Vancouver Noir

The Midden by Carleigh Baker

South Cambie

Well, this is unexpected, but I guess no one ever expects dead bodies. Not in places that aren’t morgues, or battlefields, or graveyards. I certainly didn’t think there’d be one here, in the abandoned, boarded-up house next to my own home, on the corner of Cambie and King Ed. But here we are.

There are certainly some expectations when trespassing in a vacated home. It’ll be quiet of course — a deep, engulfing quiet that only comes when the electricity is turned off for good, and the space has been empty long enough for the crackle of human existence to float off into the atmosphere. Energy never dies so it must go somewhere else. Maybe it goes to other neighborhoods, but what’s left sinks to the earth like a deflated balloon. These leftovers — dust, moss, mold — are the biology of the dying home. Distasteful things that might make us feel better about the living, breathing biology of our own homes. South Cambie is a dead neighborhood slowly being ingested by condos, but I’ll get to that later.

This body smells like someone threw steak in the compost. It’s not overwhelming because the body isn’t that old. It’s dressed in a V-neck undershirt and a cardigan, pants cut awkwardly above the ankle, no socks. Skate shoes. Some people don’t like this look — kind of normcore — but I do. Simple and youthful. There are no visible wounds, but rats have eaten its eyes. I assume it was rats, anyway. Maybe eyes are a rat delicacy, or maybe just a habitual first target, like when we get a chocolate Easter bunny and go straight for the ears.

Here’s another unexpected thing, I knew this body when it housed a person. His name was Daniel, but he went by

Diezl. I may have been the last one to see Diezl alive — around this time yesterday — and that brings a prickly feeling of responsibility to the situation. And so, standing here in this mausoleum, I try to remember what color Diezl’s eyes were. And, obviously, wonder how the hell he ended up here.

It doesn’t look like he was dragged — this would have left a trail of displaced junk, since the house is full of it: empty beer bottles, needles, piles of pink insulation. He must have died inside, but why would he come here? His territory is way down past 49th, in the neighborhood that’s still mostly alive — for now. But Diezl’s body appears to have just materialized here, the rotting sneakers and McDonald’s bags around it untouched. He always had his skateboard and his bag of spray cans with him, but there’s no sign of them. My flashlight flicks across his hands, curled into a rigor mortis grip. Diezl has huge hands, always stained with paint.

Through a busted window, I can see the dark outline of my own house. Ben will still be asleep.

I’ve been breaking into the abandoned places in South Cambie for a while now. A person needs to know the story of the land they live on, even if it’s not pretty. Especially if it’s not pretty. Some houses have been sitting empty since the push to redevelop the neighborhood started last year, while others are freshly vacated. Companies like Millennium and Bosa have bought up nearly everything, but not the place where Ben and I live, not yet. Ben’s buddy owns it — he told us he’s holding out for eight million, and if you think that’s crazy, you don’t know Vancouver. The last offer he got was four million, so for now we get to stay. He says that if the cops find us squatting, he’ll deny knowing us. Ben hates that, but he puts up with it.

Most of the glass is long gone from the windowpane, but I still take my time crawling out. A couple of rats look up at my dangling feet, unafraid. There’s been an influx of rats recently. A lot of them get hit by cars, their little mashed bodies rotting in the street. Yesterday, I opened a cupboard door and found a smallish one nibbling on Ben’s cookies. It’s not a great place to live, I’ll admit. But it’s practically free, and that feels like giving the finger to capitalism.

I’ll also admit that when we moved here six months ago, the dying houses totally freaked me out. This one is in terrible shape: crumbled carport, roof caving, thick moss on the siding. Ample signs of the neighborhood taggers brighten things up a bit, but they worried me too at first. I thought they were gangs — Diezl had a good laugh about that. Fukit seems to be a pretty prolific artistic presence in this neighborhood; his tags are all over. There may be a turf war going on, though, since **Kitten** has been making a move, painting right over Fukit’s old tags. Or maybe Fukit just got tired and fucked off. It wouldn’t surprise me. Everyone in the city seems to have forgotten South Cambie exists. Weeks go by without anyone collecting our garbage or recycling. Most of the garbage in this backyard is ours, we just toss it when the bins fill up. This is supposed to be my last break-in, since it was the house I was the most intimidated by when we first moved to the neighborhood. Some kind of milestone, but I’m not sure for what any more. Diezl was disappointed that I wanted to do it alone.

Around the time things started to get a little rough with Ben, I started going for long walks in the neighborhood. The first time, I was getting out of the shower and he was pissed because I’d used all the hot water. This isn’t hard to do, since the water heater has been leaking like crazy for ages. I told him if we just showered together it wouldn’t be a problem, and for some reason he flew off the handle and started yelling, pushed me and I slipped on the wet floor and banged my face on the towel rack. I chipped a tooth and split my lip. Pretty dramatic, I guess, but Ben swore that hadn’t been his intention — like, to actually injure me — and of course he was right. He’s not a violent guy. Still, the last thing I wanted to do was crawl into bed next to him. I slipped out while he was screwing the towel rack back into the wall, looking miserable. He really did seem to feel guilty about it.

The place next door — creepy in the day and downright terrifying at night — looks right into our backyard, since someone ripped the plywood off the windows. Awful whether I pictured a human standing in the shadows watching, or the vacant stare of the house itself. I went out the front. We’re on the southwest corner, surrounded by huge laurel hedges that hide the house completely. But we exist. There’s an overgrown staircase that’s easy to miss, almost like bushwhacking out of a magical secret garden, except totally not. I bushwhacked out of a giant, moldering house that was somebody’s affordable palace in the seventies, but it’s a dump now, because why would anyone take care of something with numbered days? Spongy walls, split hardwood floors, and high ceilings that cave in a little and dump plaster muck on the floor when it rains.

It was one in the morning, and there wasn’t much open in Cambie Village. The presence of the Canada Line station across the street makes the neighborhood a fairly unsafe place to be at night, even though it’s sandwiched between Shaughnessy to the west and Queen Elizabeth Park to the east. I decided to walk south, toward 49th. That’s where I met Diezl.

He passed me on his skateboard, then stopped. “You should be careful, there’s some guy in the neighborhood grabbing women at night.”

“Grabbing them?” I looked at his hands and quickly back up at his face, hoping that hadn’t made it seem like I was implicating him. Those humongous hands on such a small guy.

He didn’t seem to notice. “Yeah, sorry to be creepy but...”

“That’s not creepy — I mean, you telling me isn’t creepy. Thanks.”

“Okay.” His eyes searched my face for a second and I felt a little thrill for some reason, like this was a movie and something amazing was about to happen. “Your chin.”

I remembered my split lip, and rubbed the dried blood off my chin.

He nodded, and pushed off on his skateboard, looking back at me once before he disappeared out of the streetlights.

Three nights later, when Ben and I drank a lot of beers in the backyard, and he smacked me across the face for breaking his second-favorite pint glass, and then cried for nearly an hour, I took off again. This time it was closer to two a.m. Eyes peeled for any dudes who looked like they might want to grab me, I found myself smiling at the approaching sound of wheels clicking on the sidewalk cracks.

“You again,” Diezl smirked. “Living dangerously.”

“I’m looking for some action,” I said, and then immediately worried that he might think I was hitting on him.

“You better come with me then.” He picked up his skateboard and we walked down an alley, past several of those slightly-fancier-than-average Vancouver Specials. Special Vancouver Specials. From the sixties to the mideighties, these boxy beauties were filling up neighborhoods, until they were considered an eyesore. This isn’t a very old neighborhood, at least from a colonial perspective. If you check Wikipedia, that’s where the history starts — when the first colonizers arrived in the 1800s. Henry Cambie was an engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railway. The land was given to the CPR by the government, which is funny, because it wasn’t theirs to give. It was xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territory. Forest and salmon streams. Some people call that untamed wilderness, and some people call it home. Diezl stopped in front of a boarded-up rancher. He put a finger to his lips and we snuck into the backyard through a space between the tall construction barriers.

“You’re not a cop, right?” he whispered.

“Uh, SkyTrain police.” My punch lines always come one second too late. He laughed anyway. That was nice. Ben only laughs at his own jokes.

This place must not have been empty too long — the backyard was clean, grass mowed. Developers are supposed to keep the acquired houses tidy, but they don’t. Diezl put his backpack on the ground and pulled out some spray cans.

“Hey, you aren’t Fukit, are you?” I asked. “Kitten, perhaps? With asterisks?”

“They’re South Cam,” he said with a sneer that suggested more of a friendly rivalry than any actual distaste. “This is Langara, baby.” He deftly outlined a juicy-looking Diezl on the back wall, between two boarded-up windows. “I’ve never done this with somebody. You want to fill it in?”

“I’ll fuck it up,” I squeaked, and Diezl shushed me as a light went on next door.

We squeezed up next to the house and crouched low beside the bushes, my heart beating like crazy.

“Nah,” he whispered, “go ahead.”

We waited for the light to go out — “Probably just the bathroom,” Diezl said — and he handed me a can. Purple, maybe — it was hard to tell in the dark. I held my breath and got to work while Diezl supervised.

“What room do you think is on the other side of this wall?” I asked.

“Bedroom, probs,” he said.

“Ever go inside?” I cringed as a little paint dripped outside the lines.

“Nah. Hold the can farther away and it won’t drip.”

I wanted to tell him that I’d been planning to break into a dead house at the end of my block. Maybe invite him along. But I concentrated on spraying in the lines instead.

Afterward, Diezl offered to walk me home, but I wasn’t sure he should know where I live. So we just walked around. Strange to see what affordable housing used to look like. Even the roads are sprawling, with big grassy boulevards. It’s kind of obscene, all that space.

Our place is quiet when I let myself in, except for the hum of the fridge. I pull a bag of blueberries out of the freezer and dump them and some protein powder into a Magic Bullet and fire it up. This wakes Ben, and he waves groggily on his way to the bathroom.

Even a smoothie is hard to get down; I can’t get the smell of that house out of my mind. Diezl’s smell. What am I going to do with that kid? Call the cops, so they can return him to his dad? The first night we broke into an abandoned house together — a little hobbit house that I’d watched the family move out of three days before — he asked about my lip. Then he told me about his dad. Then we compared cuts and bruises.

“You’ve got a lot more than me,” I said.

He shrugged. “Some of them are from skateboarding.”

The hobbit house still had some life breath; it felt like any minute someone would come down the stairs and demand to know where all the furniture went. The carpet was still clean, though it smelled a little like cat piss. Wires poked out of the walls from where the fixtures had been.

Diezl dumped his spray cans on the floor. “Ready?”

I threw some devil horns, and then realized kids probably don’t do that anymore. “Ready.”

We propped up some flashlights and tagged the whole living room; I probably inhaled enough paint to take fifteen years off my life. I tried my hand at a tag, but it was kind of stupid. #FatLip. Who the fuck hashtags a tag? Maybe people do, who knows. It was all I could think of at the time, and it’s what brought us together. We laughed a lot at that, and Diezl said it looked good. It felt nice to believe him, but he was probably full of shit. Anyway, I was glad it was inside, so nobody would see it except for us. I joked that maybe we should move into that place, and he looked around for a long time.

When we crawled out the window into the street, it was two a.m. A security guard from the building site next door walked by, holding a coffee. At the time, that high-density heaven was nothing more than a few stories of girders, but they sure do grow up fast. Streetlights threw its skeleton profile over the hobbit house, and that was the first time I really noticed how close the condos were getting. I went back by myself a few nights later to check out our work, but a demolition crew had already ripped the place apart and widened the construction site barriers around its memorial.

What am I going to do with this kid who showed me a fresh burn on his arm yesterday, when we met up to tag the back wall of Oakridge Mall? He told me that the cops had picked him up for skateboarding and insisted on driving him home, and then his dad held him down and drove a cigarette into him.

“Do you know what burning skin smells like?” he asked. Nobody wants to hear the answer to that question, so we walked in silence. I should have hugged him, or put my arm around him or something.

