Memory Lane

by Laurence Gough

  Memory Lane

  Laurence Gough

  © Laurence Gough 1996

  Laurence Gough has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1996 by McClelland & Stewart Inc.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Prologue

  Block by block, rancid orange streetlights began to flicker on all across the city of Vancouver. By seven o’clock it was full dark. A hard rain fell heavy as lead. Churlish gusts of wind whipped up the outer harbour, tore small chunks of cloud from the greater mass and hurled them venomously across the bloated sky.

  All over the city, the naked skeletons of murdered umbrellas rattled along the wind-swept pavement. Branches were violently pruned from the trees that lined the sidewalks and boulevards, and were flung heavily down upon passing cars and unwary pedestrians. Gutters and storm drains overflowed. Here and there, eighty-pound manhole covers stood on pedestals of frothy white water.

  Downed power lines hissed lethally at nearly every corner. Buses were stranded and a stray dog was, in a moment, terrified and then overcooked.

  Many square miles of jaundiced streetlights flickered and died. Tens of thousands of apartments were suddenly plunged into absolute darkness.

  A few wise souls had working flashlights. Most lit candles. Soon the frenzied scream of fire engines tolled across the city.

  The wind gained fury, as the night darkened. Huge trees were torn from the sodden, bubbling earth. Small houses were crushed.

  Someone remarked that it was almost like living in California.

  But this was the only smile in an otherwise grimly humourless day. The sky had been falling on the city and surrounding suburbs for nearly four weeks, twenty-seven days in all, pushing an entire month. People were getting rusty. You could drown simply by looking up.

  It seemed as if it might go on raining forever.

  Chapter 1

  Ross’s last night in the slammer was not much different from the almost two thousand nights that had gone before.

  No icing glistened on a goodbye cake.

  No candles wavered in the semi-darkness.

  No sparklers sparkled, nor were any auld lang syne type songs briskly sung.

  That night, the prison was about as quiet as a prison can get.

  Somewhere a toilet dripped. Somewhere else a dreamer moaned, and a snorer snored. Ross lay on his bunk, listening to a peculiar clicking sound that he had heard before, from time to time, but had never identified.

  It look him the better part of a slow-moving hour to work out that the peculiar clicking sound was a bored screw repeatedly loading and unloading the magazine of his semiauto.

  The dreamer screeched in pain. Demonic laughter echoed down the ward.

  Five years ago, his first night in the joint, two or three seconds after lights out, his coked-up biker cellmate, a fat creep named Al Weiller, had come at him in a snuffly, loving mood. Ross had said, “I thought you’d never ask,” then slipped in a thumb and popped out the biker’s left eye.

  Two weeks later, the same day Ross came blinking out of the hole, what the screws called IMU, the Intensive Management Unit, the biker came at him with all the finesse of a dump truck. He was armed with a knife. Not a cheapo sharpened spoon, either, but a genuine, made-in-China, stainless-steel buck knife with a blood groove and serrated upper edge. Ross took the blade deep into his arm, gritted his teeth, and reached up and popped out the eye again, slapped it hard as it swung against the bikers hairy cheek. Shrieking, the biker fell back in horror and disarray. Ross pulled the knife out of his arm. Blood spurted. He plunged the knife hilt-deep into the small bull’s-eye that was the biker’s heart. Then fainted dead away.

  The prison shrink, a guy named Reynolds, Doctor J. L. Reynolds, had eased forward on his chair as he put the crucial question to him, asked him what he was thinking about when he’d killed the biker.

  Ross was ready for that one. He said, “That it must be weird, looking in two completely different directions at the same time.”

  “With his eye dangling, you mean?” Reynolds chuckled. The shrink was about five foot six, maybe a hundred and eighty-pounds. His fading red hair was shot through with streaks of grey. His moustache and full beard always looked as if they’d just been trimmed. He wore a brown tweed sports jacket, pants that didn’t quite match, a white shirt that was carrying far too heavy a load. His head was a little too large for his body and his steel-rim glasses were a little too small for his face. His eyes were dark brown, not quite as lively as pancakes. He showed more gum than teeth whenever he smiled. The hair that spouted from his ears and nostrils had been clipped short, crewcut-style. His nails gleamed like the fenders of a showroom motorcycle. The tip of his nose was shaped like a miniature bum.

  He put his silk-stockinged feet up on his desk and delicately scratched behind his ear with the soft end of an unsharpened pencil.

  Finally Ross said, “Yeah, with his eye dangling. What is it… spiders? They can do that, can’t they? Look in different directions at once. Up here, down there.”

  “Were you frightened?”

  “Not at the time, in the heat of the moment.”

  “What about later?”

  “Did I have a post-traumatic reaction?” Ross wore prison jeans, a plain white T-shirt, hold the logo. His arms were bare, the skin of his forearm raised up in a permanent welt where the knife had cut him. He leaned forward in his chair. “I wasn’t frightened, Doc. I was terrified. Think what could’ve happened to me. That great big unimaginable thing called Death. Except I’d just killed somebody, and watched him die. So it was worse, in a way, ’cause death wasn’t quite so unimaginable, anymore.”

