DEREK CAST HIS eyes around the bar. He tilted his beer this way and that, building towers of white foam along the inside of the glass and watching them slowly tumble, sandcastles swallowed by an amber sea. A waitress with shocks of blue and pink hair set a plate of nachos in front of him. He ate quickly and without pleasure, his head bent low to the plate, shovelling handfuls of grease into the burning hole of his belly.
It had been a long and largely fruitless evening of probing every rathole and greasy spoon in town, trading rounds of drinks for gossip and taking the pulse of the city’s underclass. He found nothing worth reporting, apart from an almost undetectable dulling of the atmosphere. It seemed quieter somehow. Business wasn’t down noticeably from what he remembered, but the rowdier element seemed absent, skimmed off the top to leave the thinner, more tepid brew behind. He riffled through his memory for a sense of who might be missing, but he couldn’t come up with anyone worth noting.
His nachos eaten, Derek downed the last of his beer, slapped a toonie on the table, and left. A fresh crop of burnouts would bloom along the bars after midnight, and he’d need a couple hours’ rest to face them. He squinted against the streetlights and pulled up the hood of his windbreaker. A chill breeze came hard off the river, putting a nip in the air despite the brightness of the day. Four pints of beer sloshed uneasily in his belly. A piss before leaving would’ve been just the ticket, but a creeping malaise had forced him out the door and left his bladder like an overfilled bucket, threatening to spill with the slightest jostling.
Christ, what a clusterfuck he’d stumbled into. Ballaro wanted him dead, the cops had his balls in a vice, and he couldn’t skip town unless he wanted to be subject to a province-wide manhunt. He’d scraped by thus far by his wits and his wallet, and the latter was fast approaching empty. Normally he’d score a quick job to make some cash, but he couldn’t even do that. The cops had him under the microscope. Anyone in the city ate a bullet, he’d be the first mook they’d turn to. Anxiety hung about him like a swath of flies, whining in his ears and flitting at the edges of his peripheral vision, persistent and unswattable. He patted the side of his windbreaker, where a Smith & Wesson Governor nestled cozily in the waistband of his jeans. A .38 calibre, the gun felt like a toy against his hip compared to the .45, but he cherished its company all the same.
With the bow-legged stride born of a bulging bladder, he walked to the corner of Bridge Street and Victoria Avenue, where he entered an all-night gym and flashed his card—expired but passable—to the tan, leanly-muscled woman behind the counter. She let him pass without protest. He slipped into the change room, found a free urinal, and unleashed a torrent of yellow piss, his moan of relief harmonizing with the tinkle of running water. His bladder appeased, he staked out an empty bank of lockers and changed from his thrift store windbreaker and dirty jeans into khakis and a light tweed jacket (also thrift store, but more respectably so). He pulled a black wig down over his close-cropped blond hair and covered the wig with a knitted toque, adjusting the elasticated band to expose enough wispy locks to make his phony hair colour evident. Donning a cheap pair of aviator sunglasses, he doubled back the way he’d come and legged it to the bus station, moving as swiftly as he could without drawing undue attention to himself.
At the station, he grabbed the first bus heading south and took a seat near the back. He found a used copy of the Niagara Falls Review and pretended to read, using the pages as parapets to block his face while affording a surreptitious look at his fellow passengers. They were mostly pensioners and scruffy teens half a step from homeless, not the sort Ballaro was likely to have on payroll. He cast regular glances out the rear window, noting the make and colour of cars to flag any that might be following him.
The wig’s cheap synthetic fibres itched madly against the back of his neck. After a few stops he ripped it off and stuffed it into his duffel bag when he thought no one was looking. A less than subtle ploy, but fuck it—anyone who’d followed him for this long would have to have seen through the disguise anyway.
