MARRY, BANG, KILL

by Andrew Battershill

  “What about me? What’re the odds on me?”

  Mousey laughed a bit too hard at that one. He couldn’t stop shaking his leg, so he stood up. “That’s a bet you might have trouble getting action on.”

  They separated to climb the rocks, and Mousey’s legs felt thin and weak. Tommy helped him the last step up, and Mousey held his hand a second, gave it a short, hard squeeze. “We got this, Tommy. Trust me, sometimes you’re the bottle, sometimes you’re the fridge, and all anyone cares about is hops. Y’know what I’m saying?”

  “No. I don’t think that makes sense, man.” Tommy sucked his teeth, letting out a wet, muted screech. “Robbing your drug dealer, shit. I fucked up. Why? Why did I do this? Like, for what reason?”

  “You sure did. But take it from someone who’s fucked up big and fucked up plenty: when you fuck up, all reasons become excuses.”

  “And when you’re a full-time fuck-up?”

  “Same applies, but for longer.”

  Tommy laughed again, with a lot of breath in it this time. “That doesn’t make me feel better, Mousey. You’re a trash motivational speaker, man. For real, watch a TED Talk.”

  Mousey’s laugh got stranded somewhere in the desert of his throat, so he slapped his knee with his tingling hand. “Get it together.”

  Tommy looked over to the sea. “Man, seeing my mom, it makes me think, you know. What would’ve happened? I don’t skip my bond in Montreal, I plead out, I get six months inside and five years’ probation, which is . . .”

  “Shittier than it sounds.”

  “Yep. And I move in with my mom when I get out. I work part time and get my GED, then I go to community college, and by now I’m, what, doing an apprenticeship? Making eleven bucks an hour learning how to install air conditioners? I’ve gotten super-into, like, NBA 2K or something. I’m just working, coming home, drinking six beers, and playing 2K until I go to sleep. Getting clowned on by Korean preteens. Then what? Two years from now, I get my certification, and I’m making twenty-eight an hour, get my own place, and I can actually get some dates, and everything is . . .”

  “Fine.”

  “Yeah, everything is fine. It’s fine. It’s fine, but it’s pretty fucking grim too, isn’t it?”

  “Most things are.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. I had a run, dude. I had a good time. I had, like, a hundred real friends I could party with, any weekend I wanted. Never had to wake up, never had to clean for anybody. Cute girls who like to dance, right? I had all that.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Only real regret I have is that I didn’t go pick herb at my guy’s farm in Penticton. Buddy offered me fifteen an hour cash to stay in his bunkhouse, pick weed ten hours a day. I’d be there right now. Right now, my back would hurt, I would not really care because I’d be high as fuck, and I’d have, like, four grand in cash, because what am I spending it on in fuckin’ Penticton?”

  Tommy hung his head, looking into the middle distance, flicking the index finger of his left hand with the middle finger of his right. A butterfly with wings the colour and pattern of very beautiful old wallpaper landed on his shoulder, and without turning his head or moving at all, Tommy raised his eyes to meet Mousey’s. They waited an amount of time that Mousey knew better than to guess at. They waited through five of Tommy’s still, quiet breaths, and about a hundred of Mousey’s knee bounces, and then the butterfly flew away.

  Mousey balled his fist hard, hoping to would stop the tremor. “Why didn’t you go?”

  “My guy pitches the job to me, tells me to think about it. I go out that night to the Edgewater, that’s . . .”

  “The casino.”

  “Right, yeah, so I go there, blow off a little steam, play a little twenty-one, and upstairs in the poker room, this guy wins a twenty-two-K pot in the Pot Limit Omaha game.”

  “The one-two-five game?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mousey whistled.

  “I know, man, I know. Bunch of people came up to sweat the action. Took like ten minutes to deal the turn and river, count up all the money. It was a crazy pot. So I hang out upstairs awhile, and I watch the guy who won the pot. He’s an anywhere from sixty- to ninety-five-year-old Chinese man. He’s got on, like, a Cultural Revolution sweater with all these holes in it, and I’m looking at the guy, and I just know in my soul this motherfucker did not pay for parking. End of the night, he goes to the cage, cashes in his chips, takes a cheque and a bunch in cash. I tail him outside, and I’m right, follow him onto the street. I roll the guy, and he’s got $5,800 in his fanny pack. And that’s a lot of fifteen-buck-an-hour shitdays. Enough to get me to Victoria, get an apartment.” He made the sound of a very bad commercial actor drinking a Sprite. “Get totally fucked over.”

