Montreal Noir

Driftwood by Ian Truman

Hochelaga

“He started saying shit like he knew Bloods or something.”

I was in my brother’s kitchen. It was a Hochelaga kitchen, which meant the counters hadn’t been changed since they were built in the thirties; the old windows let cold air in throughout the winter, and the wood walls were about to crumble under the weight of chipped paint. I couldn’t even imagine how many people were dealt with, how many deals were brokered, and how many problems were fixed in a kitchen just like this one.

That’s why I was here: to fix things.

My brother and I were in trouble. Not that we were the ones who caused it, but growing up where we did, you often ended up with friends who dragged you down on their way to hell. There’s that saying, You don’t choose your family. Well, sometimes you didn’t choose your friends, either. Sometimes an idiot sticks with you whether you want him around or not. Julien was that kind of friend: too useless to make it and too stupid to get rid of.

“How the fuck does Julien know any Bloods?” I asked my brother.

“He doesn’t. At least not really. He said he knew a full-patch one, though.”

“Bloods don’t have patches.”

“That’s what I told him.”

“Well, even if Julien does have connection with the Bloods, why is that bad for us?” I asked.

“Because he ran his mouth off to the wrong people. He was bragging about how he knew us, how he could sell drugs out of our bar, and how he could use his Blood friend to provide him with the dope.”

“But why would the Hells forfeit their power in Hochelaga?”

“That’s the thing: they didn’t. I got a visit from the Hells today. They wanted to know what the fuck was going on and why they were hearing these rumors. They asked if I knew the guy yapping his mouth, and I had to say yes, because I do.”

“So now we’re fucked.”

“Well, now they want a meeting.”

“Fuck!” I paced the kitchen and picked at my nails. “And Julien’s Blood — is he legitimate?”

“I’d be surprised if he was. He’s probably just some fucking wigger from Laval.”

“A wigger from Laval?”

“I mean, he may have access to some weed, but I’d be surprised about anything else,” my brother said, staring through the cracked kitchen window. “Legitimate or not, the Hells now think we’re willing to go behind their back to try and get a sideline going.”

“So what, now you’d like me to fix this?”

“I just want to brew beer, man. I don’t want anything to do with crime, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, sighing. “I’ll look into it, all right? Don’t worry.”

We gave each other a hug.

I walked out the back and into the alley. I lit up a smoke as I headed toward Ontario Street. Don’t worry! I thought. Shit.

The noises of the city surrounded me as I made my way north — two cats screeched beneath a porch; an ambulance cried in the distance. Two forty-year-old hookers were out looking for their next fix. A bunch of kids were having a late lunch at La Pataterie, the way they always did. The smell of grease and potatoes filled the street. You had to watch your step as pigeons were busy pecking at a poutine on the sidewalk.

Our bar was three blocks over, heading west. It was neither a dive bar nor a biker bar. It was a fancy place where the newly rich flocked to after they moved into the neighborhood.

Eight years ago the city renovated that fancy plaza over on Valois Street. Shortly after that the first condos started popping up around it. We just happened to be the lucky owners of a commercial lot within walking distance of those condos.

Our father had bought the place in ’86 when no one would have even pissed on it. He ran a shoe store out of it, and when the nineties came, he turned it into a Prill discount store, which was the kind of place you went to as a kid when your parents were on welfare. And there were a lot of welfare kids back then.

Then the biker wars came and whoever had enough money to leave left. We stayed behind. The war wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be, but everybody was damn glad when the Hells won and the city passed anti-bunker laws. Not that we cared if the Hells ran the place or not; we just wanted the war to be over so we could live without the stigma of being from Hochelaga.

A few years later, wealth came back to the city, for better or worse. Rents went up, vacant lands and factories got turned into condos, and the former factory workers were forced to leave the island or swim with the current. My brother and I were just driftwood. Nothing more. We were just driftwood that happened to float up with the tide as the rest of the trash drowned underneath it.

We felt lucky about that.

But running a discount store that no one but hipsters would walk into was not my brother’s idea of a future.

When we opened our bar, we had a narrow window in the history of the neighborhood, where the dive-bar crowd was catered to by the bikers, and the newly rich were looking for a place to park their asses on a Saturday night. If they had built that plaza five blocks over, we would still be selling crap that was made in China. But we got lucky. College students, designers, accountants, artists, and lawyers who wouldn’t dare admit that they couldn’t afford Outremont anymore needed a place to drink just like the rest of us. My brother wanted to build that place.

So we did. After an eight-month class at ITHQ, my brother was a certified microbrewer; six months of technical business school, and I was deemed fit to run a restaurant. We turned our father’s old discount store into a fancy microbrasserie, equipped with wooden tables, white stools, pretentious wall art, and even a stuffed beaver for the hipsters.

Soon after opening, the Hells came to see us. We told them that what we cared about was brewing good-tasting beer, and that we didn’t think our bar was the right place for them to peddle drugs. The crowd we attracted wasn’t exactly the target market for the drug trade, with the notable exception of the lawyers, who knew better than to buy dope out of a bar in Hochelaga. We promised the Hells that if they didn’t sell drugs in our bar, no one would.

These arrangements worked for the Hells under two conditions: one, that we didn’t sell the same beer that they did, which was no problem given our menu was elite brews only; and two, that none of our drink specials would come under $6.99. Those prices would separate the haves from the have-nots, and ensure that we didn’t steal the Hells’ clientele.

This deal worked perfectly for the both of us, until now. Now some guy from way back when was fucking up our thing, and got the bikers to doubt our word.

Fuck!

Julien was white trash the way you’d imagine white trash to be. He made a living stealing his mother’s welfare money, while also cashing in his own check at the same time. He and his mom had somehow scored a four-and-a-half in an SHDM project building, with a nice view of Notre-Dame Boulevard’s trucking lanes and the Lantic sugar mill. It was the kind of apartment you’d expect a guy like Julien to have. He worked the loopholes from generation to generation, and for a guy who could barely read, his maneuvering was rather impressive.

Most of the time, Julien was inoffensive, and when he was, we let him be. He just had too much time on his hands. He mostly wasted his days in Davidson Park, playing cringeworthy songs on that shitty guitar of his, the one with a porn photo taped to the back of it. I remember when he first found that photo. He just walked into the corner store one day, didn’t even pay for the magazine. He started flipping through the pages right there in the store. When he found a chick that had tits big enough for him, he looked at the teller and said, “Hey, I like this one. I’ma take it, all right?” He tore out the page, put the magazine back in the rack, and walked out like it was a thing to do.

As I said, Julien was too useless to make it, too stupid to get rid of. Until now.

I walked into my bar. The place was full for a Wednesday. Twenty people, maybe. The weather was cool, and we opened the bay windows up front. Customers were flipping through menus, discussing what kind of beer they were going to try next. There were couples in their thirties with money to spend, a few suits, a bunch of college students slumming it out in the safest way possible.

“Hey, Richard,” the barmaid called to me. She was twenty-three and a part-time student who tried to run an independent art gallery with her tip money. I nodded in response and sat my ass on the last stool.

Hey, Richard, I thought. My name felt like a name for another time, but at thirty-seven it wasn’t terribly uncommon. Nowadays kids had fucked-up names like Anne-Crystelle or Marie-Lianne. Take the barmaid’s name, for example: Sophie-Andrée. I always thought it sounded horrible, but she had an ass like you wouldn’t believe, and as a rule of thumb, a barmaid needed a fine ass more than a good-sounding name.

“Give me a blonde, will you, dear?” I asked her.

I watched her walk to the taps, checking out the curve of her thighs in her black dress, listening to the click of her boots as they smacked the tile. Her turtleneck ran soft and tight across her chest and down to her breasts. I liked the way she was leaning back on one leg; it popped out her calf, rounded up her ass.

Wasn’t there that saying, Don’t fuck where you eat? Well, I was about to do exactly that. I was in for a shit night anyway. I was in for a shit day tomorrow. I was in for a shit week if you asked me. At this point, what the Hells would do to my brother and me was anybody’s game. We could lose our money. We could lose our bar, and therefore, I could lose what was left of my sex appeal. The forties were knocking on my door, but I was willing to go a few more rounds before I counted myself out.

I made my move at closing time. I washed half her tables, picked up the empties, and asked about her tips. She said she did okay.

“Anything good for a night out?” I asked.

“Not really,” she replied. “Besides, I got bills to pay, just like everybody else.” She reached inside her purse. “Mind if I light up in here?”

“It’s closed. Sure. How are classes?”

“I don’t know.” She sighed and glanced up.

They never do. “How about a drink then?” I asked.

She said, “Sure,” as she blew out some smoke.

I walked next to her behind the bar. I poured her something old-school, a Fedora, a drink nobody knew about anymore. “Here. Taste this,” I said.

She was leaning back against the bar, her short dark hair in line with her sharp chin, the cup of her breast just a shadow in the dim light. I looked straight into her eyes. She looked back and frowned at me sideways. With the faintest pinch of the lips, she dared me to flirt. I smiled slightly. She took a sip and didn’t seem to like it. That was the plan.

“Sugar and whiskey?” she said, wincing.

“Don’t like it?”

“Not really,” she admitted. I was one-for-one.

“Maybe I’m an old fool, but I like it.”

“Come on now! When was this drink invented? The twenties? You’re not old enough to drink this!” she joked. “You’re what? Thirty-five?”

“Thirty-three,” I lied.

“See?” she said, taking a drag of her cigarette. “You’re not that old.” I was two-for-two.

“Then show me what you young mixologists are into these days.”

She tapped her ashes on the counter, bowed her head sideways, and accepted the dare. “All right, let’s see what we can come up with.” She grabbed Taylor’s Velvet Falernum, added some green Chartreuse liqueur, pineapple juice, and lime. I already knew I was going to fucking hate it.

I took a sip. “Not bad. Not bad.”

“Right?”

“What else have you got?”

“Let me look.” She turned back to the bar and leaned beautifully on her back leg.

Eyes on the prize, I thought. Eyes on the fucking prize.

I started scrolling through the bar’s iTunes account. I wasn’t gonna fuck with her taste in Lady Gaga, and she wasn’t gonna fuck with mine in Pantera, so I started flipping through the songs, hoping to find an in-between. I glanced at her. She was already moving despite the silence in the bar, her loose leg stomping softly to the steady beat of a song she had in her head.

It was my job now to figure out what that song was.

The Killers? No — the Killers would make me seem old. The National? Maybe, but they were as exciting as watching fucking paint dry. Metric? I was gonna have to go with Metric. Metric was good fuck music no matter what anyone my age would say about it. “Gold Guns Girls” was too fast, but “Gimme Sympathy” was just right. I put in on. The first few notes filled the vast empty room.

“I love this song,” she said as she looked at me. She put some ice into a glass. “Get hot,” she started signing. “Get closer to the flame...”

I was three-for-three.

She flipped a few bottles and handed me a glass of her concoction. At this point, I didn’t really care what was in it, so long as it had alcohol. She kept singing, then poured herself a glass. I’d had two beers earlier, and I knew she had done a few shots before last call with some guy who thought he’d get her home by getting her drunk. We were just tipsy enough; it was starting to be fun.

On our fourth drink, Lana Del Rey started playing. I couldn’t have planned it any better. Lana Del Rey was the kind of music that kept you awake while dreaming about twenty-three-year-old girls named Sophie-Andrée, who’d fuck their bosses at the end of a shift.

I approached her from behind, pressing myself against her back, locking my hands around her hips. She didn’t seem to mind so I dove in further. I smelled her hair, felt her smile as I started kissing the nook of her neck. She turned around, smiled, and started kissing back. I grabbed her thighs and lifted her dress. She pulled it higher to get comfortable.

She wore black-laced Brazilian panties. Goddamn did she look good. It looked like a freaking heart at the bottom of her flat belly. A freaking heart around her ass, up to her thighs, and down inside her legs.

