Slow Recoil

by C. B. Forrest

  Turner nodded, taking it in. “I’ve got the perfect place for you to store your insurance,” he said.

  SEVENTEEN

  Sometimes when sleep would not come, when the burden of his thoughts grew too heavy, McKelvey would find himself walking the streets of old Cabbagetown with only the whores of Jarvis Street and their shifty-eyed johns for company. This was the other side of Last Call, when even the dive bars were emptying of their lost-soul patrons. He knew from his patrol-car days the street whores were for the most part crack or heroin or meth addicts—dead-eyed zombies on the slow-foot shuffle to nowhere, millions of miles accrued in that four foot span of sidewalk. Girls not unlike his Jessie, who shared histories so similar, it was cliché—abused, given too much or too little attention, cast aside, pushed to the margins, stumbling to a place where this was actually a conceivable employment option—handjobs, blowjobs, whatever, whenever, the body as a commodity in the supply chain of human misery. Jessie was strong, stronger than she knew, and she’d made it out before things could bring her to this, the street level. He would make sure she never fell back to the old life.

  Regardless of age, they appeared to McKelvey as young girls, pathetic with their leg bruises and their dirty skirts and torn nylons, hair teased and sprayed and stinking. One girl in particular stuck out in his memory. He had arrested her on a cold winter night about a decade and a half earlier, back when he was in the patrol cars. Taylor, that was her name. He remembered how her feet were filthy. Toes grafted with dirt so deeply they were almost black, permanently tattooed. It was the dead of winter, and she was wearing open-toed shoes like she was a maid of honour in a summer wedding. So stoned, so far gone, she hadn’t noticed it was fifteen below zero, puffs of her breath in the air like clouds from cigarette smoke. Her eyes dark, so sad and beautiful. McKelvey remembered feeling a sense of admiration for her toughness, this survivor’s grit, like they were the same somehow and yet by sheer circumstance happened to find themselves standing on opposite sides of the abyss. He guessed he felt this kinship with the truly vulnerable, not the armed robbers and subway purse thieves and the Saturday night wife beaters, not the social housing thugs. No, there was nothing to be done for that variety of criminal except for the application of punitive repercussions. He understood and accepted as fact, for example, that the majority of armed robbers he put away would end up committing the exact same crime within three to six months of their mandatory release from prison—this is what the prison psychologists called recidivism, a fancy word that meant “chronic fuck-up”. These were the incorrigibles who continued trying the same things over and over again until eventually they killed someone in the commission of their crime or got killed themselves, some idiot waving a gun in a video store.

  McKelvey didn’t have a soft spot for hookers, nowhere near it—for he knew their hearts were long turned black, knew they could summon tears, dredge up the most vile anecdotes of what their fathers and uncles had done to them regardless of fact or fiction—but rather he felt it was something, this commercial transaction, best left between consenting adults. In this regard he was long a proponent of so-called “red light” districts. A block on a street wherein nobody was rolling anybody, nobody was on the take, women weren’t owned or muscled by bad men, where nurses and doctors and cops and priests could navigate with equal access. It would make all their jobs so much easier if the boundaries and the rules were set out. The devil’s playground, open 24-7.

  As for the johns, they were everyman. Lifetime losers on parole, the socially awkward, the sexually addicted, the small-cocked, the deformed and the tormented, or those teased as children—McKelvey knew them all, he knew them as well as he knew himself. How could he not after having spent so many hours in patrol cars driving down those endless streets, the radio crackling, driving and begging for some action to jump across the wire, spending more time with these people than with his own family. In those days he’d been a player sitting on the bench waiting for the coach to call his number, to pat him on the helmet and say “Yes, we need you, get out there McKelvey…”

  On those nights when sleep would not come despite the coaxing of the draft beer, perhaps even the extra nudge from a painkiller or two, McKelvey would throw on his coat and hit the street. He was quiet on the stairs, careful to close and lock his door without making any noise, forgetting that he no longer shared a home with a wife and a son, a family. No, he lived alone now in a building where nobody cared what he did or where he went, but old habits die hard. On this night, too, he watched his steps on the stairs. The night air was cool and made him aware of the sweat in his armpits, chilled.

  This night he was unable to sleep with his mind working through the mess he’d found and likely made worse, and he walked not so much for escape, but in search of entry. A way into this thing, the little crack that he could squeeze his fingers in, gain leverage, split wide open. The skeleton of something was beginning to form. He had returned from the immigrant support centre to find his answering machine flashing. He hadn’t been home in what seemed like twenty hours. It was Chinaski, the superintendent of Donia’s building.

  “Yeah hey there, this is Hank Chinaski calling like you asked. Listen, I found that stuff you were looking for. The cheque and the application. I got it here when you want to come by. Looks like a cheque from… (here he paused, and McKelvey could see in his mind’s eye the man squinting to read the cheque) …some place called Bridges, if that means anything.”

  He had taken that information, coupled with the publications from Bridges, and retreated to Garrity’s for a much-needed pint and some space to think where he wouldn’t be alone. The confines of his condo apartment, the emptiness, the threat of long days of winter to come, it was too much. He remembered stories his father had told about the mining and logging camps up north, how men went absolutely insane if they were snowed in and alone for a winter. Or worse, locked up with somebody else. Staring across a table at the same guy for months on end, eventually every little thing about him started to drive you crazy.