Well, something has to happen now, some kind of observance. I don’t have any sage. There are a couple of tea lights and a piña colada — scented candle in the bedroom — that’ll have to do. Line them up on the coffee table and light each one. Watch the candles flicker and try to think cleansing thoughts or whatever, but instead I think about a place past Diezl’s neighborhood, deep into Marpole, called c əsnaʔəm. That’s hən q əmin əm language. People who can’t be bothered to learn the original place names given to this land call it the Great Marpole Midden. Midden means garbage pile.

This spot is an ancient xʷməθkʷəýəm village and burial site that’s at least four thousand years old. The “midden” was uncovered in 1884, around the time the first settlers arrived in the area. It contained the ancestral remains and cultural artifacts of the Coast Salish peoples. The remains were removed by two white guys, who gave them to the Natural History Museum of New Westminster, which is funny, because this wasn’t theirs to give. Another white guy found seventy-five more human skeletons in the midden, and gave them to the museum too. In 1898, these remains were destroyed in a fire. There’s more to the story, but I’ll get to that later.

Diezl and I never even got around to tagging the mall yesterday, and this was kind of a relief. I wanted to show him I was badass enough to do it, but that would have been undeniable vandalism, not like the dead spaces. A mall is a living organism — pushing shoppers through arteries like leukocytes. Of course, too many of those little white cells in the blood is a sign of disease. Not enough, and the whole system breaks down. Diezl said he wasn’t into it. He said he’d rather just hang, so we went back toward South Cambie. He always seemed to want to be in my neighborhood.

This time we hung out in one of the new construction sites, after we watched the old security guy do his rounds and disappear back into the trailer. We climbed up onto the second floor and found a shadow to hide in, right in the belly of the beast. A beast with an insatiable appetite. In 2011, the xʷməθkʷəýəm learned that a 108-unit residential condo development was being planned for c əsnaʔəm. The following year, an intact burial of an adult ancestor was found at the site. Developers wanted to move it. Seven hundred burial sites had already been removed. The xʷməθkʷəýəm people fought hard to have the land honored as the national heritage site it was supposed to be. Eventually they won, which is funny, because it was always their unceded ancestral territory.

The condos are coming for us too. I wonder what will come next.

I’d bought us some beer, thinking I’d need the liquid courage to tag the mall, so we cracked them.

“Are you going to leave your boyfriend?” Diezl asked.

“Why?”

“Because he’s a dick, and because you can.”

“You want to run off together?” I asked, poking his leg with the toe of my shoe.

He looked at me then, and I felt awkward, like something intimate was happening. Not romance — more like we were brother and sister.

“I can’t go anywhere,” Diezl said. “You’re lucky. You have options.”

“You’ll have options soon. After graduation?”

“No, I won’t.”

I tried to read his expression in the gloom. Everything always seems so dire to teenagers, but you’re not supposed to tell them that. He didn’t want to say goodbye, even when we walked back to my place, so we sat on the front steps for a few minutes before I got worried Ben might wake up and find us.

Oh shit, now I remember his eyes in the porch light. Green. And so sad.

A half hour later the tea lights are done; only the piña colada candle is burning. I’m just sitting, trying to get ahold of things. Ben comes out of the bathroom, dressed for a run. Maybe he’s finally going to get his shit together. He kicks his runners toward the front door, opens it, and comes back.

“Where were you last night?” he says.

“Aren’t you going for a run?”

Ben moves closer. “Any new hobbies?”

“Huh?”

“Skateboarding?”

“What?”

Ben narrows his eyes a little and motions toward the front door with his lips. “C’mere.”

Diezl’s backpack and skateboard are piled on the step.

“Weird,” I croak, avoiding Ben’s gaze, “I’ll take them out to the garbage.”

His grip tightens on the knob, and I realize how tuned in I’ve become to his every move. “Leave the board. Maybe I’ll take up skateboarding.”

“Okay, I’ll get rid of the bag. Put some coffee on.”

He just stands there and watches me. “Any new boyfriends?”

“Don’t be stupid. Put some coffee on.” I nod toward the kitchen, but he doesn’t move.

Dead spaces look different in the daytime. Light filters in from cracks and holes I never would have noticed at night. The smell of Diezl’s body is stronger now. I cover my mouth and take the bag over to him. Pull the zipper so hard it catches on the fabric and sticks, so I just yank on the thing until it rips open. Dump out the spray cans, let them roll across the floor.

At the bottom of the bag is Diezl’s sketchbook. In the front pockets there are some smokes and a five-dollar bill, but nothing else. I open the sketchbook.

Diezl had shown me some of his art before: doodles and tattoo designs, and increasingly elaborate versions of his tag, incorporating stars or sometimes flames, depending on his mood. On the last page, BURN AFTER READING is drawn in an elaborate script. I close the book. Lay it on Diezl’s chest.

“Okay, buddy.”

Ben’s standing in our backyard holding two mugs. “What were you doing?”

I don’t have to answer him. Maybe I’ll just drink the damn coffee and not say anything.

But he scoots in front of the door. His eyes are brown and wounded, but he turns everything to rage.

“You need to get out of the way,” I say.

“Taryn!” he shouts after me. “Taryn, what the hell?”

A mug whizzes past me and hits a wall that’s in such bad shape, it makes a sizable dent. But when I return fire, with a pitching arm that seems to belong to someone else, my mug smashes into the fridge.

“Whoa,” Ben says. We look over each other’s shoulders at the carnage. Coffee everywhere.

I open the cupboard over the sink, where we keep the booze. Sambuca definitely lights up pretty good; I’ve done a few flaming shots in my time. Oh, and Bacardi 151, that shit is high-test.

Ben keeps saying my name over and over, and I don’t think he knows for sure whether he should be pissed off or scared. I rip a dry dishcloth in half and stuff the pieces in the bottles, leaving a little wick. There’s duct tape in the cupboard under the sink. A lighter on the table.

“Taryn, Jesus fuck.” Ben grabs both my arms with his death grip, nails dig in. “You’re being crazy.”

“Let go.”

“Taryn, put those fucking bottles down.”

“Let go.”

“What were you doing in that house?” Ben’s expression slides toward fear and his grip loosens a little. I try knocking my forehead against his nose. This definitely gets results, but it stuns me a little as well.

“Holy shit, I will kill you, you bitch!” Ben trails after me into the backyard, but he moves slowly, his nose bloody. He’s not going to kill anyone — he’s so full of shit.

I look around to make sure nobody’s close by, and of course nobody is. Dead neighborhood is dead. I turn the Sambuca bottle upside down to wet the wick, and I light it. It flares up, but not as much as I’d expected.

I should say something good, but all I can think of is, “Bye, Diezl.” Toss the bottle in the window, and do the same with the 151.

Ben stands beside me wiping his nose. “It’s not going to work.”

“Shut up.”

We watch a little bit of smoke pool inside the window, then dissipate.

“Taryn, I don’t know what you’re trying to prove—”

“Lift me up.”

“What?”

“Lift me up!”

Ben blinks, but offers a foothold and I take it, peering into the window. I’d expected an explosion, huge flames, something like a movie. The dead house seemed to absorb the fire; all I see is a scorch mark around a couple of paper bags. Diezl’s body sucks energy from the light — reaches out and demands action.

Below me, Ben’s voice is a bloody burble: “Alcohol’s not flammable enough.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

Ben doesn’t follow me back inside. He doesn’t follow me into the basement, where the hot water heater has been leaking onto the cement floor for weeks, maybe months. All those cold showers. Half underground, it smells like sweet rot. There are layers of dust and dead spiders on the crap we’ve been storing down here, trying to make a living home in a dead neighborhood.

I pull back an old tarp where the jerrican should be, and see the legacy of the rat poison we left out in the winter — a nest of dead bodies peeking out of a hole in the concrete. Ben doesn’t see this, but I do.

Shake that jerrican like it’s an adversary — only half full. I’m going to need a lot more gasoline.

Wonderful Life by Sam Wiebe

Commercial Drive

There’s a lost name for every place in the city.

The man breaking into my apartment looked to be about seventy. He carried himself with a beat cop’s bearing, his shoulders squared, but his clothes said assisted living — Velcro shoes, drawstring pants, polo shirt with the collar unbuttoned to display a thatch of white and silver hair. He was Asian, and he looked at me as if searching my face for a recognition that would jump-start his own. The man knocked the glass out of my patio door with a long-handled police flashlight, the same as my father had carried. He called me by my father’s name.

“Matt,” he said, “the hell aren’t you in uniform? You forget we’re on nights this week?”

Despite my credentials as a security consultant, I’ve never cared much about protecting my home. I live in East Van, on Broadway near Commercial Drive. I take it as a given that people will hop the fence, smoke dope on the patio, try the handle of the apartment door. If someone were to break in they’d probably swoon in disappointment — unless their dream haul is a half-decent Rega turntable, a few shelves of boxing books, and the dregs of a bottle of Bulleit.

The only possession with sentimental worth was my father’s MagLite. After his death I’d had the bulb switched to a high-powered fluorescent. Now I pointed the beam in the trespasser’s face.

The man squinted into the light. “Tonight’s the night, Matt. Or did you forget?” I turned the beam away. His vision came back quickly. He said, “You’re not Matt.”

“He’s been dead nine years,” I said. “Hit and run. Who are you?”

“Me and Matt are s’posed to do something tonight,” he said. “If you see him, say Joe stopped by.”

“Joe Itami?”

I’d seen him at the funeral, and a few times during my very brief stint on the job. I’d gotten the sense that he and my father had once been close. Joe Itami had gone the command route, attaining the rank of inspector, while Matt Wakeland had persisted as a beat cop until the car crash that killed him.

Itami had always seemed poised, dignified. A comfortable leader. To see him now with his white hair askew, a piss stain spreading across his sweats, was disconcerting.

“I’ll take you home,” I said. “You still live on Nanaimo, right?” I put a hand on his shoulder. He shivered but didn’t shake it off.

“David,” he said.

“That’s right. I used to hang out with your son, once upon a time. How’s Katz doing? He’s, what, a sergeant now?”

Itami looked back at the broken glass but I herded him through the apartment door, out onto the street where I’d parked my Cadillac. Joe shuffled as he walked. A crowd stood beneath the neon sign for the Rio Theatre, smoking and waiting for the midnight showing. They ignored us. At the car door, Joe blinked and peered around, then looked curiously at the flashlight in his hand. He snapped the light on, off, on, and off.

“David,” he repeated. “Matt’s son.”

“That’s right.”

“You don’t look much like him.”

I unlocked the passenger’s-side door and held it open for him. “Flattery gets you nowhere.”

After a moment spent staring at me in what felt like evaluation, Joe Itami said, “There isn’t one fucking shred of good in you, is there?”

Katz Itami finished putting his father to bed and joined me on the porch. He lit a cigarette, a Rooftop, and blew smoke toward Nanaimo Street. His father’s house had a view of the distant North Shore mountains. Katz stared forlornly at the V-shaped strip of ski lights blinking atop Grouse.

“I got a woman coming in next week,” he said, “make sure he takes his meds. Aricept, memantine. It’s Alzheimer’s, Dave. Dementia. Probably from all those years living alone.”

“There been other incidents?” I asked.

“I’ve been on his couch less than a month. We have oatmeal together, then I go to work. He’s usually asleep when I get back.”

“Doesn’t answer my question,” I said.

Katz shrugged. “I mean, he gets names mixed up. When Barbara dropped my stuff off, he called her by her mom’s name. But that’s nothing new.”

“Why me?”

“He was probably out walking, noticed your name on the buzzer.”

“My name’s not on the buzzer, Katz, but he knew it. Joe was looking for my father. Acting like he was still walking a beat.”

“Christ.” Katz flicked his smoke off the porch, into the trough of dead mulch that had once been a flower bed. Joe Itami’s house had been standing for eighty years, and looked every day of it. The property alone would probably fetch three million.

Katsuyori was eleven years my senior, a sergeant with the VPD. He was taller than his father, slightly heavier, and had a genial, compassionate air that had netted him more than a few confessions. Katz also had the exhausted look of the recently divorced. I didn’t judge him when he chained another smoke.

“Always thought my dad had it... not easier, but simpler,” Katz said. “He was born the year my gramps came out of the internment camp. Nisei, second-gen. Him being a cop, and then on top of that marrying Mom, putting up with her WASP-ass family looking down on him — not a lot of guys could carry all that.”

“No.”

