by Giles Blunt
“I’ll tell you what I think, sunshine,” Amis went on. “I think you’re in way over your head, looking at a sentence of eternity if convicted of trafficking, and by way of medication for the anxiety you’ve been skin-popping morning, noon and night. It looks to me, Kevin, that you’re caught between the mother of all rocks and the daddy of all hard places, because you don’t really—not really, deep down in your wholesome colonial heart—want to be a drug dealer at all. But you just can’t stand to be parted from your supply. You’re a stone junkie, Tait. It’s heroin running through your veins, not poetry, and the chances of you ever writing a single line worth reading are receding by the minute.”
The reverie popped, and Kevin was once again staring at the rough, grubby wood of his cabin wall. The yellow legal pad under his forearm bore the crossed-out attempts at new verses for his ballad.
Soon the game was over
For the lady and the ghost
She was sleeping on his shoulder
As they came in from the coast.
Well, that moved along all right. It was the next line, The border guards who killed him, that really stumped him. The border guards killed him and then what? And how can they kill a ghost? Maybe I’m too literal-minded to write poetry. The impasse had sent him veering off into another interview. And Amis had been getting pretty hostile there.
Okay, Red Bear and Leon were unnerving, to say the least; there was no denying that biker had turned up dead. Red Bear swore he’d had nothing to do with it, that it was some bad blood among the Riders themselves, but Kevin wasn’t sure he believed him. In any case, just one or two more serious deals and then he’d be free. Bye-bye, Red Bear. Bye-bye, Leon. Another couple of weeks and he’d fly to Tangiers and write poems that would put poetry back on the map.
In the meantime, he would have to exercise what Keats called negative capability. He had to be able to hold two contradictory ideas in his mind at once: the idea that he was associating with possible killers who scared the shit out of him, and the idea that he was a poet trying to scrape the money together to finance his art.
Certainly, the money was rolling in. Red Bear had some serious connections in western Canada, and now they had the goods to sell them—at a magnificent profit. Red Bear didn’t let Kevin or any of the others keep more than tiny amounts—just enough to make a little extra money in town—and he made them account for every ounce. But he paid them well. He kept most of the money himself, of course, but no one had a problem with that. After all, he was the man with the ideas and the contacts.
One day—it was late in the afternoon, and they were just sitting around over coffee at the Rosebud—Red Bear came in and told them all to head back to the camp and get dressed up. “I want you to look like gentlemen,” he said.
He drove them to the most expensive restaurant in the area, the Trianon, where they drank fine wine with dinner and finished off with cognac. Kevin would have preferred beer, but he had to admit the steak was the best he had ever tasted.
“We are at the beginning of a long run of good luck,” Red Bear told them when the brandies came. “Even the spirits are excited about it and, believe me, they don’t get excited about just anything.”
The liveried waiters, the white table linens, the gleaming silver spoke of wealth and plenitude, like a crisp, new thousand-dollar bill. We could be a group of successful young businessmen, Kevin thought, except that none of us has ever had anything to do with legitimate business. And one of us dances around dead pigs. And one of us is dumb as a streetcar. What the hell am I doing here?
“My children,” Red Bear said.
Children? Kevin nearly snorted into his wineglass. Now we’re his children?
“I want us to be successful for a very long time. And that is going to require three things.” Red Bear gave them that look, reflections of candles and wineglasses sparkling in his strange, pale eyes.
“The first requirement is hard work,” he said. “We have to find more contacts, move more product, make more sales. I will be dividing these burdens among you. Possibly there will be some travel involved. In particular, we have to make more inroads into the prairie provinces. B.C. I have locked up, but Alberta and Saskatchewan are still to be conquered.
“The second requirement—and it’s so obvious I shouldn’t have to talk about it—is discretion. You can never talk about what we do. Never. To no one. Think of it like the Secret Service or whatever you want, but you can never tell anyone—and I mean anyone—what you do for a living.”
“Not even family?” Toof said. “I got a bunch of brothers I talk to once in a while.”
