Slow Recoil

by C. B. Forrest

  “Well,” he said, looking to make her smile now, “I think we should eat those Krispy Kreme donuts, since Emily’s mother won’t let her have any. Cruel and usual punishment.”

  She pulled back and slapped his shoulder. The sight of her red and puffy eyes made him want to carve a hole in his chest to put her inside, lock it tight. Her and the little girl both. The city was a tough show at the best of times, even more so for an ex-addict walking the line. And then, as though on cue, a police siren wailed across the top of the night.

  As usual, McKelvey wakes at just after two. This sleepy-eyed, shuffling nocturnal routine. He stands there at the toilet with his boxers pulled down, willing the trickle. The stop-and-go. Standing there in the dark, in the quiet. The flow of his output is of some mild concern of late. Then again, he is old. Or just about. This is the simple, unalterable fact of the situation—he is no longer on the lip of the threshold, rather he has passed through the archway and is well along the path. How many pisses taken in a lifetime? A million? So it is to be expected, he guesses, this middle of the night stopping, starting. The infrastructure of the plumbing showing its wear and tear.

  When he is finished, he closes the lid and makes a mental note to flush in the morning so he won’t wake the girls. He pats warm water on his face and looks at himself in the mirror. At his bloodshot eyes, into his eyes, beyond them. Sees something there to be reckoned with, an outstanding account on the books. He opens the medicine chest, finds the bottle of pills. He opens the top and sprinkles the remaining tablets into his hand. He opens the lid of the toilet with his foot, tosses the pills in there with the dark golden pee. He flushes with a mild sense of loss and closes the lid. Perhaps the narcotics, he thinks, once entered into the Toronto water system, will assist in softening the sharp edge of a society already on its knees.

  Goodnight, Toronto…

  NINE

  The next morning the Sun tabloid carried a Page 8 story about a blaze at a Rexdale garage. Fire crews called out in the middle of the night. The place burned to the ground. Jarko’s Automotive. A photo of the smouldering brickworks, the roof collapsed in a pile of rubble. There was a quote from the responding platoon captain: “Trucks from West Command arrived on the scene within four minutes. We found the structure fully involved. The fire marshal is conducting an investigation into the cause of the fire. We are having difficulty locating the owner of the business at this time…”

  McKelvey’s phone rang as the news was sinking in, and it startled him. “McKelvey,” he said.

  “Good morning, sunshine. We’re going for a drive, you and me,” Hattie said, and he could tell from the rush of sounds that she was driving, already on her way over, perhaps even idling at the curb. “I’ll be there in five minutes. You’ve got some explaining to do.”

  He was dressed in jeans and a well-worn button-down dress shirt left untucked. He stood on the sidewalk and smoked a half cigarette he’d found in the pocket of the shirt. Stale as sawdust, but still. It was a gift, akin to finding money in your winter coat the first time you wore it for the season. The day was grey, a cloudless pewter, but it was still warm as summer. He would take what he could get.

  Hattie pulled up. On duty, at the wheel of an unmarked unit. He popped the door and got inside. She did a quick shoulder check and gunned it into the traffic, swung a quick turn and got them headed across King then down toward the waterfront. He immediately felt at ease inside the cruiser. The radio, the screening between the front and back seats, the smell, the history.

  “So,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Oh, you know,” he said, “a little of this, a little of that.”

  She shot him a sideways glance. “Smell like you just had a cigarette,” she said.

  “Half a cigarette,” he said. “A little gift of the gods.”

  “Still smoking at your age,” she said. “Shame, shame.”

  “I’m on a ration system.”

  “Now there’s an excellent idea,” she said. “Bet nobody ever thought of that one.”

  They stopped for a red light. She waited half a beat, reached out and hit the siren so it squawked once and the dashboard lights strobed. She checked both directions and rocketed them on through the intersection, down beneath the overpass and out the other side. McKelvey shivered as they passed through, knowing his boy’s body had been thrown beneath the concrete of the expressway overpass, thrown there among the weeds and the trash. His boy had lain there a full day before someone found him and reported it. All the while the city continued on above him, flies buzzing at his closed eyes, and his mouth.

  “Can’t stand those friggin’ lights,” she said. “Sit there for half a day. Anyway, about your face. I have to admit, there’s something strangely attractive about a man with bruises. I always had a soft spot for those hockey players with their black eyes and their missing teeth.”

  The human body was a wonder all right. His nose had deflated considerably in the past twenty-four hours, but now his eyes were ringed in darkening hues. The pain had shifted gears as well, from that apocalyptic first morning wherein he’d risen as Lazarus, every cell sounding its own alarm bell across the valleys and the mountains—to this place now where he could actually move his head without needing to clench his eyes tight to stop the buzzing drone.

  “You should see the other guy,” he said and smiled his boyhood smile for her.

  She pulled into a vacant lot behind an abandoned warehouse along the railway tracks. The big box of a building sat there with its brown bricks painted in rainbows with the personalized signatures of a hundred different graffiti taggers, its rows of small square factory windows cracked or smashed or missing altogether. Detroit or south side Chicago, could have been anywhere. She turned to him.

