Chapter Two
We flew across the bridge and smashed right through the gate on the Dartmouth side, Jimmy forgetting we didn’t have a MacPass. We zipped through the intersection before I shouted at Jimmy to stop. He screeched up onto the grass next to the graveyard.
When he stopped, a bunch of loose bullets bounced around the back of the van, souvenirs of our adventure on the waterfront.
“How the hell am I going to find Sarah?” I asked. “I gotta think. I’m in big trouble. Sweet Marky Malone is mad at me, and when he’s mad, he don’t get unmad until the problem is resolved.”
“You should know, boss.”
I did know. I’d known Malone all my life. He pretended to be a hardman from Spryfield, but we went to Clayton Park Junior High together. I went to his birthday parties in his big house on Clayton Park Drive, with his nice mom in yellow dresses and his rich dad who was never there.
“I gotta find the blond. She got me into this, she’s gonna have to get me out of it. But first, we gotta ditch this van,” I decided. “The cops’ll hear about the little situation at the waterfront soon enough, and come looking for this. We can’t be in it when they find it. We gotta take a car.”
“Okay, boss,” said Jimmy, signaling and then pulling out into the empty road. It was getting on five a.m., and I was supposed to meet the blond by 6.
We drove up and down Dartmouth, looking for something choice, but discreet. All I could think about was women: two in particular. That blond, and my girl. Sarah’s mother had loved me once, for about five minutes, nine months before Sarah was born. That was 25 years ago; she’d hated me the rest of the time, and I couldn’t blame her. Tried not to let me see my girl, called me a lowdown hood, a common crook, and how could I disagree?
Sarah turned out alright anyway, and was a lot like me, even if she was a cop. She worked undercover a lot, did her own thing, so it’s not like anyone would notice she was missing right away. She once hid as a prostitute in Montreal for two months to catch a guy who was smuggling Chinese women into Canada to be sex slaves, and didn’t tell a soul till she had a rock-solid case against him. Put him away for 20 years.
“That’s nice,” I said, pointing to a Lexus sitting in front of Celtic Corner.
“Mm,” was all Jimmy said, driving right past it.
“What do you mean, ‘mm’? Stop this vehicle and steal that one.”
He had a quiet moment.
“Can’t, boss.”
“What, you got a conscience now after shooting up a bunch of bad guys?”
“No, boss. It’s just …” he trailed off, glancing at me. He put on the blinker and went up Ochterloney.
“You’re paid to be my body, got it?” I said, thinking I should’ve splashed out a bit more and got a higher-class heavy. “I tell you what to do, and you do it. That’s how this works,” I said, gesturing between us.
“Yes, boss. I’ll boost you a car, only, well, I’m real good at stealing Previas.”
“The minivans.”
“Yes, boss.”
“I don’t want a minivan. I’m a crook. Crooks can’t drive minivans.”
“But I’m real good at stealing ’em.”
He paused for two beats.
“And bad at stealing everything else.”
“You mean you can only steal a Previa?”
“It’s what my dad taught me to steal on.”
“And he never moved on to anything else?”
“No, boss. He got killed first.”
I sighed. No point getting cross.
“Okay, find us a Previa.”
We drove around a while, but there aren’t a lot of Previas in Dartmouth. After a bit, Jimmy says, “I know where there’s one.”
I told him to go to it. The tinted van was getting hotter by the minute. The radio stations were screaming about the corpses piled up on the waterfront, and the cops’d be tearing up this city looking for this van. A squad car roared past us, lights and sirens going, but didn’t stop.
We drove into this long, windy subdivision that looked like a bit of Clayton Park West that had got blown across the harbour.
“Where the hell are we?”
“It’s called Lancaster Ridge, boss.”
Jimmy drove us down a cul-de-sac, and there it sat. A great big Toyota Previa.
“It’s pink, Jimmy.”
“Yes, boss. Frankie’s tired of me stealing it. So he painted it pink to discourage me. He knows I don’t like pink.”
Painted with a brush and a can of paint, too, so it had all these streaks and bumpy bits.
I sighed again, pinching my nose.
“Why doesn’t ‘Frankie’ just call the cops on you?”
“’Cause I know about him and his secretary. And his wife don’t.”
I puffed out a big breath.
“Let’s just do it. You grab that pregnant jellybean of a car and trail me. I’ll ditch this in Banook, and hop in that thing and we’ll roll. Got it?”
“Yes, boss,” he said, slipping out. I had to be impressed, because he was in the pink Previa in seconds, knocking out a garbage can as he reversed out of the driveway. I saw a man standing in the window of the house, looking sad.
