Funny Money Read online

  Funny Money

  Laurence Gough

  © Laurence Gough, 2000

  Laurence Gough has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2000 by McClelland & Steward Ltd.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter l8

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 1

  Detective Claire Parker turned the shower’s nozzle so the spray of water beat against the tiled wall. She pushed back the frosted glass door, snatched a towel off the rack and stepped onto the oval bath carpet. Quickly towelling herself off, she went to the open door and called out to her fellow detective and lover, Jack Willows, who was in the bedroom, just down the hall.

  “I’m out of the shower, Jack.”

  She waited a moment and then called out again.

  “Jack, you there?”

  Apparently not. She slipped into her terrycloth robe. She’d forgotten to turn on the ceiling fan, and the bathroom was like a sauna. She flipped the switch, and the air began to clear. Where was Jack? She continued to towel dry her hair as she left the bathroom. She’d expected to find him in bed, but the duvet was turned aside and he wasn’t there. She went to the top of the stairs.

  “Jack, where are you?”

  Willows was in the main-floor den, watching the nightly half-hour sports round-up on Global and nursing a nip of Cutty on the rocks. He started guiltily as he heard Claire calling him.

  Fifteen minutes earlier he’d felt sexy as hell. When Claire had said she was going to take a shower, he’d offered to wash her back, and been turned down. She didn’t like sharing the shower and he didn’t blame her because, somehow, without meaning to, he always ended up between her and the water. A shower could be a cold and lonely place. Rejected, he’d stayed downstairs, poured himself a small drink and flopped down in front of the TV. A tactical error, because the instant he stretched out on the couch, a week full of too-long days came crashing heavily down on him, and it was all he could do to keep his eyes open.

  Claire called out to him again. He fumbled for the remote, killed the television, and sat up. He drained his glass. When a man dozed off in the middle of the first drink of the evening, the poor guy was getting old. He turned off the light and walked down the hall to the foot of the stairs.

  “Be right there, honey.”

  Claire smiled down at him. “Fell asleep, didn’t you?”

  “No, but I was doing some awfully deep thinking. I’ll be up in a minute. I’m just going to check the locks.”

  Willows prowled around the house. Tripod, their three-legged marmalade cat, was balanced precariously on the outside sill of the kitchen window. He went to the back door and let him in, and shut the door and shot the deadbolt. Walking back down the hall, he noticed that Sean’s light was on, and tapped lightly.

  “Who is it?”

  “Dad.”

  “Come on in.”

  Willows pushed open the door. Sean was in bed, lying on his side, reading and making notes. A high-school dropout, Sean had spent several years in the minimum-wage wilderness. His dead-end career as a convenience-store clerk ended when he was shot and seriously wounded during a robbery. This traumatic event turned his life around. To everyone’s surprise he applied for admittance to Simon Fraser University as a mature student. He was in his second semester, had a 3.8 grade-point average and had never been happier in his life. Gone, probably forever, was his tattered Kiss poster. Which was okay. What bothered Willows, a lot, was that Sean was a criminology major and wanted to become a police officer.

  Willows said, “Hitting the books?”

  “Got a quiz tomorrow.”

  “Don’t forget to get a good night’s sleep. There’s no point in studying all night and sleeping through the exam.”

  Sean rolled his eyes. “Right, Dad. Thanks for reminding me.”

  Willows’ daughter Annie’s bedroom door was shut. He had stopped looking in on her about a year ago, at her request. His children kept getting older, and it seemed that hardly a day passed when they didn’t find another small but significant and inevitably wounding way to separate from him. Against all his expectations, being a parent just kept getting harder and harder. His role kept changing, diminishing. But at the same time there seemed no end to it. With luck, he’d keep on worrying about Annie and Sean until the day he died.

  The front door was locked but he gave it a rattle anyway, out of habit. He started up the stairs, and saw that Claire was still standing by the railing. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. His pace quickened. Suddenly he wasn’t so tired after all.

  Chapter 2

  Carlos was driving. Why not, since it was his van, paid for with cash involuntarily provided by a mid-level drug dealer who was now nourishing the rose gardens in Stanley Park. Carlos braked hard for a red light. Where did that came from? Rubber skidded on rain-slick asphalt.

  Hector mimed abject terror. “Take it easy! Tap the brake, don’t stomp on it.”

  Carlos gave his partner a hard look. “Got a driver’s licence, Hector? No, you don’t. You barely got a licence to be a moron. When your mom got herself under control she told me you were twenty years old before you learned to walk.” The van straddled the white lines of a crosswalk. Carlos shifted into reverse and backed up. “That better? Are you happy now?”

  “No, I’m not happy. Take a look around. Who d’you see? Cops? Flattened pedestrians?”

  Carlos glanced suspiciously around. “I don’t see nobody.”

