by Mike Knowles
“What’s Nicky’s last name?” I asked.
“Why?”
I pulled back my fist, and Mike barked a quick answer. “Didiodato,” he said.
“Whose idea was it for him to be the bagman?”
“Bagman?”
“The guy who took the disks to the airport.”
“Oh. He volunteered. No one here has ever done anything like this before, so no one argued with him.”
I wondered why a kid who worked with computers all day would want to be the face of a blackmailing scam. Why would anyone volunteer to put themselves out there like that? I didn’t allow myself to focus on any theories for too long; I had been in the office almost ten minutes. “Who did the accounting files belong to?” I asked.
Mike didn’t answer. He shook his head twice, gritting his teeth, showing the first sign of backbone, or of a fear of something worse than me. I hit him in the stomach, and sound echoed off the walls. The sound wasn’t my fist. The loud crack was something else, and it turned both our eyes to the door. Then the screaming started.
CHAPTER FIVE
Over the screaming, automatic gunfire erupted in the halls. Less than a second later, the heavy office door burst inward. The door was replaced by a more solid figure. I turned my hips to hide some of the movement of my arm — which was already reaching behind my back. But as I moved, the giant in the doorway raised a gloved hand. In his fist was a huge gun. He said only one heavily accented word. “Don’t.”
I didn’t know why he hadn’t shot me, but I didn’t waste time on it. I locked eyes with the giant and waited. If he minded me eyeing him, he didn’t show it. His gun was pointed at me, but every now and then he glanced to look at Mike — who was pretty messy from our conversation. He never asked Mike if he was okay, so I ruled out the giant being Mike’s backup. The giant’s glances were brief and allowed me no chance to move.
I stared at the giant and took in every detail. He was over six and a half feet tall, with short blond hair shaved close to his head. He had the shoulders of a man who swung a hammer all day. His face was young but worn, with the wrinkles and creases that come from being in the elements for extended periods. He was wearing a black nylon wind suit that he had zipped all the way up so that only a portion of the collared shirt he wore underneath peeked out. I stared at the outfit, intrigued by the contrast of a formal shirt with such a casual jacket. It was then that I noticed the gloves and shoes. The gloves were black latex. The shoes were zipped inside rubber covers — the kind used to protect leather shoes from the snow. The outfit told me all I needed to know. Something bad was happening here. The kind of thing that can’t leave evidence, and I was in the middle of it.
I ignored all of my instincts. I would not let my brain entertain all of the questions forming in my synapses. I dismissed the thoughts about who the giant was, what was going on in the hallway, and whether or not I would soon be dead. I thought only of drawing my gun. I replayed the thought over and over, imagining the smooth draw I would have to make in a split second. My concentration lapsed when gunfire popped in the hall again. There was screaming, more gunfire, and finally silence. The smell of cordite snuck into the room over the shoulders of the giant. He hadn’t flinched at the sound of gunfire, and his head didn’t turn away in curiosity.
Fuck, I thought. Why doesn’t he look?
I heard a thumping getting louder and realized that it was the sound of running — in heels. A blur passed the door, visible only in the slivers of hallway that showed from behind the giant. He gave no sign of realizing that someone had passed. He kept his head still and his gun level at my chest. I heard a voice shout, “Ivan!” The giant didn’t move at first. The name was called again — with a much louder voice. At once, the giant sprang to life like a carousel being turned on. He turned at the hip, moving the cannon away from my torso, and fired once down the hallway. His hips turned back, but his gun was already on its way to the floor as the echo of my Glock bounced off the walls. My gunshot had mingled with his, making it inaudible outside the room.
The bullet entered his right shoulder at a point where there was minimal muscle mass. I was lucky with the shot because a few inches either way would have hit the dense muscle of a deltoid or a pectoral, and would not have done the job. Ivan acknowledged the pain with one small grunt and then he immediately began to bend for his gun, which had pitched forward into the room.
“Easy, big man, or the next one is in the head,” I said.
