Buffalo Jump Read online

  Then there was Jenn, a six-foot blonde who liked to tell people she was the shortest of four Estonian sisters. She was thirty but could pass for early twenties, with eyes as blue as a prairie sky and a smile that could make a man walk happily into a lamppost. She was also, to the chagrin of sighted straight men everywhere, openly gay. She lived with a lovely nurse practitioner named Sierra Lyons, and I got along better with both of them than I ever had with Camilla. As a trained investigator, I suppose that should have told me something.

  When I first joined Beacon five years earlier, I had assumed most of the employees would be beefy ex-cops who’d put in their thirty years and wanted to top up their pensions. Clint quickly put that notion to rest.

  “Cops might know how to conduct an investigation,” he said, “but they’ve always had the badge to back them up. The authority to enter someone’s home, search the place, compel them to answer questions. We don’t have that luxury. People don’t want to talk to us, they close the door and that’s that. We have to be good talkers and better listeners. If the job is surveillance or security, give me an ex-cop. If it’s money tracking, give me an ex-accountant or banker. But for undercover work or interviews, I’d hire an actor or a social worker before an old cop.”

  “You were a cop,” I said.

  “Yes, and after I hired myself I realized my mistake and vowed not to repeat it.”

  So we had people like Andy, who before joining Beacon had been a bartender, a hot walker at Woodbine Racetrack, a warehouse worker and a night watchman. People like Jenn, who had been a member of a women’s sketch comedy troupe until she realized she’d always be looking up at the poverty line. And people like me, who’d had more false starts and accidental careers than I care to admit, including waiter, construction worker, ski guide and martial arts instructor. Among other things.

  I was just settling into my chair when Andy and Jenn exited one of the meeting rooms. “Hi guys,” I said. Andy said hi—a mouthful for him—and Jenn gave me the kind of smile that made me wish she were straight or that I were Sierra Lyons.

  “How you doing?” she asked.

  “Not too bad,” I lied. “Where’s Franny? Monday morning flu again?”

  “Haven’t heard a word.”

  I fired up my computer and logged on to our media monitoring software package. If Beacon Security had been mentioned anywhere in print or broadcast media, transcripts would be waiting for me. I had customized my profile so it would also deliver stories that mentioned certain competitors, the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, which oversees our profession, and other keywords.

  What my career had come to: a glorified clerk.

  It wasn’t hard to predict the lead story in today’s Toronto papers: the shooting death of Kylie Warren outside the Eaton Centre, at the city’s busiest corner, in the middle of a sun-kissed Sunday afternoon. Kylie was the kind of young woman Toronto loves: athletic, blonde, an achiever from a good Leaside family with a bright future on Bay Street after completing both a law degree and the Canadian Securities Course.

  Each paper had slightly differing accounts, depending on the witnesses they interviewed, but a rough consensus emerged: one group of four or five black teens walking south on Yonge came across another similar-sized group walking north. Words were spoken. Respect not paid. Shoves exchanged. Guns pulled. As one man fled across the street, another fired three shots at him. Two shots hit the wall of the restaurant Kylie was leaving. The third took most of her head off. The shooter had been identified as Dwight Junior Torrance, whose lengthy record included numerous assault, drug and weapons charges. He had been deported to his native Jamaica twice already, but kept slipping back into Canada, no doubt for the climate.

  The widest coverage was in the city’s only tabloid, the Clarion, since the shooting brought together three of its most urgent concerns: guns, good-looking girls and the ineffectiveness of the left-leaning latte-loving mayor and Toronto elite. “Year of the Gun!” the headline screamed. The coverage included a two-page spread in which every person shot to death in June—a record twenty-six—was memorialized. Almost every face was young and black. Some darker-skinned, some lighter. Some with shaved heads, some with dreads or braided rows. Apart from Kylie Warren, there was only one other white face: Kenneth Page, a fifty-two-year-old pharmacist with a glorious head of grey hair and ruddy complexion, shot to death in a carjacking. Killed for nothing, like Kylie.

