MARRY, BANG, KILL

by Andrew Battershill

  As straightforwardly as viscera escaping midsection, Glass Jar flopped his seeping arm out towards Mousey, offering the two bottles of pills in his hand.

  Glass Jar had the leathery and unwanted look of some sort of fruit that people don’t usually like to dehydrate. His skin was puckered with abuse and stained with an extremely deep tan. His hairline was the sort that never recedes, no matter how prudent a full-scale retreat might be. The hair itself was slick and thin and ropey, its colour made indeterminate by the grease. It dangled skimpily to just below his ears, the kind of hair that needn’t be cut because the ends split at a faster rate than the hair grows, giving the impression of very long, very lazily assembled fuses, smouldering listlessly towards explosion.

  Mousey had never much admired the professionalism of drug dealers, but now that he was paying for drugs instead of stealing them from evidence lockers, he began to find himself irked by its absence. He snatched the drugs from Glass Jar, and with the casual, practised style of a person who has handled large amounts of illicit cash, flipped his pre-counted roll of bills out towards Glass Jar.

  Glass Jar allowed some words to fall over the tip of his lip, like a winded marathon runner spitting. “Thanks to you, boss man.”

  Mousey grunted and, with a slight tremor he was not deluded enough to ignore, popped open the bottles and counted the pills inside.

  Glass Jar, to his credit, was actually about as smart as a six-year-old who can smell a parent’s distress and start misbehaving. He reached across and tapped Mousey oddly on the shoulder with a closed fist.

  “Don’t stand and ceremony, big man. I won’t be, whatzit, offended if you gotta pop one of those puppies now. Seems like a sweaty day for you. But that might be the pot calling the kettle metal. My pots are metal-coloured. Like metal if you don’t touch it.”

  Mousey capped the second bottle, spun it into the air, and caught it. “You’re a courteous guy, but I’m good, thanks.”

  Glass Jar tried to jam his tongue through his cheek then smiled. “If you say so. Hey, don’t mind me asking, what TV you watch?”

  “Sports. Baseball and basketball mostly. And just whatever, sitcoms, dramas. What everyone watches.”

  Glass Jar coughed and spat quizzically into the air. A thick globe of lung waste floated away from him in a comet-like parabola before splattering aggressively across the gravel.

  Mousey tossed the bottle of Percocet from his right to his left hand. “Why?”

  Glass Jar sucked his teeth and took a second, more reserved spit at his feet. “You watch that Breaking Bad, don’t you? Watch that shit and feel hard, right? Like you know about fuckin’ . . . the game, right?”

  Mousey tried to keep his smile steady, not let it peak with too much amusement. Glass Jar was a marvel, thirty years a junkie and still couldn’t spot a cop from a foot away. “I don’t think I know anything. I just get blasted and watch TV. I’m retired, done with the hustling.”

  Glass Jar laughed, his ribs rippling like a shredded-up flag. “Where I come from, hustlin’ means a different thing, boss man. Or maybe the same, I don’t know your life.”

  Mousey spun the Dexies in the air and caught them. “I guess I better be careful.” He winked at no one in particular. “You seem like you’re from a tough place.”

  Glass Jar nodded absently, “counted” his money at a speed that Mousey wasn’t fooled by for a second, and turned to leave.

  Sometimes a thing happens that can defeat the imagination of even a person who has seen the Northern Lights and a family-annihilation murder-suicide scene and several orcas in the wild who seemed happy. And Mousey was seeing one of those things: Glass Jar’s jeans had slumped down below his ass cheek while remaining on his body, somehow suspended by the bone-wide girth of his legs; meanwhile one leg of Glass Jar’s boxers had ridden well above the waistline, held up by their own waistband, like a snake biting itself halfway down its body.

  It raised so many questions in Mousey, and so little desire to answer them. A long time ago, he might have asked all those silly whys, but he’d had so many beautiful, hilarious, and brutal lessons pressed into him since then. How could he ever have wanted to know things like that? It would be like looking through the centre of the sun.

