Headhunter (22 page)

Follow That Man

12:17 p.m.

Corporal William Tipple was elated.

He had just returned from an overnight hike in the local North Shore mountains to find a message requesting that he call either Rick Scarlett or Katherine Spann at Headhunter Headquarters concerning John Lincoln Hardy. There was an even more important message, however, from Inspector Jack MacDougall ordering him to suspend whatever Commercial Crime investigation he was presently embarked upon and immediately prepare a complete set of wiretap transcripts on Steve Rackstraw. And then to top it off, a follow-up request had come from Sergeant Rodale on behalf of Scarlett and Spann asking for those same taps.

Tipple had begun surveillance of Rackstraw because of possible land transaction scams. Soon the case had expanded to include alleged music industry kickbacks and perhaps a prostitution ring. But that was all pretty dry stuff compared to a homicidal nut loose in a terrified city. Now fate it seems had intervened to steer the course of his investigation toward the Headhunter murders.

Corporal William Tipple was elated because he too was involved.

He had his foot in the door.

12:42 p.m.

Junk recognizes no holidays, no break in the daily routine. For in the world of the junkie, life is measured out in eye-droppers full of heroin solution. To the body cells of the junkie, life is but a continual pulse of shrinking and growing and shrinking again, the never-ending cycle of shot-need for every shot-completed. Junk is a prison guard: junk controls the cells.

Per capita, Vancouver has the highest percentage of junkies in all of North America.

Not so many years ago the wise ones who sit on Vancouver City Council decided to close off Granville Street, the town's main drag, and turn it into a mall. A solid concrete mall stretching for many blocks.

Now the city fathers and mothers have never been known for their musical taste, and five'll get you ten that none of them listen to the Rolling Stones. For it is rumored that they prefer instead the sort of classical sound that one can hear played again and again and again in any high-rise elevator. Of course if only they had listened to
Exile On Main Street
they might have understood a bit about the junkie's frame of mind when it comes to environment. And if they had really listened, well then they'd never have built that mall. And Vancouver would not now have for its main thoroughfare a slab of concrete with down its center a single weaving bus lane just about as straight as the snakes that curve down the inner aspect of every junkie's elbow.

Vancouver can thank its Council for creating an instant slum.

The RCMP ghost car came slowly down the mall.

From the window on the passenger's side Katherine Spann peered out through a light gray mist of rain to probe the face in each doorway.

She dismissed the woman with deep-sea eyes who seemed to stare out vaguely as if through a murky medium that she carried around with her.

She turned from the boy who jerked about like a marionette on a string, his slack jaw making him look like a ventriloquist's dummy.

She let the man go who was dressed in women's clothing and whose fleshless hips twitched as if to say, "You should see me in the nude."

She cast aside the peripheral dopers, the ones high on angel dust or benzedrine or knocked out of their skulls on goofballs.

She paid no attention to the fellow who staggered out of an alley with his face jerking at intervals like dead flesh coming alive, who fell down like some galvanized corpse with a toothless mouth pursed to give the impression that it had been sewn together with thread, his limp arm flopping in the gutter while a drop of blood bubbled up at the crease of his inner elbow.

For she had no interest in any of the regular junktown people today. Today she was searching for either the Indian or John Lincoln Hardy.

"Nothing here," Spann said. "Let's go back to Gastown."

It was as the ghost car entered Gastown's Maple Tree Square that afternoon—with its quaint narrow alleys and antique restaurants and liberal lawyers' offices—that Katherine Spann yelled suddenly: "Turn right. Rick! It's him!"

The Indian was running before they were even out of the car.

He had been walking on the north side of the square about five feet away from Gassy Jack's statue when the screech of tires on pavement told him: "Run, you fucker, run."

He ran.

By the time Rick Scarlett's feet hit the cobblestone pavement the Indian was climbing a wire-mesh fence at the end of Carrall Street and making for the water. The fence was eight feet high and it separated the City of Vancouver from the CPR lands that ran along the harbor. For one brief moment the cop caught a glimpse of the Indian outlined against the snowy ski-fields of Grouse Mountain across the Inlet, then the man vaulted the fence and dropped like a cat to make his way in leaps and bounds across the rain-slick railway tracks. Fifteen feet behind him, Scarlett hit the wire fence at the exact same moment as Spann.