“But he always knew what to do. Work the job, raise a family, come home each shift in one piece. Difficult things, but straightforward, y’know? I admired that. Part of me moving back here, aside from getting my shit sorted, was to learn from him. How he kept it all together. ’Cept it’s hard to ask him if he doesn’t know me. Doesn’t know himself.”

I left him my card. “Anything comes up.”

“’Preciate it, thanks.” He put it on the guardrail and continued staring at the lights in the dark sky. I wondered if the card would end up among the crushed filters in the barren garden. Something else forgotten.

Katz must have kept the card, because at seven the next morning he phoned my cell.

“Joe’s gone,” he said. “Took my car, I don’t know where, and Dave, fuck, he’s got my uniform. He’s got my gun.”

I picked up Katz in my Cadillac and we drove across First Avenune to Commercial Drive. Traditionally the city’s Italian and Portuguese enclave, the Drive was now also home to anarchists, activists, fashion casualties, and holdovers who viewed anyone under sixty with scorn. It was a spectacular mess — trattorias and mercados, German bakeries and African hair salons. And everywhere sushi and coffee, those two staples of East Vancouver life.

I tried to see the neighborhood the way Joe Itami circa 1974 would, when it was the center of his beat. What still remained after gentrification, real estate crises, countless waves of new arrivals? What would he look for?

Katz had the passenger’s window all the way down, ignoring the light rain that soaked the sleeve of his shirt. He trailed smoke from his mouth. I’d asked him not to light up in the car, which he’d taken as an invitation to break out his vape pen. The car’s interior filled with the smell of apricot and mint.

“The Drive was your dad’s beat too,” Katz said. “He ever talk about what he did, back in the day?”

“He didn’t talk much period. Least not to me.” I added, “I don’t think he much wanted to be a parent.”

“That’s right, you were adopted or something.”

“Or something, yeah.”

We parked and knocked on the door of the Legion Hall. Built in the forties, the building had recently been painted bright blue and trimmed orange, the words LEST WE FORGET printed above the entrance. Katz put away his pen. The door was opened by a white-haired woman holding a spray bottle of bright green liquid. She looked warily between us, sizing us up.

“Looking for my dad,” Katz said. He held his hand flat at the height of his chin. “About yay tall, Japanese Canadian, seventy-two years old.”

“The officer,” she said.

Katz sent a nervous glance my way before nodding to the woman. “He say where he was going?”

“I told him we weren’t open and he said he was looking for someone. Said he’d been waiting at the park all morning.”

“Which park? Stanley?”

“I think he meant Clark Park.” She pointed up the street in its direction. “He said he got tired of waiting and was going to find where this kid was hiding. Michael Something-or-Other, think he said.”

Katz thanked her. Back in the car, we drove south, in the direction she’d pointed. It was a nothing park, a few hilly, grassy blocks, with a soccer field and softball diamond, playground and swing set. A deep diagonal rut across the western slope, hardened by bikes and the odd motorcycle. Joe Itami wasn’t there.

We drove slow along the Drive, looking for anything unusual. I asked Katz if his dad had told him about his days walking the beat. Something significant might have happened to him then.

“It was a rough neighborhood, that time. We grew up three blocks from the prostie stroll, before that was all pushed down to the ports. I was in Pampers when he and your dad were busting heads.”

“They do a lot of that, you think?”

“The seventies, Dave. East fucking Van. What do you think?”

Driving back up Venables, Katz pointed, “There,” and told me to stop. On the pavement beside a Vietnamese sandwich shop, beneath a mural of blackbirds and First Nations orcas, was Joe Itami’s MagLite. We noticed a commotion up the block, and headed in that direction.

A small group of elderly men sat and stood outside Abbruzzo Café. They were talking in English and French and Italian, and regarded us as intruders. I asked them what happened.

“Gook got Mikey,” one of them said.

“Shut up, Mauro, you don’t say that to someone’s face.” Mr. Voice-of-Reason smiled at Katz and said, by way of apology, “He’s just nervous, got the jitters. Mauro’s not s’posed to drink coffee no more.”

“What happened to Mikey, exactly?” Katz said.

“We’re just sitting here. Guy drives up in his Nissan. He’s in uniform. Tells Mikey he wants to have a word. Mikey being Mikey, tells him what to do with that. Then the, uh, officer shows him his gun. Cuffs Mikey and drives off. Can hardly believe what I seen, y’know?”

“He looked Korean,” one of the seated men offered.

“Like you’d know,” Voice-of-Reason said. “You guys think he’s really with the cops?”

“I am,” Katz said. “And I appreciate your help. Anything else you can tell us?”

“Korean. I’m sure.”

“His car’s a piece of junk.”

“Smelled like he might’ve gotten sick on the ride over.”

“Or maybe Vietnamese.”

I stopped the flood of wisdom to ask how Mikey had acted at seeing Joe Itami.

“Same as all of us,” Mr. Voice-of-Reason said. “Came as a shock. We’re just killing time till the Juventus game, not expecting nothing like this.”

“Don’t you remember?” Mauro said to him. “Mikey recognized him. Said, Holy ess, it’s you.”

“Right, that’s right,” Voice said.

“What’s Mikey’s full name?” Katz asked.

“Michael.” Chortles from the seated men.

“Rosato,” Voice said. “Michael Rosato.”

The group closed ranks as soon as we asked about Rosato’s personal life. We went inside, bought espressos, and asked the barista, a thin woman with a hard smile and iron-colored hair. She hadn’t seen the abduction, but she knew Mikey. He’d been coming there for years.

“Take him awhile,” she said, “but he got himself back on track.”

“From what?” I said.

She shrugged and took the money and slapped my change on the counter. “From drinking, and I don’t know what else. He’s okay now, Mikey, but back in the day...” She looked at the ceiling as if his misdeeds were written there. “Back then he run with a pretty rough group.”

Another hour of searching produced nothing.

“You should call it in,” I told Katz. “It’s kidnapping.”

“My dad you’re talking about, Dave. He’s old. Confused. He’s no criminal.”

“Didn’t say he was.”

“I’ll call from the house, ’kay? Promise. By now he’s probably wandered back.”

But he wasn’t at home, and he wasn’t at Clark Park. Joe Itami had disappeared into East Vancouver, into 1974, into himself. Michael Rosato had been dragged along with him.

“Can you run Rosato through CPIC?” I asked. “Maybe Joe arrested him, back in the day.”

Katz nodded. I left him at his house to make arrangements, call in what favors he could. I told him I’d keep looking, and meet back with him in two hours.

I cruised up Woodland, down Clark, over Venables, and back up the Drive. It felt futile, like looking for someone else’s memories. Nick Cave played through the Cadillac’s speakers. “Wonderful Life.” For some of us, anyway.

My mother’s house is on Laurel Street. She and her husband had built it in the midsixties, anticipating they’d raise a family there. That hadn’t quite worked out. Instead, just as she reached the age and mind-set to give up on having kids, circumstances forced her to adopt her younger sister’s son.

I say circumstances, but it was my birth parents’ decision to leave me with the Wakelands. They’d been under the sway of a religious leader who preached that children (other than his own) were a spiritual drag. A tether to the flawed material world. Only much later did they recognize him as a fraud.

By then Beatrice and Matt Wakeland seemed to have the kid under control, so why complicate their own recently reclaimed lives? Easier to start over, to leave well enough alone.

I was luckier than most. And angrier than most. And tired of battling the past.

The woman I called my mother sat on the porch, smoking, looking slightly more frail than the last time I’d seen her, and just as defiant.

“What’s the occasion?” she said, standing to embrace me. She sat back in her rocking chair with a sigh, Oooof, which she covered for with an exaggerated yawn.

“Wanted to see how you’re doing,” I said.

“David.”

“And,” I said more truthfully, “I wanted to ask, do you remember Joe Itami?”

“Of course. Lovely man.”

“What exactly did he and Matt—”

“Your father.”

“Right, what did they do? How close were they?”

“Closer back in the day,” my mother said. “They were partnered up for a while. Joe was a nice man. Handsome as all get-out. He wanted off the streets, order to be home more. That’s why he got his promotion. Your father, well...” She shrugged. “He was who he was.”

“Constable for Life,” I said. I’d never quite escaped that mentality. “He or Joe ever mention a Michael Rosato?”

“I didn’t ask about his business. Like I don’t with you.”

“What about Clark Park, anything happen there?”

She turned her pipe upside down and banged out the ash into a Kirkland coffee tin. The muscles of her face tightened. “Why?”

“Because Joe ran off this morning in his son’s uniform, thinking it’s forty years ago. Katz and I have to find him before he hurts this Rosato. Something happened in that park, didn’t it?”

She tamped flakes of tobacco into the bowl and didn’t look at me.

“Beatrice,” I said. “Mom.”

“It was different then,” she said.

“Getting really fucking tired of hearing that.”

“Well it was,” she said. “You don’t understand ’cause you grew up in a safe place. Back then, the kids that hung out in that park were rotten to the core. A decent person couldn’t even walk through there.”

“Did Matt and Joe arrest Rosato there?”

My mother struck a kitchen match off the railing and bent low. I loomed over her, cupping my hands to provide a windscreen. She coughed and broke the match in two and tossed both pieces toward the can.

“Some things a cop’s wife knows not to ask,” she said. “Whatever your father did, I’m sure he felt he had to.”

It was late afternoon, the sun screened by slate-colored clouds. I walked around Clark Park, trying to imagine a time when it felt ominous to do so. Instead I saw a troop of Catholic students occupying the fields, a pair of middle-aged women kissing on a park bench, a kid on a bike following his father in a circuit of the basketball court, legs pumping with more assurance as the motion became familiar to him. Joe Itami wasn’t among us.

Katz phoned to say he’d looked up Michael Rosato, and found a record of drug offenses and property crimes going back to his twenties, probably further. Nothing in the last few years. Evidently he’d gotten clean.

“More a shit-disturber than a hard-ass,” Katz said. “He would’ve been seventeen, eighteen back in the day. Part of the Clark Park Gang. I asked one of the old-timers about them. She said the park gangs used to be, quote, unquote, pretty rough customers.”

“What I heard too.”

“Rosato’s known associates are mostly dead or moved away. The name that comes up the most is Holditch, Gordon, no middle initial. He did a stint for larceny back in the early eighties, but cleaned up and started a business. ’Member Gord the Stereo Guy, had the store on Alma and 10th?”

“Sure, with the commercials.” A jovial fat man jumping over a whiskey keg to prove his customers had him over a barrel, but only for a limited time.

“Gord’s dead, but his wife still lives at 30th and Main. She says a car went by her house this morning, a couple times, slow. Could’ve been a Nissan. Want to pick me up?”

I said I would.

The Holditch living room was a shrine to the late store as much as its late owner. Framed photos of Gord on opening day, full-page ads, an article in the Georgia Straight, all decorated the walls. On the floor behind a pair of recliners was the store’s neon sign, unplugged, furry with dust, its cord wound loosely around the top of the G.

Nelly Holditch was a large pretty woman in a paisley blouse and dun-colored slacks. Her frizzy brown hair was loosely ponytailed, a few white roots showing. She had coffee ready, and while she poured, she told us about her husband’s nightmares.

“Gord got sober the year we married. Never left the wagon after that. I know he’d had some bad times before me. Once, twice a year, he’d wake up with his side of the sheets soaked through. It’d take him hours to unwind. When I’d ask, he’d say he was thinking of old friends.”

“Michael Rosato?” Katz asked.

“He mentioned a Mikey but I never met him. I guess Mikey’s life hadn’t turned out so well. He couldn’t kick his problems the way Gord did. Poor guy.”

“Something happened to them in Clark Park,” I said.

“Lots. It’s where they used to congregate. They were kids — punks, I guess you’d call them. Lot of broken homes, abuse, parents who drank or did whatever. The park was where they’d get away from all that.”

“The police bothered them?”

“Harassed them,” she said. “Any time there was a fight or a break-in in the neighborhood, it was those evil kids in Clark Park. Some of the cops thought Gord was the ringleader, and really had it out for him.”

“He ever mention a cop named Joe Itami?”

“No. There was one name...” She sighed. Her irises traveled in orbit as she tried to recall.

“Wakeland,” Katz said.