  11

  Constable Mike Richmond still had an hour of paperwork left to do and only half an hour until his scheduled patrol started. He let out a long, sad breath, looked to the thin, plywoody bathroom door, and returned to work.

  Paperwork wasn’t always a bad thing, and Mike, by nature, had the patience for it. It killed time and was often a sign of a good day spent. An incident or arrest report to be filled in, maybe a search warrant to apply for, the fleeting seconds of accomplishment made solid by their recording. But the loose, shambling pile of single-ply papers currently filling Mike’s desk did nothing of the sort. They were his boss’s union paperwork. They signified not good work done but work that could only be finished. They evoked no pride in Mike, only the inevitable aftertaste of hopelessness that so often taints the palate of the passive, ambitious optimist.

  Mike’s supervisor was Sergeant Arnold Reubens, who was as demanding and unsympathetic a boss as he was useless a worker. So Mike knew not only that he had to fill out the union paperwork for his boss in order to get his vacation days right but also that he wouldn’t be thanked, and that, in fact, the work was sure to be attended with some sort of vague, unreasoned criticism.

  A particularly horrifying aspect of working under Arnold Reubens’s command was that the man shit more often, and for longer, than Mike had ever imagined a person could or would without having to see a doctor immediately. So Mike spent a good amount of his time trying desperately not to listen to painful, alternately loose, amorphic-sounding and long, spiky, rock-hard stools passing from his boss into the welcoming and resonant soundscape of their shared office toilet three to six times in a given day.

  In an effort to ignore the familiar and polyrhythmic anti-music of his boss’s desperate straining, Mike closed his eyes, spun his office chair in a slow, smooth circle, and imagined his future, his life as a high-ranking RCMP officer, and then maybe later a judge or an MLA.

  Richmond was a huge, gentle man of certain but flexible professional ambition. He’d joined the RCMP early, seeing it as the most exciting and easiest way into either a civil-service or political career. He liked the variety of directions his life might take, but only if that variety came with the sureness and stability of a rigidly hierarchical command structure. But of all the arcs he’d imagined for his career, none had included a long detour driving a boat around looking for expired licence tags under the nagging and inattentive supervision of a man with the stupidity and generalized malevolence of Sergeant Reubens. Mike had always known the two-to-four-year hardship posting was part of the deal when you joined up, and he wasn’t opposed to it on principle. But in his imaginings, the hardship postings were more solitary, more rustic. Up in Nunavut, hunting food for the old people, jumping cars with frozen batteries, scaring away polar bears, and getting a head start on LSAT prep in the off-hours.

  His current posting instead presented him with the twin curses of too much busy work and a complete lack of useful training or experience. And since Quadra Island was so temperate and scenic, it was a posting of four instead of two years.

  At length Reubens emerged from the commode as Mike was conjuring a mental picture of his future wife reading a book on the couch. Mike looking up at her from his gardening as she held the book with one hand, the fingers of the other playing absently against the soft front of her foot, tucked back towards her. Mike had been about to imagine his future wife looking up, seeing him blurry in the distance as her eyes adjusted, and then smiling at him, at the long streak of workdirt across his cheekbone — when Reubens emitted a long, wet belch. The sergeant then slammed the window open and spit through it thickly.

  With his head still halfway out the window, Reubens said. “You aren’t done yet?”

  The yo
ung cop didn’t bother looking up. Because Mike had not made eye contact on his first day, Reubens had pegged him as untrustworthy, and there was no possible action Mike could take to change or even gently modify this first impression. Sergeant Reubens believed in trusting his instincts.

  Reubens tucked his thumbs into his belt loops and surveyed his command. They worked one-on/one-off usually, with a twice-a-week overlap for collaborative projects, like road checks or calls to Cortes Island. Today was Mike’s day with Reubens, and there hadn’t even been a call to get him out of the office. Mike was sitting still and quiet, watching the stiff, familiar gears of his boss’s mental engine grinding oillessly in their futile, screeching battle against inertia, when Mousey knocked on the front door so hard they both jumped.

