by Sam Wiebe
“You and Tabitha would’ve gotten along,” she said. “You both have contempt for those who care for you.”
Breathing was becoming harder. I could feel blood pulsing out from the wound. My fingers slid from the knife handle. I heard the phone vibrate in her hand. She turned it toward me but I couldn’t read the text, my eyes half-closed from pain.
“All she had to do was transfer that money,” Essex said. She spat. “In the end, Lee had to promise to spare her boyfriend. That’s what it took.”
“And you. Had her killed.”
She was punching something into the phone, but she paused and looked down at me. “Tell me how this sounds.” She read off the text she’d written. “Found her, which she’ll take to mean me. Back door.” She punched it in and waited. I hoped the signal wouldn’t reach Sonia, but after a moment the phone buzzed again.
“On her way,” Essex said.
From her pocket she pulled a folding knife and unclasped it. “I’ll let you keep that one,” she said, digging the edge into the cut on her forehead, dragging the blade with a twisting motion until fresh blood flowed. She stepped over me and headed down the stairs.
I couldn’t sit up or turn over. The darkness seemed to be leaking out of me, as if the wound was a navel, connecting me to all of it. A night made up of my own thoughts. I wondered if I could fall endlessly through it, if that was what death would be like. Falling.
Forty-Six
I awoke looking down on Essex, who waited at the end of one of the aisles of shelving. Light was streaming in from the opposite end of the warehouse. Squinting, I could see the fire doors open, the light from the street lamps filtering in. The interior lights off, Essex bathed in shadows.
I wanted to wretch. Sonia would come through the back door that Essex had propped open, she’d see me up there and head toward me. And the blade would find her, same as it had Tabitha and Farraday and who knows how many others. And I’d have to watch from the catbird seat as Essex cut into her and reduced her to the same nothing as the rest of us.
I didn’t want to see that. I thought of Chris Chambers, sending his woman away before pulling the trigger. Hoping to spare her that sight.
“Dave?”
Sonia was calling my name. I turned my head and saw her in the doorway. Saw Essex approach her from the end of the aisle.
They met, Essex gesturing, playing the wounded victim. She pointed up toward me.
Sonia started forward, Essex lingering a few steps back.
Warn her—
I worked my leg up, drawing it toward my chest, and used its weight to turn myself onto my belly. The knife tore and did what it was going to do. I clasped the guardrail and pushed and pulled and shredded myself along the scaffold toward the bank of light switches by the door.
It was agony. I felt myself separate, smear across the steel. I could still hear Sonia’s voice. Through blurred vision I saw the beam from her flashlight dance off the shelves.
I reached the wall, reached up and dragged my hand down across as many of the switches as my fingers could touch. I waited for illumination, for the war drum sound of stadium lights.
There was nothing, only a crackle of static. I looked back and felt light on my face, knew she was looking up at me.
I reached up and pawed the switches again. No light. They didn’t work the lights. She was heading toward me. Essex toward her. I leaned up and held the switches down, and screamed into the intercom and heard my voice reverberate through the enclosed space.
Sonia
it’s her
run
she’ll cut you
don’t turn your back on her
get the police, get a gun,
please
don’t
take
another
step
What came out was nonsense, anguished babbling. I fell back, my head lolling in her direction.
Sonia had stopped halfway down the aisle, looking back. Essex was nowhere in sight. Sonia started toward me with the penlight off, cautiously, but still looking at me. I heard myself whimpering. Just go.
I saw Essex dart out to her left, saw her free arm swing out and clasp Sonia’s shoulder. Sonia leapt back as the knife shot toward her, catching her clothing, maybe catching her.
Essex came for her like a boxer, open hand jabbing for her eyes, for a handhold, for an opening, the speed of their movements madcap and Chaplinesque, charging and backstepping cartoonishly.
Then the blade swept out toward Sonia’s face and I knew Essex had cut her. That open hand grabbed her hair and the blade came up toward her chest, and her arm took the force of the blade, and Essex pulled Sonia toward her.
I heard a snap and Essex reeled back, the blade falling from her hand. Sonia was clutching her baton. She’d extended it into Essex’s eye. She spun and caught Essex in the face and dropped her. Essex’s hands felt out along the cement for the knife and Sonia hit her again across the bridge of the nose.
When Essex reached again there was no force left in her. Sonia cuffed her, kicked the blade away.
Then I lost all focus and my eyes began to close. I hoped to hell I hadn’t dreamed it.
