The First Sixteen: A Vigilante Series crime thriller novella - The Prequel

by Claude Bouchard

  “What are you going to do with that?” Masson asked, eyeing me with suspicion and fear.

  “Who was driving the car that night, Matty?” I asked, slapping the tire iron in the palm of my hand. “Things will get painful if you don’t tell me.”

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked.

  “Because an innocent mother and her unborn children are dead,” I replied. “Admit that you were driving.”

  “Was she your sister or something?” Masson enquired, going with the psychological approach by trying to keep me talking.

  In response to his question, I swung the tire iron down and smashed his left kneecap.

  I waited for his shrieking howl to subside before answering, “No, I didn’t know the woman. Were you driving the car?”

  “What are you gonna do if I say I was?” Masson cried.

  The tire iron swung again, its victim this time, Masson’s right ankle.

  “Why make it difficult for yourself, Matt?” I asked and waited.

  “Yeah,” Masson whimpered. “I was driving.”

  “There. Wasn’t that easier?” I said. “Now, who was the shooter?”

  “Aw, Jesus,” Masson sobbed. “You’re asking me to sign my death warrant.”

  “It’s a question of deciding whether it will be sooner versus later,” I replied. “Think about it before making any final decisions. Who was the shooter?”

  Masson closed his eyes and sighed as he slowly shook his head. “Rick Bourque. He’s known as Birks on the street.”

  “Very good, Mathieu,” I said. “It’s so much easier when one cooperates, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, right,” Masson replied. “I’m serious when I tell you I’m as good as dead now.”

  I nodded in agreement as I pulled out my knife and locked the blade in place. “I never doubted that, Matty. Not for a minute.”

  #4 - Maxime Leclerc - Friday, February 23, 1996

  In no particular order, Gaston Verville had been a lover and teacher of the arts, a dedicated husband and father, a keen environmentalist and an avid health and fitness buff. Though he enjoyed a variety of sports activities, his favourite was cycling which served both as physical training and a means of transportation.

  One evening in September 1995, Gaston had been biking home after having taught his first oil painting class of the autumn session at one of Montreal’s finer art schools near the downtown area. He had been making his way through La Fontaine Park when he had been literally batted off his bicycle into a tree sheltered clearing where a couple of young men had greeted him with a volley of punches and kicks as he crashed to the ground. Seconds later, the third assailant, the one with the baseball bat, had joined in the beating, swinging his weapon at Gaston with zeal as the others continued their kicking frenzy.

  The attack, which had ceased after another moment or two, had been followed by a rapid but thorough search of Gaston’s motionless body during which he had been relieved of any property of value including his wallet, keys and backpack. His bike had been taken as well.

  Gaston had been found a couple of hours later by a local German shepherd taking his people out for their late evening walk. Emergency services had been called and Gaston had been taken to the hospital where he had remained in a coma for the next four days before slowly beginning to return to a state of consciousness.

  Though initially plagued by some memory loss, he had progressively recovered and was eventually able to recount what had happened to the police with a high degree of certainty. However, some of the blows he had received, particularly those to the head, had unfortunately left what doctors feared would be permanent consequences.

  Months later, Gaston’s vision remained sufficiently blurred for him to qualify as legally blind. In addition, his speech was now somewhat slurred and he had yet to regain the coordination and dexterity he had lost in his right arm and hand. His wife hoped, for the sake of the family, that Gaston would soon pull out of his depressive state enough to begin exploring replacement possibilities for the cycling, painting and teaching which he had so loved and enjoyed.

  Police had immediately suspected an informal gang of young hoodlums known for their shady activities in the neighbourhood to be behind Gaston’s attack. In fact, they had apprehended the gang’s unofficial leader in possession of Gaston’s stolen bicycle though the young man had sworn he had found it abandoned in the alley behind a local supermarket. However, though the police had narrowed down the probable perpetrators to three specific individuals, they had been unsuccessful in obtaining any concrete evidence. The only witness to the attack had been Gaston and his vision remained sufficiently affected to render identification of his attackers impossible.

