An Ordinary Decent Criminal (25 page)

Some dead French cop said that it is not enough to destroy a man unless you destroy his reputation. But all I wanted was to be free. And have a family. And make a living. Which was actually quite a lot, if you thought about it.

It took me two days to find Robillard’s address, using the library records, the phone company, the gas company, and City Hall. Getting to the library was half the fun, taking different routes each time, avoiding any tails, dumping surveillance, if it was there, making an idiot of myself, if it wasn’t. Practicing old techniques, moving fast and well.

At the end of the second day, I took a bus out to the St. Norbert end of town and then took a walk around Robillard’s neighborhood. His place was on a nice street called Athlone, and it was a ranch house with an attached two-car garage sitting on about four acres of wooded land. I walked by once and then hopped back on the bus and used the same transfer to pay my way downtown.

While the bus jerked and spasmed through very little traffic, my hand itched for a gun and my veins itched for the heroin rush and my nose itched for the coke and my throat itched for the whisky, and my eyes itched for seeing the bad things. Taking what I wanted and not taking any shit and wanting things and not giving a rat’s ass . . .

We passed by a pawn shop. Source of all good things, knives,
money, guns, so my hand was right near the stop cord. Pull it and walk in, nail whoever the fuck was behind the counter with a fist between the eyes and then a knee to the jaw. Flip the sign in the window to
CLOSED
. Lock the door. Do unpleasant things to the shopkeeper until he handed over the money, the guns, the videotape of me coming in.

It was all eighteen inches away. And that would be the start. Acid to take you away and grass to smooth the ride. Cash on the barrelhead and sleek, slick, steel instruments of destruction. Headlines and blurred camera images. Fast cars and that crazed, myopic, adrenalin rush.

The voice inside my head said, Hey. Just one more time. Help me out, help yourself out, do some good.

Against all that old shit was a baby who, when born, measured exactly as long as the distance from the tip of my fingers to the crook of my arm. Waking up with the same beloved breath on the back of my neck. Yard work and house work. Something to own that wasn’t stolen, borrowed, or bought with blood.

My hand relaxed. I was going to bend, not break.

And then the pawn shop was gone.

That night Claire and I made love until I couldn’t even remember my name.

The next morning I left much before dawn and played all my little avoid-the-tail games and moved on foot until I could steal a bike and then by bike to Transcona. About a mile past Walsh’s house, there was a big junkyard surrounded by a wooden fence topped with razor wire, so I paused there and threw the bike over the fence to land behind a pile of gutted cars. Towering high into the sky over the fence was a bright yellow crane hoisting a massive electromagnet and I paused to admire it before walking back. It was almost 8:00 when I reached Walsh’s bungalow and it was still ice-cold out with a bitter wind.

Cops are hyper-stressed most of the time; there really are people trying to get them. For that reason I stayed far away, walking once
past the front of the place using a brisk race-walker’s stride, no one looks twice at those guys. Walsh had a small bungalow with attached garage, thick hedges between him and his neighbors, and a smallish backyard, carefully fenced in.

Changing my pace and my jacket, I walked along the back alley and saw that the property ended in a field with an old railway line cutting neatly across it.

Through his fence I could see a neatly manicured lawn, a fieldstone patio area, and a small shed. But no toys that indicated children, and no patches of dog crap or urine that indicated pets.

Back front and about a block away, I waited until Walsh had left in a small Corolla and then walked up his driveway to where a dark gray van sat in front of the attached double garage. I took my hand out of my jacket pocket and looked at the para compass resting in my gloved palm. I’d picked it up at a marine supply house in Prince Edward Island, prepping for a score that hadn’t worked out, and I’d kept it since. Sailors used it on small boats but it was strong enough to detect magnetic fields, like those around alarm systems, at close range, and it was small enough to be easily concealed. I was using it to check for an alarm on the van. In my pocket was a flexible metal shim and a Robertson screwdriver to strip the steering column and start the engine once I was in.

