Shutterbug

by Laurence Gough

  Chapter 13

  They were out in the backyard, that unlikely trio, April and Lewis sitting in Wayne’s dark green plastic Adirondack-style chairs around a metal-and-glass table topped off by a large pastel umbrella. Wayne liked the plastic chairs because they were comfortable, and if stuff got spilled on them, salsa, for example, or blood, it washed off nice and easy. One swipe with a damp rag and you’d never know a sloppy eater had passed by, or a mortally wounded man, either.

  Wayne was downwind a few feet, towering over the gas barbecue. He wore a tall chef’s cap and an apron decorated with a repeating motif print of meat cleavers and splatters of blood overlaid with the phrase COME’N’ GIT IT!

  Lewis had eyed the apron and his mouth hadn’t exactly watered.

  It was getting on to dusk, the air damp and sweet, smelling of fresh-cut grass, and horses. The slow-moving waters of the south arm of the Fraser River were about a quarter of a mile away. Lewis could smell the river, or at least he thought he could. The airport crowded the far side of the river. Incoming and outgoing flights were a constant. Every half hour or so the sound of a 747 made the ground tremble, and set the willow tree’s branches dancing.

  The airplanes didn’t seem to bother the area’s multitude of frogs. The ditches, some of them so big they were swimmable, were full of the cute little critters. Presumably they’d acclimatized. Wayne was their real enemy, their deadly enemy. About six o’clock, he’d snuck out of the house in a matte-black wetsuit, face mask, a snorkel. Prior to exiting the house, armed with a high-tech carbon fibre crossbow, he’d wandered into the bedroom.

  At the time, Lewis was lying on the bed. He’d shot up no more than an hour before, was still nice and high, feeling he was a wonderful person. He was watching cartoons on TV. An animated roadrunner raced off a cliff. Lewis was having a hard time making much sense of the plot, but he was sure enjoying all those brilliant colours that flashed across the screen.

  He jerked upright as much as the handcuffs would allow, the chains rattling, his heart suddenly using his chest for a speed-bag.

  ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ said Wayne. His voice was unaccountably garbled, and he had to repeat himself twice to be understood. Haltingly, he explained that he was headed for the ditches, and that he was looking for his swim flippers.

  ‘The ditches?’ said Lewis, uncomprehending.

  ‘To hunt frogs,’ explained Wayne, twice. ‘Froggies,’ he said in a deep bass voice. Perhaps hoping to make himself even clearer, he raised his burly arms above his head and bowed his trunk-like legs. All in all, it wasn’t a bad frog imitation, given that he was handicapped by his size and the distinctly unfrog-like bushiness of his beard. Not to mention his manic, blazing eyes. Bulging out his cheeks, he uttered a lifelike croak, and then another. He kept croaking, croak after croak. He was an incredibly talented mimic. The music of bullfrogs filled the room, drowning out Wile E. Coyote’s scream of dismay as he toppled off a mile-high cliff. Smiling, Wayne opened his mouth and fished around in there for a minute with his stubby fingers, produced a piece of pink metal almost as big as his tongue, triangular in shape, but with blunted ends.

  ‘Frog-caller,’ he said. ‘Sent off for her after I saw advert on late-night TV. It was one of them 800 numbers, and I’m here to tell you I’m real glad I made that call. Had to wait six to eight weeks for this cute little gadget to make it through the mails; she came all the way from Roanoake, Virginia. Cost me thirty bucks, but it’s worth every penny.’

  ‘You use it to call frogs?’

  ‘In season. I mean to say, mating season. You might not think so to look at them, but frogs ‘r’ smart as whippets. I’ve hunted deer, black bear, elk and moose. None of’em’s intelligent or wary as your average backyard bullfrog. And they don’t taste near half so good, neither! But when it comes time to get laid, well, what can I tell you that you don’t already know. When they’re horny, them bitty green things can’t think no straighter than a hula-hoop!’

  ‘Huh!’ said Lewis.

  It wasn’t much of a response, but it was the best he could do.

  Wayne shoved the frog-caller back into his mouth. Practising his croaks, he passed from view.

  Splat! went Wile E. Coyote.

  Wayne must have eventually found his flippers, because he was wearing them now, as he clumped around the barbecue, flipping grilled frog’s legs and contentedly sucking on a large can of Budweiser.