  I had done some investigating of my own on the three alleged attackers and had selected Maxime Leclerc, one of the leader’s regular sidekicks, as my first point of contact. Leclerc lived near the north-west side of the park where the attack had taken place and regularly cut through it on his way to his part time job as a busboy in a bistro near the eastern tip of the downtown area.

  I had parked the minivan on Calixa Lavalee Avenue, right where it ends inside the park, knowing that Leclerc would come strolling along soon enough to take the path which cut through a wooded area toward his place of work. Luck was on my side as he was working the seven to three shift – few if any people were around in the park in the evening with the cold and dark of February in Montreal.

  Though the trees bore no foliage this time of year, they were dense enough and intermixed with enough conifers to provide me with sufficient concealment. I saw Maxime approach, recognizing his gait as he drew nearer, and waited, remaining motionless and being careful to avoid producing any noticeable steam clouds as I exhaled.

  He plodded by me, perhaps a half dozen feet away from where I waited amidst the trees, singing softly off-key as he went, clearly intent on the tune blasting out of the earphones hidden by his parka hood. Thank you, Sony, for the Walkman.

  As he moved past me, I took a quick look around to make sure nobody else was coming along in either direction. Not a soul in sight.

  I stepped out from amongst the trees, glancing behind me one last time before moving in on him. I had found a twenty-four inch, wooden tee-ball bat for the occasion which I had felt was fitting, given the baseball bat attack on Gaston Verville several months earlier. One swing and Leclerc was going down, clearly not simply knocked off balance but, more precisely, knocked unconscious, or worse.

  I caught him before he hit the ground and laid him down, just long enough to check if he was still alive. He was. Following another quick glance around, I pulled him back up and slung him over my shoulder in a classic fireman’s carry, he thankfully wasn’t a big man, then hustled over to the minivan parked about fifteen feet away. I raised the back hatch, dropped him inside, yanked the earphones off of him, and duct taped his wrists, ankles and mouth before closing the hatch. Seconds later, I was in the driver’s seat, starting the engine and pulling a U-turn to get the hell out of there.

  As I headed out of the dead-end where Calixa Lavalee ended in the park, I saw a car turning in from Rachel Street and heading toward me. We approached each other and, to my dismay, the other car’s light bar blipped for a second or two, a brief flash of red and blue to get my attention.

  I slowed and so did the cop car, until we came to a stop, driver window to driver window in opposite directions. I lowered my window and the officer at the wheel did likewise. I noted he was alone on duty, presumably a good thing. On the flip side, I had an unconscious man whom I’d just kidnapped a minute earlier stored in the back of my vehicle. Even an encounter with a lone cop was likely not a good thing.

  “Bonsoir,” I said through the open window.

  “Bonsoir,” the officer replied then continued in French. “Is everything alright?”

  “Everything is fine,” I said with a smile. “I’m heading downtown to meet some friends and turned down here not realizing the street doesn’t cut through th
e park to Sherbrooke.”

  “No, you’re best to stick to the main streets on either side of the park,” the cop replied as he smiled back. “You’re going downtown?”

  “Yes, Crescent Street,” I confirmed.

  “Hang a left at the corner,” the officer suggested. “Left again when the park ends at Avenue du Parc La Fontaine. That will take you to Sherbrooke Street where you’ll turn right.”

  I nodded. “Got it. Thanks.”

  “No problem,” the cop replied. “Have a nice evening.”

  “You too,” I said with a wave.

  The cop laughed. “Yeah, right. I’m on until midnight. Have a good one.”

  I laughed back and drove off, turning left on Rachel as he had suggested and then right on Bréboeuf to get away and out of sight just in case he had turned around more quickly than expected. I certainly didn’t want to attract his attention any further and I had some business to deal with before going home for the weekend.

