IN the months since his arrest a couple of hours after whacking me across the head with a baseball bat back in early May, a small amount of detail had emerged about Short, whose real name was Richard Sherrin.
A career criminal since his early teens growing up in Calgary, Alberta, Sherrin’s record progressed from petty theft to assault, extortion, and kidnapping. He’d served time out west until being released while in his forties and had disappeared off the radar.
Armed with a new identity and documents to back it up, plus community college training in computers, business, and accounting, he’d managed to become a procurement officer for Public Works. He worked first at that department’s regional headquarters in British Columbia, then at PWGSC headquarters in Ottawa-Gatineau by the time he was fifty years of age.
As Robert Short, he’d effectively shed an identity skin and somehow managed to finesse any background checks. It helped that he could have listed forgery and advanced computer skills on his CV.
The Crown Attorney’s Office preferred to proceed with a single charge of first degree murder of Detective-Constable Phillips, as the “best” forensics were in place for this compared with the murders of Morrison and Archambault. Sherrin, aka Short, had been held without bail in the Kingston city lock-up and then was transferred to the medium security Bath facility pending his preliminary hearing and trial in Ottawa.
Now he’d escaped from the prison infirmary where he had been moved after complaining of chest pains. Correctional Services was still investigating how this had transpired exactly, but some assistance from an orderly was suspected. Sherrin had forced an elderly couple from their car at a stoplight on Highway 2. This car was later found parked on a side road in cottage country in Battersea, north and east of Kingston.
“Why he was just in medium security in Bath, I don’t know,” Martello fumed when I called him on his cell phone.
Overcrowding at jails at all levels of security across the country was the likely answer, but it didn’t seem important at that moment.
“We’ve got Kingston PD, OPP, and local detachments all over Eastern Ontario on the lookout. We think he can’t get too far, but you never know with this guy,” he continued.
Indeed, Short, as I continued to call him, had demonstrated a lot of ingenuity.
“He’s loaded with dope from the Bath infirmary, too. Painkillers, OxyContin …”
Great, I thought: Short on the loose with a head full of hillbilly heroin.
Sandy came back in just as I was saying, “OK, Tony, I want Cooke back here until he’s captured.”
“I thought you’d say that, Conn, and it’s done. He’ll be there this afternoon.”
Sandy had heard enough to put two and two together.
“I guess we won’t be marking papers now after all, Conn.”
“No, and I’m not sure about the picnic tomorrow either.”
Cooke showed up on his motorcycle as promised, wheeling it into Isabelle’s barn as before, thoughtfully agreeing to Jane’s request that he turn the motor off ahead of time to avoid startling her guinea pigs in their hutch.
He kept the night watch, stationing himself in Isabelle’s living room, while I took the day shift. By now, the beginning of the third week of August, it was quiet at Britfit anyway, so I closed down the shop for two weeks of extra vacation time for everyone. Although most of the gang had already taken their paid summer holidays in alternating weeks, we’d ended up having a good year all in all and I thought everyone deserved a bonus as some compensation for the rough patches.
Sandy was adamant that she and Jane would stay at the flat in Old Ottawa South rather than hide again in London. Since I could join them there at 6 p.m. when Cooke was willing to start the night shift at Isabelle’s, this seemed to make sense. With Sandy and Jane spending their days at the university, I thought that the bases were covered.
Nothing happened.
I’d been reissued with a cell phone by Martello, and he also provided me with a .22 calibre pistol, which I took with considerable reluctance.
“We’ve got your landlady’s property well patrolled by road, so chances are we’ll get to him first, but take the gun. It was lying around in our seized property storage. I’ll worry about the legalities if I have to.”
Why Short still saw me as responsible for fouling up his little operation was a bit beyond me when it was clients having to hand over their foreign passports in exchange for their new PR cards that was actually to blame. But drug addicts have their own logic, which was why Cooke was showing me the basics of firing a pistol in the fields behind Isabelle’s barn.
“Aim for the body – it’s the biggest part of the target,” he told me as he coached me to fire at a scarecrow he’d set up in the fields. “You’re going for disabling. With this little gun, you’ve got five rounds, so just keep pulling the trigger.”
