“Charlie?” Tim said as the lines connected.
The creepiness of call display never ceased to amaze McKelvey. “I got your message,” he said. “I was down at Garrity’s.”
“I don’t know what to do here, Charlie. This woman, this student of mine. Not a day student but a night school student…”
“Slow down, Tim,” McKelvey said, using his cop’s measured, authoritarian voice.
“Donia. Donia Kruzik. She’s taking English as a second language courses at the high school on Wednesday nights. I’ve been teaching night courses since last September. It gets me out, I make a little extra money. And…and anyway, I’m sure you know how the story goes.”
“How do you know she’s missing? Maybe she just went away for a while.”
“She didn’t show up for class last night. I called a half dozen times. Then this afternoon I stopped by her apartment and—”
“Whoa, hold up,” McKelvey said. “Back up a minute here. Did you say you left a half dozen messages? You stopped by her place? You do that for all your students, Tim?”
He heard Tim’s long exhalation. He pictured the younger man removing those glasses with the round lenses that made him look just a little like John Lennon, rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger.
“It’s more complicated than that,” Tim said.
McKelvey said, “I figured as much. It always is.”
“I didn’t sleep last night,” Tim said, and there was defeat in his voice. “I need to get some rest. I can’t even think or see straight. Will you meet me for a coffee tomorrow morning, Charlie? I need someone to talk to. Someone I can trust.”
“I’ll be over first thing,” McKelvey said.
He opens the medicine chest above the toilet and stands there a full minute, perhaps two, this game he plays on odd or even days. The dance is how he thinks of it. Or jerking his own chain, more like it. At last McKelvey sighs, pushes aside the roll-on deodorant, the striped can of Barbasol shave cream, and his fingers find the little plastic bottle—always pushed to the back, as though this will somehow delay the inevitable. Spills the remaining tablets into his palm, counts them, measuring them across days or weeks not unlike the way his own father used to stand in front of the refrigerator on a Saturday night, lips moving in thought as he worked through the mental calculations: bottles of beer against hours remaining until the start of work on Monday. He funnels all but two of the tabs back into the bottle and swallows them back with a snap of his head. The white powder residue tastes of bitter chemicals. He stoops over the sink and scoops up a palm of tap water.
Looking at his face in the mirror, he is unable to meet his own eyes for just an instant. He knows how slippery a slope this is, for his life’s work revolved around wading through the mess caused by this very thing: the getting of it, the keeping of it, the trading and selling of it, the killing and hurting for it. The motive for the majority of crimes, at least in McKelvey’s experience, could be boiled down to one of three things: drugs, greed or passion. And when those three elements combined to a single force, watch out. It was madness. Every man for himself. Working the Holdup Squad, McKelvey had come face to face with the desperate things a man would do in order to maintain the flow of his dope.
It was always simply a variation on a story as old as time itself. In his case, the doctor—the same doctor he’d been seeing without any sense of regularity for the past sixteen years—had prescribed the Oxycodone tablets to help treat the recurring pain that was the residue of the gunshot wound. A crease of sliced flesh along the top of the inside of his right thigh. The .45 slug from Pierre Duguay’s pistol had by some miracle missed his femoral artery—not to mention his balls. The scarred flesh was grey and shiny as plastic, and it ached now and then with a strange and unnameable pain, as though it were a radio signal emitting from the inside out. Some days it gave his walk a limp. Other days he forgot about it completely until he was stepping from his boxers and into the shower, when he looked down and saw it and his mind registered that yes, he had dueled in the hallway of his home; he had drawn and won.
In those moments of utter clarity that came at three o’clock in the morning—when the city was quiet, his apartment was still and he had only himself to betray—McKelvey was incapable of providing a satisfactory justification for the ongoing prescription. Everything hurt, and Christ it felt good to get a little numb, that was all. Numb the way a dentist made your gums before delivering a filling. It seemed as though the things in life which should have been getting easier, the hitching of the belt and the squaring of the shoulders, were in fact becoming more of a struggle. There was a cumulative weight to his movements. His energy was on the wane.
He moves now to the small living room and sits back in the loveseat Hattie forced him to buy at some ridiculous high-end import place on Queen Street West that had these African masks all over the walls. He had assumed his work was done with the selection of the loveseat, but oh how wrong he had been, for there had followed a litany of questions: selection of fabric covering, selection of throw cushions, selection of accompanying ottoman, and on and on. McKelvey had at one point asked the wafer-thin sales clerk if he was in on this gag with Hattie, like where were the hidden cameras. The thing had cost about as much as his first car, a point that was lost on Hattie in her mission to propel the vessel known as SS Charlie McKelvey towards the twenty-first century.
There is nothing on TV, so he settles for the late news with Lloyd Robertson. The medicine mixes with the two large beers he drank at Garrity’s, and the flow of ease comes across him as though he is being lowered into a bathtub from an overhead hoist. Warm. And good. Top of the skull, across the shoulders, down through the spine, until finally there is no pain, just the opposite in fact, the absence of pain, a vacancy where once there had been full tenancy. All the old, haunted places were filled with sunshine…
McKelvey sparked his first cigarette of the day on the sidewalk in front of his building. A morning of blue skies, a hint in the air of the autumn to come. This city was at its best, he had always believed, in those in-between seasons of spring and fall. The winter was as grey and as dirty as the slush kicked up from buses and cars, and the dead of summer brought with it a muggy, suffocating heat that made the city stink of garbage and the lake. The owner of a flower shop across the street was busy hosing off the sidewalk, and McKelvey wondered briefly if the Dart & Feather pub located next door had anything to do with it. He smiled as he conjured an image of staggering young men sloping sideways down the other side of last call, holding one another for support as that ninth pint of ale began to percolate with the deep-fried fish and chips.
He tugged on the smoke then suddenly held the mustard gas in his lungs as a lithe jogger rolled around the corner, catching him by surprise, a woman dressed in expensive exercise shorts and tank top that left no part of her a mystery. She had a life-affirming spring to her stride that made her golden ponytail bounce. You weren’t allowed to smoke anywhere any more, McKelvey thought, because people believed that by taking a few extra measures they could stretch their life to infinity. What is this prize we seek, he wondered. To outlive all contemporaries, to while away those last long empty days withered in a nursing home with a shawl wrapped around bony shoulders, some jaded and underpaid support worker celebrating like it was your birthday every time you took a shit—‘Good for you, Mister McKelvey, that’s a good boy now!’ When the moment came, that very instant that he was no longer of any use to himself or others, he’d much prefer to cross the yellow warning line and stumble onto the electrified tracks of the subway. There was no question. Find the ice floe and hop on board.
He