An Ordinary Decent Criminal Read online

  “May I? Thanks.”

  I took the pen from his hand and braced my wrist. Two steps and a hard thrust and I burst the lens amidst a shower of sparks and the smell of ozone. Thompson recoiled as I handed the pen back.

  “Are you crazy? That pen was from my mother. That camera was off, it’s never turned on when there’s an interview.”

  “Sure. The cops’ll be in right away so I’ll talk fast. I didn’t make the confession and I can prove it but if the cops find out how, then they’ll fix it.”

  I was lying (a little) and praying (a lot) at the same time, which didn’t matter to Thompson, who was just quietly furious. He remained on his stool and shook his head while gathering his stuff together to leave. It was interesting to watch as tiny flakes of dandruff rained down onto his shoulders and the pad of paper in front of him.

  “You’re dreaming. The cops aren’t watching, the camera’s standard equipment and it’s never turned on during interviews. They’d be breaking client/lawyer confidentiality rules.”

  Walsh came in with his hand on the butt of his Colt. “Any problems?”

  Thompson’s lips whitened and he looked at me through slitted eyes. I smiled and addressed myself to him. “All right, how’d they know the camera got broke unless it was on in the first place?”

  “Any problems?” Walsh repeated himself, looking everywhere but at the camera.

  Thompson stood up and exhaled through his nose. “Officer Walsh, do you have a room where I can do an interview? One without a camera?”

  Walsh rolled his eyes. “Well, they all have cameras. It’s SOP these days. You should know that, Mr. Thompson. Sorry.”

  He didn’t sound sorry.

  I waited and watched the man but my adrenals didn’t kick in, I guessed they were empty. I wanted to kill Walsh with my bare hands or some kind of tool but I was tired and sore and old. And then the pain started again.

  “What about the bathroom?” I asked.

  “The bathroom . . . you’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No. I’ve got to go.”

  “Well, sure, I’ll take you. Least we can do.”

  Thompson was livid now, his thin face pinched with rage. “Hasn’t my client been allowed to go to the bathroom yet?”

  Walsh didn’t move his hand from the gun. “He was busy confessing. He got all caught up in unburdening his soul and time just flew.”

  Thompson stepped a little closer to Walsh and his knuckles whitened around the pen.

  “My client is also looking a little battered. That didn’t happen when he was in your custody, did it? That would be unfortunate for you.”

  “That kind of shit just breaks my heart. Don’t worry, your client was treated like gold here. Pure gold.”

  “Fine. After this I want to see whomever’s in charge.”

  Walsh was acquiring an audience as cops in uniforms and plainclothes showed up along with clerks to peer in like spectators at a zoo. The smells of fresh coffee and tobacco smoke filled the interrogation room and made my stomach knot and I realized I was real close to pissing my pants. Elena Ramirez, the cop from the house, was in the front row and watching blank-faced.

  “That’d be Lieutenant Ross. He just got in. He’s reading Haaviko’s statement in his office. I’m sure he’d love to speak with you. Let me set it up.”

  The pain was growing worse and my head was aching. My voice slurred when I spoke and my tongue felt fat and thick, like an un-inked stamp pad. “Can I please use the bathroom?”

  “Sure.”

  Daniels stepped forward at Walsh’s gesture and started to usher me off to the left. My eyes were tearing and I wondered if I was going to throw up again. I stopped worrying when I realized there was probably nothing left in my stomach to throw up, even if I wanted to.

  “Mr. Thompson, come with me, please,” I said.

  I blinked back the tears and looked directly at Walsh.

  “Please, I just don’t want to get beaten again.”

  Everyone flinched and then slipped back to work and a twitch started under Walsh’s right eye, but he remained silent as Daniels led me and Thompson to the bathroom. We passed through a big room full of desks with glass-walled offices on two walls and interview rooms along the third. The fourth wall was covered in corkboard tiles holding notices and pictures and that held doors to the bathrooms.

  Daniels looked at me impassively. “Leave the stall open.”

