“Morning, Detective.”
McKelvey looked up from the cup he was stirring and stirring, endlessly stirring, and he smiled at the youthful face of the administrative assistant who had been hired just a short while ago. Amy—he couldn’t remember her last name. She was standing in the hallway, a stack of files clenched under an arm. She was a striking young woman dressed in a form-fitting skirt and blazer combination. The guys were always giving her a hard time, kids in a playground. They disguised their lust for her behind jokes and pranks, and McKelvey believed she didn’t mind the attention.
“Good morning, Amy,” he said. “You look nice today.”
And she did. She was beautiful and young. She was perfect. And McKelvey felt a twinge of sadness for something he had lost within himself somewhere along the way.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, and McKelvey thought she blushed.
Sir. That’s what she called him. It stung, but he was pleased with the show of respect.
“I’m just on my way to see the boss,” he said. “Is she in a good mood this morning?”
Amy smiled, rolled her eyes, and continued on down the hallway without a word. McKelvey took his coffee to Aoki’s office. Her door was always open. She was talking on the phone when he popped his head inside. She motioned him in, and he took a seat across from her, sipping his coffee. The office was small and unglamorous—beige—but he knew she wouldn’t inhabit it for long. She would be heading up Detective Services before her hair began its turn toward grey, that was his bet.
“Morning, Charlie,” Aoki said, setting the phone down.
“You look pissed,” he said.
She shook her head, leaning back in her chair. “These prosecutors, they think we can just pull evidence out of our assholes. They say ‘is that all you’ve got?’ and I feel like saying ‘no, we thought we’d keep some of the good stuff until we get to court’.”
Aoki made him smile. She was wiry, all sinewy muscle, her dark hair cropped short. And she swore like a longshoreman. It was as though every movement, every mannerism was aimed at destroying the myth of her diminutive stature. She had confided in him over a drink a couple of years earlier about how her father had been interned at a camp on the west coast during the Second World War. She spoke of how he hadn’t been angry with his new country for assuming he was a possible collaborator, saying instead that “everyone has a role to play when their country is at war”. McKelvey believed she both admired and detested this vein of deep stoicism within her father. Knowing Aoki, she wouldn’t have taken it on the chin for king and country.
McKelvey was anxious, and he caught himself chewing at his ragged thumb. In a matter of weeks, the Crown would kick off the trial of a bank robber, drug dealer, extortionist, suspected killer and known biker named Pierre Duguay. The trial was attracting media attention due to Duguay’s alleged connections to the Blades, an upstart Quebec biker gang with roots in the southern United States and South America. The Blades had battled the Hell’s Angels in Quebec for a few years at the closing of the nineties, fighting to control the lucrative drugs, prostitution and fraud rings. The body count was high. Car bombings, pipe bombs, shootings. The Angels were too big, too well-entrenched, too well-organized and managed, so the war eventually ran out of steam, and a large faction of Blades patched over to their rivals rather than face certain annihilation. But there remained a faithful few who drifted from Quebec in search of new frontiers out west and up north in the mining towns, places like Sudbury and Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, but like all pioneers, they stopped somewhere to catch their breath, and it ended up becoming home for a while.
The Blades bought a house in the west end of Toronto, installed security cameras and raised a new flag. They also bought an old strip joint near the airport, a place in which to conduct business, to launder their soiled cash. New kids on the block come to carve out a little corner amidst the Asian street gangs, the Jamaicans, and yes, always the Hell’s.
And it was Duguay, McKelvey knew, who was responsible for his boy’s death. Duguay, whose method of operation was to get his hangarounds and foot soldiers to befriend and recruit street kids to peddle his crack, run his errands, get his army of the lost moving across the landscape of parks and transit stops, malls and arcades. It was what he had done in Montreal, how he had ended up in Joliette for a number of years. He had recruited McKelvey’s boy, who exchanged the roof over his head for a fetid bed of rags beneath the Gardiner Expressway, the dangerous missions and shelters. Exchanged school textbooks for a goddamned squeegee rag and a bucket. Doc Martens and black eyeliner, a dozen pieces of steel attached to his head, tattoos, a whole warped and negative outlook on the world.
Then, just as McKelvey had prognosticated and warned, his boy had died alone, his body left in a vacant lot beneath the expressway. A piece of garbage tossed from a passing vehicle. That’s all.
“How is Caroline?” Aoki said, leaning forward.
He blinked, brought himself back. He said, “Fine. She has good days and bad days.”
“And you?”
He took a sip of coffee, shrugged and smiled.
“You’re always fine, right Charlie?” she said. “Good old Charlie, straight as an arrow, cool as a fucking cucumber.”
“Go easy,” he said, “my neighbour already chewed my ass this morning.”
She said, “You stopped seeing the department psychologist, I understand. That’s okay, though, because between you and me, I don’t think she’s very good at her job. She’s got nice hair, but she’s a bit of a twat. That would be my reasoning. So what about you, why did you stop going? You got everything sewn up?”
He sighed, fumbling to put into words how he felt. How did he feel about sitting in a closet-sized office, opening up to a woman practically young enough to be his daughter? Felt. Feel. Express. Breathe in, breathe out. Let’s hold hands and explore the stages of grief, Charlie.
“You can only talk about things for so long,” he said.
“Sounds to me like you didn’t do much talking.”
“You get to the point where it starts doing the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. At first, sure, it makes you feel a little better, spilling all this poison. But then they want you to keep digging deeper and deeper...and there’s nothing else down there. There’s nothing there. You’ve scooped it all out, everything, and now you’re just...empty.”
Like cleaning a Halloween pumpkin, he wanted to explain. But in picturing that, he was reminded of the years he and Gavin had carved pumpkins a day or two before Halloween, trying to find new ways to smear the greasy pumpkin guts on each other. He saw the various farmers’ fields and Sunday markets they had visited in search of the annual pumpkin. The smell of those slippery insides, rich, fecund scent of fall. And then he didn’t want to think about that any more. He blinked and saw that Aoki was still talking. Her mouth was moving as he brought himself back into the conversation, like flipping to a channel midway through a show.
“...other things that you can look into, like out-patient counselling and...”
His mind suddenly flashed with an image of old Seeburger standing there like the king of goddamned Kensington, and he gritted his teeth and imagined tying those dogs from hell to the back of his truck and taking them for a run all the way to the Humber River.
“You should take advantage of the employee assistance folks,” Aoki said.
“I’ll see about