Forty-Seven
Awake a day later, tranquilized and woozy, with a pint of my sister’s blood sloshing through me. A screaming pain in my side beneath the drugs.
Apparently in the night I’d tried to escape. Torn my stitching and the IV drip, somehow made it over the guardrail of the bed. I caused the nurses all sorts of trouble calming me down.
I don’t remember what exactly prompted the escape attempt, but I recognized a dull fear coursing through me. Fear of being helpless and being forever at someone’s mercy, and knowing this wasn’t paranoia. That fear branded on me, insinuated into the wound in my side.
In the end you can save nothing and no one. And yet.
When Sonia and Kay came into focus, sitting at my bedside, I felt the fear ebb slightly.
Sonia had a bandage on her brow from a laceration that would take seven stitches and slowly fade to an indelible furrow. She told me Jeff and Marie were on their way, and even Blatchford, up and around now with the help of a cane, wanted to come down. And anyway, Essex was in no condition to press the issue.
“She lost the eye. Sonia broke her hand, too.” Kay spoke with the reverence of someone with a newly minted hero.
Within the week I was trussed up, released, and allowed to make the trip home. The hospital bill cost as much as a Linn Sondek turntable or a good used Chevrolet.
Jeff told me the company would pay. When I asked if that meant I was still a part of Wakeland & Chen, he grunted an affirmative.
“Next time you get yourself stabbed,” he said, “try to do it at home.”
Lee Henry Crowhurst’s initial position was stoic silence. Once they got him to waive his right to counsel and begin talking, he confessed. And kept confessing. He put himself in for seventeen homicides, including Tabitha Sorenson, all on contract. Four of the victims were still listed as missing, and he offered to disclose the locations of the body dumps for fifty grand apiece. The State’s Attorney’s office bought it, on condition Crowhurst give up his clients.
He’d met Essex inside, impressed her with his matter-of-fact demeanor and candor about what he did. She’d contacted him months ago to find Tabitha Sorenson and kill her, with the two of them splitting the recovered money. He’d agreed, but didn’t do legwork: you find her, he’d told her, or hire someone to do it for you.
When Essex furnished him with Tabitha’s location, he’d taken the train up from Seattle, using a false passport to get into the country. Once in Vancouver he’d bought a cheap set of knives from the first department store he saw. Crowhurst waited for nightfall, then slipped in a back window, incapacitated Gill, and confronted Tabitha.
He explained how his banking contact had notified him the minute the money cleared. A green light for murder.
All told, Crowhurst made off with just under two hundr
ed thousand dollars. Once it was in his account, he gave Essex nine thousand and instructed her to be patient. He swore he wasn’t trying to rip her off, only being cautious to make sure the funds weren’t traced back to Tabitha. In the meantime he’d followed and photographed me, Kay, and Jeff, Essex telling him it would keep me quiet.
His testimony went on. Dates and wounds inflicted and sums agreed upon.
I’d study Crowhurst’s evolution over the following years. The first leaked videos of his confession showed the genuine article. The scars on his face and the lisp from his mangled tongue only added to his credibility. Then, in later interviews, still plainspoken but now self-aware, playing a role for his audience. His slow, considered responses gradually tapering to phrases learned by rote, repeated on command. And finally cutesying himself up into a sound-bite-spouting talking head, available when an expert on psychopaths or hitmen was needed. A joke of himself, a paper tiger, and prison royalty.
Dana Essex pled guilty and didn’t speak a word.
It was a Big Sensational American Murder Case, and Sonia and I found ourselves supporting players. It was everywhere. We endured it, head down and covered up, like a boxer on the ropes waiting for her opponent to punch herself out.
Months later, at the tail end of February, when a lull in work had left me feeling restless, I walked downtown to view the demolition. The Central Library was on my way. On a whim, I took the elevator to the seventh floor, where I asked for Sabar Gill.
“He’s in the stacks,” the Special Collections curator said. “One floor down.”
I found Gill as he was shifting an electronic shelving unit back into storage position, a blue-bound book in his hand. His expression hadn’t changed much from the last time we’d spoken.
“Got a minute to talk?”
He considered it and nodded. “I have to hand this book off. Just wait here and I’ll be right back.”
I stood by the guardrail, watching the pigeons in the atrium swoop up to the skylight. Gill returned, leaning on the rail to my right.
I said, “You probably don’t want to hear this from me, but Essex told me all Tabitha cared about was you being safe. That she bargained her money away to make sure. And whatever else, the rest of your life, you’re always going to have that.”