Red Bear grabbed his wrist, and a shadow of fear crossed Toof’s open features.
“We are your family,” Red Bear said. “Don’t you ever forget that.”
“What’s the third thing?” Kevin said, trying to take the heat off Toof. “You said success was going to require three things.”
Those husky’s eyes on him.
“The third thing, my friend, is abstinence. Nobody at this table is ever to touch the product. Ever. You can smoke all the dope you want, I don’t care. You can sell your private stashes in town for extra cash, I don’t care about that, either. But if I find one of you has used so much as a microgram from our shipments, I will kill you. I am not joking.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little extreme?” Kevin said. “We’re living with a lot of temptation here. Human beings are fallible.”
“I’m telling you the way it is, Kevin. If you don’t like it, you’re free to work for someone else. Maybe the Viking Riders would be interested.”
Leon laughed, and nearly choked on his brandy.
17
RED BEAR DIDN’T OFTEN DRIVE himself anywhere these days. Leon was always happy to drive for him, and to act as bodyguard. In fact, Leon’s progress was a source of great satisfaction to Red Bear. Bring a little magic into someone’s life, improve his sex life, and the results were fairly predictable. At this point, Red Bear was confident that Leon would do anything he asked. But today, Red Bear drove himself along Highway 11 to Shanley, a suburb of Algonquin Bay, if a place the size of Algonquin Bay may be said to have suburbs.
Shanley is a picturesque little town, hardly more than a crossroads, really. But there’s a lookout halfway up Shanley Hill, and it is not unusual for cars to stop there for a long time as the occupants gaze over the blue expanse of Lake Nipissing. On this particular day, it was a grey expanse. A herd of clouds had gathered over the water and over the hills that morning, and by late afternoon still showed no inclination to move. Whitecaps ruffled the surface of the lake, and even up on the lookout Red Bear could hear the slap of waves hitting the shore.
He had parked his BMW facing the lake and was now sitting in the passenger seat of a Chevy Blazer with windows tinted so dark it made the lake look like a scene of imminent apocalypse. The driver’s seat was occupied by Alan Clegg. Clegg was wearing a checked short-sleeve shirt with button-fly Levi’s over a pair of brown Timberland boots—not even the tan kind that might still lay some claim to being cool. Really, you couldn’t look more like an off-duty cop if you tried.
“Toss ’em again,” Clegg said. “I’m in a tricky situation here. I need to know about this stuff.”
“It won’t do any good to throw again. I told you, I’m tired. I had a late night. Very late.”
“Come on, Red Bear. It can’t hurt. Toss ’em again.”
Red Bear put the multicoloured shells back in their leather pouch and shook them. He tipped the pouch and poured the shells over the Blazer’s console.
“Okay. It’s a little better,” Red Bear said. Sometimes it was like tuning in a picture.
“What do you see?”
“Work. You’re going to get a promotion.”
Clegg grinned. He had big, thick teeth, too many for the size of his mouth. “Promotion, huh? About time, man. You wouldn’t believe the jerks that are making sergeant these days. When’s it going to happen?”
> “I don’t know when. Wait. Someone ahead of you is going to leave or retire or something. When that happens, you’ll get your promotion.”
“But you don’t know when. Let me ask you something, Red Bear: You found Wombat alone, right?”
“He was alone.”
“And you found the money, right?”
“We found the money.”
“So how come you don’t tell the future as good as me?”
“Because I’m not on the RCMP narcotics squad, that’s why.” Red Bear took off his sunglasses, giving Clegg the look. “I tell you what I see in the shells. If you want a lot of bullshit, get someone else to do your readings.”
“Tell me about Mary,” Clegg said. “What’s going to happen with Mary?”
“I don’t see you getting back together. In fact, I’d say she’ll likely file for divorce. Now, money. Here’s where things are looking bright.” Red Bear pointed to a group of three shells that formed a crescent off to one side. “You’re going to do very well financially for quite some time. In fact, I do not see anything that will get in the way of your continued good fortune.”
