“It’s seasoned, man.” Marlo moved over to the bag and carried the skillet over, his arms bowing shiftily under the weight of the iron and his own exhaustion.
“That’s not seasoning. That’s a rusted skillet.”
“No, Mousey, no. It’s, like, if you cook a steak on it, right? then the steak juice and the salt and everything like that stays and makes the pan tastier and thicker and whatnot. I’m not really sure. My buddy Scotty was a chef at Earls for a while.”
“Yeah, but you’re supposed . . . Were you washing this with soap? And the ravages of time . . . ”
Tommy dropped the skillet to the grass, settled over it and looked at it closely. “I really was taking Scotty’s word on this. He’s got his Red Seal, but, yeah, yes, that’s rust. I see that’s rust now. That’s not good, is it?”
“Eating rust? No. It isn’t.”
“Fuck yeah, man. I’ve eaten a lot of rust; I’m seeing that now. What is rust, exactly? Never mind, don’t answer that.”
“Sometimes it’s better not to know.”
“Yeah, you have to be specific about when you think not knowing is better, or you’re an ignorant person, but yeah, as a general thing you’re right.” Marlo stood up with the pan in his hand, swung around in a circle and sent the pan sailing into a rotted tree stump, which disintegrated on impact. The two men stared contemplatively at the loose pile of rot on the ground. Tommy broke the silence as he went to pick up his bag, “Same thing with rotten wood. Like, what is rot, y’know? As an object? Is that one of those things where it’s just the word is that thing. That’s just rot, there’s no, like, science description of that, I think. Sorry, I’m really tired and stoned. Where are we going?”
Mousey stayed silent.
The detective had a lot of thoughts about power. The main one was that most people didn’t get much choice over how they used it. Most people, they have power over another person, real power, maybe once or twice in their lives. And the first time you have someone in your control, where they need you and can’t hurt you back, nobody’s a good enough person to respond totally ethically to that. It feels too good and too wrong.
The way Mousey thought about things (and he’d been thinking about evolution lately), people aren’t that much better than monkeys. As far as animals go, monkeys are close. But there’s a lot of emotional stimulus a monkey can’t handle. Monkeys can be in captivity for years, their whole lives. And they’ll be fun, they’ll love people, but the second they hit sexual maturity it’s over. It’s just too much for them. They go into such a mania they start humping human legs. That’s not the right body part or species, but they will just openly try to mate with it. There’s not even a hole. They go so crazy they can’t even see what’s in front of them; they just want to fuck it to death, whatever it is. These monkeys will attack people. If a monkey attacks a person, they’ve lost sight of self-preservation. They don’t care if they live or die, because sexual urges are too emotionally complex for them to handle. Complex urges, complex feelings, there are plenty of them for people too. Someone gives it up to you. When they confess to a crime, or beg for protective custody, or offer to blow you if you let them keep their heroin. Those are complex moments, with complex feelings attached to them.
Mousey had stopped being a scared errand boy picking up small-time bricks of coke a very long time ago. Scarface Rob hadn’t stayed scary and Mousey hadn’t stayed nice. There was another little moment he could remember with Scarface Rob, and in that moment nobody offered anybody half of their orange, in that moment Scarface Rob was doing the kind of crying that only comes out after someone’s finished begging, and that moment, although Mousey remembered it just as clearly, wasn’t the start of a whole series of anything, it was the dead middle of nothing. Just another thing he remembered doing, as opposed to a thing he remembered feeling.
Mousey had been in this spot many times. Deciding if he’d ruin someone’s life or spare it. Power didn’t overwhelm him anymore. He could just take it as it came, think things through, and make a choice. Tommy Marlo wasn’t going to die in the woods, and he wasn’t going to get kidnapped and tortured and killed somewhere else, and he wasn’t going to get arrested and killed in prison. Mousey had decided.
“I’ll tell you, Mousey, man, it doesn’t get enough play, but being tired is the drinking-on-an-empty-stomach of smoking weed. And people just don’t talk about that, because there’s people who are tired all the time. We all know those. What’re you gonna tell them, the always-tireds? So we all let it slide, as a people, we let it slide.”