Despite combing the area, police had not found Short. They did find an elderly man tied up in his house near Cornwall after neighbours reported not seeing him for a couple of days. The man identified Short as the stranger who tied him up, and took some of his clothing and his pick-up truck. There was no other trace of Short after a full week since his escape.
Saturday, August 22, around 7 a.m., I headed from Sandy’s flat to Isabelle’s property in the Mini Cooper to relieve Cooke. It was going to be a hot day. Sandy was going to clean her flat, take Jane to a swimming pool, and then join me at Isabelle’s for dinner. We’d likely just watch a movie in my flat after putting Jane to bed.
Cooke was going to take the weekend off, starting again on Monday at 6 p.m. at least for another week, although by now Martello believed that Short had left Ontario entirely. Former associates were being watched in Calgary where Tony believed Short was probably headed, as Alberta was his home province.
I pulled into Isabelle’s driveway and parked the Mini Cooper outside since bits and pieces of the Riley’s interior were all over the floor of my garage. I had started to clean all the interior panels, seats, and trim now that the car’s chassis, with rebuilt motor installed, had been mated with new wood framing and bodywork a week ago. Painting of the car was to start any day. It was going to be a corker.
Angela’s Neon was parked closer to Isabelle’s house. I went into Isabelle’s living room after knocking on her front door. She had Jerry on her lap, as usual, and was reading yesterday’s paper. Jerry lifted his head, looked at me with his one eye, yawned, and rearranged himself a little, closing his eye again to resume his snooze.
“Dennis is in the barn, he wanted to clean his bike,” Angela said, asking me to fetch him for breakfast.
Although Tony was likely right, and Short had managed to leave the province, probably stealing a succession of vehicles along the way, I thought Cooke was being a bit cavalier, going to the barn to play with his motorcycle.
He was squatting down, polishing the crankcase of the Harley with a soft cloth. His helmet was on the seat, and I could see that the key was already in the ignition. He was clearly ready to get under way.
“Hi, Conn, all quiet here,” he said.
I nodded.
“Angela’s got breakfast ready for all of us. Interested?”
“Sure, then I’ll take off. Heading up to Algonquin Park for the weekend, a little camping, meeting up with some …”
I never did hear who he was supposed to be meeting. I heard three thudding noises from the direction of the barn’s roof.
Cooke started coughing and was looking at me with a wild look on his suddenly very red face. He started coughing blood, lots of blood, then fell forward onto his face and didn’t move.
Blood was spreading out across his t-shirted back. For a couple of seconds I was so shocked I didn’t react, then started to move forward to him.
“Don’t bother,” a voice said.
A figure was coming down the ladder from the barn’s loft about thirty paces away from me. He had something pointed at me as he made the descent, looking over his right shoulder straight at me while using his left hand to steady himself on the ladder.
“Oh, and you can toss that little peashooter over there.”
He gestured to a corner of the barn with what I could now see was a pistol equipped with a foot-long silencer.
“I watched you guys shoot at the scarecrow in the fields back there with that little thing. You finally seemed to get the hang of it.”
I reached slowly behind my back, pulled the .22 pistol out of my belt, and tossed it where he’d indicated.
Cooke still wasn’t moving.
Short stayed a good twenty paces away from me. About five foot, ten inches, thick around the shoulders, wearing large round glasses, he was dressed in faded but clean casual clothes. He had black-and-white sneakers on his feet.
“You were saying something about breakfast. Sounds good to me. Move it.”
I turned my back to him and started walking out of the barn.
“Hey, what are these, rabbits?”
I turned around to see Short stopped at the hutch near the barn’s opening where Suzy and Alice were rustling around in the straw.
“Nah, they’re waddya call them, guinea pigs, right? Like rabbits, though. Hey, yeah that was a good movie, saw it at Bath about a month ago, you know, where Kirk Douglas can’t keep his pecker in his pants, and that blond crazy woman, you know, she boils his kid’s rabbit in the stove. We sure liked that movie …”
I didn’t bother correcting Short’s confusion of Michael Douglas, who played the errant husband in Fatal Attraction, with his father, Kirk.
