An Ordinary Decent Criminal (2 page)

“Both, I think.”

“Good choice.”

I handed Fredrick over and he complained a bit but fell asleep again after Claire put her knife down on the table. Right beside the knife was the dent made by the rebar club.

“These three assholes broke in to rob us. I heard them and came down with the pistol to chase them out. They tried to kill me and I shot them.”

Claire’s eyes narrowed when I mentioned the pistol.

“With the pistol? What pistol? Certainly not a pistol you kept? Right? Hmmm? Not after you promised.”

Busted. I held up both hands.

“I kept one piece, just one. Not for work, I promise and I mean it. It was for self-defense. I’ll crucify myself later.”

I waited and she looked at me. She was a hair’s breadth from leaving me, I could feel it. We were together on certain conditions and if she thought I was lying about this, then she was gone.

“No more, Monty. Nothing at all, ever again. Am I clear? I’ll crucify you myself. Okay?”

The cold rage coming off her was palpable. I waved it off and went on.

“Between us, I gave ’em a chance and they didn’t take it. I’m very sorry it happened.”

The sirens were closer and I walked to the front of the house so I could see the street. Claire followed. Her mind was already working on more practical matters, like how to get away clean.

“Shouldn’t you wipe the gun?”

“Hmmm?”

I glanced down at the snub-nosed gun and felt the cool, checkered walnut grips. The gun was a Smith and Wesson K Frame revolver, a Patrolman model built to handle .38 caliber special rounds, and it was pretty much untraceable. I’d done the work myself with acid and an emery wheel, grinding down the serial numbers on the outside and the set hidden inside until it was as clean as I could make it.

I hadn’t even stolen it in this province.

“No. Our story is that the bad guys brought the gun with them. I came down and we wrestled.”

I paced around and gestured with my hand.

“Wrestle, wrestle, wrestle. Then I took the piece away from them and had to shoot. You woke up. We don’t have a phone yet so we couldn’t call the cops.”

I thought about it and continued. “They’ll be here soon enough, anyway.”

There were curtains on the front window and I could see through the gap. I’d laughed when Claire had put them up first thing, but now I appreciated them. The sirens were louder, and a blue and white Crown Victoria sedan pulled up to disgorge two Winnipeg cops, a youngish blond man and a brown woman. She yanked the shotgun out of the holder built into the dashboard and carried it at port arms up the path, but that didn’t surprise me, it was that kind of neighborhood. I felt a little thrill. I hadn’t dealt with cops for a while and I wondered if these were any good.

“Sound good?”

“Fine.”

Claire’s voice was clipped and I turned back towards the dead bodies. Already they were starting to settle as the air left the lungs and the piss and shit seeped out to mingle with the blood on the carpet. Fortunately, we were renting.

“Stall ’em a second, hon. A little panic/fear/rage would be appropriate.”

Fred started to cry when the dog began to bark, which he did as soon as the cops passed into the front yard. I put the pistol on the table and then pulled a plastic baggie with extra bullets from the dressing gown pocket. The unarmed man had fallen on his back, and I opened the front pocket on his black nylon windbreaker and dumped in the six lead and copper rounds. I shredded the baggie into a half-empty box of cutlery and then came back as the cops reached the porch.

“Police. Open up.”

They were doing it right, one on each side of the door and a long reach to knock and announce. Claire glanced at me and I nodded and opened the door. Before I could do anything, there was a thumb-wide shotgun barrel jammed into the hollow of my throat and a pale brown face staring down the receiver. The gun was crude, primitive, and lethal, and eminently capable of blowing my fucking head from my fucking neck so I slowly exhaled and made no movements at all.

“Police. Hands up, please. We have a report of shots.”

Her voice had a West Indian lilt that sounded like music and she smelled like cinnamon mixed half and half with gun oil. Slowly my hands went past my shoulders and she smiled and nodded. Her partner slipped past me with a Buck Rogers-type pistol in both hands, pointed at the ceiling.

