Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle (38 page)

Ked giggled. “Rule Number Eight: Never check to see if the monster is dead after you think you've killed it.”

“Oh, yeah!” Dan and Trevor chimed in together.

By the time the credits rolled, Dan and Trevor agreed the film had been creepy, if not downright terrifying. Two more rules were posited to sum up the genre: Rule Number Nine, the villain is never who you think it is, and Rule Ten, the hero can never go home again.

“It's still pretty scary after all these years,” Trevor said.

“It had its moments,” Dan agreed. “How about you, maestro?” he said, turning to his son. “Happy with your choice?”

Ked rolled his eyes. “Guys, it was lame. Didn't you see that stupid make-up and overdone fake vomit?
It looked like green porridge. It was totally goofy,”
he pronounced, the emperor turning thumbs down on the defeated gladiator. “I can't believe I even wanted to watch this crap.”

“Better luck next time,” Dan told his son.

Ked went off, trailed by the steadfast Ralph. “'Night, guys.”

“'Night,” they replied.

Dan looked over at Trevor and shrugged. “So what do we know about horror flicks?”

“That son of yours is a little too sophisticated for his own good. When I was his age, it scared the crap out of me,” Trevor said.

They'd just undressed and were settling in upstairs when Dan's cell buzzed. He reached for it. The screen showed a pay phone number.
Not many of those left any more,
he thought.

Trevor glanced over at him. “Better answer it. You know you won't sleep until you do.”

Dan sighed.

“Sharp.” He listened for a while in silence then said, “Didn't that burn down a couple years ago?”

Trevor rolled over to watch him.

“What's he hiding from?” Then, after a pause, “Maybe, but I wondered what you could tell me.”

The call ended abruptly.

“Damn.”

Trevor looked over at Dan.

“Duty calls,” Dan said, sitting up.

Trevor glanced at the bedside clock. “It's past midnight.”

“I know, sorry. Don't wait up.”

“I won't.” Trevor pulled the covers up to his chin. “Have fun. Don't forget your crucifix.”

It would have been good advice, if he'd followed it.

A voice crackled out of a walkie-talkie somewhere deep inside the slaughterhouse.

“Shit! Did you see this?”

“See what?” answered a second voice. Then “Holy crap! We gotta let the chief know right away.”

Dan's imagination was running riot. What could be worse than a body strung up on a meat hook? Were there others he hadn't seen? He was alert as the officer returned and headed for the cruiser.

Bryson mumbled a few words into his cell, then, “Yeah, he's on a meat hook. Just like the guy said.” He glanced at Dan. “But it gets weirder. Guy's missing an ear. It's sliced clean off.” There was a pause. “Left, I think. Hang on.” He picked up the walkie-talkie. “Harvey. Which ear?”

“The left one,” came the reply.

“Yeah, left,” Dan heard the first officer say.

This was followed by silence. Dan could hear the man's breathing quicken. “Yes, sir.” His body stiffened. “Yes, sir. I understand fully.”

Dan waited, curious, while the officer concluded his call.

The cop turned his grim face to Dan. “Anything else you can tell us?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“All right. You need to leave now.”

He brushed past Dan and headed back to the building. Dan followed.

“How can I find out if this is my guy or not?”

Officer Bryson halted. “Mr. Sharp, sir, you need to leave the site immediately.”

“Sure, but who can I talk to once the identification is made?”

Bryson gave him a dismissive stare. “If you don't leave now, I'll have to charge you with trespassing. Or I could take you down to the station for a formal briefing. Do you want that, Mr. Sharp?”

“No.”

The officer softened a bit. “There's no identification on the body. It could take a while. Maybe if you brought some dental records for your guy to the coroner's office tomorrow, you might get an answer.”

He turned and entered the slaughterhouse. Dan didn't wait for a second invitation to leave.

