Serpents Rising (2 page)

Fewer full-time writers meant less overhead, no benefits to pay. It was cheaper to hire freelancers and stringers on an ad hoc basis.

I was now one of those freelancers. And I'd done okay with it. Even won an award for a piece on the bad shit people could learn on the Internet: how to build your own roadside bomb, how to poison your spouse and get away with it, how to manufacture crack in your basement…. Most people already knew a lot of what I was telling them, but nevertheless I won some minor award that I didn't bother putting on my wall. Nobody would see it anyway.

I wrote a book too, a kids' book. That was something I was proud of. Unfortunately it was published by a company that was very good at creating nice looking, well-edited books but couldn't sell iced tea in the desert. My book,
The Spoofaloof Rally
, disappeared from the shelves of Chapters and every other Canadian bookstore faster than beer at a rodeo dance.

So I kept flogging stuff to the papers and a few magazines. And it had gone well enough. I was making my rent payments — I never bought another house even after the insurance company finally settled with me. I was making a pretty good living at a time when a lot of people were struggling to get by. I didn't really mind that part of my life.

It was the rest of it, the part that included knowing that whoever had killed my wife had never been found … that part of my life was always there, never went away, and I hated every minute of it.

And there was one other thing — the note that I was sure had come from whoever had set fire to my house.

It came a year to the day after Donna died. It read:

The Cullens live and love here. I guess not anymore. Ha ha.

One sheet of white paper, folded in half, the typewritten message on the inside.

I'd gone to the cops. Nothing. I'd even hired a private investigator I'd known when he was on the police force, a guy named Mike Cobb. Smart guy and he tried hard. We went back through every story I'd ever written that could have even remotely pissed somebody off. Examined in detail my personal life back to grade school. Friends, enemies, relatives, school mates, teammates — he looked at all of it. And wasn't able to turn up a thing.

The cops raised the possibility, a legitimate one, that the note writer might be a crank — some heartless bastard who had read about the fire and decided to play the cruelest of jokes as a follow-up. Cobb couldn't see it and neither could I. The message coming a year to the day after the fire, the reference to Donna's corny little plaque that had sat next to the front door….

Eventually the cops came to agree with what Cobb and I had already concluded.

There was someone in this world who hated me.

November 2013

I
t was annoying. A noise I couldn't quite get my head around. A loud noise. A loud
banging
noise.

It was playing hell with my sleep. Sleep that I needed to combat the hangover that was sure to be an unpleasant reality once my sleeping was done. Which I was hoping wouldn't be for some time.

The banging noise seemed to have other ideas. I sat up in bed, looked over at the digital clock. 8:35. The banging had been joined by another noise. Yelling. It occurred to me that the person doing the yelling might be the same person who was doing the banging. I was about to shout something disagreeable at the noisemaker when I realized that what he was yelling was my name. And what he was banging on was my door.

I threw the covers back and stood up. It didn't feel pleasant to do that but I didn't think I'd die from it either. I stepped over the clothes I'd worn the day before, walked to the door, leaned on it and said, “I'll make you a deal. You quit making that Goddamn racket and I'll open the door in sixty seconds.”

The yelling and pounding stopped. The person on the other side of the door said, “Deal.”

I found the light switch and flipped it on, a decision I instantly regretted. I walked to the sink, shook three Extra-Strength Tylenol out of a bottle that was sitting on the counter, and gulped down the pills and two glasses of water. I turned away from the sink, reached down, extricated a pair of well-worn jeans and an ancient Bryan Adams
Waking Up the Neighbours
T-shirt from the pile on the floor, and threw them on the bed. I sat, pulled off my sweat pants, and in relatively few attempts was able to exchange the sweats for the jeans and T-shirt.

The voice outside the door said, “You're at forty-five seconds.”

“Shut up.”

“I've got coffee out here.”

“What kind?”

“Starbucks. Pike Place. Grande.”

I stood up, crossed the floor a second time, and opened the door. Mike Cobb looked down at me. I'm not a little guy, but I was small standing next to Cobb. He smiled. “Milk and sugar or black. I don't remember.”

“Milk and sugar.”

He extended one hand.

I accepted the coffee and stepped back to let him in. My apartment is a large bachelor, which means the bed is in the living room, the far end of the room. I led Cobb to the kitchen/living area, gathered a couple of days' newspapers off the table, and threw them on a pile next to the fridge. I pulled out a chair and sat down.

I more or less pointed at one of the other chairs at the table and Cobb also sat. He was wearing a brown leather jacket over a bulky knit tan sweater. Wrangler jeans with no belt. New Balance trainers that looked fresh out of the box. A Jersey Boys ball cap sat just slightly off centre, revealing light brown hair parted on the left with no hint of grey at the temples, though he had to be getting close to that time. Cobb had never told me his age but I figured he was maybe five years older than me, which put him in his early forties.