I swear to God — it was the most beautiful sight in the entire fucking world.

I kissed her again, lifted her, and sat her on the edge of the bar. I pushed myself against her. She moved her hair out of her face. I ran my hands inside her dress and down her back. I pulled her toward me. Then she forced me toward her. She grabbed my arms, scratched me, and kissed me. Then she looked at me and said, “I got condoms in my bag.”

The sex was good but I hadn’t slept; I probably wouldn’t have anyways. It was nine in the morning. I was having coffee and a cigarette on the way to my car.

The meeting with the Hells was scheduled for ten. I needed to pick up Julien before that and drive all the way up to Rivière-des-Prairies, because when you’re in trouble with these kinds of guys, you walk the extra mile.

Julien, being the idiot that he was, had no idea what kind of trouble he had gotten himself into. Maybe the Bloods had used him and his dumb wigger friend to poke around foreign territory. Because if Julien didn’t actually know any Bloods, why would the Hells take his word seriously?

I found Julien at Davidson Park, where I had expected him to be. He was playing his fucking guitar in the shadow of the project buildings. No one else was there except two old drunks who lived in the homeless shelter down the street.

“Hey, Richard!” he shouted, playing a god-awful riff that was so out of tune it could have been experimental rock. “I’ma play a song for you, Richard.”

“It’s okay, Julien. I don’t need a song.”

“Ahhh, come on!” he slurred. “Hey, did I ever show you my girl? Let me show you my girl.” He flipped the guitar and flashed a duct-taped photo of a young Filipina lying on a beach in paradise.

“I don’t need to see your girl, either.”

“Ah, come on, man! I’ma play you a song, all right?”

“You know about drugs?”

He stopped and looked at me in a snap. “Yeah! YEAH!” he said excitedly. “Ah shit, man! Ah shit! I knew it was coming. I fucking knew it was coming. Shit, man!”

“You want to sell at the bar?” I asked.

“Yeah, man! I’m your guy, man! You know? Anything you want I’ma keep it tight, you know? Shit’s gonna be tight.”

“And that guy you know?”

“Yeah! He’s a Blood, man! In Laval. A full-patch Blood, you know?”

A full-patch Blood, I thought. What an idiot. “He’s serious about this? This Blood. He seriously wants to sell in Hochelaga?” I asked.

“Yeah, man, he’s fucking taking over. He said he can get me anything I need. He can get me weed, he can get me fucking coke, some GHB for the ladies, some E if you need it, peanuts — anything, man. Sometimes he just gets me this bag of pills, man. I fucking pop them and I don’t even know what’s in them.”

“How do you know this guy?”

“We was just talking and he said that he had all this dope. I mean so fucking much of it he couldn’t even manage to sell it off, you know? So I told him to tell the other Bloods that I had my boy who had opened his bar not that long ago, you know? I got your back, man. I got your back, you know? That’s all me, baby.”

God! I thought. He was in deeper than I had hoped. That painted me into a corner. If I didn’t take care of him, then I could appear to be compliant in his lunacy. And if the Bloods, and whoever was behind the Bloods, seemed hell-bent on taking a piece of Hochelaga, then they would come after me if they really wanted the territory. Julien or not, they would do it if they wanted to.

But that territory belonged to the Hells until proven otherwise, so my only option was to bring this imbecile to them so they could deal with him. They could beat him, run down his wigger friend, run down their supplier. They could do whatever they wanted to him; I didn’t care. All I wanted was to brew good beer.

“Get in the car,” I told him.

“What for?”

“You wanna sell? You got to talk to the boss.”

“I thought you were the boss.”

I looked at him. “We all work for somebody.”

“Right. Let me just bring her back to my place,” he said, talking about his guitar. “It’ll only take a minute, man.”

“Put her in the trunk,” I replied as I walked back to my car. He didn’t move. “In the trunk, Julien. And quit fucking around.”

I didn’t like Rivière-des-Prairies, and not only because the borough had a bad reputation — I was from Hochelaga after all. No. I didn’t like RDP because I didn’t know RDP. I didn’t know whose house not to piss on when I walked home drunk at night. I didn’t know whose wife not to fuck or whose daughter not to stare at. I didn’t know whose car not to scratch or who to vote for in order to keep the ball rolling.

That’s what made it dangerous for me.

As dangerous as Hochelaga was back in the day, I knew how to deal with the danger, and that counted for a lot. I didn’t know anything about RDP except that some of Montreal’s most powerful criminals had homes there, as well as some of the city’s highest-ranking officials. This combination could explain a lot about the corruption in Montreal.

We took 25 north, headed toward an address on Perras Boulevard. I only knew the name because it was the last exit before the toll bridge into Laval.

Julien tried to play it cool, leaning his arm against the open window. He had old, dirty jeans on, and some Sons of Anarchy — type T-shirt. Such a goddamned fool, I thought. He looked so bad I felt like it might have been a mistake to bring him. Was I really bringing such a poor offering in order to appease the gods of crime? I didn’t know, but I couldn’t exactly back down now, could I?

I put my shades on and lit up another smoke because I didn’t want to make conversation. I was about to sell out the biggest idiot in Hochelaga. What the fuck do you say to that?

We found the small bakery in a dilapidated shopping center. There was a dry cleaner, a day care, and, at the edge of the parking lot, an old Italian bakery.

We were welcomed by a bouncer dressed in all black: black boots, black pants, black jacket, black-framed sunglasses, and black-ink hand tattoos. He didn’t pat us down. He didn’t need to.

A middle-aged Italian man wearing a white shirt with an unbuttoned collar and tan pinstriped pants sat at table, having a brisket with his coffee. “Welcome,” he said warmly.

Julien sat down at his table. He leaned forward, arms resting against his knees, head bobbling for no apparent reason.

“Would you like something to eat before we begin?” the Italian asked. “You won’t find anything like this in Hochelaga.”

“Maybe in Mile End?” I responded, which was risky.

“All right, maybe in Mile End.” He smiled.

I returned the smile. “Thank you, but I’m not hungry.”

“Can I offer you an espresso, perhaps?”

“Latte, if possible.”

“Good.” The man turned to an old woman at the counter; she nodded and walked toward the espresso machine. The sound of steam running out of a nozzle filled the small shop. I looked around the well-kept store: there were pastries, vanilla cakes, Lavazza coffee bags, and the obligatory Montreal bagel.

“Anything for your friend?”

I looked at Julien. Goddamn, did he look stupid. I turned back to the Italian. “He’s all set.”

“Sit down, sit down,” he said to me.

As I settled into the wood-backed chair, the old lady handed me my coffee, smiling as she departed. It was the most honest smile I had ever seen. Something in the way she moved, the way she rested the cup slowly on the table, her old hands still soft from years of care and patience, moved me. If she was this Italian man’s mother, then the apple fell far from the tree.

“I assume you are aware of the circumstances leading to our meeting today,” he said. “Let’s have it then.”

I took a sip of the latte. I enjoyed it for a short moment, but then it was time to get down to business. I pulled an envelope out of my jacket. “You will find eight hundred dollars in here as a gesture of good faith, to cover expenses pertaining to your men’s time, as well as yours, of course.”

He nodded in approval. Eight hundred was a good number. Less than that would have meant we were either broke and expendable or that we didn’t know how things ran properly in the city. Any more than that meant we couldn’t hold our ground and, therefore, why would they even care about us? Right?

He waved toward his bouncer, who approached and accepted the envelope.

“Now,” I said, “as you know, it has come to our attention that certain, shall we say, rival organizations, have taken steps to trade illicit products within our neutral establishment.”

“I am aware, yes.”

“And I want to assure you that my brother and I have had no involvement whatsoever in these arrangements The person next to me, Julien, had, in fact, single-handedly decided to contact these criminal circles so that they could provide drugs to sell in our establishment.”

The Italian man listened in silence. He looked pleased. He glanced at Julien and said, “You have the necessary contacts to initiate such a trade?”

Julien beamed, as if he’d been handed the keys to the fucking city. “Yeah, man! I mean, my man here didn’t even need to ask, yo! I’m holding him down, man. I’m holding him down, you know? I got shit covered. My main man’s a Blood, I mean. And he said he could provide anything we needed. Weed, coke, E — just ask and I’ll call him and shit’s done.”

“This friend of yours,” the Italian said to Julien, “what’s his name?”

“Turcotte. Pete Turcotte.”

The Italian looked at his bouncer.

“Rings a bell, vaguely,” the bouncer said. “I’m guessing he’s from Saint-Vincent-de-Paul.”

“That’s it. That’s him. Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in Laval.”

The bouncer continued: “Probably pushing a little weed to his welfare friends, nothing more, but it rings a bell.”

“I see. This complicates things,” the Italian said, sipping his coffee. We peered at each other. “And you know this man?” He nodded toward Julien.

“I’m afraid we grew up on the same street. Our relationship is merely due to geographic proximity, and has nothing to do with the actual business or friendship.”

“Hey!” Julien said. “What the fuck’s up with you all of a sudden?”

The idea that he was the scapegoat for this whole thing might have just started to sprout in his dumb fucking head. I could have asked for the Italian’s lenience. I could have mentioned how stupid he really was. Hell, I could have gotten the guitar out of my trunk as proof. But Julien had fucked with my livelihood, and that required retribution.

“For all I care, you can beat him, maim him, kill him. I don’t care.”

Julien jumped out of his seat. “What the fuck, man!”

My arm rose to the sky, finger pointing like the Old Testament God. “Trust me,” I said as harshly as I could. “You want to sit yourself back on that chair and shut the hell up. Right now!”

He sat down, shoulders slumped forward like a scorned child.

I took a deep breath to calm myself. “My wish, Monsieur, is to remain independent. My brother and I happen to be beer enthusiasts, and that is the main reason why we even care about our brewery at all. We like brewing it, we like serving it, the people, the noise, the staff, the waitresses — that’s really all there is to it. While this incident is unfortunate and undesired, you can see that we took swift and immediate steps in order to ensure our neutrality. If you wish for us to handle Julien for you, we would be happy to do so, but the bottom line is that it remains your call to make, not ours. We will be happy to live with any decision that you make at this point.”

“Richard,” Julien pleaded, “don’t do this, man.”

The Italian sighed and looked at me, then Julien. Maybe the Bloods did want to start a turf war, and he’d need to beat some information out of Julien. Maybe the Bloods didn’t want a turf war, but two idiots they had allowed in their outer circles could provide an opportunity to reopen certain negotiations. Maybe I didn’t want to think about the real reason why this meeting had been called for in the first place. The silence started to weigh heavily, and I just wanted it to be over.

“We’ll handle it from here,” said the Italian. “It was a nice gesture: the envelope, him, the way you presented your case. It was well put together and you seem honest enough. We’ll handle the rest.”

“Richard,” Julien muttered.

I didn’t look at him.

“The coffee was flawless,” I said as I got up. I took my last sip and put on my shades.

“Thank you. It’s appreciated.”

As I walked toward the door, the bouncer nodded at me politely. I nodded back. I started to feel like I had gotten us out of it. It looked that way for a minute. Maybe the two pieces of driftwood from Hochelaga could rise with the tide and become rich, honest men on their own terms.

I was inches from the door when the Italian said, “But of course, you have to understand that this business...” I stopped and turned around. “This trouble of yours, him,” he added, referring to Julien, “is going to take a certain amount of our time.”

Fuck! I thought. Goddamn fucking fuck! It hit me like a wrecking ball. I wanted to scream. I wanted to smash a wall or Julien’s face. I couldn’t let it out, though. I couldn’t let it show that I had been fucked. Not now, not ever. Stay classy, I kept thinking. Stay fucking classy.

I swallowed my pride and said, “Of course,” as calmly as I could.

