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  Wayne sat there, dead silent, giving his arrow time to sink in all the way to the feathers. He flicked away his cigarette butt and lit another. ‘Tell me something. Do you care about April at all, in even the smallest of ways?’

  What was the correct answer to this question? Was there a correct answer? Lewis tried to make eye contact with the robin. Not that he expected divine guidance; he was merely stalling.

  ‘Are you taking advantage of her?’ said Wayne. ‘Are you abusing your relationship?’ He rapped the table with his fist. ‘Hey, look, I never claimed I was Mr. Perfect. But if I don’t pass judgement on you, who will?’ He took a long pull on his cigarette, and exhaled a large cloud of dirty blue smoke that sailed grimly across the yard and disappeared into the branches of the weeping willow.

  ‘I want you to be happy,’ Wayne said. ‘I know that might not be possible, or even likely, given the circumstances. She nabbed you, plucked you out of your cosy little world. Turned you into a junkie. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I can’t see into your brain. Not that 1 want to. You got a poker face, man. In another world, you could’ve been a real successful cigar-store Indian. Maybe you resent what happened to you. I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, you got a right, some might even say an obligation, to stay in touch with your emotions.’

  Lewis had no idea what Wayne was talking about. It was as if he was regurgitating vaguely remembered sentences chosen at random from a poorly written article he’d stumbled across in a trendy self-help magazine.

  Wayne said, ‘You’re going to have to try a lot harder, in all areas of your life, if you’re going to have any chance at all of cutting the mustard. Understand?’

  ‘Understood,’ said Lewis.

  ‘I’m gonna give you and April a little more time to get things sorted out, come to an understanding.’

  ‘How much time?’ wondered Lewis aloud, as he struggled to comprehend at least the basic rules of whatever weird game Wayne was playing.

  Wayne said, ‘I’m not making any promises. I want April to be happy. See, I love her. I care about her.’ Wayne cracked his third can of beer. ‘Something you might not understand, Lewis. When a man loves a woman, I mean really loves her, then all he cares about, all that’s important to him, is her happiness. He’ll do anything to make her smile. Anything. And if the thing that makes her happy also happens to be the same damn thing that breaks his heart into little pieces, that’s okay, it don’t matter.’

  Wayne’s face, as he spoke, suddenly fell in upon itself, distorted like a partially deflated balloon. He roughly knuckled his eyes. Was that why they suddenly filled with tears? He was weeping, crying a rivulet, and then a full-bore river.

  Lewis sat there on the far side of the table, aghast. Finally Wayne regained rudimentary control of his emotions. He thrust a trembling, muscle-bound finger at Lewis’s face. ‘I know who you are. A fucking thief! A low-life thief! Nothin’ but a punk! It was up to me, I’d rip your lungs out, and eat’em for dinner!’ Lewis, vividly recalling how Wayne had dealt with the frog population, believed every word.

  Severe internal turbulence had played havoc with Wayne’s heart. He sat there, chest heaving, his furry cheeks bulging and collapsing as he huffed and puffed, settling at last into an uncertain calm.

  He started in on yet another beer, slammed down the can, and rose up out of his chair, grunting and snuffling. Lewis watched him shamble over to the weeping willow. The zipper of Wayne’s jeans whined briefly, like an overheated mosquito. Wayne leaned against the tree’s sturdy trunk. He urinated copiously, not bothering to shift his boot when the amber flow suddenly and unpredictably altered course.

  A screen door banged open.

  Lewis turned, hoping for April. The frizzy-haired blonde neighbour, hands on ample hips, leaned towards them from her back porch.

  ‘Don’t I keep telling you not to do that?’ she shouted at Wayne. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you, anyways?’

  She thrust an accusatory finger at him.

  ‘This’s your last warning! Next time, I’m calling the cops!’

  Wayne spun around so his back was to her. He hurriedly zipped up, uttered a shrill screech, and howled piteously as he reversed the zipper. Moaning softly, he finished tucking himself away. He strolled with mock-casualness to the electrified fence.

  He clasped the wire. A pleasantly unpleasant tremor ran through him. He gritted his teeth and said, ‘I apologize if I shocked you, ma’am. I got severe bladder problems. Most bikers do, as I’ve patiently explained to you on more than one occasion.’

  ‘You and your damn motorcycles.’