Once the bus ventured onto a side street within a short jaunt of his neighbourhood, he changed out his tweed jacket for his windbreaker—turned inside out to mask its stormy grey with the lighter-toned lining—and signalled a stop. He scanned the street for idling cars, saw none, and walked briskly through the back roads to the fleabag low-rise apartment he’d rented over the phone. He climbed the stairs to the third floor, stepping around the soggy stains and discarded junk mail. An infant’s soprano wail sliced through the alcove. The kid’s mother tried unsuccessfully to sheath the sound with increasingly irate admonitions. “Stop it, Joey. Stop it! Joey, you stop itright now!” Derek massaged his forehead with the heel of his hand. He could feel the seeds of a forthcoming headache being planted.
The apartment was a decent size but hopelessly run down, its floorboards buckled and scratched, its plaster walls yellowed and blistered. Mildew and old cigarette smoke lent the air a sour tang that clung to his clothes and followed him for blocks every time he left. He’d crashed here for four nights now and was already sick of the place—just as well, since four nights in one spot was pushing his luck. He wondered if he could somehow skip out on rent and finagle his damage deposit back. Without it, he’d have a hard time finding another place to take him in.
Among the many skills and talents that had contributed to Derek’s survival in his particularly risky line of work, perhaps the most important was his finely honed sense of looming danger. He felt it now, a bright twang in the depths of his cerebellum. It guided his hand to the butt of the Governor hidden beneath the hem of his t-shirt before his eyes registered the peculiar shadow on the wall. He drew the gun as he stepped into the kitchen, raising the barrel to chest height and squaring it on the figure before he’d even registered who or what it was.
The man stood near the fridge, thumbs tucked into the pockets of his ragged blue jeans. Zippers grinned up and down the arms of his leather jacket, which hung open over a t-shirt sporting the album cover of Television’s Marquee Moon. His teeth glinted white within a bushy black beard. He extended one hand in a friendly two-fingered wave—a gesture that nearly got him shot by Derek, who flinched at the sudden movement. His index finger cinched tighter, putting three pounds of pressure on a four-pound trigger pull.
“Matchbook McCulloch,” the man said, his words untainted by the slightest hint of worry.
“Lucky Luke,” Derek replied, aiming for a similar nonchalance. He studied Luke’s eyes, panning their murky waters for nuggets of malice. His sieve came up empty, but that was far from enough to make him lower the gun.
“It’s Luka now. Like my babushka called me.” The humor bled from his face in an instant, leaving a corpse-white pallor that brought every scar and crease and wrinkle into stark relief. He shot a glance at Derek’s gun, and the smile returned. “You won’t be needin’ that bad boy, bro. This ain’t gonna be that kinda meeting.”
“All the same, I think I’ll keep it.”
“Suit yourself, but I’m tellin’ you there’s no need. I ain’t packin.” The man spread his arms out, planted his legs shoulder-width apart. “Pat me down if you want, bro.”
Derek shuffled forward, his gun squared on Luka’s chest. He traced the man’s outline with his free hand, checking his waistband and probing beneath his jacket for a hidden shoulder holster. Apart from his clothes and some spare change, Luka didn’t have a thing on him. Derek took three steps back and allowed his stance to relax slightly, though the gun’s sights remained locked on Luka’s sternum.
“You here about Ballaro?” he asked. “Cause if so, you should know that he and I are quits.”
“So I heard. Way folks tell it, the big man’s even got money on your head. He’d like it in his presence, and he don’t particularly care if it’s still attached to your body, if you catch my drift.”
“It’s not all that hard to catch.”
Luka laughed again, just a chuckle this time. “I always liked you, bro. You know why? You never bought into your own fuckin’ hype. Too many guys do what you do, they start to think they’re James Bond or that Day of the Jackal motherfucker. Nah, bro, you got nothin’ to fear from me. I’d sign a pact with the devil himself before I’d do that fat wop’s dirty work.”
It’s not his I’m worried about, so much as yours. But it was possible Luka was playing it straight. He had no direct beef with Derek, after all—at least not that he knew of.
“Not to be rude or anything, man, but you mind gettin’ to the point? My arms are gettin’ tired and I’d just as soon get to the ‘me shooting you’ or ‘you leaving’ part.”