  “That’s right, you don’t. Know why? Dumb luck. Just because you got a licence, don’t mean you can drive. Anybody can buy a licence. Don’t think for a minute that you are in any small way superior to me. You aren’t. In fact, chances are excellent that because you actually have a licence you are a far worse driver than I could hope to ever be.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Carlos turned to the girl sitting between them, squatting down low in the gap between the bucket seats. He ruffled her damp, stringy hair. “What’s your name again, baby?”

  “Chantal.”

  “Got a driver’s licence, baby?”

  She gave him a fleeting, worried smile. “No, I don’t.”

  “But you will if I want you to, right?” Carlos slapped his thigh, signifying high good humour.

  Hector said, “Leave her alone. She’s just a kid.”

  “Right. Little Miss Innocent. How old you gotta b
e to get a driver’s licence, sixteen? How old are you?”

  “Old enough.”

  Carlos laughed. “Ain’t that the truth,”

  The light for cross traffic turned yellow. Carlos gunned it through the last of the red. He made a pistol of his fist and pointed it at Hector. “Don’t say a word. Not a word. It takes no brains at all to move on a green light. People do it all the time, it’s a no-brainer. Keeping your eyes open, seeing that the light’s gonna change, anticipation, that’s what separates people like you from people like me.”

  “Suddenly I feel so much wiser,” said Hector.

  Carlos pulled the van tight against the curb. The front bumper nicked a fire hydrant, causing the vehicle to rock on its springs. “Who put that there?” Carlos turned to Hector. “Pay the bitch.” He put the van in park and got out, slammed the door and walked away.

  Hector gave Chantal a twitchy, patently insincere smile. “What do I owe you?”

  She shrugged. “For everything, or just you?”

  “Both of us.”

  “What did I quote you, was it a hundred?”

  Hector frowned. “Yeah, I think that’s right.”

  “But that was, you know … I mean, when I said a hundred, that was for, like … What time is it?”

  The dashboard clock was broken, the glass dial smashed a few days earlier by Carlos’ angry fist. Hector shot the sleeve of his black leather jacket, and tilted his wrist to the flickering light of a red and blue neon sign. “Just past eleven.” Another twisted smile. “Time flies, huh?”

  “How about, would two-fifty be okay?”

  “Ouch!”

  “Tell me about it.” She touched her bruised cheek and then put her hand on his knee. “Two and a half’s reasonable. You know it is. I mean, if I broke it down, charged the both of you a separate amount for everything, it’d cost you at least three hundred.”

  “Each?”

  “No, for both of you. What I’m saying, you get what you pay for, and you got a lot.” She mustered a smile. “You’re a nice guy, Hector. Unlike your buddy. If you’d like to see me again sometime, that would be real nice. But right now, it’s time for me to move on. I don’t get home pretty quick, my boyfriend’s going to have a fucking seizure.”

  “You got a boyfriend? What’s his name?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just can’t.”

  Hector rubbed his chin. He leaned back in the seat, turned his brain into a metronome and counted off the strokes of the windshield wipers. Carlos had them on medium speed, about forty beats per minute. The glass was speckled with rain, and then it was clean, and then it was speckled with rain again. It was kind of restful, though he wasn’t sure why.

  He said, “Boyfriend. You call him a boyfriend, but he isn’t your boyfriend. He’s a scum-of-the-earth pimp.”

  “No he isn’t. He loves me.”

  Hector snorted derisively. He and Carlos had picked Chantal up on Richards, a downtown street noted for its club life and broad range of hookers of both sexes, and more. Chantal was slim, bordering on emaciated. Her dyed blond hair was cut short, and streaked with fiery red. She wore heavy black boots, torn jeans, and a fake leopardskin jacket that was several sizes too large for her. The overall look was rough-trade waifish, calculated to appeal to middle-aged pervos whose daughters had finally fled their unhappy homes. Something about her had immediately appealed to Hector. Her stance, the perky look in her eyes … A lot of girls refused to get in a van. A lot of girls would turn down a ride with Carlos if he were behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce.

  Hector said, “You may not realize it, Chantal, but your pimp boyfriend is nothing but a bloodsucking parasite.”

  “No, you’re wrong. He loves me, but he can’t get a job. What’re we supposed to do, starve to death?”

  Hector popped open the glove compartment. He poked around in the darkness until he found what he was looking for, an army-surplus World War II-era bayonet. “Hold still a minute, don’t move.” The long blade came within inches of her throat as he eased past her into the van’s cargo space. He grunted as he stabbed the knife into a cardboard box. He waved the knife at her. “What’re you looking at? Turn around!”

  Hector was back in less than a minute, his fist crammed with crisp new American twenties.

  “One, two, three, four, five, six …” He lost patience, and separated a quarter-inch-thick wad of bills from the mass. “Here you go, this oughta do it.”

  Chantal reflexively began to count the money, but quickly realized it would be wiser to let it go. She glanced anxiously around, through the windshield and side windows, into the van’s rain-streaked side mirrors. No Carlos, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t just around the corner. There was something about Carlos that wasn’t quite right, even by her low standards. She doubted he was married. No woman, no matter how desperate, would marry a creep like him. Carlos was mean-spirited, with an angry, shrivelled heart. You had to watch out for guys like him, keep them under control and not let them get emotional, because once they got started, they couldn’t stop, and things could turn bad so quick you couldn’t even believe it.

