“Sheila, for Christ’s sake, I mailed the cheque on Tuesday. How the fuck should I know where it is?” Sangster and Spence heard the exchange, turning to see Sawatski shaking his head. They nodded in unison, taking the file and laptop into the conference room. Miles did his best to portray the role of beleaguered ex-husband while having a very different conversation. “I told you that I would call when I had something.”
“It’s been almost three hours since you arrived on scene,” said The Voice. “Let’s just say that our expectations were much higher.”
“What you’re paying me should be a lot higher!” whispered Sawatski as harshly as possible.
The Voice was calm. “Miles, everyone in this fair town knows that a dollar under the table is practically three on the books. We’ll look at your compensation upon the conclusion of this adventure. Have you located Miss Hebert? There is much concern for her whereabouts at this time.”
“I’m working a theory.”
“Work it well, Miles. Your stipend will be at the usual location.” The line went dead. Sawatski closed his phone, hammering the table with his fist loud enough to signal the end of the call to the squad. “Fucking bitch!”
Chapter Thirteen
Ernie Friday was kicking the snow off his boots at the back door of his Bowman Avenue shanty when his pager went off. He had resisted the move to a cell phone, convinced that it would somehow be his undoing. Though anything but advertised, the paging network was still alive and well through Manitoba Telecom Services. He dropped the license plates from the Caprice, which had just been picked up by an outfit called Dawn to Dusk Towing. The company was adept at one thing: getting your dirty car to the front of the line at the Selkirk scrap-metal shredder. Any physical evidence of Teddy Simms and his brief appearance in the rusty Caprice would soon be in the foundry smelter. The plates would be fastened to an ’86 Pontiac Parisienne, about as rusty as the Chevy that had just left. It was a tight fit in the old garage. Ernie had already wired the brake and running lights with kill switches and had replaced all the headlights and marker lamp bulbs with fresh glow. The Pontiac was a bargain: $200 cash on Kijiji, with a bad water pump that Ernie had fixed himself with plenty of cursing. There was plenty of room on the bench seat for his jammer briefcase.
The house was dark except for the fluorescent glow from the stove console. Ernie grabbed a tea towel to wipe the winter fog from his glasses. He brought the pager up to a distance of legibility. 586-1042. It was a phone number to most, especially a nosy cop. The number was also legitimate; it belonged to a drugstore on McGregor Avenue. The code system had been in place for years and was one of the carefully guarded secrets amongst the local criminal element. “86” was to eighty-six, a hit. “10” was the target category, in this case a prostitute. A drug dealer was an eighty, as in eight-ball. A snitch was a seventy, only because the number and the category started with the same letter. There were some categories that the hired hands would avoid, out of principle or preference. A witness was a twenty, for the two eyes they should have kept shut. The worst of the category codes was forty. The letter shared was F. Family.
The “5” and the “42” made up the bank branch number. Those who were regular contractors maintained safety deposit boxes at various city banks. When a hit was sanctioned, a package would be deposited in the safety deposit box of the key contractor, part of which would contain the information on the subject, plus any outstanding payments for services rendered, such as the $2,000 now owed for the late Teddy Simms. Murder was the least-used code. Most numbers had to do with drug shipments, cartage thefts, and disciplinary action against those who needed it. The HRs had resurrected the old pager system after too many career-ending taps on both landline and wireless phones.
Ernie filled the kettle and placed it on the one free burner, surrounded by pots with recent, but congealed, cooking. A grey long-haired cat made his presence known, pushing up against Ernie’s legs. “Yes, Chico, time for breakfast.” The meowing reached a fever pitch as Ernie engaged the electric can opener. As Chico ate, Ernie poured the kettle’s bounty into a cup of instant coffee grounds. He pulled down the metal tackle box from atop the fridge and removed his Beretta from his coat. The tackle box held his cleaning tools and gun oil, and in between sips of black instant, the Beretta was treated to its usual high-class service.