The Vanishing Point

It was nearly three o'clock by the time Dan got back in his car. He'd been at the slaughterhouse almost two hours, most of that time with the officers. Now, heading east along St. Clair Avenue, he reviewed the facts in his mind. Three days earlier, he received a call from a woman claiming her brother had been missing since the previous afternoon. Was that too soon to declare him missing officially? No, Dan said. Not if she felt his disappearance was suspicious or unusual. In which case it was better to act sooner than later.

The woman, Darlene Hillary, had been frantic. Dan waited till she settled down before pressing her. Why did she think his disappearance was suspicious? That was easy: her brother, Darryl, almost never left the house and when he did he always left a note.
Agoraphobe
, Dan concluded. That morning, Darlene continued, when she was on her way to work, her brother hadn't said anything about going out. When she returned, he was gone. Could he be anywhere else? No, not that she could think of. Was it possible he got delayed somewhere and found himself unable to get in touch? That, too, was unlikely, she said. Nor had he taken any personal belongings, leaving out the possibility of an extended trip.

The answers were not encouraging. Worse, Darlene said her brother had received a threatening note and several disturbing anonymous calls over the past few months. He hadn't wanted to talk about them, but she wheedled it out of him when he began acting strangely, obsessing over locking doors and keeping the windows closed and the curtains drawn at all times. Clearly he believed the threats were real, though he hadn't told his sister what they were about. Dan listened with careful gravity. If someone was serious enough to make threats, then whoever it was might be serious enough to carry them out, though a final verdict was premature.

Almost all of Dan's questions hit dead ends. Darryl hadn't held a job in five years and therefore had no work colleagues, past or present, to question. He hadn't fraternized with neighbours, frequented pool halls or movie houses, so there was no one to ask about the last time they'd seen him socially. His sister worked at an old age home and was often gone for the better part of the day or night, depending on her shift. As far as she knew, her brother spent most of his free time watching TV in his bedroom or outside in their backyard. That habit ended suddenly when the calls started. The one possible lead that held out hope for Dan, as slim as it might seem, was that Darlene's brother was an occasional dope smoker. She'd admitted that after much hesitation, seeming to think it a grievous liability. “It's not that unusual,” he reassured her.

Finding the drug dealers in any given neighbourhood was a shell game. Ask the right questions at the right time and you'd hit a mainline of information. The wrong questions asked of the wrong person on the wrong day, and you were almost guaranteed to see everybody's heads disappear, like a beach full of crabs at low tide. Lots of holes, but nothing showing aboveground. Once they got spooked, they could stay that way for months. Nobody forced these small-time dealers to sell their wares. For most of them, it was part-time work you did on top of your regular job as an underpaid garage mechanic or counter clerk at a late-night donut shop. A little
moolah
to ease the pain of whatever life didn't provide naturally. Selling crack to pay off the Mafia or to fund your own addiction was another matter, of course. There was often urgency there, but Dan doubted he was chasing that kind of animal.

“Darryl's a gentle man,” his sister insisted.

A guitar player and a poet, as it turned out. In other words, the kind of guy who picked up a little weed in the neighbourhood then came home and smoked it in the solitude of his garage, with nobody the wiser. Only in this case it seemed he'd somehow got mixed up with the wrong crowd.

Darryl Hillary was beginning to sound a little weird. He was also one of the most reclusive, introverted young men in the city. According to his sister, almost no one knew of his existence. But even poets must have friends, Dan thought. And apparently an enemy or two, as well. Then again, weren't writers and journalists the first to be silenced? An uncensored poet could be a dangerous thing indeed. But in that case, if the body turned out to be his, why cut off an ear? Why not a tongue instead?

Dan sent in the usual requests for background checks. Nothing arrived on Friday and everything slowed down by the weekend. It was now going on sixty hours since the call with Hillary's sister. In that time, Dan had managed to find the local pusher, the one who supplied the neighbourhood weed. He repaired motors at a small appliance store. No glamour there. Clearly not a big-time dealer. The man was wary when Dan approached, no doubt worried about a bust. He loosened up when Dan flashed the picture and explained why he was looking for Darryl, while assuring him he wasn't a cop. The man admitted to knowing Darryl — Dan was careful not to ask in what context — but sounded convincing when he said he hadn't seen him in several months. Which likely meant that Hillary had scored big the last time they'd been in contact, though he wasn't about to ask for details of the transaction or to wonder if he was keeping proper sales tax records. Dan left his card and a request to be in touch if Darryl contacted him.