Mousey got the look he got on his face whenever he liked a funny thing too much to laugh at it. “Gather your stuff Tommy. Throw a bunch out, keep what you need, we’ll roll the rest into this ravine. That’s why you have all those bug bites, by the way. You camped beside a ravine.”
“We’re throwing out stuff for fingerprints and shit? I haven’t been worried about that so far. I mean, fuck it, right?”
“No, that’s the exact opposite of how we’re going to be approaching things from now on.”
“Gotcha. Let’s burn the stuff I’m throwing out, for the fingerprints.”
“We’re in a . . .”
“Forest. Yep, gotcha. I’m telling you, man, toking on an empty REM bank, or whatever. However you keep REMs. Sorry, sorry, I’m . . . I’m tired and silly.”
In sharper times, Mousey would have used this moment to give Marlo a hard check, probably verbal, maybe a quick throat grab. Herd him a little bit towards seriousness, but keep him nodding along and following what he said.
Instead Mousey walked over laughing and hugged the kid, giving him that creepy grab behind the neck that men sometimes do when they’re too emotional to think about the person they’re hugging as a sentient being who would like to control the movement of their own head.
After they finished rolling Marlo’s tent and most of his (oddly heavy and bulky) supplies into the ravine, Mousey drove them to the hardware store and made Tommy lie down in the back seat as he bought a pop-up tent. On the way to the campsite Mousey patiently explained the situation and the plan. They stopped again and Mousey picked up some groceries and clothes, and also a phone card for Tommy.
Mousey paid for the campsite, booking an isolated spot up at the top of the road that overlooked but did not touch the ocean, and then the two men ineffectually tried to build the tent for a very long time. Eventually, it was close enough that they stopped, built a fire, and enjoyed the rustling silence of the forest and watched the wood burn, passing a two-litre of cider back and forth. Mousey stood up before talking, wanting to make sure the kid listened, make sure the kid remembered that Mousey was only a nice boss, not a nice man.
“You chill out here. You don’t leave the tent much, and you never leave this campsite. See no people. Call me if you run low on food or booze or whatever. Do not spend money. I can get you out of here soon. It’s just maybe a bit hot to do it right now. You got it?”
Tommy was mid-swig on the cider. Mousey was starting to think ADD wasn’t just a myth he and a bunch of people like him had made up in the nineties to get legal speed.
“Tommy! Do you get it?”
Marlo looked up at him. “I get it, man. And holy fuck, nobody has ever stepped up like this for me. I appreciate it, and I won’t let you down.”
The campsite was close enough to the beach that every wave was audible, but the only things visible were trees. “No problem, Tommy. No problem, we’re working on this thing together. I’ll need your help, and I’ll need you to stop being such a fuckin’ floating blimp-head of a guy for me pretty soon.”
They both laughed. Marlo looked back to the ground. “I’m . . . I’m what to you? Why are you doing this? Like, why bother? For real.” Marlo’s voice came out rubber-band tight. “What’s in it for you? You’re risking . . . you’re risking the same thing as me if you help. What you’re telling me, fine, I get it. It makes sense, but like you said, man, that’s all Good Samaritan shit. And like
you also said, you’re not that.”
Mousey skipped over, snatched the two-litre off the hood of his car, and drained the backwash. He leaned back over the car and laughed. Tommy Marlo was about half as smart as would be helpful in this very grave situation, but it was the half Mousey liked. “All right, you got me. I used to do this kind of thing. This exact kind of thing. It’s pretty much the only thing I’m really good at. I got run out of Chicago, and at the time I thought great, sure, whatever, I’m burned out. I’m done. But, it’s been a minute, and Netflix, internet Scrabble, and my weekly poker game aren’t really cutting it. And I know. I know what happens to you if I let you be. So I’m going to try to get you out of a really, really bad spot. I’m going to do that and ask you, after it’s over, to try to be happy and be a nice person. Is that all okay with you?”
Marlo finally let go of the moss. “Yeah, I can see that, I can see all that.” Tommy rubbed both eyes for an indulgently long time with the back of his fists, like a tired anime toddler. As he finished and looked back at Mousey, his eyes were watering so much that his body probably thought he was crying. “That’s some thrill-seeking shit, though, man. Just helping me out because you’re bored.”
