerk was looking down the blouse of the lady behind me in line so I also pocketed a set of Exacto knives and some electrical tape. At a Radio Shack I picked up AA batteries, copper wire, and a cheap-model Polaroid camera and film. At a big drugstore I found an electric toothbrush, a box of cotton pads, some double-sided carpet tape, a tube of generic super glue, and a package of latex gloves. Which took care of the rest of the money.
When I went back to the locker, I noticed a woman feeding a five-dollar bill into a bright red machine beside the information kiosk. The machine licked the bill in, chirped, and then dumped five loonies out for change through a slot in the bottom.
I said, “Praise the Lord.”
The woman, a tight-faced bottle-blonde with big pores spaced far apart, turned to me and frowned. She looked as though she was in her late fifties and hadn’t enjoyed a single day of her adult life. “You should not blaspheme. It’s not proper.”
I grinned broadly. “I agree and I’m not.”
She stared coldly at me and her lips pursed tightly, so I asked her gently. “Have you accepted Jesus as your own personal savior?”
She nodded once abruptly and walked away briskly but I kept smiling because I’d found the missing cash I needed. To make sure, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a quarter, which I let roll onto the floor and under the drink machine beside the change machine.
“Oops.”
No one seemed to be watching and there were no cameras that I noticed, so I leaned down between the machines to retrieve my change. Amid the dust bunnies the cash machine was attached to the wall by a quarter-inch steel chain that ran through a narrow pipe welded to the bottom of the unit.
The power cord was a normal, rubberized one that ran straight from a hole in the wall to the machine itself and no plug was visible. I was very careful to touch nothing with my fingers or palms.
Standing up, I found that the machine was owned by Apex Machine Works, which had been servicing the public’s needs since both 1975 and 1981. That confused me a little but I just smiled and patted the machine gently with the edge of my left hand before emptying my locker and leaving.
Seth, the beer jockey, was gone by the time I reached the hotel but the guy who had replaced him handed over the other end of the cord with no questions and I drove back to the mall. In a far corner of the lot I checked to make sure the Dremel was powered up and then I changed into the overalls. Before I did anything else, I opened the tube of glue and used it to varnish my fingertips until there were no more fingerprints. The glue dried in a couple of seconds and that was that. Then I wiped down the tools and my clipboard.
I opened the attachment pack that came with the Dremel and installed a ceramic saw blade onto the tool and pocketed two replacements. Stealing a set of licences from a random van took only a second and I used four lengths of the carpet tape to stick them over the ones the van was already wearing.
34
There were some parking spots reserved for emergency vehicles next to the mall’s entrance nearest the change machine. I used one and walked in wearing a gray baseball hat and wheeling the dolly in front of me with the Dremel and a roll of electrician’s tape sticking out my back pocket.
“Howdy.”
The girl behind the information desk was wearing a dark blue jacket and skirt with the name “Candy” in gold lace just over her heart. She looked at me disinterestedly and then went back to reading a glossy brochure. I stood there patiently until she bothered to look up again. “Can I help you?”
“Sure can. You can write Out of Order on a piece of paper and hand it to me so I can put it up. I’m from Apex and they need to recalibrate the cash machine back at the shop. There have been some problems.”
She looked me over and shook her head. “So why don’t you have a, you know, company-insignia-type-thingie on?”
She was writing on a piece of paper and doing it quite elegantly. I answered. “I’m a private contractor doing salvage and hauling. Apex just contracts me to do the heavy lifting and grunt work.”
She handed me the note.
“Wanna feel my muscles?”
She sneered. I went and posted the sign over the change machine, using her tape, and then knelt down with my back to the desk. There was a small chance the cops might be able to pull fingerprints off the tape or the sign but the odds weren’t good, what with the glue on the tips of my fingers.
There were a few shoppers around but no one paid me any interest as I went to work. In about twenty seconds, the Dremel had cut through the chain. Then I took a deep breath and started on the power cord. I figured I was insulated, using a ceramic saw blade plus the heavy-duty gloves, but if I was wrong, I’d get zapped into a crispy critter right away. In two seconds, though, the machine was free and I was unscathed, so I sealed the cord with electrician’s tape and then taped it to the wall with a big X of tape.
“That’s loud.”
I looked at the girl and shrugged. “Almost done.”
The machine was heavy, around three hundred pounds, and awkward, but I finally walked it out and levered it until the dolly could slide underneath. Then I tied it down with the canvas straps and tested the buckles.
“You’ll get it back in a day or two.”
She went back to reading her brochure, moving her lips slowly.
I wheeled the machine awkwardly out to the van and levered it ungently into the back before tucking the dolly beside it. With that done, I drove away at a sedate pace, stopping behind a convenience store to rip the stolen plates free and dump them down a storm drain.
It was almost 5:00 and getting dark so I kept my eyes open for some place to park and crack the machine. I was starting to feel nervous, when I found a brewery that was being demolished. It was surrounded by a high cyclone fence topped with barbed wire and right beside was another fenced lot where a produce company kept their trucks. It was just off a minor highway, so, to find me, someone would have to be looking right into the setting sun, heading south, and turning right immediately down a bad gravel road.