I thought about apologizing for the mess but decided against it, first of all because mess is a relative term and I'd seen my apartment look much worse, and secondly because people who drop in unexpectedly this early in the morning can damn well take the place the way it comes.

“See you got rid of the moustache,” I said.

“See you grew one,” Cobb replied. “Kind of evens it out.”

We sipped coffee. He removed the ball cap and set it beside him.

“You busy?” He was still smiling.

“Do I look busy?”

“No. You look like crap but you don't look busy.”

“Banging, yelling,
and
insults. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

I'd talked to Cobb a couple of times since he'd tried to help me with my arsonist/anonymous note writer problem. I'd used him as a resource for a couple of stories I'd done that had a crime focus.

I looked at him. Though he hadn't been able to track the person who sent the note — and also very likely burned down my house and killed my wife — Cobb had worked hard at it, then returned half his fee when he wasn't successful.

He didn't answer. Instead he stood and walked around, surveying the apartment. He'd never been in here before. He stopped at the stereo and CD collection, a series of boxes and stands that takes up a third of the space.

“There are record stores that don't have this kind of selection. You actually listen to these?”

“Yeah.”

“All of them?”

“Yeah. Listen, Cobb, I'm betting you didn't come over here at the crack of damn dawn to discuss my music preferences.”

“It's 8:44.”

“The crack of damn dawn.”

He turned away from the music to look at me, then came back to the chair at the table and sat down again.

“I could use your help with something.”

“Sure, just make an appointment with my secretary. I may have an opening next Tuesday.”

“I was thinking more like right now. There's a bit of urgency to my request.”

“I'm listening.”

“Good because this will take a little time.” As if to reinforce what he'd just said, he pulled off the jacket and draped it over the back of his chair.

I drank coffee. Waited.

“A guy came by my office yesterday morning, a guy named Larry Blevins.”

I looked up from the coffee. “Don't know the name.”

“You will. Blevins has a seventeen-year-old son, Jay. High school dropout, got into alcohol in more than a recreational way in tenth grade, moved on to drugs a year or so later, was out of school a few months after that.”

“Cocaine?”

A small nod. “Kid has eclectic tastes. Crack's his main thing though. The family's tried every way they could think of to get the kid off the juice and off the street — treatment, counselling, spent a lot of money, threw him out, took him back home, tough love, real love, all of it. Last week the kid ended up in hospital; they almost lost him. Overdose. The family figured maybe this would be the thing that might get Jay motivated to get off the stuff.”

“I think I know where this is going,” I said.

Cobb nodded again. “When they got him home they talked about it, cried, begged, bargained, all the stuff they tell you you're not supposed to do. Four nights ago Jay got some money and the car keys out of his mom's purse and took off.

“Night before last Blevins is out driving around some of the seamier areas, looking for the kid. Said he's done that before, never found anything. This time he spots his wife's car in a parking lot a few blocks from the Saddledome, figures he's maybe close. Keeps cruising, gets lucky this time, sees a friend of Jay's, also a user, coming out of a house carrying something. There's another guy on the porch of this place, badass-looking guy … Blevins figures he's found a crack house.”

“Good guess,” I said.

Cobb nodded. “This other kid, his name is Max, leaves and badass goes back inside. Blevins decides he's going in there.”

“Shit,” I said.

“It gets worse,” Cobb looked at me. “Blevins hunts and he's a gun collector, has a handgun with him. Decides to take it along thinking he might wave it around a little, scare the crap out of these creeps and warn them off selling product to his kid. Figures he'll tell them that if they do, he'll come back. Like Sylvester Stallone. His words, not mine.”

“The gun loaded?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I've got a hall-of-fame hangover and I can see a hundred holes in his line of thinking.”

Cobb shrugged, noncommittal. “Maybe. But you don't have kids. Never had to go through what Larry Blevins has. Desperate people do desperate things. Stupid things, because they're not thinking clearly. Blevins knows that now.”

Cobb paused and we both drank some of our coffee. He set his down, resumed the story.

“The door's open so he walks in. One guy's on a cell phone, the other one, the same guy who'd been on the front steps with Max, is sitting behind a table. There's a bunch of stuff Blevins has seen in pictures on the Internet spread out all over the table.”

“I've seen those pictures,” I said.

“He tells them why he's there.”

I whistled. “This guy's got balls.”

