Slow Recoil Page 7

  “I remember,” she said. And she was steel now, or ice. She stared, and she said, “Don’t tell me what I remember or don’t remember. My husband. I remember my husband. Who he was and where he came from, what he stood for. A good man. But I can’t remember his face sometimes. At night, when I wake up with the dreams of the bombs and the guns. I search, and there is nothing. I can’t remember his face… ”

  She did not cry, for the reservoir was long emptied. This, this was something she had shared with the school teacher. The burden of the survivor.

  “Tell me,” he said, and reached into his jean pockets. “If these belong to your new Canadian lover.”

  He held a single key attached to a plain metal key ring.

  “From my purse,” she said. “What right—”

  “You are moving,” Kad said, and stood, slipping the key back in his pocket.

  “When?”

  “Tonight. Your tracks here are compromised. We are moving you immediately.”

  Their words turned into an argument. It was the stress of the days behind them and the days that lay ahead. The high emotion of their shared past. After the neighbours called to complain, and the super stopped by to check in, Kad left her there to pack her clothing. She could bring one bag only. Men would arrive after dark, he explained, to wipe the unit clean so there would be no trace of her life in this small apartment.

  “I will pick you up at midnight,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Remember,” he said. “Remember why we are here.”

  It was the next afternoon when Kad returned to the apartment to take one last look for anything they might have missed. To ensure the movers Turner had brought in had not somehow forgotten anything—for you could not trust anyone these days to complete a mission simply as assigned. He was in the apartment unit when this man entered. Looking for her, for Donia. Calling her name. A friend of a friend. Oh yes, you have a new friend—a boyfriend?

  So then. She had made her mistake, and now he had made his. He had to see the place with his own eyes to know the job had been done. And by chance, sheer circumstance, he had been there when this man had come looking for her. Their work not yet begun, and already the operation was compromised. After running from the apartment, Kad sat thinking in the car outside a convenience store. He took the roll of golden dollar coins from his pocket and held them in his right hand. The knuckles were already swelling, chafed. He wrapped his fingers about the roll of coins and squeezed. A line of blood leaked where a thin sheaf of his flesh was torn from his knuckle. The man he’d struck, it had been a good hard shot. But he should have finished the job. Instead he’d run. What a fool. Forgive me, my people.

  He opened the door and walked into the store. He set the roll of coins down on the counter. The clerk had long hair and hadn’t shaved in a few days. Kad wanted to slap the sleepy look from the young man’s face. Such disrespect. Running a shop with his shirt stained, untucked.

  “Scratching tickets,” Kad said.

  “Huh?” the clerk said.

  Kad made a scratching motion with his thumb and forefinger. “Scratching tickets,” he repeated.

  “Which one?” the clerk said. “There’s like nine different kinds, man.”

  Kad shrugged. “One of each,” he said.

  FIVE

  McKelvey was perched on a stool at Garrity’s, squinting at his raccoon eyes in the dark mirror behind the bar, a good golden pint of Steam Whistle working with the pain killers to produce a new brand of unfailing optimism. It was something one could just never take for granted, this peace that settled in marrow-deep. Yes, if the feeling had a colour, it would be the blurry soft yellow of squinting through a summer’s day. The draft beer was cold, and it was brewed just down the street in the old roundhouse where the trains had converged and merged for a century. McKelvey was now officially marked absent from his pain, and it was a good thing. His nose was swollen to almost double its size across the width of the bridge, the pouches beneath his eyes turning the hue of eggplant. A series of blood vessels had apparently imploded in his right eye, resulting in a grotesque black cherry splatter across the whiteness of the orb. He wondered about the employment of some utility beyond bare knuckles.

  “I’ve been punched in the face before,” he told Huff Keegan, “but not like this. No, sir. This guy knew how to throw a goddamned punch. That, or it was brass knuckles.”

  “They say Gordie Howe had one of the hardest punches in the game,” Huff said.

  “You knocked out a few teeth in your day.”

