Property Values

by Charles Demers

  “That’s, what—thirty-six grand a year.”

  “That’s about what a receptionist makes.”

  The brandy evaporated under the force of the solemnity in the room, the three men sitting, breathing, no one saying a word. Josiah stood, moved into the kitchen, and ran his shirt under the water, letting it sit at the bottom of the sink. He rubbed at the tattoo of the baseball on his chest, the tattoo that everyone always mistook for skin cancer, then cleared his throat.

  “So, just so I have this all straight—we just stole seven grand from the Da Silva Brothers, and kicked up five grand to the Underground Riders?”

  Pardeep nodded. Scott nodded.

  “I guess the Non-Aligned Movement just picked sides in the gang war,” said Josiah.

  “That’s not how it’s supposed to work,” said Scott, and nobody could tell if he was joking.

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Pardeep. “Fidel Castro was in the Non-Aligned Movement. That didn’t stop him posing for pictures with Khrushchev.”

  12

  Kevin Dartmouth, who had killed three people several years earlier in Ontario and severely beaten many more in many places since, had suffered from sleep paralysis since childhood. He hadn’t known then that it was sleep paralysis. He could only remember what felt like an unbroken string of nights when he had lain awake in his bed, right down the hall from his parents’ room, eyes pinned open widely as he was unable to call out to his mother, who should have been able to hear him. As a grown man, he could very clearly remember the suffocating feeling of wanting the words to leave his chest, where they instead stayed leaden and unmoving. What he didn’t understand, even in retrospect, was why that should have felt so natural to him; why he hadn’t ever thought to mention it the next morning, to either his mother or his stepfather, but he supposed that since that was how things had always been, he had just assumed that it was how things were. It wasn’t until he was a teenager and casually, indirectly mentioned it to his family doctor, dropping a line into a conversation about the neck pains he would sometimes wake up with, about “You know, how sometimes when you wake up, you can’t move or breathe for the first little bit?” that he was given a name for it, sleep paralysis—the exact opposite of sleepwalking. Where sleepwalkers had a dysfunction in the distribution of the chemicals that keep the rest of us relatively still while sleeping—letting us run through fields in our minds, or take final exams for courses we’d forgotten to drop out of at the beginning of the semester, while actually staying perfectly horizontally in bed—those who suffered sleep paralysis were on the other end of the spectrum, their minds leaving sleep for waking life before the stilling elements had run their full course, rendering them unable to move. Never-convicted murderer Kevin Dartmouth would suffer between twelve and fifteen incidents of sleep paralysis a year, and these had left him with a preternatural fear of suffocation, of the loss of control of his limbs or his body. He had come to believe that Lou Gehrig’s disease or multiple sclerosis or even something as simple as a stroke were the very worst things that could possibly happen to a person. He had read the story about that guy who had been in a coma for like twenty, twenty-five years, and everybody had thought he was brain-dead, but in fact, he had been fully conscious and simply unable to move or indicate anything. Kevin thought about that story two or three times a week, and every time he did he had to leave the room, shake his arms and legs, splash his face with water. His belief that to be imprisoned inside one’s own body was the very deepest of possible sufferings had been the reason why he, two summers ago, despite not being what anyone would describe as a feminist, had broken the legs and ribs and then neck of an aspiring Underground Riders associate who had laughingly recounted the story of drugging a young woman to the point of motionlessness before violating her. As a full-patch member, the unilateral decision to mete out that kind of discipline had been within his rights, even if some had found it extreme. The young rapist was now in a wheelchair, and would be, moving forward.

  None of these thoughts went through Kevin Dartmouth’s mind in any salient way as he lay face-down on the floor of the backseat of a car he didn’t know, a T-shirt stuffed into his mouth, his hands taped behind his back, the full weight of his friend Patty Baker on top of him. The muted childhood recollections, the terrified mornings after freedom of movement finally made its way to his extremities, the surge of empathy he had felt for the young, drugged woman—he didn’t think through any of them distinctly, but rather felt all of them, all at once, on a level that superseded rationality or even memory. He had vibrated his body against Patty’s for the first few minutes of the ride, just to know that he could. But finally, he laid perfectly still, waiting—as he had on so many awful mornings—for the ability to move to come back.