They both scrambled and clawed with hands and feet to swing up and over the top. As he crested the barrier, Scarlett's uniform caught on a wire barb and ripped from his crotch to his knee. He ignored the fact and was running the second his shoes touched the ground.

"Watch out for the train!" Spann yelled, as she too completed the leap. She had just seen the Indian ahead of them throw himself under a boxcar.

Not a second later, with an ear-splitting slam, a CPR diesel engine hit the car next to the boxcar as it shunted the rolling stock together. With the grate of steel on steel the boxcar lurched forward. Luckily for him, the Indian was lying parallel to the tracks.

The instant the cars slowed down enough, the fugitive— seeing a break—rolled out between the moving front and back wheels of one of the boxcars to gain the other side. His left leg missed being pulverized by a distance of one foot. Then he was up and running.

Scarlett grabbed the ladder of a tanker and swung himself onboard. Within five seconds he had climbed up to the loading spout. It took one more second to slip over the top of the cylindrical tank. Then less than a second to let go and drop down to the ground.

He landed ten feet down the track from where he had climbed on.

His right foot slipped on the gore of a seagull squashed by one of the trains and he fell down on his face.

In the meantime Spann—playing it safe—had run to the right and around behind the shunting CPR engine. There was another train beyond but it was standing still. Twenty-five feet off to her left she saw Scarlett down on the ground.

On the far side of the second train lay a road that ran parallel to the harbor. It was the woman's guess that the Indian had made for it, turned left, and was now running west toward the CPR station. To turn right would take him into the hands of the National Harbors Board Police.

By the time Rick Scarlett had caught his breath and was struggling up to one knee, Spann had scaled the side of the second train and dropped down on the ground beyond. She ran across an old cobble road to a four-foot gravel bank. As she crested the embankment the peaks of the North Shore Mountains loomed up in front of her. Today the summits were cloaked with cloud and rain pockmarked the choppy purple waters below. She turned to her left and began to head for the office buildings of the city core that jut up out of the ground a quarter-mile away. The fleet-footed Indian was already halfway there.

Spann picked up the chase.

The driver of the CPR engine was mildly surprised when Rick Scarlett burst into his cab. Were it not for the uniform he would have reached for a wrench. Milt Molesworth was getting on in age but he still had a memory like a trap. Back in the 1950s he had seen the very same situation that he was now living on TV in the program
Follow That Man.
He truly expected this tattered Mountie to throw out one arm and shout those words.

Scarlett disappointed him.

"Let's move! Fast!" he yelled, pointing toward the station.

Molesworth replied, "You're the boss," as he reached for the throttle. After thirty-five years of shunting boxcars it was nice to have some action.

With a lurch, the engine moved forward.

As the diesel ran parallel to the stationary train on the right, Scarlett craned his neck for a look between each join of the cars. At one point he saw Katherine Spann running and wildly pumping her arms. Through the gap at another connection he saw tugboats chugging out of the harbor as the Seabus came in to dock. Then at yet a third point he caught a glimpse of the Indian frantically pulling at a door. The door was on the lowest level of the Seabus terminal and it was obviously locked.

"Stop this thing!" Scarlett ordered as the Indian once more took off running.

"You're the boss," Milt said, and he jammed on the brake.

With a hump and then a hiss the engine stopped moving.

Scarlett jumped down and picked up on the chase. As he came around the western end of the stationary train, the wind and rain off the water slammed into his face. Katherine Spann shot by in front of him. To his left the Indian was running beneath the rampway that led up to Burrard Street, to the Marine Building and to the ritzy Vancouver Club. A man at the club window stared out with a bemused look as he sipped his Beefeater gin.