  The screen door slammed shut. Wayne let go of the fence and strode back to the table. He thumped down into his chair. ‘I gotta stop doin’ that. What’s wrong with me?’ He punched himself on the side of his jaw. His head snapped sideways.

  Lewis said, ‘When’s April coming home?’

  ‘Good question.’

  Wayne shook a plump, hand-rolled cigarette liberally laced with heroin from his pack of Marlboros. He leaned across the table and stuck the cigarette between Wayne’s parched lips, sparked his lighter. Lewis sucked the smoke into his lungs, his bloodstream, the vast arterial roadmap of his body. The world brightened. Suddenly feeling perky, he leaned back and enjoyed the spectacle of the contrail-filled sky.

  ‘That’s better, huh?’

  Wayne watched Lewis closely, hunting for symptoms. Miosis, severe constriction of the pupils, occurred in just under two minutes. Lewis was slumped in his chair, admiring the willow tree.

  ‘It’s just a question of time,’ Wayne said, ‘until April loses interest in you. When that happens, you’re gonna end up exactly like my good buddy Lester Rules.’

  Lewis had no idea who Lester Rules was, or what had happened to him. Nor did he care about Lester, or anything else. Except the robin. Where had he flown off to, that pretty bird?

  Chapter 18

  The last call Sandy Newton ever received on her StarTac cellphone was traced to a woman named Kathy Brown.

  Questioned, Ms. Brown defined herself as a therapist specializing in ‘buried memory’ syndrome. Ms. Brown’s compact offices were located at the top of a four-storey staircase, in an unfashionable, badly neglected building on the expanding fringes of Gastown, a brick-lined tourist trap to the north of the downtown core, down by the tracks. A low-slung woman who favoured androgynous clothing, and apparently cut her own hair, Ms. Brown volunteered that Sandy Newton had uncharacteristically missed two consecutive appointments, and had not returned calls to her home or cellphone.

  Kathy Brown was rigorously questioned. In the interests of justice, she agreed to let the police photocopy her late client’s confidential files. But she was unable to provide detectives with any useful leads.

  Christy Kirkpatrick’s autopsy proved conclusively that Lester Rules had died, as many heroin addicts do, of asphyxiation. He’d choked on his own vomit.

  However, scorch marks on Rules’ body strongly suggested that he had been tortured before he’d died. This was a new twist. Kirkpatrick was buried in work. He hadn’t even scheduled autopsies for the other victims. But he had given them a cursory visual examination, and determined that Tom Klein and Warren Fishburg had suffered third-degree burns in the area of their genitals. Willows and Parker, en route to a Chinatown restaurant for a lunchtime brainstorm with Tony LoBrio and Ken DelMonte, mulled over many enticing possibilities. Were the men tortured for spite, or fun, or merely for profit?

  The four detectives had agreed to meet at the On-On, a local landmark renowned for good eating, moderate prices, and dependably cheerful waiters. LoBrio and DelMonte had arrived early, and were parked, backs to the wall, in a semi-enclosed corner booth at the far end of the restaurant. Both men wore jeans, Nikes, and expensive black leather jackets that were identical except in the detailing.

  The restaurant had seen better days. The place needed a coat of paint. The tables and chairs were battered and scarred. The linoleum floor was
badly worn. The lighting was inadequate. But Willows liked the double glass doors, the old-fashioned glass counter, the ancient, but unfailingly courtly, Chinese who manned the cash register, the tinny music that came from cheap speakers mounted high up on the walls. Most of all, he liked the gaudy decorations that had been hung from the ceiling about five years earlier, and never come down.

  ‘Nice jackets,’ said Parker as she and Willows entered the booth. ‘Kind of similar, aren’t they?’

  ‘I told you it was gonna be a problem,’ said DelMonte to LoBrio.

  LoBrio shrugged.

  DelMonte said, ‘Price shouldn’t have been the major consideration. Didn’t I say? You still got the receipt? I’m taking mine back.’ ‘Do whatever you want, Ken.’

  ‘I will. For a change.’

  Willows said, ‘You ordered yet?’

  ‘Just got here. We’re still waiting for menus.’

  A waiter drifted past. LoBrio tried and failed to catch his eye.

