Slow Recoil (10 page)

“Oh my god, Charlie,” Fielding had said, “there's no choice now. We've got to call the police. The apartment was empty? I mean, what the hell is going on here? She wouldn't just…”

McKelvey had calmed the younger man over the phone, cotton shoved up his nostrils making his own voice sound like a cartoon character. Convinced him to settle down, to shut his mouth, to keep it to himself. The police weren't interested in someone who had moved, whatever their reasons. And anyway, Christ, he needed some time to think it through, find this guy and break his nose in return.

“We need to be careful here, Tim. I need some time to figure out a few leads,” McKelvey said, as though it made all the sense in the world. “Don't talk to anyone, okay? Don't even answer your phone unless you see that it's me.”

“We should do what you wanted to do from the start, Charlie, and call the police. I don't want to mess around. Donia could be…don't you think we should get some help?”

“If this is a love triangle, or if this guy is out of his mind with jealousy or whatever, we don't want to be fanning the flames by dragging the cops into everything, you understand? I'm going to talk to a few people,” McKelvey said. “Listen, you brought me in to this, and I just got a nose job. You owe me that much, Tim. A day or two, that's all I want. I'll be in touch.”

He hung up. And then he called Detective Mary-Ann Hattie with his list of favours. She seemed beyond the point of asking questions. Perhaps “exasperated” was the word.

“You know they can monitor this sort of thing now. It's not 1973 any more, Charlie. It's not the card catalogue system. You know, Dewey decimal. They use phrases like ‘abuse of privileges'. They have all these pesky privacy laws. The douchebags in Professional Standards salivate over these little indiscretions.”

Her sarcasm made him smile. He knew she could run with a line for a week and a half, find new ways to insult or bend the humour, squeeze every last drop of life from it. Sometimes he thought if she hadn't become a cop, she would have made a good standup comedian. Other times he looked at her and saw her leading a Grade Two class, her dress powdered in chalk dust.

He said, “You know as well as I do how to open a locked door.”

“What the hell are you doing anyway?” she said. “Thinking of renting an office, maybe buying a fedora and a .38 Special? Hang a shingle, ‘Private Detective, Charlie McKelvey'?”

“I'm just doing a favour, looking into a few things. Listen,” he said, “I need to see you, Hattie. Come on. It's been what, a week and a half? I've got the girls coming Saturday night. Why don't you come over on Sunday. You could stay.”

There. He'd said it. Caught in a moment of vulnerability, his head smashed in, brains turned to pillow stuffing. He blinked through the silence that rang from the other end. An announcement over the public address system in the emergency room gave him a start. Code Blue—which he knew meant someone had stopped breathing. McKelvey thought,
Could be
an asshole or a saint, it hardly mattered in the end, did it?
They worked just as hard to save the assholes from dying. He opened his eyes, refocused through the ringing in his ears. The hospital waiting room was full of puking kids latched to bleary-eyed mothers, and a gaggle of young college-aged men who had apparently been involved in a fracas of some variety, bruises and lacerations across their young faces.

“We'll see,” she said. “Hey listen, I've got to run. I'm working a double today, filling in for Teckles. The guy's sick again.”

“Probably got cramps. They never should have transferred him up from Traffic Investigations. He can't stand the pace in Hold-Up. Needs to have everything mapped out with his measuring tape.”

“Yeah, well not everyone is as adaptable as you, McKelvey,” Hattie said, and he took it the way she intended it. That east coast fisherman's daughter passive-aggressiveness coming through loud and clear. Oh, Mary-Ann Hattie, his redhead beauty with the longshoreman's mouth and those green, green eyes. She was slipping from his grasp like an old dory cut from its mooring. The thirteen-year age difference which at first had seemed hardly a topic of discussion seemed now like an ever-widening chasm. How was it that he always seemed to find himself standing on the other side, the wrong side? You were not born for these times, Charlie McKelvey.

“I appreciate you running those numbers,” he said.

“Take care of yourself, Charlie,” she said. Then she was gone.

His mind turned to the magnet he'd lifted from the refrigerator of Donia's apartment. Upon his return from the ER, carried on the wings of the newly prescribed Percocet, he had sat and held the thing and closed one eye to focus.