  On the far side of the neighbour’s sagging rail fence, a couple of nondescript ponies stood quietly. The fence wasn’t much to look at, but it was topped off with an illegally installed electrified wire. From time to time a robin or a blackbird, or perhaps a small hawk, would alight on the wire, and sizzle, and die. It was entertainment, of sorts.

  The smallest of the horses wore a saddle. Not long ago their owner had appeared wearing a bulky black sweater, jodhpurs, and a pair of knee-high black leather boots with vestigial spurs. She was a large woman, cumbersome and dull-eyed, topped off by a mop of frizzy bottle-blonde hair and armed with a whip.

  The woman had ridden for precisely half an hour, in cramped circles. Two or three times per rotation she would exhort the horse to slow down. Her voice was shrill and irritating as a mosquito hawk’s. Eventually she dismounted without fanfare and disappeared back inside her house. If she’d enjoyed herself, it was a well-tended secret.

  ‘Pretty, aren’t they?’ said April, following Lewis’s line of sight.

  He shrugged.

  April nodded agreeably. ‘I know what you mean. The way they’re standing there, so quiet and unambitious, it’s like somebody must’ve snuck up behind them and scooped out their brains. I’m not saying they’re all that smart to begin with.’ She paused in her monologue to strike a match and set fire to the Marlboro that had been jumping around in the corner of her animated mouth. ‘Ever been bit by a horse, Lewis?’

  ‘Not that I remember.’

  ‘Now that smarts!’ said April. She chuckled at her own joke, and exhaled a cloud of smoke. ‘It’s when they’re in motion that they really come alive. Cantering, trotting, at full gallop. Who cares, just as long as they’re moving. The way their tails flow out behind them, and those long legs, four of them, and they never get all tangled up, no matter how fast they go. And they can go like hell, Lewis!’

  Lewis slapped at a mosquito. There were thousands of them. He was slathered in repellant, but they were so famished and desperate for blood that they didn’t seem to care. Lewis, a city boy, had never given much thought to mosquitoes. Up until that evening, they’d been nothing more than bugs. Now he saw them as airborne hypodermic needles, silent and deadly. Wayne didn’t seem bothered by them. Probably the vicious little bastards couldn’t penetrate the wet suit’s thick rubber. Or maybe the fact that Wayne periodically disappeared into a self-inflicted cloud of Raid was responsible for the fact that he was so unappealing.

  April leaned across the table, picked up Lewis’s empty Bud-weiser, and gave it a shake. ‘Want another beer?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks.’

  She dipped into the foam cooler, got him a beer and even opened it for him. She raised her martini glass. ‘Cheers!’

  ‘Jeers,’ mumbled Lewis.

  ‘Hey, don’t be like that. Wayne’s a party animal. He happens to notice your lower lip dragging on the ground, he’s liable to stomp all over your face.’

  Lewis smiled weakly.

  ‘I’m kinda surprised he hasn’t already killed you,’ said April. ‘It’s a lucky thing for you that he’s so inner-directed.’ She cocked her head in a way that was supposed to make her look cute but not too bright, and gave him a daffy smile, so he’d know she wasn’t entirely serious. ‘Perk up, handsome. Enjoy yourself, why don’t ya?’

  Lewis was trying. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Wayne, how the biker had looked as he’d come stumbling up out of the ditch and over the fence and through the weedy backyard. Wayne had spent almost two hours hunting frogs. He was covered in mud and algae. The crossbow
was slung over his back. His sack, made from a leg cut from an old pair of pantyhose, bulged with perforated amphibians.

  Wayne emptied the sack onto the table. Here were froggies that would no more go a’courtin. Froggies that would go no more to the coconut show. Had Lewis a little more education, he’d have been reminded of the more horrific paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

  There was a cutting board, and a small, chrome-plated meat cleaver.

  Wayne tested the meat cleaver’s edge against the ball of his thumb, and easily drew blood. Satisfied, he tossed several corpses onto the cutting board, and began to hack away at them, separating the legs and piling them on a plate. He was, indeed, a natural-born butcher.

  Lewis’s stomach churned.

  April said, ‘Say, are those frogs bothering you?’

  He managed to nod weakly.

  ‘Well, why in heaven’s name didn’t you say so?’ She jumped out of her chair, snatched up the de-legged corpses and piled them high on the cutting board and picked up the board and carried it around to the side of the house. Lewis heard the clatter of garbage cans. She was back in jig time, briskly rubbing her hands. ‘That better?’

