The shower stall of a one-bedroom flat in East Van isn’t the ideal convalescent space. I made do. A long scalding shower, several ice packs, a double slug of cask-strength bourbon and a fitful night’s sleep.
At ten the next morning I was back at Hastings, doused with ancient liniment from my bathroom cabinet and nursing a pot of Earl Grey. I needed to talk with Sabar Gill.
The flight purchase connected him to Tabitha Sorenson. A boyfriend, maybe, or co-conspirator. Maybe the cause of her disappearance.
There were plenty of Gills in the Pacific Northwest. I narrowed by age and location. None in Surrey but one likely candidate in Vancouver.
The Vancouver Gill was twenty-six and held a masters degree in Library Science. He worked in the Special Collections department of the Vancouver Public Library’s central branch. His picture on the VPL website showed a handsome man with short-cut hair and beard and pensive eyes.
I phoned the library. The cheerful male voice in Special Collections told me Gill wouldn’t be in till one. I asked for his phone number, but the voice wasn’t comfortable with sharing that information.
I was flipping through the audit report when Jeff entered the boardroom. He made a show of locking the door and unfurling the blinds so that we were secluded. He said, “We should talk about last night.”
“I don’t remember much of what got said on the ride home. But the way you hit that guy—” He looked at me as if inspecting glass merchandise for hairline cracks and chipped edges. He spread his hands. “And here you are, drinking tea.”
“Coffee after breakfast fucks with my bladder.”
“Worse than a baseball bat?”
I pushed back from the table and rummaged in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet. “If you want me to say thanks again.”
“Not about thanks, Dave.” My partner spoke with a hint of exasperation. “You hit him when you didn’t have to.”
The knuckles on my right hand had swollen to red burial mounds. I used my left to fetch the parcel out of the back of the drawer.
“We’re gone tomorrow on our honeymoon,” Jeff said. “Which means you’re in charge. I’d like to think things’ll be okay while I’m gone. Like very much to think that.”
“So think it.”
“Hard when last night you nearly beat a guy to death.”
“We’re never going to agree on that,” I said. “So let’s not hash this out again.”
“I think we should.”
“All right. You were the one who pointed a gun at Cody Hayes.”
“To rescue you.”
“Yes, and thank you again. But Jeff, he’s afraid of the gun, not of you. He’s a bully. His whole point, the fire, the weapons, was to scare me. Intimidate us into doing what he wants. We needed to show we can’t be intimidated.”
“So what’s to stop him from getting a gun of his own and coming after us?” Jeff said.
“There’s no guarantee, but he’s afraid now. Bullies prefer easy targets.”
“Know what I think?” Jeff said. “He did scare you, and you wanted to pay him back for that.”
I handed him the parcel, a square the size of a hand wrapped in cheap brown paper.
“What the hell is this?”
“Your wedding present.”
He tore away the paper, revealing a mocked-up book jacket. A giant magnifying glass on the cover, the lens raising details on a fingerprint and a Sherlock Holmes hunting cap. The words “Advanced Techniques for the Contemporary Interviewer by Jun Fei Jefferson Chen” in a bland default font. I’d wrapped the cover around an old copy of Tai Pan someone had left in our waiting room.
“Not the actual cover, of course,” I said. “There’s a publisher on the North Shore. They mostly do cookbooks. Got the idea from Tabitha’s mother. They’ll work with you and put this out professionally. No money, but such is the writing life.”
He held the book up and grinned. “Holy shit.”
Jeff was a notoriously difficult person to shop for, and it felt good to hit the mark. At Christmas the year before, he’d walked into the office on December twenty-third holding a copy of Nomeansno’s Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed, the same album I’d just finished wrapping to put on his desk. “Look what was on sale,” he’d said, and I’d taken his present home with me.
Now he turned the book over in his hands. “This is great. Thanks, Dave. Thank you.” Suddenly serious: “So’s this mean you’re gonna stop teasing me about writing it?”
“Not a fucking chance,” I said.