New Canadian Noir

by Claude Lalumiere

  They’ve got themselves a new angle now. Do you know those sandwich boards that sit outside restaurants advertising the special of the day? Or outside beauty salons, letting pedestrians know how much it will cost to paint their nails in shades of neon? They’ve decided that businesses need a license for each sign they own.

  Last week the sidewalk-sign inspector showed up. That’s what we call him. He’s got a little uniform like a doorman and he’s been given the job of making sure that all of the sidewalk signboards in the city of Halifax are legitimately licensed. I’ve got a sign out there advertising the lottery tickets that I sell. The sign occupies about one square yard of real estate. I told the sign inspector that the lottery sign made money for the government with the lottery ticket sales, and as such, ought to be exempt from the tax, but he told me that it didn’t matter. I had to pay to apply for a license for my sandwich board or else take it in.

  So I took the sign in. I taped a handwritten sign in my window that read Welcome to Halifax, Nova Scotia, leave your wallet at the door. Of course, there isn’t a city of Halifax any more. Back in 1996, some chowder-headed bureaucrat decided to amalgamate the four adjoining municipalities – Bedford, Sackville, Dartmouth, and Halifax – and give them the name Halifax Regional Municipality, or HRM for short.

  I’m not sure where that leaves Halifax these days. Maybe we ought to start calling ourselves the city formerly known as Halifax. It worked for Prince, didn’t it? Of course everybody still called him Prince, except if they were telling a joke or were being paid to be polite. Everybody here still calls the city Halifax, and when we take the ferry across the Halifax Harbour we’re headed for Dartmouth.

  Halifax has had a few names over the years. The local Mi’kmaq called the area Jipugtug, which was mumble-slurred into Chebucto and is now a name for a road that leads into Halifax – or should I call it HRM? – from the Armdale Rotary, which we are now supposed to call the Armdale Roundabout, which sounds a little like something you might ride on in a carnival midway. The new roundabout looks a little like a pentacle from the air, and I sometimes wonder what sort of a spell the road designers had in mind when they redesigned it.

  They’ve decided to widen Chebucto Road by plowing a few feet from the front yards of the folks who live along Chebucto Road. Nobody’s really happy about that; petitions were signed but the road is being widened all the same. The folks whose front lawns are being taken have signs out reading PEOPLE, NOT CARS. I don’t know if they have to pay a sidewalk-sign license fee for them or not.

  Jipugtug is a native term that means “the biggest harbour,” which Halifax Harbour is. Halifax Harbour is kind of toilet shaped, which is probably why we’ve been flushing our city’s sewage system into the Harbour since the Second World War. I don’t know if we pay a poop tax or not.

  That’s how it is when you live on a peninsula like Halifax. There’s just nowhere else to go but down to the sea. Only the water is too dirty to fish in so we settle for whatever we can bum from all of those fat American tourists smelling of toilet water, limes, and eagle feathers. All of us sit down by Pier 21, a pack of cargo cult cannibals lurking in commercially designed kiosks festooned with state-of-the-art price tags, shaking our booty for the tourists and saying those three wonderful magic words – “Spare-sum-change?”

  Some folks in the HRM have figured out a better plan. They greet the tourists with brightly painted Nova Scotian plaid tour buses that whisk them away to a wonderland of Walmart and folk art. Bagpipers lure the tourists away from the ships, as the kilted bus drivers tap their toes to a hypnotic Riverdance rhythm, the tassels on their sporrans swinging in a Svengali-like state of instant mesmerism.

  As a result, the tourists bypass Barrington Street. We’re becoming a street full of closed-up shops. Our windows are covered in butcher paper and old newsprint. You can read the obituaries across the street in the window that used to be Sam The Record Man’s. The art gallery on the corner of Barrington and Prince has moved down to Pier 21. The Dooley’s Pool Hall has closed down, and the street is lined with demolition trucks that haul trash from closed-down stores like an army of trained looters. The only businesses that seem to be flourishing are the telemarketers, who have opened up three offices directly above three of the closed stores. They sit up there at their telephones, the dials spinning like so many Buddhist prayer wheels (alright, so they don’t use dials anymore but I like to imagine they do), and you can hear them whispering into the airwaves, over and over – “Spare-sum-change?”