“Not just, Tommy, not even mostly. I miss it. I miss this, and I think I’ve got another one in me. I think I can pull this off. I’ve got about a gram and a quarter of moral fibre in my diet, and I like you a fuck-ton better than any of the people coming for you. So add it all up. Some combination of all that.”
“Fair enough. I believe you. But you got the jump on me, man. I told you everything, I told you all my shit, and I don’t know anything about you. You’re from Chicago?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it nice there? You like it?”
“It’s my favourite place in the world. I love it. You’ve never been?”
“Nah, man, I never been out of Canada. Kicked out of school, right?, ran off, didn’t take my passport, and then I had a warrant, so . . . Why’re you here?”
Mousey looked up at the sky, bruising to purple, framed by the tall trees. “I told you, I got run off.”
“You married? Divorced?”
“Neither.” Mousey’s neck was starting to hurt from the angle, but he didn’t want to look at Tommy yet. “I was, uh, I was with a woman for seven years, though.”
“Ah, yeah, man, don’t have to marry ’em to count for something, for sure”
“Well, she was married.”
“Oh shit, you dog.”
“She was married to the head of the Illinois Liquor Control Commission.”
“Damn, Mousey, seven, that’s . . . you were a full-time mistress. Respect. What happened, she, uh, she stayed with the liquor man?”
“Nope. She did a speedball with way more heroin in it than either of us realized there’d be.”
“Fuuuuck. She died?”
“Yep. I fell asleep for about twelve hours and she died in less than one.” Mousey finally looked down. Who needs a therapist when you’ve got a sympathetic dirtbag the quality of Tommy Marlo around? “There’s a saying in cut-your-throat municipal politics: better to be caught with a dead girl than a live boy . . .”
“That’s pretty homophobic, dude.”
“It’s a pretty homophobic world out there, Tommy, but, uh, turns out it’s also really, really bad to get caught with a dead girl if you’re an ex-cop with a fixer job at the biggest law firm not on either coast and you’ve never loved anybody else more in your whole, fucked-up life than that dead girl. Woman. Dead woman.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry, man. I’m so sorry. That’s awful. That’s . . . I’m sorry I even asked, man. That’s awful.”
Mousey launched himself off the truck. “So that’s one way to get run out of a nice town, Tommy.”
“Yeah, I’ve been run out of, fuck, twenty towns? Never heard of that way.” Tommy bit his lip and paused, finally spoke, looking at the ground. “Well, glass half-full, this way you got to meet me.” He peeled back into a Japanese-soap-commercial pose, his smile showing all of his dirty teeth. Tommy Marlo: earning it.
Mousey didn’t say anything back. He just laughed for about ten seconds longer than was comfortable, then coughed for another ten past that. Finally, he reached down and ran his hand over Tommy’s shaved head. That pleasant, wrong-way scrape barely reaching his ears above the sound of the empty forest.
28
Greta spent the next morning driving from one end of the island to the other, stopping occasionally to poke her head into the bushes and identify hiking trails she’d assessed as reasonable Marlo hideouts. She was gradually and uncomfortably settling into the mindset of an upwardly mobile professional and was therefore always thinking vaguely about real estate. Quadra wasn’t a bad place to have a place, it seemed to her. If you picked off one of the residential lots near a ferry, it would gain value, especially as prices pushed everyone further from Vancouver.
Around eleven thirty she did a second pass in front of Grace Simmons’s property, a nice, mostly wooded lot. Less cultivated than Greta was looking to buy (she was a move-in-ready kind of gal), but respectable. She parked on the shoulder a few yards down the road and hiked back up to the house. She ducked down along the stand of trees lining Grace’s driveway, irritably swiping at branches and pausing occasionally to orient herself. As she got closer to the house Greta could swear she heard singing. She pulled her Glock and dropped into an athletic crouch. She moved swiftly towards the sound, emerging into a small clearing where there was a squat tree with a sprawling mushroom cloud of leaves branching out. It was one of those trees that gives the impression of whole insect lives lived under its branches. A tree that makes you think, for once, about ants. The forest was very quiet, and Greta tucked the gun into her ankle holster and approached the tree. She turned her back and let herself fall loosely into it. The hitman rolled around the tree to see the house from cover.
