T
he next day I visited Marie and she gave me a thousand bucks in old tens and twenties for building supplies. I pocketed that and took her SUV and hit refit and second-hand stores. Those, along with a prolonged shopping spree at a big-box hardware store, allowed me to quickly and anonymously collect an assortment of tools and building supplies. When I had everything I thought I might need, I loaded it all into her garage and took the rest of the day off.
Up on Main Street I found a phone booth outside a dry cleaning store, far away from any cameras. There I made some phone calls using the numbers I’d taken off Greg’s body; in each case I used the same line: “I’m looking for Sam.”
I didn’t bother blocking the number; if anyone had call display, all it would show was an MTS pay phone, which could be anything from anyone. No one answered the cell numbers, and the first land line found me talking to a young woman who told me to go fuck myself. The second number was for a downtown pawnshop which took a message for Sam while
not admitting they’d ever heard of “him.” The last number connected me to a young man who wheezed into the phone and told me Samantha wasn’t there. In the background I heard music at a distance and someone laughing, so I asked another question: “Do you know when she’ll be back? I’m holding something, something she wants.”
The guy on the other end of the phone became excited, though he tried to be cool. “Yeah, well. She’s my man, you can give me whatever and I’ll hold it.”
“Really? Okay. But you have to keep it cold, okay?”
“Oh. Sure.”
“Yeah, a fridge is good, but don’t freeze it … so where are you?”
Suspicion crept into his voice. “You don’t know?”
“No. I’m from Vancouver.”
“Oh, sure.”
He gave me an address in Saint Boniface and I filed it away.
Before I could deal with Sam I needed to think things through, so I decided to check out the drug house near our place. Twenty minutes later I was outside the address explaining the facts of life to my son. “… and that, my fine little sonny boy, well, that’s a drug house.”
Fred looked at me with bright eyes and very little comprehension, which was understandable, since he was fifteen months old, with a relatively simple vocabulary focused on food and the necessity for someone to clean his bum. He was in the red Flyer wagon with a pillow wedged in behind him and he struggled when I tucked his blanket around him.
“Can you say ‘crack house’?”
“Cak-ouse!”
He was very tired and drooled a little. I wiped the corner of his mouth with my thumb and then dried it on Renfield, the dog, on the other side of me. The three of us were on the sidewalk looking across and down the street at the two-story brick building. In the evening light it looked in even worse shape than it had in moonlight. It looked battered and wicked and out of place amongst other, neater, cleaner, poorer houses that lined the street.
“Actually, though, we could more correctly call it a drug house.” Fred said something that didn’t make much sense to distract me while he tried to wriggle free of the wagon. While he was doing that the dog let his tongue hang out and tentatively wagged his tail.
It was past five in the afternoon; Claire had watched the kids all day and now had the chore of making dinner while I made my reconnaissance. She had argued that it was dangerous and I had explained that no one sees anyone if they have a baby and a dog. They’re the most innocent combination of things imaginable.
I stared at the building and considered it from a professional, ex-bad-guy perspective. It was two stories high with blank brick walls and it had once been a big house, big enough maybe to have once had suites on the top floor and another in the basement. We walked around the block and then down the back alley and found that both front and rear yards were huge and open.
If I was going to guess I would say that the doors were solid steel and the windows were barred and covered in plywood. It had become a fortress of sorts. I had asked Claire, the budding real estate tycoon, to make an anonymous call to the real estate company that had sold the place. They’d said that the renters had intentions to do extensive renovations and
then move in. That had been three months ago. According to Claire’s partner, that translated into three long months of gradually increasing incidents in the neighbourhood and no police response worth mentioning.
“So, boys, I guess we’re going to have to deal with it. If we’re all agreed it’s a drug house, that is?”
Fred pitched a rattle in disgust and said “Home!” while Renfield flopped down on his belly. I took that as mass agreement. “All right, then we’re decided. They must go. And we’re just the guys to do it.”
I kept looking at the building and listened to the whisper of past experience that said fire always worked. I could use a little plastic squeeze bottle of gasoline and a length of plastic tubing to direct it through a window or under a door. Maybe a couple of cylinders of propane with some spark plugs and a car battery as a detonator to bring the walls down. There was always the tried and true diesel fuel and nitrate fertilizer packed into a stolen car for the Hertz special. Or I could steal some nice safe ANFO or Fragmax explosives from northern Manitoba. I was sure there were some hard rock mines up there waiting to be pillaged.