“I want to call a lawyer. My name is Samuel Parker and this is my house, my family just moved in and we have no phone yet. The woman behind me is my wife and the baby is my son. Three men broke in with guns and knives to rob us and I killed them in self-defense. I want to call a lawyer.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the younger cop blush furiously when he saw Claire standing there naked. Reflexively he moved to holster his piece. “Jeez,” he said.

The woman with the shotgun made a gentle spitting sound like a chicken critiquing her young and her nose wrinkled in disapproval.

“No, Officer. You keep the gun out. You ignore the pretty naked lady. You check the house. Then you call for an ambulance. Ma’am? Please don’t move. This has to be done a certain way to avoid unpleasantness.”

The boy cop held onto his gun and started into the dining room, staying near the wall and out of the lady’s line of fire. Fred cried and the shotgun stayed steady at my throat as Claire spoke with a voice that cracked with the same cold rage. “Goddamn you. Take that gun off my husband, he didn’t do anything wrong. Go do your job.”

The bright eyes sighting along the shotgun didn’t even twitch and the cop’s cheerful voice dropped half an octave. “Be quiet, ma’am.”

The other officer finished checking the first floor and came into view out of the corner of my vision. “We got three deaders back there.”

He looked blank and started talking into the walkie-talkie on his belt. “We need two ambulances plus crime scene and homicide to a private home on Aikins. No sirens. Repeat: no sirens, one suspect, and needing crime scene and homicide. Reference officers Ramirez and Halley.”

Our dog Renfield, a Frankenstein-mixed mongrel, ambled up to sit pretty beside me with a battered Frisbee in his mouth.

“Sorry, boy, not now.”

The cop behind me grabbed my wrist and I felt the cold steel forcing my hand down to waist level before ratcheting tight, one wrist to the other. The cop with the shotgun didn’t do anything until I was pulled down to my knees and then she spoke. “The gun, Officer. The one on the table, bag it. You should have done that right away.”

The younger one had a whine in his voice as he answered and it grated on my nerves. “What about chain of evidence?”

The shotgun was now pointed at the floor and the cop’s finger was finally outside the trigger guard. Now I could focus past it to read “Ramirez” on the name tag.

“Chain of evidence don’t mean shit if the lady with the baby shoots us dead. We protect ourselves first.”

She gave me a sweet half-smile at odds with disinterested cop eyes.

“Sorry, sir. We have to do things in a certain way. I am quite sure you have done nothing wrong.”

Fred had finally stopped crying and I turned my head to see Claire standing about four feet away and staring at Ramirez as she asked, “What is your name?”

The cop smiled and showed beautiful teeth. They looked capped and were even, with a smudge of lipstick on one incisor. “Elena Ramirez, ma’am. That is a beautiful boy you have there.”

Claire didn’t say a word; she just stared with narrowed eyes and I recognized her rage, but then she smiled and chucked Fred under the chin. When he laughed, I relaxed a bit and allowed a smile as Ramirez glanced down at me with a slightly confused look and then back at Claire.

“Yes. His name is Fredrick.”

The cop shifted her grip on the shotgun and I knew what she was seeing. Here she was, talking politely with a man who had just killed three people and a naked woman who looked absolutely relaxed despite having three stiffs in the same room. She was probably wondering if she had missed something because all the little cop alarms were going off in her head. She stepped back and looked me over again, and I knew she was trying to place my face. Early thirties, slightly over six feet tall, with very pale skin and lots of old scars on his arms and hands. Pale gray or blue eyes and blond hair cut short. Normal enough, except I looked comfortable despite the handcuffs and the corpses and the cops. Cops know that only psychopaths, soldiers, and cops can kill and be comfortable with it, and she was probably trying to put me in the right category.

Others had tried, so I grinned at her, “Lots of luck.”