  From the barbecue, Wayne called out for Lewis to ‘C’mon over here and gimme a hand!’

  The frog’s legs were already done. The flesh was puffy and white, the stubs of shattered bones tantalizingly charred. Wayne flapped six huge T-bone steaks down on the grill.

  ‘That’s a lot of meat,’ observed Lewis.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ snarled Wayne. He lowered the barbecue’s domed lid, grabbed Lewis’s arm and led him back to the table.

  April wore impossibly tight-fitting gold Mylar shorts, a gold Mylar halter top, matching open-toed shoes with squared-off three-inch heels, a floppy-brimmed straw hat she’d painted gold. She’d used the same shiny gold paint on her toenails and fingernails, and she had a lovely tan, especially considering that summer was still just around the corner. She had prepared a dill-and-green-pepper dip that Wayne noisily approved of. Between the two of them, they made short work of the appetizers.

  His mouth full of hot frog, Wayne told Lewis to flip the T-bones.

  Lewis got up without thinking about it. He went over to the barbecue and lifted the lid and turned over the six massive steaks, one after another.

  The barbecue was marginally closer to the fence than the table. The electrified wire was about chest height. Wayne had his back to him. The wire might burn him, but it wouldn’t kill him. On the other hand, Wayne surely would kill him, sooner or later. Him or April. Even if he didn’t make it over the fence, the frizzy-haired woman would hear him screaming, call an ambulance. He’d be wounded, but saved. What was there to think about? Why was he loitering?

  No reason, really.

  Except he had a craving deep inside him for heroin, and a strong hunch April was going to shoot him up pretty soon.

  Not that he was an addict. Yet.

  He shut the barbecue’s lid and went back to the table and sat down. The light was fading fast, softening Wayne’s hard edges, lending April’s lightly tanned body a ghostly, luminous quality. Wayne loved to talk motorcycles, but April wasn’t interested, so Wayne started talking about his second-favourite subject, which was Wayne.

  He’d left home just short of age fourteen, via a stolen Ford that belonged to his mother. A bad start had led to a predictable middle. He confessed, as he poured an inch of Wild Turkey into his Harley-Davidson mug, that he was a recovered junkie and alcoholic. Well, who could blame him? He’d never had a chance. His father had bailed out of the relationship, which was criminally casual to begin with, about three cigarettes after the moment of conception. Wayne’s mother, not quite sixteen, was an unrepentant lush, full of unrepressed rage. She’d given him up for adoption, but there’d been no takers. He’d ended up at Granny’s. His presence was not appreciated.

  Now, he explained, as April served plates full of hot meat, baked potato, and Caesar salad, he worked hard at staying calm. Doing that Zen thing. His life was full. He collected Harleys, and enjoyed tinkering with them. He owned a large number of pistols and hunting rifles, and he was a damn fine shot.

  Wayne talked firearms right through his third steak and second baked potato. He chewed and swallowed, fixed his beady eyes on Lewis. Leaning over and jabbing him in the chest with his fork, not intending to wound or maim but simply emphasizing his point, he said, ‘And there’s something else you should know about me, Lewis.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Lewis, getting the words out just as Wayne blindsided him with the empty Wild Turkey bottle.

  ‘Tell you later, bud.’ Snickering, Wayne hoisted Lewis over his broad shoulder, and carried him into the house, through the kitchen and into the bedroom. April had tagged along, and was watching him closely, so Wayne gently lowered Lewis onto the bed, instead of dumping him like a sack of potatoes.

  Against his better judgement, Wayne hung around while April stripped Lewis naked.

  ‘He sure is skinny.’

  ‘Yes he is,’ said April, still caustic. ‘And if you keep whacking him unconscious at the dinner table, you can bet that he isn’t going to gain a lot of weight.’

  ‘Not that it makes any difference,’ Wayne pointed out.

  Ignoring him, April prepared a syringe, and slipped the needle into the big muscle in Lewis’s thigh. When she had finished administering the drug, she turned out the bedside light, plunging the room into darkness.

  Wayne said, ‘Hold on a minute.’ There was a furtive rustling sound and then the spark of a lighter. A long, thin blue line of hissing fire lit up Lewis’s supine body; Wayne had deployed his miniature propane burner.

