Slow Recoil (6 page)

McKelvey gave the address, and Hassan said, “Thank you sir, for calling back.”

“My truck died a couple of weeks ago,” McKelvey explained. “I'm having trouble finding a replacement. Who knows, maybe I'll become a regular until something turns up.”

“Try Auto Trader online,” Hassan suggested, like they were old friends now.

“Online, sure,” McKelvey said. “I don't have a computer at home.”

“They have it for free, sir, the internet. At the public library. That is where my children use it for their schooling. We can't afford a computer of our own. Not yet.”

“I guess I'll need to apply for a library card first,” McKelvey said.

The guy on the AM sports station was going on about the Blue Jays, how Clemens took the loss last night in a tough game against the Yankees.
The bastards
, McKelvey thought. He hated the New York Yankees not for winning all the time, but for winning the way they did. They were just a hateful team, overpaid braggarts and loudmouths—so perfect in their prancing starched pinstripes. Tonight Pete Walker would hit the mound for the Jays, and McKelvey had his money on the home team. Walker was the sort of guy who could keep his cool and get himself out of a tight spot. It was a characteristic that would have made the man a good cop.

Hassan pulled up to the curb outside the low-rise apartment. It was a working class neighbourhood, the fringe of so-called Little Poland. As the metropolis grew, these self-proclaimed neighbourhoods seemed to blossom from beneath the sidewalks as though the roots had been there all along, defining themselves by block and intersection. Little Italy, Greektown, Chinatown, Portugal Village, Koreatown, the Gay Village, there was something for everyone, for that was the essence of Toronto, the heart pumping blood through this massive body: a hundred different languages, a million different stories, the past preserved and the future a shared dream. This new city, it belonged to everybody, the last best frontier.

“Here,” McKelvey said, getting out and handing the driver a twenty. “Wait here for me for ten minutes, will you?”

Hassan took the bill, folded it once and set it on the clipboard at his side. “I am at your service, sir.”

McKelvey made his way up the walkway to the four steps that led to a set of double glass doors. Suddenly he was filled with a sense of foreboding, the cop's instinct that gave his stomach a quick flip. He thought he was probably going to walk in on the woman and another boyfriend, or maybe her and a whole crew of reprobates holed up in the love shack with the phone turned off and poor Tim Fielding sitting across town going crazy. The whole thing was a misunderstanding. Inside the foyer was a wall of mailboxes to the right, flyers and coupons for pizza and carpet cleaning scattered on the floor. To the left was a listing of tenants set in a glass case next to a keypad and speaker intercom. He ran his finger down the list until he came to D. Kruzik. He pressed the buzzer and waited. Nothing. He pressed it again, this time for a full minute. Nothing. He pulled at the main door, found it sloppily unlocked, and slipped inside.

The apartment was on the top floor of the eight-storey building. He rode one of two elevators, noting the drastic difference in design and upkeep compared to Fielding's newer building. This elevator was small and the carpet was stained and marked here and there with black cigarette burns. It smelled like the inside of a cab mixed with something else he couldn't quite put his finger on. As the doors opened, it came to him: boiled cabbage.

He found the unit—801—at the end of the hallway on the left. A narrow rectangular window on either end of the hall let in the only daylight, and it was a good thing, because the whole place had the feeling of 1960s Eastern European Cold War modesty. He knocked and waited. He put his ear to the door and listened. Nothing. A door opened up the hall, and a woman in her mid fifties, dressed in a dark coat with a kerchief tied over her hair, glanced at him quickly. He fished his own house keys from his pants pocket and pretended to look for the right one. When the woman was inside the elevator, he knocked again, put his ear to the door, closed his eyes. Nothing. And then something. What, a sound of movement? The subtle resonation of human presence on the other side? He reached out and turned the doorknob. It was unlocked. He took a step back and gave it a moment. He stepped in and listened again. Nothing. He turned the doorknob quietly in his left hand.

“Hello,” he called.

He was startled to find the apartment empty save for a few papers scattered across the top of the kitchen counter, old direct mail flyers. Tiny and spare, a one-bedroom for eight-fifty a month. But it was empty. He left the door ajar as he stepped quietly into the hallway that opened on the right to a small kitchen and continued straight ahead into a living room. He surveyed the emptiness, and spotted a single magnet stuck to the fridge, an item of information stored for later testimony perhaps.

“Hello?” he said. “Donia? I'm a friend of Tim's…”

He listened. Nothing. And then it was there again, the sense of human energy. It wasn't a sound, not quite, it was some frequency coming through on the channel of the sixth sense. He had entered enough rooms and vacant buildings in his day to trust in the feeling, to believe in its root. In an earlier life he would have reached now, hand hovering above the holstered sidearm at his side. But he was unarmed now, standing there alone in a stranger's apartment. What a fool's errand. What the fuck had he been thinking…

He was turning back to the door when the rush came upon him, the kinetic surge of a body in motion. From a bathroom down the hall, four fast strides—McKelvey turned, pivoting at the knees just in time to catch something thick and hard across the side of his skull, heavy metal: explosions of pinwheels scorched across the blackness.

McKelvey twisted, falling sideways, reaching out, hands curled into fists, and he saw his mistake—goddamned rookie patrolman's mistake of turning his back before every single room, every single closet had been checked and cleared—and the son of a bitch was right there, combat jacket and jeans, hair shaved close to the bone—and McKelvey caught a sledgehammer of a blow square in the centre of his face, an atomic detonation.

He was splayed on the floor, a beetle turned the wrong way.

The door slammed shut.

