Willows and Parker Box Set

by Laurence Gough

  Willows had just reached the edge of the parking lot when Mannie suddenly bolted from the cover of the fence, across the road and into the park. A dim, indistinct shape, he ran straight up the middle of the open area and then turned sharply right, plunged into the strip of brush and came out the other side, running towards the ponds.

  He couldn’t be sure; but Willows thought he knew what Mannie would do next. He followed Mannie across Midlothian Avenue and up the slope. The grass was heavy with dew: it was easy to see where Mannie had gone off to the right. Instead of veering after him, Willows kept going straight up the hill, keeping on a course parallel to the thick strip of brush. As he’d guessed, the brush marked the course of a shallow ravine, a depression formed over the years by rainwater draining down into the ponds. Willows kept low, but made no real attempt at concealment. Either Mannie would see him or he wouldn’t. It was a question of timing, and of luck.

  He continued up the slope, pacing himself, going as fast as he could without losing his wind.

  Mannie leaned against a stunted cherry tree growing near the bank of a small pond. His legs were trembling with fatigue. His lungs were on fire. Too many nights spent in front of the TV, gobbling junk food and drinking beer. He was going to have to buy one of those designer jogging outfits, start getting up a little earlier, do a few laps around the neighbourhood every morning before hitting the granola.

  A car drove slowly past, headlights sweeping across the black surface of the water and beyond, to a wide expanse of mowed grass. Mannie saw he’d made a mistake, taken a wrong turn somewhere. He was exactly where he didn’t want to be, out in the open, exposed and vulnerable. Another car cruised past. A face, pale and inquisitive, peered out the side window. Mannie didn’t know if he’d been seen or not.

  He ran back to the cover of the ravine and scrambled blindly upwards, slipped and fell, banged a knee. The floor of the ravine was littered with broken shale, the fragments thin and sharp. With each step he took, he caused a miniature landslide. He knelt and took off his shoes. Much better. In his stockinged feet he was able to move through the darkness in almost absolute silence, a shadow among shadows.

  From his vantage point high up on the hill, Willows could see the sparkling red and blue lights of an ambulance, fire trucks, at least half a dozen patrol cars. Plenty of men and equipment down there, but it seemed nobody had thought to come and lend him a hand. He was sure now that Claire Parker hadn’t seen him go after Mannie. He wondered if there was a car from the dog squad down there, how long it would take to follow his scent into the park. Then he heard the tin-whistle screech of a disturbed bird, and knew that wherever Rover was, he wasn’t going to make it in time for the party.

  The sides of the ravine had become increasingly shallow, and now, suddenly, the ravine petered out altogether. Mannie found himself standing on a narrow path that ran diagonally across the slope of the hill, up towards the faint glow of the arboretum. There was a stand of scrawny trees to his left, a clump of rocks off to the right. He started up the path and one of the rocks stood up.

  “Police,” said Willows softly. “Put your hands up and don’t move.”

  “What?” said Mannie. The way the guy was holding his body, Mannie knew he had a gun. He was also very much aware that he was backlit by the powerful arc lights of the ball park. It was a perfect situation, but not for him. He’d provided the cop with the kind of sharp-edged silhouette target he’d normally only expect to find on a firing-range.

  Willows inched closer, his gun extended in front of him in a two-handed grip. “Police,” he said again. “Put your hands on top of your head. Do it now.”

  “Okay,” said Mannie. “Whatever you say.” He lifted his arms and a tongue of flame leapt up at him, actually reached out and touched him. He felt a searing heat, and was dazzled, blinded by the muzzle flash. At the same instant he heard a sharp report, a thunderclap of sound so loud it hurt his ears. He couldn’t believe it. For some reason the dumb fucking cop had fired a warning shot. He stumbled backwards, lost his balance and fell into the mouth of the ravine, slid a few feet and was still. Lying motionless and blind on his bed of stones, he cried out and heard nothing.

