Walt Read online

  The animal stands there, helpless, and the bushmen practically walk right up and stick in their spears.

  It’s all about patience and doggedness, and that’s worth remembering. You don’t have to be the fastest or the smartest. You just have to be the most willing to keep going. The most persistent.

  I saw her coming out of the house, her and two friends, and they were all done up. By then, the cats were almost nose to nose: when the door opened, the tomcat fled, but I’m sure he didn’t go far.

  Friday night and you almost need to have night vision, because it’s so late when people finally decide that it’s time to go downtown and pay bar prices. They stay at home and get warmed up with their own liquor-store-priced booze, heading downtown when they’re already well lit and when the bands have finally decided to start playing.

  I didn’t know where she was going for sure, but I had a good idea, and anyway, if it turned out she was going to a house party or something, I could always head back up and try to get the car and get home before I really did have a ticket.

  But they were headed downtown after all.

  I was afraid one of them would turn around and spot the shape of me behind them, but it turned out I didn’t really have to worry. Not one of them turned around, not even once.

  The three of them clearly together and overflowing — that’s the easiest way to describe it. Laughing and absolutely involved in themselves. And what a wonderful thing that would be, just to be inside that feeling. Walking down the narrow street with the close-ranked downtown buildings on both sides, their words echoing back and forth off the concrete, the high corners of their voices rattling off the pavement and the windows. I’d hear the peaks of every sentence, but not the valleys.

  They ended up at a small bar off a laneway running down to the harbour. It was a small place I already knew pretty well, with a pool table and a few scattered televisions high on the walls for the boyfriends who get distracted too quick and need to keep an eye on one game or another when their conversation skills flag.

  A pint of beer for me, and I was doing my best to nurse it, to not drink too much too fast, while watching her and trying not to get caught doing it. Looking right over and drinking her in, but ready to throw my eyes sideways if she looked up. Once in a while I’d get caught, that was okay, but I couldn’t let it happen too often, or suddenly I’d become “that creepy guy.”

  I pretended to watch one of the hockey games in a television off to the side, but really I was looking back in the mirror at her reflection, and it wasn’t hard to see that I was right about her, absolutely right about the note.

  There’s a way people behave when they’re short of cash — it’s like they hold it closer to themselves, like making sure that they have the right change is suddenly a necessity.

  They study the inside of their wallet as if counting what’s inside two or three times over will make the cash magically multiply into more. I’ve been there: it never does.

  Not lately, though. I’d been to the banking machine, and I could feel a fat wad of twenties bulked up in my pocket, and I knew my whole plan depended on timing — making just the right call, just the right judgement about what I could ask for and how much I would have to offer. The right amount to make the whole thing almost tragically irresistible, the right amount to make everything possible.

  It still might all go south. I knew that. She still might walk away before I even got the first part of it out, before I even managed to cast the fly out there on the surface of the water.

  Here’s something about that bar. Down near the washrooms, down the two tight switchback flights of wooden-treaded stairs, when someone takes a shot on the pool table upstairs and misses, you can hear the thunk of the butt end of the pool cue on the floor as they let it slide through their hands and the end bounces down hard. One hard thud, clear punctuation at the end of someone’s turn.

  The missed shot, the scratch. You can’t hear anything when they make a shot, but you sure can tell when they fail.

  What I was going to say is, “I have a business proposition for you.”

  I’d say it to her right as she came out of the bathroom, me standing there, her still in that last little bit of disorganization that everyone has when they’re coming out of the washroom, that quick pat-down with the palms of your hands, making sure that everything is zipped or buttoned or at least close to in the right place.

  She’d give me that half-disconcerted look, that look that says, “I think I should know you but I can’t place why,” and the truth is, she’d be right.

  I’d say: “I know how much you need the money. And you know it, too.”

  There are plenty of sharp little marks in your memory: those “turned-corner” things, inked real heavy so you can pick out, with barely a moment’s notice, the instant something happened. The spots you can honestly look back at and say, afterwards, that a whole bunch of things changed, even if you can’t clearly say why. The places where you can draw up memories as being before or after.

  It would have been quick and quiet, tucked in a doorway by the cigarette machine, fast enough that it would have all been over before the next person upstairs felt that their bladder was too full.

  And I know absolutely that it would have worked, just the way I had planned it — there’s no doubt in my mind at all.

  Instead, I left the bar right away, left my beer: straight up the stairs and out the door without looking either way.

  I felt great, knew I was in charge of the whole thing. My plan — my decision.

  With Mary, you were never in charge. You were along for the ride, no matter how hard you tried to grab the wheel and drive.

  And I have to say it’s addictive, that being in charge, even if the sheer rush of it passes quickly.

  I saw that girl again at the store — saw her coming in, dark blue jacket like a sailor’s pea coat, big round buttons up the front in two even rows, blue jeans.