  The cop leaned back against the sinks and watched me with his arms crossed while Thompson turned around to wash his face. I used one hand to brace myself while manipulating the soft, plastic zipper down the front of the overalls. The overalls were one piece and it was a practiced humiliation that made it necessary to remove your clothes all the way down to the ankles to use a toilet. I did it without thinking and pissed a weak, pain-filled arc.

  I stared and puzzled out loud. “Red?”

  The bowl filled as I watched but my brain didn’t register at first.

  “Red means blood.”

  It came out in a trickle, diluted with urine, and the pain spiked and I doubled over as Thompson and the cop rushed over.

  “Oh shit.”

  Suddenly the cop was trying to hold me up and then I heard Thompson dialing his cell phone and asking for an ambulance and then I passed out.

  5

  The hospital bed was a deeply comfortable nest of crisp white cotton and I was out, out, out.

  The five milligrams of generic Valium the nurse had forced on me hadn’t been necessary and I tongued it out once she’d left the room, but I had to keep it in my mouth because of the lady cop across the room from me. They’d let Claire and Fred in to visit and my wife squeezed my right hand, as it was closest. Each hand was handcuffed to the bed frame and the contact of flesh to flesh made me smile. From her arms, Fred looked solemnly down.

  “You want it?”

  I’d told her about the pill in my cheek and she shook her head. The cop raised her eyes at my whisper but nothing happened and she went back to reading an old issue of Guns and Ammo magazine.

  “Keep it, just in case. You look like shit. Consider it your kryptonite crucifix.” That made me smile something weak and tenuous. It was a line stolen from late-night TV and pleasant because it was shared. She went on, “Vampires and Superman both.”

  Claire’s eyes were alight with pleasure and twinkled with humour but her mouth was grim and she held herself rigidly between me and the cop. She was spoiling for a fight and I couldn’t and wouldn’t argue with her.

  “Yeah.”

  The pill went into the top of my cheek, where it was dry and cool, and I could feel it nestled there, a bitter and metallic memento. My body ached with the memory of the drug, the sweet forgetfulness that lay therein and the surcease from the pain and the altered state it would bring. Claire squeezed my hand again and brought me quickly away from that line of thinking. I was intellectualizing the addiction and that was a bad sign.

  She said, “You’re stronger than that.”

  She was right and wrong at the same time. I was stronger than the pills with her and Fred there, but the pills were stronger than me if I was alone. I nodded anyway. “So you called the lawyer?”

  Claire switched Fred to her left arm and snorted.

  “It took a while. The cops didn’t let me go until past one and Ramirez called a cab, which got me to a hotel. I took the file case with your papers after the cops looked through it and phoned from the hotel. I reached your old lawyer in Calgary and he gave me a name here in town. He sounded happy to hear from you.”

  I couldn’t nod, there was a monitoring tube up my nose and a brace across my neck, but I rolled my eyes. “I always paid on time.”

  She shrugged and switched Fred to the other arm. “Yeah, he’s a vulture, but a good vulture.”

  “True.”

  She shifted Fred again and a frown creased her forehead. “How we gonna afford the shyster?”

  It was almost a whisper and I motioned he
r close. The cop shifted a little in her chair, but didn’t do anything. “Legal aid. It’s a good case, lots of publicity. The money will come from the province and so will the lawyer.”

  She leaned back and her eyes narrowed at the sight of the restraints on my wrists. “You’ve changed. I know that. Isn’t it obvious? Can’t all the cops and all the cons and all the rest see? You’ve gone straight.”

  It was a plea, a demand, a complaint, and there was no answer I could make. She leaned down and kissed me gently but the effect was ruined when Fred tried to pull the tube out of my nose. She raised her head and patted my shoulder.

  “They just don’t realize that I’ll pull your lungs out if you fuck up again. Oh, well. I’ll see you tomorrow, so behave. Tomorrow we’ll roast ’em. But for now, sleep.”

  And I did, but it took a long time to forget about the pill slowly dissolving and numbing my whole mouth and reminding me of what I had been. It’s not like I ever really stopped being addicted, I just stopped doing the drugs.