Some jays sang nearby as I held the compass near the body of the van and slowly walked around it, watching for the needle to deflect. Nothing happened but the needle took a little dip near the front driver’s side wheel.

“Nah. Nothing’s that easy.”

I circled the van and came back to the same place and felt around until I found a small, magnetized box where Walsh had put a spare set of house and car keys. I opened the box and slid into the van. In the back there was a nice set-up with a chair on a heavy-duty rotating bracket, some shelves, a locker built into the back of the driver’s chair, and a little cooler resting between the seats. I left everything in place and arranged myself behind the steering wheel.

My palms were sweaty under the gloves and I turned on the ignition, holding my breath. It would be just like a cop to install some kind of extra gimmick in his own car, parked in his own yard, but nothing happened.

The van started on the first try and I turned it off and fingered the house key.

Oh well, nothing ventured.

Walsh had a nice place but very masculine. The front door opened right onto a living room with dark wood paneling on the walls, black leather and chrome steel couches and chairs. The furniture all faced a pale birchwood entertainment unit from Ikea that covered one side of the room. A stereo, good TV, DVD player, and so on were all prominently displayed along with racks of movies and music. In the corner near the closet, there was a stand-up bar that showed signs of use, big glasses and supplies of Johnny Walker Blue and Gold scotch, Hennesey cognac, Drambuie, Jack Daniel’s bourbon. Hard liquor for hard men.

No books but magazines on tabletops: guns, computers, cars, fitness, self-defense.

Under the coffee table was a Bushnell Spacemaster Spotting scope, about six hundred dollars’ worth of quality optics, and one of those ashtrays with a built-in fan to suck up smoke.

The kitchen was small and functional and full of appliances. The bathroom was equally small and had a well-thumbed selection of
Playboy
,
Penthouse
, and
Maxim
magazines in a rack beside the tub.
His medicine cabinet was full of vitamin supplements, herbal compounds (what the hell was St. John’s Wort or even ginseng for that matter?), condoms (ribbed and regular), and a big bottle of industrial-strength pain medication with codeine.

As I moved through the rooms, I listened but didn’t hear a thing.

The dining room had been turned into a study with narrow tables along all the walls holding too many computers. I shook my head and counted: eighteen towers, three laptops, sixteen screens of various sizes, along with three printers. And stuff I’d never seen before.

Along one wall was a bookshelf full of manuals and a three-drawer file cabinet full of warranties. The one window in the room had been sealed with a great deal of care and laid over it was a patch of corkboard that reached from throat height to the ceiling.

Pinned to that were about fifty pictures of me and Claire and Fred; at home, in the yard, shopping, in the hospital, on the street, working at the convenience store. The pictures were printed on computer paper, not standard photographic stock.

Off to the side were six pictures grouped together, pictures of Robillard talking to someone I couldn’t identify in the front seat of a Taurus station wagon down the street from my place. Pictures of Robillard walking. Pictures of Robillard driving out of my neighborhood in a big SUV.

I wanted to check the computers but didn’t know anything about how they worked, so I stuck with what I knew. Under one desk I found a barrel safe bolted into the floor. The lock was a good one, twenty million possible combinations, but the steel was shit and I could have opened it with a claw hammer in about two seconds. I left it alone.

There were two bedrooms. Walsh had turned one into a storeroom by filling it with boxes upon boxes of stuff. At the same time, he had left an open space down the center, where he’d strung a length of braided steel wire upon which to hang his clothes, all his clothes, right down to underwear and socks, which hung on their own little hangers.

The second bedroom was his own with a big, expensive mattress
on an antique cherrywood frame, two matching end tables, and a small vanity table set into the wall with a huge mirror that did double duty for sexual stimulus and grooming. In the drawers of the vanity, I found more condoms, breath spray, nail grooming equipment, a selection of cigars sealed in aluminum cases, and a pair of Zippo lighters.