The blood trailed down the nylon windbreaker, gaining momentum because it wasn’t absorbed, and dripped onto the floor beside his covered shoes. He was still, bent slightly at the waist, staring at the gun on the floor.
“Leave the gun on the floor, step slowly into the room, and sit in the green chair, Ivan,” I said calmly.
Ivan did as he was told, as though the idea was a direct command he could not disobey. He sat in the client chair in front of the bookcase; the chair angled toward Mike’s desk and away from the doorway.
“Mike, take a seat behind your desk,” I said.
“What the hell is going on out there? I can’t stay here. I gotta go now. I gotta go. I gotta —” I smacked him hard with my left hand, and he staggered to his desk without any further complaint. I moved to the side of the desk, putting my back to the wall. It looked like I was watching a face-to-face meeting take place between Ivan and Mike. Mike’s tears and Ivan’s clenched jaw made the meeting appear extremely tense.
“Talk and you’re dead, partner,” I said to Ivan. If he heard me, he didn’t let it show. Shock was probably setting in, or the monster was alive behind those eyes waiting, visualizing, just as I was. Mike looked back and forth nervously. Sweat had wet the waxed hair on the top of his head and it was starting to wilt. The shooting down the hall had him shocked and scared. His eyes looked at me as his head swivelled from the door back to Ivan. His mouth was open slightly as though his tongue was too big to fit into a closed mouth.
“Shut up, Mike,” I said. “If you make this harder than it has to be, I’ll put you down too.” He sensed how serious I was, and his open mouth closed.
With Mike silent, I ran through ways to get out of 22 Hess. Mike’s office had no windows to jump out of, and running down the hall had a lousy track record. I had to wait for an opportunity and take it when it came.
I picked up Ivan’s gun from the floor and admired the size and weight of it; the Colt Python is only a bit smaller than a cannon. The gun was missing only the one round it took to kill the woman who ran for her life down the hall. I held the Colt down at the side of my leg with my left hand, out of fear that it would pull my pants down if I put it under my belt. I listened as the clock above the door clicked second by second one hundred eighty times. From the halls, I heard doors opening and closing, mumbled voices, and the occasional laugh. I knew the safety of the room would vanish when the voices down the hall called for Ivan again. There were no opportunities coming. I had to move.
“Both of you, get up and move to the door. Step into the hall facing right.”
Ivan mechanically stood and moved toward the door, one arm immobile as he walked. Mike shuddered and stayed put in his chair.
“Get up, Mike, or I leave you here.”
My words broke through whatever mental fog Mike was in, and he got up. He moved in Ivan’s direction, but kept his distance from the big man as though he was afraid that the limp, wounded arm would come to life and strangle him. I moved around the desk until I was behind the two. I got close and pressed a muzzle into each man’s neck while I spoke.
“Mike, is there an exit at the left end of the hall?”
“Yuh, yuh, yeah. It’s around the corner at the end.”
“How many steps?” I asked.
“What?”
“If you walked it, how many steps would it take?”
“I dunno, twenty-five or thirty.”
“Okay, boys, we’re going to back up twenty-five or thirty steps to the exit. Once we’re there
, Mike and I are out of here.”
The giant moved as though he were a robot following a direct command. Mike moved beside him, dragged along by the giant’s gravity. Mike suddenly realized how close he was to the Russian and tried to move back, but he changed his mind when he felt the muzzle of the Python in my hand separate two of his vertebrae. I moved backward, a step behind both men, down the empty hall to the exit. Ivan must have been sent alone to cover this hallway, which meant he was as real as he looked. As we moved, I whispered over Ivan’s bad shoulder: “A bullet will drop you as easy as the girl. Remember that, big guy.”
There was no response from Ivan — no twitch. He was waiting just like I had been, but I wasn’t going to give him any opportunity to move. Using a low voice, I counted the steps back for each man. No one at the other end of the hall made any noise, and no one yelled down to Ivan. After fifteen paces, my heel touched the receptionist with the freshly painted nails. She wasn’t breathing. The Colt had put a hole through the centre of her back. The exit wound left the white walls tinged with pink.