  Just a half hour before, Kevin and Patty had each been finishing plates of ribs as heavily doused in syrup and cloying sauces as sundaes. All night, they had laughed louder than they’d needed to laugh at each other’s stories, called the waitress sweet pea a greater number of times than men three times their age would have, stood as far back as possible from the urinals while pissing, so that anyone who came into the washroom while they occupied it would know where they stood. Patty was a fast-rising associate, and Kevin had a full-patch, and what was it all about if not this? The money to eat and drink; the power to be merry.

  It had all felt like a perfect night: a couple of bitch suburban dads being reminded who was boss, a cute little good-sport waitress taking home a forty-percent tip, Kevin laughing soddenly as he waved to Patty with the keys he’d just found despite himself, barely seeing the baseball bat Patty took across the face at what seemed for all the world like the exact second he felt the gun go into his ribs. Then the shirt was in his mouth, and the waking paralysis took hold. Nobody said anything in the car, which was silent for several minutes, until someone put on Phil Collins. Hearing the music, Kevin tried to bring back good memories of his stepfather for comfort. He couldn’t. Although he had loved Phil Collins, Barry hadn’t been a very good stepfather.

  After an impossible number of turns, the car finally stopped, and the warm night air was like a deep-freeze after getting out from under Patty. Kevin stumbled to keep up with his captor as he was pushed and dragged along a short tar driveway and down a shorter set of stairs; all he could see was country—a green darkness, not the grey darkness of the city, and in the small halo of yellow light that shone from the bulb on the side of the house, all he could process was a farmhouse and maybe some woods. In the basement, he was very quickly forced onto a spring cot, watched them handcuffing him to the sides of it as the T-shirt finally came out of his mouth, and he gulped air like a dying man. Patty was set up nine or ten feet away from him, in the same situation.

  “Patty, buddy? You with me?” he croaked.

  “They fucked me right across the face, bro. I was out for a little bit, I don’t know how long.”

  “Why don’t the two of you shut the fuck up?” asked one of the men who was in charge, very calmly and mid-vape, so that his voice was like cotton. There were three kidnappers and the two of them, and they all stood, or lay, in silence for twenty minutes before the basement door opened again, and Kevin got up as far as he could on his side to see who it was.

  “Buddy. You like racist jokes, huh?” asked Nicky Da Silva as he crouched down next to Kevin’s cot, smelling beautiful, dressed simply but with elegance.

  “Fuck you, buddy,” Kevin said, his voice sounding like his own again. “I done time with white men and done crime with plenty others when I had to. I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  Nicky Da Silva’s face stayed perfectly still. Then he laid his hand on Kevin’s crotch.

  “Fuck off!” Kevin thrashed, but Da Silva’s men came over to the cot and pinned him. Once again, his movements weren’t his own. He began to foam and seethe. Nicky put his hand back, this time as a fist.

  “‘Long Dong Tam.’ That’s some very stupid shit,” he said.
r />   He raised his fist. He brought it down.

  13

  The moment that Scott saw Michelle Chong’s name flash onto his call display, he regretted having put off phoning Darryl for so long. The conversation with Darryl would have been hard, but now, instead, he would have a conversation with Michelle which would be impossible. And as compulsively easy as it had been to keep sending Darryl’s calls to voicemail, one after the other, it was inversely inconceivable that Scott would not pick up a call from the woman who had been his wife.

  “Hello?” he said, as a question. People still answered the phone as though they didn’t know who was calling, just like they stubbornly referred to phones as “ringing” even though there wasn’t a twenty-five-year-old alive who had ever heard them do anything but chime, buzz, or beep. In this instance, Scott felt deeply grateful for the three-second’s grace the anachronism bought him. But Michelle had no time for indirectness.