  “Did you, or rather, do you, feel any remorse?”

  Ross put his hand to his jaw and mulled that one over for a few seconds. Not that he needed the time; it was just that he wanted the shrink to know for certain that he wasn’t being spontaneously frivolous. Finally he said, “The guy was a couple of chromosomes short of human. I won’t say he actually deserved to die… but at the same time, why should I have allowed him to live?”

  Reynolds nodded. Demonstrating his mastery of body language, he showed Ross the palms of his hands. “Of course, it was a clear case of self-defence.”

  “That’s what they said at the inquest, Doc.”

  “What do you say, Ross?”

  “You’ve read my sheet. The only person I ever hurt was myself.”

  “And that poor fella in the bar.” Reynolds nudged Ross’s file folder with the heel of his shoe. Ross just sat there. Patience without limit. A con.

  But though he was as immobile as a life-size bronze statue of himself, Ross’s mind was hard at work, remembering everything in detail. The ‘poor’ fella in the bar, Barry Flax. Barry was a stockbroker. Worse, he was extraordinarily talent
ed, a genius of a stockbroker. The slick-faced prosecutor informed the gap-jawed jury that, in the twelve months leading up to the afternoon Ross had pounced on him, Barry Flax had grossed a cool five hundred and eighty grand. Think about it, ladies and gentlemen! More than half a million dollars! The fact that the hotshot broker had made his dough via insider trading and a trail of broken-hearted shareholders held no water. All that mattered was that he’d taken a licking and more or less completely stopped ticking. No longer was he a mover and a shaker, down there on the shady side of the street.

  Fair enough, Ross had thought at the time. But now he was five years older, five years wiser. Nobody deserved what he’d given Barry. Five years was getting off light. Despite the circumstances, he was repentant. Genuinely repentant.

  He’d hit Barry with a bar chair, whacked him into a kind of twilight zone between this life and the next. Barry had been in a coma six months, awakened to discover ‘Matlock’ was his favourite television program. In his spare moments, he kept himself busy trying to remember how to brush his teeth. He had, in other words, lost his lust for life. Ross had rendered him, now and perhaps forever, pretty much unemployable. His savings had dwindled to zero. The bank had repo’d his Corvette and False Creek waterfront condo. His gorgeous blonde girlfriend had stepped into a taxi, and vanished. The broker had been forced to move in with his mother, who wasn’t very goddamn happy about it.

  The lawyer pointed out that Ross was flat broke. He instructed the jury in the self-evident truth that the only way Ross could hope to pay for his sins was with the tattered remains of his miserable life.

  Ross forbade his lawyer to call as a defence witness the stripper and semi-pro hooker he’d believed himself to be defending from violent rape, and who was his beloved sister, Angela. She had visited him once, as he languished without bail in the city lockup, and made it clear to him that she couldn’t offer up any evidence on his behalf because if their mother, who had a faulty valve, ever found out how her beloved daughter made a living, it would kill her. During the past several years, Angela had mailed their mom stacks of documents indicating that she, Angela, was a small-town kindergarten teacher happily married to a dentist named Walther, and that she and Walther had three darling children, all girls.

  So Ross kept his mouth shut, and took the fall. He spent eleven months in jail, awaiting trial. He was given a ten-year term, but the time he’d already served was credited to his sentence, which left him with nine years and one month to go. Except for killing the biker, he was a model prisoner. His first parole hearing was a total flop but a great learning experience. The second time around, they green-lighted him for a cautious six months’ worth of weekend day passes. At the end of that time he went before the board again, barked on cue, balanced a red-and-blue ball on his nose, and managed to keep a straight face as he gave numbingly detailed answers to an apparently endless series of well-intentioned, increasingly hare-brained questions.

  And now, finally, it was almost time to go. All he had to do was survive this last session with Reynolds.

  The shrink said, “So tell me, what’re you going to do, out there?”

  “Get a job, I guess.”

  “Yes, of course. It’s a condition of your parole, isn’t it, that you make every reasonable effort to seek gainful employment. What kind of a job will you be looking for?”

  Ross shrugged. Wishing to be polite, he tried to think of something that was at least borderline believable. But his mind had suddenly gone blank, as if God had taken a swipe at him with a giant eraser. “Heart transplants?” he lamely offered.

  Reynolds vented a cynical chuckle. “You are still feeling guilty about Al. You have a strong need to be a healer, and that’s so nice. But hardly plausible.”

  The shrink mimed climbing swiftly down a ladder. Ross’s brow looked as if it had just been ploughed, as he struggled to understand what Reynolds meant, finally he got it. The shrink believed he was aiming too high.

  “Car wash?”

  Reynolds beamed. He said, “It’s worth a try. Hey, you never know.” He gestured broadly. “After all, we’re next-door-neighbours to the land of opportunity. Some of that wonderfulness is bound to rub off. Osmosis by proximity!”

  “Miracles can happen,” said Ross.

