Shutterbug

by Laurence Gough

  Now the Humvee was behind him, trailing by less than a block, its lights dead-centre in his rearview mirror.

  Parker was in constant contact with the dispatcher. The number of marked units tailing them on a parallel course, three blocks distant on either side, had grown to more than a dozen.

  Willows was driving at a steady ten kilometres an hour above the speed limit. The Humvee had been keeping pace. At Granville, Willows eased into the left-turn lane. The light was red, and there was nothing he could do about it. He watched the Humvee grow larger in the rearview mirror. If Harvey pulled up alongside the unmarked Ford, there was every chance he’d recognize the car and its occupants. Willows had made a crucial mistake. Anticipating the red light, he should have made a right on Granville, clearing the intersection before the Humvee overtook him.

  The Humvee was half a block away now, and closing fast. Parker slouched down low in the seat and Willows made a pretence of enjoying the view of the city. He’d blown the pursuit. He felt like an idiot, and for good reason. It occurred to him, too late, to get out of the left-turn lane, reposition the Ford so there was at least a chance Harvey would pull up behind him.

  The Humvee filled his rearview mirror.

  He heard the drone of its tires on asphalt, and then the fast-paced blare of salsa music, as Harvey pulled past them and cruised through the red.

  Parker was laughing hysterically. She and Willows both holstered their Glocks.

  The light turned green. An unmarked vice-squad Chevrolet joined the hunt. The drug squad chipped in with a Mercedes that had recently been seized under the ‘profits of crime’ law, from a convicted marijuana grower. The dispatcher informed Parker that the first and second units of the Emergency Response Team had rolled, were racing across the city, and would soon join the pursuit.

  The ERT cowboys were hot to take the Humvee down now.

  Willows emphatically disagreed. He wanted to tail Harvey all the way to his destination, believing the glitter twins planned to kill whoever had been knocking off Jake’s network of dealers. Radio traffic was chaotic, and rapidly getting worse.

  Willows had made the left off Granville and now he made a right on Eighth Avenue, and accelerated hard. He lit up his fireball, but didn’t use his siren. These were short blocks. He slowed at the intersections of Hemlock, Birch, and Alder. His blood was up, flushed with adrenalin. His heart rate was in the high one-twenties, and climbing. His vision was pinpoint sharp. Colours were brilliant.

  The conflicting multitude of sounds engendered by a highspeed, multi-vehicle collision came to him with such crystal-clear fidelity that it was as if he’d been curled up in the heart of the accident.

  Parker said, ‘What was that!’

  It would be some time before they were able to fill in the details. Harvey had forgotten all his driver training. He’d driven up to Twelfth Avenue, turned left, and made a spontaneous and highly illegal U-turn, causing a rusty Saab stuffed with overworked nurses to drive head-on into a speeding Bentley driven by an exhausted emergency-room surgeon. Harvey cut sharply across a Vancouver General Hospital staff parking lot, and used the Humvee’s stump-pulling torque, four-wheel drive, and vastly superior ground clearance to exit the lot. His routine evasive tactics were devastatingly effective. The drug squad’s effete Mercedes had been trapped in the cul-de-sac.

  The vice squad’s Chevy hadn’t done much better. They’d followed at what they hoped was a discreet distance as Harvey barrelled down one alley after another, seemingly at random. He’d braked to an abrupt stop in mid-block, squared the Humvee up to a tall wooden fence topped off with tight coils of razorwire, and hit the gas.

  The fence had been built with a view to discouraging two-hundred-pound burglars. The Humvee’s dry weight was a little over two-and-one-half tons. The vehicle effortlessly churned the fence to splinters. An obstinate or slow or just plain stupid guard dog, an outsized rottweiler, had the bad luck to be chained to a post just inside the fence, in the span of dead ground behind the building. The snarling rottie stood its ground. The Humvee flattened it almost as effortlessly as it had knocked over the fence.

  The twins’ manic laughter could easily be heard over the sounds of destruction, salsa music, and the bitter howling of a dog that had just learned it wasn’t king of the world.

