Darwin's Nightmare (6 page)

“It's still not yours.”

“How much for the paper then?” I asked with a low, even tone. I didn't want any more attention than I had already gotten.

“We don't sell them.”

She still didn't look away when she said this, making me still think we weren't done. “Did those hurt? The rings, I mean. In your face. Did they hurt?”

“No.” Her voice was less sure; the conversation was getting away from her.

“Why three of them? Why not two? How do you decide what to pierce?”

“Why, you got a fetish?” Her tone was a bit more defiant. She thought she had scored a point in her little game.

“I just want to know why you need to make something out of nothing. Why do you need to pierce a lip, or an eyebrow? Why do you make nothing into a whole production? What I'm trying to say is, why do you want to hassle me for nothing? Or did I just answer my question? You can't leave things alone — not even your chubby lower lip.”

She threw a pen at me, meaning to hit me in the face. I moved my head, and she hit a woman behind me who was drinking a latte. I picked up the pen as she said, “Ma'am, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to . . .” I heard someone call for a manager as I took my seat and started writing. The crossword would explain my presence in the coffee house for an hour or two. I had no interest in the puzzle; I instead used it to chart out what I knew and what I didn't. I filled in the boxes of the puzzle with everything I had found out at 22 Hess. I worked fast, filling in names, places, and information I had learned. I noted everything Mike had told me about their piracy, and what I knew about the team that had shown up to clean the entire building. To the passerby I was not a person who was almost killed less than half an hour ago. I was a person who was very interested in his crossword puzzle. Over the two hours I stayed in the Second Cup, I recorded all of the information I knew, and the questions I had. I also learned
the local bus route. My uncle hated writing anything down; he said it was the start of something concrete. Something a person could follow back to you. Most in my profession would have agreed with my uncle, but ever since I had lived with my uncle I did it. He taught me to dissect books before I learned to dissect people, and those early lessons were hard-wired into my brain. Seeing things on paper started my mind turning. I could swim through the information, picking out important details like a pike among minnows feeding on the biggest fish. It wasn't my uncle's way to use pen and paper, but it was something he could accept because his most important rule was to use whatever worked.

The names and accents I had heard at 22 Hess made me think I had crossed paths with the Russian mob. They had been a growing element in Southern Ontario for years, following Russian hockey players and circus troupes to Canada. The Russians were violent, but they were pros; they would make sure what happened to the computer geeks wouldn't attract the attention of the law for at least another few hours. I couldn't go back: they would have eyes posted there until the cops showed. Eventually the eyes outside would settle on my car, parked across the street from 22 Hess. The car didn't have my name on it, but the right people would track it to me eventually. I went to the coffee shop's pay phone and made a call to Sully's Tavern. The phone was answered on the second ring by a voice that was clear and without distortion.

“Hello?”

“It's Wilson.”

“What is it?” The voice on the phone did not sound interested or concerned, but I knew better than to think Steve wasn't paying attention; he heard every word.

“I need you to do me a favour.”

“What?” Mr. Personality was laying it on thick this afternoon.

“My car is over on Hess. I need it picked up.”

“Is it hot yet?”

“No, but the cops will be checking it soon, so it needs to be moved fast.”

“Where are you now?”

I told him, and listened to Steve chuckle. He seemed amused that I was stranded so close by.

Twenty minutes later, I was in Steve's car, a beat-up, decade-old Range Rover. The
SUV
was uncomfortable in the city, but ready to run forever. I was driving so Steve could do the quick pick-up. Never once did he ask why; he would do whatever I asked. I did Steve a favour once, and he'd been ready to help ever since. I always felt a pang of guilt asking him for help because I knew he'd always say yes. He would always help me for what I did, but I hadn't helped him for favours. I helped him because he had become like family in a time when I thought I would never have family again. I owed him as much as he owed me.

“Who's tending bar?”

“Sandra. With help from Ben,” he said.