  “Good catch on the parking. Smart.”

  Tommy shook his head slowly. “Nah, man, nah. I’m not smart” — he did a very slow and sad version of jazz hands — “I’m just lucky.”

  Mousey looked at Tommy adjusting his huge, bent glasses, the frames canted around his nose like an unfinished roundabout. Mousey thought about whistling and ears and how many friends he’d ever made sober. And he so, so did not want to see Tommy get tortured to death by a motorcycle club.

  Ø

  Tommy was halfway back to his usual halfway-there self, but Mousey was still a good deal more than halfway worried about what was about to go down at Glass Jar’s place. His plan was to break in, zip-tie Glass Jar, and toss the place for the cash, maybe put the boots to Glass Jar if it wasn’t turning up quickly enough. Once they had the money in hand, he’d send Tommy back to the car and give Glass Jar an accidental overdose. Easy. It should be easy.

  The shack only had one window, so sneaking up wasn’t too much of a problem, even with zombie-legs Tommy tripping on every pebble between the car and the wall. Mousey pulled his weapon and took a second to compose himself. Tommy moved in front of the door and lifted his leg to kick it. Mousey reached out and gently stopped him, put a finger to his lips, and turned the doorknob.

  Glass Jar was, as expected, passed out. Less expectedly, he was lying face down on the floor, foamy spit bubbling out from the side of his mouth in time with his breath. His pants were halfway down his legs and shit-stained from the waistband down. There was a dark brown puddle under his crotch that could equally have been disturbingly solid urine or disturbingly liquid feces.

  “Holy shit, is he dead?

  Mousey walked over to the body, kneeling beside it and holstering his piece at the same time. “Would you ever call a jellyfish dead?” He briefly considered feeling for a pulse but thought better of it, then he patted his pocket and realized he’d forgotten the zip-ties in the car.

  Mousey figured that Tommy was probably more used to watching the door than he was effectively searching a very messy and broken-glass-filled home, so he left Tommy in the living room with his knife, and told him not to let Glass Jar move. Not that Glass Jar looked ready to earn a participation ribbon in any kind of track meet right then.

  The search went slower than he expected, mostly because Mousey really didn’t want to cut himself, or get stuck with anything, or maybe just catch straight-up hepatitis C by osmosis.

  Then there was the shit.

  It didn’t so much seem that Glass Jar had shit his pants a time or two around the house, but rather that he’d been spinning in a circle spraying relatively small portions of feces out of his fingertips, like an industrial sprinkler head on a high school football field. There wasn’t any consistent pattern, smell, or colour to the flecks. It was a collage of overwhelming diversity, the distinctness of the excrement coalescing into a unit more powerful than the sum of its parts.

  By the time he finally got up the nerve to search the bathroom, it occurred to Mousey that it was probably where he ought to have started. He’d searched the house the way he would have searched the house of a sentient human being, which, to be fair, Glass Jar had at one time been, but Mousey had wilfully blinded himself to the cur
rent reality of Glass Jar.

  Guys like Glass Jar, the one-percenters of addiction, are easy to imagine as conscienceless monsters. The truth of them is, as it always seems to be, sadder and far less easy. The Glass Jars of the world do horrible things, and they never get better, and they never stop until they die. But for however long they last, they do the things they do, always aware of the world’s pressures and codes and consequences. And the more they do the worse they feel, and the worse they feel the worse they do. The Glass Jars of the world feel pressure, feel the firm, choking grip of morality around their throats, but they are too weak to handle it. They want to do better, and they know what better is, they just can’t manage it. That’s not how it is with monsters. Monsters don’t understand pressure. Monsters take care of themselves. Monsters love life.