  “Scott, what is going on?” she asked immediately before continuing with a kindness and concern that twisted the knife. “Are you okay?”

  In some ways, Michelle had been the worst person in the world with whom to mourn his mother, because she had loved her just as much as he did, and Scott knew that the feelings had been reciprocated. From the first time that Scott had brought Michelle home to meet his parents, he had noticed Bojana reacting to her, treating her very differently from the admittedly small sample-size of previous romantic partners to whom she had been introduced. The fact that his mother regarded Michelle so differently made Scott look at her differently, and sped the intimacy of their first months together. After they were married, Scott had never heard Michelle say the words “mother-in-law”; she had always referred to Bojana as “my Mom.”

  In life, the intimacy had been touching, had smoothed out moments that, in other people’s relationships, were fraught. But in death, the symmetry of feeling was crushing. When they found out, together, that Bojana was dead, Michelle had let loose a primeval, moaning wail that the far-flung Serbian aunts and cousins had found jarring, and that Scott found left no room for him to scream. There was no leaning on Michelle because she needed just as badly to lean on him.

  Scott had wondered, in retrospect, whether the unmediated quality of Michelle’s grief—the fact that it wasn’t a reflection of his own, but its own burning source—had made some part of him think of her as a sister, or some part of her think of him as a brother, because in the months after his mother died, what had been a lively and formally experimental sex life became an artifact, a set of memories. The incestuous dampening of their physical lusts had been exacerbated by the fact that he and Michelle had run in different directions from the loss of their mother: for Michelle, it meant that it was time for the two of them to become adults in earnest; to build real, mature, professional and family lives to the extent to which that was possible in Vancouver. Scott had responded differently.

  “Hi, Michelle,” Scott said now. “Hey, listen—I know this is weird or whatever, but, honestly. Congratulations.”

  “What? Oh, my God. Thank you, Scott. But can we focus on one thing at a time here? My dad is beside himself. Have you gotten hooked up with some kind of gangsters?”

  Scott tried to imagine Michelle pregnant—what kind of pregnant lady she would be. Her sister had been one of the women whose entire body stayed exactly the same, cheekbones like broken dinner plates, with a tiny little mound above the pelvis; but her best friend, Christine, seemed to gain weight even on her nose and lips. Scott could imagine Michelle with that thick, shiny hair they all seemed to get, that luminous skin. She had always had beautiful skin.

  “I guess it couldn’t be me, huh?”

  “What? Scott, what does that mean?”

  “I’d have to be ‘hooked up’ with gangsters? It could never be me who actually was the gangster himself, right?”

  “Scott. What the hell are you talking about?”

  Scott sighed, turned off by his own peevishness. He had started to make peace with the fact that that aspect of the plan hadn’t worked, and maybe that was for the best. Despite his reported non-cooperation with police, no one seemed to think that he was any kind of gangster or that the Non-Aligned Movement was any sort of player in the Lower Mainland scene. Angelique Bryan had failed, so far, to publish anything, even on her blog, about the hardened criminal Scott Clark, about the feisty upstarts of the NAM, and it seemed like all that was probably a good thing—it had gotten him off the hook with Mike, for instance. It meant that there wouldn’t be any long-term repercussions.

  But there was something nagging at Scott’s ego about the impossible time that everyone seemed to have imagining him as a genuine menace. The suburbs were full of middle-class thugs, the muscle-bound sons of general managers and administrators, who nevertheless managed to convince everybody that they were genuine criminals. No one thought of Vancouver’s street gangs as collections of sallow urchins anymore, rumbling as much for body heat as out of the economic desperation of a Jacob Riis still. The West Coast had long ago accepted that their new kingpins had grown up going to swimming lessons; that they’d had backyards and, when they didn’t have carports, they’d had genuine garages with doors that closed by remote. So why did everyone insist on thinking that he was soft, but not them?