  Until very recently, guns had been relatively rare in Toronto, whose citizens tended to kill each other with knives, beer bottles, fists, boots or any blunt object at hand. But guns were everywhere now, sweeping out of pockets, waistbands, glove compartments, backpacks and school lockers, bearing down on people like Kylie and Kenneth Page. Like me and Colin MacAdam.

  I’d been on the other side of guns once—the shooting side—and hadn’t liked it any better. I knew all too well what guns could do, to both the victim and the shooter. I told Clint when I took the job that I wouldn’t accept any assignment that required me to carry a gun. He laughed and told me to relax, that Toronto wasn’t L.A.

  Of course, he probably wouldn’t trust me with a stapler now, but that was fine with me.

  It was lunchtime by the time I finished the media review, including all the weekend editions. I ordered in a roast beef sandwich from the deli on the corner and was just tucking into it when François Paradis made his entrance.

  He was a big physical presence, Franny, with a grand black pompadour he vowed never to change and a booming voice that switched effortlessly back and forth between English and French, joking and cursing eloquently in both official languages. He was a few years older than me, kept fit at the gym and seemed to enjoy his life as much as anyone nearing forty without much to show for it. Which could be me if I didn’t pick up my game soon.

  “Good afternoon,” I said.

  “Like hell,” he groaned.

  “So what is it today? Flu? Asthma acting up?”

  “Neither,” he winked. “Her name is LaReine, maudit Christ, and she rode me all night like a bull. Big black girl, eh, has an ass like two melons. Sacrament, I never had it like that before. I’m afraid to take a leak, eh? My thing’s so tired he can’t lift his head to see the toilet. I’m afraid I’ll piss all over my shoes.”

  “Not the Bruno Maglis.”

  “Any coffee going?” he said. “I need one bad, my friend.”

  “Might be some in the kitchen.”

  “Don’t suppose you’re heading that way.”

  “Don’t suppose so.”

  “Listen,” he said, leaning forward and dropping his voice. “Can you help me out with one thing?”

  “Like?”

  “The case I’m on, this nursing home thing. I met the client Friday and I was supposed to type up my notes but I had a date Friday after work—”

  “With LaReine?”

  He looked puzzled. “What? No, no, I met her just last night. Friday was this girl Micheline, friend of my ex-wife. I always wanted to plant her when I was married but I was trying to be a good husband back then. Stupid me, eh? So I ran into her at the track and I went for it, tabernac, and she was everything what I hoped for. Now I just have to make sure my ex finds out about it.”

  “Which ex?”

  “Eh? Oh, Mireille, of course. Vicki doesn’t give a crap anymore.”

  “So you ran into this girl at Woodbine?”

  “Best luck I’ve had there in weeks. I even hit a four-hundred-and-twenty-dollar trifecta.”

  “But you said you had a date.”

  “When?”

  “You said you couldn’t type up your notes because you had a date. But your date was someone you ran into once you were already at the track.”

  Franny slumped in his chair and threw up his hands with a smile. “You got me,” he said. “Caught me in my own lie. That is why you are a rising star—”

  “Was.”

  “Come on. See how you picked up my little fib?”

>   “Butter the other side later, Franny,” I said. “You bugger off to the track and I have to type up your notes?”

  “Clint said you were here to help if I needed it. And I do.” He wheeled his chair closer. I could smell a musk of cologne, booze, coffee and, presumably, LaReine. He handed me a chrome microcassette recorder and said, “Double-spaced, please. Before end of business today is fine.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Buffalo: the previous March

  Barry Aiken entered his garage from the laundry room off the kitchen, so it wasn’t until he opened the outside door that he felt the coldness of the rain and the bite of the wind. A raw, late winter day in Buffalo, still a few weeks shy of spring. Barry had to open the garage door by hand because the remote hadn’t worked in weeks: the only loser on Lincoln Parkway getting his face wet opening the door to the outside world.

