Property Values

by Charles Demers

  “Hello, are you Mr Clark? Is this your house?”

  Fuck.

  Technically those were questions, but—did they count? I mean, what would be the point of lying about his name, or his address? Or of not answering?

  “Mr Clark?”

  “Yes. Yeah.”

  “Mr Clark, can we please enter?”

  “Yes. Yeah.”

  The two Mounties entered the house without taking off their shoes, and for a second Scott worried that his parents would get mad before remembering that the house, for now, was his.

  “Can I—” Scott started, about to offer the constables something to drink, then wondering if that was the proper etiquette even for someone who was planning to cooperate with police, before deciding that it certainly wouldn’t qualify as a lack of cooperation. As a queasy heat vined its way from the pit of his stomach up the sides of his neck, Scott felt his knees quivering and blurted, “What seems to be the problem, officer?”

  For a second, the cops seemed taken aback to hear a line of dialogue each had heard a thousand times before, in movies, but had never encountered in real life. They themselves looked like movie cops, both good-looking, both with fist-sized green eyes. The younger cop was a Middle Eastern woman, with large features on a very serious face. The older cop, a man, had impossibly thick silver hair cropped closely, and a crease running diagonally across each cheek as though his face had been carefully folded and packed for an overnight flight. When he spoke to Clark, he revealed a Québecois accent (which somehow made him seem even more like a Mountie) and a set of adult braces (which for fairly obvious reasons made him seem like less of one).

  “Mr Clark, I’m Constable Gaulin, and this is Constable Sayyed,” he said, passing Scott two business cards which he half-consciously took in hand before realizing that if he weren’t cooperating, he probably should have refused. “We had some phone calls from some of your neighbours about gunshots and screaming. Constable Sayyed and I took a quick look around the front of your house, and it seems like there have been half a dozen shots.”

  “Did you have a warrant?” Scott said, needing desperately to vomit and choosing the idiocy of confrontation instead.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “To search the front yard?”

  “Mr Clark,” said Sayyed, creasing the brows of her serious face even more sternly. “We didn’t have to search anything. The bullet holes in your house and car are visible from the street.”

  “Mr Clark, do you need to sit down?”

  Scott shook his head. He could feel the plan slipping away. It was the fucking braces. They made Gaulin’s handsome olive face preternaturally gentle and comforting, and they made Scott want to hug him, and maybe cry, and when he turned his attention to Sayyed, he wanted to kiss her tall, smooth forehead. He turned and looked at the broken Renoir instead.

  “Mr Clark, an incident like this can be very terrifying, and shocking, and if you like, we can get an ambulance dispatched here, that’s no problem.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Mr Clark,” said Sayyed, “can I ask why you didn’t call us yourself after the shooting? Were you hurt, shocked?”

  Scott was convinced that it was the screaming, his running after the U-Haul, the motherfuckers, that had forced the neighbours into action. He could have imagined them staying behind their curtains otherwise, telling themselves that those probably weren’t gunshots—Scott could now say from experience that the first reaction to hearing gunshots is to know exactly that that was what they were, followed by the mind immediately assuring itself that it couldn’t have been, that there had to be another explanation—but the screaming was too embarrassing to ignore.

  Scott jutted his lower lip in response to Constable Sayyed’s question.

  “I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

  “Sorry,” said Gaulin. “Someone shot up the front of your house, and you didn’t think it was a big deal?”

  Scott turned his head away, but immediately worried that he seemed peevish, adolescent, rather than tough.

  “It’s nothing I can’t handle myself.”

  “Hey, listen,” Gaulin said with an authority leavened by condescending paternal concern. “This isn’t hockey, Mr Clark. You’re not going to get two minutes for fighting. We’re the ones who’ll handle this.” As he spoke, his partner’s face was shrivelling in confused disgust, sizing Scott up and looking as though she’d eaten the rancid sunflower seed at the bottom of the bag.

  “I’m not cooperating,” Scott blurted finally, shifting into high gear.

  “With who?” asked Sayyed.

  “With you guys, I mean. I’m not cooperating.”

  “I know.”

  “No, but, I mean officially. I—I want to enter into a, what do you call it, an official state of non-cooperation.”

  “Mr Clark,” said Gaulin softly, “I’m going to call you an ambulance, okay?”

  “Goddamn it! I just—you know when it says ‘the victim is not cooperating with police’? Like in the newspaper? Just put me down for that. I’m one of those guys!”

  Constable Sayyed shook her head, dumbfounded, angry, mouth agape in bewildered frustration. Gaulin spaced out, searching the room with his eyes, and landing on the broken frame on the living room floor.

  “Renoir,” he said.

