An Ordinary Decent Criminal (29 page)

In fact, I imagined Atismak getting the report and putting a little tick against Walsh’s name and going about his business.

At ten I asked if Claire minded making a phone call from any downtown club she chose to name.

“Any particular phone call?”

“Yep. A very specific one to a very specific lady. Don’t leave a message, though, either talk to her directly or hang up.”

“Right . . .”

“And it would help if you sound drunk . . .”

“Sure.”

I spent ten minutes explaining while she dressed in blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater.

“So I’m a neighbor to this woman, I saw someone in the field behind her place with a big camera pointed right at her place. I don’t
want to be involved but feel that girls have to stick up for each other. Right?”

“Bingo.”

“Don’t say that. I’ll call from a gay bar, then.”

“A gay bar?”

She smiled sweetly. “Yep. It’s a great reason not to give a name. Repressed lesbian longing . . .”

After she left I realized she was enjoying this far too much.

The next morning I was up before dawn and put together a bag before catching the bus downtown. I changed into a new jacket, hat, sunglasses, and pants in a restroom under a big mall and then slipped into the service area through a locked but poorly sealed door in the corner. Twenty minutes later I called for limo service out to the Winnipeg International Airport and then from there to the downtown Delta hotel. From the hotel I made it to St. Norbert by bus and foot. No way anyone followed me.

The rest of the day I spent wandering around Robillard’s neighborhood but the house was tight. No one came in or out, the garage door was down, the yard was serviced by an agency, they had a satellite dish for TV, along with a short-wave antenna for either ham radio or a CB receiver. A working-class neighborhood.

Every hour or so I changed clothes. This hat with this jacket. This jacket with those glasses. Those glasses with this hat.

For half an hour I borrowed a poodle from a house down the block where it had been chained up under a dying tree. We walked around, she peed on everything, sniffed everything, and licked me a lot. When I left to go home, I put her back in her yard and she whined.

After supper Claire and I checked the house for bugs or surveillance, didn’t find anything, and finally bundled Fred up in the
uber
-stroller for a walk. The dog came too.

“Stay. Sit. Wait.”

Claire laughed.

“You better not be laughing.”

“Right.”

I untangled the dog from a tree and we continued. When Claire had caught her breath, she leaned into my arm. “So what happens next?”

“Walsh’s life is becoming strange. His van is stolen but someone had the keys so it can’t be stolen and they send a message to the insurance company saying exactly that. That’s a problem. Walsh is receiving grief from the cops because he didn’t get in trouble for beating me but two other guys did. That’s a problem. Atismak is probably asking some questions about the first call to Crime Stoppers and he’s definitely asking questions about the second call. And that’s a problem.”

I untangled the dog from a woman in a wheelchair and apologized, then we went on.

“Then some neighbor calls the cops and says there’s some pervert peeping her. The cops find his scope with his fingerprints in a field behind his house. That’s a problem.”

Claire listened well. “But it’s going to get worse?”

“Yep. Now, Robillard’s not so easy. I can’t see him giving up and walking away.”

“That’s another problem.”

“Yeah.”

“So deal with this one first.”

The next morning I took a bus to a new mall and used one of the bank of phones outside a restaurant. In quick succession I made calls to the major crimes unit at the police station, victim’s services at the court, and then Walsh’s home. The results were that the cops told me that Walsh was at the courthouse, the courts told me he was scheduled to testify and, to top it all off, no one answered when I called his home. Which all made up my mind for me.

A new bus took me to within ten blocks of the Schmengis junk
yard. From there I walked until I was outside the front gate, where I didn’t pause at all.

Without thinking about it, I pulled a balaclava down over my eyes and crossed the invisible line into someone else’s property. With an eighteen-inch length of heavy-gauge iron pipe, I was ready for anything. I had padded the striking surface with duct and electrician’s tape in case I had to cosh someone. In the backpack was the fully charged Dremel, a selection of heads for it, a length of bike chain, and another padlock still in its plastic case with the price sticker neatly affixed.

Seagulls and crows and ravens picked over the piles of neatly organized piles of garbage as I walked towards the rear of the yard. I could see most of the crane I was interested in. It hung motionless in the sky with its round, hockey-puck-shaped cargo swaying not at all in the wind. Finally I saw the cab of the crane itself. I had seen it before and it had been moving scrap machinery around but now it was simply sitting there on big caterpillar treads with the control booth stuck on like an afterthought. Beside it was a tiny lean-to built right onto the back fence of the lot and there was no one around that I could see. The pipe slipped into my gloved hand and I listened but could hear nothing, no voices, no radio, no movement, nothing. Was there really no one around?

It couldn’t be so easy.

In the lean-to I found a bright yellow hard hat, some earmuffs, and a set of keys attached to a billet of wood on which was carved “Crane.” When I walked over to the crane I found that the batteries were ninety percent charged and that the diesel tanks were more than half full, so I got into the cab and stared at the sixteen separate levers and nineteen separate buttons.

The engine started with a half twist of the key and I lowered the crane until it was parallel to the ground with the deactivated electromagnet maybe two yards above. It was kind of funny, really; you can learn lots of stuff in prison. I know how to build a bomb out of what
I can find in most janitor’s closets. I know four ways to kill a man with a piece of newspaper. No, five.

I know how to torture and kill, maim and wound, steal and con. I can hot-wire most cars, build a gun out of pipes and some duct tape, and sew a knife wound shut with fishing line and wax. I learned how to drive a Caterpillar tractor while working in Drumheller Prison, moving a prefabricated greenhouse to the right place a piece at a time.

