Specimen & Other Stories (3 page)

Ken checked his watch and walked back to his
car. He knew the guy had to be somewhere else at five o’clock, and
he’d have to leave soon. But if Ken had his way, he wouldn’t get
far.

He got back inside his Volvo and opened the
glove compartment to take out a pair of see-through latex gloves.
He pulled them on and then reached under his seat to take out the
gun. It was a .22-caliber Comanche revolver with a 9-shot magazine.
They were pretty cheap and he bought them by the six-pack for a
discount. The originals had 6-inch barrels but he’d taken a hacksaw
to all of them and cut an inch and half off the muzzles. All the
work he did was close up and personal, and he didn’t need a gun
sight to hit a frontal lobe.

He got out of the car and slipped on the
double-breasted blue blazer with the gold buttons that he kept in
the car for his work. He looked around to make sure no one was
looking and stuck the gun into his waistband. He took a pair of
sunglasses from the dash and slipped them on.

He opened the back door and picked up a soda
can from the floor. He’d stuffed it lightly full of cat hair that
he’d accumulated from weekly brushings of his 12-year-old Angora
cat, whose name was Boston Blackie. The rate at which Blackie was
shedding was sufficient to handle about three hits a month, and
since Ken rarely achieved such a level of business, he had a bale
of hair at home, enough to stuff a couple of pillows or knit a few
sweaters.

He locked the car and headed back to
Danforth, occasionally raising the soda can to his lips and
pretending to take a sip from it, but all he got was a whiff of
pussy hair. Typical. Sometimes a whiff, rarely a taste. But all
that could change...

He glanced at himself in the window of a
storefront. Lookin’ sharp, man, like a car salesman in a recession,
all dressed up and no place to go. A couple of songs danced through
his head, competing for his attention.
He’s a real nowhere man,
working with his awesome hands
... And those bearded Texas
bluesmen singing,
Everybody talkin’ ‘bout a sharp-dressed
man
...

He was a hundred feet away from the
restaurant when the banana shirt stepped out onto the sidewalk.
That was one thing Ken had, it was a sense of timing, like he was
right in lockstep with destiny. He followed Mr. Banana a dozen
stores down the street, and stood looking in the window of a
bookstore until the guy re-emerged from a convenience store. Mr.
Banana tore the cellophane off a pack of cigarettes, ripped out the
foil-wrap sleeve and lit a cigarette with a lighter. He crumpled
the waste in his fist and threw it half-heartedly at a trash bin,
totally missing the waste paper aperture, and the garbage fell onto
the sidewalk.

Ken gritted his teeth, picked up the litter
and placed it in the Paper & Plastic compartment. It wasn’t
much, but it was the principle of the thing. What was the matter
with people these days?

He followed the guy around the corner onto
Carlaw. A dark blue Porsche Cayenne was illegally parked in a
commercial zone. Its lights blinked, its horn made a little toot,
and its engine started up as Mister Banana approached it. Ken
crossed the street with him, glancing around him as he went. No
innocent bystanders to witness what was about to happen, the
nearest pedestrians on Danforth a good twenty yards away.

Mister Banana opened the door and slipped
behind the wheel. Ken was just five steps behind him. He saw it was
a Cayenne Turbo, which listed for about $125K. Interestingly
enough, there was a big blue
Handicapped
placard lying on
the front dash. Oooh, bonus points!

He caught the door just before Mr. Banana
swung it shut and in one smooth movement he pulled the Comanche
from under his jacket, jammed its barrel into the mouth of the soda
can and popped the guy one right under the armpit. The home-made
silencer burped discreetly. The guy leaned away from him, pawing
the air like he was trying to shoo away a bumblebee, and his voice
gagged in his throat, like the noise Blackie made when he was
trying to cough up a hairball. Ken grabbed the flapping hand, held
it tight for a moment, and popped the guy another one right in the
temple.

There was no big splat from an exit wound
because a .22 didn’t have the power to do more than one cranial
wall. The slug just went in and bounced around once or twice and
that was all she wrote. The Cayenne’s cream leather interior would
be left unspoiled and the wife could either keep the ride or, if
she felt any guilt about it, sell it like new.