  Nobody comes into my store these days. The silverfish are having a fine feed on all of those used books on the rusty shelves and the words on the pages are forgetting their meaning. I’ve torn up the lottery tickets and smoked the last pack of cigarettes, refusing to pay taxes on every single butt.

  Now I sit outside my store, on the spot where my sidewalk sign used to stand. I’m wearing an overcoat that I found in a dumpster behind a closed-out Frenchy’s used clothing store. My boots are two different sizes and two different styles, and I have to stuff newspaper in one of them for a tight enough fit. They both leak when it rains. I have a dirty fedora that I found blowing down the street one morning like a forgotten Leonard Cohen lyric. I wear the fedora with a seagull feather poked into the hatband for luck. I figure it didn’t hurt the seagull any.

  “Spare-sum-change?”

  In the old days, I would have been a fisherman or maybe a hunter. Working a stream or a trapline, trying to fish something out or snag some beaver by its flat waffled ass, standing on snowshoes or moccasins or a pair of mismatched hip waders, probably whispering to myself – “Spare-sum-change?”

  Every morning I move one telephone post closer to the waterfront. I’m just a transient drifting on down the street. I don’t know what I’ll do when I run out of telephone poles. That harbour is looking better every day.

  I figure the change of scenery will do me good.

  JACK WON

  Edward McDermott

  Just after 2:00 a.m. my phone rang. I shook the sleep out of my eyes and picked up, expecting a wrong number, but the caller ID showed Beecham.

  “Yeah?”

  “Frank,” he said, his words slightly slurred. “Frank. My ship has come in. I’m flush and I need some help.”

  I didn’t have the faintest clue what he meant. “So tell me,” I said.

  “Five grand,” he said. “Five grand for you to pick me up, take me to an airport, and put me on a plane to Charleston.”

  “Legal?”

  Beecham didn’t wave five grand around for nothing.

  “All legal. I’m at the Seminole Casino Immokalee. I won big but I think someone has ideas.”

  “So take a cashier’s cheque, mail it, and drive away.”

  He laughed. “They want that money. Think how they’ll react if they don’t get it.”

  Jack Beecham stood six foot one, with all the muscles twenty years on the offshore rigs as a roughneck could build. Not a good man. Too quick with his fists for friends or family. He had broken everything that meant something to him. That’s the type on whom God’s good fortune falls out of the heavens.

  I looked at my watch. Lake Worth to Miami and along Alligator Alley. Call it two hours. “I’ll be there in three. Stay where you’ll be safe. And stop drinking.” I hung up before he could start yammering at me.

  I didn’t like Jack Beecham. I respected the hardness of his fists and the way he’d laugh if you gave him a hard shot, but I didn’t like his angry destructive race to the end. Still. Five grand.

  Augie was up for a ride in the middle of the night, for a big one. He’d been in the Marines and Semper Fi was tattooed into his soul. I could trust him to keep his head when things got hairy. Besides, he had a car and knew how to drive.

  After I dressed, I slipped into a little spot in my boat, the Pelican, a place under this and behind that and pulled out a sealed plastic box. Inside was a Colt Police Positive with a short barrel and chambered for .38 calibre. The Colt is
for needful times. It’s small, light, and doesn’t toss brass all over the place.

  I put on a jacket and slipped the gun into a pocket. I walked out of the marina into the parking lot, where Augie picked me up.

  Ten minutes later we were onto I-75 heading south at seventy miles per hour, in the black of the night.

  “Beecham,” I said as he answered. “We’re in the parking lot. Red Ford Taurus.”

  “We?”

  “I can’t drive and protect you at the same time. We’ll pull up to the front. You walk out the doors and into the car as I step past you. Understand?”

  He did. Beecham had four inches on me, but he knew when I put my mind to it, I am like that Natalie Grant song. I will not be moved.