  He heard the rumble of thunder in the distance, felt the dampness in his bones. Shivered and zipped his leather bomber as high as it would go. Barry hated driving to the west side but that’s where Kevin was, and Kevin had the supply; Barry was all demand. He patted his jacket pocket, the inside one that buttoned shut, to make sure he had his wallet. He didn’t like carrying this much cash, but what else was he going to do? Offer to write Kevin a cheque? Ask him if he took plastic? Right, then hang around until he stopped laughing.

  Barry aimed his fob at the side of his Honda CR-V and heard it chirp as the lock disengaged. He got in and eased the seat back and adjusted the mirrors. Amy had been the last one to drive and he was much taller than she was, six-one to her five-five. He started the engine and put the gearshift in reverse, then put it back in park and turned off the engine. Got out of the car and retreated to a corner of the garage that was sheltered from the wind and the neighbour’s view. He opened his silver-plated cigarette case—both the case and the bomber jacket had once been his dad’s—and slipped out a thin joint.

  Just half, he told himself, to take the edge off, get him to Kevin’s and back. He needed to calm down. Needed something to calm him down. Until he saw Kevin, a joint would have to do. He lit up and inhaled deeply, holding it in his lungs, watching smoke spiral off the lit end. The neighbours would smell it if they were outside, but so what? It wouldn’t be the first time. He exhaled and inhaled again, holding the smoke in until his lungs told him to cut that shit out and take in some air. He blew out a good-sized cloud and took one more hit, then butted the joint carefully against the cinder-block wall of the garage and put the remnant back in the case.

  No more, he told himself. Not until you get home. Don’t want to go past mellow into paranoid. Don’t want to be all red-eyed if you get pulled over for some reason. Especially on the way back.

  Thus fortified, Barry backed out of his driveway and drove down Lincoln Parkway, a wide boulevard with fine houses on large treed lots. That he lived in one of Buffalo’s more affluent areas was due more to his father’s efforts than to his own. His dad had left Barry the house when he passed away two years ago, and he and Amy had been more than happy to leave their frame semi near D’Youville College and live close to the Albright-Knox Gallery and the park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Live as his dad had, in his dad’s colonial-style brick house with the white portico in front, on a street where the neighbours were all professionals, just as his dad had been.

  Asked what he did, Barry would say graphic designer. True enough but not in the sense it had once been. He had started out in fine arts, like everyone else in his sixties circle, and eventually had turned to Mac-based design to leverage his modest talent into a livable wage. He had been an in-house designer for more than twenty years, the last twelve at the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority, churning out pamphlets, brochures, reports and newsletters until the latest round of cutbacks claimed him. Why keep a middle-aged man on staff with benefits when work could be farmed out to twenty-two-year-old techies straight out of college who knew all the latest design programs and would charge half the price, the bony-butted pimply little shits.

  So now he was freelancing out of his home but work was hard to find. Maybe his lifestyle was catching up with him, or maybe he was just getting old, but he didn’t feel as sharp as he once did. Things didn’t click like they used to. He’d still be trying to master the latest page-making software when the company would release a new version. He couldn’t put in sixteen-hour days like cyberpunks fuelled by junk food, caffeine and the inexhaustible energy of their youth. His income had tailed off dramatically. For now he had modest savings and a decent stock portfolio his dad had left him, but there wasn’t enough to keep Barry and Amy going until their pensions kicked in. Thank God, thank God, thank God they had never had kids. Amy had wavered in her late thirties but Barry had held fast and hadn’t he been right? Look at them now. How would they manage if they had teenagers? Amy wasn’t faring any better than he was, financially or otherwise. Who needed a piano teacher with arthritis, barely able to play the notes her students stumbled through?

  The worst thing about being laid off—worse than the drop in income or the blow to whatever self-esteem had accrued to him during a relatively unaccomplished life—had been the loss of his dental, health and prescription drug benefits. As a municipal employee, he’d had a good plan that covered Amy as well. Now they were shopping for a plan they could afford and having no luck at all.