  “Charlie,” she said. “What the hell is going on?”

  He exhaled a long breath and gathered his notes, collected his thoughts as he’d done a hundred times on the witness stand. “My friend Tim Fielding—you remember Tim.”

  “The school teacher,” she said.

  “He called the other day, very upset. This woman he’d been seeing a little from his night class—he’s been teaching English as a second language at nights to get out of the house—she just sort of disappeared. He wanted me to check into things.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Why leave it to the police, right?”

  “Anyway, I went over to her apartment. Guy ambushed me. Caught me with my back turned,” he said. “Thing is, there was nothing in the place. She’d already moved out. No trace.”

  He gathered the facts together for her like putting place settings at a dinner table. In doing so he was able to hear his own voice, to look at things from a new perspective. How they had tracked the vehicle down to the garage in Rexdale. How he had questioned the superintendent and the owner of the garage. How the garage had burned to the ground.

  “Couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?” she said.

  “You should have seen this guy at the garage when I was questioning him.”

  She looked at him for a long moment. Working through something, he could see it in her eyes. She looked at him, and he saw that something had changed there. Something. He couldn’t put his finger on it.

  “Tell me,” she said, “in what capacity you were questioning this individual.”

  “As a private, tax-paying citizen,” he said, “who got his fucking nose broken by somebody driving a car registered to this asshole’s business.”

  “Hmmm,” she said, thick with her east-coast sarcasm. “And that same night the garage burns down. Very interesting. What are you thinking on this, recently retired detective McKelvey?”

  A good question. What was he thinking on this? He sat there in the car in silence, watching pigeons flutter around the roof of the old building, coating the overhang with the poison white waste of their urban hell.

  “Me, I’m thinking one of two things,” she said. “This chick was playing with Tim. She had a boyfriend or maybe eve
n a husband all along. This would be the gentleman who tried to put his hand through the back of your head. Maybe the guy found out about his woman’s indiscretion and decided to pull a midnight move. You know, get out of Dodge.”

  He turned and looked at her. The plain beauty of her face like a girl from the country, the milky flesh and the red hair and the freckles on her nose. Good god, those green eyes that pulled and pulled. Just the smell of her. He longed to be with her again. Close. Now.

  “Or,” he said.

  “Or else you just stepped into the middle of something really bad. Either way, I think you should stop playing private eye. You want to press assault charges, you know who to call.”

  “I’m not interested in pressing any charges,” he said.

  “What are you interested in exactly?”

  “It doesn’t make any sense. I could buy the part about her having a boyfriend or a husband. It’s what I assumed from the get-go. But now I’m not so sure. The connection between the car and the garage. This guy, Jarko, he wasn’t above board. Something was off. When I went into Donia’s place, it’s not like I didn’t announce myself. Said I was a friend of Tim’s.”

  “And now the paper says they can’t locate the owner of the garage,” she said. “They’re leaning towards arson. I made a couple of calls this morning to a friend of mine in the marshal’s office. She didn’t take too kindly to being woken up on a Sunday.”

  She sighed, settled back in her seat, and they both sat there looking at the scarred face of the building as though they were teenagers at a summer drive-in waiting for something to happen.

  “Well, the one good thing is, if you have in fact stepped into the middle of a shit storm, you might not have to go looking for these people. They might just find you. That,” she said, “or maybe they’ll find Tim Fielding first.”

  Something dropped inside his rib cage, fell like a stone to the pit of his belly. He said, “I was just thinking that very thing myself.”

  TEN

  Kadro sat eating a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal at a small table in the sparse apartment in the east end of the city. It was a dive, an anonymous and inexpensive safe house located atop a Vietnamese noodle takeout restaurant in a grubby neighborhood strip mall that also housed a pawn shop, a twenty-four convenience store that had been robbed six times in four months, and a dry cleaning depot that was on the verge of bankruptcy. Turner had accepted his call and made the arrangements—with admonishments and warnings to stay focused, keep the mission on track. Get it done and get gone. There were only so many contingency plans, variations to the schematic. Kad had bit his tongue and let the Canadian swear at him. This time. But he was growing weary of the man’s condescension. Take the butt of his rifle and smash and smash and smash as he had done, bone and flesh giving way to the heavy wood of the stock…

  Donia came into the kitchen dressed in the clothes she had slept in. Jeans and a sweater, her brown hair tied back in a pony tail. Her face was thick from a night of poor sleep, tossing and turning. She did not want to stop their work. She wanted them to pause and talk, to think things through, to be strategic. She had not changed her mind. But other things had changed. This place, it was not so simple. Nothing was black and white here in this country, at least not as black and white as during the long days of war she had known. Here there was much grey to be considered. The many different colours of faces that walked the downtown streets, they lived in peace and harmony, at least for the most part, having left their political and religious baggage at the airports and train stations.