“Real cute little guys aren’t they? Maybe I’ll have them for lunch on the barbeque.”
He started laughing in a snuffling, wheezy way, spittle gathering at the corners of his mouth.
I turned back to keep walking the hundred yards or so to Isabelle’s house, thinking desperately. Perhaps I could jump him while he was eating and distracted. I couldn’t do anything now. Short was far enough behind me that he could shoot me easily before I got to him.
Isabelle gave a start on seeing Short. She reached toward her supply of canes in their ceramic pot.
“Hey, goin’ to whack me with one of your canes, old bag? I don’t think so.”
Again with the wheezy laugh.
Isabelle pulled her hand back and just stared at him.
Angela appeared at the kitchen doorway, from which was wafting the mouthwatering smell of frying bacon mixed with toast.
“But where’s Dennis?” Angela asked, then fell silent, looking at me, as I shook my head back and forth.
“Don’t worry about Dennis, sweetie,” Short said. “I’ll eat his. You just load up a plate for me on the kitchen table, then come back in here, sit down, and shut up.”
While Angela clattered around in the kitchen, Short looked at all of Isabelle’s stuff.
When Angela re-entered the living room, Short waved her over to a chair the other side of Isabelle’s fireplace.
“That’s good. Not a peep out of either of you. You, Anderson, go into the kitchen.”
Angela had left a plate of scrambled eggs, rashers of bacon, and buttered toast on the kitchen table along with a serviette, salt and pepper, and cutlery.
Short directed me to stand in front of the kitchen sink about ten paces away from the table. He moved his chair around so he could watch me while he ate. He kept his back to a wall so he could also see through the doorway into the living room.
From my place standing in front of the sink, I could glimpse the end of Isabelle’s recliner.
He sat down, put his pistol down close to his right hand near his plate, and started shovelling food into his mouth, making little grunts of satisfaction with each mouthful, still watching me closely.
When he had finished gobbling the last piece of toast, he sat back, sighed, and picked up the pistol again.
“Well that hit the spot. Eating has been a bit of a challenge lately. I’ve been staying with those nice people that live behind this place, you know. The wife started screaming and fussing, though, so they’re staying in their cellar at the moment. Whoooooeeee, it sure stinks down there now. But there’s lots of cans of food in their kitchen, so I’m managing okay, but it’s really nice to have a big cooked breakfast, you know, the full monty so to speak …”
During this chatter, I’d tried folding my arms across my chest, hoping to get him used to seeing me move a little, not be alarmed by it.
“Hold it. Keep your arms down at your sides,” he barked.
I could feel my father’s five-inch Scottish knife in my right pants pocket. It was in its sheath, though. It would take two hands to get it clear.
Short reached into the left pocket of his pants with his left hand, pulling a little prescription container out of his jeans while still holding the pistol in his right hand and looking straight at me.
He flipped the top of the container off with his left thumb, dumping about half a dozen tablets on the table. Using the handle of the knife from his breakfast, he started crushing the tablets into powder, glancing down only briefly to check his progress.
“Yeah, you know, things were going so well for a while …”
Since he seemed talkative, I thought I’d ask him a question.
“Why burn the Jag? It was going to go back to the department anyway.”
“Just seemed like a good idea. For all I knew, the Quebec cops weren’t going to believe forever that little Rodney had done himself in like that. There was nothing in the paper about it, which I thought there would have been. Jill told me the car could come back to the department, that the cops were finished with it, but something wasn’t adding up.”
Short was still grinding away at his tablets. I remembered thinking that it was curious that there was no mention of Morrison’s death at all in the news. Presumably this had been the MO and Bryson’s doing, calling in some favours with news outlets. Bryson would have been especially worried about her daughter’s involvement with the PR card scam.
“Hey, get me a glass of water, will ya?” Short said. “Slowly, though.”
As I turned to pass it to Short, we both heard a noise from the living room, a sort of sighing, “shish” noise.