  “Now you’re talking!” The shrink’s face lit up, as if he’d just inhaled a double lungful of helium, touched a match. “By the way, there’s something you ought to know, buddy.”

  “What might that be?”

  “Your sister helped you with those assholes on the parole board. Went to work on me, too, though I blush to admit it.”

  Ross was astonished. “What’d she do?”

  Reynolds smiled with teeth that had benefited greatly from the generous terms of the correctional system’s dental plan. “The babe’s a hooker. What d’you think she did?”

  Ross had two options. Sit quietly or lunge headfirst into a canister of Mace. He had no doubt that a brace of screws lurked on the other side of the shrink’s office door, truncheons in hand, cauliflower ears pressed against the polished mahogany. Those sadistic bastards. They’d rather kick his ass than chow down on pint bottles of Wild Turkey and a plateful of Sara Lee. He sat very still. The decision to suck wind might have been a real toughie, once upon a time. But Angela had betrayed him. The five years he’d survived in the joint, in tandem with the countless terrible things he’d been forced to do — to himself and others — in order to accomplish that insignificant task, had turned Ross into as tough a cookie as he needed to be.

  He let his eyes go out of focus. His body went slack, as he assumed the posture of a man who was content to wait passively for someone else to tell him what to do.

  Reynolds fumbled under his jacket for his fat gold pen. He ceremoniously unscrewed the cap, opened a spiral-bound notebook with a gold-embossed blue suede cover. He hunted for a blank page, scratched down two or three words in blood-red ink. Then he put his pen down on his desk and fished out another exactly like it. Ross sat quietly. Reynolds’ breathing was laboured as he ponderously wrote two short paragraphs in green ink, blotted the page and shut the hook. By way of bringing this segment of the interview to a conclusion, he tilted sideways in his chair and loosed a firecracker-sharp fart.

  “Do you understand the significance of the green ink and the red ink?”

  “Green is good, red is bad?”

  Reynolds waggled the pen. A rainbow of gold flashed bright. “Green is go. Red is stop. Do you comprehend the difference?” Ross nodded.

  The shrink stroked his beard against the grain, and seemed to take small pleasure in the velocity with which the stiff hairs sprang back into place. “I hope you do. I wish it were so. But, off the record, I have serious doubts about your ability to reintegrate.”

  Ross felt as if someone had dropped a bowling ball into his unsuspecting crotch. He said, “Why is that, exactly?”

  “Your cellmate. Gary. Garret. You and he were real tight, weren’t you?”

  Ross nodded. “We got along okay.”

  “Refresh my memory, Ross. What was he in for?”

  “Armed robbery. Murder.”

  “The details, please.”

  “He and another guy, Billy, they robbed an armoured car. Shot a couple of guards…”

  “How much of the money was never recovered?”

  “Two hundred and twenty grand, if you can believe the cops.”

  “Can we believe the police, Ross?”

  “Always, Doctor Reynolds.”

  “You must have been very upset, when your good friend Garret died.”

  “Not as upset as he was.”

  “He knew he was dying, Ross. There are rumours circulating within these sturdy walls that, shortly before he passed away, he told you what happened to the loot. Any truth to those rumours?”

  Ross shook his head. For emphasis, he said, “Nope” Then he shook his head again.

  “You’re sure about that? Garret didn’t have any relatives, not eve
n a mother. Nobody had visited him except his girlfriend, for a while, and his lawyer, from time to time. You two guys were like brothers. He was dying, and you were up for parole. He left almost everything he owned to you. Doesn’t it make sense that he’d tell you where he stashed the two hundred grand?”

  “Yeah, I thought so.”

  Reynolds poked the blunt end of the pen into his hairy ear. “But he didn’t agree?”

  “There was his girlfriend. Shannon. If anybody got the cash, probably it was her. He really loved her. Showed me pictures, the letters she wrote…”

  Reynolds waved all of that away. “We monitored the relationship, such as it was. And we’ve already talked to her. Many times. She has no idea what happened to the money. So, that leaves you.”

  “Garret didn’t believe he was going to die,” said Ross. “He was touched by the Lord, towards the end. He believed his bacon was going to be saved by no less an authority figure than God Himself.”

  Reynolds nodded thoughtfully. He removed the pen from his ear, wiped away an apparently sticky substance, slipped the pen into his pocket. “Didn’t work out that way, did it?”

  “Maybe the line was busy,” said Ross. But Reynolds was looking out his office window. It was as if the shrink had given up on Ross, lost interest. Ross couldn’t blame him. What were the chances that he’d successfully integrate into society, become one of a billion cheerful little cogs?

  Not too good, really.

  He leaned back in his chair. Reynolds’ office was military-sparse. It was one of those places where there was a place for everything and everything had its place. Or was summarily executed, or got the hell out. Ross finally noticed that the ceiling was papered from wall to wall with thousands of large-denomination bills. A few bills came unstuck and drifted erratically down. Soon there was a blizzard. By the time Reynolds finally let him go he had to wade through drifts of cash that were crotch-deep, to get to the door.

  Or maybe he was dreaming again, as his last night in the slammer drifted slowly by.