  It was Scott’s turn now to peek from behind the curtains, watching as Gaulin and Sayyed made their way around the cul-de-sac, gathering what they could from the neighbours about what they had witnessed. Two hours or so after the shooting, the block was finally clear, as quiet and lifeless as on a normal, peaceful night, and Scott backed the Jetta with its spiderwebbed rear window out onto Driftwood Crescent and down the hill toward Johnson, onto Barnet Highway, hugging the side of Burnaby Mountain past the marina, past the refinery, and into North Burnaby. It had been a hot day, but now the evening air coming in from Burrard Inlet was cool, mixing with the stale heat like someone was adjusting the temperature of a bath.

  Scott pulled the car off onto a side street named for a letter of the Greek alphabet and walked into a small, unfamiliar corner store where an angry looking old woman stood behind a cash register.

  “Do you have internet?”

  She nodded, holding up an index finger for Scott to wait, printing him off a receipt with a time code.

  Scott made his way to the back of the store, where the atmosphere shifted to the distinct musk of testicles on sweatpants. A very large, ageless man with no moustache and a very long beard was breathing so loudly at one of the two computers that Scott thought that he was sleeping. The man took no notice of Scott as he sat on the stained, backless office chair next to him, shaking the mouse to wake the screen.

  Occasionally casting an eye toward his aromatic, asthmatic neighbour in order to ensure privacy, Scott made his way to the Gmail homepage and registered a new account. ConcernedCitizen@gmail.com, though, was taken, as was VigilantCitizen@gmail.com, and NoCrime@gmail.com. Finally, settling on the less than poetic ConcernedCitizen12@gmail.com, he addressed a message to abryannewsblotter@vanstar.com.

  Dear Ms Bryan,

  Like you, I am a citizen concerned by crime. You will soon be hearing about a shooting on Driftwood Crescent in Coquitlam earlier this evening. Do not concern yourself with how I know this. Five (5) bullets were shot into the home of Scott Clark, a local THUG. It has been known for some time by those in the know that Scott is gang-affiliated. The police themselves will tell you that he is not cooperating with police. Scott is a member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). You can even check the Dr. Charles Best Secondary School yearbook from 2005 to see that he was talking about it even then. Are his neighbours safe? Only time will tell. It pains me greatly to come forward in this way, but do we have any other choice. You are the trusted voice in crime. We know that I can TRUST you with this delicate information.

  All best,

  A Concerned Citizen

  The man next to Scott revved a hum of mucous in his ches
t, committing it to a grey handkerchief just as Scott pressed send. He logged out of the account, then cleared the browser’s recent history. To be safe, he shut down the computer. Scott had three toonies in his pocket so that there would be no trace of the transaction, and on his way out the door he paid the angry old woman for fifteen minutes of internet time and a bottle of cream soda.

  As he drove east along Hastings, the broad street was quiet. He rolled down his windows to fill the car with blue summer air, and accelerated when the lights were green, and slowed down when they were yellow, then red. At an intersection next to a storefront karate dōjō, a driver pulled up next to him. Her face furrowed in concern as she stared at him, and Scott blinked in confusion. Did she know about the email? He’d made certain to write it in the cadence of someone from outer space. Had she followed him from the store?

  As the light turned green, the other car sped away, and only when Scott checked his rearview mirror did he see the bullet hole and the menacing cracks in the glass, and he realized that he probably shouldn’t be driving the Jetta.

  6

  The day after the shooting, Scott met with Josiah and Pardeep at Polis, the three of them giggling over a plate of hummus and thick, cakey pita points. None of them knew what to do with the excess of adrenaline that was still pumping through each of their bodies.

  “I’m ruined for Counterinsurgency 4,” said Josiah, and all three of them had laughed.

  The media from the hit had been somewhat underwhelming. There’d been no story in the print newspaper, just a short entry on Angelique Bryan’s Vancouver Star crime blog, The Blotter, explaining that police were investigating a shooting on Driftwood Crescent last night, and that the victim was not cooperating. Scott had smiled with deep satisfaction when he’d seen that detail, rendered exactly as he’d seen it before in a dozen articles about gangsters. His name, though, was left out of it, as was his address, as was any of the information that Concerned Citizen had emailed to Bryan; he would have to check the account from a different corner store tonight to see if she’d responded. He would also have to call back Darryl Chong, who had phoned five or six times over the course of the day, though Scott, for the time being, ignored each call.

  “So? What happens next, man?” asked Pardeep, smiling.

  “Well, they didn’t offer any details, so I’m going to let the broken windows sit for a little bit, make sure the word gets out. I called a realtor this morning—”

  “You what?” asked Josiah.

  “I called a realtor, dude,” Scott said, smiling.

  “Balls, bro. Balls.” They laughed again.

  “This guy was so cute, you could hear every one of his instincts fighting all the other ones at every turn. Trying to tell me that now wasn’t the time to think about selling, but that down the line, as soon as it was, I should call him. It was perfect.”

  “But he said what you wanted to hear?”

  Scott nodded. “Yeah, man, he said it’s no good trying to sell right after something like this. You just take too big a hit.”

  “So you did it.”