  Mousey slouched in and threw out his usual clipped, Midwestern slur. “Am I interrupting a punitive moment, Sergeant Reubens?” He raised the box of donuts he was holding and started to spin it on his finger, and then stopped the box from falling with his other hand.

  Here it is, Mike thought, the tumbleweed rolling right across the long, sad, deserted street of Detective Heaven. The tumbleweed was in his mid- to late forties, soft in the middle, drawn in the neck and face, with weirdly toned legs wrapped in jean shorts he must have borrowed from his niece. According to Mike’s extensive internet research, Mousey’d been a genuine Chicago Detective Bureau hotshot: old-school Vice Squad legend, homicide case man, DA bagman. An escape artist who walked out clean from three of the biggest shitstorms in the history of the hurricane alley of cop shitstorms with his twenty-year pension intact and a beautiful house in the Gulf Islands. Now the kind of burnout case your dead grandfather warns you about in the boozy nightmares you have after a wake or a high school reunion.

  The tumbleweed blew across the room in his usual stoned, half-skipping manner, dipping low to offer the donuts to Mike, and then swinging with a certain junkie grace up to Reubens, who, having just rid his body of several ounces of congealed gluten, began filling it up again. Mousey pulled a weird half pivot and perched on the corner of Reubens’s empty desk and crossed his legs in a long, showy motion. He winked a droopy eye at Mike, having obviously taken a stronger than usual combination of whatever pills he was popping these days.

  Mousey fired off a few of his standard bits, a combination of whimsical, child-like nature insights and super-callous and disturbing Chicago law enforcement tales, and Reubens, as always, ate it up.

  Sergeant Reubens, for all his years of service and tight-leash supervisor cop pronouncements, was not cagey enough to realize that Mousey was not some good-old-boy cop coming in to swap stories but rather a junkie who sometimes got loaded and popped off shots into the bushes around his house and knew he needed to be tight with the local PD. Mike, for all his inexperience and small-minded ambition, was.

  Mike gently escorted the remainder of the donut into his mouth then reached his boot out to tap Mousey’s crossed shin. “How’s it going, Mousey? Like, today?”

  Mousey turned slightly, eyeballed Mike for a second, and then looked back at his shoes and shrugged. “Ahhh, the usual, Constable — few strikes, few gutters. But it’s all good at the bowling alley as long as you give those shoes back. Y’know what I’m saying? Sometimes you’re the sock, sometimes you’re the foot, and all anyone cares about is the shoe. Y’know what I mean, Mickey?”

  It was the first time anyone had ever called him Mickey, and judging from the tumbleweed’s eyes, Mike thought it would probably be the last. He returned to his paperwork, and the conversation between Mousey and Reubens gradually petered out. Mousey left the donuts behind, threw Richmond a crisp salute and shuffled out of the office.

  “Get out on the road, Constable. If you’re this slow, you’re gonna have to come back and finish the paperwork. Don’t cut corners.”

  Mike only needed his peripheral vision to see Reubens’s beer belly stretched tightly against the buttons of his shirt in a way that always made Mike think about the last second when you’re tearing a donut apart and it almost seems like the thing has seams. Mike had spent literally hours, maybe days, if you added it up, staring at that belly, thinking and dreaming.

  If donuts had seams.

  12 Victoria, British Columbia

  Greta had many skills that were fairly unique, if not necessarily all that prized, in the world of contract murder, one of which was an honest, deep, and overdeveloped talent for self-analysis. She hardly looked like anyone’s first choice, and had Karen and Sergei not trained and advocated for her, she would never have had any contracts, let alone a six-figure payday for a quick kidnap or kill job.

  She was used most often in situations that required some combination of stealth, the element of surprise, and most importantly, research and computer skills. Greta’s work, as quick and as good as it had been, had only established Marlo’s planned destination, not his actual location. It was also impossible to know if he still had the computer with him, but on the off chance that he’d been either dumb enough to hold onto it for no reason or smart enough to hold onto it as a bargaining chip, Greta was the best choice for recovering the computer intact, and if at all possible, bringing Marlo in alive to be tortured/debriefed about what he’d seen and who he’d talked to about it, and doing all of that without drawing any (more) heat.