  Harvey pointed the vehicle towards the narrow space between two cinderblock buildings. The Humvee was inches wider than the gap between the buildings, so Harvey had to drive through with his offside wheels on the ground and the other wheels up on the wall of one of the buildings. The irritated vice-squad cops estimated the Humvee must have been tilted at a thirty-degree angle, minimum, as it passed between the two cinderblock walls. Dejected and dispirited, they hadn’t even bothered to try to emulate him. Nor could they try an alternate route. The rottweiler, down but not out, had charged the Chevy and chomped down hard, puncturing a tire.

  Meanwhile, marked patrol cars established a perimeter through which the Humvee could not pass undetected. Willows and Parker and three unmarked cars that had recently joined the hunt continued to search frantically for the vehicle.

  The thing was fifteen feet long and seven feet wide, and weighed five thousand two hundred pounds.

  Where in hell could it have gone?

  Chapter 31

  The mirror twins, Dave and Danny, were in a sparkly, diamondhunting mood. They tumbled out of the Humvee the instant the massive vehicle skidded to a stop.

  Dave, still chortling, pointed his MAC-10 machine gun at Harvey and yelled, ‘You the man!’

  ‘Gotta be a real popular ride at Disneyland, baby!’ shouted Danny.

  ‘He’s more fun than them damn electric race cars!’ yelled Dave.

  ‘And that’s no lie!’ the twins cried out together.

  Harvey was astounded. The twins were not normally loquacious. In all the time he’d known them - almost six months - he’d never before heard either twin string more than a few words together, much less attempt a compound sentence.

  But there was something else bothering him. Both twins were, as usual, equally keen to get the job done. But Danny was suddenly almost as serious as a dentist in the middle of a self-diagnosed root canal, while Dave acted happier than a recently gathered bucketful of red-tide clams. In the past, the twins had always functioned in perfect unison, rather like a duo of synchronized swimmers, no matter how trivial or commonplace their actions.

  Harvey would never forget his first meal with them. Watching them eat spaghetti and meatballs together, the complicated twist and flip of pasta around their forks, the rhythmic and perfectly sequential rise and fall of identical jaws, the flash of cutlery, the blade-angle as knives sliced into meatballs, the patting of lips with red-stained napkins, the shift of elbows, the hasty gulps of wine and perfectly timed, tablecloth-rippling burps and belches. It was a spectacle, for sure.

  Harvey hadn’t touched his own meal. He’d sat there, stunned, while the twins cleaned their plates at breakneck pace, racing to a photo finish that had no losers.

  Man, they were as fully synchronized as a pair of lungs.

  It was one of the strangest experiences of his life, but just another day in the life, as far as the twins were concerned.

  He said, ‘Danny, you okay?’

  ‘Yeah, fine,’ said Danny tersely.

  Dave, on the other hand, said nothing. Oddly, the twins seemed unaware of the difference in their moods.

  Harvey said, ‘I’ll be right here, okay?’

  ‘Keep the engine running.’

  Harvey nodded. He checked the gas gauge. The Humvee’s tank was more full than empty. He wished he felt the same way about himself. He wondered if he should get on the phone to Marty, tell him the twins were acting weird. Acting weird in an unusual way. Acting weirder. No matter how he phrased it, his complaint seemed to lack substance. This worried him. The last thing he wanted to do was confirm Marty’s opinion of him - that scrubbing Jake’s fleet of vehicles was about all he was good for. H
is ambition, no matter what Marty thought of him, was to be a thug like Dave and Danny. Well, similar to Dave and Danny. Pack a weapon, all that.

  Dave racked the slide on his MAC-IO. The MAC was ugly as a bulldog, but the thing sprayed bullets at an amazing rate. It was ideal in close-quarter situations, if you weren’t too concerned about taking prisoners.

  Danny laid two fat, artistically wavering lines of cocaine across the Humvee’s hood. He and his identical brother stood on opposite sides of the vehicle, facing each other. At a signal visible only to them, they leaned forward, and started snorting.

  Dave finished first, by several seconds. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, sneezed a couple of times, brushed a spray of white powder from the lapel of his suit, and started up the sidewalk to Rodney McGuire’s condo.

  Danny said, ‘Hey, wait a minute!’

  ‘No way, man! Get crackin’, or get left behind!’

  ‘Fuck you!’

  ‘No, fuck yow!’