  He tried to imagine what had happened. His imagination failed him. There was a shift of time. No pain, only silence. Then, gradually, he became aware of the reassuring sound of his heart at work. He focused on the moist thumping of it, the hiss of the valves opening and closing, the rush and thunder of his blood as it was pumped through a network of arteries and veins into the fading depths of his body. As he listened, the rhythm quickened and the noise and clamour intensified until his entire body shook with the power and force of it.

  And then, all at once, it stopped.

  * * *

  The narrow beam of a five-cell flashlight played over yellow teeth, pinched nostrils, corroded skin, eyes that were all pupil, black and sightless. Parker knelt down beside Willows, touched him lightly on the shoulder.

  “Are you okay, Jack?”

  “Better than him.”

  Parker ran the beam of light across Mannie’s pale green polo shirt. Willows had shot Mannie right through the alligator.

  “Let’s see his hands,” said Willows.

  Parker focused the spot on Mannie’s outflung right hand. A quartet of heavy gold rings caught the light and threw it back at her.

  “I thought he had a knife,” said Willows. “All he was packing was a handful of jewellery.”

  “Maybe, and maybe not,” said Parker quickly. “If he had a knife, he would have dropped it when you shot him. It could be anywhere. It could be fifty feet down the hill.” She squeezed Willows’ arm. “Let’s get the dogs up here, and some lights and metal detectors, and see what we find, okay?”

  Willows stood up. He holstered his revolver. “I’m going home, Claire.”

  “Is that a good idea? Inspector Bradley’s going to want to talk to you.”

  “It can wait.”

  Parker hesitated. “I’m going downtown anyway, why don’t I give you a ride.”

  “I’m not going downtown,” said Willows. “I’m going home. Back to the wife and kids. If Sheila doesn’t like it, she can move into the goddam apartment.”

  There were cops all over the mountain, moving in fast. As soon as Willows turned his back, Claire Parker started running her hands over the corpse. There was a straight razor in the back pocket of the tan slacks. Parker snapped open the blade. She closed Mannie’s lifeless fingers around the bone handle and then kicked the razor out of his hand and into the darkness, heard it skitter over the shale. There was a throaty roar from the crowd at Nat Bailey Stadium. A tiny white ball arced high into the air, was lost in the glare of the lights. Parker stood there for a moment, thinking about what she had done. She switched off the flashlight.

  Mannie Katz vanished like a bad dream.

  Chapter 35

  The old man still liked a beer now and then. Misha, always looking to score a few extra points, had troubled herself to lug home a case of Labatt’s Classic, a premium quality brew she didn’t believe was available in southern California. Felix was drinking a bottle now, watching her critically as she fiddled with the TV receiver, trying to get the dish up on the roof to suck CBC Vancouver down out of the heavens.

  Felix didn’t say a word as she fumbled with the controls, but she could hear his raspy impatient breathing, feel his lizard eyes on the nape of her neck.

  Eventually a woman with thick auburn hair and gelled lips snapped into focus on the Sony’s twenty-eight inch screen.

  “That’s it,” said Felix. “Hold it right there.”

  Misha turned and gave him a smile that was meant to be reassuring. Felix had been drinking all evening. Wine with dinner, shot glasses of Glenlivet afterwards, then the beer. He was long past the point of simply being drunk. He was also nervous and irritable, growing increasingly worried about Junior. Misha was worried too. Junior should’ve phoned as soon as he’d dealt with the problem that was Mannie
Katz. Called out of common courtesy, if nothing else. He was supposed to give Felix a ring whenever he did anything even remotely dangerous, never mind attempting to murder a professional killer. If something had gone wrong in Vancouver, Misha would catch the flak. And there’d be a lot of it, for sure. She moved away from the TV, careful to keep out of Felix’s line of sight.

  Felix brusquely patted the chesterfield. “Come on over here and sit down, will you.”