  April took the torch from Wayne. Careful not to scorch him, she slowly traced the outline of Lewis’s body with the burner’s hissing, hot blue flame.

  ‘He’s beautiful, isn’t he?’

  Wayne wasn’t looking for an argument. Not tonight, after all the trouble Lester Rules had caused him. He said, ‘Yeah, sure.’

  Scathingly, April said,’Know something, Wayne? You’re fucking pathetic!’

  Wounded something awful, Wayne spent the next couple of hours in the attached garage, fooling around with his new Anniversary Edition 1200 c.c. Sportster. The bike only had a few hundred kilometres on it, looked and rode as if it had just come out of the showroom. Worse, he couldn’t even change the spark plugs, for fear of voiding the warranty. He turned on the radio and got a bundle of clean rags and a can of polish and went to work on the chromed spoke wheels.

  Not that he was complaining, but sometimes he wished April was a little less complicated. Trying to figure her out was about as easy as grabbing a handful of steam. He hoped she wasn’t getting emotionally involved with little ol’ Lewis. April was precious to him. He loved her almost as much as he loved life itself.

  Almost, but not quite.

  Chapter 14

  Inspector Homer Bradleys cramped but tidy office on the third floor of 312 Main had gradually become, during the course of more than ten years, a second home to him. Bradley was getting perilously close to the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five. Recently, increasingly personal photographs of family and friends had appeared on the walls, next to the faded rectangles of parchment that charted Bradley’s slow but inevitable progress through the ranks.

  But except for the expensive Haida-carved cedar humidor his cigar-loathing wife had given him as a farewell gift, following a particularly acrimonious divorce fuelled by particularly acrimonious divorce lawyers, Bradley’s cherrywood desk was all business.

  He signed a document with no hint of a flourish, pushed aside a berm of paperwork, capped his pen, and looked up.

  Willows and Parker sat with no hint of impatience in the two wooden chairs by the door. Not long ago, a year or two, maybe, there was no way Willows would have been able to sit down, stay still. Was Jack getting old? No, it was too soon, even for a cop. He did look tired, though. Bradley clipped his pen to his shirt pocket, leaned back in
his chair and, careful not to muss his thinning hair, clasped his hands behind his head.

  ‘Detectives Parker and Willows. If you’re here because you need somebody to co-sign your mortgage, forget it.’

  Parker cringed. She’d forgotten all about yesterday morning’s appointment with Mary Sanderson, the Bank of Montreal loans officer. Christ.

  Willows said, ‘I phoned Jerry Goldstein, called in some heavy markers.’ Goldstein was a VPD technician who’d been assigned to the E Division RCMP crime lab about a year earlier. The overtime was phenomenal. ‘Jerry analysed the trace heroin found in the hypos used by Lester Rules and Melvin Ladner, using the Heroin Signature Program. Preliminary results indicate the heroin originated in Nigeria.’

  Parker said, ‘The dope’s 66-per-cent pure.’

  Bradley lifted an eyebrow, registering his surprise. Street heroin was usually about 34-per-cent pure. No wonder so many junkies were going belly-up from overdoses.

  Willows, reading from his notes, said, ‘According to Jerry, the heroin’s been diluted with talc, which is nothing unusual. But there are also various other contaminants, including scopolamine, cocaine, and dextromethorphan.’

  Bradley nodded.

  Willows said, ‘It’s a toxic mix, Inspector. We’re not looking at accidental deaths. Lester Rules and Melvin Ladner were murdered. It’s probably safe to assume at least some of the other victims injected from the same batch.’

  ‘Jerry working on that?’

  Willows nodded. ‘Yeah, but it’s going to take time. Weeks, if we’re lucky.’

  Bradley said, ‘We had three deaths last night. A body turned up in an efficiency apartment on Comox about twenty minutes ago. Spears and Orwell are working on it. The victim’s name is Paul Ames. He worked for an advertising agency, was considered very conscientious, but didn’t show up for work yesterday, or answer his phone. His girlfriend works for the same company. She used her key, found Ames in the bathroom with a needle sticking out of his arm. Add’em up, if they’re all murders, we’re deep into double digits.’ Bradley reached for the phone. He said, ‘The chief’s going to want to organize a task force.’ He shuffled papers, selected a file from a stack of identical files, withdrew a single sheet of paper. ‘That’s a copy of the list of victims, up to but not including Ames. Keep it - you may want to revisit some of the crime scenes.’