  “Scott, my dad is apoplectic. He says he’s been trying to call you non-stop, but you keep ignoring his messages.”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying—”

  “Do you know what this is like for him?”

  “What what’s like?”

  “Having you turn on him like this.”

  “I haven’t turned on him, Michelle, Jesus.”

  “That is so unfair.”

  “How?”

  “My father loves you, Scott! Or, at least he did when he thought he knew who you were.”

  “Michelle, it was all a mistake. I—I think it had to do with the biker who used to live—he owns the house next door. You remember that guy?”

  “Muscles?”

  “Yeah, the big guy. His name’s Mike.”

  “How do you know his name?”

  “I don’t know—it doesn’t matter. Every white guy that age is a Mike. Anyway, I think he’s UR.”

  “Like an Underground Rider?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow.”

  “And I’m guessing that that’s what the shooting at the house was.”

  “Somebody was gunning for him?”

  Scott nodded reluctantly, then remembered that he was on the phone. Here he was, being emasculated by his own criminal fiction, his own set-up. He resigned himself to the fact that, even in a lie, he didn’t make a believable target.

  “That’s why I didn’t say anything to the cops, Michelle. I was—” He sighed. “I was scared. I didn’t want to tell them about Mike.”

  “Scott, Jesus—it’s perfectly understandable that you were scared. I’m just glad that you’re okay.”

  “Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

  “Listen, I’ll talk to my dad, all right? I’ll explain it.”

  “Thanks. Michelle, listen—I spoke with your dad a few days ago about selling the house, but—” Scott swallowed his guilt. “I don’t think this would be a good time to do it. With the violence, the shooting, it’s going to make the house really hard to sell.”

  “You mean it might take two hours to get an offer, rather than ten minutes?”

  “Right. No, but I’m serious. I know you guys need a place to live, but I just don’t think I could take the hit that the loss in value would represent.”

  “Scott, I don’t want you to worry about us right now. We’re okay where we are, for the time being. I mean, I would like some space for the baby …”

  “Yeah. So do I. Like, I mean—I want for your baby to have space.”

  “Right. But I don’t want you to have this on your plate. I’ll talk to my dad, okay? I’ll explain. Don’t worry about selling the house.”

  “Michelle, I—than
k you,” Scott said. He ran his thumb along his teeth, and he hung up the phone.

  14

  Angelique missed the presence of other journalists; she missed the days of rooms filled with people writing. But things had become lean; made efficient by becoming worse. Angelique had been on crime for years, spending more time at courthouses and police stations and shot-up coffee houses than she ever did in the offices of the Star, but there had nevertheless always been the feeling of a home base; a buzzing, teeming office that, these days, she couldn’t remember ever having been irritated by. Now, she could only remember how comforting it had been to be able to talk a hunch through with somebody, ferret out a bullshit source by bouncing their rap off a colleague at the politics desk, the city desk—anyone who knew people and institutions and who therefore knew the corruption and temptation and gullibility and cruelty and kindness that invariably followed in their wake like rats following agricultural settlements or waterworks.

  There was something about Scott Clark that didn’t add up, but at a certain point Angelique Bryan would have to concede that she had everything she needed to include him as one of the local players, if a minor one (and maybe, given the story she’d just seen on the wire, something more). Her instincts strongly compelled her to slot the ConcernedCitizen12 emails as bullshit—except that everything else, besides her own unscientific sense of the man, pointed to the fact that they weren’t. His house had been shot up, and that generally wasn’t something that happened to innocent people; someone had given him a serious beating, but he hadn’t seemed shaken by it, and certainly didn’t seem to be pursuing it legally; he himself had admitted to the existence of his gang, of his founding role in it, and had petulantly hinted, in fact all but admitted, that they’d been behind the stick-up at Polis. Still, she wished she had someone—someone with her seniority, someone who had ten seconds to spare where they weren’t doing what used to count as four separate and indispensable newspaper jobs—to talk it over with. Something still didn’t feel right.