I resisted the temptation to put pinholes in the condoms and kept looking.

Where the closet had been, Walsh had installed a Sentry 14 gun safe. Steel frame and full construction with a combination lock. Capable of holding fourteen long guns. Locked, of course.

I stared at the closed door for a moment and then retraced my way back to the filing cabinet in the study, where I found a sheaf of warranties. A Taurus Raging Bull magnum revolver in .44, Ruger Model 77 bolt-action rifle in .30-06, a Browning Buck pistol in .22, a Mossberg Model 500 pump shotgun in 12 gauge. There were also bills of sale for more weapons bought at gun shows and second hand. A Ruger ranch rifle in 7.62 Russian, a Derringer in .45 ACP, a Colt Commander pistol in .45 bought at a place called Gunsite down in New Mexico. The bill for that was over twenty-five hundred, US. About four times more than a Colt should have cost.

I backtracked some more. In the living room there were three framed diplomas, all for Walsh. One for graduating from Red River. One for graduating from the Cooper Gunsite pistol course down in the States, where he had apparently gone to learn combat shooting. The last was for graduating cop school.

If Walsh had a Colt worth two and a half grand from Gunsite, then it would have been accurized and modified. Which meant he knew how to shoot.

Back to the warranties. Grown-up toys, a Nikon SLR digital camera bought at a police auction, a Meridian GPS Gold system from a local sporting goods store, black combat fatigues from a mail order company called US Cavalry, body armor from Second Chance, good
knives from Gerber and Buck, a laser range finder from Leica, night vision binoculars from Bushnell, the warranty for the spotting scope in the living room, and surveillance equipment like bug finders and sonic amplifiers from a variety of companies, most of them in England. I put the papers back.

Downstairs the basement was unfinished but Walsh had a weight bench set up with free weights, a Bowflex gym, as well as a stationary bike and a treadmill. Beside the racked weights was a big punching bag about a yard long, a heavy-duty Everlast, which I checked out for wear marks and found quite a few low and on the left-hand side and some centered.

I reached his garage through the kitchen. It had been turned into a workshop with woodworking tools, billets of lumber, and many racks of tools. There was nothing that jumped out so I closed the door softly and stood there. I could have done a lot of things. I could have broken into his gun safe, loaded a shotgun, pointed it at groin level down the front hall, and set up twine to trigger it when he opened the door.

I could have cut the bolts through on his weights. Or wired his gas stove. Or sawn halfway through the stairs leading to the basement. Or drilled a hole into his tub with a live wire from his basement and painted the end white. Or spilled black powder around his hot water heater. Or dissolved codeine invisibly into his whisky.

But I didn’t.

I stopped in the living room and collected the Bushnell telescope and stole his van.

The van drove like a dream and I wasted some time driving around the industrial lots along the perimeter highway before finding what I wanted in a back lot outside a trucking firm. Parked near the back was a Dodge Caravan of the same year, model, and color, so I stole the front and back licence plates and replaced them with the ones off Walsh’s van. Then I came back and went around to the driver’s side and opened the gas cap. No one was around so I poured a bottle of Coke from Walsh’s cooler into the tank and headed back onto the highway. I felt sorry for the poor van owner, who comes back and finds his van won’t start and calls a tow truck, who probably won’t look at the plates. Tow truck comes and drags the van back to some garage somewhere where it is off the street. Which means the licence plates are not available to the cops. Which means confusion.

I headed down the highway until I found a small hotel for breakfast in the coffee shop. I chose a table near the front and had to wait until the waitress finally came over and stifled a jaw-cracking yawn. I put her at maybe seventeen and pretty enough in a flyblown way,
blond and heavy-set with thick calves and a weak chin. She stood and slowly scratched her neck with the end of her pencil. “Whaddyawant?”

I opted for simple and scorched. That way the germs would be dead or at least stunned and easy to eat. “Scrambled eggs, bacon, rye toast, and a can of diet Coke.”