CHRIST, WHAT A DUMP.
The street was worse than Derek remembered it: a procession of ramshackle brick houses with mangy roofs and rotting verandas, their overgrown lawns littered with fallen shingles and children’s toys bleached by the sun. The houses were pre-war, solidly built but battered by decades of neglect. They bore the broken posture of prizefighters past their prime. Surely not that much could have changed since he’d been here last, yet the place felt strange and hostile in its working poverty. He felt like these houses deserved better. Their decline saddened him.
He turned onto a cul-de-sac and ventured to the second-last house on the right. What cursory effort the neighbourhood’s other homeowners made at maintenance was absent here. The lawn rose in a knee-high tangle of crabgrass and clover, the thicket brightened with dabs of ox-eye daisy and slashes of purple loosestrife. Tendrils of swallowwort clung to the wire links of a cyclone fence. A plywood cataract blinded one window, and the glass in the others was grimy and cracked. He climbed the stairs, the punky runs buckling ominously, and rang the doorbell.
The man who answered had broad shoulders and a sagging belly. Curly black hair spilled haphazardly over his head, and patchy stubble covered his cheeks.
“How’s it goin’, Mike?” Derek asked.
Mike greeted the question with the sort of white-eyed shock Derek had fast been getting used to since his forced return to Niagara—a look of mingled dread and discomfort, as if Derek were a ghost crossed with a panhandler. His run-in with Perone and Santino was an open secret in the circles he frequented. Mike must have noticed his own gawking, for he quickly buried it beneath a grin.
“Matchbook! Hey, wow, good to see you man! I didn’t know you were in town.”
Probably figured my corpse was halfway down the river by now. “Yeah, well, business, y’know?” They stood there for a minute, Mike grinning stupidly, Derek awaiting an invitation inside, a coil of frustration winding ever tighter in his belly. “You mind if I come in for a sec?” he asked, keeping his voice pleasant.
Mike laughed. “Yeah, sorry, no problem. Come in, come in!”
He led Derek into the living room. Thrift-store furniture stood atop nappy yellow carpet. A stink of old food and cigarette smoke clung to every fibre. Mike swept an old pizza box off the couch to make room for Derek to sit.
“You want a beer?”
“No thanks.”
“Scotch? Vodka?” Mike shook a bottle on the hutch and a few drops sloshed around inside. “No vodka, sorry. Rum?”
“I’m fine. I really just wanted to know if I could use your garage for a few.” Though a bit gormless, Mike was a welder by trade, when he wasn’t dealing rock or breaking into houses. His temperament kept him from steady legit work, but he still had a decent workshop that Derek had taken advantage of more than once when he required discreet access to power tools.
“Sure, sure,” Mike said, too nervous to hide his relief. “Take all the time you need, man. Want me to show you the way?”
“I can find it, thanks.”
Mike’s garage and his house could have belonged to two different people. The grungy floors and disorderly furniture and haphazardly-strewn trash were nowhere in evidence. A procession of wrenches and hammers and saws lined the pressboard behind a freshly swept workbench, regiments grouped by tool and arranged from small to large. Labels festooned every drawer and cubby; not a screw was left out of place. Saw blades and drill bits gleamed beneath fluorescent light. Even the smell was different, the must and smoke replaced by the scents of steel and sawdust.
Derek ran his hand over the workbench. He’d done some good work in this garage over the years: sawed a shotgun short enough to hide beneath a quarter coat, jury-rigged a car bomb, built single-use silencers for half a dozen pistols. The contemplative nature of shopwork agreed with him. He enjoyed the precision, the alchemy of adding and removing components to make something new.
He pulled a box of .38 calibre shells from his left pocket, removed a bullet, paused, and grabbed a second as well. He placed them point-side up in Mike’s vice and spun the lever clockwise until the clamps touched the casing. He grabbed a butane torch from the opposite wall, checked the fuel gauge, and set it next to the bullets. From his right pocket he removed a ceramic dish he’d lifted from a neighbour’s potted plant, a four-inch spiral shank nail, and a short length of silver solder. He coiled the solder in the dish, lit the flame, and danced it back and forth. The silver coil wept and sagged, melting into viscous slurry. He dipped the nail in the solder and worked it briskly over the head of the first bullet, repeating the process several times. After a few minutes both bullets bore slightly bulbous crowns of silver maybe a quarter millimetre thick. The end result was a little choppy—probably not great for the ballistics, but over a few dozen feet it wouldn’t make much difference. He could have got a cleaner coating by melting the solder on the bullet directly, but he didn’t want to risk applying that kind of heat to live ammo.