Nelly’s head made deep, emphatic nods. “Him, yeah. I remember ’cause we saw the name on a business ad somewhere, a couple years ago. Security company, I think. Gord tensed right up. That night he had one of his sweat spells.”

I tried not to show any emotion. It was easy. Anger and shame and disbelief all roiled through me at once, canceling each other out. I didn’t know what to feel. Joe Itami’s words came back to me.

“People saw Gord as this happy, funny guy,” Nelly said. “A real character. And for the most part he was. God, no one could make me laugh like him. But something happened back in the day, and once in a blue moon it would creep to the surface. I’d tell him to forget it, it was ages ago. Gord would say, Easy for you, they didn’t put you in the drink.”

“You think his alcoholism resulted from whatever happened with the police?” Katz said.

“I do, yes. He fought it, and beat it, but it was always waiting to pounce.”

We finished our coffee and left, making one last circuit of the Drive. Rush hour slowed our progress. We peered at every building, down every side street, at every face no matter how unlike Joe Itami’s. Katz smoked. The stereo hummed. Chris Cornell, “Preaching the End of the World.”

Finally, Katz said, “It was their job.”

“What was? Beating up teenagers? Or kidnapping — that part of the job?”

“Those gangs weren’t just troubled kids,” Katz said. “They caused riots. Hurt people. Scared an entire neighborhood. The word came down to clean up the parks, whatever it took. Joe and Matt were a part of that. The H-Squad, the Heavy Squad, they called it.”

“Meaning they targeted the kids in Clark Park, Rosato and Holditch specifically.”

“Not like my dad ever talked about it,” Katz said. “I had to ask the old-timers on the job. No one speaks too much about what went on back then, who signed off. Black eye for the top brass and all that. But they went after those gangs hard.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said. I wasn’t especially shocked by the revelation. I’d never doubted my father’s capacity for violence. But the lack of specifics was frustrating. “Hard meaning what, exactly?”

“What I heard, they’d pick up a gang member at home, take him for a ride somewhere, and throw a scare into him.”

“Take him fucking where, Katz? Scare him how?”

“I dunno, Dave, just that my dad must be reliving whatever it is they did. It’s burned on his brain. Whatever it was drove one kid to drugs, another to the bottle.”

“The drink,” I said.

“Whatever. My point, we need to figure out—”

“Not whatever,” I said. “Holditch told his wife, Didn’t put you in the drink. Not the bottle, not drinking. You want to scare a kid in East Van, the kind that’s not afraid of anything on the streets, where would you take them?”

Katz coughed, dropping his vaporizer as the answer came to him.

Joe had driven the Nissan across the uneven grass above the New Brighton Park beach, leaving the headlights on as he walked his captive out onto the narrow pier. It was almost dark, and he must have been waiting for nightfall to make his move.

The Cadillac bounced as it followed the tracks Joe had left in the grass. We parked alongside and raced across the sand toward the pier. The planks creaked and shuddered under our feet.

We heard the splash.

I was carrying my father’s MagLite, and I aimed it at the water. A head bobbed above the black waves. We heard gasps and sputters, then the thundercrack of gunfire accompanied by a spout of flame from the pier’s end.

Joe was aiming his son’s pistol at the water. He turned and pointed the gun at me and smiled.

“’Bout time you got here, Matt.”

Up close I could see the shirt of his uniform was unbuttoned, stained with something. A hole in the knee of one pant leg. He nodded his head toward the water.

“Smart-ass thought I wouldn’t remember,” he said. “We warned him, didn’t we, about him and his pals hanging out in the park, bothering the nice people.”

In the water, Michael Rosato thrashed. His hands broke the water, still manacled together in a pose of supplication. Katz knocked off his shoes.

“Think this one’s just about got the message,” Joe said. “Either shape up or start swimming for Japan. You hear me, kid?” He fired again at the water, missing Rosato by several feet. Intentionally, I hoped. Rosato’s scream was choked back by waves.

“What do you think, Matt, another couple shots?”

“Where’s it stop?” I said.

“With the city safe for decent folks, and this hump in his place. Was your idea, Matt. You want a shot? You’re up after me.”

He turned and held the gun with both hands, sighted on Rosato. As I moved I thought of what he’d said to me the night before. He’d been right. Not even a fucking shred. I swung the flashlight as hard as I could and struck him across the temple.

The gun fell. Joe fell. Katz dived into the water.

And me, I collected the pistol, and stared down at a sick and bleeding man, and wondered for a second why I felt like I’d betrayed him.

Katz emerged from the water to the left of the dock, dragging Rosato onto the rock-studded beach. Rosato looked frail and ancient, his thin hair matted into dark gray tendrils. He crawled up to the sandbank and lay on his back, sobbing. Katz unlocked his cuffs and tended to him.

Joe Itami turned over and moaned softly. “Christ, my head.”

I unloaded the gun, pocketed the clip. I helped Joe to his feet and led him toward his son’s car. Joe glanced at the quivering figure of Michael Rosato with mild curiosity and zero recognition. He seated himself in the passenger’s side of the Nissan. His eyes closed. Soon he was snoring.

“All forgotten,” I said to Katz.

“Yeah. Lucky him.”

I said I’d wait with Rosato for the ambulance. Katz thanked me and drove his father home. As the taillights of his Nissan bounced onto the pavement, I saw he’d left his cigarettes on my dashboard.

I hauled a Hudson’s Bay blanket out of the trunk of my car and handed it to Rosato. He seemed shaken up but physically fine. He massaged his wrists, shivered, and refused the cigarette I offered him.

“Worst night of my life was when those cops threw me and Gord into the water,” he said. “That man is sick, isn’t he? His poor son. Lord have mercy on them both.”

The ambulance approached, all lights and sirens. Rosato stood and walked across the grass to meet the EMTs.

Lighting a Rooftop, I leaned against the hood of the car and stared at the water for a while, thinking that there was a lost name for every place in the city. At one point I might have believed that if I could just learn enough of them, an entire secret history would reveal itself to me. The world as it was, or should have been. But it didn’t work like that, and even if it did, there simply wasn’t time. Not even enough to forget.

Author’s note: Credit is due to Charles Demers for the quote at the beginning, taken from Vancouver Special, and to Aaron Chapman for his article “Gangs of Vancouver,” published on February 4, 2011, in the Vancouver Courier, later expanded into the book The Last Gang in Town.

Bottom Dollar by Dietrich Kalteis

Strathcona

The way he did it, Lonzo D’Cruz pulled up out front, flicked on his four-ways, left the Benz running, and walked up to this French bistro. Some guy with a sandwich board walking back and forth out front got in his way.

Lonzo stepped right, the guy stepped the same way. Lonzo tried left, the guy doing it too, misstepping, smiling like it was funny. Taking it wrong, Lonzo gave him a shove. Awkward with the sign hanging on him, the guy went down and turned turtle. Not giving him another look, Lonzo moved past him and into the place. The maître d’ looking horrified, asking if he had a reservation.

“I look like I’d eat here?” Lonzo weaved around the tables, up to the couple at the corner booth, nice romantic spot with white linens, candles, and a bottle of bubbly on ice. Cracking his knuckles to get their attention, he smiled and waved a finger at Carmen Roth, the guy who did the laundry, made dirty money clean. Lonzo smiled at the woman and asked if she’d like to dance.

“You hearin’ music, Lonz? ’Cause if you do...” Carmen Roth looped a finger at his temple, grinning at the woman named Bobbi Lee. He picked up a cocktail shrimp, dipping it in sauce and sticking it in his mouth, now grinning up at Lonzo.

Clutching shirtfront, Lonzo sent a jab, accented by the big ring he always wore. Carmen reeled, spitting bits of shellfish. The rocket that followed would have sent Carmen to the floor if Lonzo hadn’t been holding onto his collar. Lonzo asking if Carmen heard the music now.

Coughing shrimp and blinking, Carmen put up a pudgy hand in surrender. Straightening his own jacket, Lonzo smiled again at Bobbi, held out the hand with the ring, asked, “How about that dance?”

“Jesus, gonna hit me if I say no?” Bobbi finished her drink.

“I’m a lover, not a fighter, you know that.”

Sliding from the booth, she shrugged at Carmen, said thanks for dinner, slipped her hand on Lonzo’s arm, and let him lead her past the tables, all eyes on them. The maître d’ keeping his distance, snapping his fingers for a waiter to go clean up Carmen.

Stepping close, Lonzo pressed a hundred in the maître d’s hand, saying his friend just had a bad shrimp. “Ought to be more careful what you serve in this joint.” Leading Bobbi to the door, holding it for her.

“Mind me asking where we’re going?” Bobbi said.

“Little place I know.” Lonzo steered her around the guy with the sandwich board, the guy still trying to get up. Going to the passenger side, Lonzo opened the door, saying to her, “Feel like Italian?”

“You mean Umbertos?”

“Mean like my place.”

“Thought we were going dancing.”

“Yeah, after.”

The guy with the sandwich board got his feet under him, the board cracked, bent, and ruined. Lonzo stepped over, tucking a twenty in the guy’s shirt, telling him, “Get a real job, man. This is embarrassing.”

It was raining when Ronnie Trane arrived at the Strathcona address. Some old factory near Venables and Clark, used to make sensible shoes. He’d heard some realtor on a talk show call this part of town gentrified. Lofts going in, an exotic car dealer with a Ferrari in the window, promises of Starbucks and yoga studios, ladies walking dogs that fit in a purse. Sure didn’t look like that to Ronnie.

Counting a dozen heads in the outdoor line ahead of him, Ronnie guessed they were all applying for the same job. Some A-list entertainer needed a personal assistant. The Craigslist ad didn’t say who it was, only that the successful applicant needed no experience, just a valid driver’s license. Ronnie had to lie about that, not due to get his back for a few months.

The rain was light when the door opened, letting the next applicant in and closing again, the line inching forward. A couple of twentyish women under a black umbrella in front of Ronnie speculated who the star was. Too busy bandying celebrity names, they didn’t notice him without an umbrella. Every man for himself. One hoping for Beyoncé, the other going for Bieber.

Flipping up his collar to the rain, Ronnie saw the guy across the street marching back and forth with the sandwich board, out front of some swank French bistro that just opened. Ronnie thinking, what kind of job was that, walking back and forth in the rain? Letting the world know soup, salad, and entrée was under twenty bucks.

The Mercedes pulling up out front of the place put on its four-ways. Recognizing the black S-Class, the same one Ronnie used to drive when he chauffeured Lonzo around, his name on the vanity plate. The psycho gangster got out and looked his way, but didn’t recognize him. Lonzo fired Ronnie for losing his license to a DUI, told him he drove like an old bat anyway. Did it in front of Bobbi Lee and a few of his guys. All of them laughing except Bobbi.

With no job, Ronnie went back to his former livelihood, breaking into places, scraping up enough to pay the DUI fine. Tripping a silent alarm at this mansion in Altamont, he met two security guards as he came out, holding a pair of vases he thought were Ming. Noting the DUI on his sheet, the judge told Ronnie his grandkids played hockey in the street, then handed down twelve months, Ronnie getting out of Mission after serving six. Having to report to BC Corrections and show some guy named Maxwell a list of places where he’d applied for legit work every Friday. The system keeping him on a leash.

Standing in the rain, he watched Lonzo doing the two-step with the guy with the sandwich board, knocking him out of the way. Typical Lonzo. The women in front of him missed it, still tossing about celebrity names, one saying Ryan Gosling was dreamy.

“Asshole,” Ronnie said, watching Lonzo walk past the guy on the sidewalk with the busted sandwich board. Both women turning on Ronnie, giving him a sour look, thinking he just dissed Gosling.

“You see that?” Ronnie pointed across the street, but Lonzo was already in the restaurant, the sandwich-board guy lost from view behind the S-Class. The women clicking their teeth and turning their backs, using the umbrella to block him out, talking in hushed tones. Ronnie shrugged into his jacket, feeling the rain coming through the denim. Watching Lonzo step from the restaurant a couple of minutes later with Bobbi Lee. Tall, blond, and fine. Lonzo escorted her around the sandwich-board guy. Opening her door, Lonzo got her inside, then played the big man and slipped the sandwich-board guy a tip and gave him some words of advice, like next time get out of the fuckin’ way. Getting behind the wheel, Lonzo pulled away from the curb, the wipers swishing.

