Slow Recoil (21 page)

He jumped in the car, moved it across the street to the visitor parking, then he waited just long enough for her to disappear inside the building. He came up right behind her. She was standing at the door to Fielding's apartment, hesitating because it was slightly ajar. He had hoped, of course, that she would slip inside, but he was prepared to adapt. He came up behind her. She turned. The look on her face seemed to tell him that she knew what was to come. In her eyes he saw confusion and sadness, anger and regret and sorrow—the eyes of his mother when he'd left for war in the hills…

Of course, the operation was not ad-hoc, as Krupps used to say, his old squad leader with the university education in literature, throwing these expensive words and Rimbaud and Kipling quotes out during the heat of a firefight. Nothing Kadro did was ad-hoc, not if time and circumstance permitted. Earlier he had cased this building sufficiently to understand the landscape, the possibilities. He hugged the side of the building, bricks to his cheek. At the laundry room door he pulled a sample-size of black spray paint from his coat pocket, reached up and coated the video camera that provided roughly, in his estimates, a forty-degree scan from its position.

From there it had been tactical, the collateral damage of battle. His hands moved and his legs moved, and he was bent at the waist, the trees and the fields and the mud at his feet and the stink of death and gun powder, and he heard Krupps screaming at him to hurry up, hurry up, and he pressed and squeezed, then she was limp and he was done, Donia was done. She was gone.

He set her gently on the carpet. His breath came fast and short.

Her eyes staring, lifeless grey.

How the eyes of the dead saw everything and nothing all at once.

There was a long moment wherein he could hear nothing but the rush of blood in his ears as it was during a firefight, and he stood there in the school teacher's room with his mind playing tricks—like where was Krupps, where were the others?

Then he blinked. He looked down at Donia's body, and everything was here and now. He untied the school teacher and shoved the neckties in the man's back pockets, not wanting to leave anything behind, and he put the man's head and neck in the vice of his arms and applied a sleeper, ensuring continued compliance. At the doorway, Kad borrowed the man's British driving cap and fall jacket from the hall tree, even put his eyeglasses on, then he left the building by the stairs with the dead weight of his drunken friend wilting at his side. He was sweating profusely by the time he kicked open the exit door on the main level, shuffling with Fielding's hundred and sixty pounds at his side, huffing it across the ridge, to the next hedgerow and the safety of his squad, Boom-Boom set up with his big machine gun.

“Pardon me,” an elderly lady said when he bumped into her. She was coming around the hallway towards the elevators, a bag of groceries in her hand.

“My friend is sick,” he said and pushed on, down the hall to the laundry room.

Baskets sat atop the working washers and dryers and the room smelled thickly of heat and the false spring scents of Bounce sheets, but he got lucky and there was nobody in the room. Out the door and along the wall, he came out to the parking lot from the far side so that any video that did catch them would be difficult to decipher. He set Fielding in the passenger seat long enough to get them out onto the street then in behind a strip mall by a clump of overgrown weeds and saplings near a dumpster. The man was coming around, woozy, and he got sick on himself a little bit, the result of being knocked out. Kad worked fast, with precision, and Fielding was in the trunk and Kad was back on the road in less than three minutes.

Kad had called Turner on his cell and told him they had to meet at once—plans had once again been altered out of necessity—and Turner, swearing a blue streak, had given him directions to Exhibition Place. Edging the lake and bordered by a tall stone wall and triumphant archway, this was the space where, since 1879, the city had annually staged the country's largest fair, the Canadian National Exhibition. In late fall, the grounds hosted the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, where, as the ads declared, “once a year the country comes to the city”.

“Are you out of your fucking mind? I'm spending time with my family, asshole. Do you remember when I told you to contact me only in the case of emergency?”

“This is emergency,” Kad said.

Now the two men were standing in the parking lot of Exhibition Place.