  Augie pulled into the sweeping driveway before the casino and rolled up to the entrance. I stepped out of the car and put a ten spot in the doorman’s hand and told him to open the rear door. Next, I started for the entrance.

  Beecham saw us and came out at a fast walk, not a panicked run. Behind him trailed a couple of hard boys, just getting ready. I was walking slowly. The thugs didn’t even notice me. I kicked one in the balls and thumped the other with the roll of nickels in my fist. I turned and sprinted back to the car. Augie pulled out sharply, making the tires squeal.

  Beecham was shaking in the back. The adrenaline in his system had him so wired he practically bounced out of the car.

  I turned. “Money.”

  He handed me an envelope. Hundreds. I peeled ten off and shoved them into Augie’s breast pocket. I put the envelope inside my jacket.

  “Smooth,” Beecham said. “You made that smooth. I’ll bet we’re home free.”

  “Frank,” Augie said. “Lights behind us, coming up fast.”

  “Lose them.”

  His Taurus wasn’t exactly factory and Augie liked nothing better than speed, except cooking. He just pushed the pedal down and it felt like we were in a rocket on the Bonneville Salt Flats.

  We left them behind but not as quickly as I would have liked. We flew down FL-29 toward I-75. Should we go along 75 through the big cypress swamp to Miami, hook back into Fort Myers on 75 North, or drop down to the Tamiami Trail and head for Miami? I didn’t like any of these routes.

  “Can you lose them?” I asked Augie.

  “I have an idea,” he said.

  He killed the car’s lights. Now we were flying blind. Then he put the car into neutral and turned off the engine. Now we were flying in a rapidly slowing car without power for the breaks. In a newer car this would have locked the steering.

  He pulled hard to the right and slid us off the road into a little fruit-stand lot. He stood on the brakes and pulled us into some bushes coming to a stop, with the green waving around our windows.

  Thirty seconds later the pursuing car raced by.

  We waited. We waited some more. Ten minutes later the same car roared by on the far side of the road. After they had passed, Augie started his car and we headed off once more.

  “Route?” Augie asked.

  “You’re driving. You choose,” I replied.

  “There’s a non-stop flight from MIA to CHS on American Airlines at 2:45 p.m.,” I said to Beecham. “Unless you want to fly charter.”

  “No,” Beecham answered after a second. “I don’t think we’ll need that.” How wrong he was.

  As we drove, he told us how God’s fortune had simply fallen into his lap.

  “I’d been playing pretty much the whole evening. Blackjack went nowhere. The dice at the craps table were cold, so I wandered over to the roulette. I’m not much for the wheel, but something told me to stay.

  “I started with a couple chips. Alternating red and black and the pile began to grow. I was up a thousand when I decided to go for a corner bet. Something or someone must have moved my pile. When the wheel stopped on 24, I saw my entire stack sitting firmly on the number. It paid off thirty-five to one. Even after the 35 percent withholding, I was up more than fifty thousand.”

  He paused. The car rolled through AlligatorAlley in the night and silence. Neither Augie nor I spoke. It was his story to tell.

  “Well, when you win that type of money people notice. And I guess I was a bit loud. They took me for a dumb red-neck and I could read what they planned in their eyes. If I’d taken a cheque, they would’ve just picked me up immediately and before they’d finished with me, I’d be begging to sign it over to them. No, I thought. This goes to Darlene. So I called you, Frank.”

  I nodded. Darlene was the only good thing Beecham had made in his entire life, the only thing he hadn’t ruined. She would be seventeen now. He’d shown me her picture more than once. A shy-looking skinny blonde with her mother’s features and her father’s size. First string in girls’ basketball all through high school.

  “She’s in Charleston. I’m going there and I’m giving her this. It’ll pay for four years of college. Darlene’s brighter than me or her mother.”

  The flight was scheduled tomorrow afternoon. Where should I stash him until then? Did I believe his story about the roulette wheel? Stranger things had happened. Beecham had spent more time in casinos than in churches. I always thought he was punishing himself for something. Perhaps he just needed to lose every cent before he could go back out to the rigs in the gulf, the one place he really felt at home.