He didn’t answer, only stared across the atrium to the cables that held up the Milton quote.
“Anyway.” I prepared to take my leave. “Felt you should know.”
“What’s weird,” Gill said, “is even though I know it wasn’t you, when I think about her and picture her killer, it’s your face I see.”
“I guess that’s understandable.”
He looked at my ribcage, noticed I was wincing. “The news said she stabbed you. Does it still hurt?”
“Not if I don’t move or laugh or breathe.”
We made small talk and I left. Outside it was a white-skied winter day, rain in the offing. I walked up Robson, bought a Japadog, then turned right on Richards and headed east to the building site.
A small crowd had gathered on the corner of Pender, where a lifetime ago I’d intervened between Essex and Gary. The crowd was more upscale than the neighborhood usually saw. Gary darted among them now, asking for change and cigarettes. The crowd looked past him, training their cameras and cell phones on the spot where my office had been.
The building had been reduced to a skeleton of exposed joists, scaffolding around it, blue plastic and cyclone fencing marking off the perimeter. The workers were carting out the building in pieces, loads of crumbling brick and timber.
Tied to the fence was a sign proclaiming the future location of THE LOFTS, with HOMES STARTING FROM $799,000, and below that the hashtagged slogan, YOU DON’T NEED A MILLION!
But beyond that, what the demolition exposed—a hand-painted sign on the faded brick of the neighbor building. A movie advertisement, HAROLD LLOYD IN SAFETY LAST!, directing passersby to the long-gone Capitol Theater.
A white-gloved hand pointed up the street to where the Capitol had stood. My now-gutted office had preserved its neighbor’s sign for almost a hundred years. The white paint looked pristine, a ghost emerging above the rubble, though the hand now pointed nowhere.
I made sure to slip Gary some money, enough to convince myself, at least for the moment, that I wasn’t like all the others. He greeted me with a belated Happy New Year.
I limped home, thinking about how the past returns to us, how it folds back upon us. How it always seems to have the final say. And I thought, as curses go, there probably were worse.
Acknowledgments
While in some cases I’ve drawn from actual events, ultimately this is a work of fiction, and the people are entirely imaginary. Characters who misuse their authority are not representative of their real-world counterparts, or the institutions themselves.
I’ve taken slight liberties with the geography of downtown Vancouver, in the hope of more accurately reflecting the city’s character, or what’s left of it.
In writing this book I consulted the findings of the Kwantlen University College Student Association’s forensic accounting investigation, made public by the KSA. Don Pentecost’s Put ’Em Down, Take ’Em Out!: Knife Fighting Techniques from Folsom Prison told me all I wanted to know about stabbing someone and more. Kim Bolan and Nick Eagland from the Vancouver Sun took the time to answer questions about Abbotsford crime, and Jerry Langton’s The Notorious Bacon Brothers: Inside Gang Warfare on Vancouver Streets also provided important details. Thanks also to David Swinson, retired police officer and author of the terrific novel The Second Girl, for some procedural advice.
I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my agent Chris Bucci of The Cooke McDermid Agency, and my editors, Craig Pyette at Penguin Random House Canada, and Amelia Ayrelan Iuvino at Quercus USA. All three made important contributions to the book, and I’m indebted to them.
Thanks to the publishing teams at Penguin Random House Canada and Quercus USA for their support. Nathaniel Marunas, Amanda Harkness, Elyse Gregov, Patricia Kells, Anne Robinson, Nick Seliwoniuk, and Anne Collins, among many, many others.
Thanks also to my brothers Dan and Josh and my parents Al and Linda; Sook Kong and the staff at Coquitlam College; Jade, Anne, Amber, Sam, Jenna, and Mark at the Vancouver Public Library; Alex Kennedy, Bruce Lord, Mike Stachura and Nicole Fauteaux for accompanying me during my wrestling “research”; my fellow Vancouver crime writers Linda Richards, Sheena Kamal, Ed Brisson, Dietrich Kalteis, Robin Spano, Owen Laukkanen, E. R. Brown, and Tricia Barker; as well as Mercedes Eng, Mel Yap and Mako Morris-Yap, Chris Brayshaw and the staff at Pulp Fiction Books, John McFetridge, Ashley Looye, Brian Thornton, Paul Budra, Torsten Kehler, Cecilia Martell, Neil Kennedy, Charles Demers, Benoit Lelievre, Janie Chang, and the late Brad Dean.
And thanks to you for reading this.
Sam Wiebe
Vancouver