The job line moved some more, the rain picking up, water in Ronnie’s shoes making a squishing sound. Thinking screw this, but he needed to show Maxwell his list on Friday — probably have pneumonia by then. Another ten minutes before the door opened again, the recruiter sticking her head out, looking surprised it was raining and saying sorry, that was it for today. Telling the rest of the applicants they’d have to come back early tomorrow, she wished them luck and closed the door. The star remained a mystery.

“Bitch,” Ronnie said under his breath. The women ahead of him gave him another look and left.

When he got back to his flat, he stood under the shower’s spray till the hot water tank ran cold, then he revived himself with a couple cans of Cutthroat, popped a thin-crust Delissio in the oven while he eyed the classifieds, still enough time to get to the library before it closed to check for any new online job postings. Looking out the window, seeing it was still raining, he decided to stay home.

Catching an early bus back to Strathcona the next morning, he was third in line, no rain and no sign of the two women, his hands wrapped around a Starbucks, still warm by the time it was his turn.

“Have a seat,” the recruiter told him. Green-tinted hair, the ring skewering her lip looking inflamed and causing her to lisp. Reminded him of a pike he gaffed on a fishing trip back when he was a kid.

She eyed his CV. “You did time, huh?” Saying it like it was cool.

The recruiter asked the usual questions, explained the job was on-call, seven days a week. Asked if he was on any kind of medication. Told him it might involve travel. Finished up by saying, “The candidate we’re seeking must be discrete, no loose lips.”

“I’m not a snitch,” Ronnie told her, smiling.

Turning the paper over like she was looking for something, asking about college or university. Ronnie said no, guessing you needed that to fetch stuff for entertainers. She mentioned he’d have to join the Association of Celebrity Personal Assistants, asked about his temperament and how he handled somebody else’s. “Anyone ever throw anything at you, and if so, how did you resolve it?”

It sounded like these A-listers could get cranky. Ronnie thinking about it, getting a glimpse of Justin Bieber tossing something at him, a guy he could bench press.

“Mostly you just make pickups,” she said, not waiting for an answer.

“You mean the stuff they throw at me?” Smiling at her.

“Like dry cleaning, takeout, stuff like that.” Putting her clipboard down, she thanked him for coming, offered a handshake, her hand damp like she just licked her palm, saying they’d be in touch.

Going out the door, one of the two women from yesterday’s lineup brushed roughly by him as she was heading in. The same guy with a new sandwich board that said they served breakfast was pacing across the street. Ronnie guessed there was a lineup for that job too.

It was six months in, and Bobbi couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t lie there listening to the hibernating brute that lived down Lonzo’s throat, snoring like a chainsaw. The gasping and grunting thing with its wet sucking breath. Telling herself she was still in her prime, but starting to feel like she was creeping close to her best-before date.

Enough light shone through the window to show the man lying there with his head twisted to the side. Looking like somebody dropped him off a building. Bobbi thinking, God, close your mouth.

Lonzo had promised to get cleaned up the night he found her with Carmen Roth at the bistro, going pit bull on her date, then practically begging her for a second chance. To tell the truth, she kind of liked the way he just walked in and took what he wanted. Bobbi believed most men had short-man syndrome, no matter what their height. Lonzo just had it in spades, especially when he was wasted. But, true to his word, he stopped doing blow like Tony Montana. No more tapping a razor blade like it was Morse code. But the problem was, now that he was clean, Lonzo was dull and predictable. And while Little Lonzo didn’t need the blue pills to rise to the occasion so much, sex had become routine. And the snoring was getting worse.

Making up her mind a couple days ago, she came up with the plan. She wasn’t going to stick around and wait for Lonzo to fall victim to the usual hazards of his line of work. Like getting shot. Or pulling open his car door someday and bam. Chunks of Lonzo across the lawn and in the pool filter. And it could be her getting in the car, or catching one in a crossfire. Lonzo had plenty of enemies.

What really moved it along — Bobbi caught him crouching by his walk-in closet, taking out all his shoes, pulling out the bottom shelf, and lifting one of two Louis Vuitton cases hidden there. Working the combination lock, popping the latches, and grabbing a bundle of hundreds, slipping it inside his jacket. Didn’t see her watching when he put the shelf and shoes back.

The next time Lonzo went off on business, she moved the shoes and the shelf, lifting the matching Louis Vuittons one at a time, shaking them, wondering how much cash was in them. Trying different lock combinations on the cases — his birthday, phone number, address — coming up with nothing. Driving herself crazy. Betting one was packed with American, the other with euros, Lonzo covering his ass either way, depending which way he had to run when the time came.

Dubbing the cases the twins, she set the shelf and shoes back the way they were. Then she started thinking how she’d do it, how she’d run off with the twins and live to spend the money.

Ronnie Trane had three rules for breaking into places. First rule: keep your edge, be smooth going in, and don’t overthink it. Tighten up and you start screwing up. Rule two: no drugs, no more booze. A little weed maybe, a couple tokes to help keep it all smooth. Three: never go back. Forget about what you didn’t get the first time. Greed spells prison.

That one time he got busted, Ronnie broke all three rules by the time the cuffs were on. Tripping a silent alarm in the same Altamont mansion he’d robbed the month before. He’d helped himself to a bottle of Cabo Wabo and drank most of it by the time he tried to make it over the back fence with the pair of vases in a sack.

Counting off his rules now as he drove along Chartwell, waiting up the street in the stolen Corolla until the lights in the house went off. Parking over by Vinson Creek, he walked back to the driveway, making it look natural, like Lonzo was expecting him to drop by, middle of the night.

Ronnie kept his eyes wide and ears sharp, ready for anything. Picking up a newspaper from the driveway, he headed around the back and slipped a hand in his pocket for the glass cutter — knowing the alarm-company stickers on the windows were fake, no surveillance cameras under the eaves. Lonzo used to brag when Ronnie was driving him around how he dared any asshole to break into his place. Being armed to the teeth was the only security a man needed.

Since Lonzo had fired him, Ronnie hadn’t been able to find a straight job, not a decent one anyway. Nobody was willing to take a chance on an ex-con. It got him thinking a little payback was due.

He started staking out Lonzo’s place, learning his routine and making sure the crook hadn’t got a dog. He read in the North Shore News about some guy breaking into a place in Deep Cove last month, getting cornered by one of those German breeds. Had to lock himself in the upstairs can, the dog snarling and bashing against the door. The guy ended up making a 911 call on himself. Cops and canine control coming and finding the guy with a pillowcase stuffed with silverware next to the toilet. Never going to live that one down in any house of corrections.

Ronnie had followed them tonight, Lonzo and Bobbi coming out of Venue. Lonzo staggering, Bobbi having to drive. Perfect. Ronnie trailed the Mercedes across the Lion’s Gate Bridge, giving himself a pep talk, convincing himself this guy had it coming.

Looking at the lights of the houses on the slope, thinking this part of town had been good to him. Broke into over a dozen places in what Ronnie liked to call Martini Hill. Scored over twenty-five grand in cash, jewelry, and easy stuff to fence. Ronnie feeling confident, thinking he knew these streets and the rich folks with their valuables and secrets, cars worth over a hundred grand in the driveways, usually more than one. Only got busted that one time. Ronnie blamed the booze.

First Bobbi got her hands on some club drug from a dealer in North Van, a guy Lonzo didn’t know. The dealer promised this shit was the bomb, some name she couldn’t pronounce, assured her it would last half the night.

Then she slipped enough in his drink at Venue to knock out a horse. Listening to his ragged snores now, she got out of the bed. Lonzo rolled her way, flopping his arm across her pillow. Bobbi waited till he settled, waited for the beast down his throat to start up again. Going barefoot past the windows that rose to the high ceiling, the panorama of the city lost in a bank of clouds, top of the British Properties. Great view when it wasn’t raining. Going to the can, seeing the lit pool shimmering out back, the raindrops making little circles in the water. Lonzo always bragged about this place being worth ten million, easy.

Sitting on the toilet, she did some deep breathing and played it through one more time: take the Beretta he kept next to the bed, grab the twins, take his car keys, and get the hell out of there. Then pray there was enough cash to put an ocean between her and Lonzo, thinking maybe Paris would be nice.

Back in the bedroom, she was careful not to bump into things. Slipping into her panties, hooking her bra in back, she went to his nightstand and took the Beretta from the drawer. Lonzo out cold, the beast getting snagged between an inhale and exhale. That’s when she heard it.

Bobbi’s own breath caught. Standing, she held the Beretta ready, hearing it again, a slight rattle at the bedroom door. Grabbing her robe, she slung it on, moving to the door, sure she saw the knob turn. Bobbi wanted to shake Lonzo awake and press the gun in his hand, but he was drugged and useless.

The knob turned again, somebody on the other side of the door, working at the flimsy lock. Bobbi raised the pistol, feeling her heart and the wet under her arms, aiming just above the knob, her finger on the trigger.

Crawling in through the basement window had been easy. It took Ronnie two minutes to work his way through the house, stopping every few steps, listening, using the pen light to guide his way. The snores coming through the door sounded like a phlegmy musical with a chorus of wheezing. Getting past the flimsy lock on the bedroom door, Ronnie turned the knob, easing it open and peeking in, saw Lonzo splayed across the king bed. Thinking, man, how does that chick Bobbi sleep next to that? Guessing she was in one of the other bedrooms.

Keeping to the shadows along the wall, Ronnie moved to the nightstand, knowing Lonzo would have a gun in reach, the man bragging about all the firepower he kept stashed in the house. Easing open the drawer, finding nothing, he went to the dresser. Ronnie knew about Lonzo’s getaway cash, Lonzo bragging about that too, saying it was to make a hasty exit in case the Mounties came banging at his door. All Ronnie had to do was find it, sure Lonzo kept it close to where he slept. He was helping himself to the Rolex and wallet on top of the dresser when he felt it — steel pressed to his ear. He froze, his heart jumping. The hairs on the back of his neck prickling, bladder nearly letting go.

Taking the pistol from his ear, Bobbi waited for him to half turn, wagged for him to go to the can. One hand holding the pistol, the other snugging the dressing gown closed, she stepped behind him, easing the bathroom door closed.

“The hell you doing, Ronnie?” she whispered. Remembering the way he used to glance at her in the rearview, always pretending not to listen in on their conversations in the backseat while he played chauffeur.

“Hey, Bobbi.” He shrugged, catching her scent.

“Here to get your old job back?”

“Funny.” His eyes going to the pistol. “So, now what?”

“That’s not the question.” Thinking a moment, she reached behind her for the knob, keeping an eye on him, saying, “Give me a hand, and maybe you come out of this.”

Not sure what she meant, but he nodded anyway.

Opening the door, she pointed to the walk-in closet, keeping the pistol on him. Whispering for him to move the shoes and lift out the lower shelf. Taking out the twins, one in each hand, he tiptoed behind her through the bedroom, Lonzo still out cold, snoring away like a freight train.

She stopped in the hall, whispered, “Wait here.” Leaving him at the top of the stairs, she disappeared back into the room.

Ronnie thought of rushing down the stairs, knowing he was holding Lonzo’s getaway cash. Still thinking about it when she returned, clothes draped over her arm, a pair of shoes in her hand, the pistol in the other. She motioned for him to walk ahead of her down the stairs. At the bottom, she told him to hang on, dropping the robe. Not too dark to make out the black bra and panties, Ronnie watched her slip into her clothes. One foot at a time going into the shoes.

Then she led him through the kitchen, to the garage. Ronnie acting like the chauffeur again, carrying the luggage, following her into the garage, glad to get out of there.

Pressing the fob, she unlocked the trunk of the Benz. Ronnie laying the twins in there and easing it shut.

Popping the door locks, Bobbi tossed him the keys, saying, “You drive.” Getting in the passenger side, she pressed a button on the remote clipped to the visor, the garage door going up. Ronnie starting the car and backing down the driveway, driving the way he came, past the hot Toyota. Rolling down Chartwell, not fast enough to attract attention, the lights of the city like stars before them.

“How about putting that away,” he said, glancing at the pistol. “You’re making me nervous.”