  Mousey saw it clearly in his mind, as he toed the bathroom door open and steeled himself against a new wave of smell: Glass Jar had gone to Grace’s, gotten what he wanted, and gone completely bugfuck body-included insane with guilt. He’d driven straight home, probably still feeling good, and then he’d lost it. Smoking six hits too many, crying, puking, shitting himself, probably started in the driveway and continued into the living room, sputtering out tears and weeks-old opiate-constipation shit, smashing bottles. He’d gone to the bathroom, tried to clean himself up, shit in the toilet awhile, and he’d gone back out to the living room and given up. Too bereft to even take the money with him. He’d left it there on the sink, untouched. Sat in the living room drooling and blubbering and inhaling whatever downers he had around as fast as he could swallow them.

  Gingerly lifting the money off the counter between his index finger and thumb, Mousey began searching the cabinets for drugs. Mousey had rarely failed to steal drugs from a house he was searching, and he was conscious that he would have trouble getting his hands on the stuff for at least a little while. He found the pill stash pretty quickly. Glass Jar, original as always, kept it in the cabinet above the sink. As he was filling his pockets, Mousey heard Tommy shout out in pain from the living room.

  He ran back into the living room and saw Glass Jar with a firm bite-hold on Tommy’s ankle. Tommy was slamming the handle of his knife into the back of Glass Jar’s head, but Glass Jar was holding on with his teeth, his arms limply hanging at his side, his legs twitching only slightly. Mousey took a steadying breath and fired two bullets into the wall adjacent Glass Jar, the third hitting him high on the right side of his chest, bluntly jolting the junkie’s long, bird-bone-light frame back into the wall, somehow propping him upright. Tommy sprawled sidelong across the room into the opposite wall and almost stabbed himself in the chest. Mousey ran across the room and grabbed the knife, shoved Tommy to sit on the floor. Tommy grabbed his ankle, the hand coming away bloody. The pills rattled jauntily in Mousey’s pocket.

  Mousey moved over to Glass Jar, dropped down to his haunches. Glass Jar, steadily foaming blood out of his mouth, spoke softly, air moving out as if through a pinhole in an empty balloon. “I died. I died. I died. I died.”

  Glass Jar’s blood was so dark. Mousey gripped the back of the junkie’s neck, as if beginning the world’s most pointless massage, holding the head steady and angling it away as he put one more bullet through the temple.

  43

  Two questions at the bar and three hits on Google were all it took for Greta to find out who the old drunk was, and how close she’d been to going down. Alan Mouse, retired Chicago Detective Bureau legend. She shook ice cubes around in her glass and thought about it. Seeing him now, half of you would never guess; the other half would have a tickling suspicion too gentle to mind.

  Greta was a bit better with large-scale disappointment than she was with in-the-moment flubs. Since the mid-morning, she’d gone from being minutes away from the biggest score of her life to coming home empty-handed, having cost Sergei a five-figure hit in expenses. Sergei liked her, but he was a cautious guy. Probably she’d be riding the bench, picking up odd jobs until he felt like she’d learned her lesson. One more old man getting one more chance to teach her one more lesson. Like she didn’t know. Like she didn’t know it would have been preferable to find the kid in a day and come home, like she hadn’t tried and done better than he would have done in the same spot. Like everything all the time.

  She wasn’t even thinking about Darillo. Not even ever bothering or daring or caring to think about Darillo, a six-minute boat ride away.

  She wandered out of the bar without paying, Keith the bartender unreasonably pinning her as trustworthy, and found a quiet spot in the shade of a tree. Even if you’re drinking in the mid-afternoon, if your shoulders are narrow enough and you’re hip and stylish and white and without face piercings, you get that specific kind of trust.

  The hitman sat and pulled out her phone. It was funny, of all the things that had changed since that night in the stairwell at Grumpy’s Tavern, the most distinct was her relationship to telephones. She remembered all the afternoons of her childhood, sitting in bed, drawing absently on a sketch pad and talking. Just talking freely, and forever, to friends she’d been with all day. The whole wide net of words they’d spew out, catching everything. And then there was now: quick codes, clipped tones, talking about friends and dads and sons, who were always all just future dead people or the people who would kill them. Staring at the second hand of her watch as she talked and listened to Sergei. She already knew what they’d say. It was already decided, and she just had to punch in the numbers and let it ring.