“Now exactly how much time this is all going to take will be entirely up to our friend’s collaborative spirit. So do not bother yourself with worrying quite yet.” He got up from his chair and put his jacket on. “We’ll get in touch with you when we know for sure. Go now, enjoy the rest of your day. It’s a beautiful day outside. Go and enjoy it.”

There was nothing else to say. I had just signed up for a lifetime protection plan, and I couldn’t get myself out of it.

We were fucked.

“I’m sorry,” Julien tried saying to me. I didn’t answer. That goddamned idiot had gotten me into so much trouble. So much fucking trouble. I didn’t want to answer. It could get ugly and this wasn’t the time and place for me to lose it.

The Italian walked up to me. The bouncer approached Julien.

“Thank you for your time,” the Italian said as he opened the door. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

I could hear the first punch hit Julien as I walked out. I heard him whine, cry, plead, and shout. I didn’t feel bad. Not for a minute.

I got in my car, lit up a smoke, and started the engine. After I made it to Maurice-Duplessis Boulevard — that’s when I lost it, and I lost it bad. I started punching the steering wheel, punching the dashboard. I punched my own fucking head, shouting, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”

It wasn’t gonna do.

I still had Julien’s guitar in the trunk. I still had his fucking guitar. I still had his shitty guitar that was out of tune with the broken stings and the cheap porn glued to the back of it. I still had his shitty fucking guitar.

I was going to nail that fucking thing to the wall in my bar. I was going to nail it right over the bar, right over the fucking bar as a reminder of things that are and things to come.

Shit! I said to myself. The light was green again. There is no such thing as independence in this world.

Joke’s On You by Catherine McKenzie

Coyote by Brad Smith

Westmount

They gathered at the Sunflower Diner in the mornings, never before ten because they weren’t the kind to get out of bed early, even to go kill something. The core group was generally the same, a dozen or so men most days, although the number could double, depending on who was working what shift where. They’d have breakfast before heading out, slopping up egg yolks with Wonder Bread toast, and calling for more coffee, those bottomless cups.

They were older, the majority of them, half-assed farmers who called themselves retired even though they had never worked full time, having years ago rented out the acreage they’d inherited from their fathers to the big US cash croppers. They still called themselves farmers, living on the fat of the land rather than off it, but most had worked other jobs sporadically over the years, and nearly all of them had wives who worked. The men drove big pickup trucks that served no practical purpose other than a participation in some vehicular pissing contest. Splattered with mud, like some badge of honor, the trucks had loud diesel engines and tires the size of Volkswagens.

From time to time, Joanna would see some of their working wives in town, driving their husband’s trucks. They practically needed stepladders to climb in and out of the monstrosities.

Breakfast was leisurely and long, the conversation revolving around sports — the Maple Leafs, the Canadiens, and sometimes the NFL. The weather, if commented upon at all, was quickly determined to be fucked up. They didn’t need to talk politics; they all voted the same way so there was nothing to discuss. Some days it would be close to noon before they left the diner, Ben Dubois deciding when it was time to go. Anybody walking into the diner wouldn’t exactly pin Dubois as the leader, and the other guys wouldn’t readily admit it, but he was certainly their captain.

He would sit in the same corner booth as always, not saying much, too busy concentrating on his eggs, pancakes, and sausages, cleaning up his own plate before helping himself to the scraps on someone else’s. He would then sit back, toothpick in his mouth, a slight look of contempt on his face, some undisclosed disdain for his surrondings. He couldn’t care less about hockey or football, and the weather was going to do whatever it wanted. But Dubois held himself in such a way that suggested he knew more about the matters at hand than the rest of them put together, and if someone came up with an inordinately stupid statement, all eyes would turn to his reaction, even if it was nothing more than a condescending smirk.

Leaving, they’d stand in the parking lot for a few minutes, light the cigarettes they weren’t allowed to smoke in the diner, and watch the sky, deciding what concession to hit first, rifles in the racks, whiskey in flasks tucked into their hip pockets.

The hunting had started just a few years earlier, so Joanna had never known about it. She had come home in the spring, and didn’t notice the bunch until late fall, when the crops were off the fields, the leaves off the trees. One afternoon, washing dishes in the kitchen sink, she spotted trucks parked alongside the road, north of the farm, exhaust pipes puffing smoke rings into the cold November air. Homer was just two days quit of the latest round of his chemo, and was in the front room by the fire, trying to stay warm and positive, his skin as gray as day.

“What’s with the trucks on the side of the road, Dad?”

He didn’t look away from the flames. “Dubois and that bunch.”

“What are they doing?”

“Coyote hunting.”

It was pure serendipity that Joanna was even there, in the house, her marriage having finally collapsed at roughly the same time that Homer’s cancer came back. The disease thrived as the marriage had not. Her leaving had been anticlimactic, and Richard had said as much on their final night together. He compared their relationship to a baseball player batting.180 over the course of his final season, with everybody, including the player, knowing it was over.

Joanna hated sports metaphors, and that this was the best he could come up with after fourteen years made her resent him even more than she already did.

They’d spent some time in counseling, even changing therapists twice, as if the therapist might somehow be the problem. The last one was a sunny blond woman named Nathalie. She had a degree from McGill, and legs like a Vogue model. She brought things to a close when she called Joanna at work to tell her that Richard had sent her a text asking if she wanted to get a drink. It was the first time Joanna had ever heard of a marriage counselor advising a client to run for the hills.

Which is precisely what Joanna did, although the hills turned out to be the fields of her youth, less than an hour south of Montreal, in Howick. She took a leave of absence from her job at Dawson College. Her father’s illness provided a convenient excuse, although most of her colleagues were aware of her domestic situation. Who knows — maybe a few of them received a text from Richard too. Maybe a few even responded.

She came home to her old bedroom, to the familiar smell of the house and the barn and the land. She cooked for her father, drove him to Montreal for his treatments, and in between, she frantically cleaned a house that hadn’t seen much more than the occasional pass of a corn broom since her mother died seven years earlier. In what even she recognized as a cathartic state, she suggested painting, papering, and installing new flooring. Homer would have none of it. He wanted things to be as they’d always been — his walls and his floors and his health.

Joanna should have known better. She had tried a similar tactic when Richard began his wayward drift, spending less and less time at home, showing houses to prospective clients in the evening instead of the day, attending real estate conferences he’d eschewed in the past. Meanwhile, Joanna renovated and redecorated the house, knocking down the wall between the kitchen and dining room, making an en suite bath and walk-in closet in the bedroom for the kids they’d never have. The renovations had been expensive, even for Westmount, but money was never the problem.

By early December, Homer felt well enough to wander around outside for a couple hours every day, looking for jobs to do. One sunny morning, Joanna found him on an extension ladder, cleaning leaves from the eave above the front porch. She’d made him climb down, to his disgust. Since then, he’d reluctantly confined himself to whatever chores he could find at ground level.

One gray afternoon, Homer was changing the oil in his pickup truck when Ben Dubois rolled into the driveway. Joanna was in the kitchen making soup from the carcass of a chicken she and Homer had eaten over the weekend. When she heard the rumble of the exhaust, she saw Dubois sliding his girth out from behind the wheel. Ralph Acton emerged from the passenger side, shoulders slumped, head hanging down like a cartoon character. Homer straightened and wiped his hands on a rag he drew from his coveralls. Joanna could tell by his step that he was not happy with the interruption.

The three men were standing by the tailgate when Joanna came out of the house wearing Homer’s old wool jacket, which he’d once worn when doing his evening chores. Ralph Acton nodded as she approached, but looked away quickly so he wouldn’t know if Joanna nodded back.

Inside Dubois’s truck bed were three dead coyotes, two of them small and brown, the third large and yellow. Their hides were thickly matted where they had bled out, their eyes glassy, tongues swollen. Dubois glanced at Joanna as if she were a child interrupting the grown-ups, and then didn’t look at her again.

“The big one near got away,” he said. “We ran him around the beehive bush and he went through a culvert on Mill Road. Billy Logan just pulled up to the intersection there, got out with his .222, and put a slug through his hindquarters.” Dubois pointed to the shattered hip of the dead coyote. “Spun him around like a whirligig. Son of a bitch kept going, though, just his front legs working. Made the mistake of crossing my path, so I hit him in the ribs with my rifle. He was done like dinner. Lookit the size of him, Homer.”

Homer nodded. It seemed to Joanna that he was trying to muster some enthusiasm for the matter at hand, but couldn’t quite do it. Changing the oil in his pickup was the job at hand. The cancer had made him more focused, she’d noticed, whether he was cutting the grass or clearing the vegetable garden — whatever the task of the day was, he did it relentlessly, distractions be damned.

“What do you do with them?” Joanna asked.

Dubois, looking at Homer, smiled, making a point of not acknowledging the question or the woman who’d asked it.

Ralph watched Dubois, needing direction, then reluctantly took it upon himself to reply: “We dump ’em at the landfill.”

Joanna kept her eyes on Dubois. If he wouldn’t look at her, she wouldn’t stop looking at him. “You’re not serious,” she said.

“Girls,” Ralph chided, “always against us boys and our hunting.”

“Right,” Joanna said. “Except I was shooting and skinning out rabbits and ducks when you were still shitting your pants, Ralph. We ate what we shot.”

“I ain’t going to eat no coyote,” Ralph said.

“A little bit of the city come home to roost, I see, Homer,” Dubois said.

“You don’t sell the hides or anything?” Joanna persisted.

“Ain’t worth nothing.” Ralph again.

Now Joanna turned to him. “Then why shoot them?”

Ralph grinned. “Just what we do. Right, Dubois?”

Dubois stepped to the tailgate, lifted the front quarters of the large coyote, and stared straight into the dead glassy eyes. “That’s right. It’s what we do. And we do what we want.” He dropped the carcass carelessly, the animal’s head banging onto the metal of the tailgate, and turned to Homer. “We’ll let you get back to your truck, Homer. Got a feeling you’ll be getting an earful over supper tonight.”

Joanna waited until the vehicle was out of the driveway before turning to her father. “They ask your permission to hunt here?”

“Yeah,” Homer answered, slowly adding new oil to his engine.

“You approve of it?”

“I guess I don’t disapprove of it.”

Joanna stared hard at her dying father.

It wasn’t until breakfast the next morning that the subject came up again. It seemed Homer had been thinking it over.

“A coyote will kill young calves and lambs,” he said, having finished his single piece of toast, both hands on the coffee cup before him. “Helps out the farmers, keeping their numbers down.”

“Except these days you can drive fifty kilometers in any direction and not see a single cow,” Joanna countered. “And when was the last time anybody in this county raised sheep?”

When Homer took a sip of coffee, his watch slid halfway up his wrist. His forearms had once been like fence posts. “They’re just a nuisance.”

“So are telemarketers,” Joanna said. “We don’t shoot them and toss them in a landfill.”

Homer smiled. “It’s an idea though.”

Joanna stood and cleared the table. “I’m not opposed to hunting. But these guys aren’t doing it for meat. It’s nothing more than blood sport. Sitting in their goddamn trucks along the road with the heaters going. Ralph Acton smelled like a distillery yesterday. Dubois too.”

Homer got to his feet. “I guess it’s become a bit of a hobby with them. I told them years ago they could hunt here.” He grabbed his jacket from a hook on the door. “Hard to untell them now.”

Five or six years into Joanna and Richard’s marriage, Joanna had lunch one afternoon with a colleague from the college. They went to a newly opened café a few blocks away on Sherbrooke Street, near Atwater. Joanna’s mother was in failing health at the time, and the woman told her that she’d lost both her parents in the past couple of years. The woman had inherited her parents’ house, an old-style ranch on three acres at the city’s edge. A young man and his wife had approached the woman immediately after her widowed mother died. They impressed her with a story of how they were about to get married, looking for the perfect place to start a family. The woman had sold the house to them without putting it on the market. The couple immediately sold the property to a city realtor, who promptly turned the three acres into a subdivision. The realtor was Richard. Joanna hadn’t taken Richard’s last name, so the woman did not know he was her husband.