  Barry switched on his headlights and set the wipers to high as he drove toward Elmwood. Humps of snow were still visible on some lawns, so black with soot they looked like magma. Not even noon but almost dark, wind blowing the rain hard against the windshield. Remind me again why I live in Buffalo, Barry thought.

  ’Cause you got no fucking choice.

  He had been born in Buffalo fifty-five years ago, the only child of a surgeon and a homemaker, his mom dying of breast cancer when he was fourteen. He had never lived anywhere else. Where could he and Amy go at their age? How would they find someone like Kevin in another town?

  His dad had moved to Buffalo from Brooklyn after med school to take up residency at Roswell Park and had genuinely loved the town. Loved its history, its architecture, its smallness and slower pace. Well, you’d really love it now, Dad, Barry thought. It’s smaller than ever, fewer than 300,000 people, maybe half the population of its heyday. When his mom and dad had arrived in 1949, Buffalo had been a Great Lakes port thriving on shipping, steelmaking and manufacturing. With those industries now in decline, and little to replace them, it was just another Rust Belt relic closing in on itself, best known for lake-effect storms that dumped snow three feet at a time and a football team that went 0-for-4 in Super Bowls.

  Some Buffalo Bills player, he forgot who, once said after leaving for warmer climes: “Buffalo isn’t the end of the world. But you can see it from there.”

  Barry could feel the tightness in his hip spreading up his back and under his right shoulder blade, the one that’d been going into spasm lately. God, getting old sucked. It wasn’t just the hip, the leg, the back. Everything was starting to go. His eyesight: two new prescriptions in the last three years. His hearing, especially the right ear. Waking up mornings stiff all over, from his neck to his ankles.

  Stiff everywhere but where it counted.

  Barry had always pictured himself staying fit and virile into old age. He knew he still looked good enough. He had all his hair and wore it stylishly long. He thought he could pass for forty-five in the right light. He still had a couple of guitars around the house and could play passable rhythm if called upon. He wore hand-tooled cowboy boots and faded genuine Levis. No pre-washed designer crap; he had denim cred, goddammit. None of it changed the fact that he was closer to the end of his life than to the beginning. The vertical lines on his face were practically furrows. His jowls were beginning to sag. A wattle was forming under his chin. His feathered hair was greying. His body was betraying him at every opportunity, especially in the bedroom. Amy was still a gamer, up for pretty much anything, but lately even her most attentive ministra
tions had been for naught.

  It could be worse, Barry told himself. You could be Larry Foti, who dropped dead of a heart attack before his fiftieth birthday. Or the guy who had worked next to him for six years at the housing authority, Marc Ormond. He had a cerebral hemmorhage in his sleep. His wife found him in the morning cold as ice, blood coming out of his ears and nose. People his age, his peers, his co-workers and old school chums, were dying of natural causes. Heart attacks, strokes and all kinds of cancer: the breast, the prostate, the blood, the brain, for God’s sake.

  He stopped at a red light. Through rain-blurred windows he could see the people on the sidewalks were mostly black or Hispanic. One kid with a bandana under a tilted ball cap pushed off the wall and ambled toward Barry’s car.

  Turn green, he implored the light. He felt like an idiot, carrying so much cash in his wallet. If he got mugged, that’s the first thing they’d grab. A real pro would have thought of something better—like putting the money in a crumpled drive-thru bag under the seat. Sure, now I think of it, he berated himself. Why when it’s always too late?

  Barry had nothing against black people. He was just scared shitless of them. He believed it was a class thing more than a race thing. A black doctor wouldn’t scare him. Or a black lawyer or actor or accountant. But the guys outside his car now were clearly not members of the professions, with their combative stares, baggy pants, untied runners, caps turned this way, that way, any way but straight. Barry was sure the one coming toward the car could see right through the car window, through the leather jacket and into his wallet stuffed with cash. Turn fucking green, he pleaded silently. Maybe he could outrun these guys if he had to. How fast could they run with their pants down around their thighs and their running shoes unlaced?