  #5 - Gary O’Connor - Wednesday, February 28, 1996

  I was starting to attract some attention, however minor, at this point. Ron Henderson, a crime reporter with the Montreal Gazette, had noticed that four men with ties to criminal activities had succumbed to similar yet unnatural causes in the last two months. Police had not confirmed any belief that the deaths might be linked but Henderson had suggested the four killings were being looked into by the city’s recently formed Special Homicide Task Force headed by a Lieutenant Dave McCall. I had looked into the lieutenant’s records and he seemed like a sharp and bright investigator so I knew I’d have to continue honing my skills if I intended to stay a couple of steps ahead of the man.

  My encounter with the cop at La Fontaine Park had been my warning, my one ‘stay out of jail’ card. Though I doubted any link had or would be made between my chance meeting with the cop and Leclerc’s subsequent death elsewhere later that night, it had certainly been a lesson to me about needing to be one hundred percent accurate in my planning going forward.

  My lesson learned, I was extra careful as the time came to dealing with Gary O’Connor, an ex-accountant with a mid-sized distribution company in east-end Montreal. O’Connor, single and in his mid-forties, was a fairly likeable fellow and had been an adequate enough bookkeeper to hang onto his job until his legal issues had surfaced. As it turned out, O’Connor had a penchant for drinking somewhat excessively.

  If that had been the extent of his faux-pas, with tying one on too many on occasion, everyone might have looked the other way. However, O’Connor tended to lose all reason when he got to drinking, the worst consequence of which was his firm belief that he was fully capable of driving. Such thinking had resulted in several prior arrests in the past which had led to driving permit suspensions, vehicle impoundment, jail time and, consequently, loss of employment.

  A few months earlier, in an effort to raise his spirits during hard times, O’Connor had decided to treat himself to a Saturday night on the town. Permit suspension had never kept him from driving in the past and things had not been any different that evening. He no longer had owned a vehicle but that hadn’t been an issue since his sister, who lived close by, had gone out of town for the weekend with friends and left her car behind.

  All had been fine until he had been driving back home. In his intoxicated state, O’Connor failed to notice a red light and unfortunately hit a teenager who had been crossing the street with friends. The young lady had died while O’Connor sped onward, intent on returning the car where he had taken it before staggering home.

  None of the eight witnesses present had been able to supply any information about the driver of the killing machine which had sped by at two in the morning, not even if it was a male or female. Descriptions of the car had been varied and conflicting – a Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic or Nissan Sentra which was either blue, grey, green or black – though all had agreed it wasn’t a recent model, at least five or more years old. Only one had thought of trying to get the license plate number but, as the car had retreated in the night, all she was fairly sure she had seen was a partial 580.

  With this limited information the police had gotten to work, slowly eliminating possibilities until they had looked into a Cheryl O’Connor who owned a ten year old, charcoal grey Honda Civic. Fully cooperating, O’Connor had quickly established her innocence, providing names of friends, receipts and even photos to show she had been out of town. However, through further questioning, the police had determined that Cheryl’s brother, Gary, who had keys to her home, might have used the car in her absence with a spare key she admitted keeping in a kitchen drawer.

  When interviewed, one of Cheryl’s neighbours had stated noticing the car’s disappearance for a few hours that fateful evening though he had not seen it leave, return or who might have used it. A woman who lived in the same building as Gary O’Connor had stated seeing him stagger down the sidewalk at two-thirty in the morning on the same night when looking out the window after having used the bathroom. The investigation had led to O’Connor’s arrest with a promise of serious jail time, despite the fact he had vehemently denied responsibility, claiming he had been home for the night, reading and watching movies from his collection of video cassettes.

  A court date had been set and O’Connor, unable to afford representation, had been provided with an attorney from the public defender’s office. Into the trial, the young, unknown defence lawyer had demonstrated how one should defend one’s client by ripping the prosecution’s case against O’Connor to shreds.