  The hitman looked across the water at some trees, at the deep forest, and she thought, for the first time in a long time, about Karen, and wooden dwarves, and curly hair, and listening intently to dial tones.

  44

  Because he believed himself permanently entitled to treats, Sergeant Reubens could not abide the idea of going to Cortes Island to deal with a domestic violence call without turning the trip into an unofficial mini-vacation for himself.

  In the relatively short time Mike had been stationed on Quadra, there had been eight calls for them to take the boat over to Cortes — four had been car accidents, one a house fire, and three had been the same incredibly sad repeated domestic dispute. Each time — even though the calls had involved, respectively, a potentially life-altering neck injury, a third-degree burn on a child, and a chronically battered woman — Reubens had hustled through them, handling the situations in as scant and perfunctory a fashion as was legally permissible, before making Mike take the boat back and heading straight over the creepy bed and breakfast he frequented there, eating and doing whatever awful things he liked to do when alone.

  Since Reubens’s extracurriculars made it necessary for them to separate at the end of the day, Reubens always took the boat and made Mike drive on the ferry, but this time Mike had faked a traffic accident call on Quadra and managed to get Reubens to let him stay behind.

  With Reubens off the island, Mike knew this was his chance to make some headway on finding Marlo. It took him over two hours to make his fake accident report, so by the time he really got down to work on the Marlo thing, it was already time for lunch.

  Mike remembered something Mousey had told him a long time ago, when he’d first gotten to Quadra. He’d been wading through another pile of Reubens shitwork, and Mousey had squeezed his shoulder with that loose, halfway-towards-patting grip and told him about paperwork. About how everyone had paperwork wrong. Most cops think of paperwork as this artificial thing that you end up having to impose on the real shit, real life, the things you did. And they have it exactly backwards. If you think real life is this thing you have to boil down to put on paper, you’re always going to be following. But if you go the other direction, if you know that the paperwork is coming, you can switch it up. Break reality down into its parts and think about them the way you’d think about writing it up. Think of the things you do as paper you’ll have to file, because that’s exactly what it is.

  And now that he was in it, a real situation where he’d have
to do real things, Mike was starting to see the mostly baked wisdom of it. Mike tried to think of all the things that might happen as things that had, things he was only now bringing hindsight to bear on. He made himself a large coffee, carefully laid out his file, and resolved to act carefully and calmly.

  Less than an hour into watching Glass Jar surveillance footage on fast-forward, and less than a second after recognizing Mousey and Tommy-in-the-Actual-Fucking-Flesh Marlo as the two men walking through Glass Jar’s front door, Mike bolted for the car, toppling a chair and leaving the front door to the police station wide open, peeling his car across the only two lanes of traffic on the whole island without looking, and speeding towards the shack.

  Ø

  Having never found a corpse before, Mike couldn’t tell if the smell had more to do with Glass Jar’s body or the huge amount of excrement and rot decorating the walls and floors and countertops and upholstery of his home. Mike dropped to his haunches, pressed his closed fists together, and then pressed the double fist into his forehead as he tried to think the situation through without vomiting.

  Standing back up, his already seized legs revolted, and Mike fell towards the exit, steadying himself against the door hard enough to bend the hinges, then sprawled his way across the meagre grass of Glass Jar’s lawn. Flat on his back, half-blinded by the sun, Mike noticed the huge, undead tree on Glass Jar’s body’s property for the first time, somehow its enormity being only visible to him in relief against the whole sky behind it.

  Mike started laughing in a creepy, sad, inauthentic way that would have been unimaginable to him just a few days prior but which felt both comfortable and comforting to him now. Sad realizations are sad. That’s the downside. But the upside is you only have them after you’ve seen the situation as a whole and understood it. If Mike had done it all by the book, Glass Jar’d be in lock-up, whatever scraps of drugs and cash Mousey’d killed the guy over would have been seized, and he’d be in his office, staring out his window and making plans that were slightly more likely to actualize than they’d been before.