  It was cold out, and her eyes were in the process of sweeping over me when she stopped and straightened up and locked right onto me, and then just looked away as if I wasn’t even there. She was carrying one of those green baskets that you get when you just need a few things, and she had it loose on the inside of her elbow. I followed her with the cart, watched her ass, the shape of her mouth, the way it curved slightly downwards as she turned and looked at things on the shelves. Knew for a fact I could have owned every inch of it.

  I can hardly describe the feeling that went through me, the rush of it, right down to my toes. Exquisite. As easy to touch as the fruit laid out in front of you in the produce section, ripe and full and round.

  Chapter 29

  (St. John’s, NL) — The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) is seeking the assistance of the general public in two missing persons investigations, Mary CARTER, 48, and Lisa TAPPER. CARTER was last seen in the area of McKay Street in St. John’s. TAPPER, 21, was last seen leaving a cabin on the Salmonier Line. The RNC is seeking the assistance of the general public in both cases.

  If anyone has any information pertaining to the whereabouts of Mary CARTER or Lisa TAPPER, they are asked to contact the RNC at 729-8000 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477).

  “Why do we keep sending them out?” Scoville said. “We didn’t hear anything back last time, and we’re not going to hear anything now.”

  “You know why — for scraps. What we’re looking for is scraps, something someone’s half forgotten seeing, and it’s like we’re looking at a guy who doesn’t leave any. He’s someone who knows just how important scraps are. But there’s always the chance. We just need one.”

  Dean didn’t say that the order he saw emerging wasn’t a collection of things, but an absence of things. A lot of things just plain missing, with Walt the constant.

  Scoville snorted. “What are you going to want to do next? Start trailing him around? You and
me put a tail on him for another month or so, when all he does is fish and walk back and forth from the grocery store? Sooner or later we’ll have to find something, or we’re just going to have to let it go.”

  “There’s nothing at his house — at least nothing we’ve been able to find — but now maybe he hears about this and figures that we know something. That we’re thinking Mary’s part of something bigger. And maybe he’ll get sloppy,” Dean said.

  “Think the two are connected?”

  “I don’t know,” Dean said. “But it is two missing women, and he’s in the right place for both. Mary’s right in his house, Lisa Tapper was last seen down where he goes fishing the most. So maybe. And maybe he gets nervous enough to slip.”

  “I don’t think so,” Scoville said. “How many times have we been there now — three, four? He just gets cockier every time. I’d like to haul off and belt him one, just to see how cocky that makes him.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe eventually we’ll have enough to bring him in. Maybe we bring him in anyway, just to try and make him crack.”

  Sometimes you’re furious, Dean thought. Seething, boiling with rage, and you can look out through the red mist of it and understand why it is that wives get beaten — why reasoning flies out the window and you’re screaming at someone you love, your fists in hard, ready balls, and how doing real damage to someone else is the only option left. Dean had heard it from men for years when he was still in Patrol, had them sitting in the back of his squad car, banging their faces off the Plexiglas divider between the front and back seats, the red and blue roof lights battering around off the walls and fronts of houses in that staccato that seems designed to push everything to the next, even-more-explosive level.

  He was sitting in his own car, parked on LeMarchant Road, in the dark and just a few doors down from the second-floor apartment Julie was renting, thinking that, if she saw him, he might be considered a stalker. He could see slivers of the two front rooms through the curtains, enough to catch the colours and a slice or two of things on the walls. In one, a corner of a dresser that was all too familiar, a dresser she couldn’t have lifted by herself but that had left their house silently while he was on shift one afternoon, leaving only four dimpled dents in the carpet and a few loose skeins of dust.

  He didn’t know why he was parked there. It was not on his route; it was definitely out of character. He realized that — but he was doing it anyway. It wasn’t the only rule he was breaking. He was pretty sure he’d had too much to drink to be driving, but he’d taken the keys out of the ignition so the running lights would go off, and then dropped the whole bunch into his lap.

  He knew he could talk his way out of it, if someone from Patrol pulled in behind him. Argue there was no “care and control,” lean on “the brotherhood.” He looked up at Julie’s windows, wondered what it was like inside. Wondered who was inside, what she was wearing, whether she still needed to wear heavy socks to keep her feet warm from drafts. He thought about her feet. The wind was up and the bare black tree branches were whipping around over the car, and he could hear the sound of it around the door handles, the wing mirrors, as if the car was still moving.

  Pretend the car is still moving, Dean thought. Pretend and don’t open the door, don’t open the door and don’t go up to the front of the house and don’t make her talk to you and don’t push your way in, demanding explanations until you see some guy on the couch in there, some guy that needs hitting.

  Would that be so bad? he wondered. Wouldn’t it show her? Wouldn’t it make the point? It’s not like other cops would show up and arrest him, not any more than they were going to pick him up for impaired. They’d hustle him out of the place once they recognized him and then explain to everybody why it would just be better all around if it got dealt with quietly, saying things like, “You gotta know the guy’s hurting,” even though Dean wasn’t hurting. Not so much. Not any more. He was just trying to find an anchor, to find any sense at all.