“Step lightly over the girl and don’t look down. Mike, I mean it.”
Both men took a large step backwards over the body. Ivan looked straight ahead; Mike stole a glance at the body. “Oh, God, Martha!” he screamed.
The sound of Mike’s voice bounced off the walls with a boom like bowling pins falling down. A loud, “What the fuck was that?” came from the end of the hall seventeen paces in front of me. The voice was gravelly, and it sounded Russian — the w in “what” sounded like a v.
“Steady, boys,” I said, before counting steps eighteen and nineteen.
“Ivan!” a voice called. It sounded like “Eevan” from twenty paces away. I couldn’t see who was speaking from the other end of the hall; I could only make out bits of images through the spaces between the two men.
“Keep moving. Don’t stop.” I shoved the guns hard into the two men as I said the word stop. We moved to the end of the hall as the voice repeated Ivan’s name. After calling a second time, the voice clued in to what was happening and shouted something in a harsh language. We ignored the foreign command and kept walking.
“Stop!” The voice coming down the hall was loud and sounded like it was used to being obeyed. Out of instinct, all of us almost stopped. Ivan and I ignored the urge to comply and kept moving backwards. Mike, unable to disobey the voice at the end of the hall, stopped walking. He was falling before I heard the shot. It was low in the gut and it bent him over. Mike landed on his ass with a thump. His hands didn’t break his fall because they were holding his stomach. I had five steps left. I raised both arms, pressed both guns into Ivan’s back, and kept moving. I stopped counting out loud at twenty-seven, and after a silent twenty-eight and twenty-nine, Ivan made his move. He pancaked his huge body onto the floor, using his one good arm to break his fall. I dove left before a bullet could tear me in two at twenty-nine paces.
I hit the floor with my shoulder and rolled to my feet five paces from a grey metal door with a glowing exit sign on top. I pushed through the door and found myself in an alley. To my left were three metal stairs leading down to the pavement between 22 Hess and its neighbour. I leapt down the stairs and ran hard toward an overflowing Dumpster; I hooked around it, and kept running, invisible from the door I just exited. Once I was in the street, I crossed and entered another alley, which I followed to Queen Street. I went into the first coffee shop I saw and took a seat at the window. I waited for my breathing to slow before I got up to grab a newspaper and order a large tea. I flipped to the crossword and then scanned the room for a pen. I had to get up again to ask the girl behind the counter for something to write with.
“Do you have a pen I could use?”
“What for?” The girl’s reply was cold, and she looked me dead in the eye as she said it. It was a challenge from a frumpy girl with hoops in her lip, nose, and eyebrow.
“I just wanted to do the crossword.”
“That paper is for everyone, not just you.”
I didn’t think this meant no, because she didn’t look away as though the conversation were over. “It’s yesterday’s paper,” I said.
“It’s still not yours.”
“How much for the paper then?” I asked with a low, even tone. I didn’t want any more attention than I had already gotten.
“We don’t sell them.”
She still didn’t look away when she said this, making me still think we weren’t done. “Did those hurt? The rings, I mean. In your face. Did they hurt?”
“No.” Her voice was less sure; the conversation was getting away from her.
“Why three of them? Why not two? How do you decide what to pierce?”
“Why, you got a fetish?” Her tone was a bit more defiant. She thought she had scored a point in her little game.
“I just want to know why you need to make something out of nothing. Why do you need to pierce a lip, or an eyebrow? Why do you make nothing into a whole production? What I’m trying to say is, why do you want to hassle me for nothing? Or did I just answer my question? You can’t leave things alone — not even your chubby lower lip.”