“Big time. The first guy, the one behind the table, says he's never heard of anyone named Jay. He sticks with that for a while, laughing like it's all a big joke. Blevins wasn't sure what he said that changed the guy's attitude, but suddenly the guy goes from all smiles to mean as a snake — tells Blevins to get his ass out of there, or he'll put him out.”

“And all this time Blevins is holding a gun.”

Cobb nodded.

“The dealer
also
has balls.”

“Now he tells Blevins that Jay's one of their most valued customers, says they could work up a family package if he really wants to bond with his son. Blevins actually points the gun at him, but that just gets the guy laughing again, like it's the funniest thing he's seen in a long time. Just then the front door opens and a girl, younger than Jay, walks into the place. Blevins said she looked maybe fifteen, sixteen.

“Laughing Boy says something about how now the fun would really begin, because Carly doesn't have any money and she needs a load. Blevins tries to take the girl by the arm and push her back out of there but she twists away, tells him to fuck off. The guy behind the table stands up, starts coming around the table. Blevins tells him to back off but the guy keeps coming. Blevins said he was tall, real tall, maybe six-six, but he isn't laughing anymore and he's got something in his hand. Maybe a knife, Blevins wasn't sure.

“Blevins shoots him. Twice.”

“Jesus.”

“Then everything gets loud. The young girl, Carly, she's screaming, the other guy is yelling and knocking over chairs and stuff wanting to get out of there. Blevins told me he thought the guy was trying to get to the back door. Anyway, wherever he's going he isn't fast enough and Blevins shoots him too.”

Cobb stopped talking. Neither of us spoke for quite a while. I've covered crime in Calgary for a dozen years and I've heard lots of stories, some bad, some
real
bad. This was one of the real bad ones.

Desperation.

“What about the girl … Carly?” I was almost afraid to ask. If Blevins had completely lost it, who knew what else he'd done?

“Blevins didn't know. He thought she ran out the door … the front door. When he went back outside he didn't see her. He got in his car and drove away.”

I took a breath.

“What did Blevins think you could do for him?”

“Nothing. That wasn't why he'd come to see me.”

“What then?”

“He's worried about Jay. That he might be in danger.”

“Why? Was the kid there?”

“No, but the guy on the cell phone, Blevins said it was like he was doing play-by-play, telling whoever he was talking to that Jay-boy's old man is here and oooh he has a gun and he's such a scary man … same deal, like it was all a big joke.

“Blevins figures, and he's probably right, that whoever was on the other end of the line will know who shot those guys. Might even think Jay
was
there, with his old man. And he's worried that maybe they'll try to get to Jay … a payback thing.”

“Were the two guys dead? Did he check?”

“He says he didn't but he put two in the middle of the first guy's chest. The second guy, the one on the cell phone, he got him with a head shot. He figured they were both dead.”

Two in the middle of the chest. Head shot
. “The guy was good under pressure.”

“Real good.”

“And Blevins wants you to…?”

“Find Jay. If these guys' bosses, associates, partners, whatever, go looking for him …” Cobb didn't finish the sentence.

“The kid could be hard to keep safe. If he's using and needs to make a buy …” It was my turn to leave a sentence unfinished.

Cobb nodded. “I know that. So does Blevins. But he's hired me to try.”

Another long silence.

I rubbed my hand over the stubble that was the result of not having shaved for a couple of days. Cobb may have been right. I likely did look like crap.

“You think Blevins's story was for real?”

“I already checked. Made a couple of calls. Two shooting victims, no information on the condition of the victims, found at a house on Raleigh Avenue.”

“Okay, so it sounds like it's the real deal.”

“When Blevins finished talking to me, he walked over and dropped a handgun into one of my filing cabinet drawers. Guess he didn't think he'd need it anymore.”

“Let me guess — the two guys were shot with a handgun that matches the make and model of the one Blevins deposited in your filing cabinet.”

“Check.”

“What about Blevins?”

“He said he'd be turning himself in but needed twenty-four hours to take care of a few things.”

“I hope shooting some more people wasn't one of the things he had to take care of.”

“I asked him that. He said it wasn't.”

“And you believed him.”

“He's not a nut, Adam. He's a guy who lost it and shot two people who were hurting his son. Something that in his position I could have done. He's aware of what he did and all he cares about is keeping the kid safe.”

I stared at the ceiling for a while trying to make sense of it. With limited success.

“I guess that brings us to me. When you came in here you mentioned wanting my help.”

He nodded. “My time on the force, and even the work I've done since, I haven't spent much time on the drug side. I've had my share of dealing with crimes that were
fuelled
by drugs and even motivated by the need to obtain the resources to make a purchase, but that's not the same as being up to my ass in the drug culture. So my expertise is limited.”