by Ross Pennie
Travis pulled at Max’s shirt again. “Ask him if those guys are still bothering his dad?”
The two of them had argued a lot about what to do about Lion-Nads and the guy whose name could be Ghazwan but they weren’t sure. They’d only managed to square that they had no idea how to deal with murderers, gangsters, and warlords beyond the realms of Fortnite. After what they’d witnessed in the barbershop on Friday, they more or less agreed (Max more, Travis less) that they’d better take a back seat on this one for the time being. It was one thing to be brave and daring while playing video games, but this situation was real, and the less they said about it to anyone, the better. Providing Omar with a pair of friendlies to chat with on Facebook was probably the best they could offer and still keep themselves out of Witness Protection. Or worse.
KB
Yes.
one more thing. very serious.
Okay.
my father out walking yesterday. i search his
bedroom for more notes from Lion-Nads and warlord.
Did you find any?
no. something worse.
What?
You promise not to tell?
Of course.
really promise?
Yes, Omar, we both promise.
okay . . . inside one sock i find drugs with needle and syringe.
i look up on google.
drugs used for execution. lethal injection.
Omar, you can’t be serious.
i send photos.
Half a minute later, three photos pinged into Max’s inbox. He could see they were of three different vials containing medications in liquid form. Each one was full and hadn’t been opened. In the photos, the lettering on the labels was too tiny for the boys to read, so Travis reached over and blew up the images until they filled the screen. The barcodes on the vials said Pharmacy Services, CUMC Hamilton. Both of them had made plenty of visits to that place: Caledonian University Medical Centre.
Travis retrieved his laptop from his backpack and set it beside Max’s on the kitchen table. “You spell out the drug names,” he said. “And I’ll Google them.”
The first drug was midazolam. Max spelled it out loud. Travis typed it into Google on his keyboard.
Travis picked the Wikipedia entry from the first page of hits, and they read it together. Wiki explained that midazolam was a sedative given to ease the discomfort of mechanical ventilation. It could also be used in surgical anesthesia and to treat epileptic seizures.
The next vial was labelled Succinylcholine. Its Wikipedia entry said it caused rapid-onset, short-duration muscle paralysis and was mostly used to facilitate endotracheal intubation and mechanical ventilation.
“Endotracheal intubation?” Travis said. “What’s that?”
“That’s where they put a tube in your windpipe to help you breathe.”
“Oh, yeah. Like on those YouTube channels you like so much.”
“Hey . . . you watch them often enough too.”
Travis was too intent on their research to argue. “What does the third vial say?”
“Rocuronium.” Max spelled it, and Travis brought up a page that outlined the attributes of the drug in detail.
“Another paralyzing drug,” Travis said. “Its effects last much longer than the other one. About forty-five minutes.”
“And here it is again,” Max said. “Facilitation of endotracheal intubation and mechanical ventilation.”
Max was a faster reader than Travis, who had a fine appreciation for nuances and read slowly to catch them. “Keep reading,” Max told him.
After a moment, Travis said, “Bingo! Midazolam and rocuronium are in the lethal-injection cocktail used for executions. Just like Omar said. That’s way cool!”
The details Wikipedia divulged were spellbinding: most government-sanctioned lethal injections were performed with a pharmaceutical triple whammy. The first drug, midazolam, made the condemned go more or less unconscious. The second drug, rocuronium, stopped their breathing. A third drug, potassium chloride, arrested their heart. “Game, set, and match,” Max said, then was suddenly appalled at how easy it was to kill someone that way. “Sorry. That was kind of an asshole thing to say.”
Travis shrugged and pointed to his screen. “You could kill someone with the rocuronium by itself, eh?”
“A nasty way to go. The victim would be fully conscious and desperate for breath until they finally passed out from lack of oxygen.”
Travis had that look their science teacher called pensive when they were pondering a particularly meaty question. “They’d know exactly what was happening and feel themselves asphyxiating. Talk about a horror show!”
After that terrifying notion had well and truly sunk in, Max said, “What is our favourite barber doing with a powerful sedative and two drugs that can kill you within minutes?”
Travis, Mr. Nuance, was developing a theory. Max could see it in his eyes.
“Omar said his dad visited this Jamila girl in an ER on Saturday,” Travis said. “That must have been at CUMC because all the polio cases are going there, right?”
“That’s what my dad told me.”
“So . . . Jamila is paralyzed from the polio. Which means she has to be on a mechanical ventilator to stay alive. That means she was given at least a couple of these drugs when they performed the endotracheal intubation so they could —”
“— hook her up to the ventilator. I get it.”
“So . . . Hosam goes in to visit Jamila soon after that’s done . . . and he sees the vials on the . . . what-do-they-call-it?”
“The crash cart.”
“So he sees the drugs sitting on the cart, scoops them up when no one is looking, and slips them into his pocket.”
Trav’s birthmark was on fire. The other half of his face had turned green.
Or maybe the green was Max’s imagination working overtime because that’s how he was feeling. His tongue was so dry he could hardly talk. He reached across the table for more OJ, but Travis had finished the carton.