“Now you’ve got a real handicap,” Ken told
the dead guy.

He kept the soda can but dropped the gun on
the floor and closed the door. He looked around. Not a soul was
looking in his direction. He’d always been lucky that way too. He
walked back to Danforth and headed for his car. He stopped at one
of the litter bins and inserted the soda can into the compartment
marked Cans and Bottles. He peeled off the latex gloves as he
walked along the sidewalk, glancing at the happy couples eating
pikilia
and drinking wine.

There was a small square at the corner of
Danforth and Logan dedicated to Alexander the Great. Ken put the
gloves in the Garbage compartment of another litter bin. A place
for everything, and everything in its place, his mother used to
say. Just that he’d never understood why she had to go so soon to
the place most people tried to avoid.

He unlocked the Volvo, took off his jacket
and laid it flat in the back seat. He was hungry and there was a
souvlaki joint right there on the square, but it was already after
five, and he didn’t want to spoil his appetite.

As he headed back downtown, he ran through a
short list in his mind of places he might take Barb for dinner. But
mostly, he wondered what he’d tell her when she asked him what he
did for a living.

~~~~~~~~~

Stanley Rudd was a man of regular habits.
Every morning he rose at six AM and went for a one-hour run. Every
Tuesday morning, he ran only 15 minutes, to the home of Isabel
Amore, where he spent 30 minutes in her bed, and then ran home to
shower before going to work at the Department of Social Welfare,
where he was Manager of Social Statistics.

His wife Martha used to run with him, but
she’d injured her knee two years ago falling off a stepladder in
the art gallery she co-owned. He now ran solo. Which was just as
well since Isabel, despite being a sexually-charged divorcee whose
champagne cork could pop after only a few minutes of agitation, was
not into threesomes.

This Tuesday morning Stanley got up five
minutes earlier so that he could say goodbye to Martha, who was
catching an early flight to New York. She and her co-owner Beth
would spend the rest of the week prowling the galleries of SoHo and
Greenwich Village in hopes of discovering hot talent fresh out of
the Big Apple oven, and new product for their growing
clientele.

“You won’t forget to water the plants?” she
reminded him. It was mid-August and a withering heat had settled
over Toronto like a sweat-drenched sauna towel. Aside from art,
Martha was an amateur botanist. Her current pride and joy was her
backyard garden filled with flowers whose Latin names she could
rattle off like a catechism.

“Don’t worry, darling,” Stanley said. “I
have my instructions.” Martha had prepared a detailed work order,
specifying how many milliliters of purified water and organic
supplements went into each plant each day.

“Have a good week. I’ll see you on Sunday.”
She gave him a quick hug and a dry kiss on the mouth. “Call me if
you have any problem with the rhododendrons. They’ve been droopy
this weekend but so long as you follow their schedule, I’m sure
they’ll be fine.”

Stanley tied his Nikes and set off for
Isabel. He lived in Riverdale, whose tree-lined streets of large
houses were near dozens of good restaurants, lively bars and
stylish boutiques. It was a neighborhood many upwardly-mobile
professionals set their sights on. Ironically, Stanley was never so
happy as when he was running away from it.

He loped up Broadview a few blocks, then
descended Pottery Road, which twisted down the hillside to the
meandering stream of the Lower Don River. On the other side of the
Don Valley was Rosedale, where the sultry Isabel lay waiting for
him in her red-walled boudoir on Hampton Park Crescent.

Stanley took it slow going down the hill,
mindful of the shock to his 50-year-old knees. At the bottom of the
hill was a small bridge over the river. As he crossed it, he saw in
the corner of his eye a brief flash of something in the river. As
he broke his stride to turn his head, he saw a pair of naked
buttocks breach the surface of the water and disappear.

Amazing what the eye could register in a
blink. The buttocks flared at the hips, immediately registered in
Stanley’s reptilian cortex as female. Also tanned, and further
classified in Stanley’s analytical mind as belonging to a nudist,
or perhaps a lady of bohemian nature whose derriere had been
protected from the sun by nothing more than a thong.

The Don River, however, was not typically
high on a local swimmer’s choice of dipping destinations. Scarcely