I said it out loud and Ramirez glanced at Claire and looked even more confused. My wife was mad, which made sense, but not scared, which didn’t. So Claire ended up filed away in the cop memory too, five foot nine, about a hundred and forty pounds, well built, sun-browned all over except for a narrow strip around belly and crotch. She was crowned with thick, unkempt, reddish-brown hair worn long, and had dark brown eyes. I wondered if the cop would recognize the untannable stretch marks brought on by pregnancy.

The other cop was back on the walkie-talkie, deciphering the Babel of static and code with ease and answering too low for me to hear.

Ramirez said, “Perhaps, ma’am, you might get dressed. I think you might distract the paramedics when they arrive. You are also certainly confusing Officer Halley.”

Claire allowed herself to be escorted upstairs and started a conversation about babies, while I waited in the doorway with a really dumb cop behind me with a pistol and a walkie-talkie. My hands weren’t used to being handcuffed anymore and they ached with tension and muscle memory until I consciously relaxed. I could see out the open door past the front yard to the tree-lined street and, although it was early spring and cold, neighbors were starting to cluster in small groups on the sidewalk. The police car still had its flashers on and the harsh light threw the whole block into sharp relief.

In time Claire and Ramirez came back down with Fred but she wasn’t allowed to talk to me, and soon after that, an ambulance showed with a half-dozen cop cars and a small panel truck. The first non-uniformed cop into the house was a big man with washed-out blue eyes in a cheap, gray, three-piece suit, carrying an unlit, expensive cigar. In the house I could hear Ramirez talking and then the big cop came back and stared at me while he lit the cigar with a wooden kitchen match. In front of us, the yard was filling up with cops in uniforms and paramedics in white smocks.

“Mister Parker?”

“Yes. I would like to call a lawyer.”

I said it as loud as I could without yelling and some of the people in the yard flinched but the big cop paid no attention.

“My name is Detective Enzio Walsh. You are under arrest. You have . . .”

In the background Claire yelled that I was innocent and I let a smile cross my face because for the first time in a long while, I knew where I stood.

Sergeant Enzio Walsh burst through the steel door that kept the world out of the little interrogation room on the sixth floor of Winnipeg’s Public Safety Building. The door smashed against the wall and a uniformed cop named Daniels jumped off his stool and came to attention. I sat there and yawned.

“PAR-ker?”

Walsh yelled and I nodded peacefully as his glance pinwheeled around. The room was three yards by three square, and two and a half yards high, with rivetted walls painted some colour between green and gray. It had a stool for the cop and a table built into the wall and a ledge upon which I could rest my sorry ass. Above the door was a camera mount with a security camera in a heavy-duty cage, but it hadn’t moved since I’d come into the room three hours ago. During that time, my only company had been Daniels, who’d tried to talk to me about anything at all. With no fucking luck ’cause momma taught me never to talk to cops.

“Par-KER?”

I nodded again. I’d had my head down on the table, exhausted as
the adrenalin from the shooting leached slowly out of my system The handcuffs still cranked tight behind my back. Claire had tossed the cops a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and about an hour ago they’d let me put them on.

“Parker?”

Walsh stood with a bundle of paper in one hand, his conservatively colored tie loose around his neck. His coat was open and I could see the checkered grip of an automatic pistol on his right hip with the butt towards the front. With a quick little gesture, he motioned Daniels out, grinning with an intensity that didn’t quite touch his eyes. When Daniels was gone, he shut the door and pulled the stool up across from me.

“Parker?”

I yawned again and blinked as he went on.

“No, no, no, my lad.”

He cleared his throat and read from the sheet in front of him.

“Montgomery Uller Haaviko. Also known as Sheridan Potter, Igor Worley, and Gerry Timmins. Habitual offender from way back. Arrests for assault, arson, uttering threats, theft, breaking and entry, smuggling, possession of weapons, possession of prohibited weapons, possession of controlled substances, sale of controlled substances, and seven counts of attempted murder over the years. Convictions leading to eight years of prison out of the past ten. You got off easy before but I’ve got you now, you prick, and in my very own province. And for murder, of all things, you finally got it right after all that fucking effort.”