  Dean could already imagine what it would sound like to be in the middle of a late-night, booze-filled racket, could remember hustling Stick Davidge out of a bad situation in an apartment on Prospect Street four or five years before, the guy Constable Davidge didn’t like with four stumps left for front teeth, Dean explaining that someone would pick up the dental bill and “you don’t want to see a good cop losing his job and his pension . . .” Remembering how hard it was to cross that line when you were supposed to be protecting the public, not each other.

  Except Stick had developed a real taste for hitting after that, finding a niche on the weekend bar patrol where drunks kept getting their hands caught in closing doors until the regularity of the injuries was too much for the brass to ignore. Stick got a job working for the police association afterwards — he still worked bar at the Christmas party. And Stick still occasionally hit people, but usually it was other cops, so that at least made it closer to fair.

  The worst part is that you’re not always mad, he thought.

  That would be too simple, too explainable. And so much easier to deal with.

  Sometimes, you’re just working a problem around like a sore in your mouth, poking it with your tongue, feeling the sharp metal taste of it and still poking it again, impossible to resist. Going through the cycles in your head: What if I’d done this differently? What if I’d spoken up? What if I’d shut up? What if I hadn’t gone back and raised it that one last time?

  Everything like tracks in his head, like some huge switchyard with heavy purposeful trains going off in every direction, everything right there if he could only decide which route was the right one to take at the right time.

  Dean sat in the car and stared out the windshield at the dark, watched two pedestrians scurrying along the block against the wind. Looked up again at Julie’s window, watched to see if he could catch even a shadow of her against the wall.

  Stopped and wondered how he would feel about that shadow, about whether it would be familiar or foreign.

  He knew that there had been a time when he could see the back of her neck in a crowd at the mall and know exactly, precisely that it was her. At the same time, he remembered it like punctuation, like the full stop of a period.

  All at once, Dean realized that the one thing he was certain of was that he wouldn’t feel nothing. You never feel nothing.

  Not unless everybody’s spent years moving away from each other. Not unless it’s a mutual decision. Not unless absolutely no one is surprised.

  That wasn’t where he saw Walt living. Not when he saw Walt in the front hall of his own house. Walt wouldn’t settle for it — wouldn’t settle for anything. What they were still missing was what Walt did instead of settling, Dean thought. He wished that Scoville was in the car with him then, just so he could tell him about it, just so he could say, “This is what’s wrong. This is the magic thing.”

  He ran it around and around in his head, thinking about the way Walt moved, the things he’d said, about the inside of Walt’s house. And as he did, Julie’s apartment, and whoever was in it, slipped further and further away.

  Outside the car, the tree branches were hissing in the wind, the night packed up hard like something was supposed to happen, a lone plastic shopping bag skittering fast down the street. Inside, Dean was writing notes, caught in a pool of streetlight that turned his notebook orange and the ink far blacker than it actually was.

  Chapter 30

  • Plain yogurt

  • Dijon mustard

  • Thyme (dried leaves)

  • Bread crumbs?

  Small, round writing, black ink in nice tight loops on a piece of paper from the kind of notepads they hand out at conferences. Exactly the kind of scratch pad they hand out at conferences, because this one says CDA-ACB up in the top corner, and it’s the Canadian Dam Association of all things, and the other corner says “CDA 2011 Annual Conference, Fredericton, N.B. Oct 15–
20.”

  Wouldn’t it be nice to get away, even just for a weekend, even to some place like Fredericton? To go to a conference, see a bunch of people who do the same things you do, share the same complaints and frustrations, and know for sure that there were other people just like you?

  Sometimes I think I’d like to get away like that, because staying in the same place sure doesn’t seem to be doing anything for me.

  I get up in the mornings on the weekend now and I smell sour.

  That’s the only real word for it — sour. Like something’s gone off, some part of me has gone past that “best before” date you always have a look at before you take a swig of milk right from the carton. And I’m boxed in by this house: sometimes the walls are like the walls of a fortress, keeping everything out, the wind hauling hard fingers of snow along the clapboard outside, random branches tapping.

  Other times, it’s like a cell, and I’m sentenced to be locked in here with myself. Unable to leave.

  For years. Forever.

  I prowl around the ground floor, leave the upstairs alone, make coffee, drink a couple of cups, but there’s nothing really satisfying in that. Think about taking a shower, but I’m suddenly afraid that even the feeling of hot water on my skin will be a letdown. You’ve got to know that you’re in trouble when even the simple things aren’t good any more — I’d like to tell that to someone. I’d like to have someone to tell it to, because actually saying it out loud — out loud and to someone else, some other living person — gives it more weight. The feel of hot water on the back of your neck, the taste of fresh coffee, the unreasonable optimism of hearing the lid slap down on the mailbox on the front of the house. All of those things, all gone flat.

  I swear I’m not going to become one of those people who goes around talking to myself, dazzling my own constantly appreciative audience of one. I may do strange things, but I do them deliberately.