“The love of money is the root of all evil.”
A preacher in Drumheller had said that, over and over again. I repeated it as I switched heads on the Dremel and used an expensive tungsten drill bit to make an eighth of an inch hole in each corner of the access hatch in the front of the machine. Then I used one of Walsh’s screwdrivers from his tool kit in the back of the van as a lever and ripped off the whole heavy-gauge plate, pushing it at each hole and moving the unit just a little each time.
“Charity begins at home.”
The preacher had said that too. The machine opened and inside was twelve hundred and fifty dollars, nine hundred in fives and tens, three hundred in loonies and fifty in quarters. I pocketed the cash and dumped the coins into a plastic bag. That was awkward because of the gloves. Then I switched heads on the Dremel and hopped out, kept talking to myself.
“And of course the Petshop Boys, who said, ‘Let’s make lots of money.’ ”
The next bit was the riskiest part of the whole thing so I worked fast to cut a two-yard gash through the fence and into the brewery. And when it was done, I cut a second gash along the bottom and levered the wires inward until they stayed put.
“Allez . . .”
The gutted cash machine slid painfully out of the van.
> “. . . Oops.”
There was no need to be gentle so I muscled it upright and walked it through the fence and toppled it into the weeds. If I was lucky, no one would even notice it there. The two Dremel heads and the screwdriver also ended up in the yard. They’d match the cuts and abuse on the cash machine so they had to go. Resealing the fence took a couple of minutes and four yards of baling wire to lace the cut closed and then I was done.
My stomach grumbled as I started the van so I drove fast to a garish casino nearby. I pulled my suit on in the rear of the van and went in to a poor dinner in an overpriced, well-staffed restaurant under a fake waterfall. No one seemed to mind that I paid for the meal with one-dollar coins and a couple of quarters.
The waitress admitted she had a copy of the Free Press in the back and she generously allowed me to read it over coffee while I free-associated through the next set of problems. I was really no closer to where I wanted to be: I had rough ideas.
My coffee grew cold as I stared into space.
“A refill?”
I looked at the waitress and nodded so she poured and left. I folded the paper and put it off to the side. Then I went driving around.
35
I stopped on three separate occasions to get rid of stuff. The dolly I left beside a moving company’s rent-all store and I shredded the overalls and dropped them into Omand’s Creek. Lastly, the Dremel and its heads went into the brush at the foot of a stubby hill that looked seriously out of place in the middle of the city.
Because you can never be completely sure about the capacities of forensics.
I had stolen a copy of the Yellow Pages from the casino and I marked down the places I wanted to visit on a piece of paper: a sporting goods store, a home hardware place, and a party supply store. All of them within a mile of each other in the St. James industrial park. I parked in roughly the middle of a triangle formed by the stores and walked from there.
First was the sporting goods store, a big place called S.I.R. They took my money with no questions asked and sold me a cheapish pair of Tasco binoculars with low light capacity, range finder, and a built-in compass. I could have bought real infrared or starlight light amplification, but they were generally unreliable, extremely heavy, and ridiculously expensive, and the battery always wore out at the worst possible time. So I stuck with the Tascos, which had a pretty effective passive light-gathering system. Which would never run out of power.
It’s a sore point. I went to jail once because some batteries failed.
Some long underwear. Spring or no spring, it was still cold. A suit of ridiculous-looking leafy camouflage two sizes too big so I could wear a tuxedo under (if I wanted, which I didn’t). Wearing the suit, which was brown and green and had tufts of cloth sticking out in all directions, would make me look like a walking bush but I’d be invisible to anyone beyond ten yards in the right terrain. It might be useful, or I could save it and use it during deer season with my new bow.
I lingered over the hand and long guns in the far-left corner but resolutely turned away. No firearms acquisition certificate in the first place and some stupid judge had banned me from ever (legally) owning firearms forever in the second place. But guns were not what I wanted, not what I needed, nor did I need black powder or gun cotton or primers or any of the stuff so useful to turn into bombs.
I lingered some more over the knives. They had some Spydercos, made popular by Hannibal the Cannibal in the movies and books, but they were folders and not my favorite because folders sometimes folded their blades at the wrong time.
I have scars to prove that.
Further down the line under the glass, they had some Cold Steel knives and I picked up a small and very cheap Bushman’s knife. It had good steel, the blade would never fold at the wrong time, it would keep an edge. And it was cheap enough so I wouldn’t weep if and when I had to dump it.
Finally I found a heavy-duty backpack and added that to the cart.
The girl at the front counter was very pretty. “Would you like to sign for our giveaway?”
“No, I’m married.”
“What?”
“No, I’m not from around here.”
“Oh.”
“What did you think I said?”
All my purchases went back to the van and then I went to the party supply store.
“Greetings.”
The place was a two-storey brick building with a bright neon sign reading PARTY HEARTY.
The clerk was a fairly unattractive, black-haired man wearing a French maid’s outfit. I didn’t answer his first greeting so he tried again.
“May I help you?”
“Umm. No. I’ll just look around.”