Heading downtown now, he wondered if it was this contact that had netted the call from the fast food outlet earlier in the evening. Dan was even reasonably sure which diner it was — there was only one open late in that neighbourhood, at the corner of Lansdowne and St. Clair, not far from the former abattoir. If he drove past now it would still be open, though his anonymous caller would long since have wolfed down an order of fries and a burger and bolted.

He turned south and headed east on College Street, past Yonge and over to Church. Despite the hour, the hookers were still on their corners, long-legged and ever optimistic that Daddy Warbucks would be cruising in their direction any minute.
Got the time? Your place or mine?
It was more than two decades since Dan had seen anything from that side of the fence, but there was a period in his teenage years when he'd needed to support himself. He'd done that by standing on a downtown corner until he met the man who would take him away from all that, briefly, before getting onto the straight-and-somewhat-narrow in his early twenties after finding himself the father of a young boy.

At seventeen, however, Dan had been desperate to escape his claustrophobic, dysfunctional background and his abusive, barely communicative father. He'd left the old man to drink himself to death, a task Stuart Sharp had accomplished quickly and efficiently once he got down to the business at hand, one of the few successes in his otherwise un-noteworthy life. Dan's mother's early death due to pneumonia was something he preferred not to dwell on, if he could avoid it.

In fact, when he considered his beginnings, Dan felt he'd been lucky overall. Life had its surprising twists and turns, but somehow his had turned out all right, where other people's hadn't. He was never more aware of this than when sitting down with clients to discuss the loved ones who'd disappeared — some after fights, some after disappointments, while others simply vanished without leaving a clue as to where they'd gone. Or why. He'd become expert at ferreting out the signs, following them like a trail of breadcrumbs to learn how and why people reinvented themselves. Assuming they were lucky enough to be given a choice and a second chance, that is. He became adept at sniffing the air, picking up the scent of one life and following it to where it morphed into another, the mismatched remnants of a shattered vessel pieced together into something that resembled a whole again. Those were the relatively lucky ones, Dan knew. Then there were the thousands who approached some kind of vanishing point and were never heard from again, donning a cloak of invisibility. Who knew, but some of them could be standing on a nearby street corner right now, having joined the ranks of the Girls of the Night.

Dan's stomach growled: it was payback time for staying up late. He swung south and headed down to the lake, following the concrete trail beneath the Gardiner Expressway, past the film studios and dockyard canals. A burger and fries combo from Wendy's was uppermost on his mind. He stopped at the Leslie Street outlet, the one with the friendly Jamaican woman who was there every night, no matter what time he turned up. He imagined she had kids to support, debts to pay off. Otherwise, why would she be there grinning like a madwoman at 3:18 in the morning?

He handed over his change and silently wished her a better future, whatever it might be, while wondering if Darryl Hillary liked Wendy's combos. Dan gratefully accepted the pungent-smelling bag of carbs and grease and a large Frosty before driving on. With one hand plunged into the paper to draw out a fistful of stringy fries, he passed the turn-off that would have led home. Instead, seemingly of its own accord, the car turned left on Queen Street, heading back over the Don Valley until it reached a cul-de-sac with a thicket of townhouses springing up like mushrooms. He stopped in front of a tall grey unit in a row of five. This place would soon have his name on it. His and Trevor's, if things turned out. Kedrick's, too, but that would be temporary now that Ked was nearing the end of high school and starting to think about university. And so the page turned, Dan mused.