The sunshine portion of Ernie’s Thursday morning had started at nine sharp, with a quick stop to the insurance agent on Watt Street, updating the Caprice tags for the Pontiac. Next stop was the Winnipeg Credit Union at Notre Dame Avenue and Arlington, home of the nearest safety deposit box, which would have the directions to his next two grand. The Pontiac had a handicapped placard in the glove box — out of date but good enough to hoodwink the parking authority. Ernie threw in a bit of a limp as he walked towards the door. There was no teller at the wicket for the safety deposit boxes as Ernie tapped his fingers on the desk. A woman close to Ernie’s age appeared, thin, well dressed, and with almost enough black hair dye to qualify as a close Friday relative. She smiled, the kind of smile reserved for regulars.
“Good morning, Ernie. How’s my favourite cat?”
Ernie grinned. “Chico says hi, Merle.” Merle wore a nametag with the credit union logo and a stick-on nodule that spoke of thirty-five years of service. “Need to get into my safety deposit box.”
“Four-thirty-four,” said Merle from memory. “Right this way.”
She led Ernie down a narrow corridor to the rear stairs, taking the steps slowly, thanks to shoes reserved more for a night on the town than eight hours standing on a marble floor.
“These bloody hips,” said Merle, as she gripped the well-worn rail. “I think I need a new pair.”
“Must be all those dance partners at the Legion,” said Ernie. He never was much of a dancer, though he would often run into Merle and her friends at the Army Navy Air Force hall. There was always a good meat draw, and the video lottery terminals must have been wired for payout. “What’s your favourite dance, Merle? The Horizontal Mambo?”
Merle stopped and swatted him in his well-fed belly. “Ernie Bloody Friday!” she scolded, as she continued down the stairs to the safety deposit box cage. Ernie found the light switch for the customer room. A moment later, Merle appeared with box 434. It was the longer-sized box, though it didn’t seem to be full enough to involve a struggle of effort.
“Four thirty-four,” said Merle as she laid the box in front of him. “Full of pearls and gold bars, and rubies the size of your nose.”
Ernie grinned. “That would be one ugly-looking ruby.”
Merle turned to head up the stairs. “Call me when you’re done massaging your platinum tie bars.” Ernie listened as she ascended the stairs, each step punctuated by her heels. He waited until she was at the top, or what he thought was the top, about thirty steps. He opened the long top cover of the box, half-wondering if Merle knew how the information was deposited. The manager was an underworld friendly, carrying out the duties of criminal postmaster. The packet would arrive via local courier, attention to the manager. Within the thick manila envelope was a second envelope of the bubble-wrap variety. Within this were two standard letter envelopes; one blank, with five hundred-dollar bills for the manager, the second marked with a computer-generated label with the box number. Ernie removed the envelope and easily opened its fresh adhesive strip.
The picture was folded in half, with the particulars handwritten on the backside of the photo paper. He recognized the name without a sign of emotion. Ernie had never been a fan of Claire Hebert, especially after what she had done to Tommy and how it had put Jeremy in the crosshairs. Just like a movie rating, the name was accompanied by five badly drawn red stars. Ernie had heard about the Stephanos murder the previous night on the CJOB morning drive, concerned at first that they were talking about Teddy Simms. The North End location calmed his nerves. They hadn’t released the name, though Ernie knew of th
e Heaven’s Rejects clubhouse on Pritchard. Five stars: the most any future corpse could get. Teddy Simms had only three. Five stars meant the job was open, with a one hundred percent premium. Four grand was enough for a proper vacation down to the Shooting Star Casino on the Minnesota side, maybe even that Dominican all-inclusive that Merle raved about every winter.
There was another picture inside the packet, though it wasn’t a second someone in need of a few Beretta slugs. The picture was of a book, some type of cheap store-brand ledger that Stephanos must have used to record the HRs’ business transactions of the day. If it fell into the wrong hands, and could be deciphered, there could be dire consequences for the future of the HRs in Winnipeg. A simple notation had been written on the photograph in black Magic Marker — To be discussed.
