An Ordinary Decent Criminal (13 page)

He opened up the cash register and pulled the drawer onto the counter. Then he began to empty small baggies of change and bills from his pockets into the compartments, talking all the while. “I bring the money home at night and count it in the morning, before work. It’s a lousy idea to try to balance your books at the end of a shift. Each day the till starts out with two hundred dollars and we open the doors at 7:30 and close them at 11:00. I take the shift from 3:00 to 11:00 and I need someone to cover the 7:00 till 3:00. I pay seven dollars and a quarter an hour and you can have all the fountain drinks and coffee you want. Interested?”

I smiled and made a noncommittal gesture.

“I need someone honest and hard-working and clean. You’ll be working alone, selling to the customers, dealing with complaints, and making sure everything works. You’ll also have to keep the place clean. I don’t schedule lunch breaks, you can get a rush at any time, so you’ll have to make your own as you get a chance.”

Someone tried the door and Marquez looked over and shook his head violently from side to side and then motioned at his wrist. With an audible curse, the old man stamped away.

“Like it makes a difference if he gets his lottery tickets five minutes later. That’s one of my regulars.”

Marquez had shut the till and rung up No Sale, and was busy unlocking a deep drawer with steel plates reinforcing the sides and bottom. It was full of brightly painted bits of pasteboard, scratch-and-win lottery tickets with themes like “Trains of the World,” “Great Music,” and “Astronomy Jackpots.” He shuffled through them and slid them into a display case over his head, then he reached over and turned on the computer that linked him with the Manitoba Lottery Corporation.

“Stupidity tax, anyway. Could you turn on the coffee maker? It’s an old one.”

I walked over and hung the jacket on a rack of oddly named generic and knock-off brands of potato chips, and then unscrewed the top of a big percolator beside a sink. Marquez was watching me as I looked into the big drum and whistled quietly.

“Not a problem.”

The machine was exactly the same as the kind they had in every prison and halfway house I’d ever been in. I’d worked in the cafeteria out in Drumheller for a few months over the years and I’d nursed the same kind of machine through good days and bad. It had been a job with an interesting motivational base. If cons don’t get their coffee, they’ll kill someone, generally the person who’s supposed to make the coffee in the first place. Marquez watched as I poured the water
in and checked the stainless steel filter. It was filthy so I cleaned it before adding fresh grounds from a pre-measured foil envelope.

“Do you have any salt?”

Marquez was still watching me and I was feeling kind of nervous about being stared at.

“No. Don’t worry, they won’t care about bitter as long as you make it strong.”

I flipped the switch and let the machine start. The red light came on and I turned around.

“All right, Mr. Parker. Do you have any experience in convenience stores?”

“It’s Sam and, no, I’ve never worked in a convenience store.”

The back of my head added, “But I have robbed many of them over the years.” I ignored the voice and waited.

“You’re hired. I’ll work with you today until you’ve got the hang of it. Let’s go open the doors.”

And that was the start of my first day on my very first job, and that made for a lame curriculum vitae for a thirty-two-year-old man.

When I was finished work, I bought three dollars’ worth of quarters from Marquez and headed west until I hit the next major street, which was Salter. A block along I found a phone booth, where I made my calls and double-checked each name and number of the news people I wanted to talk with.

I was right on the money for six out of eight and two receptionists also gave me the extension numbers. Those I marked down.

On my way home, a young woman stopped me in the park beside the church near my house.

“Mr. Robillard wants to talk.”

She was about ten feet away in the park, standing in the shadow of a big elm. Somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five, a dangerous age, a reckless age. She was slimly built with narrow hips and shoulders, a darkly tanned complexion, large green eyes, and straight black hair worn down to below her chin.

“Shit, lady. Don’t do that. You scared me.”

“Like I said, Robillard wants to talk.”

Without thinking I looked both ways and stepped into the park and the concealing shadows. She was wearing gloves, a leather Stetson, olive-green overalls fastened with black buttons, dark blue, high-topped runners, and a loosely fitting leather jacket. I recognized them as working clothes and my heart started to beat faster.

“Followed you this morning and saw you schlepping coffee and Snickers bars to the great unwashed.”

Was this a hit? Was she going to kill me here? The overalls were a
couple of sizes too big so she could have different clothes on underneath, and the jacket had room for the tools of the trade.

“I mean, really.”

Her hands were visible, held loosely at her sides, and if she was intending to kill me, then I was pretty much dead, so I figured to wait until the hands moved and then dive forward to take her apart.

She’d still kill me but at least I’d be doing something. The woman smiled like she was reading my mind. “Relax, I’m not killing you today. Just taking you for a ride.”

I didn’t relax. “Chicago rules?”

She lit a cigarette with a small, red, steel lighter. “Don’t know those.”

“A ride is one way.”

“Oh. No. The car’s around behind the church. Robillard wants to talk at you.”

“You said that. Don’t you mean to me?”

She was silent.

“Even with me. But at me?”

She grunted and led me out of the park and around the church. “I meant what I said.”

Getting into the car, I finished the sentence. “And I said what I meant. One hundred percent.”

While she drove, the woman talked. Robillard had set up the meeting in an empty Northern Chinese restaurant downtown that he had points in. It made me feel oddly uncomfortable, like he was trying to impress me. Like he was showing his connections and power. And pride and insecurity had never been a good combination in anyone I’d ever had to deal with.

We ended up in a neighborhood of redbrick buildings five or six storeys high with old woodwork and big pieces of wrought iron framing filthy panes of starred and cracked glass. Shards of paper blew
across the sidewalks and gathered in eddies with leaves, empty paper cups, and cigarette butts raped of any shred of tobacco.