  Huff shrugged, and it was like a ripple moving along a mountain range. Two hundred and thirty pounds of corded muscle rolling in a tectonic shift. But the last two years away from the game had taken its toll, and Huff ’s body was less toned and more bulky now, his stomach starting to show early signs of the eventual paunch that he would pat while telling stories of his gladiator days to his grandchildren.

  “One night you’re the guy doing the feeding, the next night you’re the guy getting fed,” Huff said. “It all evens out in the end. I had my nose broken three times, lost four teeth. I had my orbital bone fractured, right here under my right eye. Broke my left hand twice. Two of the knuckles on my right hand are fused together from hitting helmets. I scored six goals a year on average, and most of those were flukes. Two thousand penalty minutes.”

  He held his hands up in front of his face, turning them over, thick bricks of permanently swollen and scarred flesh and bone. They seemed a marvel to him, that they should still work after the way he had treated them.

  “Spent a lot of hours after games with my hands in a bucket of ice,” he continued. “Sitting there while the pretty boys and the scoring leaders were out having beers or grabbing a steak—or grabbing a piece of something else. It was the job, you know. It was just the job.”

  Huff had played a few games up in the big leagues with Buffalo and Detroit, just enough, McKelvey supposed, to give a man a taste of what he was missing. Down in the minors of the American Hockey League, in the dead-end steel towns and the factory towns of the north and northeast, Huff Keegan had been an icon who’d carried his own duffel bag, slept four to a room, and grown old by his late twenties.

  “Miss it?” McKelvey said.

  Huff shrugged, and said, “Shit yeah. Every day, man.” After a beat, he said, “You miss the job?”

  McKelvey smiled and said, “Every second day.”

  He drank his beer and thought of the unexpected visit to the emergency department that morning. The twelve-year-old doctor confirmed what he already knew, that his nose was broken. It was not set off kilter, so it required no setting—the good news of the day. He was taped across the bridge and handed a scrip for yet more pain killers, McKelvey pretending he had never before listened to the spiel about the seriousness of the drug, the constipation and stomach cramps, the responsibility that came with that piece of chicken-scrawled paper. Now his mind was already playing through the next steps here. The partial plate number, the basic description of the vehicle and the man—the fridge magnet in his pocket. He ran through his call to Tim Fielding from the payphone in the emergency waiting area.

  “Oh my god, Charlie,” Fielding had said, “there’s no choice now. We’ve got to call the police. The apartment was empty? I mean, what the hell is going on here? She wouldn’t just…”

  McKelvey had calmed the younger man over the phone, cotton shoved up his nostrils making his own voice sound like a cartoon character. Convinced him to settle down, to shut his mouth, to keep it to himself. The police weren’t interested in someone who had moved, whatever their reasons. And anyway, Christ, he needed some time to think it through, find this guy and break his nose in return.

  “We need to be careful here, Tim. I need some time to figure out a few leads,” McKelvey said, as though it made all the sense in the world. “Don’t talk to anyone, okay? Don’t even answer your phone unless you see that it’s me.”

  “We should do
what you wanted to do from the start, Charlie, and call the police. I don’t want to mess around. Donia could be…don’t you think we should get some help?”

  “If this is a love triangle, or if this guy is out of his mind with jealousy or whatever, we don’t want to be fanning the flames by dragging the cops into everything, you understand? I’m going to talk to a few people,” McKelvey said. “Listen, you brought me in to this, and I just got a nose job. You owe me that much, Tim. A day or two, that’s all I want. I’ll be in touch.”

  He hung up. And then he called Detective Mary-Ann Hattie with his list of favours. She seemed beyond the point of asking questions. Perhaps “exasperated” was the word.

  “You know they can monitor this sort of thing now. It’s not 1973 any more, Charlie. It’s not the card catalogue system. You know, Dewey decimal. They use phrases like ‘abuse of privileges’. They have all these pesky privacy laws. The douchebags in Professional Standards salivate over these little indiscretions.”

  Her sarcasm made him smile. He knew she could run with a line for a week and a half, find new ways to insult or bend the humour, squeeze every last drop of life from it. Sometimes he thought if she hadn’t become a cop, she would have made a good standup comedian. Other times he looked at her and saw her leading a Grade Two class, her dress powdered in chalk dust.