It was anyone’s guess as to what the ledger retrieval notation meant for payment; maybe a lot, maybe a little. For now, it was a four-grand hit, which meant that every amateur shooter in town was going to be gunning for Claire Hebert. Most were of little consequence; they didn’t have enough contacts or smarts to unload a clip at a gun-club target, let alone Hebert. It wasn’t them who Ernie was worried about, it was the Two Pauls — Paul Bouchard and Paul Lemay.
Every city has its complete psychopaths, even a place like Winnipeg. While without official affiliation, Ernie knew that the Two Pauls could be counted on for one thing: making a deadly mess of the person on the contract. Ernie always tried to keep things clean. The smaller calibre of the Beretta meant that even a head shot would be relatively easy for a funeral director to patch — not an easy task when large-calibre weaponry is used. The Two Pauls weren’t concerned with calibre, clip size, or pearl-handled grips; they prided themselves on one key element, and it was about as Winnipeg as you could get: the cheapest kill possible.
Ernie had read about the latest budget body in the Sentinel. It was a true puzzler, found frozen solid on the top of the Smith Street parkade. Stranger still was the autopsy upon thaw. The victim had drowned, though there was extensive dental damage and inner throat lacerations. The lungs had traces of an industrial grade tire cleaner, car wax, and liquid soap. The break for Robbery-Homicide was the discovery of a dental partial at a coin-operated car wash in the West End. They even found teeth marks on the wash wand. There were no usable prints or fibres, not even off the change in the coin box. The medical examiner figured that the water volume that killed the victim was less than one full cycle. It was less than one loonie. That was still cheaper than five rounds from Ernie’s Beretta.
The Two Pauls were veterans of the auto-dismantling trade, with two decades of criminal freelance between them. Paul Bouchard had the look of blue-collar respectability, a clothes horse in an industry that soiled your attempts on an hourly basis. He had five Carhartt yard jackets and went through a washing machine a year diluting the grease stain patchwork. His steel-toed boots were a combination of scuff and multiple coats of Arctic Dubbin. He favoured black knit skullcaps, a necessity in the chill of the outdoor wrecking yards. Beneath was a thin pattern of blond stubble and a tightly trimmed matching goatee. A shop mishap some ten years before had cut the vision in his left eye to borderline blindness, making it a milkier blue than the movie-star tint of the right. Fix the eye and remove the acne scars, and his muscular six-foot-two frame could have easily graced the pages of a work-apparel catalogue. Ernie had first met him at the counter of an auto-parts recycler. He remembered how he had told Bouchard to go fuck himself after he quoted a ridiculous price for a radiator support for a 1989 Ford F-150 that Ernie was fixing on the cheap. He had recently been laid off, which freed up time for his cocaine deliveries. He had the perfect cover: delivering food hampers on welfare cheque day to the so-called needy throughout the North End.
Ernie had put eyes on Paul Lemay about a year ago at a towing compound auction. He kept his distance after he passed him getting a hot dog from the compound canteen, and for good reason. Lemay carried the stench of three days of sweat at all times, with a fifty-pound overhang, bad teeth, and greasy salt-and-pepper locks that had never known a comb. Ernie had heard that Lemay was an artist with a cutting torch, so much so that the wreckers he worked for never dared to complain about the hours he chose to keep, or if he showed up at all. His car dismantles were clean and precise, in stark contrast to his manner of dispatch for the unfortunate. While Bouchard favoured Ernie’s belief that less mess is more, Lemay was simply unhinged, with a creative lilt. He had suggested the inland drowning technique. Bouchard would hold the victim in a full nelson, looking the other way, as Lemay performed his life-ending work. Rumour had it that it was his victims’ eyes that fascinated Lemay. It never ceased to amaze him how something so full of movement and emotion in their final throes could become so equally still and empty in mere seconds. He never looked away.
The Two Pauls were KTP, known to police, but not for these reasons. The current local drinking establishment ban tally for the Pauls was eight. They would drink themselves into oblivion, and then break into boisterous song, with or without a karaoke system on the premises. It would start off as amusing but would eventually require a call to the police service for public intoxication as the Pauls ended with their off-key rendition of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” while being loaded into the paddy wagon. Ernie had heard that there was only one assault charge on the books for Lemay, and it depended on your definition of assault: a Main Street Project care worker lodged the complaint, after a shower of Lemay’s projectile vomit. It ended as a public mischief charge plus a dry-cleaning bill.