Short got up from the table, brandishing his revolver, and walked into the living room. While his back was turned to me, I pulled the skean dhu out of my pocket, unsheathed it, put the sheath back in my pocket, and concealed the knife itself up the sleeve of my shirt at my right wrist. Thankfully I had a longsleeved shirt on, even though the forecast was for a hot day. All my t-shirts needed washing.
Short was barking in the living room.
“What are you doing? I told you to shut up.”
He re-entered the kitchen and sat back down again, placing the gun back on the table at his right hand. I passed him the glass of water.
Short grunted, scooped the now powdered tablets into his mouth, and swallowed them down with a mouthful of water.
“Anyways, who cares? Little Rodney and then little Albert were getting too nervous. The girl in Sydney was starting to complain, too. Bunch of whiners.”
He started laughing, his eyes widening as the OxyContin started to take effect. Crushing up the tablets into powder and taking it that way speeds up the euphoric reaction, so I had read.
“Let’s go back in and join the ladies,” he chuckled now. “Then you and me are going to play a little more baseball.”
I walked slowly into the living room, where both Angela and Isabelle were still seated. Isabelle looked pale and now had a blanket over her body, probably placed there by Angela. This must have been the noise we’d heard from the kitchen.
Short told me to stand in front of the fireplace, beside Angela.
“You know, you’re kind of cute. Let’s see ’em,” Short said to Angela, who stared back wide-eyed at him, frozen.
Short moved closer to all of us. He was now standing right near Isabelle’s chair, about a dozen feet or so in front of Angela, who was still seated, and me standing next to her.
He extended his right hand holding the pistol with its ugly looking silencer, pointing it at Angela’s head.
“C’mon, you heard me … take your shirt off.”
Angela, still staring at him, started to undo her blouse. I let the knife drop down from my shirtsleeve into my right hand, shielded from Short’s view by the back of my hand. I had the sharp tip in my two first fingers and figured to throw it at Short’s face, and then go for the gun.
Short stared as Angela opened her blouse. His gun hand dropped a bit.
Then everything happened at once. Jerry suddenly hissed at Short from his place on Isabelle’s lap, which startled Short into bringing the gun back up and turning his head. I threw the knife underhanded, catching Short with a hit at the fleshy part of his left ear lobe as he turned.
“What the …”
Short grabbed at his left ear, which was spurting blood. The knife had bounced off his shoulder onto the carpet. He aimed his gun at me as I grabbed the fireplace poker from its stand beside me and raised it to throw. Isabelle was faster. There was a flash of yard-long steel from the right side of her recliner.
Short stared down at his right hand where his fingers used to be, blood pumping from the stumps. The gun had clattered onto the fireplace hearth tiles at my feet.
Short turned and ran.
He could move pretty fast, thanks to adrenalin plus the dose of OxyContin. By the time I was out the front door with his pistol, he had covered the distance to the barn and was heading toward the fields behind it.
I ran into the barn, pulled Cooke’s Harley off the kickstand, and mounted it. I got it started and kicked it into first gear, wheeling around Cooke’s body out of the barn and out to the field.
I’d had a series of motorbikes as a teenager, and Cooke had let me try his out a couple of times on Isabelle’s driveway. A Harley wouldn’t have been my choice to buy, but I blessed it now. I got it into second, and sat as far back as I could on the seat. The bike didn’t like the ruts in the field, and I had to let the front wheel find its own way.
Short looked over his shoulder at me. He had covered a good hundred yards of the field, half-way to the wire fence that bounded the mirror image property behind Isabelle’s. Short was flagging, stumbling, and appeared to be cradling his right arm close to his belly. He must have been pumping blood out like crazy from the stumps of his fingers running like that. I was only ninety feet or so from him now.
I realized I’d stupidly left his pistol on the barn floor, needing both hands to get the bike going. The .22 was still there, too.
No matter. I twisted the throttle of the bike and it lurched forward, delivering lots of torque to the fat rear wheel, causing the rear end to slew a little. Then the tire got a grip on the tightly packed August sunshine-hardened soil.
I just ran him down.