She threw a pen at me, meaning to hit me in the face. I moved my head, and she hit a woman behind me who was drinking a latte. I picked up the pen as she said, “Ma’am, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .” I heard someone call for a manager as I took my seat and started writing. The crossword would explain my presence in the coffee house for an hour or two. I had no interest in the puzzle; I instead used it to chart out what I knew and what I didn’t. I filled in the boxes of the puzzle with everything I had found out at 22 Hess. I worked fast, filling in names, places, and information I had learned. I noted everything Mike had told me about their piracy, and what I knew about the team that had shown up to clean the entire building. To the passerby I was not a person who was almost killed less than half an hour ago. I was a person who was very interested in his crossword puzzle. Over the two hours I stayed in the Second Cup, I recorded all of the information I knew, and the questions I had. I also learned the local bus route. My uncle hated writing anything down; he said it was the start of something concrete. Something a person could follow back to you. Most in my profession would have agreed with my uncle, but ever since I had lived with my uncle I did it. He taught me to dissect books before I learned to dissect people, and those early lessons were hard-wired into my brain. Seeing things on paper started my mind turning. I could swim through the information, picking out important details like a pike among minnows feeding on the biggest fish. It wasn’t my uncle’s way to use pen and paper, but it was something he could accept because his most important rule was to use whatever worked.
The names and accents I had heard at 22 Hess made me think I had crossed paths with the Russian mob. They had been a growing element in Southern Ontario for years, following Russian hockey players and circus troupes to Canada. The Russians were violent, but they were pros; they would make sure what happened to the computer geeks wouldn’t attract the attention of the law for at least another few hours. I couldn’t go back: they would have eyes posted there until the cops showed. Eventually the eyes outside would settle on my car, parked across the street from 22 Hess. The car didn’t have my name on it, but the right people would track it to me eventually. I went to the coffee shop’s pay phone and made a call to Sully’s Tavern. The phone was answered on the second ring by a voice that was clear and without distortion.
“Hello?”
“It’s Wilson.”
“What is it?” The voice on the phone did not sound interested or concerned, but I knew better than to think Steve wasn’t paying attention; he heard every word.
“I need you to do me a favour.”
“What?” Mr. Personality was laying it on thick this afternoon.
“My car is over on Hess. I need it picked up.”
“Is it hot yet?”
“No, but the cops will be checking it soon, so it needs to be moved fast.
”
“Where are you now?”
I told him, and listened to Steve chuckle. He seemed amused that I was stranded so close by.
CHAPTER SIX
Twenty minutes later, I was in Steve’s car, a beat-up, decade-old Range Rover. The SUV was uncomfortable in the city, but ready to run forever. I was driving so Steve could do the quick pick-up. Never once did he ask why; he would do whatever I asked. I did Steve a favour once, and he’d been ready to help ever since. I always felt a pang of guilt asking him for help because I knew he’d always say yes. He would always help me for what I did, but I hadn’t helped him for favours. I helped him because he had become like family in a time when I thought I would never have family again. I owed him as much as he owed me.
“Who’s tending bar?”
“Sandra. With help from Ben,” he said.
Since the day Sandra had been kidnapped, Steve always had Ben at the bar when he couldn’t be, just to make sure things were kosher. Ben was way over six feet tall, and well over three hundred pounds. All of his size made him look like the son of a farmer, one who didn’t own any machinery. It didn’t help that he was one of the only men in the city who had overalls on regular rotation in his wardrobe. I had seen Ben take apart groups of people at once, but the real menace of the bar was Steve. He was no danger to the regular customers — just to those who were there to threaten his business or family, specifically Sandra.
At one time, I had been no more than a passing customer in the bar. I’d check into it once in a while for information and the like. One night I happened to brace a junkie a little hard, and Steve told me to let him go. I didn’t listen because bartenders are usually full of hot air and Steve didn’t look like much — he only weighed about one-seventy, and he could barely see through the hair that hung over his eyes. While I was holding the junkie to the wall with my forearm, I missed the sound of the thin bartender moving over the bar. Almost at once he was behind me, tripping me backward over his foot.