Avoiding the access road was simple. I backed out through the three-yard-high plywood fence and turned right. The ground, though, was soft and slippery, so I angled up onto an unused railway bed and drove on the pebbles and gravel with the rails themselves far under the treads.

It took ten minutes to reach Walsh’s house and then I reversed again and plowed through his backyard towards the house. When I was close enough, I maneuvered the crane with the parallel switches and finally lowered it until it was almost, but not quite, touching the roof of his house.

Then I turned the electromagnet up to full power and snapped the key off in the starter.

I hopped out and wrapped the chain around to seal the cab and then I put the padlock on the chain and locked it. That key I pitched over my shoulder, then walked into the field and started a roundabout route home.

I wasn’t sure what an industrial electromagnet would do to Walsh’s computers or files or toys, but I suspected it wouldn’t be good. As I walked away, I wondered how long it would be before someone called someone.

According to Mildred Penny-something’s news report later that night, it took four hours until a neighbor realized maybe the giant crane in Walsh’s yard shouldn’t be there. During that time the magnet completely erased the hard drive of six
computers and more than six thousand floppy and CD-Rom discs. It also irretrievably damaged three TVs, a microwave, a short-wave ham radio receiver/transceiver, and sundry other devices.

On the bus ride downtown the next day, I thought about bombs and stared blankly into space. Wiring, detonator, timer, shrapnel . . .

“What the fuck are you smiling at?”

There was a man standing beside me in the corridor of the bus. He looked to be in his early twenties with black hair cut short, a nose frequently broken, and eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. He wore blue jeans and a denim jacket covered in copper studs. His right hand was behind his back and his left hand was on the rail in front of me. His fingers were covered in thinly drawn, organically shaped tattoos, designs whose name I had forgotten.

“Was I smiling?”

He leaned down and I could smell cigarettes and stale sweat and just a hint of grass. “Yeah, you fuck.”

I looked mildly at him. Could this be a set-up? If so, cops or Robillard? Did it matter? No, so I said it quietly. “Well, then I will.”

He stared at me through the sunglasses and I stared back until he flinched and I knew he was going to back down. And he mumbled out loud, “Alright then.”

He fled the bus and I went back to thinking about bombs. There were other things to worry about, like the casing or body of the device, anti-tampering devices, back-up fuses. . . . All in all, easy as pie. I had a few good ideas so I stopped at a convenience store and bought a huge mug of thoroughly toxic coffee along with a pad of generic graph paper and some pens. With that in hand, I went back and found a bench in a small park about two blocks from the house and started to sketch.

Near as I can tell, it was an accident, it certainly wasn’t due to my own observation or alertness, I was just in the right place. Blind luck.

I was sketching on a bench at the rear of the park where there were deep shadows cast by big elms and small pines. After a while a very old-model, dark blue station wagon pulled up and parked. There were four adult figures in it, one driving, one riding in the passenger seat, and two in the back, and, as I watched, one of the ones in the back seat climbed into the cargo space in the rear.

A sedan full of adults was warning enough, but a couple of seconds later the windows on one side rolled down and I heard the ratchet-click of a pump-action shotgun being loaded. Before I knew it, I was off the bench and moving around to the side, keeping close to the trees and next to the redbrick front of a Baptist church that bordered the park. The last elm was about three yards from the van and I moved up beside it and waited in the shadow.

“. . . so where the fuck is he?”

The man was young with a tinny, nasal voice.

Another voice answered, older, still male. “No idea. No idea at all.”

I could vaguely see that all the men in the car were white, mostly young, and wearing dark blue Nike track jackets with the white piping on the sleeves and black toques sitting high on their heads. Gang bangers? Cops?

“I feel like an idiot.”

A third voice. Was this a hit? A drive-by? A home invasion? I chanced another look. The car was idling. The guy in the passenger seat was fiddling with something between his legs.

The guy in the back bench was leaning against the door nearest to me with his legs stretched out on the bench itself and a towel stretched across his lap. The last guy was crouched in the trunk area, holding two, big, gallon glass pickle jars full of fluid with rags stuffed in the tops. Molotov cocktails? Simple to make, gasoline and dish soap, and I wondered if the fuckers had scored the jars with a glass cutter to let ’em fragment when they landed.

“So where the fuck is he? His bitch is there, so’s the brat. Should we just go ahead? I mean, the wheels is hot, right? I mean, we gotta do this, right?”

I realized the whole neighborhood was quiet, no kids on the street, no one working in their yards. Nothing. Some kind of ESP, maybe. Some kind of group consciousness.

“Shut up.”

Not cops and not a home invasion, which meant a hit. I looked down the street and saw that my house was on the same side the guy in the bench seat was facing, along with the guy in the shotgun seat. Funny that name, not enough to laugh but funny anyway, aptly named. In my head I could imagine them driving up with the windows down and parking across from my house. Guy in the back seat opens up (he probably had the shotgun), guy in the passenger’s seat opens up (a pistol, maybe), driver just drives when he has to, parks when necessary,
so boom-boom-boom, then, after a second, the guy in the rear opens the door, hops out, lights the cocktails, tosses them through the blown-open window.

My house. Shot up and burned with my wife and my son inside.

I moved in a rush. There was half a red brick on the ground, fallen and half-rotten from the church wall, and I scooped it up in my right hand and took two steps forward as I wound up and let fly. It hit the half-open driver’s side window like a bomb and blew it into a cloud of safety glass that still managed to razor away about half the driver’s face.

“Shit!”

I was still moving and I opened the rear door with brutal force. The guy in the back fell halfway out of the car. There was a shotgun on his lap and I plucked it from his nerveless fingers as the station wagon surged forward three feet into a cargo van parked in front of the church. Someone else in the car swore.