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover. And at least a hundred ways to take something out. Maybe that could be a new song, “A Hundred Ways to Tag a Target.”
“… but really, all that would make a hell of a mess and what I want to do is clean the place up.”
I said it out loud and the solution hit me all of a sudden and I started to laugh, which purely scared the crap out of both Fred and the dog.
T
he next day I had all the kids to babysit and I took the whole menagerie on a long walk to try to wear them down a little. That also gave me a chance to think about Marie and Samantha and the drug house and smuggling in general. We did the walk with strict rules about holding hands, looking both ways, and with me pushing a heavy-duty double-baby buggy. I’d bought the damn thing from a pawnshop for $40 and it could hold two babies and about thirty kilos of snacks, water, blankets, and assorted baby-wrangling supplies. Downtown we reached the law courts building and we all stared at the seven-metre-high metal statue in front. It was a massive construction of metal beams, twisted and turned around like a giant knot.
“What is it?” I said wonderingly.
A hatchet-faced blond woman sitting on the edge of the pedestal smiled at the children and answered, “It’s justice.”
“Justice?”
“It’s balanced, see?” She reached out one finger and touched the burnished aluminum side and it shifted slightly
and squealed. She gestured at the building behind it. “Those are the courts back there so that’s the statue they chose to represent themselves.”
“Interesting.” The babies were getting bored and starting to wander around. Rachel came over with two fingers in her mouth and removed them to say, “Tangle!”
The woman agreed, “Yes it is, honey, all tangled.” She turned to me and said, “It’s very strange.”
I assumed she was talking about the statue or sculpture, whatever it actually was.
She turned back to it and lit a cigarette, then butted it out when Rachel coughed theatrically. “Sorry, babe. Anyhow, the statue’s a big tangle, and if you try to go inside to the courtroom, well they run you through a metal detector and your bag through an x-ray machine.”
“Nothing quite like a transparent, open system for fairness and responsibility.” It made me smile and almost laugh.
“Yeah. I just wanted to see what went on in there. I’m from Miami and I thought it would be different up here.”
She sounded sad and a haunted look came over face. Then she gathered herself together and shook my hand and introduced herself as Alice. Rachel invited her to eat snacks with me and the monsters and she agreed. We ate there under the big tangle and while I was cleaning up I pushed the statue myself a little and made it shake and squeal. “Not a tangle.”
“No?” The woman was busy trying to make Rachel eat a carrot.
“Nope. It looks like an elephant. See—trunk, tusks, tail.”
“Ah. But why?”
I lined the kids up go home. “Because elephants never forget. Hope you enjoy your stay.”
She laughed. “Are there elephants in Manitoba?”
I thought about it. “No, not even in the zoo. But there used to be mammoths.”
“In the zoo?” She looked at me like I was crazy.
“I wish. No, there used to be mammoths, or maybe it was mastodons, here in Manitoba a long time ago.”
We both looked back at the tangle and she saluted it. “To the mammoths of justice.”
She said it solemnly and we both laughed.
On the way back home I called Marie to find out if everything was still going fine. She sounded cheerful and told me she hadn’t seen or heard anything suspicious at all.
That night Claire came home to find me sitting at the dining-room table with a pad of paper and a pencil, fully equipped with a deep, intense frown.
“Where’s the baby?”
I didn’t look up from my work. “I’m right here. See? Can’t miss me.”
“I meant the other baby. You know, the little one?” She kissed me and reached through the open-backed chair to pinch my ass.
“He’s around somewhere … he kept muttering something about how you were cramping his style and how he wanted to get away from it all. Mentioned how you were ruining his life. He talked about his greater goals and needs and yakked on endlessly about his desire to be free.”
She put her purse down on the table and stretched. “So he’s asleep?”
“Yep, or scoring chicks. Either or.”
Claire leaned close and the smell of her personal fragrance filled my nose and throat. Her breast touched the back of my neck and I squirmed and stroked her hip.
“Does this mean I get a lap dance?”
She leaned on me, pulled off her shoes, and threw them toward the front entry. Renfield heard them land and began to trot in that direction until Claire spoke up. “Touch the shoes and die, dog. I mean dead. Dead-dead. Deceased. Mort. Muerte. Tot.”
Renfield kept going until I said loudly, “No. Sit. Stay.”
He did and Claire stretched again and kissed my cheek. She smelled slightly of sweat and slightly of soap and entirely good.
“A lap dance, is that what you want? Sure. Is it your birthday?”