He squinted through the tongue-thick ether. Numbness spread across his face, a dull pulse knocking from behind his eyes. Then his hearing went garbled as though he were under water. He could taste blood down the back of his throat, iron and copper, and he knew, even before he sat up, that his nose was broken, his fucking nose was broken.

The taxi driver was pulled up to the curb listening to callers on talk radio share their opposing views on the so-called “War on Terror” when he noticed the big man in the green army jacket come bursting through the main doors. He ran across the street— mere feet in front of Hassan's car—and jumped in a silver Honda Accord (probably a '94 or '95, Hassan thought). The car peeled from the curb, gone. Hassan strained to make out the plate. APVB and three digits, maybe a nine in there. These were the details he provided to McKelvey once his passenger had also come stumbling from the building, a clutch of bloodied paper towel held to his face, a darkness crawling beneath and between his eyes.

“What happened, sir? Are you all right?” Hassan's wide eyes told McKelvey all he needed to know about his own condition.

“You see a guy come out of there the last few minutes, which way he went?” McKelvey said, his voice thick, nasal.

A lifetime on the force, and he'd never been punched in the face with such velocity or precision. Kicked, spat upon, stabbed at, and yes, even shot at on two occasions—once at the deadly shootout intersection of Jane and Finch, the other time in the hallway of his own home as he and Duguay drew like gunfighters—but this, this was otherworldly. He had come as close to blacking out as his fragile male ego would allow. Held on there to the tassels of faint hope, pulled himself up through sheer stubborn determination, an ode to his Celtic ancestry. It was the fucking pill, that little half tablet that had dulled his edge. As bad as taking a drink on duty, for Christ's sake. Rather than being ashamed of himself, he was angry and embarrassed and wanted to get this asshole face to face in a fair fight, no sucker punches thrown from the dark.

Hassan relayed the facts as he had processed them, his cab driver's eyes always recording—which is what made drivers such a great source for the dicks of the various crews working in Hold-Up, Homicide, Sexual Assault. McKelvey put his head back on the headrest in the back seat and took a haul of air between clenched teeth. His face could come off if he pulled hard enough. He could pull it off and hand it to Hassan and walk away and find another face somewhere. He was cotton-headed, tongue-thick. He had the four numbers from the plate, the general description of the asshole wielding the sledgehammer in his right hand. He closed his eyes and centred himself, willing forth the last of the reservoir, the needle well past “E”. His mind flashed to the image of the stark white refrigerator and that single square magnet stuck to the door.

“I'll be back in a minute,” he said, opening the door, and stepping out on legs no longer connected to his hips. “I forgot something.”

“Please sir, let me take you to the hospital,” Hassan said.

“That's our next stop,” McKelvey said.

FOUR

Three days earlier…

K
adro stands on the balcony of the cheap airport-strip motel smoking a Canadian cigarette. Du Maurier. The cigarette is smooth. Fine. Back in the war, he liked those mornings best when the sun had not yet burned away the fog completely, and he could stand alone with the gun slung over his shoulder and enjoy a cigarette all to himself. The fields seemed peaceful then and not at all associated with the gruesome acts of war. The bullets, the bombs. The effect of shrapnel on the human body. The sweet, sick stink of the dead, the sounds they made in their own moment of dying. None of it seemed possible inside the stillness and clear sunshine of those fields. He would smoke his cigarette and watch the morning glow within itself, and it made a man feel grateful to stand with his legs wholly intact, heart still beating, still pushing blood. He understood in those moments what it meant to be entirely alive, because he was already dead—his generation expendable as a matter of birth and name and timing. The great lottery of life. His number was accounted for; it had been waiting for him just up ahead all the days of his life. The next field, the next town.

“Always daydreaming,” that's what Krupps used to say. The weary squad leader with the perpetual smirk, the crooked grin. The dimpled cheeks of a farm boy contrasted against the dead eyes of a killer, their best shooter. Removed the head from an enemy soldier at six hundred yards. At dusk. With a hard wind blowing at them. Krupps had collected on the bet from every man in the squad, including Kadro. It was supernatural.

But it was Krupps who was dead and not him. Dead going on seven years now. And only just yesterday. Life was funny that way, how time shifted, played tricks so that even now Kad could close his eyes and actually smell the cordite, the blue-grey smoke from their guns—and then the other smells that came on, the stomach-curdling stink of death, the foul funk of bodies left to bloat and swell in the hot summer sun, a smell that settled in your mouth like a taste, something that stayed on your tongue for days.

“This,” Krupps said, handing him a pint of plum brandy, “is the only thing that gets rid of the stink. Drink it. And then smear some under your nose… ”

Yes, life was funny. Kad's brother Tomas had studied at a school in Chicago, because he was the smarter of the two, always reading these thick books, preferring conversation and debates to sports or roughhousing. And it was Kad who'd stayed home with the rifle and the grenades, the bayonet that he could mount on his rifle when the fighting got that close, that dirty. Kad was not jealous of his brother. He was proud of Tomas and happy that he had been spared these years of war. To see the world come to an end, to stand each day in the midst of the apocalypse. To have killed men, to have witnessed the cause and effect of the bullets stored in the belt slung across his back. Kad had seen the brochures for his brother's school in Illinois.
Ill-in-noise
—how many times had he said that word as he tried to imagine this unknown world his smart brother had flown to with scholarship dollars. The fields that looked like a golf course, the thin white girls with blonde hair, always blonde. What perfect timing Tomas always had. He graduated and earned his scholarship—his ticket out—in the very months before the war came to their villages, to their homeland. At first it was the whisperings of independence that reverberated around the world.

“I will come home to fight,” Tomas had told his brother in their last phone call.