She collected Marilyn, filled a jerry can with gas at the Petro-Canada and put it in the trunk, smiling off the woman’s twenty-dollar bill. “Your tax dollars at work,” she said with a grin.
Ten minutes later back at the Shirley turn, they filled the tank, and the engine started purring immediately. Once again, riding a wave of sorrow, Marilyn’s lips quivered as she offered a departing wave of thanks. “Bless you.”
Holly watched the dowager silver Audi make steady progress down the road, disappearing over a hill. Everyone handled grief differently, but Marilyn seemed to have a core as strong as the muscles common to her trade. Then Holly covered the next few kilometres to the detachment at tiny Fossil Bay. Set in a community of only a few hundred, the outlier post of three officers handled policing another fifty kilometres of blacktop west to Port Renfrew. From there a logging road looped back up to Lake Cowichan, home of yet another of the 126 detachments in British Columbia’s E Division, the largest in Canada with over six thousand employees.
The white frame building with a cedar-shingle roof was a refurbished cottage with an entrance room, where Corporal Ann Troy and rookie Constable Chipper Knox Singh had their desks, filing cabinets and computers. Remaining were Holly’s office, a lunchroom, a small bathroom, and dark and drear interrogation room. Suspicious of the black mould that lurked under the old linoleum, Holly hoped to update when the budget allowed. The furniture consisted of castoffs from larger detachments, with chipped corners and mummifying duct tape. Holly had made some progress in getting the rooms painted and put up a few landscape prints, but here was the equivalent of Fort Zinderneuf on a day off. Truth was that the post would probably be disbanded before it was remodelled.
Coming through the squeaky front door, she left her hat in the closet, where three sturdy black umbrellas were planted in a stand. With the rains of winter and spring over, they had now entered the dry season. The danger of forest fires replaced floods. Holly took a reusable plastic cup of water from the cooler and sipped. “Tell me more about the complaint, Ann. I checked Bailey Bridge last week. Just an old fire pit and a dozen beer bottles. Did our volunteers report anything recently?” A squad of retirees and youngsters on bicycles made their job easier by reporting suspicious vehicles and property damage. A small percentage of the citizens of Fossil Bay operated their homes as mere summer cottages, so the occasional break-in often went unnoticed.
Ann rose to stretch her aching back as the palsied arm of the wall clock shuddered to nine on the dot. Degenerative disc disease hastened by a daring rescue during a convenience-store robbery had forced her to give up an active career just as she had made corporal. Instead of heading up the detachment by replacing retiring Reg Wilkinson, she drove a desk. The RCMP tried to make accommodations for its staff, especially since they were moved from post to post after only a few years and subject to morale challenges. “Last week Sean Carter said he spotted the first...guest. When you came last fall, the homeless had already moved back to winter quarters in Sooke or Victoria. With that large parking area and the sheltered places under the high bridge, the Bailey fills up fast in the summer. Get used to the minor annoyances and an occasional fight. It helps to set down the rules right off the bat. That’s what I di...used to do.”
“Better than gang wars, I suppose.” Holly felt questions worm themselves around her temple. The more she learned about her turf, the better. Proactive beat reactive. Trouble was easier to head off when anticipated, rather than fighting a defensive action.“But they don’t have vehicles. Where do they get their food? They’re not eating at Nan’s, and the gas station carries mostly junk food and picnic supplies.”
“Some have old bicycles. And it’s easy to hitchhike on the island. People are more laid-back and trusting. Pick up simple groceries like bread, peanut butter, tuna, soup, stuff that can be eaten cold from the can. Pastor Pete does a sandwich run with the Helping Hands van weekdays on his way home to Jordan River. We’d rather he didn’t, since it only makes it easier for them to stay. But try to tell him that.” Ann spread her large hands in a gesture of helplessness.
“Enablement is a problem everywhere, and a tough call. Are they all drifters? What’s the profile? Are drugs involved?” Ann and Chipper had come the year before Holly had arrived. As post leader, she was in the initial throes of trying to identify her team’s strengths and build upon them. Rivalry did not belong in the cards. But if she’d been Ann, she would have had a tough time adjusting to being second in command, especially to a leader ten years younger.
“It’s usually a pretty harmless group. At least they’re not hanging around schools like in Victoria, moving in at night with sheets of plastic and sleeping bags, leaving needles and human waste behind. A few older regulars know how to work the resources. Some even have small pensions. Reg said that until a few years ago, there were full-time shacks at Sombrio Beach.”
“That was in my time. Sort of an old hippie hangout. Malibu North. Everything changed when the Juan de Fuca and West Coast Trail system got going. The authorities cleaned house for the tourists.” Holly leaned against the wall and folded her arms. “Sounds innocent enough. I don’t want to come down too hard. Usually it’s live and let live around here. But the panhandling complaint worries me. It was a man, I’m presuming. Was he particularly aggressive? Any charges possible?”
Ann plunged into a slim “in” pile on her desk and consulted a paper. “There was no contact. The guy backed off.” She gave a bark of a laugh. “Wish you’d seen the complainant. About fifty, dressed head to toe in Tilley gear, hat that went through the guts of an elephant, jungle jacket, belt knife. Aluminum water bottle in a case around his shoulder.”
Holly smiled at the picture. “No pith helmet?”
“Do knee socks and shorts count? You know the kind. He didn’t feel that beggars belonged in his dream vacation spot. He’d had enough of that sightseeing in Vancouver and Victoria. ‘Are there no workhouses?’ he asked. ‘Then throw the bastards in jail.’ I don’t know how I kept my big mouth shut.”
“We rarely enforce vagrancy laws out here, unless assault’s involved,” Holly said. “Sounds like a malcontent who expected Disneyworld.”
They heard loud music coming from the parking lot as a car door slammed and bootsteps came toward the door. “Morning, ladies, I mean officers.”
Constable Chirakumar (Chipper) Knox Singh gave them a winning smile as he entered. At over six feet in his light-blue custom-made turban, he was Bollywood handsome, a trim beard adding a few years to his boyish, café au lait face. Chipper had entered the force nearly twenty years after Baltej Singh Dhillon had become the first Sikh to wear the turban as a member of the RCMP. Nearly two hundred thousand disgruntled Canadians took the case all the way to the Supreme Court and lost in a landmark decision. The five symbols, including the turban and a symbolic wooden dagger, were becoming familiar to people in the land of multiculturalism. She suspected that he took some grief for his career, and that as they got to know each other, they’d swap stories. She remembered the Playboy cartoons and tampons taped to her rookie locker. It was a broad and dangerous path between waving the white flag and showing some ovaries, so to speak.
Chipper placed his hat in the closet, opened his jacket at the neck and took a seat at his desk, swinging around to face them, the lightest scent of sandalwood drifting their way. “The traffic’s heating up out there, even with gas prices. Guess if you blew two hundred thousand dollars on a diesel RV, what’s a few more bucks?” The provincial government’s two-and-a-half-cent carbon tax, returned in a one-time, chump-change rebate, had seemed negligible when the oil prices soared and now was as irrelevant as a male mosquito.