  *

  Inside the apartment, April was counting money. Rodney McGuire had stuffed his safe with one-hundred-dollar bills, fifty bills to the bound packet. The math was simple, or would have been, if April hadn’t insisted on tearing apart the packets and counting the individual bills. She sat on the carpet next to McGuire, who was still unconscious and showed no signs of reviving. As she tore apart packet after packet, McGuire was slowly buried in money.

  Wayne surreptitiously loaded a new film cartridge into his trusty Polaroid. April told him, if he tried to take her picture with that thing, he’d regret it for the rest of his extremely abbreviated life.

  Point taken.

  Wayne asked Lewis how he was doing. Lewis sat there on the sofa with his arms by his sides. His mouth hung open, but his eyes were slitted like a dozing cat’s. Wayne hunkered down beside him. He took a tiny Mag-Lite from his pocket and shone the beam into Lewis’s eye. Lewis turned his head away. His movements were as ponderous as those of a heavily narcotized elephant. He shut his mouth, but it immediately fell open again. A line of drool free-fell to his lap.

  Wayne said, ‘I’m gonna take another look around, see what I can see.’

  April told him to please shut up, she was counting.

  Wayne went back into the bathroom, to empty his bladder. He was a little uncomfortable, with Marilyn standing there looking at him, a big smile on her face. She was only a piece of painted cardboard, but she sure looked real. He stood with his back to her for a long time, before he was able to urinate, and when he was done he was careful to zip up before he turned around.

  She was still watching him. Knowing what was on her pretty little mind, he went over to the double sink, ran the water until it was hot, and thoroughly washed his latex-gloved hands.

  In the bedroom closet, he found a well-oiled bicycle pump, and eleven plain brown cardboard boxes, each of which contained a Marilyn identical to the model he’d already met. He carried the boxes over to the bed and sat down, opened one up, and read the accompanying instruction booklet.

  The Marilyns were the deluxe, fully functional model. Wayne was delighted to learn they came with washable, fluffy soft pubic hair, a long-lasting synthetic wig, Qwik-Patch® kit, and a ‘Saucy Winking Device.’ He learned that Marilyn’s body was made of the same durable miracle fabrics used in the company’s line of virtually indestructible inflatable pool toys, and was guaranteed for thirty nights from time of purchase.

  Wayne lit a Marlboro. He fetched the bicycle pump from the closet and returned to the bed.

  Marilyn was wrapped in flimsy yellow tissue paper. He tore the paper aside and saw she was folded neatly as a brand-new shirt, face up. Her flat blue eyes stared up at him. How long had she been in that box? Where had she come from?

  Wayne checked the instruction booklet. Taiwan. God, such a long journey!

  If she could think, what would she be thinking?

  The pump was equipped with a hollow needle with a blunt tip, suitable for inflating beach balls, etcetera.

  Wayne unfolded Marilyn and laid her down on the bed. She had razor-sharp creases at her knees and crotch, just below her breasts, and midway up her shapely neck. Could he iron them out?

  Unlikely, not to mention risky. He’d never forgive himself, if he melted her.

  He perused the booklet’s fine print. The topic of crease lines was not covered, or even mentioned.

  The bike pump’s needle was meant to be inserted into a reinforced hole hidden in Marilyn’s belly button.

  How clever.

  Lubricate before insertion, solemnly advised the instructions, on page thirty-seven.

  Wayne did as he’d been told. He laboured over Marilyn for a solid ten minutes, pumping rhythmically away, revelling in the sight of her body slowly acquiring that vitally important third dimension.

  He had the needle in her, and he was bringing her to life. What a nice change from all his previous work. Was it too much to think that he was godlike, in a strange, admittedly frivolous and insignificant way?

  Absolutely. But that in no way detracted from the thrill of creation.

  He was a sculptor, working in plastics and compressed air.

  Marilyn’s hips swelled.

  Her breasts plumped up nicely.

  Her fingers assumed their natural shape one after the other, until even her opposable thumb seemed operational.

  Wayne was a little disappointed to notice that the manufacturer had shaved a few bucks off his costs by neglecting to give her individual toes. Her feet, in fact, were merely painted on.

  As were her eyes, but since they were so lifelike and twinkly, it didn’t really matter.