“Eventually it will be. Plus think about all those birthdays you missed over the years. All those dozens of birthdays for which I am owed lap dances. Like the first and the second, and don’t forget the tenth. That’s a very significant birthday which should have been celebrated via lap-dance. As a matter of consideration I think it’s a law in Quebec.”
She ignored me, looked down at the pad of paper, and hummed loudly. “What you doing?”
“Math. What’s 632 multiplied by 42?”
“No idea.”
“Okay. Next question, when you figure out the square footage of a house you are renting or selling, do you include the basement?”
“No, sometimes, depends.”
“You are a wealth of knowledge. You are an absolute wealth of untapped knowledge.”
She touched my lips with her finger. “I know, I know. Ask me another one, tap away!” I turned and looked at her with love and affection. Her long, wavy hair made her look like she was always in motion and I felt it was appropriate—she was always moving, always doing something. Today
she’d been working, so she was wearing a light blue skirt and jacket with a white blouse. She claimed it was confidence-inspiring costuming for prospective home-buyers and apartment-renters.
“Maybe later.” I stood up from the table and took her by the hand and she resisted for a moment. “Hey, I thought you said later?”
“This is later. Now is later than the beginning of the sentence. Right now is even later than that. And now is later than that …”
She laughed and we spent some time the best way there was, ever had been, or ever could be.
After supper we listened to music on the radio and read while Fred built sprawling cities out of small plain wooden blocks and the dog destroyed them.
“Bad OG! Ba-OG!”
The dog was nonplussed and kept wagging his tail and Fred went back to building. They both seemed happy with the game despite the emotion.
I was trying to read a very well-written mystery about a smart magistrate in ancient China. It was full of details and some realistically smart and stupid people.
“So, did you ever figure out your math problem?” Claire’s sudden question pulled me out of that world and into the real one.
“Sort of.”
“So what’s the answer?”
“632 times 3 times 9. So a total of 17,064 feet. Divided by 3 equals 5688 metres.”
“What’s that?”
“The volume of a house. I think.”
She put down her book, a brightly illustrated history of the Eaton’s store that had graced downtown Winnipeg. I had never seen it, but the pictures in the book were spectacular. Greed had replaced it with a hockey rink and bandstand, which brought such notables as Hilary Duff and the Backstreet Boys. Greed and pop culture overcoming commercialism and greed; funny how that went.
Claire was alternating between that book and a real estate guidebook to help her study for her real estate licence, the Holy Grail of the house hunter-gatherer.
“I won’t ask. Now, what are you going to do for Marie?”
I flipped the page on the book I was reading and found out that the body was under the bronze bell in the abandoned temple. I marked the point on the page with my finger and lifted my eyes while I marshalled my thoughts. I’d told Claire most of the problem with Marie and the smuggling and she was curious.
“I’m working on it.”
“Working on it?”
“Yep. And that’s not going well so I’m thinking about drug houses right now.”
Claire nodded. “That’s where the volume question comes in?”
“Yep. Although my math sucks.”
“Tell me about the house.”
“The doors are armoured and barricaded, ditto the windows. There are at least five, six people selling dope, probably cooking meth in the basement. And there will be hookers and johns and probably a nodding room inside.”
“Nodding room?” I loved hearing her voice.
“A room where you can sleep off your high. Where you can crash.”
She stared at me and then said accusingly, “You made that up.”
I stuck out my tongue. “Be that as it may. Plus the guys in charge are probably—no, make that definitely—armed to deal with anyone ripping them off. And drug-fuelled psychosis plus greed plus guns means a gunfight if someone tries to go in through the front door.”
“Why are you thinking about drug houses?”
I shrugged, “Because.”
She brought her finger to her lips and kissed it. “Back to the nodding room—you have your very own language, you know that, right?”
I stuck my tongue out at her again. “Back to the subject, the whole space is undoubtedly booby-trapped as it’s a place where paranoid drug users meet paranoid drug dealers.” I picked the book up again and went on, “So there’s nothing anyone can do. It’s a job for the police. Or Batman. Period.”
“Hmmmm. Let me rephrase the question: what are you going to do about the drug house near us? Hypothetically.”
“Nothing. What drug house? And, do you really want to know?”
She smiled, somewhat amused. “No, not really.”
“All right then, is tomorrow garbage day?”
“Yes.”
I went back to my book and then looked up. “I love you.”
She went back to her book and smiled to herself. After a minute she looked up, kissed the tip of her finger and pointed it at me. “I know.”