a kilometer upriver from where Stanley now stood, breathless with
both exertion and curiosity, was the North Toronto Sewage Treatment
Plant. Tree-huggers who biked and hiked along the river trail swore
its effluence was contaminating the environment, an accusation the
Public Works Department vehemently denied.

Possibilities danced through Stanley’s mind
like ping-pong balls in a lottery barrel. The woman had tumbled
from her bicycle into the river, somehow losing her biking shorts
in trying to reach shore. She’d been ambushed by a would-be rapist
during her morning jog and leaped half-naked into the river to
escape her attacker. She’d been sky-diving when severe wind shear
had blown her off-course, ripping parachute and clothes from her
body.

No matter the cause, she had to be in
jeopardy. Although he had a standing engagement, Stanley could not
stand idly by. He trotted off the bridge and entered a well-trodden
trail paralleling the river. But the bushes were thick along this
section and, although he could hear splashing and thrashing, he
couldn’t see the woman.

He forced his way through an alder thicket
until he stood on the bank of the Don. It was only 20 feet wide at
this point and scarcely deeper than six feet, its sluggish current
moving in eddies of dark green, reminding him of the wheat-grass
smoothies sold at the juice bar of The Carrot Common, a local
health food mecca on Danforth Avenue.

Beneath the turgid surface, the outline of
her body writhed like a naked eel. Was she caught in the roots of a
riverside tree? Or chained to a pair of construction blocks, a
murder witness condemned to drown by Mafia hitmen?

He toed off his Nikes, peeled off his
T-shirt and dived into the water. His hands had barely touched her
nakedness when she thrust off from the bottom and broke the
surface. He quickly followed. In a few powerful strokes, she
reached the shore. He caught a brief glimpse of a fish, flashing
silver and speckled in her fist, before she gave it a hard smack on
a rock near the river’s edge.

She turned to look at him, the fish hanging
limp in one hand, like a post-tumescent member. Despite her
nakedness, it was her eyes that drew his attention. They were
bright green, as iridescent as the thorax of a dragonfly, seeming
to sparkle with the light of a superbly-cut emerald.

“Had breakfast?” she said, holding up the
fish.

“No.” Stanley typically bought a
double-double and a bran muffin at Tim Horton’s en route to his
office.

“Join me?” There was something about the way
she said it, teasing him, pushing the envelope of his credulity, as
if this scene might not be real. Or was she daring him to make it
real?

He said nothing. For the moment he was still
mesmerized by her eyes, but not unaware of her heaving nut-brown
breasts from which water crept in rivulets down her belly. Any
moment now, he expected to wake up from a dream with an
erection.

Stanley heard some runners go by on the
trail. From this turn in the river, he and the woman were
completely screened from view. They might as well have been in the
wilderness, he felt that alone with her. Alone and drifting on a
current of compulsion.

She tossed the fish onto the bank and
clambered after it on all fours, offering him a brief glimpse of
her little pelt, glossy-haired between her naked buttocks. She
tugged a summer dress of mottled brown-and-green from a branch
where it’d been draped. She pulled it over her head, smoothed it
across her hips. She ran her fingers through her wet hair and
picked up her fish.

“Coming or not?”

As if in a dream, there seemed to be as
little alternative as there was logic. He retrieved his Nikes and
T-shirt and followed her back to the trail. She strode on ahead,
barefoot and silent, never looking back, seemingly doubtless that
he was following close behind, like a dog trailing its master. They
followed the trail downriver for a kilometer. En route they met or
were overtaken by cyclists and runners, some of whom Stanley
recognized as regulars on this stretch.

She stepped off the trail, ducked her head
and went under a tree. Stanley followed her onto a raccoon path
through the bushes, arriving at a dense grove of trees on the
river’s edge. The Don widened a little at this point, perhaps
thirty feet across, although no more than three feet deep.

Here was a dwelling of sorts – a patchwork
affair of green tarpaulin, a sheet of plywood, tree branches
secured with rope, an aluminum tent pole and some duct tape – with
a bare patch of ground swept clean around a small fire pit.