His new neighbourhood was Corktown, a roughly triangular area bounded on the south and east by the Don River where it fed into Lake Ontario. To the north, Regent Park's housing projects were jammed together with the privileged gentrification of Cabbagetown, while poor, unfashionable Moss Park and its homeless shelters lay to the west. With Dan's rag-tag background, he could rightly claim to belong to all of these groups, and none.

Some declared that Corktown got its name from the wave of Irish immigrants arriving in the early-nineteenth century, though Dan preferred the local legend that it was due to the many breweries and a cork manufacturer that once employed a good number of the area's residents. In any case, it was a decidedly old world slice of Toronto's past containing the city's first Catholic parish. Somewhere beneath a current-day schoolyard, an unmarked graveyard held the remains of those parishioners, fleeing poverty and famine in the old world only to find death in the new one. Poor Protestants who couldn't afford the pew fees at nearby St. James Anglican Cathedral eventually erected their own place of worship, Little Trinity, the city's oldest surviving church. A Tudor Gothic structure built “for all people,” it was set smack on King Street, the new arrivals seemingly unable to shake off the aristocratic shadows of the Dominion even here.

This would be Dan's second house in the city. Fifteen years earlier, he had bought his current home at the foot of Leslieville during a slump in the market. It had cost considerably less than expected, but he'd taken his good fortune in stride and made the best of it. Now, with the anticipated addition — meaning Trevor — his domestic arrangements needed expanding. He'd bid on the current property and paid dearly for it, gratefully accepting Trevor's offer to remake the interior and oversee the project's completion. It promised to be quietly spectacular when done. Dan was counting on that. It had to be right; this was probably the last place he'd buy before his retirement, if that day ever arrived.

He rolled down his window and gazed up at the structure. So far, things had gone according to schedule.
The roof had been replaced and the interior gutted. Last week, the builders had installed new window casements on the upper floor. They gleamed in the dark. Once painted, however, they would blend in nicely. Trevor had worked hard to reassure the anxious community reps that no drastic changes would be made to the building's exterior. He promised to maintain the historic façade, matching it with those on either side. Dan liked being the townhouse in the middle, though he hoped for nicer neighbours than the current ones in newly trendified Leslieville, where the money had been flocking of late.

Grabbing his bag of fries and half-eaten hamburger, he stepped out of the car. He approached the house as though it were a nervous horse, touching the brick with his fingertips and feeling the city's restless pulse beneath his hands.
Home
. In his mind, he envisioned living here with Trevor and Ked, meeting the neighbours, learning the ins-and-outs of the community: which market had the best vegetables and fruits, which butcher to go to for the freshest cuts of meat, who the neighbourhood characters were.

Domesticity was growing on him daily. He couldn't wait to move in officially with Trevor. It would dispel the unease he felt waiting for their relationship to settle. At present, Trevor travelled back and forth from Toronto to the west coast, where he carried out occasional renovation projects. When the new house was finished, he'd move here for good. A new neighbourhood meant a new beginning, a new corner turned in life. It felt right.

Dan's mind went to the dark cloud on his horizon. Coaxing Trevor from his rustic British Columbia villa had been a protracted exercise. A self-proclaimed sociophobe, he'd lived in semi-retirement for the past half-dozen years on Mayne Island, a lesser-known cousin of Salt Springs in the Southern Gulf chains. One of the things Dan had enticed him with was the prospect of running the renovation project. Trevor had accepted, but on a no-promises, no-payment basis. If he stayed, the payment would be to live with Dan. He was unsure if he could fulfil that promise, however. Architectural design had been his occupation at one time, but he'd largely left it behind when he retreated to Mayne Island after the death of his lover. While living the life of a hermit had helped him regain his equilibrium, he wasn't sure that returning to urban life was on the agenda for him.

Dan monitored the progress anxiously. From the start, Trevor found Toronto challenging. Too much concrete. Too many buildings swaying overhead and blotting out the sky. Too many people. It was very different from his west coast Pleasantville existence, with its sweeping vistas of snow-capped mountains on one side and the endless ocean on the other. Dan had promised him Toronto wouldn't be all that different, but who was he fooling?