The magnet had a graphic of a bridge spanning across the continents. It said: Bridges: Bosnian Immigrant Support Centre.

Beneath that was a phone number, address and website link, and beneath that was a line of italicized writing in a foreign language, presumably Bosnian.

So then. Beyond the assault, there was no crime here. In fact, McKelvey was the one with a stolen fridge magnet (Theft Under $5,000). None of it made sense, though, and all of it rubbed him the wrong way. Perhaps it was a simple case of unpaid rent and a midnight escape. But he doubted it. And the first person he needed to speak to in the morning was the superintendent of Donia's building. That was the logical starting point. Find out who the woman was, where she'd gone.

“Last call in a few minutes,” Huff said.

“How about a Jameson's on ice for the road,” McKelvey said, and he knew it was a bad idea this late into a busted-face day, but what the fuck. He finished the last of the beer in his glass, the taste distorted to a lick of old pennies thanks to the bloodied cotton stuffed in his nostrils.

Huff set him up with a shot of the amber Irish whiskey on ice. It was smooth, then it burned just a little, but he missed out on the taste of peat and toasted barley, the sweetness that lingered within the melting ice. As he set the glass down, he glanced in the mirror and caught the eyes of a man he'd noticed a few nights earlier. He didn't miss the fact the man seemed to be checking him out this night as well. A husky fellow with shaggy black hair, and a thick goatee in need of a trim. Dressed in jeans and one of those long canvas riding coats that seemed always to be slicked with oil. McKelvey stared back via the mirror until the man, who was sitting at a small table near the back, turned away.

“That guy back there, the big guy,” McKelvey said, “you know him?”

Huff was removing glasses from the small dishwasher beneath the bar, setting them on a shelf above his head. He looked over in his practiced bartender's way so as not to draw attention. He looked back to McKelvey and shook his head. “Been in a couple times the past week. Sits alone, has a beer, maybe two.”

McKelvey knew a rounder when he saw one, and this guy was a rounder. Perhaps somebody he had put away a few years ago. Who knew. He stood and held the bar for a moment while his neurons and synapses began to fire in sequence, sending signals to his feet and ankles, knees and hips. Move. This way. Left, right…

“What's the damage, Huff?” he said, digging in his coat for his wallet.

“On the house tonight, Charlie,” Huff said. “You've had a tough day.”

McKelvey slipped his wallet back in his pocket and nodded in appreciation. “You're a good man, Huff Keegan.”

It was, in the end, all and more that a man could ask for: a good bar and a good bartender waiting for you at the end of a ball-busting day. I hope heaven is a little like this, McKelvey thought. A stool waiting for you, a bunch of guys with no need for in-depth conversation about household accessories or other impractical and confounding subjects. It made McKelvey miss the locker room at shift change, the warriors in from their patrols, all the swagger and the bullshit.

“I've got to hit the all-night grocery,” McKelvey said. “My granddaughter's coming to visit me tomorrow.”

He liked the sound of that. And despite the broken nose, despite this new hangnail of Donia Kruzik throbbing in the back of his brain like an unsolved case he had failed to close years earlier, he felt good. It was in the pills, he knew, this false sense of ease. A little bit of paradise crushed to powder. As he made his way out onto Front Street to the twenty-four Dominion store, the night clear and cut open with city lights and sirens, he thought he might perhaps even buy a package of Krispy Kreme donuts for the little girl with the dark curls.

SIX

K
adro was standing in line at the concession stand at the mid-town theatre. He was watching the sloppy teenagers behind the counter fill cardboard boxes with popcorn, shuffle to the butter dispenser, pump a few shot across the top, then shuffle back to the counter. One boy's uniform shirt was dirty with stains, and it was untucked. Another boy's hair was a rat's nest, and this one kept trying to make a couple of the girls laugh with his sarcastic jokes rather than serve the line of customers. Kad gritted his teeth until his molars ached. How grateful he'd been at their age to earn a few dinars mucking the pens of the farmer down the road, to shovel shit for pocket change to buy candy and a comic book. It seemed everything had changed within a generation. There was no respect, for self, let alone for others. Too many fat people, too many lazy people. Where, he wanted to know, was their sense of pride in service? What would these assholes do if their country ever called upon them to fight in a war, a real war?