She ignored him.

“Man, that’s some racket coming out of him,” he said, going for some chitchat. “How you stand it?”

Bobbi told him about the club drug cocktail.

“Jesus.”

“Wanted to be sure, you know. No surprises, like him waking up when I’m walking out with the twins.”

Ronnie shook his head and laughed, saying, “Never pictured it, the two of you anyway.”

“You going Dr. Laura on me now, Ronnie?”

“Sorry, really none of my business.”

“Anyway, you telling me you don’t snore?”

“Not like that.”

“Yeah, well, guess we’ll see.”

Wondering what that meant, Ronnie coasted down the hill, seeing the flashing lights and barrier as they turned at the top of Taylor Way. His heart back in his throat, thinking it was the cops. Turned out to be a work crew in safety vests, one guy setting out orange cones, a couple others dealing with what looked like a burst water main. A flagger waved them down a single lane along the wide boulevard.

Ronnie got in the left lane, set to take the ramp and head east on the 1. Bobbi telling him to turn right instead, the pistol still aimed at him.

Powering up the ramp, sailing along. Didn’t speak again till they were near Caulfield, then Ronnie said, “Could be he’s got some tracking device in the cases. Should pull over, have a look. See how much we got.”

“Just drive.”

Staying in the outside lane, Ronnie kept an eye on his speed. No desire to get pulled over. They were quiet till they rolled past Horseshoe Bay, no lines for the ferries at this hour.

Then she asked, “Why’d you pick tonight?”

He told her he’d been watching and waiting. How he’d seen them that time, her and Lonzo at the bistro six months back, Ronnie standing in a job line across the street. Said it came to him soon after that. He figured Lonzo owed him.

She told him what happened inside the bistro, the way Lonzo just walked in and took her from Carmen Roth. “He owes you shit, by the way.”

“Maybe so, but still, we got two bags of his money. One for you, one for me.”

“That’s how you see it, huh?”

“Think it’s fair, yeah.”

“Yeah, well, think again.”

“You know how much’s in there?”

“No.”

Ronnie frowned, feeling his phone vibrate, reaching for it, doing it slow. Could be Maxwell, pissed off about the missed appointment, calling at a ridiculous hour to remind Ronnie he could send him back to the can — just like that. But it wasn’t him.

Bobbi leaned close and looked at his screen.

“How d’you like that?” Reading the text, he told her it was the recruiter he saw all those months ago, how he’d long given up on it. “Says the last assistant didn’t work out.”

“What kind of employer texts at this time of night?”

“You got no idea what it’s like out there.” Reading the rest of it, Ronnie said he’d been short-listed to assist some big star.

“Like who?”

“Doesn’t say.”

“Pffft.”

Bobbi looked out at the scenery rushing past. The two of them talking about different jobs they’d had, people they both knew, most of them gangsters. Laughing as they passed a sign that read Squamish up ahead.

Ronnie thought of making a grab for the pistol, Bobbi acting like she forgot it was in her lap. He could take it all, leave her the Benz, and jack himself a fresh car in Squamish, drive back down, get his stuff from his flat, and split town. Maybe drive east. Saying, “You mind I turn on the radio?” Reaching for the knob, he turned it on.

Bobbi switched it off.

“You don’t like country?”

“Turn at the light.”

Putting on his flasher, getting in the left lane, guessing she was dropping him off at the McDonald’s. Hopefully with some of the cash. Then she’d drive off and ditch him. Maybe he should be glad she hadn’t shot him.

Showing him where to park, she told him to make hers black.

He reached for the keys.

“Uh-uhn.” Giving him a smile, hand on the pistol. Ronnie noted her painted fingernails.

He got out and went into the restaurant, seeing himself on the first bus back to the city, likely with none of the cash. Stuck following up with the recruiter with the pierced lip and green hair, then calling Maxwell, sucking up and telling him the good news, saying sorry for missing his appointment. Back to scraping the bottom.

He came out sipping a large. The Benz was parked where he left it. Bobbi in the passenger side, talking on her cell. Going back in the door that said Welcome, he ordered one for her. Going back to the car, he heard the country, some Willie Nelson number. Ronnie got in, handing her a cup, saying, “Thought maybe you’d be gone.”

“Did cross my mind.” She set the cup in the holder, stared straight ahead.

“So, how about it? We check the cases, see how much we got, see if they’re wearing bugs.”

“Was him on the phone.”

“Lonzo?”

She nodded, trying to smile past the scared look. “Man sure is pissed. Wants it back, his million bucks.”

Staring at her, Ronnie mouthed the amount.

“Yeah.”

“Lemme see it.” Ronnie held out his hand, meaning her phone.

A puzzled look, she handed it to him.

Opening his door, he dropped it out, crushing it under his heel.

Bobbi stared at him, the pistol pointing at him.

“Can track us by it. The car too. I say we jack another ride, maybe that one.” Glancing at a plain van in the next row. “Figure this shit out.”

“Not going anywhere in that.” She sipped some coffee, saying, “I know this guy, he’s got a chalet up near Whistler. Spot with a fireplace and pool, real nice. He’ll let us crash till we figure things out.”

“He know Lonzo?”

“Carmen Roth, the guy from the bistro.”

Ronnie looking at her, then they were laughing, sipping their coffee.

“Any chance he’d give us up?”

“None, ’specially after I tell him how I drugged Lonzo and ripped off his cash.”

More nervous laughing. Ronnie finally saying, “Okay, so we drive up, wait till morning, then you call this Carmen, see what he says.”

“I’d call him right now, but you just killed my phone.”

Reaching in his jacket for his, handing it to her, looking at the pistol back on her lap. Saying, “You ever shoot one of those?”

“Not yet.”

She punched in directory assistance, and he started the engine, knowing that lunatic Lonzo D’Cruz would be coming after them. The strange thing, Ronnie wasn’t worried. In fact he was feeling pretty good about the way things were turning out. Ripping off a million bucks and running sure beat the hell out of picking up some A-lister’s dry cleaning. Then he was thinking about the chalet and sleeping arrangements.

The Landecker Party by Nathan Ripley

Mount Pleasant

They’d opened another American Apparel on this side of the bridge, this one a fifteen-minute walk away from our place. Glass, plastic, primary colors, sex as branded by a Montreal megalomaniac pervert who’d drive his own business into the ground in just a few more years. I bought a gray T-shirt from a girl named Crissie who I’d seen last Tuesday at Rivko’s doo-wop night at Shine, and around the city for the last few months, roughly since the start of the 2007 school year.

“You hear about the Landecker party?” I asked her while shaking my head no to the plastic bag she was offering.

“Who’s Landecker?”

“It’s a booze, not a very good one. It sells okay back east, and now they’re trying to make an impact out here, I guess. Anyway, Landecker threw us a sponsorship — my friend Mark and I do shows — for a house party. Free drinks. It’s our place, 16th and Oak-ish. I can write down the address if you want to come. Friends are cool too. Not many, but feel free.”

“Cool,” she said. Crissie was nineteen, tops, about four years between us. “Getting booze to sponsor your party is like, it’s like — getting food to sponsor your dinner, or something. Sorry, that’s lame.”

“I’ve been trying to make the same kind of joke for the last week and I still can’t get it to work.”

Mark and Esther were still playing around when I got back, mixing some brutal new-country Tim McGraw shit with a pretty great house track, creating a sickening aural soup that made them giggle and made me want to pour a warm Coke onto Mark’s PowerBook. We were on the lower floor of a shitty two-level, and Mark and Esther had the music cranked already, hours before anyone was due here.

The upstairs neighbor had been gone all week, his Jetta missing from its usual parking spot. Nice dude, a kid from Taiwan who near as we could tell was AWOL from his Sauder School of Business program and waiting for his parents to find out and haul him back home. We were surprised he was living in this place, one of the last true dumps on the block, instead of one of the endless condo buildings, only about half of which were tarped and scaffolded up for leaking roof repairs. He’d introduced himself to us when he moved in over a year ago, told us his name was Phil, waved off our occasional invitations to driveway beers, but clearly did some extremely committed partying of his own. In hangover he metamorphosed into a disapproving phantom, leaving us imploring Post-its about needing sleep. He’d knock on the door and run back upstairs, leaving notes on our door that said things like, Pls turn down your Call of Duty. But I’d seen Phil at an after-hours in the West End no less than three times in the past month, a booze-free and drug-heavy space where Mark and I netted five hundred dollars to split for playing from two to seven. A pretty shit deal, looking back on it, but we used each gig to get better at mixing, at reading a room. The more serious we were at clubs and parties, the more we could goof off at home.

Mark took mercy on me and switched from Ableton over to his iTunes, putting on a Hot Snakes record at low volume. There were twenty-four green bottles of Landecker around the living room, kitchen, and bedroom, which we’d collaborated in cleaning up and turning into a secondary hanging room for the party, carrying the couch over from my apartment on the next block and leaning the mattress against the wall. It looked pretty good in there.

“You going to do the tent?” Mark asked. He was sitting on this beautiful leather office chair with a circular base that his dad had given him, a piece that looked alien on a carpet we’d been staining into an accidental pattern and between the two living room couches, both road salvage — this was before bedbugs reared up big-time and made street furniture an idiotic risk.

“If I need to,” I said.

Mark just looked at the ceiling, taking a pack of Belmonts out of his pocket. He’d gatewayed into smoking last — after booze, which we started with when we were fifteen and playing in a shockingly bad death metal band in Kamloops; weed, which we’d dealt to pay for gas money for two summers of touring cross-country in our slightly better prog-rock band; and MDMA, which we both embraced eagerly when we sold our Orange amps and Les Pauls for the laptops and decks we needed to start making money in the clubs. We pirated all the software.

Esther, unwrapping a sleeve of red plastic cups in the corner, looked over at us. “What Mark means is, Could you please set up the tent, Raj, neither of us have the basic skills required.” She was three years older than Mark and me, about ten years better at communicating, and Mark would collapse mentally if she left him. Esther didn’t need him at all, and all three of us knew it, but she got something out of hanging out with the two of us, watching us knock heads, develop, devolve. She got paid double what we did for the same gigs and was worth it. Rivko had her sub in for him when he couldn’t do the doo-wop night, and she’d gotten to open for Steve Aoki once, Diplo twice. Guys we mocked endlessly and envied deeply.

I headed out back with the tent canvas, seeing through the kitchen window that the poles were already out there, probably from an earlier rage-filled attempt by Mark to get it up. It was a big one, tall enough to stand up in. I had it rigged in twenty minutes, and Esther and Mark carried a white table with folding legs out into it right as I finished up. We put three bottles of Landecker on it, and Esther took three steak knives out from where she’d tucked them into her belt.

“What are these for?” I asked.

“We need to ventilate the sides or it’ll just become a hotbox for cigarette smoke, especially if it rains, which it’s supposed to. I want to be able to tell people something nice if they try to smoke inside and complain that there’s no covered porch.”

“It’s the point of the fucking tent,” Mark said.

“Did we have some fight I don’t know about, dude?” I said. Even with just the three of us in the tent, it was markedly hotter than it was outside.

“He’s just stressed about the party,” Esther said. “His hero Rivko’s coming. So’s Lana.”

“Lana’s Occasional Lana?”

“Yep.” Lana took party pictures, good ones. Instant social capital for events, people who did parties, deejays. Enough notice for us, scored piecemeal through these pictures, through people talking about what we did for parties, could eventually mean regular higher-paying gigs, could mean avoiding getting a job. The point of all this shit.

I took a steak knife and started poking and slicing the sides of the tent my dad had given me when I moved out to go to college. I’d only gone camping once the whole time I was out here, anyway.

It was rammed by nine thirty, and had been pretty busy since eight, people stopping by to predrink our vile Landecker before properly going out for the night, then clocking that most of the people they wanted to see were in the room with them, the drinks were free, and Mike and Esther were doing pretty great on the music. So people stayed and the rooms filled up.

Landecker, I should say, truly is disgusting. I just tried some again at the Opus Hotel last night, where I was waiting for an LA commercial-director pal to turn up. First time I’d had any since the party, and I was wondering if it was just the memory of what we had to do later on that night that tainted its taste in my head. No. It tastes like Jägermeister with Scope and Palmolive notes.