Since the day Sandra had been kidnapped, Steve always had Ben at the bar when he couldn't be, just to make sure things were kosher. Ben was way over six feet tall, and well over three hundred pounds. All of his size made him look like the son of a farmer, one who didn't own any
machinery. It didn't help that he was one of the only men in the city who had overalls on regular rotation in his wardrobe. I had seen Ben take apart groups of people at once, but the real menace of the bar was Steve. He was no danger to the regular customers — just to those who were there to threaten his business or family, specifically Sandra.

At one time, I had been no more than a passing customer in the bar. I'd check into it once in a while for information and the like. One night I happened to brace a junkie a little hard, and Steve told me to let him go. I didn't listen because bartenders are usually full of hot air and Steve didn't look like much — he only weighed about one-seventy, and he could barely see through the hair that hung over his eyes. While I was holding the junkie to the wall with my forearm, I missed the sound of the thin bartender moving over the bar. Almost at once he was behind me, tripping me backward over his foot.

I bumped off the ground ready to fight. The junkie saw that Steve was between us and rushed out the door. Steve tilted his head forward, and with a hard jerk he sent his hair flying back. He used a rubber band from his wrist to tie the hair up into some kind of shabby samurai topknot. I threw a weak jab before he was done with his hair as a setup to something much worse; he surprised me, pulling my arm tight — hyperextending it. Steve twisted and pulled the arm in front of him and began pushing against it like he was at the turnstile to get on a roller coaster. I grabbed the brass rail on the bar and pulled against my arm, interrupting Steve's momentum. He stumbled into my field of vision, no longer able to put me to the floor. My elbow drove back over my shoulder and connected with his jaw, but it did nothing to loosen his grip. I hit him five more times in the jaw and side of the head until my twisted arm was free. The fight went on for three more minutes. Steve
tried repeatedly to take me down while I tried to knock him out. I used fast hard punches and elbows out of fear of getting a limb broken in a painful joint lock.

After three minutes, we both were slow to get up and Sandra had just come back from the store. She walked up to the fight, unafraid, and pulled Steve away by the arm. At once, his eyes softened, and he followed her behind the bar. The junkie was long gone, and my left knee and right arm were severely stretched. I staggered to the bar and did the only thing I was able to do. I ordered a Coke.

We weren't friends after that, not by a long shot, but I did my best to respect the bar, and Steve did his best to turn an eye every now and then when I had to brace someone a little rough. Three years ago that all changed — not because of some touching Hallmark moment, but rather because of something much worse. We both got blood on our hands together. Blood has a way of making two people stick together like nothing else.

The neighbourhood where Sully's Tavern was located was rough. No one lived there because they wanted to — they just had nowhere else to go. Every violent offender, addict, and pedophile was like a magnet dragging others like them to the area. Sully's Tavern was the eye of the hurricane; it was the one peaceful spot in a mass of human depravity. The only real order in the neighbourhood came from Paolo's men. It was mob turf, and everybody was expected to pay into the local protection fund. The hoods in charge of the collecting left Steve alone for the first little while because his bar didn't turn a profit, and he didn't care who came in with who so long as they didn't start trouble. But when the bar started getting regular customers, the neighbourhood boys became more interested in Sully's Tavern. The first visit was on a Tuesday, then every other day after Steve refused to pay. The boys just
didn't understand, being so low on the food chain and used to intimidating everyone, that Steve wasn't going to be scared into anything.

I heard rumblings of what was going on and I talked to Steve about it. “Those aren't punk kids, Steve, they work for a dangerous man. Just give them a piece of the pie and call it the price of doing business.”

Quietly, under his hair, he said, “It's my business, my pie, no tastes. You want another Coke?”

I came in a week later, on a Monday, to find Steve ramming a man's head into the brass footrest of the bar. Another man was on the floor, his left arm and leg at unnatural angles. On the floor between the two men were baseball bats.

“What's going on?” I asked.