  He said, “You know as well as I do how to open a locked door.”

  “What the hell are you doing anyway?” she said. “Thinking of renting an office, maybe buying a fedora and a .38 Special? Hang a shingle, ‘Private Detective, Charlie McKelvey’?”

  “I’m just doing a favour, looking into a few things. Listen,” he said, “I need to see you, Hattie. Come on. It’s been what, a week and a half? I’ve got the girls coming Saturday night. Why don’t you come over on Sunday. You could stay.”

  There. He’d said it. Caught in a moment of vulnerability, his head smashed in, brains turned to pillow stuffing. He blinked through the silence that rang from the other end. An announcement over the public address system in the emergency room gave him a start. Code Blue—which he knew meant someone had stopped breathing. McKelvey thought, Could be an asshole or a saint, it hardly mattered in the end, did it? They worked just as hard to save the assholes from dying. He opened his eyes, refocused through the ringing in his ears. The hospital waiting room was full of puking kids latched to bleary-eyed mothers, and a gaggle of young college-aged men who had apparently been involved in a fracas of some variety, bruises and lacerations across their young faces.

  “We’ll see,” she said. “Hey listen, I’ve got to run. I’m working a double today, filling in for Teckles. The guy’s sick again.”

  “Probably got cramps. They never should have transferred him up from Traffic Investigations. He can’t stand the pace in Hold-Up. Needs to have everything mapped out with his measuring tape.”

  “Yeah, well not everyone is as adaptable as you, McKelvey,” Hattie said, and he took it the way she intended it. That east coast fisherman’s daughter passive-aggressiveness coming through loud and clear. Oh, Mary-Ann Hattie, his redhead beauty with the longshoreman’s mouth and those green, green eyes. She was slipping from his grasp like an old dory cut from its mooring. The thirteen-year age difference which at first had seemed hardly a topic of discussion seemed now like an ever-widening chasm. How was it that he always seemed to find himself standing on the other side, the wrong side? You were not born for these times, Charlie McKelvey.

  “I appreciate you running those numbers,” he said.

  “Take care of yourself, Charlie,” she said. Then she was gone.

  His mind turned to the magnet he’d lifted from the refrigerator of Donia’s apartment. Upon his return from the ER, carried on the wings of the newly prescribed Percocet, he had sat and held the thing and closed one eye to focus.

  The magnet had a graphic of a bridge spanning across the continents. It said: Bridges: Bosnian Immigrant Support Centre.

  Beneath that was a phone number, address and website link, and beneath that was a line of italicized writing in a foreign language, presumably Bosnian.

  So then. Beyond the assault, there was no crime here. In fact, McKelvey was the one with a stolen fridge magnet (Theft Under $5,000). None of it made sense, though, and all of it rubbed him the wrong way. Perhaps it was a simple case of unpaid rent and a midnight escape. But he doubted it. And the first person he needed to speak to in the morning was the superintendent of Donia’s building. That was the logical starting point. Find out who the woman was, where she’d gone.

  “Last call in a few minutes,” Huff said.

  “How about a Jameson’s on ice for the road,” McKelvey said, and he knew it was a bad idea this late into a busted-face day, but what the fuck. He finished the last of the beer in his glass, the taste distorted to a lick of old pennies thanks to the bloodied cotton stuffed in his nostrils.

  Huff set him up with a shot of the amber Irish whiskey on ice. It was smooth, then it burned just a little, but he missed out on the taste of peat and toasted barley, the sweetness that lingered within the melting ice. As he set the glass down, he glanced in the mirror and caught the eyes of a man he’d noticed a few nights earlier. He didn’t miss the fact the man seemed to be checking him out this night as well. A husky fellow with shaggy black hair, and a thick goatee in need of a trim. Dressed in jeans and one of those long canvas riding coats that seemed always to be slicked with oil. McKelvey stared back via the mirror until the man, who was sitting at a small table near the back, turned away.

  “That guy back there, the big guy,” McKelvey said, “you know him?”