  So Greta was taking the GHB with her, just in case she took Marlo alive and needed to sedate him, but she was also bringing her shotgun, just in case she didn’t and had to blow huge holes in him and anyone who saw her do it. She’d been on some tricky jobs but never one this high profile. The hitman wasn’t nervous, but she also wasn’t as calm as she was used to being.

  Relocating her tools from her storage locker to the trunk of the car, Greta was thinking over her options and, she would readily admit (to herself), worrying about the stakes of this gig and was paying a little less attention to her surroundings than she usually did, so she only saw the thick-bodied manshape behind her reflected in the rear window of her car as she unlocked the trunk and barely had time to drop the unloaded shotgun and grab a low single leg on the guy, sending his considerable bulk off its already tenuous balance, dropping her knee on his spine as he hit the ground. She pulled her ankle-piece and jammed it into the knob between his neck and brain stem and waited for him to settle, which he did after he stopped coughing.

  It was only then that she saw the patch on the back of his leather cut and the RC stitched just above it. “Fuck.”

  Jason Darillo was the road captain of the Victoria chapter of the club, and now mostly helped manage and supply cocaine to the city’s two strip clubs. He was also the whole reason she’d been hired, since even the club knew he was too crazy to unleash on his daughter’s mugger. He croaked out a breathless “Cunt.” She eased off him to let him sit up, kept the gun pointed at his head.

  Darillo rolled to a seated position and coughed intentionally down between his legs. “You get it? Who I am? Drop that bitch-piece and let’s talk.”

  “All you’ve shown me is a Halloween costume, sir. Slowly grab your wallet and throw it to me, and if you get frisky, I’ll put two in your throat. My trunk’s not full yet.”

  Darillo moaned and reached with exaggerated caution into the front pocket of his cut. He pulled out a slim wallet with a stylized AK-47 sewn onto it and tossed it over. Greta caught the wallet with her off-hand, her eyes staying locked on Darillo. She took two lateral steps and brought the wallet into her vision through the side-mirror of the car.

  “See, see who I am, you stupid fuckin’ twat?”

  Greta winked and tossed his wallet back to him. “Okay, Jason — Captain Darillo? — let’s meet halfway, I’ll lower this gun but keep it in my hand, and you just at some point privately consider why you go right to harsh vaginal expletives to express your frustration.” Greta cocked the gun up playfully then spun it once around and lowered the barrel to the ground, like a cowperson would.

  Darillo stood and didn’t wipe himself off or adjust his clothes,
which had pulled to the side and bunched in a thick, awkward lump. “I’m your fuckin’ boss, I’m paying you.”

  “Listen, it’s your girl got mugged, right? Your daughter. So I’m giving you a break. But you are not my boss. You’re not Sergei’s boss either, and he’s the guy you’re paying. And you’re not paying. Other people are paying me because they want you out of it, because, as evidenced by you sneaking up on someone you know to be a killer for hire, they think you’re a little too emotionally invested in this situation.”

  Darillo finally straightened his shirt, jeans still weirdly low-slung and gaping to the side. “You’re right, and you’re wrong. I’m here to tell you that they trust you. And if you can do your cuteshit and get them the computer back, you’ll get your money. But they’re also letting me take my six oldest, ugliest friends to Campbell River to wait this out. And you’re gonna keep me updated, upfuckingseconded, on your progress. And if you take too long, or make a fucking cunt-ass nuisance of yourself . . .”

  “I’m as vulgar as the next person, but was that necessary?”

  “They will call it in. And I will take the ferry over with my boys, and we will make it rain all over that island. And if you get wet, that’s no one’s fuckin’ concern but yours and your priest’s.” Darillo paused for the medium-horrible second it took for Greta to know he wasn’t bluffing. “Call whoever the fuck you think your boss is and check it out, little girl. Sergei was supposed to give you the news, but I’m a hands-on sort of a guy, and this fuckin’ Marlo held a blade to my daughter’s throat. So I thought I’d let you know.” He took a step forward and Greta raised the gun evenly.