He nodded serenely and went back to data entry. I found a plastic pail with handle to hold my selections. The store was big, maybe twenty aisles, and I wandered back and forth until I had found what I needed.
“Did you find everything you needed?”
“Yep.”
He rang it through and came up with a big chunk of money. Press-on instant tattoos good enough to look like homemade ones, cheap sunglasses in a variety of styles, cheap glasses with plain glass in the lenses, a fake scar and two fake warts that looked surprisingly good, a plain black eye patch, cotton pads for changing the shape of a face, some good-quality buck teeth to fit over real ones. Even a decent wig of short, graying hair and a novelty voice changer, an idiot toy to make you sound like an alien.
On my way back to the car I detoured to the hardware store, where I picked up a new Dremel and a selection of cutting, drilling, and other heads. At a donut shop inside the store, I got the morning edition of the newspaper, and at the key-cutting place by customer service, I had two extra copies made of Walsh’s car keys and one of his house keys. On my way out I saw a small kiosk selling cellular phones and I stopped and stared.
An idea was coming to me. Now, you have to understand that professional crooks don’t like cell phones. There’s no security, anyone with the right equipment can listen in.
Like Scott MacKenzie, a bank robber I’d worked with once or twice, used to say, “Just lie down and spread your legs. You will be getting fucked.”
He’d believed in tailored dark suits, good guns, magnum shells, eight-cylinder engines in big cars, hollow point rounds, buckshot, and stocking masks. The cops had caught him in a crossfire outside a Regina credit union and put more than eighty rounds through his suit.
But cell phones did have their uses. I walked up to the guy there getting ready to shut down.
“Hi. Just a few questions, how do the payments work?”
He was about eighteen and tired of standing in a hardware store selling technology many of his customers only had contempt for.
“Hi. ’Kay. You pay for the phone here. You pick the plan you want off the list. You sign up for three, six, or twelve months. That’s it.”
“What kind of ID do I need?”
“Nothing really.”
Five minutes later I walked out two hundred poorer with the cheapest model cell phone possible in my pocket and the cheapest possible plan in place. I had registered as Ken Graham with a fictitious address, job, and other pertinent data.
The only thing that had been real had been the money I’d paid.
Back at the van, I closed the door firmly before looking over my purchases. Most of the bulk was made up of cardboard boxes, plastic wrap, and so on. When all that was removed, I was left with a very full backpack and a slightly less full canvas shoulder bag. First I took the garbage out and stuffed it into a big bin behind a bakery, then I drove the van to a parking lot serving a restaurant across the street from another shopping mall.
With the bags in hand, I cleaned the van down with a rag soaked in gasoline siphoned from the tank. It made my head hurt but was guaranteed to ruin any fingerprints. Then I propped a copy of the current Winnipeg Sun on the steering wheel and put my new copies of Walsh’s keys in the ignition. The original ones went back into the case under
the van. I unfastened the stolen licence plates and dropped them into a bag for later disposal.
Then I came back and took a Polaroid of the paper with the keys prominently visible.
On the back I printed with the pen held straight up: “The son of a bitch Walsh is lying, he lent me the van, how could I have stolen it if he gave me the keys?” That went into an oversized envelope, which I addressed to the Manitoba Public Insurance Agency and dropped into a mailbox on my way to the bus stop. I had ten minutes to spare so I went into the mall and bought a bouquet of roses. Only then did I get on a bus towards home and sleep.
Moving through town towards home, I went from hedge to hedge and down alleys and across small parks and it took more time than I’d thought and twice I had unpleasant almost-encounters with dogs. I started to wonder about my sanity and desire to avoid surveillance. By the time I got home, it was past eleven and Claire was asleep on the futon upstairs with Renfield on my side of the bed. Her arm was thrown possessively over the dog and I had to nudge him hard before he left.
“You have an unnatural relationship with that dog.”
She sounded sleepy. “Means nothing to me. Nothing. There’s only you.”
“Likely story.”
She cuddled up to my naked back and kissed my neck. “Have a good day?”
“Well, I met a nice man in a French maid’s outfit. You’d like him.”
She laughed. “I let you out too much.”
“I also bought you flowers.”
She practically purred. “Good boy.”
36
I woke up before four and crept out before Claire and Fred woke up. Renfield noticed but accepted a large piece of cheese as a bribe for silence. The night before, Claire had made up a half-dozen sandwiches for lunch with a gallon plastic jug of weak tea with lemon. That went into the backpack and then I headed out the rear door and cut through yards and down alleys.
It took me ten minutes to reach the park near the river, where I found an overgrown thicket of brush. There I settled down and watched my back trail for the next hour. While I waited I ate a sandwich and watched to see if anyone was following and when I was sure I wasn’t being tailed, I cut out across alleys and backyards. I moved that way as long as I could until the river started to have houses and then I cut back towards Main. Once, to my surprise, I startled a deer along the riverbank that bolted abruptly into the false dawn, its tawny hide speckled with dew and its fat, little, white tail flashing a warning I couldn’t understand.
An Ordinary Decent Criminal Page 20