Joanna kept the story to herself for a long time, not knowing how to bring it up, and not knowing if she wanted to. She deliberately avoided becoming better friends with the woman, fearful that the truth would eventually come out. Of course, when Joanna finally broached the matter with Richard, she did so during a late-night argument, the details of which she couldn’t remember. When she had accused him of screwing over her friend, Richard mocked her. If the woman had done due diligence, he said, she would have known that subdividing was not only possible but quite likely. Besides, if Richard hadn’t moved on the property, somebody else would have. He told her this in his usual forceful manner, silencing her with his tone.

The trucks continued to appear throughout the winter. Joanna occasionally heard gunshots in the distance. There were days when she saw the trucks but didn’t hear shooting; those days were rare. Neither Ben Dubois nor any of the others pulled into their driveway again to show off their kills. That might have been because Homer was rarely outside anymore, the combination of sickness and cold weather keeping him housebound.

Joanna did have an encounter with Dubois in town one day, in the parking lot of the food market on Bridge Street. In a town of less than a thousand people, it was inevitable that they would see each other eventually. It was late in the afternoon when Joanna walked out of the store, carrying her heavy grocery bags, and spotted Dubois talking to another man in the lot. His truck was parked next to Joanna’s Honda — not coincidentally, she guessed. He watched her as she approached, his face red with drink, his tiny eyes narrowing. The other man sulked off the moment Dubois diverted his attention, like he had been waiting for a chance to take his leave.

“There’s the girl,” Dubois said. “How’s Homer?” It was more of a demand than a question.

“Getting by.” Joanna opened the hatch and started to place the groceries inside. Dubois drew near; without turning, she smelled the whiskey on his breath.

“Some of us been thinking we’d like to come see him. Thing is, we don’t feel all that welcome.”

“Why not?”

“Makes you feel that way, being judged.” Dubois paused but couldn’t help himself. “Especially by the likes of you.”

Now she turned on him. “I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me. You’re from here, same as the rest of us. Don’t matter if you go off and live in the city awhile, until you figure out you can’t hold onto a man and you come running back. You’re still from here. But all of a sudden, you act like we’re beneath you.”

It surprised her how angry she became. There was something about him, some inborn visceral hatred, that she recognized, and it was the recognition that bothered her, more than Dubois himself. It was as if she wanted the concept of someone like him to be completely alien to her.

“Nothing is beneath me,” she said. “I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”

And then she was in the car, pulling away, not looking over to where he stood, legs spread, his mouth slack with liquor, an ever-present grin on his face.

Christmas came, and then New Year’s, neither day delivering anything remotely festive. Joanna cooked, but Homer had no appetite, so she ended up eating too much and tossing things out.

In late January, the doctors decided that further treatment would be pointless. Homer passed his days in the front room by the fire, first in his leather recliner and lastly in a bed the hospital brought over. He read mostly nonfiction books, and watched movies Joanna got from the library in Ormstown. He said he wanted to make it until spring; he died the day after Easter Sunday.

The funeral was on that Wednesday. They filled a little church with friends and neighbors, mostly people Homer’s age, some still upright and relatively strong, but most bent and worn, leaning on canes or walkers. Homer’s last surviving sibling, Doug, didn’t make the trip from Victoria.

Richard wasn’t at the funeral either. For that Joanna was mostly grateful. She didn’t want to see him at a time when she was so emotionally fragile, but his absence clarified his incredible selfishness. He knew her father had died — she had left him a message on his cell, and had regretted the call immediately after she put the phone back in its cradle.

Richard did show up six weeks later, pulling into the driveway in a black BMW Roadster Joanna had not seen before. She was planting string beans in Homer’s vegetable garden along the south wall of the barn. When she saw him, she moved the sticks and twine over a row, running the corner of the hoe to cut a valley in the fresh-tilled dirt. As he approached, he made no comment about what she was doing. If someone were to ask him about it later, Joanna would bet that he wouldn’t remember what she was doing when he saw her. He said hello and got to it.

“I’ve been wondering how you were getting along,” he began.

“Fine,” she said. “Thanks for asking.”

“I meant with the farm,” he elaborated. “How close are you to putting it on the market?”

Joanna straightened. “You thought I might list it with you?”

“No,” he said. “Find somebody local. I need to know when you’re going to sell.”

“Why do you need to know that?”

He gave her an incredulous look. “We’re married, Joanna. The place is half mine. I could use the equity for a project I’m starting.”

Joanna looked at the cutting edge of the hoe. “You think you own half of my father’s farm?”

“The law thinks I do,” he replied. “We were together fourteen years.”

“And now we’re not.”

“Now doesn’t matter,” he said. He waited a moment. “You’d better talk to your lawyer.”

She went back to work as he got into the BMW and drove off.

After a few minutes, she sat down on the grass in the shade of the barn. She felt like she’d imagined him there, that it hadn’t really happened. In the garden, the beans were partially planted, the rest still in the envelope by the watering can. She realized she’d been planting the garden without even considering if she’d still be there when things were ready to harvest. She was planting the garden because it was time to do it.

She got up and started for the house. It was past noon, and she thought she would eat something. Movement caught the corner of her eye as she rounded the old machine shed. A skinny brown coyote was crossing the field to the west of the house, the field planted in red clover just six inches high. The animal was mangy, its tail nearly bereft of fur.

It seemed to Joanna that she sensed the shot an instant before she heard it. It rang out like a thunderclap during a sudden summer storm. The coyote lurched sideways as the bullet hit it, then took two steps forward and collapsed.

Joanna glanced toward the side road and spotted Ben Dubois’s truck before she saw him. He came out of the trees, his gun in the crook of his arm, walking toward the dead coyote. He noticed Joanna in the yard as he approached. He gave her a quick look of dismissal. Even in the distance, she could see him smiling, knowing she’d been watching.

She had left the double doors to the storm cellar open when she’d retrieved the gardening tools earlier. She walked past the house to the edge of the property, waiting for Dubois to pick up the coyote before calling to him. He had the animal’s rear legs in one hand, preparing to drag it away, when he heard her voice. He hesitated, then started over, leaving it behind. When he was near enough, she gestured toward the storm cellar.

“You like to kill things. How are you with rats?”

Dubois looked wary as he approached, but now he smiled into the darkness of the cellar. “Don’t tell me you’ve changed your way of thinking.”

“I just want it dead.”

“Rat’s no different than a coyote.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Joanna said. “Give me the gun. I’ll kill it myself.”

Dubois did so, liking the idea. When she had the rifle in her hands, she swung the stock as hard as she could, crashing it across his temple.

Later in the day she heard him yelling, and then calling out, promising vengeance before seeking conciliation, and finally pleading with her. She kept the radio on to drown him out. He was still making noise when she went to bed, alternating back and forth between dark threats and offers to bargain, before finally stopping. Joanna went to sleep; she assumed Dubois did too.

When she went into town late that afternoon, she heard that Ben Dubois had been reported missing. The police had found his truck on English River Road, two kilometers from the farm. There were no leads, although the prominent theory was that Dubois had suffered a heart attack while hunting, and was lying in the woods somewhere. When Joanna got home, she buried Dubois’s rifle in the heavy loam of the barnyard before going down into the basement to give him a bowl of water. He howled as he heard her come near, first calling her a fucking whore, then sobbing, begging for forgiveness. He told her he was starving and beseeched her to give him something — anything — to eat. She slid the water beneath the door and left.

A few hours later, she stewed some meat and gave it to him, along with a piece of bread. She could hear him eating from behind the door. The next morning, she went out to the smokehouse where she had hung the dead coyote. She hacked the back leg from the carcass and took it inside, where she cut the meat into pieces and made more stew. She figured there was enough there to last Ben Dubois a couple of weeks.

After that, she didn’t know.

The Crap Magnet by Peter Kirby

L’île Sainte-Thérèse

My buddy Mike brought me over to L’île Sainte-Thérèse in his boat. It was two in the morning. Pitch black. The only light came from the stars. I needed a place to hide out for a while, and Sainte-Thérèse was the perfect spot. Only a ten-minute boat ride from Montreal, but it’s another world, a tiny island that no one controls, except the squatters who have been living there since the fifties. The police and the authorities gave up on the place years ago. Mike said the cottage was empty and I could stay there as long as I wanted.

That bastard cop, Luc Vanier, was pissed at me. He had me marked for a double murder, but couldn’t prove anything. So instead of letting it go and moving on, he put out word that I was cooperating, that I was going to make a deal with the prosecutor in exchange for a free pass and a spot in witness protection. In my line of work, that’s a death sentence.

That’s why I needed to drop out of sight. I needed to figure things out.

The first night, I took a quick look around outside but it was darker than a blacked-out basement. I locked the doors and put chairs against them. I slept in a sleeping bag under the dining room table but I didn’t sleep well.

In the morning, I took a good look around. The cottage was surrounded by trees that had been cleared back, like a bunker in a green parking lot. In two hours, I counted about twenty different ways people could approach the cottage through the trees. If you’re sneaking through the woods trying to find someone, you won’t be hacking a new path, and I wasn’t expecting Indiana Jones. If anyone was going to show up, it would be guys as freaked out by the forest as I was. I found a spot on the deck where I could see the approaches funnel into the clearing, a spot where it was still a short run into the woods if anyone showed up.

Mike’s father must’ve been some kind of handyman; he had a nice collection of tools in the shed. There was a wrench the length of a baseball bat, with most of its weight at the business end. There were a couple hammers, a mallet that could crush a skull, and an axe. I dropped them onto the forest floor, covering them with leaves and making sure I remembered where I hid them. I also hid two old baseball bats in the undergrowth beside some trees. I found a serious chef’s knife in the kitchen that I wrapped in a dishrag and stuffed into my pants. I had to cut a small hole in the pocket to get it to sit properly.

I kept the sleeping bag under the kitchen table. Every night after I finished eating in the last light, I would turn on the television in the living room and sit in the kitchen. Sitting in the dark isn’t much fun, but it’s safe, and when you’re looking out into the night from a dark room, you see everything. Guys who creep into houses at night always go for light, like moths. Most of the time they’re right; the target will be sitting in his La-Z-Boy, nursing a beer, watching Jay Leno, not a clue what’s going on until it’s too late.

It took me awhile to settle into the cottage. In the city, you develop a filter. You ignore all the normal stuff, noticing only what’s odd — like the guy trying too hard to appear drunk, or the fool who looks you in the eye but turns away a second too late. On the island, all the activity made me twitchy at first. Nothing stayed still. Shit was happening all over the place. Fat brown birds rooted around trees, making more noise than rats in a dumpster. Squirrels with stripes up their backs sprinted through the grass like they were trying to escape something awful.

Eventually I figured out the patterns, relaxed, and focused on the stuff that stood out.

Like the golden-brown flash that sliced through the trees. By the time the dog came bounding into the clearing, I was thirty feet into the woods. A red ball on a short rope went flying over his head, and he chased after it. It was a Labrador, I think. The dog grabbed the rope as the ball hit the ground, turned in a big circle, and headed back to the brunette behind him. Her hair was loose and curly, and she wore jeans and a white T-shirt. She had a farmer’s tan. She grabbed the rope and threw the ball in a slow arc toward the house. The dog took off after it. I scanned the woods behind her. She was alone.

I was ten feet behind her before she noticed me. She wheeled around to face me, terrified. I tried for a disarming smile and said, “Hi.”

“You made me jump,” she said, backing away. “I didn’t know there was anyone here. It’s been empty for weeks.”

“I’m staying here for a few days, maybe longer.” Before I could reach out for a handshake, the dog was sniffing my crotch. “I’m John Webster.”