  Huff was removing glasses from the small dishwasher beneath the bar, setting them on a shelf above his head. He looked over in his practiced bartender’s way so as not to draw attention. He looked back to McKelvey and shook his head. “Been in a couple times the past week. Sits alone, has a beer, maybe two.”

  McKelvey knew a rounder when he saw one, and this guy was a rounder. Perhaps somebody he had put away a few years ago. Who knew. He stood and held the bar for a moment while his neurons and synapses began to fire in sequence, sending signals to his feet and ankles, knees and hips. Move. This way. Left, right…

  “What’s the damage, Huff?” he said, digging in his coat for his wallet.

  “On the house tonight, Charlie,” Huff said. “You’ve had a tough day.”

  McKelvey slipped his wallet back in his pocket and nodded in appreciation. “You’re a good man, Huff Keegan.”

  It was, in the end, all and more that a man could ask for: a good bar and a good bartender waiting for you at the end of a ball-busting day. I hope heaven is a little like this, McKelvey thought. A stool waiting for you, a bunch of guys with no need for in-depth conversation about household accessories or other impractical and confounding subjects. It made McKelvey miss the locker room at shift change, the warriors in from their patrols, all the swagger and the bullshit.

  “I’ve got to hit the all-night grocery,” McKelvey said. “My granddaughter’s coming to visit me tomorrow.”

  He liked the sound of that. And despite the broken nose, despite this new hangnail of Donia Kruzik throbbing in the back of his brain like an unsolved case he had failed to close years earlier, he felt good. It was in the pills, he knew, this false sense of ease. A little bit of paradise crushed to powder. As he made his way out onto Front Street to the twenty-four Dominion store, the night clear and cut open with city lights and sirens, he thought he might perhaps even buy a package of Krispy Kreme donuts for the little girl with the dark curls.

  SIX

  Kadro was standing in line at the concession stand at the mid-town theatre. He was watching the sloppy teenagers behind the counter fill cardboard boxes with popcorn, shuffle to the butter dispenser, pump a few shot across the top, then shuffle back to the counter. One boy’s uniform shirt was dirty with stains, and it was untucked. Another boy’s hair was a rat’s nest, and this one kept trying to make a couple of the gir
ls laugh with his sarcastic jokes rather than serve the line of customers. Kad gritted his teeth until his molars ached. How grateful he’d been at their age to earn a few dinars mucking the pens of the farmer down the road, to shovel shit for pocket change to buy candy and a comic book. It seemed everything had changed within a generation. There was no respect, for self, let alone for others. Too many fat people, too many lazy people. Where, he wanted to know, was their sense of pride in service? What would these assholes do if their country ever called upon them to fight in a war, a real war?

  As he moved up in the line, he kept his eye on the silver-haired man in the adjacent line. The man was out with a younger woman and a girl of five or six. The woman had brown hair cut short, she was pretty but wore no makeup, and the little girl had brown curly hair and wore a dress with what looked like new black shoes. The man kept his hand on the back of her head, as though to have contact with her at all times in a public place gave him a sense of comfort. Kadro did not need to stare at the man in order to confirm his identification. This was Bojan Kordic, Donia’s manager at the dress factory. Bojan Kordic, leader of the rogue unit that had come through the village that summer, staying just long enough to round up the men and the boys, the young and the old and the crippled alike. Driven to a farm field. Lined up. Shot.

  Kad had been following the man for two hours now. Thanks to the fastidious notes in the file made by his sister in this, he had everything he needed. The address of the man’s home, the license plates of his two vehicles, grainy photos taken on a cheap disposable camera of the home and the cars, of the man and his family walking in a park. Kadro had sat outside the home to get a lay of the land, then the garage doors opened, and they came out, heading first to an A&W for burgers and onion rings, then on to the theatre for an early afternoon show. It was true that every life was, in effect, simply a series of habits and routines played out across the days and weeks and months of a life. We fall into patterns that make us easy targets for those who might wish us harm. This man’s life was no different—the same coffee shop each morning, the same route to work. His life was put down in black and white, and Kad smiled at Donia’s good work when he read the notes about how the man left the office early every Wednesday to go and screw a woman who worked in Payroll.