  They watched several minutes’ coverage of a children’s fishing derby in False Creek. Ranks of beaming toddlers proudly displayed a variety of tiny dead fish that had been yanked from the sea. Felix drank beer and held Misha’s hand. She could feel his fingernails, blunt and prehensile, digging into her palm.

  The woman with the auburn hair came back on the screen. She looked serious.

  Misha had a sense of impending doom. She found herself standing at a shot of the burnt-out hulk of a car. The fire had burned so hot that there was nothing left but the body and engine and frame, a few large unidentifiable chunks of metal.

  “What the hell’s all this about?” Felix said.

  The camera panned out on to the street. There was something rectangular and black about halfway up the block. The camera zoomed in. The black object turned out to be the crumpled bonnet of a Pontiac Trans Am. Felix recognized it by the big sprawled-out gold eagle painted on it.

  “Oh my God,” he said.

  There was a quick cut to a couple of white-coated ambulance attendants easing a bagged corpse into the back of an ambulance. Lights flashing, blue and red. Mannie Katz’s name was mentioned, voice-over. Felix hardly heard a word that was said, his heart was beating so loudly.

  There was an establishing shot of a hospital, then a long shot of a cop sitting in a wooden chair at the end of a brightly lit corridor with bare walls and a polished linoleum floor. Felix pushed himself up off the chesterfield and went over and turned up the sound. His son Junior Newton was in the intensive care ward with a bullet wound in his chest and second and third degree burns all down the left side of his body, unknown internal injuries. His condition was critical.

  Felix hurled the bottle of Labatt’s Classic at the TV screen. It bounced off the thick glass and fell to the carpet spewing foam. Felix kicked the bottle across the room and went outside, on to the porch that fronted the house. He left the door wide-open behind him. The beach was easily a hundred yards away, but there was an offshore wind and the ocean was noisy. Misha could hear the waves slamming down on the hard-packed sand, the dull grinding of stones caught in the surf. She went over to the door and looked out. Felix was curled up in a wicker chair at the far end of the porch, his hands clenched in his lap. In the orange glow of the bug lights she could see his chest rising and falling spasmodically, tears of grief and rage spilling down his withered cheeks. He must have sensed her presence, because after a moment he looked up, glaring at her with bloodshot eyes.

  “I want my boy back,” he said, his voice thick with sorrow. He coughed, teeth flashing a dull orange. “I don’t care how much it costs, just do it.”

  “Yes,” said Misha.

  “Wait for me upstairs,” said Felix.

  Nodding, Misha stepped quickly back inside the house. Although she knew Felix very well, she’d never before seen him express any emotion but anger. Now they had shared a moment of compassion, human distress. And she was frightened. A man like Felix, once you had discovered his weakness, would feel he had no choice but to display his strength.

  She stooped to pick up the beer bottle Felix had thrown at the television. As her fingers touched the curved surface of the glass a thought occurred to her; an idea that came uninvited but was nevertheless warmly received.

  Junior had tried to shoot a policeman and was a suspect in a murder investigation. He was a foreigner, as well. How high would his bail be set, once he was capable of leaving the hospital? Misha tried to imagine it. A hundred thousand dollars, easily. Perhaps as much as half a million, who could say! There was a joke Junior made the day Felix bought the Laguna Beach house. That Felix needed so many bedrooms because where else would he keep all his money if not stuffed inside his mattresses. This was an exaggeration, of course, but grounded in truth. Felix did have a tendency to keep his assets liquid. The more she thought about it the surer she was that he’d give her cash to take care of the Canadian courts. A suitcase crammed with small bills, perhaps a week’s profit from his various enterprises.

  A woman could go anywhere in the world with a hundred thousand dollars. She could even visit Japan, if she liked.