Ernie had reason to be concerned about the Pauls. It had been less than two years since a freelance contractor was found next to a contract corpse in a similar state. The contractor had been suffocated, courtesy of an entire roll of duct tape concealing his head. It was later determined that the contractor had completed the deed and was checking for vitals on the victim when a cinder block knocked him out cold. Dead men can’t spend, and the first to make the contract claim gets the cash, regardless of how many bonus bodies are present. That event had resulted in more specific contract management amongst the various criminal groups. The Claire Hebert job was the first open contract since the bonus-body incident.
Ernie stowed the items in the safety deposit box. They would be destroyed by the bank manager within the hour. The last known addresses were committed to memory, though Ernie knew those would be of little use. Claire Hebert was surely underground by now, protected by the friendlies in the sex trade. The goal would be to get her out of town as quickly as possible, which would be anything but easy with the Robbery-Homicide unit bearing down. Five stars. That’s the concern, Ernie thought as he held the guardrail for his ascent. The punishment doesn’t exactly fit the crime.
Chapter Fourteen
Claire Hebert hadn’t moved a muscle on the musty fold-out as Jasmine Starr searched for her instant coffee grounds. Her plug-in kettle lacked a whistle, though the boiling gurgle and switch shut-off were easily heard in the rear of the shop. She still took care to keep the spoon from making too much clank, with a dash of sweetener to take the edge off. The briefcase was now on the floor, un-bagged, with Claire still hanging on to the shoulder strap.
Once the instant started to charge her, Jasmine noticed that the strap was removable. Fair game, and a fair price to pay, thought Jasmine, for keeping Claire safe. Keeping up with the offshore online sex-toy suppliers had been whittling away at The Other Woman’s profit margins for the last two years. Jasmine had sold her cabin at West Hawk Lake, even shaved staff hours to the bone. She was also sick and tired of black instant.
The clasps on the bag were spring-loaded, which kept the rustling to a minimum. The contents were relatively minor: a few pens, a cheap RadioShack calculator, a few receipts for gas, some lottery tickets with the Please Try Again paper slice. No sign of drugs or cash; not even a laptop in the laptop compartment. A stiff wind could have knocked over this bag, Jasmine thought. She gingerly pull
ed open the Velcro strap where the laptop would have resided. A thin journal presented itself. There was no writing on the exterior. Jasmine figured it was the usual goings-on of any criminal enterprise: drugs, payments for drugs, and who was behind on their payments for drugs. There could also be prostitution, cartage theft, possibly some high-end cars jacked for HR friendlies in Montreal. A River Heights BMW could end up on a pier in Nigeria for a fifth of retail. Jasmine hesitated slightly, wondering if it was worth opening, wondering if it was worth knowing. She wondered if it was truly worth her life.
The entries, as legible and neat as they were, offered no obvious clues. Each entry had a date, then a long string of digits, with a separate amount that may have been some form of total. Jasmine had seen such ledgers like this before, and they didn’t tend to be too hard to crack. She remembered one such book, where the “code” for the cartage thefts was the license plate of the trailer that had been fleeced. The dates went back about eighteen months, right up to the previous day. Each date had twenty entries. The first string of digits remained the same for all individual entries, which probably pointed to a location of some sort. The rest seemed jumbled, with different sequences, even the odd letter or symbol. Jasmine figured it had to be some way of recording cash transactions without being too obvious.
Jasmine would have read further, were it not for a new piece of reading material that had just slammed into the side of her head. She fell to the floor, dazed, her left cheek stinging. Claire was very much awake. She tossed the White Pages aside, pulling the bag away from Jasmine’s reach. Claire did her best to keep one eye on Jasmine as she groaned, using the other to scan the contents of the bag. She was not pleased. Jasmine’s left ear was now bleeding, wounded from the contact of the phone book with her array of earrings. Claire reached down, pulling on the damaged ear.
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