At the party, we discovered that it tasted okay if you mixed it with Diet Coke. I sent Dave Proskich, an Emily Carr kid who badly wanted to be our friend, out to the Sunshine Market to get a half-dozen two-liter bottles. Later that night Dave got really wasted and took multiple pictures of his dick with the disposable camera that Lana always left at parties. He had a weird, trollish little thing, and hadn’t realized that the limited-edition Vans he wore every day were visible in every shot. Lana told me a couple years after that that he’d paid her a hundred bucks to take the pictures off her site.

By the time Crissie turned up, it was beyond standing-room tight in the house. Mark’s dad’s office chair had two girls sitting in it and a guy on each arm — we’d discover the next day that the base was mangled and the chair permanently angled, useless. Mark started crying when he sat in it, but Esther and I just left him alone. He’d earned a decent cry, and if he wanted to attach it to the dead chair, that was fine.

“Is there any left?” Crissie asked. She wasn’t wearing any AA, and looked almost businesslike compared to most of the other people in the room. A nice collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up, black jeans.

“Any what?”

“The free booze you promised was really gross.”

“It’s drained. There may be some in the tent, actually, come with me.” I was drunk enough to take her by the hand and lead her through the party, Esther laughing in my face when I walked by the deejay setup.

It hadn’t rained, so the tent had gone mostly unused, people choosing to smoke out front in the driveway or just scattered around the yard. There was an untouched bottle of Landecker on the table. I unscrewed the lid and Crissie and I swapped sips and revulsed expressions.

“That’s really impressive in there. You guys throw parties all the time?”

“No, not really.”

“You should charge.”

“Would defeat the purpose. Plus, no one knows who the fuck we are. We want people to like us first, so we can get hired to play more stuff, rely on turnout. That’s why this was important,” I said. It was my longest conversation of the night so far — even Rivko, who I’d been meaning to corner, I’d only up-nodded to, him inclining a Pilsner bottle back at me. He was having a good time, which meant more than me talking to him.

“So I’m a statistical quantity?” Crissie asked.

“No, of course not. I wanted you to come. You, in particular.” We looked at each other for a second and I was about to push my luck. Instead, I took another sip of the Landecker and passed the bottle over, then said we should go back inside.

Mark was waiting in the kitchen. “Neighbor’s here, and it’s weird,” he said.

Crissie saw a friend, a narrow guy with unwashed Cobain hair who worked at her same location, in the living room. She pointed to him and made a talking motion with her hand to me, and I nodded and smiled.

“What’s the problem? Phil’s fine. And he weighs like eleven pounds, he’s not a problem.”

“Yeah, but he turned up with like six randoms.”

“Total randoms?”

“Mostly people I recognize. All okay. But one of them looks rough. And Phil looks fucking half-dead.”

Rivko came into the kitchen behind Mark. Rivko, back then, was so handsome it made you look at your own shitty body in shame as soon as you saw him. I don’t think he’s that good-looking anymore, but maybe that’s from spending every day of the last eight years in the office with him during the day and the clubs with him at night. When you spend enough time around it, beauty disappears the way a smell does.

“That guy’s a heavy dealer,” Rivko said.

“The big guy?” Mark asked.

“No, small Asian dude in the leather jacket. Big importer as of a few months ago. I think he got a few pounds of amazing MDMA muled to him from somewhere or another. Extremely delicious.”

“That stuff we did last week?” Mark asked.

“Yep,” Rivko said, drifting out of the kitchen. It was packed with people, incredibly warm, so many conversations happening that you could yell at the person in front of you without any fear of being overheard.

“You didn’t tell me you got high with Rivko,” I said.

“You’re a jealous girlfriend now? I was trying to get us that Justice after-party, so we hung late, super late.”

“Did it work?”

“No. Let’s get these sketchy dealers out of our house, okay?”

Mark and I walked into the living room to find that the problem had vanished. Phil and the big guy, a random, were gone, leaving only the other five people behind. Mark and I walked out front to share a smoke and talk about Rivko. I think that’s what we were going to talk about, anyway. We didn’t get to it.

The door to Phil’s unit was open, wide open, the light off in the stairwell leading up. There were some footsteps, and the guy Mark had been talking about came down. Big gut, massive beard, black T-shirt, sleeve tattoos. But he didn’t have the friendly headbanger smile that usually went with that outfit. He was carrying four huge black backpacks, two in each hand, his biceps bulging and forearm veins popping from the weight of them. He walked past us, looking down, but he did say one thing, in a surprisingly friendly tone.

“Don’t look at shit and don’t say shit’s my advice,” he said, then walked across 16th and toward a silver car. The back passenger door popped open as he got there and he gently set the bags down, then slid into the front passenger seat. The car drove away, leaving its lights off until it got to Oak, flicking them on along with the right turn signal.

The noise of the party, which made the big cheap single-pane bay window in front of our living room seem nonexistent, must have made us feel safer than we should have felt, because Mark and I started walking up the stairs. Mark laughed halfway up, and I said, “Don’t touch anything.” We got to the apartment.

It had the same layout as downstairs, just with more, and nicer, furniture. And a black Samsonite full of unbound and crumpled money, and Phil lying facedown on the floor, except his face was looking three-quarters of the way back at us, on top of a broken spine.

We went downstairs and closed the door to Rick and Phil’s suite, went back to our party. There was no consultation, just entering the room and going our separate ways, me finding Crissie and starting to ask her questions about what she did, what she wanted to do, how much her current job sucked, anything. Mark went over to Esther and tapped her out, taking over the music, looking straight down. He was getting really good, good enough that it was just a matter of months before he quit, same as he quit songwriting and the band.

Mark never started anything without knowing when he was going to quit, and he taught me how to do the same. Not some subtle, observed, by-example thing: it was a spoken strategy to avoid stagnation and to get onto the next thing, the next “arena of accomplishment,” as he said. He would write great self-help entrepreneurial crap if he had the stomach for it. Finding Esther had been part of his next-thing plan: someone better than him, smarter than him, less weak where it counted. Halfway through a reliable Eric Prydz banger, Mark gestured Esther over and started whispering to her.

The party wound down at about four thiry, leaving us with one hour of darkness to pull off what we wanted to do. Not enough time, but we were drunk enough to think it was. Esther went out to the tent and made the precise cuts in the grass, rolling back the sod, while Mark and I headed upstairs. It hadn’t rained after all.

Gloved up, but knowing we could excuse any DNA presence in the apartment as the residue of a friendly neighbor visit, we carried Phil, toes and lolling head facing the floor, down the stairs, checking to be sure no pedestrians were out there.

“It’s hundreds of thousands,” Mark said, pretending he wasn’t out of breath as we carried the body around to the backyard. “Those were hundreds, down to the bottom, I swear. They’re coming back for it.”

“They’re not,” Esther said, as we arrived in the tent and set the body down. “They’re sending a signal to other dealers that they don’t care about the money. This is about the territory. Cops and the papers will report that the cash was just left there.”

“That’s some TV crap, Esther,” I said.

“No, that’s some my-father-is-a-lead-investigator-on-gang-related-crimes-in-the-Lower-Mainland crap,” Esther replied. “Phil’s car’s not here, and if there’s no cash and no drugs and no body in the apartment, then he’s a missing person to the cops. It can work.”

“If Rivko knew he was dealing, then other people know,” I said.

“And that helps us,” Esther countered, impatient. “Means that the same guys who took the drugs killed him and made him evaporate, and the cops will either look for him through those connections or just not bother. They won’t look where we’re going to put him.”

Instead of steak knives this time, she had shovels, but just two. Mark and I dug, the booze sweating out of us and the tent getting incredibly hot, Phil facing away from us until we rolled him into the four-foot-deep hole and put the dirt back on. Esther came out to arrange the rolls of grass back over him: she was better with the precision stuff.

I had Crissie’s number in my Razr, and I texted her when I got out of the shower. It was too quick to be doing that, desperate, but I wanted to do something normal and human.

hungover as fucc / glad you came

She didn’t answer for another three hours, but it was nice when it came. Sincere. She even punctuated.

Me too.

When the cops came two days later, driven by desperate calls from Phil’s parents, they barely bothered with us, it was so clear that this was unsavory drug gangster shit. I don’t know the story they pieced together — Esther wasn’t afraid of much, but she feared her dad’s perceptiveness, even though she’d inherited it. She never asked him anything so we don’t know what the official take was, just that they asked us about the party, took a look around and in the tent. (Esther had insisted we leave it up, said it made sense of any disturbance in the dirt they found. She was right, they barely looked.)

“What do we do with this money?” I asked Esther when the cops left.

“I told you, we buy this place with most of it, keep some to spend,” she said.

“I mean now, what do we do with it? How can we spend it without—”

“We clean it through the after-hours, through Rivko,” Mark said. “He barely claims any of his income, he knows this shit.”

“Exactly,” Esther said.

And that’s what we did.

Rivko asked very few questions, just took a little cut and did the work for us. I asked my dad for the rest of the cash we’d need to buy out the landlord, which was less than we’d worried when we approached the old Sikh guy who owned the place but still drove a cab fifty-five hours a week. A vanishing-likely-drug-murder knocks a high five figures off any property value. And my dad was so proud to see me making a strong practical move that he signed the check the same day I asked.

The party worked too. The money I brought to Rivko plus the crowd we got out at the Landecker thing and the next few gigs gave him enough faith in me to ask for a trial run as VP of his new events company. Within six months I was barely deejaying at all — just booking Diplo, Aoki, Oizo, and taking a slice of profit, instead of trying to be them. Mark quit too, finishing his conversion into the housing game by taking his real estate licensing exam. It was Esther and Crissie who kept going, joining up to play shows, flying out to Europe on Phil’s dime, eventually getting bigger in town and huge in Germany and Italy, packing out mega-clubs over there. Mark, Esther and I used a second mortgage on the place to buy and flip our first house, then our second, and just kept going.

Esther and Mark now live out on Saltspring, on some enormous compound they designed themselves. Crissie and I live in the place on 16th. We refurbished the shit out of the inside, of course, but I lied to Crissie about the yard.

“Permitting hell to relandscape. I’ve tried with the city a half-dozen times,” I told her last year.

“We can’t have a garden?”

“Two more hoops and we can.”

So tonight, with Crissie playing a solo gig in Vegas, Esther and Mark came over. I’d bought a bottle of Landecker for the occasion, but wasn’t sentimental enough to demand that we kill it. I already had the tent set up, exactly the way it was before, pulling it out of the storage shed in the yard.

Esther got there ahead of Mark, wearing a YSL sundress. She rolled her eyes when I looked at her questioningly.

“I’ve got a tracksuit in my bag.”

“Should have known, sorry.”

Mark got there a second after her — he’d been nostalgia-eating a slice from Zaccary’s. We just sat there in the living room for a second, and right before I was going to make a joke about the Landecker, Mark spoke up.

“Is he bones yet? He must be by now.”

“Yeah,” I said. He must be.

Burned by Yasuko Thanh

Yaletown

Paula’s always been a hard case. She’s got those eyes. A.C. is her pimp and she makes bank even though there’s something dead about her: like I said, those eyes, and her laugh is cold and hollow. A meanness hides beneath her top layer of pretty, fragile as a porcelain doll.

Paula’s features are so perfect they look painted on. Deb, my best friend, is beautiful in every way that Paula is not. Deb’s shorter than me and has hair in different shades of blond that spikes in all directions, and apple-red cheeks even when she hasn’t been outside. Paula’s body is willowy and Deb’s body is warm and soft, the kind of body that makes you think she’d be a great mom someday.

Paula’s been A.C.’s woman for years. Deb got with him just a few months ago.

I’ll confess, when A.C. bumped Deb, I started hanging out with her just to get under Paula’s skin. I was tired of how the other girls fawned over her. She reminded me of all the girls I’d hated in high school. I’d been an honor roll student, and the popular girls who’d once been my friends had stopped hanging out with me when I started smoking, stealing, and getting arrested. Paula reminds me of my old life too, but not in the same way Deb does. Paula reminds me of the bad parts. The parts I wanted to leave behind when I quit school three weeks into the tenth grade and ran away from home, a town house in the slums of the city on a street with no trees.