  Wayne recalled the curious boast about a ‘Saucy Winking Device.’ He examined her more closely, and found that her left eye was equipped with a folding eyelid. Push it down, voila, Marilyn was winking at him. Winking saucily! He pushed the eyelid up and down several times, and then resumed pumping away at her.

  He wanted to get the pressure, the critical measurement of pounds-per-square-inch, exactly right. He wanted his special Marilyn to be perfect. Under his gentle-yet-eager hands she blossomed, pretty as a time-lapsed rose. Soon enough, she was as flawless as a human-shaped balloon can be.

  Judicious use of a tube of contact cement (provided) secured her pubic thatch. Ditto her wig.

  Practice makes perfect. The second through eleventh Marilyns were assembled with amazing speed. Wayne couldn’t stop smiling. The bedroom was full of them. They lay everywhere, pointed in all directions, faceup and facedown, immodest as immodest can be.

  Wayne gently gathered up his flock and herded them, jostling and bumping convivially against each other, out of the bedroom and down the hallway towards the living room. The lead Marilyns behaved almost as if they had minds of their own, toppling over in slow motion, ricochetting off the walls, drifting lackadaisically away from the mob. Their behaviour was remarkably similar to that of deep-space astronauts. Counting the one in the living room, he had an even dozen. Enough for a baseball team, and more.

  *

  Danny and Dave took the steps up to the condo’s cramped little porch one step at a time. Harvey had already cased the joint. He had a tool that resembled a miniature telescope, which he’d pressed tightly against Rodney McGuire’s front door’s spyhole. The device reversed the spyhole’s magnification, giving Harvey a crystal-clear fish-eye view of the apartment’s interior.

  It hadn’t taken Harvey long to catch an eyeful of Rodney, who lay flat on his back on the carpet, apparently unconscious. Or dead. A woman straddled Rodney. She had her back to the door but was plainly armed with a loaded syringe, which she carried at port arms. Then, all of a sudden, there were all these weird pneumatic women…

  Danny turned to his sibling. ‘All set?’

  ‘All set, bro.’

  Below them and to their right, the city glittered with all the bright promise of a handful of sequins.

  ‘Nice view’

  ‘If you like views.’

/>   Their identical heads swivelled to look down at the Humvee. Harvey, back in the van, had turned on the dome light and was reading a magazine.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m ready.’

  Dave’s hand came up to his ear. He counted off his three stud diamonds, even as Danny took a fraction of a second longer to tally up his four. Dave wondered if, by the time he reached fifty, he’d have killed so many people that he wouldn’t have any room left on his ears. What would he do then?’

  ‘Danny.’

  ‘Right here, Dave.’

  ‘What’re we gonna do if we run out of space on our ears, we got no more room for diamonds? We gotta stop killing people? I mean, it’s a tradition.’

  Danny frowned. It was a darn good question. He stood there by the door, facing slightly towards the street, and the killer view of the city. The solution came to him in a flash.

  ‘The ears get crowded, what we do, we make one ruby the equal of five diamonds.’

  ‘Take out five diamonds, stick in one ruby.’

  ‘Or it could be a sapphire, or whatever.’

  ‘An emerald…

  Danny shook his head. ‘Nah, emeralds are too faggy.’

  ‘What?’ Dave laughed, not believing what he was hearing. ‘Too faggy? Is that what you said, too faggy?’

  ‘You got a problem with that?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe? What’s maybe? Maybe’s nothing. No thing. So what’s it gonna be, a yes or a no?’

  ‘It’s gonna be a maybe, that’s what it’s gonna be. I reserve my right to reserve my decision. This is a free country, ain’t it?’

  ‘Where’d you get that idea?’

  Dave shifted his MAC-IO to his left hand and reached out and gave his brother a hard push.

  Danny pushed back.

  Dave slapped his face.

  Danny kicked his brother in the shin.

  The twins were starting to get into it, the bickering segueing into vicious insults, the kicks and punches coming harder and faster as they pumped themselves up for the slaughter that surely, they hoped, lay on the other side of the condo’s door. Dave smacked Danny on the jaw, and in turn received a twisting blow to the kidneys that doubled him over and left him gasping.