“I got something else I wanna talk about.”
“In a minute. You ask me to do a reading, have the courtesy to let me finish.”
“You’re pretty thin-skinned for an Indian. Anyone ever tell you that?”
Red Bear gathered up the shells and sifted them back into the leather pouch.
“What are you doing? You said you weren’t finished.”
Red Bear strung the bag from his belt with a leather thong. He got out of the Blazer and looked around. There were no other cars in sight. He opened the trunk of the BMW and pulled out a crisp new paper bag. He tossed it through the open door of the Blazer and climbed back in.
Clegg pulled out the three packs of bills. “Seventy-five grand. Not much, considering.”
“Considering what? Seventy-five was the deal.”
“The deal was I give you the information, you do the rip-off. Rip-off, not murder. Where the hell do you get off pulling something like that? The local force is all over it, in case you didn’t know. So help me, if it blows back to me I’m going to come looking for you.”
“Don’t worry about it. Wombat is working for us, now.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Wombat Guthrie is stone-cold dead. They don’t come any deader. And he’s short a couple of hands and one head. Is that your idea of concealing his identity? Because it didn’t work. This thing is all over the radios. The guy was alone. It was totally unnecessary. Why did you kill him?”
“Who said I killed him? You don’t know I killed him. The last time I saw Wombat, we made a deal. From now on, he would be working for us. So if he was murdered, there’s no way it’s coming back to me. How could it come back to you?”
“Are you telling me you didn’t kill this guy?”
“I don’t murder people, Alan. It’s not my way. The most likely thing is he’s been punished by his colleagues for failing the organization so dramatically. I don’t see how that’s a problem for you.”
“All right. Okay. That makes sense.” Clegg seemed to relax a little. “How’d your crew react to the takeover? They had to be pretty impressed.”
“Yes, I think so. Even Kevin, and he’s very skeptical about my magic.”
“He’s not going to be trouble, is he?”
“Kevin?” Red Bear looked out across the lake, the tiny white pennants of surf. “Kevin won’t be a problem.”
“Because I’ll tell you who could be a problem, and that’s your little Toofus-Doofus friend.”
“Toof is a harmless pothead. How could he be a problem?”
Clegg looked at his watch. “I gotta hit the road. I gotta be back at the detachment by six.”
“How would Toof be a problem?”
“I’m not saying he is a problem. I’m saying he might be. Informant of mine gave me a little morsel of info the other day. One Nelson Tyndall. Not the most reliable asshole in the world, but not the worst either—for a junkie. Old Nelson tells me Toof told him that his crew was going to be doing something big in a couple of days. That was before your little trip across the lake.”
“‘Something big’?” Red Bear said. “‘Something big’ is not a problem. ‘Something big’ could be anything.”
“How about something big with the Viking Riders?”
“The Viking Riders? Your informant told you this before?”
“No, he told me Toof told him before.”
“That is not possible. None of them knew we were going near the Riders until we were on the lake and heading for the French River.”
“Like I say, Nelson’s not the most reliable asshole in the world.”
Red Bear cursed. He took off his Wayfarers and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
The sun broke through the clouds above the western shore. Clegg lowered his visor and started the Blazer.
“Keep an eye on the guy,” Clegg said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
18
KEVIN STRETCHED, AND CLOSED his eyes. He had spent the entire morning in Red Bear’s cabin under the watchful eye of Red Bear himself, stepping on the dope and packing it into ever-smaller packages. It was torment to be so close to ecstasy and yet forbidden to taste. He thought long and hard about shoving some into his pocket, but Red Bear was never more than a few feet away, talking quietly into the telephone, making deals.
Now Kevin was lying on his bunk, trying to write a poem about Karen, his last girlfriend in Vancouver. So far, he hadn’t had any luck with the females of Algonquin Bay, so he thought about Karen quite often. Strictly speaking, Karen had been someone else’s girlfriend and, despite her one-night adventure with Kevin, she had chosen to stay that way. Kevin summoned her image in his mind. That mouth, those sweet blue eyes, that silky blond hair. Unfortunately, his thoughts had a tendency to turn lustful, and lust was not conducive to good verse. He had crossed out a dozen opening lines, each one worse than the last.