The fear in her eyes was obvious, but the dog was friendly enough. I grabbed his head and looked him in the eyes. His tail waved back and forth. I peered up at her, keeping my eyes on her face, avoiding the body scan. She was attractive, but worn-looking.

“I’m sorry for disturbing you,” she said, turning to the dog, “Come on, Hoagy.”

“Carmichael?” I asked.

“What?”

“Hoagy. Hoagy Carmichael, the singer. That’s the dog’s name?”

“How did you guess?” She almost cracked a smile. “My dad used to sing ‘Stardust’ all the time. That’s why I picked the name. Reminded me of my dad, I guess.”

Hoagy was bouncing around, and she was warming up to me.

“Want a drink?” I offered. “All I’ve got is iced tea and coffee, but iced tea is good in this heat.”

She looked past me into the woods. “Sure, iced tea sounds good. I’m Maude,” she said, reaching out to shake my hand. As she did, I noticed fingertip bruising on the inside of her arm.

We sat on the deck. She wasn’t relaxed, constantly twisting a cheap ring on her finger that looked like a purple flower. She had other bruises, fading but still obvious. She kept glancing back over her shoulder at the woods. I could have told her I would see anyone before they arrived, but I didn’t.

“So you live on Sainte-Thérèse?” I asked.

“Yeah, about half a mile through the woods.” She pointed in the direction she’d come from.

I’d seen the house. It was a crap magnet, a worn-out looking shack surrounded by junk, like an old all-terrain vehicle on cinder blocks, rusting parts on the ground like it had spilled its guts, a refrigerator lying on its side, empty beer cases, rusted appliances. It was the kind of place that brought down the neighborhood. But there wasn’t any neighborhood, so who cared?

“So we’re neighbors, Maude,” I said.

We made small talk. Then I saw movement. Hoagy was on his feet running toward it. I dropped off the deck, moved to the woods at a right angle to the dog’s path, and made a wide circle through the trees. I came up behind a stocky guy in green pants and a camouflage T-shirt, carrying a shotgun in his right hand. Hoagy made crotch contact with him, and turned to run back to Maude.

Camo-boy stepped into the clearing and yelled, “Maude?” It wasn’t a Hey, darling, where you been? More of a What the fuck are you doing here?

I moved quietly toward him. Here’s a rule: never surprise a guy who’s carrying a gun, unless you’re close enough to jump him. He probably felt my breath on his neck before he heard me.

“Afternoon,” I said. I was getting good at this friendly neighbor speak.

He spun around and backed away from me. Another rule: if it’s a choice between invading someone’s personal space and giving him room to lift and aim, go for invasion. I had maybe forty pounds on him. I reached out and grabbed the gun. He wasn’t happy.

“These things make me nervous,” I said, grinning. “So I have a rule: no guns on the property.”

He didn’t argue when I cracked the gun open and lobbed the two cartridges in his general direction.

“John’s the name. Want to join us for iced tea?”

It took him a few seconds to process everything. Eventually he said, “Sure.”

We walked back to the cottage.

“My name’s Ace. Me and Maude live back over there,” he said, pointing over his shoulder.

Ace was trying to be nice.

I left him with Maude on the deck and went for another glass. When I got back, they were silent. Hoagy was sleeping in the shade.

Right away, Ace started to explain himself. He carried the gun because you never knew who you might run into. Maude had been gone awhile, and he had gotten worried. Then he started into the questions, too many questions. He was trying to figure out where to slot me in his limited universe. I was thinking how to pull his wires to leave him safe. Maude was watching both of us with a who-gives-a-shit expression.

At some point Ace felt comfortable enough to stake his claim: “Me and Maude, we’ve been together for a long time. We love this place. That right, Maude?”

“Sure, I suppose. It can be nice here sometimes,” she replied.

Ace waited for Maude to say more, but she looked away. He rolled his eyes. “Women. They’re never satisfied, know what I mean?”

“I’ve known some pretty satisfied women in my time.” I looked him in the eye, let him understand. Then I let him off the hook: “But I’ve never been able to satisfy one myself.”

When they were leaving, Ace acted like he had made a new friend, full of the we-should-do bullshit of fishing and drinking beer.

Doing nothing on Sainte-Thérèse wasn’t easy. I was thinking too much. I couldn’t help it, but I started going over every hit I had done in the last fifteen years. In my business, forgetting is what keeps you going; you just do the job and move on. Yet with nothing to do but sit around, I started reliving the old jobs, and there had been a lot. I even did a priest once, for paying too much attention to an altar boy. I gave him a knife through the ribs, right after he gave me absolution.

Don’t get me wrong — I wasn’t feeling guilty. They all deserved it. It was more like, How did I end up doing this? The only reason I could come up with was that some moron had paid me. It wasn’t personal. I hadn’t felt anything personal in years.

Maude came back three days later, early in the morning. I was having a coffee on the deck and saw Hoagy coming through the trees. I disappeared into the woods. She didn’t notice the coffee cup as she crossed the deck and went into the cottage like she owned the place. I was back in my chair when she came out.

“A regular Houdini,” she said, her eyes hidden behind big movie-star sunglasses. She had washed up. Her hair was clean, and it looked like she had ironed her T-shirt. When I brought her a coffee, I smelled flowers in her hair. She cradled the mug in her hands, tucking her feet under her chair. She hardly protested when I lifted the sunglasses off her face. Her right eye was ringed with dark bruises.

“You got him mad by taking his gun off him.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“It’s the way it is.”

“You could leave. Walk away.”

“Walk away?” She stared at me like I was an idiot. “He’d come after me. He’d kill me. I’ve learned to put up with things, to be satisfied with whatever little escapes I can get.”

She looked me in the eye. I was today’s little escape.

I grabbed her hand and led her into the cottage, straight into the back bedroom. She let go of my hand, peeled off her T-shirt, and unclasped the front hooks on her bra. I stood and watched. She stripped off her boots, socks, jeans, and panties. Then she came up and kissed me. She braced herself against me, wrapping both legs around my waist. I held her ass to support her. She took her time, testing me. Then she put her feet back on the ground and started undressing me. There were no questions, no hesitations, and I’m not the kind of guy who argues with women.

The sex was quick and rough. I let her scratch, claw, and grab handfuls of me, squeeze like she was causing pain. She was hitting me, solid punches, one after the other into my ribs while she played with my tongue in her mouth. She was slick with sweat, and my hands glided into her body’s slippery crevasses as she pushed herself into me. We stared at each other in the final moments.

We lay naked on the bed, covered in sweat. I could feel her heart beating against my chest. Finally she stirred.

“Shit,” she said.

“That bad?”

She aimed another blow at my ribs, softer this time.

Not even five minutes later, she stirred again. “I gotta get going, before Ace wakes up.”

“You know, you don’t have to take his shit, Maude. It’s a free country. You can walk away anytime you feel like it.”

“Simple as that, Mr. Webster? And what planet do you come from? I want to get away from this shithole more than anything else, but I also want to stay alive. I’m stuck here with a maniac who owns nothing but me. He won’t ever let me go.” She was pulling on her jeans.

“If you want, I can get you off the island. Get you to Montreal.”

“I left once, two years ago.” She put on her bra and stood up. “I got a job waiting tables. Not much, but it was all I needed. God knows how he found me, but he showed up when I finished my shift. He pulled me into his pickup. Literally picked me up and put me in the truck. We drove back here, and he beat me hard for three weeks. Who came to my rescue? Nobody. Not my fucking family, not the social services, not the police. I gave up. It’s easier to be nice than to be beaten.”

She let her words hang in the air, pulled her hair back from her face, and leaned over and kissed me, her tongue snaking deep into my mouth. Then she pulled back and kissed me on my forehead. “I have to get going before that fucker wakes up. Maybe we can do this again sometime.”

She pulled on her T-shirt and left.

I lay there, anger beating in my chest. I thought I had lost that anger long ago.

Once, when I was a teenager, I met my dad on his drunken walk home. Every night he drank at the Bar Saint-Vincent on Ontario Street before staggering home through the alley. He was always angry, drunk or sober, but he was violent when he was drunk. He had stopped hitting me when I grew big enough to fight back, but he never stopped beating Mum.

I remember waiting for him in an alleyway called Sansregret. I always thought that was funny. He didn’t see the baseball bat swing out from behind the dumpster and into his face; he didn’t feel the dozen or so home runs I smashed into his disintegrating skull. Mum didn’t cry when she heard he’d been killed.

Four months after Dad blocked the swings with his face, Mum had another shithead living in our apartment. When her bruises became regular, I realized there was nothing I could do. I gave up on the emotional stuff.

When I whack someone, it’s business. I’m good at it, and you can’t be emotional. If you want to make a career out of it, you have to treat it as a business.

Maude didn’t come back. After a couple of days, I decided to pay a visit to the crap magnet. I knocked on the door. Eleven in the morning, and Ace was already hitting the booze.

“Just passing by,” I said.

He wasn’t so friendly this time. He told me that Maude had left him. She took the dog. He loaded his sob story with details — about his brother coming to help look for her, about the bus schedule he found in the house. Liars love details. They think the more details, the better the story. Honest people tell the facts, and don’t dress their stories up like whores.

Walking back to the cottage, I thought about Maude. Ace didn’t deserve her. She deserved some Henry Constant to take care of her, someone who wouldn’t punch her in the stomach or slap her face with flat fists. She didn’t deserve to leave without a goodbye.

It took me awhile, but I found the fresh earth covered with leaves and branches. I didn’t have a shovel, but just kicking the dirt a few inches down was enough to expose Hoagy’s back. Ace hadn’t even dug a grave deep enough for respect. Kicking up some more dirt, I uncovered her hand, the one with the purple flower ring. I moved her pathetic burial back into place, spread some more leaves and branches on top of it, and went back to the cottage.

It was none of my business. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen people turn up dead for no good reason. No point taking sides. There’s no mileage in supporting the dead.

I should have walked away. But maybe I had too much time on my hands.

I went back to visit Ace first thing the next morning. He came to the door looking like shit, in boxers and a mangy vest, his greasy hair sticking up in odd places. I told him I wanted to go to Montreal for booze and food, and asked to borrow his boat.

“Sure, no problem, man. Long as we share some of the booze.” He went back into his pigsty and returned with the keys.

Five hours later, I brought the boat keys back. I had a bag full of booze and a case of beer. His eyes lit up.

I let him outpace me — he didn’t notice. After two hours he was feeling it. He rigged up a radio outside using an orange extension cord that ran through the kitchen window. He tuned the radio to a country music station that broadcasted from Kahnawake. After three hours he started talking about Maude, the heartbreak and lonesome country songs fueling his imagination.

“I loved her, man, I really did. Sure, we used to fight, but she was the best thing I ever had. And taking my dog too? What kind of woman does that?”

“Hoagy was your dog?”

“Strictly speaking, she came with the dog. But I loved that dog, man.”

“I understand, buddy.”

I walked off into the trees to take a leak. When I came back, I leaned over Ace and said, “Isn’t it always the case? The ones you love are the ones who break your heart.” I had just heard something like that in a song on the radio — it seemed appropriate. Ace looked up at me like I’d said something profound, his mouth open in awe. That’s when I put all my weight into a punch I sent into his slack jaw. His head folded down onto his chest and he dropped the glass. He didn’t even look surprised.

When he woke up he was sitting in the kitchen, strips of duct tape holding him to the chair. I knew he was awake when his breathing changed, but he kept his eyes closed. I waited on the couch while he tried to figure things out. The place stank of stale beer, cigarettes, and dog piss. I had a shovel across my lap, its shiny silver blade still sporting its new label. When Ace finally decided to open his eyes, he looked at me but said nothing.

“I’ll be back in a bit, Ace.” I smiled at him and left.