Max coaxed the last few drops from the bottom of his glass. “So, what’s Hosam going to do with his executioner’s cocktail?”
Travis shrugged. “Go after warlords?”
KB? you still there?
you get the photos yet?
Holy crap! What could they possibly say to Omar that would make the guy feel any better?
Chapter 22
By the time Hosam found himself standing at the McNab Street bus terminal at almost eleven o’clock on that surprisingly hot Monday evening, his guts felt like the inside of Vesuvius. With Leila working long hours and Omar in his bedroom glued to his laptop, he had passed much of the day alone. Too distraught to study, he had watched hours of mindless television in the living room but could not remember a thing he had seen.
He had convinced Leila not to cancel her appointments. She was better working than fretting all day about the Caliph and the polio circulating far too close to home. And they needed the money now that the barbershop was a fenced-off crime scene. He could not quench the fear that the sensational attack was going to drive away most of his and Ibrahim’s clients. The Syrian war, a complex game of failed alliances and outright betrayals, had shown him that loyalty was a rare commodity.
Earlier, on the telephone, Ibrahim had been agitated but still holding it together. He explained that this morning he had been summoned to the police station downtown and kept waiting alone in a stuffy room for over an hour. When the homicide detective assigned to the case finally arrived, he had grilled him with the same few questions over and over.
“Did you give him Ghazwan’s name?” Hosam asked him.
“And sign my death warrant?”
“Do you think they have any idea about the Caliph?”
“Like everyone else, they think you Syrians are cuddly little refugees w
ho know their place and never give any trouble.”
“Maybe, but that will not last long,” Hosam told him, picturing what he had been up to on Friday night.
“The detective was more interested in our involvement with the Italian mob.”
“Seriously? That is strange.”
“I had nothing to give him, of course. And he could see I was telling the truth. After a while, he and his assistant lost interest. I don’t think they’re going to call you in.”
“Alhamdulillah! That is a relief.”
“The police were impressed when I told them you were a trauma surgeon awaiting your re-certification papers. And that you’d worked in a war zone and saved so many lives it was impossible to count them.”
“A shameless exaggeration, but thanks for that,” Hosam had said as they ended their call. “I owe you one, my friend.”
But now, as Hosam sweated inside his dark clothing and waited for the bus to arrive, Omar’s health loomed as a worry bigger than anything involving the barbershop. The boy had spent hours sitting next to that girl, Jamila, on their school trip to Niagara. The doctor in Hosam reckoned that Omar was safe because the excursion was a good three weeks in the past, well outside the period of contagiousness for most infections. But the parent in him worried that Dr. Szabo and Co. had no idea what was causing the polio epidemic. Jamila could have been spewing its unknown contagious agent for weeks before she began to show signs of fever, headache, and paralysis. And if Jamila had polio, how many other students at their school were walking time bombs? How many were silently spreading the disease to their classmates while on the verge of developing paralysis themselves? No, Omar was not going back into that high school until Hosam was sure it was safe. Until then, Omar could improve his English by chatting with his friends on social media and playing Fortnite.
He glanced again at his watch, the seven-dollar Casio he had bought from a shady Kurdish merchant in Gaziantep’s central bazaar. His Omega Seamaster had been stolen from him at knifepoint on one of Gaziantep’s busiest streets in the middle of the day. Syrian refugees were soft targets in Turkey, especially amid the bustle of its larger cities. Everyone looked the other way when petty thieves brought out their knives.
The Caliph’s instructions said to catch the Number 23 Upper Gage at eleven o’clock and be waiting at the appointed McDonald’s at eleven thirty. Eleven ten came and went and there was still no sign of the bus. Had the schedule changed? Had he missed the bus by a few minutes? He looked around for someone to ask. The place was deserted. Not a single soul was waiting at any of the platforms. Merde! The bus service must have shut down for the night. Life was so much easier, dammit, when you had your own car. Just as he was about to give up and trudge home, a Number 23 eased toward the platform. At eleven bloody twenty. The driver, a young guy with pale skin and a ginger goatee in need of a barber’s attention, looked like he had never had a care in his life. Lucky him.
Hosam boarded and tapped his transit card, which he had recharged at a nearby machine to be certain it had sufficient funds for the journey. He took a seat on the mostly empty bus and wondered how long they were going to sit there. Not long, thank God. A minute later they were rolling.
He pulled his copy of the Rubáiyát from his backpack and thumbed its pages, desperate for a sign from the poet. But Khayyam had no explanation — or justification — for Hosam’s theft of the drugs from Jamila’s crash cart. He told himself he must have been seized by a compulsion of self-preservation. He had suddenly seen the drugs not as life-saving medications but as lethal weapons he might one day use against the Caliph. He knew the modest danger of midazolam and the extreme danger of rocuronium and succinylcholine. Leila would be terrified if she knew those drugs were in the house, though for some reason she did not have a problem with ketamine. It had taken some convincing to stop her using that powerful, mind-bending drug on her anxious clients.