“You've had a goddamned emergency every day. Two targets, that's all you had to look after. Christ almighty,” Turner said, hands on his hips. He looked around, taking in the enormity of the exhibition grounds, the sky windswept and cloudless. “Do you appreciate the planning and training, the costs, the sheer lengths that people besides yourself have gone to here in order to make this happen? And you're running around like some sociopath. Didn't I say not to draw attention to yourself?”

Turner's older model Volkswagen station wagon was pulled in beside the Corolla at the far end of the lonely parking lot. The Honda, there was the first mistake. Jarko's Garage. Poor Jarko.

“Jesus, this is like a nightmare or something,” Turner said. “I thought you'd be the least of our problems. I thought of all people, this is the guy we don't even need to worry about. You're one of the few who actually served in the Colonel's unit.”

There were people out jogging and riding bikes along the lakeshore, and the long blades of the country's first large-scale urban windmill were turning soundlessly in the slight breeze, gulls fluttering around the lot to pick at the last of the squashed fries left from the end-of-summer exhibition.

“So let me get this straight. You've eliminated two people; the superintendent of your partner's building, and now your partner,” Turner now said in a low voice, calm and measured. He leaned back against his car, arms folded across his chest, the sun on his face. They could have been old buddies meeting up to throw the Frisbee or smoke a joint and talk about girls from high school. “Two bodies, and not one of them is an official target. All you've done is draw heat and add to the trail that leads back to you and me and everybody else involved in this gaggle-fuck. I mean, you just wacked your partner in this whole thing. The one who just spent months working a dead-end job so she could track and detail and ensure the targets are bona fide. You don't think the cops will track her back to her job then straight to Bridges? What the hell am I supposed to think here? Are you shell-shocked?”

Kad leaned back against his car now, too, and folded his arms. He stared at the Canadian. In this light the man's one good eye appeared grey, like smoke.

“It had to be done,” Kad said. “I did not plan this. I am not stupid, I am not a sociopath. I am doing what I came here to do. You talk like the fat generals who ran our war from the back rooms, from the safety of their fancy hotels with their whores and their wine and caviar, while we slept like dogs in the rain and the snow, scrounging for food like goddamned animals, not even enough bullets for our guns. Don't talk to me about my partner, you know nothing of the sacrifice she has made for her people. This will never be forgotten. We all have our roles to play in war. She made a mistake, and I controlled the damage.”

“Listen,” Turner said, and stepped closer now. “I'm not going to stand here and tell you about the places I've been and the things I've done. I'm no backroom general. My job is to get this back on track before the Colonel finds out and sends another squad over here to clean up your mess and clean you and me up at the same time. You've got twenty-four hours. Find your targets, eliminate them, then call me. I don't want to hear from you until this is done.”

Kad exhaled. He turned and walked to the back of the car, and he said, “There is still this.” He unlocked and opened the trunk. The school teacher was awake inside, bound and gagged, laying on his side. The light flooded in, and the school teacher squinted, turning his head away. He made noises and tried to lift himself.

“What the hell is this?” Turner said.

“The school teacher.”

“You're just zipping around town like some goddamned Sunday driver? What if you get pulled over?”

“He is my insurance,” Kad said, then slammed the trunk. “This man's friend, he is a policeman. This is the man I met in Donia's apartment when I returned to make sure we had not left anything behind. I should have killed him, but I did not. Now I am cleaning up my own mess. This man's friend is the one who tracked us to the garage then also went back to talk to the superintendent to get answers to his questions. He left his card… ”

Kad pulled the business card from his shirt pocket and held it up. “He is the final link to all of this, to all of us,” Kad said. “I will tell him he can find his friend safe and sound if he follows my instructions. In the meantime, I am free to finish my work. The police and the newspapers are looking for the man in my trunk. He is the one who killed Donia. It is called, in the military jargon, a diversionary tactic.”

Turner nodded, taking it in. “I've got the perfect place for you to store your insurance,” he said.