  “Where did you go last night?” she said, speaking in their native tongue. She moved to the stove and put some water on to boil for tea. The apartment was lightly furnished and stocked with only the bare essentials, canned goods and non-perishables. “I heard you leave, but I didn’t hear you come back.”

  “I just came in an hour ago,” Kad said. “I was fixing our mess. The mess you caused. It is a big mess, let me tell you.”

  She smelled the stink of smoke on him, but she dared not ask. He set the bowl aside and looked up at her. There was a dribble of milk on his chin, and he wiped it with the back of his hand. This is what the city children ate, bowls of sugar and marshmallows because nobody had time to cook. Everything was already finished when you bought it—cooked or baked or fried, nothing left to do but consume. In his village, back when he was a child, all of the mothers knew how to take the seeds and the scraps and to stretch them and twist them into tables full of food for the working men. Fresh baked breads and dried meats and cheeses, vegetables still tasting of the rich fecund earth from which they’d been plucked. The old country, the old life, the old ways—gone now, bombed to shit.

  “A big mess for us to clean up,” he went on. “This man friend of yours, he has a friend on the police. I caught a policeman looking around the apartment.”

  “What did you do?” she asked. But she did not want to know, not really.

  Or what had she done? And why had she brought these innocent people into this?

  “Did you kill him?” she asked.

  She had to ask, because he just stared at her. Something in him perhaps enjoyed this punishment. The place of the woman and the place of the man. Theirs was not an equal partnership, not here and certainly not back home in the world they had come from. She had her role, and it was an important role, but Kadro was in charge. Make no mistake.

  “Yes, I should have killed him,” he said. “But I did not kill the man. I did not have the time or the tools to properly dispose of him. Somehow he tracked the vehicle to our contact, Jarko. A friend of the cause. Just a good and simple business man who came here even before the wars in our land. He called Turner to tell him this man, this cop, had been asking questions. Now this friend of our cause has no business, and he has been sent away in hiding. His life in this country is finished.”

  She sat down at the table, her legs suddenly weak. “Is all of this necessary?” she said. “To send this friend away because of this police officer? What will they find? There is nothing to find, Kadro. Turner can deal with these details, he can make anything go away. Please, we can still do what we have come to do. This week. Tomorrow even. And then we can go back home. We will have kept our bargain, but there is no sense in taking risks. I have done the work that was asked of me. I have the files and the logs, everything is there.”

  “The work that was asked of you? This is work you volunteered for,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I volunteered, and with a glad heart. My family was taken by these men, too, not just your family. My husband. I have as much at stake here as you or anyone else, and yet from the moment you came here you have acted strange, as though you are in charge, you are the only one concerned with finishing the work. I’m telling you, Kadro, there is nothing to find. These are all good and simple people who have nothing to do with anything.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” He stared at her, and his eyes held her in her place as though her feet were bolted to the floor. “We are here to kill two men, my sister. We can leave no trace of our involvement. All strings that come back to any part of this must be cut. Do you not understand this? That was the directive from The Colonel.”

  She fully understood the ripple effect from this stone she had thrown in the water.

  “Listen,” he said. “Before this trouble with Jarko’s Automotive, I went to a movie. Bojan Kordic brought his perfect little family. I am ready now. And so tomorrow this man faces justice for what he has done. But first, my sister, first we have to do some cleaning.”

  “What are we going to do?” she said.

  “A little mopping up. This boyfriend of yours. I need to speak to him. But first,” Kad said, digging into his pants pocket, “first we need to return your keys to your landlord. I forgot to leave them on the kitchen counter as we discussed. My mistake.”

  The superintendent opened the door a few inches and made a face a that said ‘What is it? Which one of you assholes needs a light
bulb changed now?’ He was unshaven and his eyes were red, perhaps roused from sleep. It was possible, Kadro thought. After all, it was early yet, quarter after eight.

  “I have keys for you,” Kad said.

  “Who are you?” the super said, still holding the door. He had failed to notice the blue medical gloves on the hands of the man at his door. And then recognition clicked, the morning fog lifted. “Wait—you was the guy up there the other night with the Polish chick. Hollering like a couple of teenagers.”

  “The Polish chick,” Kad repeated, amused.

  “She pulled up stakes, ’cause I told her to keep it down?” Chinaski said.

  Kad did not have the patience to work this aspect with dialogue or reasoning. Time was a luxury he could ill afford. And so in one bullet-fast motion, he raised his booted foot and kicked the door with the force of a battering ram, so quick and so sharp that the superintendent had no sense that it was even coming. He was simply on his rear end looking up from the carpet, his forehead bleeding a trickle where the corner of the door had struck him.

  “What in the hell—”

  Kad slipped inside and closed the door behind him. He reached down and pulled the superintendent up with one hand behind the man’s neck, the other wrapped tightly around the gathered ball of filthy undershirt. Kad flung him towards the junky recliner as though he were a small boy, and the superintendant landed squarely in the chair with such force that both his feet flew up and the chair sprang back to its naturally reclined position.

  “First,” Kad said, “does this building have cameras?”