Although he did feel better knowing he had some kind of weapon in his home, he worried what Omar might do if he came across the lethal cocktail. Kids were endlessly curious and seldom thought about consequences, no matter how potentially catastrophic. Before leaving the house, Hosam moved the three vials from his sock drawer to a nook concealed by the loose ceiling tile above the toilet. The family’s vital documents from the United Nations and the Canadian government were hidden in the same place. Leila’s earnings — her transactions were always enacted in cash — were stashed in their bedroom, behind another loose tile. They called it Leila’s Bank, and Hosam looked after the bookkeeping. He reviewed each week’s accounts on Sundays or Mondays when the barbershop was closed. Leila’s Bank was growing every week. Inshallah, the steady growth would continue.
The bus groaned in low gear as they ascended the Escarpment via the switchback linking the lower and upper halves of the city. Beyond the downtown office towers and apartment blocks, flames flickered like giant candles from the steel-mill chimneys by the lake. If what many of his haircutting clients said was true, it might not be long before the mills were shuttered, the furnaces unplugged, the flames extinguished.
A few minutes later, McDonald’s golden arches were impossible to miss as he approached his destination on Mohawk Road. He was five minutes late when he strode across the Drive-Thru. Headlamps flashed from the parking lot — a dark Ford F-150 pickup with a four-door cab and an extended box. Saramin was at the wheel.
He jumped in without waiting for a further invitation and clicked his seatbelt in place. He sat up straight and offered no apology for his tardy arrival. He may have been coerced into doing the Caliph’s bidding, but he was not going to act like a slave.
“Keep your gloves on,” she said then levered the gear stick into drive and eased out of the parking lot. Her perfume was the same scent as before but not quite as strong. He did not let on that he noticed.
“Here we are again, I guess,” he said to her in Arabic once she had merged with the southbound traffic on Upper Gage Avenue.
She checked her rearview mirror then looked straight ahead. “A busy night ahead of us. I trust you still have not acquired a mobile phone?”
He opened his jacket and everted the linings of its pockets. “No worries there. I cannot afford one.”
“Don’t even dream about bringing a phone on any of these excursions.”
Dreading her reference to future sorties on behalf of the Caliph, he inspected the cab’s well-worn interior. It had none of the pristine elegance of Friday night’s Lincoln. He hoped that meant Saramin would not be as obsessed about the state of the carpets and upholstery. Extra scuffs and smudges were less likely to be noticed when the rightful owner retook possession at the airport.
“The same drill,” he said, “with the valet parking guys at YYZ?”
“Ah, you’re learning the local lingo.”
“And the modus operandi.”
“Don’t get smart. The Caliph does not like it.”
“You tell him everything? Even our little —”
“Just conduct yourself as if you were in his presence and we’ll continue to get along without complications. You must know by now the Caliph hates complications.”
“Most certainly.”
A kilometre later, she took the eastbound ramp onto the crosstown parkway. In the smooth flow of negligible late-night traffic, the tension around her mouth eased and her shoulders relaxed.
After a few moments, he asked, “Another church, tonight?” At least it would not be as bad as stealing from his own Church People.
She signalled her frustration at his curiosity with a long sigh then pressed the master switch on the door locks. “Baseball diamonds.”
“More copper roofs and downspouts?”
She shook her head. “These are country places, mostly for kids. No roofs. No seating. Just simple playing fields.” She paused then added, “What they do have are powerful lights for night games.”
“They rarely play on Mondays. But when they do, they’re always gone by ten, ten thirty at the latest.”
She exited the parkway at Mud Street. The compass on the dashboard showed they were still heading east. He had a feeling they were travelling to the same district as Friday night but were coming at it from the west instead of from the north.
“What are we going to steal?”
“Copper wire.”
“From a baseball field?”
“The lighting system uses a lot of it. Heavy gauge.”
“I trust there is a switch we can turn off first.”
She laughed. “You are afraid of getting electrocuted?”
“Well . . .”
“No switch. But our guys have that covered. They’ll show you.”
“Are we working with those two Syrians from Friday night?”
Her glossy crimson lips tightened. “No more questions.”
As Mud Street became increasingly rural and deserted, Hosam wondered how a few dozen metres of copper wire could be worth this elaborate cloak-and-dagger effort. How valuable was scrap copper, anyway? He tried to calculate how much wire they might take away with them tonight, but he had no idea. He knew too little about the dimensions of community baseball diamonds and the height and spacing of their light poles. It seemed likely that churches and ballparks were merely the Caliph’s testing grounds. He was probably warming up his mob-style operation by amassing a cache of seed money and scrutinizing refugee conscripts in the process. Undoubtedly, he had plans for jobs that were far more lucrative and dangerous.
Less than twenty minutes from their McDonald’s rendezvous, it was now pitch dark on either side of Mud Street. No lights anywhere. The truck’s headlamps caught a sign that said Tapley-Town Community Diamond along with an arrow pointing left. Vesuvius belched in Hosam’s belly the moment he recognized the logo beneath the arrow. His father had been a staunch Rotarian. The treachery Hosam was about to commit against a Rotary International project would have his dad cursing from the grave.