  Chantal had become very good at reading people, and Carlos was definitely the scariest trick she’d ever met. The kind of cold-hearted sonofabitch who could slice a girl open, smoke a cigarette while he watched her bleed to death, then roll her up in a carpet and toss her in a dumpster, go home and laugh his head off watching a “Seinfeld” rerun. She’d talked to some of the other girls about creeps like Carlos. Everybody knew they were out there, but at the same time they were kind of an urban legend, because nobody had ever actually run into anybody like that. Or at least lived to tell about it.

  She had to crawl across Hector to get out of the van. When he grabbed her and pulled her close, she couldn’t stop herself from uttering a pipsqueak scream. He immediately let go of her. The light was dim, but he looked offended.

  “Hey, I’m not like that. I wouldn’t hurt a cute kid like you!” He pushed open the door. “Beat it, sweetheart.”

  Chantal crawled awkwardly across his lap. He managed to score one last grope before she could get out of the van. She shrugged into her leopardskin coat as she hurried across Robson Street towards the bright lights of a McDonald’s. Behind her, the van door slammed shut.

  Hector watched her until she’d vanished into the restaurant. A ragged group of street kids huddled under an awning just up the street. One of the kids had waved at Chantal, but she’d ignored him. Hector decided that, if he ever had a daughter, he hoped she grew up just like her. Not a hooker, but somebody who was pretty, and had guts.

  He leaned forward and turned up the volume of the police scanner on the dashboard. There’d been a collision on the Cambie Street bridge, two road-rage drones fighting for the same lane, duelling wannabe Nascar types. Pretty dull stuff, but not as bad as the tow-truck or fire-hall channels. He reached across and adjusted the speed of the windshield wipers. Now they were really moving, frantically slapping back and forth across glass, tossing sheets of water off to the side. Hector was studying his watch, timing the cycle, when Carlos got back into the van.

  Hector shied away from him. “Man, you’re soaked! Where’d you go, to get some smokes?”

  “Had to make a call.”

  “Whyn’t you say so? You coulda used my cell. Assuming you got a quarter.”

  Carlos patted himself down, found his cigarettes, shook one free of the pack and lit up with his disposable lighter. “No, Jake told me I got to use a land line, a pay phone. He says cellphones ain’t safe, ’cause anybody can listen in. Like with the scanner, that easy. Jake told me, without security, all you got is insecurity.”

  “So, what’d he say?”

  Carlos jerked his thumb at the cardboard boxes in the back of the van. “Nothin’. I talked to Marty. He said Jake couldn’t come to the phone. He’s sick, got some kind of problem with his heart.”

  “Like it’s been
missing forever and nobody can find it.”

  Carlos flicked ash onto the floor. “You never said that, and I never heard it.” He took a moment to compose himself. “What happened, Jake had a stroke. They took him away in an ambulance. He might live, but then again he might not. Nobody knows except God, and he ain’t talking.”

  “Not to you, anyway.”

  Carlos nodded. No point in arguing that one.

  Hector said, “What’re we supposed to do with the money?”

  “Marty’s the man, for now. He says we gotta hold on to it until he figures out what to do.”

  Hector didn’t like that one little bit. He and Carlos were unbonded short-haul couriers. They’d been freelancing for drug kingpin Jake Cappalletti for about six months, had started out carting rolls of quarters to Jake’s illegal slot machines, worked their way up the ladder rung by rung. The cardboard boxes in the back of the van held ten million in bogus U.S. twenties, fifties and hundreds. The money was destined for the ravenous, wonderfully unsophisticated Russian market, where it would fetch as much as fifty cents on the dollar.

  Hector and Carlos, short-haul couriers with short-haul attention spans, were ideally suited to their job. But now, the way Hector saw it, Marty had plunked them down in a unique and scary situation.

  He said, “This ain’t right.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Ten million bucks. How long we supposed to hold on to all that cash? You don’t know, because Marty didn’t say. Which means we got to hang around until he gives us a call. How many guys know about the money? I don’t know and neither do you. But what I do know is that we both know plenty of guys would gladly whack us for the ten, never mind all them zeros.”

  Carlos turned up the scanner’s volume, but Hector wasn’t finished, and he turned the volume back down again.

  “We were hired to move a quantity of money over a specific distance during a given time. We agreed to perform this task for a reasonable remuneration. But now we’re gettin’ screwed, and I don’t like it.”

  Carlos slapped Hector on the shoulder. “Look, what we got here is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I agree: if we screw up, we’re Alpo. But we ain’t gonna screw up. Somebody tries to rob us, we’ll blast ’em. Also, Jake’s a pretty ruthless guy, but he’s fair-minded. He pays top dollar, and he’ll stand up for you if something happens and it ain’t your fault. You need bail, you got bail. Also, I heard he’s got a dental plan.”