Grace was standing at a music stand, belting a song with her eyes closed. The music coming out loud enough for Greta to barely make out. She brought one hand up to rest on the tree, draped it at the height of a person’s hip, adjusting the pressure of her fingers as she swayed in time to Grace’s voice, enjoying the still, resolute lead of the tree’s dancing.
After Grace finished her practice, Greta cased around the other side, confirmed the absence of cars other than Grace’s, and formed a solid read that Marlo wasn’t staying with his mother, not yet, anyway. No signs of shithead.
She returned to her car and ate a flavourless cup of Greek yogourt. The phone on her hip began buzzing insistently, and Greta let it ring through as she painstakingly scraped the sides of the yogourt cup. Finally, she pulled the phone out and returned Sergei’s call.
“Hey, big cat, what’s the good word?”
She heard Sergei pulling the phone away from his face to cough twice. “Dearest girl, I have often requested that you call me anything besides this ‘big cat’ you so insist upon. A big cat is Garfield, he is the only big cat I know. How he disgusts me. A fat lump, eating lasagna and emotionally abusing a lonely, loyal office worker. Tell me, is this the way you see me?”
Greta’s sustained laugh was her only response.
Sergei expelled the weight of years through one sigh. “How goes your quest?”
“Mmmm, I’m on a quest. That’s a nice way to think, Serge. But yeah, nowhere fast. I’m pretty sure he’s not with the mom. I just finished checking her place. Anything on your end?”
“Do you have a pen and paper?”
“You always ask me that. No. I don’t take notes, never have never will. Tellllll meeeee.”
“Very well. First off, an impressive number of official record searches were traced to the RCMP office on Quadra Island.”
Greta bonked her head against the window. “So it’s off. I’m rabbiting if we have heat.”
“Calm yourself. There has been absolutely no other indication of RCMP involvement on the island. The searches were conducted after hours, so we are assu
ming, you and I, that the two RCMP officers on the island know about Tommy’s plans but are not confident enough to alert their superiors. A text message is forthcoming with details; you should proceed cautiously but swiftly, use your judgment, and be as thorough as you need to be. I will alert you of any activity from the police, whose cyber-security in this instance is deplorable. As I’m given to understand he has informed you, the aggrieved father is waiting just over the water. He is waiting for your failure. Should he need to scorch the earth behind you, you may be allowed to burn as well. Remember, at last, that. Have a wonderful and positive day.”
“Are you forgetting something?”
“I am not an elephant, so perhaps. They are vile, stupid creatures, those elephants.”
“If I have to do what I’m going to have to do, you need to double my cash.”
“Obviously. Your money will be doubled but still contingent on your initial task, the Marlo fellow. If you cannot find him, the rest of your services are, as we say at the Spaghetti Factory, on the house.” He sighed directly into the phone. “I have never been proud of being a man, only ever of not being an elephant.”
“Deal.”
“Deals cannot be made more than once, my darling, or they have not been made at all.”
Greta turned off the screen of her phone, waited for a minute, and let the phone buzz once without looking. Seven minutes after Sergei sent a text, Darillo sent a wordless one that was just a string of emojis: Knife, Gun, Knife, Gun, Gun, Shotgun, Rain Cloud, Shotgun, Ambulance, Gun, Gun, Knife, Pickup Truck, Thumbs-Up, Stormcloud, Sucked-In Cheeks Smiley, Rain Cloud, Stormcloud, Knife, Small Patch of Grass in an Implied Wind, Gun, Clock, Shotgun, Clock, Brick of Money, Thumbs-Up, Clock, Knife, Gun, Knife, Gun, Old Hindu Man, Old Hindu Man, Old Hindu Man, Money Bag with Wings.
Sergei had included the names and addresses of the two RCMP guys, and their probable snitch, some meth cook named Glass Jar. Apparently Darillo, not knowing his ass from a hole in the ground, had put out the word to this character to keep his head down, thereby telling him, for no useful reason, that there was something going down. Tic-tac-toe, Glass Jar had figured it out, snitched to the locals, and she’d gotten incredibly lucky that they’d kept it to themselves and hadn’t beat her to Marlo yet.
MARRY, BANG, KILL Page 14