The drop point was that self-storage place in Bayers Lake Industrial Park, just off the highway by the Price Club. The blond was supposed to meet me there when I brought up the killer. I glanced at my watch, worried she’d not stick around.
We rolled up to the gate and I plugged in the code the blond had given me. Open Sesame. We rolled in cautiously, looking for the right lockup, leery of a setup.
Found the lockup. No cars, no sign anyone was there but us.
“You stay out here, Jimmy. I’ll go see what the score is.”
I stepped out of the pink Previa, trying to be cool anyway. I adjusted my suit, straightened my hat, and walked inside.
Empty. The door clanged shut behind me. Great big empty warehouse, and me.
“Jaysus,” I said to myself.
“You a believer?” said that voice. Soft, sexy, like Jessica Rabbit.
She stepped out of the shadows. It was six a.m., but she was dressed for midnight, her skyscraper legs disappearing into a little black dress that didn’t want to let go of her. Well, at least I could see she wasn’t packing.
“I believed in you,” I said.
She laughed, a tight-rope laugh.
“Nice ride,” she said.
I let that go.
We eyed each other up, circling.
“Listen,” I said, “you’ve gotta a bunch of corpses in this city, and one of them’s your assassin,
and none of them are Marky Malone. That killer you hired was a dud, and got himself killed
before he got to shore. Malone’s men musta got word of the plan, took over the boat, and now they’ve got my girl. And now you’re gonna tell me everything you know.”
I noticed she wasn’t surprised by what I was saying.
I walked over to her, not bothering to pull my gun.
“But you knew all that, didn’t you,” I said, stopping a couple of inches from her. We were eye-to-eye, my greys facing down her blues. She didn’t even step back, like we were about to dance.
She stared me straight in the eye until I blinked. That hadn’t happened before.
“You screwed up,” she explained. “I watched you from the Four Seasons.”
“Hey, not my fault if you can’t get a ship to shore without getting everyone on board killed. But I don’t care about that – I care about my girl, and you’re gonna help me get her back.”
I grabbed her by her bare arms, hard enough to leave marks.
She kneed me in the groin.
“You got it backwards, mister,” she said, standing over me as I rolled about on the floor, howling. “You’re going to help me.”
I wondered, is this what it feels like to fall in love?
“Marky Malone has got to die. And you,” she said, crouching down next to me, “are going to kill him.”
I wheezed for a bit, holding myself, and waited till I could see straight.
“Malone must’ve heard about this plot, and stole the stolen ship,” she said. “So you’ve got to do what the American didn’t.”
“Who are you?” I managed, still groaning.
“It’s who I’m with that you should worry about.”
I waited for it.
“I’m Scotia’s woman,” she said.
That’d be Sam “Scotia” Jones, named for the court where he grew up. Scotia, the up-and-coming hood who had plans to take this city from Malone. Malone and I used to be tight – in my heyday, people called me his lieutenant – but lately, he didn’t have much work for me, and a crook’s gotta feed himself somehow, so I did odd jobs for Scotia. Malone was bad, but in a good kinda way. Scotia was just plain bad. I had never actually laid eyes on the man, but his money looke the same as anyone else’s.
The blond smiled, “Makes sense now, your pink jellybean car.”
I just looked at her.
“Working for the man from Jellybean Square.”
She got back to the plot: “Scotia could kill Marky himself, but he hired the American to take him out. He figures it’s one thing to kill Sweet Marky Malone, but it’s something else to hire the best killer in the world to do it. Kinda like using a brand name. High profile. So everybody’d know whose city this is now, you know?”
I nodded that I did, then tried to stand up. She helped me.
“And Malone’s got plans to put an end to Scotia at the Buskerfest, when Scotia and his men are prowling the waterfront, expanding their territory. So Scotia is getting his revenge in first,” she said. “And that’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to get right back in tight with Malone, and kill him.”
“Listen, Ms, that’s all very complicated, but all I’ve got to do is find Sarah.”
She shook her head. “You’re in over your head. You bail on Scotia now, he’ll kill you, and who knows what Malone does to your daughter.
“No, what’s going to happen is, you take out Malone, and we’ll find your daughter. The smoke clears on this, and you’ll have your girl, Malone will be dead, and Scotia will rule this city. That’s the best way for this to end,” she said, offering me her hand. “Just trust me.”
I was thinking about Jimmy, sitting out in the pink van with his gun. I thought of Sarah, sitting God know’s where. And I thought of Malone.
Should I trust the blond?
First published in the Sunday Daily News July 22 2007