“Sure thing, bro. Ballaro’s been swinging his dick around this town for a long time, right? Someone pisses him off, he has a little chat with ‘em and they go for a ride over the falls without a barrel. We know the drill. A guy like that tends to piss a lot of people off, but he’s got so much muscle it don’t matter. That’s about to change.” Luka spread his arms in a grandiose gesture. Derek’s finger tensed on the trigger, pausing an ounce of pressure shy of firing. “I had a vision, bro. I saw a way to get back at him. To pay him back for my babushka, and everyone else he’s stepped on.”
“Not that I plan to cry any tears over the Ballaros, but you’ve got your work cut out for you there. As targets go, you won’t find one much trickier than Frank Ballaro.”
Luka buffed his nails on the front of his t-shirt, inspected his cuticles. “I got at his kids, didn’t I?”
“So you say. Some folks out there think the fuckers got offed in a bear attack.”
Luka flashed a smile. “Pretty choosy bear, ain’t it? Got a taste for Italian?”
A droplet of sweat oozed into Derek’s eye. He wiped it away, careful to keep the gun trained on Luka. “Okay, assume you’re tellin’ the truth. You nailed his kids, used a trained circus tiger, went nuts with a hatchet, whatever the fuck happened. You’ve still got poppa to deal with, and poppa’s awful mad. His back’s to the wall, and he’s gonna be under tighter guard than the pope at Mecca. How the hell do you expect to compete with that?”
“That’s just it, bro. It ain’t gonna just be me for much longer. I’m gettin’ myself a pack.”
“A pack?”
“Ain’t no shortage of people run afoul of Ballaro in this town, bro. Lotta muscle, but no one to put it to good use. I’ve been taking these guys under my wing, and I’ve just about got everyone I need. All I’m missin’s a lieutenant. Someone with brains and savvy, the kinda guy who knows how to do more than just pull a trigger. The kind of guy can send a strong message.”
Derek wiped first one hand on the seat of his pants, then the other, taking care to keep the gun raised all the while. The barrel trembled as he held it one-handed. “Wait. So that’s what this is about? You’re . . . recruiting me?”
“You could put it that way. What d’you say? Ballaro’s got it in for you. I’m offerin’ a chance to wipe him off the map for good. Get you a clean slate.”
“Did it occur to you that I could just as easily sell you to Ballaro myself? I bring him your head, it might put him in a forgiving mood.”
Luka shrugged, not in the least perturbed by the threat. “You could try. I dunno if he’d be willing to hear you out, but you never know. First you gotta get my head off my shoulders, though, and I kinda like it where it is.”
“This thing I’m holding? It’s called a gun. You might not’ve heard of it, but it gives me a bit of an edge in the whole ‘kill or be killed’ department.”
“What kind of bullets you packin’?”
“Just .38s, but they’re hollow points. I put four or five in you, your guts’ll be chop suey.”
Luka smiled. “Maybe. Maybe not. Care to give it a try?”
Another bead of sweat ran into Derek’s eye. He blinked it away, his grip on the pistol tightening. “Excuse me?”
“You got the piece, right? Shoot me.”
“Buddy, my life’s complicated enough right now without having to dispose of a body. Could we not and just say we did?”
In response, Luka raised one arm with his palm facing outward, as if being sworn in to testify. He drew the nail of his index finger down his forearm from wrist to elbow, digging a culvert of split flesh. A thin ribbon of blood wound downward to his bicep, where it pooled until distending in tear-sized droplets and falling to the ground. Derek counted four of them—maybe a half a teaspoon of blood in total—and looked up to find the wound already closed, a months-old scar in its place.
Derek felt his grip on the pistol falter. The butt grew slick and viscous, as if formed from soft wax that was melting in his hands. The barrel drooped, pulled down by an impossible weight. “What kind of Criss Angel shit is this?” he asked.
“Trust me, bro. Angels got nothing to do with it.”