The door opened, and Leon stepped inside, a dark silhouette against the sunlight.
“Don’t you ever, like, go outdoors, man?”
“I’m working.”
“Working?”
“Yes, Leon. I’m working. Writing. Some people do actually consider it work, you know.”
“Oh, excuse me. What are you, like, William Asshole Shakespeare? Ernest Asshole Hemingway?”
“You’re letting the flies in, Leon. I just got rid of the last one, and you’re letting them in again.”
Leon shut the door behind him. “I hope you’re writing a screenplay. That’s where the money is.”
“Never,” Kevin said, and snapped his notebook shut. He felt under the bed for his shoes. “I wanted to ask you something, Leon. The day Terri left, you drove her to the train station, right?”
“What are you going on about that again for? I told you. I’d been back from Toronto, like, thirty seconds and Red Bear says, ‘Hey. This is Kevin’s sister. She needs a ride to the station.’ She was in a hurry.”
“Yeah, I know she was pissed off at me. But I called her place in Vancouver and her roommates haven’t heard from her.”
“I got no answer for that. She didn’t give me an itinerary, man. I only just met her. Far as I know, she was catching the train to Toronto. After that, I got no idea.”
“I’m getting kind of worried. Normally, she would’ve called me by now. I don’t know where she can be.”
“She’s probably with friends in Toronto. Why not? Anyways, we got other things to worry about. Red Bear’s got a little job for us.”
“Shit. What now?”
“What are you talking about, man? We got the easiest gig anybody ever dreamed up. He makes the big contacts, sets up the big scores. All we gotta do is mule the stuff around once in a while.”
That was true. Mostly, all Kevin had to do for his money was occasionally meet one of Red Bear’s mysterious contacts downtown and put him together with some p
roduct at an agreed-upon location. Easy as pie.
“Man, you must be the laziest bastard in the world,” Leon went on.
“I just told you, man, I’m working on my poetry. Anyway, what’s he want us to do?”
“Toof’s been shooting his mouth off to the wrong people. Got to have a little talk with Canada’s favourite pot-head.”
“Nobody listens to Toof. He’s a harmless goof.” God, Kevin thought, I’ve been thinking about rhyme too long.
Leon snatched at a fly. “I didn’t say we have to beat him to death. We just got to have a talk with him.”
Later, when they were in the car, Kevin said, “So what’s the deal? Why have we got to talk to him?”
Leon attacked the gearshift and the Trans Am roared onto the dirt road. “Red Bear wants us to convince him to stop blabbing our business to the entire world.”
“So why doesn’t Red Bear talk to him? He’d be a lot more convincing than you or me.”
“It’s called delegating responsibility, Kevin. Red Bear actually wants us to do some work, you know what I mean? And he don’t mean writing.”
“So what are we supposed to do?”
“Just get him to stop, that’s all. How we do it is our business. But if Toof doesn’t stop, that’ll be Red Bear’s business, and you know what? I don’t want Red Bear mad at me, do you?”
A Toyota Echo cut them off as they turned onto the highway, and Leon leaned on the horn. “Asshole. I oughta run him into a rock cut.”
“So who’s Toof supposed to have been talking to?”
“Apparently, the little jerk let slip that we had some business with the Viking Riders, and somehow it got back to Red Bear. Is that bad enough for you, or do you need like a detailed transcript? You wanna go back to camp and cross-examine Red Bear on the subject?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Me either.”
They didn’t speak the rest of the way into town.
Toof was an easy person to find most afternoons, because Algonquin Bay has only two poolrooms: Duane’s Billiard Emporium and the Corner Pocket. He wasn’t at Duane’s but someone said they’d seen him earlier and he was heading over to the Pocket.