So I looked right at Deb, and asked her how she was getting along with her wife-in-law.

She looked at me, stunned, and then decided what to do. She snorted. The kind of over-the-shoulder snort that works best when you toss your hair at the same time.

Later I discovered I really liked Deb. I told her I used to be a gymnast and she said, “I used to do gymnastics too,” and she said it so quiet, with a bit of a smile, it was like she was telling me a secret.

We worked the high track bounded by Nelson, Seymour, Helmcken, and Richards. We shared the block with a pub where people threw their peanut shells on the floor; a strip club with the oldest, most washed-up dancers you’d ever seen; a corner store that sold single condoms, cigarettes, KY lube, and scratch-and-wins; a nightclub for yuppies; and a pretty wooden two-story house. A little old man lived inside. Outside are birdhouses. Tons of them. He’d built them to look like little people houses, human bungalows and ranchers and country inns, this man with thick hands and a headful of white hair. His hand-painted sign read, I’d rather be happy in my crazy world than to be sane and sad.

I live in a condo on West 14th and Oak by the Jewish market where you can buy the best perogies in the city. I own a mountain bike. Drive a Beemer. Deb lives down the street. When she laughs too hard she sprays beer out of her mouth. Because I’ve started hanging out with her wife-in-law, Paula looks at me through that thin veneer of prettiness, and smiles at me in that I’d-stab-you-if-I-could way.

But I’m smart, I make money. Girls wonder how I do it.

Paula doesn’t say nasty things to me. She knows better. I get my respect. I knew Paula was fucked up. I never knew how much until the night in the Korner Kitchen when she was hissing in my ear, telling me about the robbery.

The streetlamp shines down on Deb and me and the corner store. All the action for us starts in the Helmcken Street parking lot, because if a trick won’t pull over and take a cab from there, that’s it for the date before it even begins.

I like working on Helmcken. From here we can see the Korner Kitchen, the window sill littered with a line of Styrofoam takeout cups, can see who’s going in, who’s coming out, who’s spending more time taking coffee breaks than working.

A.C. told Deb right in the middle of their having sex, while A.C. was pumping it in and out, just like that he said to Deb, “Paula doesn’t make love like a woman.”

Deb tells me this in the cold, under a streetlamp, flicking her cigarette into traffic. Girls stand around the block, their elbows touching like paper dolls, two of us on one side of the alley, three or four girls on the other.

Deb puts on bedroom eyes and imitates a man’s voice. She says, “Now you make love like a woman. And then he gave me the ring.”

Paula doesn’t make love like a woman. What does she make love like then? An alien? A zombie? I’ve seen her on doubles, when two girls take one guy (“One starts at your nose, one starts at your toes, and we meet in the middle”), or when two girls do a date with two guys in the same hotel room. But, naturally, there’s no comparing what a working girl is like with a trick and what she’s like with her man. You have to call both “sex” because there’s no other word to use. But “sex” with tricks is about as interesting and erotic as peeling potatoes, especially since we mostly do fake lays. As in, there’s no penetration. As in, we make the trick fuck our hand and they can’t tell the difference, because they’re wearing two condoms and there’s so much KY slathered everywhere.

Now you make love like a woman.

Does Deb moan as she stares into his eyes, no shame in her own pleasure? Gazes locked as she comes, her eyes not letting go of his?

I imagine Deb on her back, looking at A.C., the roundness of her potbelly, the soft rolling hills of her breasts. He grabs her ass, fingers digging into her flesh. What does it feel like to make a man lose control like that? The sun rising through the curtains. The room smelling like sex. Maybe it makes you feel grateful. To know you’re part of something bigger than yourself.

The two-carat diamond, rose-cut, catches the streetlight. They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Maybe if you turn out late — the difference between turning out at fifteen and turning out at twenty-five — you’ll just always do stupid things on the track by accident. You’ve already lived too much square life to not have bad habits. Like carrying a wallet or wearing a diamond ring to work. But I put aside Deb’s stupidity and try to take pleasure in her excitement. I nod politely and give her a big grin.

Paula bought A.C. the Mercedes he drives. A.C. has a reputation for having his shit together; he doesn’t smoke crack, saves his money. Jesse Diamond, my people, is not together. But at least he never hits me with a closed fist, always an open hand.

Pimps sell you love, and considered from a mathematical angle it’s a tidy arrangement, considering we get money from the tricks we turn for something a lot of them want to pretend is love too.

When I first came to Vancouver on a PCL bus and a ferry, to work the streets in a new city, I wanted to see if the high track stories I’d heard were true, that girls, for instance, regularly made a g-note a night.

I wanted to see what the high track was like and keep all my money. Not pay some man to tell me I looked “fine” over dinner in the new ho clothes he’d bought me so I could earn him bank on the track. I’d dabbled with pimps in Victoria, but I’d always worked as a renegade.

So I lied on the high track when the girls asked, Who’s your people? I made one up. It felt like a game.

But the high track’s not a place to lie and get away with it, so when things became nasty, I chose Jesse, to save my ass. I’ve been with him ever since. Jesse Diamond isn’t all bad. Tracksuit, long Jheri curls, and a Morris Day mustache. The night we met I had the feeling that anything could happen. The air seemed as full and rich as a piece of cake, and I wanted to swallow it whole or at least slip a piece into my pocket. I’d met better-looking guys, but he could talk, and he made me feel beautiful.

A.C. has given Deb — his tip — a diamond ring.

“She already hated me,” Deb says. “I wonder what she’ll do now.”

Ever since Deb came along, Paula seems more hollow than she used to be, and colder. Her head like a porcelain doll’s seems more like a glass flask about to explode. I watch her, waiting for it.

She’s changing. There’s a current of nervous energy underneath, high-voltage. Everyone can see that A.C. has a soft spot for Deb. For real. And Paula’s humiliated.

Deb can’t keep to herself what’s making her happy, and soon everyone knows about the ring.

Paula’s regular has a wardrobe full of fetish gear: leather cuffs, spreader bars, x-frames, sleepsacks, nipple clamps, gags, and whips. He’s into bondage and obedience training. Paula orders him, at twice the normal hourly rate, to lick cabernet spills off his kitchen floor tiles with his tongue, and then punishes him for his defiance if he takes more than a second or two to get down on all fours. Typically she flogs his ass, making him pay her for the privilege. Paula keeps his beatings below the neck, so no one at his law firm knows.

There’s nothing wrong with spanking a guy or whipping him for money. I’ve done it myself. Kinky starts at two hundred dollars and goes up from there. Though I usually feel like laughing halfway through. I just can’t take myself seriously when I say, “Crawl across that floor, slave, and call me mistress.” I have one regular who gives me over a thousand dollars when he smokes crack. I just think up nasty things for him to do and stash the cash — until he runs out of money or coke. The last time, I hurt him more than he wanted; it was an accident. I hadn’t realized the buckle was whipping around and hitting him where it shouldn’t have been, in the ribs. His bruises were so swollen they were wet-looking.

Most of my regulars are salt-of-the-earth types. One talks to me about Akira Kurosawa films and shows me photos of the commune where he grew up. Another gave me an electric guitar, another a Günter Grass book as a present. I have regulars who are loggers, or fishermen, who tell me about all the places they’ve been and all the places they’d still like to see.

Paula. She’s different. But you already know that. Paula passes the pictures around in the Korner Kitchen.

We’re in the last booth. She’s squashed herself in next to Deb. Andrea sits with her ankle-length black sable across from us, and I’m thinking, Why us? Why now? But it’s because the diner is full of girls and designer purses and compacts brought out over the scarred tables to fix lipstick and powder noses, and there’s nowhere else to sit. Everyone came in like bees in a hive, and now I’m stuck in a booth with Paula and Andrea, when all I wanted to do was sink into the softness of the red vinyl seat and massage my toes.

On any given night in this cheap diner on the track, a girl might be crying on the pay phone, another girl in the bathroom might be pissing blood from a beating she got the night before, another girl sitting in one of the horseshoe-shaped booths at the front might be adjusting her waist-length hair to hide the crisscrossing of stitches on her head from a bad date’s crowbar, and groups of women with brand-new breasts might be discussing the pros and cons of enlargement surgery with those who haven’t yet had the procedure, saying things like, Yeah, now I got no feeling in my nipples. But, you know, whatever. Discussing the merits of different brands of hairspray, laughing at anyone gauche enough to use one bought at a drugstore, or rolling in the aisles like professional wrestlers, one woman vice-gripping another in her long, lean, tanning-salon-perfect thighs, before grabbing a sugar canister and bringing it down on the other girl’s head, knocking over a gashed stool that’s been repaired with yellow police tape.

Squashed in like this, I can’t move my elbows. This gives me an excuse not to reach for the picture Paula tries to pass me, but it makes no difference to her. She lays it faceup on the table for everyone to see.

I notice burns around his nipples. Angry red circles outlined with black, charred flesh in the center. More on his inner thighs, his balls. They look like smallpox, the pictures I’ve seen in books of dying people. She passes me another one of them pouring gross stuff on him like ketchup and motor oil. Her and her friend Sherri. I can’t imagine how much that must have hurt, stinging its way into his burns, his open wounds.

Paula makes me sick. The kind of sick that makes you want to punch someone and walk away.

Next they light more cigarettes and run them over his body, little burning caterpillars leaving ash trails.

At this point in the story, part of me wants to get up and leave.

So many burns that his body looks disfigured, twisted in discomfort. You can’t see his expression in any of these pictures. You can see his face — that there is one — but not enough to tell what he’s thinking. Can you ever?

He isn’t smiling, and he isn’t asleep, even though in some of the pictures his eyes are closed and his head is craned to the right, away from the camera. But his arched body gives away that he is awake with pain.

There are no pictures of the flames. But there are pictures of what he looked like afterward.

Paula and Andrea keep passing the photo back and forth silently.

I begin to cry without meaning to, the way your eyes water when you’re really mad.

“Mother Teresa, here,” Paula says.

They stole everything they could carry away. They took his microwave and stereo and paintings off the walls. They took his lamps and barware. Sculptures they liked and sculptures they didn’t like. They loaded it into Paula’s car, and before the lawyer passed out he told them the combination for the safe.

I admire Andrea’s thick skin. Her internal fortitude. Paula shows me another photo.

“How much did you guys get?” Andrea says, her eyes beaming.

“Who cares?” I say. “Seriously.”

“Who cares?” Paula repeats. “What the hell?” She said it like you’d say, Bird shit? Bird shit on my windshield?

“Keep your shitty pictures,” I say.

“I don’t think I could do that,” Deb finally speaks, “no matter the money.”

Paula beams. “That’s why I’m me and you’re you.” She pauses. “Thank God.”

What power does Paula think this gives her over Deb? Part of me understands not wanting to be broken. But if Paula thinks Deb now regards her with awe, she is wrong.

“Did you leave him there?” I ask, changing the subject. I haven’t come here to give Paula any glory.

“Yeah, duh.”

“Fuckin’ barbecue,” I say. I want to be hard. I want to be tough.

“God, that’s gross,” Paula says, like I’m the witch.

I swallow. “I guess it takes all kinds,” I say. Did I mean him asking for it, or her giving it to him?

“He wanted us to.”

If someone asked me to set them on fire. To kill them. Let them die. What would I do? “Did you at least call 911?” I say to everyone at the table.

Deb hugs me. The waitress comes to take our orders. Andrea gawks at me as if I’m joking. But some days the world’s beauty hurts. You have to let it. Not care who sees. Who hears.

Deb rubs my shoulder.

“We put out the fire, stupid. What do you think? We killed him?”

“Let it out,” Deb says. “That’s right.”

Deb would have called 911. Deb would have waited with him until the ambulance arrived.

“Then, get this,” Paula nudges me with her elbow, “he actually says thank you.”

All’s I know is this. It’s been three days since Paula and Sherri did that date. Sherri’s still not back at work. Maybe they made so much money she’s able to take the time off. Or maybe the experience screwed her up. I don’t know which. Do you always give someone exactly what they want? Certain experiences turn us into people we never thought we could be.

“You make love like a woman,” Deb says, imitating A.C. again. “So what’s that mean? Paula’s not a woman?”

I think of the photos. I tell Deb she better watch her back.