I came back with Hoagy in my arms, and dropped him at Ace’s feet. Dirt and dried blood made the dog look like he was wearing a bad wig. Ace remained quiet, so I left again. I was back in thirty minutes carrying Maude over my shoulder. I sat her down in an armchair opposite him.

“Look who I found, Ace. Maude came back to see you.”

“Listen, I can explain.”

“Go ahead.”

“It was an accident. I didn’t kill her. She tripped and fell. I didn’t know what to do. Wasn’t any point calling an ambulance, she was dead. I knew they’d blame me.”

“How’d it happen?”

“We’d been drinking. Maude liked to drink. It was one of those freak accidents, you know, like on America’s Funniest Home Videos. But it wasn’t funny. She was walking past Hoagy and he jumped up like she’d stepped on his tail. She tripped and went flying.”

He was talking as though every word was a step toward escape; all he had to do was fill the room with words and he’d be okay.

“She hit her head on the corner of the stove. When she got up, she seemed fine. We went to bed, and she fell asleep right away. She’d had a lot to drink. Later, maybe three in the morning, she woke up and started vomiting. She was vomiting like crazy for about an hour, then she came back to bed and fell asleep. But in the morning she didn’t wake up.”

“Good story,” I said.

“Yeah, a horrible accident.”

I would have done the same thing in his situation: deny everything.

“I don’t believe you, Ace. I saw the bruises on Maude. She was scared of you. You used to beat her pretty good, didn’t you? What was it, recreational?”

“No way, man.”

“So it got out of hand, and now she’s dead. That’s an accident. You didn’t mean to kill her, did you? Just rough her up a little, right?”

“It was a fucking accident. It happened the way I said it. That’s the truth.”

“And what about Hoagy? I thought you loved that animal.” I nodded toward the dog. The top of his skull was caved in, the hair around it matted with mud and congealed blood. “You must have done that with a hammer.”

“Yeah. It hurt me to do it. But I didn’t have a choice. Every time I let him off the leash, he scratched at the place Maude was, like he was trying to dig her up. He wanted to be with her, so I gave him his wish.” He looked up at me with pleading eyes. “Listen, I know I’ve done wrong, but this ain’t the way to deal with it. Why don’t we just call the police? I’ll tell them everything.”

“I can’t do that. It wouldn’t really make things right for Maude, would it? You’d just repeat your sad little story, and get a few months for interfering with a dead body. But Maude’s gone forever. So is Hoagy.”

“But I didn’t mean to kill her. You know how it is. We had a fight — pushing and shoving. But then she fell. It was an accident, I swear.”

Fear makes people run off at the mouth. When talk’s the only thing left, they’ll say anything to unlock the leg-hole trap they’re in.

“So why don’t we ask Maude?” I said. “Look at her.”

He did; she didn’t look good. A worm was climbing out of her T-shirt. Under the dirt, insect bites covered her skin, which was washed out and ready to start peeling. Ace was sobering up.

I opened a bottle of vodka and poured half of it down his throat. He chugged it like he was proving something at a frat party. Then I went over to the counter, took a large pot from under the sink, and filled it with canola oil. I set it on the stove top, but didn’t put the heat on. I started peeling some potatoes I had brought over. Ace had his back to me, but I could hear him straining to see what I was doing.

“Don’t look at me, Ace, look at Maude,” I said as I peeled. “Why don’t you guys chat a bit while I prepare dinner?”

“Please don’t do this. I admit it. It was my fault. I killed her. Please, for the love of God.”

“Talk to Maude, Ace. I’m busy with dinner. You like french fries, don’t you?”

He was quiet for a while, then I heard him say, “Maude, you wouldn’t want this, would you? Not like this. Maude, tell him.”

Maude didn’t say a word. After an hour in the small cabin, she was beginning to smell pretty bad.

“I’m sorry, Maude. We had some good times together, didn’t we?”

I chopped the potatoes into thick wedges and left them on the counter. “Another drink, Ace?” I asked.

He didn’t say anything. I picked up the vodka bottle and slowly poured the rest of it into his mouth. I held his chin to make sure it all went down the right way. I poured myself a Scotch and sat on the couch.

Ace was crying now, sobbing like a child.

“What’s the matter, pal?”

He didn’t answer.

Some people would say I was toying with him, and maybe I was. It takes time for alcohol to get into your bloodstream. I had to fill the time. What’s wrong with being polite? What’s wrong with trying to make someone’s last experience civilized? I was doing what felt right.

Ace hadn’t given up hope, and I didn’t need to take that away from him. There’s a point when people finally understand the inevitable, when they realize there’s no way out. Most people never get there — they refuse to cross the line. They keep pleading, hoping and praying for a miracle to happen. And it never does. Like most people, Ace believed what he hoped for.

“Why are you crying?”

“Because I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I’ve done. I didn’t mean to kill her, honestly. It was an accident. It ain’t right to do this.”

“Oh. I thought that you were crying for Maude.”

“I’m crying for her too. If I could do things over, I would.”

“Another drink would help you, Ace.” I opened the second bottle of vodka and began pouring it down his throat. He struggled against it. It took a long time for the second bottle to go down.

He was stronger than I thought, but eventually his head lolled around and his eyes lost focus. Then he passed out. He was lucky he wouldn’t have to deal with the hangover in the morning.

I went to the stove and put the heat under the oil. I left the potatoes on the counter. The cottage was a scene of domesticity ruined by tragedy, both Ace and Maude asleep while waiting for the oil to heat up. I took the duct tape off Ace and carried him to the couch. I left the cabin and waited at the edge of the woods.

Through the window, I could see the pot sitting on the stove. After a few minutes there were small whiffs of smoke, and there was no detector to wake them up. I had the battery in my pocket. The smoke darkened, and then an explosion of flames erupted out of the pot. In seconds, the flames took hold of the wall behind the stove and moved through the kitchen like something alive. A little while later I saw little puffs of smoke escape from under the roof. I watched the couch burst into flames, and with it, Ace disappeared into the smoke and fire. His face was the last thing I saw, the skin blistered and peeling. He didn’t suffer. The fumes would have gotten him before the flames.

I stood watching at the edge of the trees, feeling better than I had in a long time. I realized then that I had a future. Maude was dead because I held back, didn’t get involved. Well, that was going to change. I’ve got skills. I just need to use them properly.

Poppa by Robert Pobi

Little Burgundy

It was a shouldn’t-be-there kind of noise that took Jimmy from a dead sleep to the edge of his mattress with a pistol in his fist — all in a single beat of his heart. He froze in the dark and cocked his head to one side, pointing his attention to the world beyond the bedroom. After a few breaths he heard it again — a chair sliding on the floor in the kitchen. Followed by a cupboard door closing. A drawer sliding open. The tap coming on.

Jimmy checked the clock — a little past three a.m. It wasn’t a hit; hit men didn’t drag chairs around and wash their hands in the middle of the night. Which narrowed the possibilities to a home invasion or Iggy. And since Iggy at this time of night meant bad news, Jimmy would have preferred a home invasion; he hadn’t shot anyone in a while.

Christie woke up as the lights went on out in the apartment. “Jesus, Jimmy. Don’t you ever get any privacy?”

He put his hand on her ass, gave it a squeeze, and smiled into the dark. “Easter’s usually pretty quiet.” He got up, put on a robe, and left the bedroom with the big automatic still in his hand. Just in case, like Poppa would say.

Iggy was at the other side of the apartment, at the kitchen counter. He was going through the preflight operation of adjusting knobs and wiping down stainless steel on the espresso machine. Iggy was a clumsy-looking motherfucker, but he was a surgeon when it came to making coffee. And hurting people. The chrome contraption was burping and coughing and farting.

Jimmy flipped on the rest of the light switches, bathing the two-thousand-square-foot living room in incandescent whites. He crossed the space and Iggy stopped fiddling with the machine and dried his hands on a towel. “Sorry for showing up like this, Jim.”

Jimmy waved it away. “I can sleep because I pay you not to.” He stepped up out of the living room and put the big autoloader down on the granite. He cinched the belt on his silk robe a little tighter and dropped onto one of the barstools flanking the island. “What’s going on?”

Iggy picked up two tiny espresso demitasses and put them under the filter. There was something tentative, almost nervous about the gesture — two characteristics foreign to Iggy. He turned a knob on the machine then looked up. “Tiny Rockatansky crossed the border at Champlain an hour ago.”

Jimmy reached for the phone: the boys needed to know that Satan was coming to town.

Jimmy faced the big window, hands in pockets, head tilted to one side. On a good day he could see Upstate New York from here. Maybe even Vermont. Now the world stopped somewhere in the flickering image of Westmount below, an intermittent signal pulsing in the blizzard. The snow crippling the city looked like a Christmas movie effect, thick fist-sized clumps dropping from the sky that stuck to everything like baby shit to Russian sable. CNN was on the tube in flat-panel silence, the chryon stating that the whole East Coast was shut down. Wolf Blitzer was shaking his head as if driving over speed bumps, soundlessly professing doom and gloom and loss of life. Jimmy often wondered when — specifically — the pussification of society had started. People were afraid of a little fucking snow. It wasn’t like this was Aruba. And it was February. What did the sports fans expect?

It was all shut down, from New York up through Quebec, and it looked like the city of the dead. Chimneys burped pollution into the sky and a few cars did their best to thread their way through drifts and accidents. The handful of people who were out looked like astronauts, bundled up in coats that could be stuffed with pink fiberglass insulation. But for the most part, it looked as if a sniper warning had been issued.

The abandoned blizzard-painted cityscape held very little of his available attention; like the ticking of a clock, it was relegated to the status of background noise. Jimmy was too immersed in his regular function: outthinking the rest of the motherfuckers in the room. He had an almost preternatural ability in solving problems — it was this core competency, not nepotism, that had earned him his place in the ecosystem of his father’s business.

Jimmy turned away from the window, back to the men scattered around the living room. Iggy stood back in the kitchen, brewing coffee, where he could see everyone. Jimmy brought his focus to Harold in the chair by the fireplace. Harold saw the world through the single prism of legality. He was not good at creative thinking unless it involved fancy legal footwork. And a huge fucking invoice. He had been on retainer for Poppa for the better part of half a century. Very much one of the pillars of the old regime.

Harold sat perfectly poised in his suit — no doubt Brioni — balancing the delicate demitasse and saucer on the arm of the chair. “Through a friend in the DHS south of the border, we know that ten mil just went into a Caribbean account owned by Rockatansky.”

Jimmy nodded. Rockatansky’s contractual requirements were well known: half on signing, half on completion. Boilerplate and nonnegotiable. Which left him crossing the border to do a hit for twenty million dollars. A big pile of money. Poppa kind of money.

Marcus — one of his old-school captains — unfolded from the sofa and walked over to the window. “I got guys on every hotel in the city, from the Ritz-Carlton down to the Colibri. I have people checking out every apartment, loft, and room that has been rented out on the Internet in the past six weeks. Unless the guy’s sleeping on a bench, he has to turn up.”

Jimmy took his hands out of his pockets for this part. “Except nobody knows what he looks like. He drives through a border checkpoint and we don’t have a photograph. How is that even possible? This isn’t Keyser fucking Söze.” Jimmy looked around the room. Half a dozen men in here and not a single one he trusted. Including Harold.

Harold finished his espresso in one poised tilt of his head, wiped his mustache on a linen napkin, and pointed at Jimmy in a we-need-to-talk gesture. “No one has ever seen Rockatansky.”

Jimmy heard caution in Harold’s voice. When Jimmy was on his meds, his temper was pretty much under control. But when he was free-ranging it, his reaction-proportion meter could be pretty off; last fall he had put one of his Ferraris through the window of the dealership. He had taken it in three times to replace a piece of trim that kept falling off. On the third visit they had tried to charge him nine hundred and sixty-nine bucks, saying that it wasn’t covered by the bumper-to-bumper that came with the car. Jimmy smiled over the counter at the service manager, then pointed at the phone. “Call the police,” he said.