  “Lots of hotels near Miami International,” I said to Augie. “Think of anything better?”

  “I have some friends from the Corps down there. Might find something further off the radar if you want?”

  “Do it.”

  He didn’t find us five-star. We spent the night in the car in a garage at the back of a property in Homestead. Around ten we picked up breakfast from a hamburger drive-thru.

  “So we drop you off at the entrance?” I asked Beecham.

  “No. I want you to take me through to the gate. I want you with me until I walk into the plane.”

  “Going to need a ticket to get past security.”

  “You have your passport?” he asked.

  I could have said no but it didn’t sound like much. Augie could wait for me in the short-term parking until the flight was in the air. I took my pistol out of my pocket, showed it to Augie and slipped it into the glove compartment after he nodded. The TSA wouldn’t approve of it.

  Augie pulled up to Departures and I stepped out first and opened the door for Beecham. There are two ways to cover a man. You walk in front of him, but then everyone behind you is the black zone. Alternately you walk behind him, in which case he can walk into trouble. I chose the second. Why? At least I could keep an eye on Beecham.

  We strode up to the counter. He bought two refundable tickets from Miami International Airport to Charleston International Airport, nonstop. No baggage. He paid for them with cash. Maybe they see a lot of that in Miami. Nobody blinked.

  We walked to security, where they asked questions and scanned us with wands.

  Then we waited, drinking bad coffee and thinking our own thoughts. Thirty minutes and I’d be shut of him. When they announced his flight was ready to board, Beecham wanted to use the airport facilities.

  “I just don’t fit well into those airplane bathrooms.”

  So I let him.

  As he entered the bathroom, I noticed something from the side of my eye. I didn’t know what it was but I knew Beecham and I had made a mistake. Whoever wanted the money knew about Darlene and Charleston and this flight.

  I raced into the bathroom.

  Two of them. Beecham had one by the coat lapels, whapping him in the face with all his might, while the other smashed his fist time and again into Beecham’s kidney. I saw blood.

  I took the second one with a straight open-handed blow that caught part of his jaw and rattled the dust out of his attic. He turned to me. He had blood on the shank in his hand. I didn’t wait. I kicked him in the shin, the kneecap, and the groin – bang, bang, bang.

  The first fellow was taking the punishment Beecham was handing out and
whipping him with a homemade sap. I stepped in, keeping clear of the sap, and rabbit-punched him in the back of the head. As he turned all sloppy eyed, I grabbed the arm with the sap and dislocated his elbow.

  Beecham sank to the floor, blood from his back turning the tiles a burgundy red.

  “No,” he said. “No. We have to make that plane.”

  “They won’t let you on; if they did, you might bleed out before it lands.”

  “No. Have to get the money to Darlene. You don’t understand. Have to do the right thing.”

  “Dying’s not the right thing.”

  Someone walked in.

  “Call an ambulance,” I snapped and turned back to Beecham.

  He tried to stand but didn’t make it. He looked surprised, as if his body had never betrayed him before.

  “Damn,” he said under his breath.

  “Here,” he continued, taking off a money belt which was bloody in places. “Here’s her address. Tell her Daddy wanted to give her this stuff himself but he couldn’t make it. Can I trust you, Frank?”

  I smiled. “You have to decide that yourself.”

  “Damn you,” he said. “Always was a hard case. Now go.”

  I got out of the bathroom seconds before the airport security arrived. The money belt was stuffed into my armpit, held there by keeping my elbow in tight. I caught the last call for the flight. Inside the cabin, I called Augie and told him what had happened and hung up.

  Buckling in, I noticed blood on my hands. The flight attendant noticed too.

  “Bad paper cut,” I said and asked for a wipe. She brought one but gave me a disapproving look.

  I had one hour and forty minutes to figure out how to stay alive at the other end of the flight.

  After the plane was in the air, I used the washroom. I checked the money belt and opened each packet of bills, looking for a homing device. Nothing. The mugs knew Beecham well enough to know where he planned to go. There was more than the big fifty Beecham had mentioned. Enough to kill a man over.