  Something pinched my foot gently through the sheet and I woke up slick with sweat and trembling with remembered pain. The room was dark and there were low snores coming from the cop’s chair.

  “Claire?”

  Someone had drawn the curtain around the bed, shutting out all the lights except for the watch lights down low on the walls to stop people from tripping on obstacles.

  “No, not Claire.”

  The voice was unfamiliar and I adjusted my left hand into a striking surface before I remembered the handcuffs. Then I stopped and waited.

  “Monty, my man. Remember me?”

  I didn’t and he flipped on a penlight with a piece of electrician’s tape over the lens. The tape was pierced with a pinhole and I could see a vaguely familiar face in the silken thread of light.

  “No.”

  On second thought, he was still no one I knew, and my heart drummed tightly. He waited for a second and then shut off the light, but his image floated there, a sharp-planed face, a Canadian mixture of Scot and Cree with wide nostrils and a thin nose. He was wearing loose-fitting hospital greens and looked toned and lean.

  I remembered what e.e. cummings said about Buffalo Bill: “Christ, he was a handsome man.” And I wondered if I was looking at my executioner.

  “C’mon. You must remember. Teddy Stiles, the one and only.”

  He took my hand gently in the dark and squeezed it.

  “We were in Drumheller on the same range. ’Bout four years back. Ted Stiles. In for arm-ed robbery.”

  He separated the first word into two parts and the fact he said “armed” told me a lot. Serious cons don’t say “armed robbery,” that’s for social workers. Serious cons assume the armed.

  “No. Sorry.”

  He sounded hurt. “You sure? I had a house with Benjamin Capito? Played blackjack with you a few times?”

  “Sorry. Been in lots of jails with lots of guys.”

  “Oh. Well.”

  He thought about it and changed the subject. “How bad off are you?”

  His tone was conversational, casual, and I matched it. “Two, maybe three days in here but I can walk or even run right now. Nothing permanent, bruised kidneys and general contusions, nothing broken.”

  He pushed my legs over and settled in next to me with his knees resting on the rail around the bed. When he was comfortable, he lit up a cigarette.

  “Good.”

  The lady cop let out a massive snore from outside the curtain.

  “What about the cop?” I asked

  “Ropena, Rophena, Ropellis, shit. I can’t remember.”

  He fished out his light again and turned it on to look at a brown vial half full of oblong white pills. “Aha. Rohypnol. Not just for rape anymore. She was dozing when I got here, you were all the way out. I just brought her some fresh coffee on my way by with a laundry cart. I gotta remember that, no one looks at someone pushing a cart of dirty sheets. She’ll be out for five or six hours, depending on weight, and she’s a big heifer. Or is it sow, considering all things? She won’t remember much, either, which is handy.”

  He shifted his weight and the bed creaked. “Got some left over from a badger game.”

  I wasn’t tracking too well. Badger games were cons done with a girl who plays the hooker, a guy who plays the irate boyfriend/brother/father/husband, and the john who doesn’t know he’s even playing anything at all. Easy money in a resort town or working a convention. Rohypnol would make sure the john didn’t remember anything but what the girl wanted to tell him. Actually, it was a nice touch.

  “Ted, right? Not to break up old home week but what’cha doing here?”

  He blew smoke towards the ceiling. “In Winnipeg? Working, favours for friends, little games of this and that.”

  “No. What are you doing here—here? With me.”

  The cigarette glowed as he inhaled. “Checking up on you and delivering a message from an acquaintance named Robillard. He runs some action in town and one of the boys you capped last night was a cousin or some such shit.”

  In the dark the words floated and I could taste them.

  “The message is . . . ?”

  He lit another cigarette from the stub of the first and drew deeply. “The boys in your house weren’t heavy. Not with guns, anyway. They were break-and-enter artists feeding their veins. It is generally accepted by the bad guys around these parts that those boys were too dumb to use guns. If they ever got a hold of iron, they’d sell it. So Mr. Robillard figures you set them up and knocked them down.”