“This looks familiar.”

She lit another cigarette, this time with the car’s lighter. “Yeah. It should. This chunk of the city’s been filmed like twenty million times.”

I looked out the window and tapped the glass. “Sure.”

“
Framed
with Sam Neill.
Twilight of the Ice Nymphs
.
Acceptable Risk
.
The Adventures of Shirley Holmes
.”

I turned in my seat and looked at her quizzically. “
Adventures of Shirley Holmes
?”

“It was good.”

I let it lie for a while but circled back to it. “
Adventures of Shirley Holmes
?”

“Drop it. Here we are.”

She pulled into a tunnel in the middle of a block and drove halfway down until the walls opened up on either side and we could get out of the car. The woman took a big drag on the cigarette and snapped it away to bounce off the bricks, trailing sparks like the tail off a comet.

She asked casually, “You carrying?”

“No.”

She looked at me indifferently as though she didn’t believe me but let it pass anyway. Then I added, “Do I know you?”

“I used to be a hooker and you might have fucked me. But I don’t remember you.”

“What’s your name?”

“Sandra. Now, there’s no need to be nervous here. Robillard just wants to talk.”

“Right.
Adventures of Shirley Holmes
. Shit.”

She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips disapprovingly. “You ever watch it?”

“Well, no.”

“So shut your mouth. It was good.”

There was a heavy-gauge steel door set into the wall and Sandra knocked on it six times slowly before it was opened by a sullen teenage boy.

“Hiya, Sandy. Thank fuck you’re here, your husband’s being a knob.”

“Good afternoon, Tom, you’re looking lovely today.”

She looked at him and smiled at the corner of her mouth. The boy glanced at me and I saw he was carrying a thin-bodied, long-barreled Colt pistol level with his crotch. He tightened the grip on the pistol with one hand. I tried to break the ice.

“Hey, nice gun. Colt thirty-eight Super, right?”

The kid nodded half-heartedly.

“Great gun and a nice round. Good and fast. Especially for the thirties, when they started making it. Not so fast these days. Kinda old-fashioned.”

The kid didn’t cut me slack, just stared, so I tried again.

“Where’s Robillard?”

Sandra turned halfway around to face me. “My husband’s downstairs.”

She walked in front of me down narrow stairs into the basement underneath the building. I followed, then the kid. Halfway down the stairs I sneezed and it echoed loudly. “Stupid allergy.”

Sandra led us into a large kitchen floored with industrial gray tiles and full of stainless steel tables, counters, and equipment. In the center of the room was a perforated metal lid over a drain and I knew that this place could be a killing room just as easy as not. The drain could carry away my blood as easy as anything else.

Looking up from the drain, I saw a fattish white man. He wore a maroon silk shirt over khaki pants and held a tall can of Olympic Ale in one meaty hand. He waved the can around when he talked and some slopped into the air and fell like molten gold to the tiled floor.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Haaviko, is it? Or do you prefer Parker?”

“Parker.”

“Excellent. Do you know who I am?”

He sounded reasonable. I took two steps into the room and waited while the kid with the Colt closed the door and leaned up against it. Sandra took three steps to the right and hitched herself up onto a platform beside a heavy cutting block.

“Robillard. You’re a crook.”

He nodded, like I was a good student. “Excellent. Yes, I am. I own parts of three or four restaurants, two garages, a pool hall, some other businesses. I smuggle, I fence, I grow and distribute weed, I lend money, I arrange for people to get hurt. I am telling you all this as a courtesy so we know where we’re at.”

My eyes went to Sandra and then back to him. “You a pimp too?”

His smile flickered like a neon light. A tremor ran through his face and subsided and his voice got louder. “No.”

He drank some beer and I saw his hand tremble a little until some beer splashed out. For a second the drops were suspended in the air and then they hit the ground.

“Sandra’s my wife. You should apologize.”

Emphasis on
my
. I nodded to her and spoke very softly. “Sorry.”

Robillard paused for a moment and then ran his free hand through his hair. “I am not the worst man in the city, nor am I the best. I am not a shark amongst minnows. I am a shark amongst other sharks. We all have sharp teeth and I am not to be fucked with.”

The tremors in his hands came again, stronger this time, and he took a deep breath and slowly they stopped. “Yet you are fucking with me.”

The way he spoke, the obscenity was in brackets and sounded like a preacher telling a dirty joke. It sounded out of place.

“This is about your cousin, I suppose?”

“You suppose right. Your actions show contempt.”

The kid with the Colt shifted around a little and Sandra stared at a point on the wall above my head. Robillard went on, his voice smooth now. “And if you show me contempt, then it makes it harder
for me to follow my chosen profession. I will appear weak. Some other shark will try me out. Which would lead to violence. Which would lead to bloodshed. Which no one wants.”

He waited for me to say something but I didn’t.

“So I really should kill you. To prove that I am not weak.”

“That’s an option.”

His eye twitched and the tremors came back for a second. I could swear I saw Sandra hide a grin.

“What do you mean?” Robillard’s voice was throaty now, full of anger.

“I’m hard to kill. Find another option.”

Without making a big deal about it, I moved to the right and turned so I could see the door and the kid with the Colt out of the corner of my eye. The woman tilted her head to the side like this whole thing was amusing her and now the smile was in the open. Robillard went on, this time talking to me and then switching to Sandra. While he talked, he opened another beer from a six-pack on the counter.

“I’ve decided I do not want to talk to you.”