  How many dark Civics, Sentras and Corollas aged five to ten years old actually existed in the city, the province, the country? How many license plate numbers included the 580 sequence the witness had fairly surely seen? It might have been 5B0, SBO, S8O, S80, etc. Had Cheryl’s car really disappeared that evening or was it parked elsewhere on the street? After all, she had no reserved parking spot. Did the woman who saw Gary staggering outside at two-thirty in the morning wear glasses? Yes. Was she wearing them when she had looked out the window for a few seconds that night? No.

  And so on. Cheryl O’Connor’s Civic had been carefully examined for evidence of the hit and run. However, since automobiles tend to be more robust than one hundred pound teenagers, insufficient incriminating damage had been found to weigh in the prosecution’s favour, particularly off the ten year old dinged and scratched vehicle.

  In the end, although everyone in the courtroom knew that Gary O’Connor had been responsible for the death of seventeen year old Amelie Toupin, a non-guilty verdict had been rendered due to insufficient proof. O’Connor had gone home, a free man, an unemployed drunk, a murderer who felt sorry for himself and blamed society for his misfortune while an innocent young woman, not even of legal drinking age, slowly rotted in her casket because of his actions.

  I had taken the afternoon off, I could afford to with the time I put in, and followed O’Connor through his usual ritual of going for a late breakfast at a small greasy spoon near the basement condominium he lived in, courtesy of his mother, deceased a year earlier. The remainder of the afternoon had dwindled away with O’Connor slowly sucking down his usual quota of four pints of beer on tap at a local pub, paid from his rapidly diminishing share of the inheritance his mother had left.

  As expected, he had next visited the liquor store at the nearby shopping mall for a twenty-six ounce bottle of obscure brandy, his cheap evening companion of late then gone on to the supermarket to buy dinner, a can of no-name pasta in tomato sauce. Keeping with his schedule, he had headed home where he had dumped the contents of the pasta can into a dirty pot recouped from the sink and set it on the burner to heat while he knocked back two hefty shots of brandy – aperitifs before the evening meal.

  I watched him as he went through the usual routine, first from a distance and as the evening wore on, from inside his basement dwelling, the lock on his patio door nowhere near a challenge for one intent on entering. He’d finished his dinner, slurping the soggy pasta right out of the pot
with a soup spoon – bachelor-style, some might argue – before settling down on the couch, mumbling to himself in the diminishing light as he poured shot after shot of cheap brandy into the juice glass which served as his drinking vessel of choice.

  “How’s it going, Gary?” I asked, stepping from the darkness of his bedroom and into the tiny living room/dining room adjacent to the even tinier kitchen.

  “Who are you?” he slurred, the curiosity in his question a barely distinguishable factor.

  “I’m here about Amelie,” I replied.

  “Amelie?” O’Connor questioned before the synapses clicked into place. “Oh, the girl they say I ran down.”

  “She’s the one,” I confirmed. “You hit her with your sister’s car.”

  O’Connor shrugged, his look morose then nodded. “Yeah, whatever… but it all worked out for my sister and her car… and they said it was okay in court… now, I just have to find another job… I’m an accountant, you know.”

  “Yes, I read about that, Gary,” I replied.

  “Lost my job though,” O’Connor continued, adopting a depressed expression once more. “Wasn’t even drinking on the job, or barely. They fired me anyway. Said it was because of the legal problems I was having. Not sure they can do that but maybe they can. Big companies have lawyers to deal with that kind of thing. Make it difficult for little guys like me, just trying to do my job and earn a living.”

  “Yeah, life’s a bitch, Gary,” I agreed, “But what about Amelie? Don’t you think that sucks? She was only seventeen. Never had a chance to live life and now she’s gone.”

  O’Connor leaned over and carefully refilled his juice glass from the now nearly empty bottle. Once done, he placed the bottle back down and raised his glass to me.

  “Here’s to Amelie,” he said with tears in his eyes. “Poor kid was at the wrong place at the wrong time… or I was.”