  “I knew a guy, Lucky Lachapelle,” his father had told him once, “got his hand chopped off because of the way he scraped his food with his fork. Made a certain noise that drove his cabin mate crazy. Chopped it off with a hatchet, just like that.”

  The trouble with McKelvey was that he was alone and had only himself to drive insane. He stopped and asked the woman behind the bar, a university student named Melissa, if Huff was off for the night.

  “He’s sick,” she said, pouring a pint of thick, coffee-brown Guinness.

  “The flu’s making the rounds,” McKelvey said.

  He passed by the bar and took a small table at the back. The beer had never tasted so good, and he got through two pints and a bowl of mixed nuts by the time he had read the centre’s annual report and brochures. The support centre had been founded in late 1995 as NATO bombers brought an end to the wars in the former Yugoslavia. It was initially funded through a series of grants provided by a Bosnian community association which was now apparently defunct—hence the need for fundraising drives. The mandate of the centre was to provide services to the influx of those seeking refugee status (or, McKelvey surmised, those with enough money or connections to make it out of the war zone). A group of dedicated volunteers, mostly final-year students in university social work and international studies programs, provided counselling and advice to the centre’s clients on their transition to this new country, this new way of life. McKelvey flipped to the back page in the annual report that featured a photo of the volunteers standing in the middle of the centre with the executive director, a middle-aged man named Peter Dawson. He would call the man on Tuesday and see what he could find.

  His eyes paused on a slim and clean-cut man standing among the volunteers with his face turned slightly to the left and downward as though he were shy. It was the man’s eye patch that made him stop. It wasn’t every day you saw a guy with an eye patch. Like a pirate, McKelvey thought.

  Now Ga
rrity’s was long closed, and McKelvey was walking and walking, his mind working through the tangle of lines. Tim Fielding was out there somewhere, alive or dead, and McKelvey had to find him. This was his responsibility. He didn’t deserve to sleep, to rest, to slow, until he had found his friend and cleared his name. He passed a pawn shop across from the empty benches and dead statues of Moss Park. Guitars and blenders and old TV sets displayed in the barred front window, and at the doorway he saw a guy standing there as though it were a perfectly normal thing to be doing at this dead hour.

  “Got a smoke, buddy?” the guy said.

  Hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt. His face was pockmarked, and he had a teardrop tattoo at the corner of his right eye. He had done time, he had broken his momma’s heart. McKelvey noticed everything.

  “Sure,” McKelvey said, and he stopped. “I got a smoke.”

  He fished a couple of cigarettes from his pack, handed them over. Standing there in the dark on the street. The guy gave a nod, his eyes narrowed to slits. Out here on the street, McKelvey looked everyone in the eye, kept his hands out of his pockets. He felt he was ready for anything, and some nights he wondered if he was perhaps inviting something into his life. Go for it, he heard his own heart whisper. For it was only out here on the dark city streets, at the very nucleus of this urban experiment, that he felt oddly in control of the direction of his life—minute by minute, breath by breath. These days especially, with Caroline living her life out on the west coast, with Jessie busy with her school, with Hattie focused on her career, he felt lonelier than he’d ever felt in his life. But out here everything was slowed down, the landscape was familiar, the smells and sounds. He knew there was nothing to be taken for granted, that anything could happen at any time. For better or for worse, this was his space. Where he was alive, where he maneuvered best. It was in these moments he believed he understood why so many retired cops were divorced or suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, or both. Because nothing—paying bills, building model ships, Tuesday night sex, or fish sticks and minute rice—well, nothing could ever quite measure up to this, the city of sirens.

  He turned at the other side of King and came back down Jarvis towards Front Street. As he crossed the street near the St. Lawrence Market, a car came around the corner like a boat swinging from port, and McKelvey saw that it was a ghost car, and Jesus, there at the wheel, was Leyden. McKelvey stopped halfway across the street and let the cruiser pull up beside him, a great sleek whale of the night. The window rolled down. Leyden looked at him for a minute, then said, “Late for a walk.”

  “Needed some air,” McKelvey said, “after being cooped up in that box with you and your partner. He has B.O. You really should tell him about it. Unless it’s part of the approach, bring the suspect to tears, squeeze out a confession.”

  Leyden almost smiled, but it was hard to tell with the interior of the car swathed in shadow.

  “No word yet on that woman’s ID beyond the name we get from her classmates and her co-workers,” Leyden said. “We got her forms from the HR department at the garment factory she was working at. Showed the morgue photo to a few classmates and coworkers. Say they knew her as Donia Kruzik. Everything’s in order on paper, but none of it checks out through the system. Almost like she’s a ghost. We got her last known address from her night school registration, but get this. Place is empty, like she was never there.”

  “That is odd,” McKelvey said.

  Leyden leaned across the seat now and looked right into McKelvey’s eyes. “And check this for luck. Superintendent had a heart attack sometime this morning. Found him stiff in his La-Z-Boy, so we can’t even interview him. His place looks like a bomb went off. Guy wasn’t what you’d call on top of his paperwork.”

