An Ordinary Decent Criminal (31 page)

“No, wait. What if I promised to back off and leave you alone?”

The woman pursed her lips and listened.

“You already did that and you didn’t,” I said. “I’ve got no reason to believe you’ll be honest this time.”

Sandra spoke. “Okay, what if I promised? Not him, me?”

I switched aim at her and she didn’t flinch.

“You?”

Her voice was soft. “Yeah. Me.”

“Come here.”

She got up and walked over very slowly with her hands held out to either side. Robillard’s eyes flickered to the pistol on the table and back again and I addressed myself to him.

“Go ahead.”

He stopped looking and stared off somewhere above me. The woman stopped about three feet away with the arrow pointed squarely at her chest.

“You’ll promise?”

“Yes.”

She took a deep breath. “We’ll leave you and your wife and your son alone. We’ll stop helping Walsh. We’ll back off and let whatever happen naturally.”

It was almost funny.

“Why should I believe you?”

She shrugged and there was no humor in her eyes. “Because I promise. I didn’t know about whatever my husband sent at you. I would have stopped him. And I’ll promise.”

Robillard was getting angry. “Well, what about me? I already fucking promised.”

She glanced at him. I shook my head and answered. “Your promise is worth nothing. Hers might be.”

I looked her over again and saw a young, thin woman in mended blue jeans and a soft wool lumberjack shirt with a black and red checkered pattern. By no means would I have called her pretty but she did have character and her dark eyes were steady and unflinching.

“Can you control him?”

She glanced at him again and his face was turning purple with rage.

“Yes.”

“Or?”

“If he breaks my promise, then it’s my problem. May I?”

I nodded and she reached over and picked up the big pistol and held it loosely in her right hand while I lowered the bow and relaxed my arm. She turned to face Robillard and spoke slowly and carefully.

“Hon? You understand I gave my promise?”

“SHOOT HIM! Shoot him now, you dumb bitch!”

She went on as though he hadn’t said a word.

“I gave my promise and I won’t break it. Neither will you.”

He roared something inarticulate and started around the table towards me.

“Kill him, you dumb bitch, just kill him. Here, let me do it . . .”

He kept coming and his right hand came up and dipped into his back pocket. A glittering straight razor with a pearl handle appeared in his fist and he moved easily towards me on the balls of his feet. Like a man intent on his enjoyment, he was riveted on me and breathing heavily. He passed Sandra and she slipped aside to let him go with an apologetic glance at me.

“You’re . . .”

I never did find out what I was because she waited until his back was to her before she touched the barrel of the pistol to the back of his head.

“Put it down, hon.”

She waited and he did nothing, and she whispered, her mouth about six inches from his ear, “Or I will shoot you.”

I waited and he finally dropped the razor when she cocked the hammer.

“ ’Kay. Mr. Parker, you can leave.”

I walked over and pulled the arrow from the carbine and then put both away in the holder attached to the bow. For a moment I was at a loss for words and then she spoke. “I’ll deal with this.”

She touched the side of her husband’s face with her free hand but the gun stayed steady.

“My promise still stands.”

Robillard’s eyes were focused inward and his mouth opened and closed in confusion.

Behind him, Sandra kept her eyes veiled while the corners of her mouth turned down slightly as though at an unpleasant memory. When I spoke, his eyes caught mine and then the gaze slipped slickly away.

“Never doubted it for a minute.”

Oddly enough, I never had. Less oddly, I never heard of Robillard again.

The Civic ended up parked behind a strip club and I washed up in a ditch before taking a cab back home, where the cops and the firemen and all their superhuman crew were still working down the road. Claire took the bow and put it aside and then kissed me gently on the forehead before putting me to bed.

I dreamt of nothing and awoke to a large mug of tea sweetened with syrup. And another kiss.

“Long day?”

“Yeah. Longer. Longest.”

She brought Fred in and he slept beside me on the futon while I held my wife and let the tea work.

“So what time is it?”

“One.”

“ ’Kay. Gotta go to work.”

“I figured. Is it almost over?”

“Yeah.”

Claire watched while I dressed and then kissed me again before leaving.

In the rear-most booth of a Salisbury House diner, I lowered my head and exhaled bacon fumes and fried onion toxins. The coffee went down like a bomb and drove me into the bathroom and the cramps made me flee back onto the streets.

Walsh was in the Princess Street cop shop. That’s where he was stationed. That’s where he felt most secure. Surrounded by a blue wall.

That’s where he was weakest because he felt most secure.

Cop shop. Off to the side was the Winnipeg Police Force Credit Union. On another side was City Hall. Down the street was a big parking garage. Past that was the Chinese Cultural Centre.

Walsh was a senior officer and the police station had underground parking, but would he park there? I remembered the figures I’d read in the paper: there were a thousand plus cops in the city, at least three hundred stationed in this one building. How many patrol cars? Fifty, seventy-five?

They’d be underground along with the EMT vans, and the surveillance vehicles, and the motorcycles, and the supervisor SUVs, and the paddy wagons, and the identification wagons, and the mobile Breathalyzer vans, and the. And the. And the.

Not enough space left for a sergeant to park, no matter how senior.

So I climbed the low concrete wall into the parking lot and started to walk up and down the ranks of cars. Everywhere there were cameras, small suckers the size of pop cans with wide-angle lenses to cover every inch of the structure. Undoubtedly tied to monitors downstairs, where the clerk gave out parking tickets and took money. I ignored the cameras, trusted my hat and high collar, and kept walking.