The service manager just stared at him.

“Nine one one. Tell them that a customer just put a million-dollar car through your window.”

The manager’s expression was still stuck on skeptical when Jimmy launched the Enzo through the wall of plate glass, scattering the salesmen and destroying two floor models.

Jimmy stepped out of his car onto a floor frosted with broken glass. What was left of the carbon fiber nose section was embedded two feet into the sheetrock at the back of the showroom. “Better get out your Price Reduced! stickers, asshole,” he said. The police arrived three minutes after Harold, by which point the dealership had decided not to press charges. They replaced his Ferrari. Free of charge.

And that had been over a car. This was a hit man hired to take out his father. The response had to be stepped up by orders of magnitude.

Jimmy spotted the Range Rover idling by the wall in the courtyard below, the wipers thumping away in a perfectly timed beat. The city was hidden in the blizzard and Tiny Rockatansky was hidden in the city. Planning bad things.

It was impossible to think of Rockatansky without getting melodramatic. People liked to say shit like, This guy is the deadliest assassin alive, or, That guy is the most notorious hit man who ever lived, but either allocation would be hyperbole.

Rockatansky was a monster because he loved what he did. With him it was never business, it was always personal, and that made him infinitely more frightening.

His resume was a who’s who of top-tier alpha male targets — from dictators in lost little banana republics to captains of industry and barons of crime. One of the tamer stories involved a former Dutch acquaintance — Mr. Van Dorman, the president of a shipping line — who stupidly refused to pay the second half on a job he had contracted. Rockatansky blew up the school where Van Dorman’s grandchildren went; three dozen five-year-olds lost their lives. The device was packed with leaflets stating Mr. Van Dorman should pay his bills to prevent bad things from happening. Six months later, his daughter and son were shot in their sleep. Four months after that, his wife was found dismembered in a parking lot, her driver and bodyguard burned alive in the trunk of the car. Two months on, Van Dorman was killed in his shower with an axe.

And that was just one story; there were plenty more.

Jimmy shook his head, thinking that if this wasn’t so fucking serious, it would be sad; a pair of hundred-year-old guys playing cat-and-mouse. Only the cat wasn’t playing. Which was sad on a whole new level.

“I’m thinking I want to pull this guy’s teeth out one at a time then piss in his mouth.”

“What’s first?” Harold asked.

Jimmy didn’t have to think about it. There was only one piece of information they were missing. “I want to know where that money came from.”

Harold was already shaking his head. “It’s not important who hired him, only that he’s here. What I sugg—”

“Fuck that.” Jimmy paused and dropped his volume. Not everything needed to be shared with these people. “Look, just find this guy. Put one in his stomach and bring him to me in a hockey bag.”

Harold smiled up at the roomful of stereotypes. “You heard the man, go find Rockatansky.”

Harold and Jimmy shared the backseat while Iggy worked the big English sport ute through the drifts. The snowfall had ramped up along with the wind and the streets looked like the stage for an intergalactic conspiracy film — all that was missing was O.J. Simpson in a silver spacesuit.

Jimmy stared at the lawyer. “I have Tiny Rockatansky out there trying to find a chink in Poppa’s armor where he can put a spear.”

Harold kept his face turned to the window, more of that perfect posture again. “I understand that you want to unleash the dogs of war, but wait to see what your father thinks.”

“I know exactly what he’s going to think.”

Harold kept his face turned to the snowbound terrain slipping by the tinted window. “I’m not so sure about that.”

Harold had already gone into the room to see the old man but Jimmy hung back, nodding at his cell phone. Once Harold was inside, Jimmy called an associate in Ottawa — someone who owed him a lot of money. Without a greeting he asked the person at the other end to find out where the money in Rockatansky’s account had come from. There was a pause followed by, “Of course.” Jimmy hung up, turned off the phone, removed the battery, and dropped it into his pocket. He straightened his jacket and walked into Poppa’s room.

The old man looked like a patchwork cyborg Karloff but his knocks hadn’t come from the FX and makeup department; he had earned every scratch, dent, and stich honestly. Over the course of his not insignificant lifetime, fate or destiny or whatever other loose rubric one chose to classify happenstance under did its best to put him in the dirt. He had been visited by four car accidents, three shootings, two bombings, one poisoning, an attempted garroting, numerous cases of the clap, type-two diabetes, a heart attack, shingles, a fall in the shower, a bout of colon cancer, and, finally, a stroke. By this point one thing had become painfully clear to all concerned: you couldn’t kill Poppa, at least not with anything they’d tried so far. His refusal to display an expiration date had earned him the moniker of Old Man Bullseye in the Quebec press. But even the old man would have a hard time outrunning Rockatansky.

Poppa was in his chair — the only one he would occupy for however many more breaths the Intel-controlled machinery could coax out of his taxed mortal coil. But calling the contraption a chair was akin to calling an aircraft carrier a boat. The mobile life-support system had helped him jump levels from latter-day-de-facto-crime-boss-Rasputin to hard-core-computerized Franken-Don. The doctors said that with the assistance of his new self-contained health station, he’d outlive the cockroaches in Keith Richards’s drug chest.

An easy decade.

Maybe two.

Instead of the traditional wheelchair, the engineers had gone with an upright model based on Chuck Close’s famous device, supporting the old man in a manner that made his grandchildren think he resembled Han Solo on a bad carbonite trip. Most of the general components wouldn’t be available to anyone, corporate or government, for years. Some of the more specialized technology would likely never be available for mass consumption — it was simply too expensive. Being a billionaire helped knock down trade barriers and corporate secrets. And where money couldn’t do its evil little dance, Jimmy knew some people who could rob some people; anything was gettable.

There was more onboard computing power than NASA’s latest communications satellite. Pulse and respiratory functions were priority one — his heart was wired to a dime-sized computer that regulated its beat and his lungs were fed a better dose of air than most city dwellers got to smell in a lifetime. The setup monitored all major nervous functions, sending real-time readings to the specialized server at the Jewish General Hospital, where they were used to remotely optimize his OS.

The crown jewel in Poppa’s mechanized cocoon was the communications hardware. The stroke had pretty much wiped his organic motor-skill software clean, only leaving him the use of his eye muscles and two toes and two fingers on his left side. This diminished capacity was nonetheless a veritable treasure trove of digits for the tailored apparatus. The Bowers and Wilkens speakers delivered Poppa’s end of conversation in a slightly baritone Stephen Hawking that the software tinted with a digitized version of his old voice. This unsetting byproduct had been achieved by sampling his speech from more than ninety-one hours of heavily redacted recordings from surveillance files in the CSIS vault; Harold had subpoenaed the tapes under a medical-emergency umbrella, citing their access as the only viable way to replicate some of the sick old man’s identity. The judge agreed; it was obvious Poppa was pretty much out of the food chain.

It was not the first time someone had written the old bastard off.

Poppa operated his speech program via eye movement and the good digits on his hand- and foot-controlled cell phone and Internet, respectively. He could carry on silent phone conversations with his fingertips and send e-mail with his toes while blinking out speech at the same time, a practice he had quickly mastered. Cell phone was piped into his head via Grado headphones and the Internet was displayed on a pair of glasses that functioned in much the same way as a combat pilot’s heads-up display. Transcripts of any part of his conversations — including e-mail and cell phone — were printed up and spit into a tray. The combined capabilities of Internet, e-mail, text, cell phone, and voice enabled the old man to exercise a twenty-first-century level of control over the financial empire he had inherited more than half a century ago — a classic example of the Stone Age meeting the Space Age.

Allo Police had recently dubbed him Franken-Don. The Montreal Gazette had been less kind. But they were right. The old head of the family was gone and what was left in his place was a little unsettling.

Jimmy stood between Poppa and the big windows, and even in this near-taxidermied state, his father still had massive presence, like a regal oil portrait. The old man’s hunting collection, glazed eyeballs and frozen expressions of carnage grinning off the exotic mounts, peppered the walls. The rictus grins were not dissimilar to the old man in many ways.

Before the stroke, Poppa swore he never wanted to live like this — like a fucking space vegetable. Yet here he was — the only time he had stepped out of character in his life. Jimmy wasn’t sure if he saw his surrender to the Fates as his indomitable will to survive — no matter what the cost — or his failure to accept the inevitable. A newfound strength or a newfound weakness? Whatever the deep-rooted logic of the choice, he had trouble reconciling his old man’s life before the stroke with what he now saw before him.

But even like this, Poppa could read situations with Wicca clairvoyance and his digitized voice cut through the perfunctory greeting Harold was still trying to hand out. “Why are you... here?”

Jimmy stepped in front of the lawyer. “Tiny Rockatansky crossed the border at Champlain a little more than—” he dropped his eyes to his Rolex Daytona, “four and a half hours ago.”

For a few seconds Jimmy thought the old man was blinking out a long response behind his glasses and he shifted on his feet to see past the yellow glare of the lenses. Poppa was staring at him with avian concentration, unblinking. His fingers were still; he wasn’t carrying on a phone conversation.

Harold stepped forward. “Tiny Rockatansky is—”

Jimmy put a hand on Harold’s chest, his fingers splayed out over the silk tie. “He fucking remembers who he is.” Jimmy was used to people thinking that Poppa was in some kind of vegetative state, even those who knew him, and it pissed him off. More underestimation at work.

Harold stepped back and looked down at his tie, as if Jimmy carried cholera. “Of course.”

After a few long moments, Poppa’s voice came back on in the controlled cadence of the computer. Jimmy knew that this probably should have come out as a yell but the software was not good at conveying emotion and, like e-mail, if you didn’t know Poppa cold it was easy to misinterpret the cadence. “What else... do you know?”

This time Jimmy let the lawyer step up to the plate. “Ten mil went into Rockatansky’s account in Freemason’s in Nassau, eleven days ago.”

Poppa’s eyes shuttered in a rapid staccato that the eye monitor translated into speech, delivering the old man’s favorite word with passionless precision: “Fuck.”

Harold moved away from the window and stood in the shadow beneath a Cape Buffalo shoulder mount. His expression, like both the buffalo and the toxin-injected faces of the local Westmount hausfraus, never gave much away other than irritation.

Jimmy nodded. “Yeah. Fuck. We need to know where that money came from.”

Harold shook his head. “There’s only one person still alive who hates Poppa enough to pay twenty mil to put him down.”

“Nikolai,” Poppa’s simulated voice said.

The feud went back to the 1978 Stanley Cup Playoffs and a ticket scam that should have been shared. But wasn’t. At least the Habs won.

There had been no bloodshed for a decade and change, and breaking the peace made no sense, at least not from any practical angle. Maybe Poppa would finally get that revenge he had been talking about for all these years.

If Poppa could have shook his head, he would have. “We know... who’s responsible. There’s only one... course of action.” He paused and the only sound in the room was the gentle hum of his electronic life-support system. “Harold, could... you wait outside.” Even the software-imposed monotone could not present the statement as anything other than what it was — an order.

Harold opened his mouth as if to protest, then closed it. “Sure, Poppa, whatever you say.”

Harold left the room, stepping between a pair of men who took up several yards of well-tailored menace, and into the hallway. Jimmy locked the dead bolt and went back to the window, to the blizzard-caked city. “What do I do?”

“If Rockatanksy isn’t... guaranteed the second half... of payment he... won’t complete the... job.” After a few metronomic pumps of the old man’s artificial lungs, he said, “You and I... spend a few minutes discussing... things. Then you walk out... of here and go to... war.”

Another splendid view spilled out below him, rooftops and trees, all the way to Westmount Square, St. Henri beyond, and the river in the distance.

Poppa had spent his life running this business — it had been his central obsession since inheriting the kingdom when his own father was shot down in front of the Ogilvy Christmas window all those years ago.