SEVENTEEN

S
ometimes when sleep would not come, when the burden of his thoughts grew too heavy, McKelvey would find himself walking the streets of old Cabbagetown with only the whores of Jarvis Street and their shifty-eyed johns for company. This was the other side of Last Call, when even the dive bars were emptying of their lost-soul patrons. He knew from his patrol-car days the street whores were for the most part crack or heroin or meth addicts—dead-eyed zombies on the slow-foot shuffle to nowhere, millions of miles accrued in that four foot span of sidewalk. Girls not unlike his Jessie, who shared histories so similar, it was cliché—abused, given too much or too little attention, cast aside, pushed to the margins, stumbling to a place where this was actually a conceivable employment option—handjobs, blowjobs, whatever, whenever, the body as a commodity in the supply chain of human misery. Jessie was strong, stronger than she knew, and she'd made it out before things could bring her to this, the street level. He would make sure she never fell back to the old life.

Regardless of age, they appeared to McKelvey as young girls, pathetic with their leg bruises and their dirty skirts and torn nylons, hair teased and sprayed and stinking. One girl in particular stuck out in his memory. He had arrested her on a cold winter night about a decade and a half earlier, back when he was in the patrol cars. Taylor, that was her name. He remembered how her feet were filthy. Toes grafted with dirt so deeply they were almost black, permanently tattooed. It was the dead of winter, and she was wearing open-toed shoes like she was a maid of honour in a summer wedding. So stoned, so far gone, she hadn't noticed it was fifteen below zero, puffs of her breath in the air like clouds from cigarette smoke. Her eyes dark, so sad and beautiful. McKelvey remembered feeling a sense of admiration for her toughness, this survivor's grit, like they were the same somehow and yet by sheer circumstance happened to find themselves standing on opposite sides of the abyss. He guessed he felt this kinship with the truly vulnerable, not the armed robbers and subway purse thieves and the Saturday night wife beaters, not the social housing thugs. No, there was nothing to be done for that variety of criminal except for the application of punitive repercussions. He understood and accepted as fact, for example, that the majority of armed robbers he put away would end up committing the exact same crime within three to six months of their mandatory release from prison—this is what the prison psychologists called recidivism, a fancy word that meant “chronic fuck-up”. These were the incorrigibles who continued trying the same things over and over again until eventually they killed someone in the commission of their crime or got killed themselves, some idiot waving a gun in a video store.

McKelvey didn't have a soft spot for hookers, nowhere near it—for he knew their hearts were long turned black, knew they could summon tears, dredge up the most vile anecdotes of what their fathers and uncles had done to them regardless of fact or fiction—but rather he felt it was something, this commercial transaction, best left between consenting adults. In this regard he was long a proponent of so-called “red light” districts. A block on a street wherein nobody was rolling anybody, nobody was on the take, women weren't owned or muscled by bad men, where nurses and doctors and cops and priests could navigate with equal access. It would make all their jobs so much easier if the boundaries and the rules were set out. The devil's playground, open 24-7.

As for the johns, they were everyman. Lifetime losers on parole, the socially awkward, the sexually addicted, the small-cocked, the deformed and the tormented, or those teased as children—McKelvey knew them all, he knew them as well as he knew himself. How could he not after having spent so many hours in patrol cars driving down those endless streets, the radio crackling, driving and begging for some action to jump across the wire, spending more time with these people than with his own family. In those days he'd been a player sitting on the bench waiting for the coach to call his number, to pat him on the helmet and say
“Yes, we need you, get out there McKelvey…”

On those nights when sleep would not come despite the coaxing of the draft beer, perhaps even the extra nudge from a painkiller or two, McKelvey would throw on his coat and hit the street. He was quiet on the stairs, careful to close and lock his door without making any noise, forgetting that he no longer shared a home with a wife and a son, a family. No, he lived alone now in a building where nobody cared what he did or where he went, but old habits die hard. On this night, too, he watched his steps on the stairs. The night air was cool and made him aware of the sweat in his armpits, chilled.