  ‘See?’ said DelMonte. ‘What’d I tell you.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Bein’ a tightwad cheapskate’ In direct contravention of recently imposed city bylaws, DelMonte lit a cigarette. Waving his cigarette at LoBrio, switchbacks of smoke curling into the air, he said, ‘I told you, didn’t I? Stiff one waiter, you stiff’em all.’ Another waiter drifted past. And another, and another.

  ‘He spilled my black bean soup on my goddamn Rockports!’ ‘Hey! Calm down. Jeez. It was an accident. These guys are all related. The way you glared at him, you’re lucky you didn’t end up with a meat cleaver sticking out of your obstinate skull.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  DelMonte’s chair shrieked as he stood up.

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘There and back.’ DelMonte strolled down the narrow passageway between the restaurant’s semi-private booths, and disappeared into the kitchen. He returned a few minutes later, looking unduly pleased with himself.

  ‘What’d you do?’

  ‘Took care of business. Made it right.’

  ‘What’d you say?’

  ‘I said, Here’s twenty bucks, to make up for the last time me and my contemptibly penurious partner ate here.’

  ‘What’d the waiter say?’

  ‘He said, ‘Thank you.’’

  ‘Well, yeah. Twenty bucks. But he didn’t know why you gave him the money, did he?’

  DelMonte dropped his cigarette on the spotless linoleum floor and squashed it underfoot. ‘I got a thing for Chinese food, Tony. You know it and I know it. You think I’m gonna enjoy my meal, knowing there’s a good chance it’s got something in it doesn’t belong?’

  A waiter wearing black pants and a limp white shirt dropped four menus on the table.

  LoBrio said, ‘The usual.’

  ‘Ditto for me,’ chimed in DelMonte.

  The waiter scrutinized Parker. ‘A diet Coke,’ she said. ‘In an unopened can, please.’

  ‘Ditto,’ said Willows.

  A different waiter was back in a few moments, with the two Cokes and four unopened bottles of Kokanee beer.

  LoBrio uncapped two bottles of beer, handed one to his partner. He leaned back in his chair, waggled the bottle at Willows and Parker. ‘You're not hungry, don’t want to eat? No problem. But we split the tab four ways, understood?’

  ‘Fine with me,’ said Parker.

  DelMonte lit another cigarette. He’d smoked it all the way down to the filter when the food arrived. Chop suey for LoBrio; lemon chicken, ginger beef, crispy noodles and stir-fried rice for DelMonte. LoBrio was adept with his chopsticks. DelMonte employed stainless steel cutlery he produced from an inside jacket pocket.

  Predictably, DelMonte did most of the eating and his partner did most of the talking.

  ‘Okay, at your request and on your behalf, in the best interests of the department, and because you’re gonna owe us a huge favour, we did a little discreet poking around, snapped some bones…

  ‘Metaphorically speaking,’ interjected DelMonte, responding to the look of alarm in Parker’s luscious, chocolate-brown eyes.

  ‘Oh yeah, absolutely!’ LoBrio rested his hand on Parker’s arm, offering her comradely reassurance. ‘We don’t actually hurt people.’

  ‘We merely threaten them,’ said DelMonte. He lit a cigarette, drank some beer, and plunged his fork into the ginger beef.

  LoBrio said, ‘What we learned, the late but not great Tom Klein, Warren Fishburg, Lester Rules, and Madeleine Kara, Russ Green, Toby Clark and Sandy Newton… ‘

  ‘And Maggie Collins and Neil Window,’ prompted DelMonte.

  ‘Winwood, Neil Winwood. Anyway they were all dealing, all of them.’

  ‘In what quantities?’ said Willows.

  ‘Minuscule.’ LoBrio sipped at his beer. ‘We’re talking dime bags.’

  ‘Lester was doing okay’ said DelMonte. ‘Fishburg, too.’ Willows said, ‘What about Melvin Ladner?’

  ‘Melvin was living relatively large, having climbed a rung or two up the ladder. Until his untimely demise, he dealt to Tom, Warren, and Lester.’

  Parker said, ‘Hand me a napkin, Ken.’

  DelMonte continued shovelling food into his mouth as he pushed the chrome-plated napkin dispenser across the table. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Is that how you get to be a homicide cop,’ said LoBrio, ‘by being so polite?’

  Parker industriously wiped the top of her Coke can clean, and popped the tab.

  Willows said, ‘Who did Melvin Ladner work for?’