“You will inherit... everything. What I need—”

“Stop with—”

“Don’t interrupt... me.”

Jimmy put his hands in his pockets and listened.

Poppa’s answering-machine voice continued: “With that comes... a great responsibility... I know you have... respect in this... town. With that comes... enemies. Enemies who will... want what you... have. Now that I’m in this—” he paused for a second and his eyes shifted to Jimmy; he looked at his son and tears welled up in his eyes, “computerized prison, they... think they can get... to me. Maybe they... can. But I don’t want you... inheriting a... a flaming ball of shit.”

“Anything happens to you and I’ll burn this fucking town to the ground.”

Poppa blinked out his response. “No... you won’t.”

Jimmy was getting frustrated; he was warlord but his old man’s word was biblical. “What do you want me to do?”

“You kill Nikolai Bushinsky... and his sons. Immediate... ly.”

From the time Rockatansky had been spotted at the border, Jimmy knew the situation would get boiled down to two options — fight or flight. And the second had never really been on the table.

The old man’s ATamp;T vocal delivery went on: “Rockatansky won’t... fulfill his contract if... his employer is... dead. But... even if... he does, you’ll have no... competition when I’m gone... Take out Nikolai and those... two retards he calls his sons... and the town is yours.”

“Do we want to be subtle?”

His father paused again and for a few seconds the only sound was that of his lungs being inflated and deflated with computerized precision. He watched his son, and Jimmy was sure a smile had crept into his eyes somehow, a near-invisible flash of the man he had been.

It took a few seconds for the old man to cycle up a response with his eyes. “Fuck... subtle. Do something... massive.”

Like Guy Lafleur on the ice, his old man had that unnamable mystery sauce that you couldn’t rent, buy, learn, fake, or steal. “It’s Wednesday. Bushinsky and his two sons always eat at Joe Beef on Wednesday; Nikolai loves their pasta and lobster — there was an article about it in the Gazette.”

Poppa’s eyes shifted over to him again and that smile Jimmy hadn’t seen in a long time was back in his eyes. “Perfect.”

The blizzard had let up and the streets were haphazardly plowed in what appeared to be a paranoid schizophrenic’s version of order. Notre Dame east of Atwater was relatively plowed but most of the locals had yet to dig their rigs out and there weren’t many parking places. Antennae stuck out of snowbanks like snorkels.

The ersatz foodie crowd was thinner than usual; apparently the snow was too much of an obstacle to overcome in the search for the perfect Instagram photo. The Burgundy Lion was crammed with the usual crowd of mindless hipsters who made too much noise under the universal assumption of the uninventive that it made them more interesting. Outside the Lion, the bearded guys in rolled-up skinny jeans and Cowichan sweaters smoked imported cigarettes and drunkenly pontificated on the latest Mac product. Across the street, the heavy-hitting Joe Beef and Liverpool House had started to empty, the second-string service over and many of the diners heading home for the tail end of the Habs game.

A big guy ignoring the weather smoked a cigarette in front of Joe Beef wearing nothing but a plaid shirt, jeans, a ball cap, and three days’ worth of stubble. His sleeves were rolled up, exposing an inkwork koi and he looked like an uber-hipster, assembled in the lab out of the parts of lesser hipsters. Nikolai Bushinsky came out behind him, thanked him for a splendid meal, and stumbled toward the snowbank. Bushinksy looked like what he was, an old-school mobster who had pretty much gone straight, in that he didn’t personally kill people anymore. He was flanked by Josef and Vlad — his sons. Josef was a heavy-lidded stereotype who would always look the part of a wannabe gangster trying to stay in character. Vlad was small, lithe, and sat in at the piano at a few jazz bars around town. Even to the casual observer it was obvious that they had spent the evening celebrating. They were all a little drunk, having put away seven bottles of good Burgundy, and scaling the snowbank to the waiting Town Car proved an exercise in swearing and the near loss of one Gucci horsebit loafer. Nikolai and Vlad got in back, Josef in the front with their driver, cursing his wet sock.

At the corner of Charlevoix, the Lincoln stopped behind a rental cube van — the kind the film business has a monopoly on in town. The light was red and the three Bushinskys were trying to decide if there would be any chicks at Chez Parée worth braving the elements for. Nikolai was of the opinion that it was smarter to go home and watch the end of the Canadiens game in the screening room. They were pretty much decided on the Habs when the roll-up door on the truck ahead flew up, exposing the biggest motherfucking antiaircraft gun any of them had seen outside of a Star Wars film. To be fair, the driver’s reflexes were great. Maybe perfect. But even a big eight with the gas punched to the floor can’t back up faster than a double-snouted.75 cal can spit out death.

The car rocketed in reverse for about twenty yards before the massive gun opened up. As the first volley of fire mulched the engine block and front window, Josef detonated like meat-filled popcorn. The car fishtailed, swerving left and mowing down one of the groovy young people in front of the Lion before hitting the brick wall of the Corona Theatre. The big gun kept punching it, the rattle of brass in the bed of the truck tinkling like laughter just below the heavy barrage of the slugs.

The car shuddered in place as it came apart, hundreds of rounds smacking into the metal skin at supersonic speeds, red tracers lighting up the street like insects from a Timothy Leary nightmare. Somehow, Vlad rolled out of the backseat and ran for the corner of Viger. One of his hands was gone and he stumbled along, drooling blood out of his sleeve and bellowing a single shriek that was a good three octaves higher than a kicked puppy could produce.

The gunner moved off the car, the red tracers stitching a line along the storefronts, shattering windows and whipper-

snippering two hipsters down like plaid-clad dandelions. When the line of fire caught up to Vlad he danced in place for a few seconds, rounds vapor-trailing through him in a heavy black mist peppered in chunks of flesh and bone. Glass and stone and brick behind him exploded as copper-jacketed lead drilled through his body. Car alarms went off. A lamppost toppled. Vlad disintegrated before he could fall over and the line of fire swung back onto the Town Car.

But the Lincoln had already exploded. Nikolai Bushinsky’s arm stuck out the shattered back window, wrapped in flames, the index finger pointing at nothing in particular.

Jimmy stood looking out at the city in the exact same spot where, less than twenty-four hours ago, he had learned about Rockatansky. Only now Nikolai Bushinsky and his sprogs had been gunned down like 1950s goombas. Of course there were also the nine dead bystanders, if the police reports could be trusted. But there is a hidden cost to everything, survival in particular.

Harold was in the apartment, just in case the police came around. They wouldn’t have anything concrete, not in any real sense of the word. Besides, no one really cared about the Bushinsky boys — just more criminal d etritus subtracted from the gene pool of the city. Iggy and Marcus left the truck on the street, along with the anti-aircraft gun; the weapon had been in storage since the seventies and the only one who knew about it was Iggy — who Jimmy trusted with his life (at least in a theoretical sense). And the truck had been stolen earlier in the evening. Nothing but a handful of dead ends.

The nine bystanders were the problem. Which meant at least one visit from the police. A few midlevel soldiers might get picked up. Maybe even smacked around. But Jimmy and Poppa would sit right here in the apartment, comfy and safe behind a thin veil of respectability. And a pile of money.

Jimmy watched the television for a few moments. Pulse News was on the scene, interviewing Dave McMillan, one of the owners of Joe Beef. Dave was a big guy in a ball cap and apparently didn’t need anything more than a plaid shirt to keep warm. He threw a cockeyed and somehow weirdly cherubic smile at the camera. “I saw the whole thing. Four guys left the truck. Small, wiry dudes dressed in black, wearing masks — like ninjas. They got into two waiting cars — red Camaros. I think they were speaking Russian. Maybe Czechoslovakian.”

Behind McMillan, a man sporting a CN cap jumped up and down, a meat cleaver in one hand, a Labatt Blue in the other. “Ninjas, tabarnak!” he kept yelling.

Jimmy smiled and nodded at the screen. “I like these guys. Iggy, send them ten cases of Scotch — the good Japanese stuff.”

Iggy lifted his head, scanned the screen, and reached for the phone.

Jimmy watched the rest of the report then turned off the set. There wasn’t anyone from the Bushinsky family left to come after him. No sons, grandkids, or nephews — no one of note. He had already reached out to mutual friends and they had happily jumped the fence.

Which left Tiny Rockatansky as the last pebble in his shoe.

Jimmy turned back to his apartment. The old man was in front of the fish tank, off to the side of the fireplace. Every now and then Poppa’s fingers moved and his first thought was that the old man was multitasking, but he dismissed it — who would Poppa be speaking to at this hour?

Harold was in one of the chairs flanking the coffee table, a tumbler of Scotch in his hand and a concerned look on his face — from his perspective there was always a downside. After all these years, Jimmy still hadn’t figured out if skeptical was Harold’s natural setting or if he had adopted the stance because that’s what Poppa paid him for.

“Thoughts?” Jimmy asked the lawyer.

Harold took a sip and shrugged. For a man who should have looked happy, he was missing a smile. “I think that Joe Beef stunt opened a wormhole. You two have set things back fifty years.” His delivery was Kissinger-esque.

A cell phone on the counter buzzed, and Iggy, who was doing his duty at the espresso machine, held it up. “It’s yours, Jim.”

Jimmy smiled at his old man, upright in front of the aquarium. He’d had a busy day with the moving crew and his standard late night-puréed meal was an effort to get down.

His father blinked. “You did good... son. You get a clean... slate... to work with.”

Jimmy took his phone from Iggy’s hand. He checked the display then thumbed the screen.

After a terse greeting, his associate in Ottawa relayed information on the banking transaction — ten million US dollars that originated in a Grand Cayman account had gone through Luxembourg en route to Nassau. Not an unusual route or sum, but it was the only transaction that fit the parameters. It had been sent by a law firm in Toronto. Her gave Jimmy a name and hung up.

Jimmy put the phone down on the counter and nodded at the bulge under Iggy’s sweater. Iggy raised an eyebrow but handed it over.

Harold was pouring another Scotch when Jimmy came back in with the chrome .357 in his hand. The lawyer topped up the tumbler and returned to his seat by the fire. He kept his eyes on the pistol while he took a sip.

“I found out where the money came from, Harold.”

“Oh?”

Jimmy raised the pistol. “Toronto firm. Dooley, Hall, Kerr and Reid. Heard of them?”

Harold’s eyes scrolled up and to the right. He nodded. “Big firm.”

“Remember the Place Ville Marie parking lot purchase? They notarized the papers for the seller.”

Harold took another sip of single malt, then said, “Good memory.” He looked over at Poppa. “Aren’t you going to—”

Jimmy pulled the trigger and Harold shuddered in place. His chest blossomed in a massive welt of red and he vomited up a rope of black blood that slopped into his tumbler and spilled onto his lap.

Jimmy walked over to the kitchen and placed the pistol in the sink. Iggy opened the hot water.

Back in the living room, Harold made a horrible wheezing sound, then slumped over.

“It was... me,” the old man’s voice chimed to life. “I hired... Rockatansky.”

Jimmy stared at the old man.

“You have... a clean slate... a kingdom. Nikolai... just would have... been in the way. Harold and you were... a terrible... match.”

“So you had me kill him for nothing?” Jimmy jabbed a finger at Harold’s dead body.

“You needed to... make a state... ment. I am... done... tired of... this prison.” Poppa’s fingers tapped away as he blinked out his thoughts. “I am past the... point where even... the shitty parts... of long ago seem... better than... the present.” His fingers stopped and his printer spat out a single sheet of paper. “Visit me in your dreams... son.”

Jimmy lifted the paper from the tray. It was a bank transfer order. Another ten million US dollars.

He had time to read it once before the window exploded. The heavy slug drilled through Poppa, through his magical chair, and into the aquarium, sending the candy-colored fish to the floor in a massive surge of water. Poppa teetered in place for a second before the second shot came whistling in and he stopped being alive.