Just as Spann was about to collar the fugitive man, he threw himself into an opening under the ramp where wooden pilings rose out of the sea to give the structure support. As Scarlett ran up, the Indian was starting to shinny along a crossbeam soaked with creosote.

"Damn!" Spann said as her grip closed on empty air. Then she crawled in after him.

It was dark under the ramp. For here was a murky claustrophobic space where water dripped down from holes worn in the asphalt above and the sea slapped angrily against the barnacle-encrusted old wooden pilings below. The air stank of rotting fish and sea salt and creosote oil carried up on the ocean spray tossed off by the lurching waves. From several of the crossbeams water rats sniffed at the intruders and blinked their seedy eyes. Both the Indian and Katherine Spann inched slowly forward. There was seven feet between them.

Ahead of the fugitive there was a second opening. Through it he could see the pier that jutted out into the sea. That opening and freedom was only five feet away. Then four. Then three. Then two. Then Rick Scarlett jumped down from the ramp above to land on the pier and stick his right hand through the opening.

"Police," Scarlett said quietly from behind the gun in his fist.

In resignation, the Indian stopped creeping along the beam.

Spann closed the gap between them and reached out to grasp his foot. Suddenly a violent kick knocked her hand away. Then with a shove the cornered man pushed himself off from his perch and tumbled down into the water. The splash from his body hitting the sea drenched the woman above.

"Damn!" Spann said again, filling her lungs with air and plunging in after him.

Up on the pier Rick Scarlett stood and waited for both heads to surface. It was certainly not his intention to join these midday swimmers, preferring instead to wait up top where it was high and dry. Then abruptly it occurred to him that Spann would make the collar. That she would get first credit if something big came out of this
Good God!
Scarlett thought.
She'd one-up me again.

"Damn!" the man said aloud, then he too crawled in under the pier and tumbled into the water.

His timing was perfect. For no sooner had the Indian surfaced to get a breath of air than Scarlett landed squarely on him with his uniform boots. The Indian went back under. Crushed between the descending cop and the slope of the submerged shore he crumpled into a ball and choked out the last of his oxygen. By the time that he surfaced again, he was sputtering, wheezing and gasping. The man was in no condition to fight as they dragged him out of the water.

Scarlett snapped on the cuffs as Spann frisked him down.

"Jesus, Blondie!" the Indian exclaimed, recognizing the woman. "I never made you for a narc!"

"It's a world of deceit," Spann said, and she tugged off one of his boots. When she turned it upside down a red balloon fell out.

"You dropped something," she said, holding out the heroin bundle.

"I never seen it before. You must have planted it on me."

Scarlett unsnapped a button at the man's right wrist and yanked his shirtsleeve up to the elbow. The needle tracks exposed were more than seven inches long. The veins had long since disappeared, retreating down toward the bone to escape the incessant probe of a needle.

"I want a lawyer," the Indian said. And then he started to shiver.

"I want information," Katherine Spann said in reply.

As she spoke she watched the handcuffed man. His pupils were not pinned so he hadn't recently fixed. His body was beginning to move in jerks as if his clothes were made of poison ivy. She knew that the feel of water on skin was unpleasant to an addict, that this was why junkies were reluctant to take a bath. The Indian's nose was starting to run and he was beginning to sweat despite the chill in the air. She concluded that the man's junk-clock was running down. And that soon it would stop.

All cops know that addicts have a fear of time. For time leaves them jerking with no place to go. The only escape from external time is another stab of the needle.

Now all we do is wait,
she thought, shivering herself.

"I'm freezing," Scarlett said. "Let's take this guy downtown."

The Indian shivered and shook, his spasms slipping out of control. "Oh, my skin," he whispered.

Spann nonchalantly took a look at her watch, wondering in her mind if the water had ruined it. "I'm waiting," she said.

"F-f-f-fuck you!" But no sooner had the man spoken than a stomach cramp doubled him up.

"Make it easy for yourself. First tell us your name."

The Indian said nothing.

"Tell me what I want and I promise I'll let you fix."

"Y-y-yeah sure," the man said. "It's a w-w-world of fuckin' deceit."