  “We did it.”

  “Yeah, man,” said Pardeep, grinning even wider. “We did it.”

  “I haven’t decided yet how to tell Darryl. He’s gonna be—I don’t know if it’ll be more worried, or, like, pissed, or just weirded out.”

  “He’s never going to believe you’re a gangster, though.”

  Scott winced slightly at how easily this dismissal came, how uncontroversially, but was too giddy to indulge his resentment. “I don’t need him to. I just need a nervous realtor to tell him to wait.”

  As Josiah drove Scott home, the two of them laughed about the shot-up Jetta, about the audacity of what they’d done, about the neighbourhood. Josiah stopped his car outside of the house on Driftwood Crescent.

  “Thanks, man.”

  “No sweat.”

  “I mean for everything.”

  “Actually, now that it’s over—it was actually pretty fun. And I know I said it was a bad idea, but—and I mean, it was still crazy. And very stupid. But it looks like, I don’t know. It looks good, man.”

  Scott smiled. Then he laughed.

  “I told Angelique Bryan that I was with the Non-Aligned Movement. That she could check the yearbook.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Josiah laughed nervously. “Buddy, you’re not the only one who shouted out the NAM in that yearbook.”

  “No, you and Par were 14-1-13, remember?”

  Josiah shook his head. “That’s right. Jesus, what a bunch of fucking idiots.”

  “I guess Adnan’s fucked though.”

  “Wherever he is,” Josiah said, raising his palms to the heavens. “Maybe this’ll bring him out of hiding.”

  Scott smiled, staring out the window at the cul-de-sac. “I’ll see you tonight? Seven-thirty?”

  “Yeah. You want me to pick you up?”

  “No, I’ll walk. I need a change of pace.”

  Scott opened the front door, made his way into the kitchen, poured himself half a glass of milk, and was drinking it before he choked, seeing a man standing in his backyard.

  The biker was staring off over the fence into his old yard when Scott saw him. The sight was jarringly nightmarish and surreal—he looked identical, muscles rippling out of a black T-shirt, wearing grey sweatpants, and Scott had no idea what to do when the biker looked up and saw him at the window. He moved with the smooth, terrifying grace of a Zamboni toward the back door. He didn’t knock; he assumed that Scott would simply answer. Which he did.

  “Hey, what’s your name again?” He spoke in a voice like anybody else’s, but the confidence it was filtered through made the difference. Scott was immediately on his heels.

  “Uh, Scott.”

  “Right. I’m Mike. I own the house next door. I used to live there, you remember me?”

  “Yeah, for sure. Hey, Mike.”

  “I’m just going to come in for a minute, okay.”

  It would have to be.

  As he moved into the house, Mike the Biker took in the details of the room with an intensity exceeding that brought to bear by Constables Gaulin and Sayyed.

  “Let’s talk downstairs.” Mike beckoned Scott with the side of his bald head.

  “Sure. Listen, could I—”

  “I’m not doing the listening today.”

  Scott followed Mike into the basement, suppressing a strong urge to piss or to cry, as the large man searched downstairs with a visibly increasing curiosity. He looked at the elliptical machine, then looked at Scott and almost smiled. But he didn’t.

  “I hear there was a shooting here last night.”

  “Yeah, it was—there was one, but it was no big deal.”

  Mike nodded understandingly, bit the side of his lower lip as he processed the information, and then lunged at Scott in one perfectly fluid and muscular motion as though he were made of lava, taking the whole side of Scott’s head into his giant hand and driving it through the drywall.

  There had been only two or three genuine experiences of violence in Scott’s life, and each time, his immediate response had been to wonder if there was any way to go back in time in order to prevent it from happening.

  But already there was nausea as Scott realized that Mike was kicking him in the ribs; that no one in the world could see them; that the only person who had the power to end what was happening was Mike himself. Too scared to cry, Scott lay dazed on his stomach as the beating stopped and Mike crouched next to him.

  “What the fuck were you running out of here?”

  “Nothing.”

  Mike knelt on Scott’s back, sending a wave of excruciation through the whole circuit of his musculature. Scott’s face screamed.

  “What the fuck were you running?”

  “Nothing, nothing. I swear.”

  “Why the fuck did somebody shoot up your house then, asshole?”

  Scott tried to think, to speak through the cloud of pain.

  “I d
on’t know. I don’t know. It was just a joke.”

  Mike punched Scott in the back of the leg, and Scott wondered if he would ever walk again.

  “Here’s the problem, Scott. I read in the fucking news that the house next to my old place, a place I still own, gets shot up, and the cunt who lives there isn’t cooperating with police. So now I know something’s going on in my backyard—literally, my fucking backyard—and nobody’s paying me rent for it.” Mike bounced Scott’s head off the wall again, this time without enough purchase to make a dent in either. “This block is Riders’ territory, little man. Do you understand what I’m telling you? You Are Here, bitch, because we say you are.”