  Misha forced herself to be calm, to concern herself with realities rather than dreams. She listened to the waves pound the beach and to the abrasive thunder of stones imprisoned in the surf; to the sounds of America’s coastline chewing itself to pieces. Certified cheques weren’t Felix’s style. To his way of thinking a piece of paper was worthless unless it had the face of a president engraved on it. She considered Tokyo. In Tokyo or any other large city in Japan there would be many opportunities for a woman of her varied tastes, unusual talents. It would be easy to change her appearance; to let her hair grow down to her hips, wear the clothes of her ancestors, learn once again to think and speak only in the language of her childhood. Felix might very well summon up the energy to go after her, but who would he chase? How could he hope to find a woman he had never really known and who in any case had ceased to exist?

  Misha giggled. Windchimes. The twittering of glass sparrows. She covered her face with her hands, revelled in the touch of lacquered nails on skin.

  Out on the porch, under the bug lights, Felix sat hunched in his wicker chair and stared out at the blackness of the night, the uncertain, crumbling, chalk-white demarcation line of the surf.

  He’d already run out of tears. There was a lot to think about, and he was thinking hard.

  HOT SHOTS

  This one is for my father, W. C. B.

  Table of Contents

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  1

  Gary Silk was down eight points. He was about as angry as a man with everything can be. Because he’d lost his temper he’d lost his rhythm. His timing was all shot to hell. He was disgusted with himself, the way he was running all over the damn court, bouncing off the walls with his damn tongue hanging out, trying to get something going against the pro’s barrage of stupid little dinky lob shots. He knew what he was doing wrong — chasing the goddamn ball instead of working the court, letting the ball come to him — but he was out of control, couldn’t help himself.

  He watched the ball hit the far wall about an eighth of an inch above the foul line and drop straight down. Hit the deck and just lay there, dead. He glared at the pro’s broad and muscular back as the golden jerk wound up and fired a bullet into the corner, the little blue sphere caroming off the wall almost at right angles, an impossible shot to return, the ball hitting the adjoining wall before Gary had time to react, then dribbling along the baseboard as if it’d had all the air let out of it.

  Now Gary was down nine points.

  He jogged over and retrieved the ball, bent from the waist and scooped it up, his knees locked and his skinny hairless legs perfectly straight. Thirty-seven years old but he was in the best shape of his life. Well, why not? He played squash three times a week. Every second day he laced on a hundred-dollar pair of Nikes and put a minimum ten miles on the odometer of his silver Mercedes 560SL convertible, Frank cruising along maybe a hundred feet behind him, one hand draped across the wheel and the other on his gun.

  Plus
didn’t he spend at least an hour a day in the gym, working out on his Universal, which the salesman had told him was the exact same model Clint Eastwood had out at his spread in Carmel?

  Gary used his wristband to wipe his forehead dry. He twirled his racket in the air. The pro was watching him out of the corner of his big blue eye, wary, wondering if maybe he’d gone a little too far. Gary gave him a big smile and the pro relaxed, his shoulders dropping. Gary could be a charmer when he was in the mood — people who’d met him said he could charm the teeth out of a doberman, and it was almost true.

  He started back down the court, polished maple squeaking under his shoes. The pro stood there, waiting, examining some tiny imagined flaw in the strings of his racket.

  So intent was Gary on his game that he had walked almost all the way down the court before he noticed Frank sitting on the edge of his seat on the other side of the glass wall that separated the back of the court from the spectator’s area. What was Frank up to? He was no sports fan, and anyway knew it was the pro’s job to beat the shit out of Gary, make him, in theory, a better player. Frank was smart enough not to hang around and watch Gary get thumped.

  Clearly, Frank’s presence had to be bad news. Gary tossed the ball to the pro, flipping it underhand, but putting a little extra zip on it.

  “Gotta run. Let’s call it a draw, okay?”

  “Sure thing, Mr Silk.” The pro gave Gary his very best smile. The kid had teeth like fucking Chicklets, so white they looked like he’d stuck tiny hundred-watt light bulbs in them. He hustled over to the small square door set flush into the back wall of the court, below where the glass started. He yanked the door open and stepped aside. Gary stooped and slipped through, into the locker room.