Steve paid no mind to my question as he finished with the hood. The gong sound of his skull hitting the hard metal was replaced by the sound of a skull falling into blood and teeth. The sound was like raw chicken falling off a counter onto the floor. Steve never once looked at me or said a word. His wiry body rippled under his thin white shirt as he grabbed each man by a foot. He didn't even flinch when one of the men began shrieking because Steve was pulling on the leg that was obviously damaged. Steve walked right past me, dragging the bodies into the street in front of the bar. As he walked back in he ran his fingers through his hair, removing the rubber band; his face once again becoming hidden.

“Time to put out new peanuts,” was all he said to me.

I found out that night, through the grapevine, that the two men were collectors. After Steve's repeated refusals to pay, they had decided to step things up by coming into the bar with bats.

The next day, I went to the office and found Steve waiting
outside the door dressed in khakis and a white T-shirt. The veins in his forearms pressed out hard like overfilled balloons, and his hair was up in the topknot.

“Where can I find your boss?” was all he said.

I could see that he was ready to go through me to find out so I said, “Tell me.”

Steve said he went for napkins, and when he came back Sandra was gone. A phone call came a few minutes after he walked in; it told him that to get his wife back he had to pay up all the “rent” he had missed. The kidnappers gave Steve three hours to get together all the money. Steve was no idiot; he knew that after what he'd done there was no way Sandra was coming back. He might get pieces of her, but she wouldn't be back as he knew her.

“The good thing is the time,” I said. “They want the money so they'll keep her alive until they know they've got it. How much time is left?”

“Two hours.” Steve's gaze was out the window; his fists were tight, clenching imaginary ghosts.

We left the office together and took my car downtown to Barton Street East; I parked in a public parking space, and we moved on foot over the pavement. The concrete had been repaved with chewing gum and cigarettes, making the rough surface smooth with urban grime. As we rounded the corner of an alley to Barton, its stream of people flowing by unyielding, I stopped and spoke to Steve. “This building around the corner — the barbershop — is the gate; Mario is middle management for some heavy hitters on the east side. Everything on the street goes through Mario. You do this and you are on everyone's radar.”

Steve looked at me for about one second, long enough for me to see pure fury, pure hate. He turned and walked into the crowd, vanishing amid the faces. I followed, trying to keep up, but Steve moved fast, his thin body
gliding through the human traffic. He entered the barber-shop without hesitation. As I followed in his wake, I eyed the barber pole spinning. I took a breath and thought about nothing, relaxing so I could commit to what I was about to become a part of. I was helping Steve, and back then I never once thought that I shouldn't — never once. I took one last look at the pole spinning white then red, and got ready for a lot more red.

When I opened the door the chime didn't turn any heads my way. Two barbers were unconscious on the floor. Beside the barbers lay a man in a finely tailored black suit. Six feet above his body was a fine spray of red on the white wall.

I moved through the room and into the next. The door to the office had been torn from one of the hinges; it hung on like a loose tooth. In the doorway, face down, arms cradling his head, lay another suit, dead. I could see the defensive wounds that had leaked onto the floor — Steve had come in slicing high. The pool of blood was growing; so were the screams inside the office. Steve wasn't talking; he was taking off Mario's ear with a barber's straight razor. He must have taken the razor off one of the barbers when he came in. Steve was using the razor like a conductor's wand, making the fat Italian man scream a bloody aria. His pockmarked face was made even uglier in its agonized distortion. The ear came off despite the pawing of stubby fingers. Steve slammed it on the desk and started on Mario's nose. When it was half off he looked at Mario and demanded, “Where is she?” The question had an exclamation point in the form of a haymaker.

When there was no response he moved the razor back to the nose, and the answers came like water from a faucet. “Tommy took her! He did it! Talarese did it, all right? Just stop!”

“I know him,” I said.

Mario saw me, and his eyes widened. “You fuck. You yellow traitor shit. I'll spit on your grave.”