  LoBrio grinned mischievously. He drained his beer and opened the last two bottles, pushed one across the table to his partner.

  DelMonte spread his knife and fork wide. ‘The guy who owns this restaurant.’

  ‘Sammy Wu,’ said LoBrio.

  DelMonte flicked cigarette ash at the floor. A direct hit. He yelled, ‘Hey, Sammy! You on the premises, Sammy? Got a minute to talk to a couple of your old pals from the drug squad?’

  The wall of silence that met this riposte was timeless and inscrutable.

  ‘I guess not,’ said LoBrio.

  ‘He was here earlier.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘No, really. I’m sure he was working in the kitchen, when I went back there to take care of that waiter you stiffed.’

  ‘He was in the kitchen?’

  ‘Eviscerating a cat. An alley cat. A marmalade.’

  ‘Get outta here!’

  DelMonte speared a particularly succulent chunk of ginger beef, popped it into his mouth. ‘This’s really good.’ He genially waved his fork at Parker. ‘Sure you don’t want some?’

  ‘Thanks anyway.’

  ‘So polite,’ said LoBrio.

  Willows snapped the tab on his Coke. ‘Tell us about Sammy Wu.’

  LoBrio shrugged. ‘What’s to tell? Almost nothing, because that’s exactly what we know about him.’

  ‘It ain’t that bad,’ said DelMonte.

  ‘No, it’s worse. Wu’s a real slippery carp. The guy’s been busted more times than…’

  ‘Than what?’ said DelMonte. ‘Than G.E.’s sold refrigerators? Sylvania’s sold lightbulbs? Madonna’s been a virgin?’

  ‘That last one,’ said LoBrio. ‘But the thing is, Wu’s never gone to court. If that sounds like sloppy police work, it’s time to clean the wax out of your ears. What always happens, gaudily lighted vehicles appear from outer space, and yank our witnesses.’

  ‘At least, that’s what we assume happens to them,’ said DelMonte. ‘The truth is, we don’t actually know the details of their fates.’

  ‘Gruesome details,’ interjected LoBrio.

  ‘However,’ said DelMonte, ‘I do have a new theory pertaining to their sudden and unscheduled disappearances.’

  LoBrio was genuinely interested. He said, ‘What’s that, partner?’

  ‘I’m thinking cats.’

  ‘No! Get outta here!’

  ‘Evisceration. Slice and dice. Cubism. And then, voila!
You got your delicious portions of ginger beef!’

  ‘Yeah? Really?’ LoBrio scooped up his chopsticks. ‘Mind if I try a bite?’

  ‘Help yourself, partner.’

  LoBrio, when he’d finished licking his chops, explained that the network of mid-level dealers was unbelievably complex; mazes within mazes, gangs within gangs. To complicate matters, turnover within the industry was nothing short of phenomenal. People kept dying.

  For decades, there had been unsubstantiated but infuriatingly persistent rumours that Sammy Wu, along with virtually all the other top-of-the-ladder dealers that worked within the confines of the city limits, were on the plump payroll of ageing West Coast kingpin Jake Cappalletti.

  This last titbit came as no surprise to either Willows or Parker. Jake was the stuff of legends. They’d first heard about him during their stints in the academy. Jake had been a spectacularly successful crook since the Depression, where he’d earned a ton of money wholesaling booze’n’ broads. A year earlier, Jake had been a prime suspect in a high-profile VPD investigation into the kidnapping of a local stock promoter. During a brief-but-entertaining shootout, Jake’s chauffeur was killed. Willows and Parker had failed to implicate Jake in the kidnapping or any of several related murders. They were still steaming over their failure to put Jake away.

  ‘Summing up,’ said LoBrio, ‘I’d say the next step was to locate Sammy Wu, or somebody else on his level. Talk to the guy, reason with him, snap a few bones if you have to, see if he comes up with any ideas as to who might be bumping off Jake’s low-level talent.’

  ‘Or… ‘ said DelMonte.

  ‘Or you could go straight to Jake. Point out that it’d be in his best interests to cooperate, before the killer makes it all the way to the top of the ladder.’

  ‘Jake won’t talk,’ said DelMonte. He picked at a last scrap of lemon chicken, wiped his knife and fork clean on a handful of paper napkins, wrapped them in several more napkins, and slipped them into his inside jacket pocket.