  He took another hit off the cigarette and the smoke swirled around my face as he exhaled. “Now, Mr. Robillard doesn’t really care, family ties just aren’t that strong. But the whole thing shows a certain disrespect. So he figures that you and your family . . .”

  My face felt very cold. His hand was still on mine and the handcuff gave me maybe six inches of motion and I decided not to let him finish.

  “. . . ew . . .”

  It takes about ten pounds of pressure to break a joint, about fifteen to break a bone. I twisted my wrist and grabbed his thumb and three fingers and broke them. That much pain was disabling, paralyzing, and he squeaked but I didn’t let go.

  “. . . ew . . .”

  The coal of the cigarette gave me something to aim for as his free hand groped towards my face. The nurse had left a thin cotton sheet over me and I kicked it loose and brought my shin up hard to mash the cigarette into his face. While I was doing that, I twisted his broken fingers and ground the torn-open nerves against each other. His hand closed on my face weakly and I brought my left leg past my right one and kicked his face again, this time connecting with my toes.

  My left big toe broke on his forehead so I kicked him twice more with my right foot and twisted his hand down until I felt his fingers break some more.

  “. . . ew . . .”

  He was leaning down towards me to get away from the kicks but moving really slowly. His breath was stale and full of cigarette smoke and sandwich meat. I locked my legs around his throat and chest and twisted his body down onto the bed.

  “. . . ew . . . ew . . . ew . . .”

  His left hand stopped grabbing my face and flopped over to the other side of me, where I grabbed it with my left, also handcuffed, hand. Merrily I started to break those fingers too.

  Stiles spasmed with the pain and tried to raise his head and I tightened my legs and turned out his lights. An LA cop could do it in twenty seconds with a billy club but it took me twice that long. Even after he stopped struggling, I held my legs in place around his neck, but I did relax them a little finally and waited.

  After a while he shuddered and took a deep breath and I could feel his muscles tense.

  “Ted. Listen to me. I can choke you out. I can break your neck. I can crush your fingers. Can you understand me?”

  It took a few moments.

  “. . . ew . . . I understand.”

  “Good. You packing?”

  “.
. . a knife.”

  “Where is it?” He took another breath. “Right-hand front pocket.”

  “ ’Kay. I’m gonna tell you what happens next. In a bit the nurse will come in and I’ll turn you over to the cops. I won’t press charges but the cops will. Feeding a mickey to a cop is assault. You cool with that?”

  “Do I got a choice?”

  I took a deep breath. “Yeah. If you don’t wanna do the time, I can break your neck.”

  He thought about it before answering. “Cops.”

  “Now tell me about Robillard.”

  He thought about it. “Or?”

  “I break your fingers some more.”

  “Yeah, you would. Okay, Robillard runs ten or twenty guys. Grows and sells hydro-weed, fences some, smuggles crank from out west, guns from the south, heroin from the east. He’s connected to the Angels in Quebec, Christian Identity freaks in Idaho, some Native gangs.”

  “So he sent you to take me out.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “Yeah.”

  “What did he pay?”

  “Nothing. A favour for a favour.”

  “Even though I’m probably going down on murder?”

  Stiles groaned. “You are? Shit, I didn’t know . . .”

  Amateur night. I thought about breaking his neck anyway but the urge passed.

  “So far, Ted, I’m regretting keeping you above the ground. Make yourself useful. Tell me more.”

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking. He’s a big guy, like three hundred and fifty pounds and maybe five foot ten. Brown and gray hair worn long. His wife is smarter than him, she used to be a whore, a tough chick named Sandra. Had some of that when she was working and a sweet little snatch she’s got.”

  My toe was throbbing. I must have really broken it well and thoroughly. “Why’s he so pissed?”

  “Like I said; you killed his cousin. It’s some kind of personal insult . . .”

  His voice had been getting weaker and it finally trailed off and shock took him away. I lay in the dark with my legs wrapped around the idiot’s neck. Finally the nurse came in and the shit hit the fan.