  The superintendent. Dead. It gave McKelvey a quick chill. A coincidence or another link in this obscure chain? The man had not been the picture of vim and vigor, but still. What were the odds at play here?

  So then…the guy in Donia’s apartment has his car tracked to Jarko Automotive. The garage burns down after McKelvey talks with the owner. The superintendent of Donia’s building has a heart attack after McKelvey talks with him about Donia…

  McKelvey had a hundred things he wanted to ask the detective, but all of them would reveal that he knew more than he was letting on. It was too late to go back and expand on the answers he’d given Leyden and Kennedy—about stopping by Donia’s apartment, about the stranger who was inside and had broken his nose. He would need Hattie to poke around. It was the last time he would ask this of her, put her in this bad spot.

  “A real conspiracy of bad luck on our part,” Leyden said.

  “I’m sure something will turn up,” McKelvey said.

  “Hope your friend does, too,” Leyden said. “Before he gets himself in trouble.”

  The two men regarded one another for a long moment. It was a strange dance, both of them confident in their assessment of the other, of the situation they found themselves in. McKelvey’s mind flashed with an image of the two of them in a schoolyard at three o’clock, a ring of students formed around them, the sun beating down, their hearts hammering as they looked to finally settle something that neither of them fully understood.

  “Well, enjoy the air,” Leyden said, and gave a nod.

  McKelvey put his head back and pulled a dramatic inhalation of the city air. “And you enjoy your midnight prowl,” he said, then he crossed the street and turned south towards The Esplanade and his condo. He heard the cruiser float down Front Street, then the sound of its engine and tires on the pavement dissolved into the night. McKelvey stopped to light a cigarette. It would put him in the deficit column to start the following day, but what the fuck. The added stress of being tailed by Leyden while he also attempted to find Fielding—while he also wrestled with the realization that Hattie was drifting away from him and there was a good goddamned chance that Jessie and Emily might stay up in Manitoulin or Sudbury—well, it seemed like more than enough justification for a temporary pause to the rationing system.

  Back at home, he turned the TV on with the volume off and sat back on the sofa. He remembered the days when most of the channels at this hour were frosted out, but now the flow of entertainment was infinite. He found a number of infomercials. One for a dissolving toilet cleaner in the shape of hockey puck that featured a guy with a black beard who was shoving the puck out to the camera. He switched the channel to an infomercial for a 1-800 sex chat line, the image on the screen of this young beauty coming out of the ocean in some tropical paradise, dressed in a too-small red bikini, and she flung her wet hair in slow motion, but she didn’t seem to have a phone anywhere within reach. McKelvey noted these small details, always pointed them out, and it was something that drove Caroline crazy. Especially if they were watching a cop show or a mystery movie.

  “Would never happen like that,” he’d say, just barely under his breath.

  “Shhh, and just let me enjoy it,” Caroline would say.

  “Not very realistic.”

  “It’s not supposed to be, Charlie! It’s for entertainment!”

  He flipped the channel now to the local TV guide that featured the weather and a run-down of the day’s biggest headlines and news briefs. He stopped and read:

  Night school teacher wanted for questioning in slaying of student City cops searching for Timothy Fielding, teacher wanted for questioning in slaying of student. Detectives say all airports, train and bus stations are under surveillance after a woman’s body was found in a mid-town apartment. Cops have confirmed the victim was a student enrolled in evening courses for English as a Second Language. The woman’s name has not been released, pending notification of next of kin.

  McKelvey turned the TV off and tossed the remote to the end of the couch. He sat there in the dark with his head back, wondering where in the world Tim Fielding could be. He had this horrible feeling his friend was closer than he could imagine, nothing to go on but a hunch. He drifted off, without knowing it, and
when he snapped awake, the room was dark and silent. Just his heart rushing blood in his ears, then, within the stillness of the off-beat there was the sound through the window of tires rolling by on the street down there. He sat up. He blinked and wiped his face with a hand. Fuck, the mess he’d made. Again. This pattern, Charlie. Dig it deep then feel like you’re alive, really alive, when you’re fighting your way back out. Tim Fielding was in trouble with bad people, and here he was trying to do it all on his own.

  You’re not a cop any more, Charlie. Get it through your head. Ask for help…

  He sat forward, and with his head in his hands, he thought maybe it was true after all. Maybe Hattie was right. Maybe he did have a death wish. Move things along towards the inevitable. Jesus, it was too late to be thinking about shit like that. Or maybe it was too early. He sat there for a long time, listening to the city outside, sufficiently quiet at this late hour for him to be able to isolate the specific sounds of urban activity. It was going on four o’clock when he moved to the little table by the window. He stood there and looked out at the bricks and stones and the darkness washed with false light. He picked up the receiver. Held it for a minute, or maybe longer, then he dialed the number. She answered on the third ring, her voice thick with sleep.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “Hi me... ”

  It was that surreal time of the day, impossible to tell whether the hazy light spreading across the city was the last burn of night or the first glow of morning.

  “Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” Hattie said.