Derek didn’t intend to use the bullets, anyway. As things stood, Luka was the only ally he had. His “pack mates,” though pacified by Luka’s support, didn’t hold Derek in high esteem, and the few who did trust him weren’t about to stick their necks out on his behalf. Ballaro remained a threat, and the cops weren’t about to offer safe haven—short of a life in solitary, maybe—as long as Detective Moore was around to connect him with his partner’s death. Taking out Luka would be tantamount to putting a bullet in his own head.
But it was good to plan for all contingencies.
As the last of the solder cooled, a familiar itch of intuition curled itself around Derek’s brainstem. The world grew sharper, all cold lines and hard surfaces glazed with an antiseptic sheen. He switched on the circular saw and left its blade buzzing pointlessly, tucked the Governor into the back of his pants, and crept back into the house, slipping the door shut behind him.
The carpets made slipping out of his shoes unnecessary, but he did it anyway—old habits and all that. A bassy burble carried through the wall, punctuated by long bouts of silence. He took slow, measured steps on the balls of his feet until the words became clear enough to catch.
“—don’t know how long he’s going to be. A silencer or something, I guess. Usually a few hours at least, but I can’t make any guarantees. On my own? Are you fucking nuts? Get over here and we’ll split it, okay? Look, I got to go.”
Derek frowned. He’d always found Mike to be a little slow on the uptake, but he was decent company. He wouldn’t have pegged the guy as treacherous. Shit, he didn’t seem clever enough for duplicity. Pulling his gun from his waistband, he rapped on the living room doorframe and stepped into view.
“Hey, Mike, I thought I’d take you up on that beer after all.”
Mike sat in a wingback chair near the rabbit-eared television, a cordless phone in one hand and a sleek black automatic pistol in the other. Derek kept his own gun dangling at his side. He was curious as to whether Mike would have the stones to pull on him. He guessed not, and Mike proved him right. He dropped the phone and shoved the gun out of view, tucking it between his hip and the arm of the chair.
“Hey, man! That was fast, eh? Sure, help yourself. You wanna grab me one, too?”
Derek smiled but made no move toward the kitchen. The Governor remained hanging from his side. His index finger traced the trigger guard.
“Why d’you got a gun there, Mike?”
Mike shifted in his seat, his hand still cocked awkwardly beneath the opposite elbow.
“Mike? Why do you have a gun?”
He chewed his lips, eyes roving about the carpet. “I dunno what you mean, man. You’re the one come into my home holdin’ a revolver in your hand. I could ask you why you got a gun.”
“I think you know the answer to that.”
Mike wept quietly, his eyes shut tight. Derek sighed.
“This is so fucking disappointing. How much am I worth?”
“Thirty grand, last I heard.”
Christ, I hang around much longer and every scumbag in the city’ll be crawling up my ass. “Decent chunk of change for shooting a friend in cold blood.”
“You’re one to talk, man. Doin’ what you do for a living.”
“You’re not me, Mike. You were, I’d be handlin’ this a lot differently.” He grabbed a throw pillow off the couch and tossed it to Mike. Mike caught it, leaving the pistol tucked against his hip. Either he was so out of his depth he lacked the presence of mind to try and draw on Derek even now, with their cards laid flat, or he simply knew he’d never work it in time. Derek, feeling charitable, chose to assume the latter. He raised the gun, his grip on the butt still casual. “Hold that up to your face.”
“Derek, hey, listen, I hadn’t decided nothin’ yet, okay? Money’s tight, the bank’s tellin’ me they’re gonna take the house.”
“Hold the pillow up to your face.”
“I was confused, okay? Desperate, even! Just go, forget it, I won’t say nothin’ to anyone, I swear!”
“I could shoot you in the belly instead. Takes a day to die, sometimes. Your intestines, stomach, all that shit, it’s under pressure in there. You make a hole and it all squirts out.”
Mike raised the pillow. He sobbed more openly with his face covered, his shoulders hitching. Derek pressed the Governor into the quilted fabric. The pillow dimpled where the barrel touched down. Mike made a high, mewling noise in the back of his throat.
“Hey, Mike?”
Mike pulled his head from the pillow to reply. Derek shoved it back in his face with a prod of the Governor’s barrel.
“Thanks for letting me use the garage.”
He fired a single shot, the sound of it muffled by the pillow. Mike jerked once and slumped to the side. Smoke curled from the hole in the pillow’s upholstery, its singed cotton innards sizzling faintly. Cordite sliced through the musty air, followed by the stink of piss trickling down Mike’s leg.
Back in the garage, Derek was pleased to find the solder had set nicely. He ran his thumb over the silver caps. Their cold smoothness felt pleasant against his skin. He loaded the bullets into the Governor and spun the cylinder until they reached the fifth and sixth chamber. He’d have to remember not to unload on any old target.