On the third level, parked near a walkway to the police station, was Walsh’s car. Backed into a spot prominently labeled with a “Reserved” sign. Without a second glance, I walked until I reached the top of the structure, where I took the elevator down to the ground floor and out into the afternoon.

My head ached and I went in to the Chinese Cultural Centre to hide from the sun. And found myself staring into a glass case holding a terra cotta warrior from the Chin dynasty. A grim man with a sparse beard and mustache. A serious man.

According to the plaque on the wall, the statue was part of an army buried by the first Chin emperor to protect him in the afterlife. One member of an army of thousands of men and horses, all made out of clay. All the men with different expressions. Different faces.

A black-haired woman came up beside me. She was wearing the basic black blouse and skirt of a university student and carrying a backpack over one arm.

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair . . .”

She looked at my incurious face and blushed.

“ ‘Ozymandias.’ The poem. Magnificent statue, huh?”

“Gorgeous. Glorious.”

The figure was dressed in clay armor and his hand was held out in front of him with the grip closed around air.

“Why isn’t he carrying a weapon? He was a soldier, right?”

It was rhetorical but the girl answered anyway. “Oh. Originally they all were. The emperor had banned all weapons from the peasants so they wouldn’t rise up against him. When his son took over, the peasants revolted. They had no weapons so they dug down to the clay soldiers and took their weapons. And overthrew the son.”

She stared at the statue and bit her upper lip. I thought about what she’d said, about the arrogance that doomed the son. And then I left.

Outside, I ducked into an alley and changed hats and jackets before continuing. I had some useful stuff in my backpack, the Dremel with some spare heads, the binoculars, the electric toothbrush I’d modified, the cell phone, some spare hats, jackets, and sunglasses. They’d have to do. Pulling on latex gloves, I put the toothbrush in my pocket and checked building fronts and angles before walking up to the front door of a small, brownstone, office building. The doors were open and I walked in and past the receptionist, who was signing for a package.

She didn’t even notice me as I headed up the stairs, taking two at a time. On the third floor there were three businesses, an import/export business, a chiropractor, and an attorney. All busy. On the fourth floor there was a camp office, a travel agent, and a large bathroom at the front half of the building. Even luckier for me was the fact it had a window facing the parking structure about eighty yards away.

No one was in the bathroom so I took out the binoculars and focused them on Walsh’s car. It was like I was in it and I started to hum to myself, repeating the incorrect words to an old Eagles song as I watched.

Scanning down, I looked into the tiny kiosk, where a uniformed security guard sat in front of three monitors. The picture constantly changed and every little while someone drove out and needed change or a ticket stamped and the clerk moved. Other than that, he was pretty much an inert lump.

I focused on one monitor at a time. First the one on the right. I’d watched the picture change five times when someone opened the door and I had to let the binoculars thud onto my chest while I washed my gloved hands, the quickest way I knew to hide the latex. A nervous bit of peeing later and a man in a white smock left and I went back to spying. The cell phone had a clock, which told me that it was almost three.

The monitor switched and I saw Walsh’s car. In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen was written “Unit 250” and something else, and then the screen switched. Starting at quarter to three, a torrent of cars filled the parking lot and the passengers filed into the police station, the 3:00 to 11:00 shift coming to work. At five after three, a torrent of white men and women started to come out, the 7:00 to 3:00 shift leaving.

The monitor switched again and I saw Walsh’s car with Walsh getting into it and the same words on the screen: “Unit 250—1509.”

I put the binoculars away and took a walk through the rest of the building. On the eighth floor, I found an office in the back with no
lettering on the door. I knocked briskly to be heard over a class of tap dancers one floor down but no one answered. So I pulled out the toothbrush and pressed the head to the lock and flipped the bugger on, keeping my body close by to absorb the noise.

Bzzz.

It was quieter than that.

bzzz.

I’d modified the Plaque Buster 2000 by removing the plastic bristles and gluing a tiny disc onto the front plate. Into that disc I’d inserted fifteen tiny lengths of copper wire as thin as hair, each of different length and bent at different angles. Insert said copper wires into a lock and turn on the engine, which makes the wires oscillate, vibrate, and turn. These wires in the lock are now caressing the tiny little faces that make up the working surfaces of a lock. Give it a few seconds and by sheer chaos theory, the lock is opened and the wielder of the toothbrush is allowed entry.

Of course, the lock would be very scratched up but it would take someone who knew what he or she was doing with a magnifying glass to discover that.

The room beyond was small and dreary, filled with a dusty, oversized desk, armchairs, and a wooden filing cabinet. I relocked the door from the inside and walked to a closet in the far corner. It was the work of seconds to slip inside and crouch down on the floor with my knees drawn up to my chest. The door of the closet I left open an inch, both for air and because people are less likely to check a door if it’s open.

Then I settled down to wait.

At 6:30 a security guard made a very noisy patrol of the building, shouting as she went, “Closing down for the night. Everyone out.”

Thirty minutes after that, I stood up and did some quick calisthenics in the middle of the room to start my blood flowing. My eyes had adjusted to the half-light from the dying spring day and when I was feeling limber, I prepared to go to work. For the sake of silence, I pulled off my shoes and put them in the backpack before making my way downstairs to the lawyer’s office.

There was one more thing I needed.

With a jacket around the toothbrush, it was even quieter but the lock was better and it took a good six seconds to make my way into the lawyer’s office. It was even brighter in the office with light coming in the windows and from a computer screen with its screen saver on. I checked left and right for a security panel that would indicate a separate alarm system but saw nothing. Behind the receptionist’s desk there was a closet, a likely location for a panel, so I slipped over and checked but there was nothing and I relaxed.