As he moved up in the line, he kept his eye on the silver-haired man in the adjacent line. The man was out with a younger woman and a girl of five or six. The woman had brown hair cut short, she was pretty but wore no makeup, and the little girl had brown curly hair and wore a dress with what looked like new black shoes. The man kept his hand on the back of her head, as though to have contact with her at all times in a public place gave him a sense of comfort. Kadro did not need to stare at the man in order to confirm his identification. This was Bojan Kordic, Donia's manager at the dress factory. Bojan Kordic, leader of the rogue unit that had come through the village that summer, staying just long enough to round up the men and the boys, the young and the old and the crippled alike. Driven to a farm field. Lined up. Shot.

Kad had been following the man for two hours now. Thanks to the fastidious notes in the file made by his sister in this, he had everything he needed. The address of the man's home, the license plates of his two vehicles, grainy photos taken on a cheap disposable camera of the home and the cars, of the man and his family walking in a park. Kadro had sat outside the home to get a lay of the land, then the garage doors opened, and they came out, heading first to an A&W for burgers and onion rings, then on to the theatre for an early afternoon show. It was true that every life was, in effect, simply a series of habits and routines played out across the days and weeks and months of a life. We fall into patterns that make us easy targets for those who might wish us harm. This man's life was no different—the same coffee shop each morning, the same route to work. His life was put down in black and white, and Kad smiled at Donia's good work when he read the notes about how the man left the office early every Wednesday to go and screw a woman who worked in Payroll.

Here they appeared as any other family. Kad wondered if the woman, this man's wife, knew of her husband's past. The violence of which he was capable. Beneath the suit, beyond the minivan and the suburban home with a two-car garage, the soccer games and the ballet lessons. Did she ever catch of glimpse of the monster beneath the surface? He doubted it.
We are all capable of
wearing masks,
he thinks,
of minding our manners when the sign
tells us to act this way or that way.
Civilization is based upon this basic principal or unspoken agreement. If you shoot someone on the street, or say in this movie theatre, it is murder, a senseless act of violence. Even if there is a root cause and effect, even if that cause is righteous. It makes headlines in the newspaper. Shocking. And yet, if the same players are lifted and carried to a war zone, any war zone with any number of geo-political roots and causes and righteous notions, then we say, this is simply war; this is boys being boys, it has been this way since the dawning of the first sun.

When the war is done, when the politicians have stood for photos and the signing of peace agreements, then it is back to the rules again. The switch is thrown, and you wash the blood from your hands, and you smile and wave at your neighbour again, the same neighbour who raped and killed your sister, the very same neighbour you had in your rifle sights only a month earlier—how you fired and missed, the physics of fate. Yes, you are told to forgive and forget, to drive within the lines on the highway, to wait your turn in the queue for bread. But nobody can ever completely forgive and forget. That's why the wars are fought, then peace is called, then the wars are fought again. Because there is always a germ of the cause left untreated. Grandfathers tell their grandsons stories of the war, of the old days, of what is right and wrong. And the seed is planted. And it germinates like a speck of rust.

The man purchased two boxes of popcorn, soft drinks, and a bag of red licorice. With his hand still on the back of the girl's head, they walked through the foyer and down the hall towards theatre number 4.
Lilo & Stitch
was playing. The same show that Kadro had come to watch. He waited a second at the door, gave them time to choose seats and get settled, then he slipped inside the theatre. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness. He went up the stairs with his small bag of popcorn, scanning the rows that were two-thirds filled, and found them close to the middle, over to the right-hand side. He went one row up and settled in just behind and to the left of them.

The previews came on, and Kad settled back and ate his popcorn. It was stale, and the butter tasted of chemicals. Yes, everything had changed. Movies were ten bucks and the popcorn was shit. Gary Cooper was dead. No more simple Saturday afternoons at his uncle's house, the TV playing old movies, then he and his cousins acting them out in the barns and the fields and the woods, those days of wide-open wonder. He looked over to the family every now and then, and he watched them, the back of the man's head, and he wondered what the man would be thinking right now if he knew that he would be dead in a matter of days.