Chapter Twenty-two―Follow the Money II
Ozzie was the darling of the covered dish supper circuit. He thrived on
scalloped potatoes and lime jello. Harriet had never looked lovelier, everyone
said; she basked in the sunshine of their mutual devotion. And watching them
made folks happy, too. Well, not everyone and not all the time.
"Young love. Bullshit." Less than a year out of the academy, Quigley had not
been enthusiastic; last Wednesday he thought he had them but it had been a false
alarm. Dreams of glory ate away at the lawmen’s free time. They had been frozen
in a holding pattern. Their chimaera of career advancement grew more elusive
with every passing day, week, month.
This day Everlast had the tail. The Mountie's notebook entries of the four
months they had shadowed the couple's comings and goings could have been a
school girl's diaries. When after his first two weeks of watching he noticed a
pattern in the couple's lives, Everlast had whimsically divided his pages into
two columns—Casseroles and Camisoles. As he paralleled their actions, the spiral
bound notebooks he bought at the Pick N Pay filled up quickly. Detail—pages of
detail, the little things would find them out. His neat, cramped vertical script
was a catalog of comings and goings, work and daily chores, a voyeur's-eye view
of life lived as usual with no startling peaks or valleys. After two weeks and
three notebooks, doodling appeared in his margins and the entries were fewer.
Everlast hadn't shown the other two; he did not want to appear flighty. And then
a change from the routine.
Harriet's day off, the couple packed a picnic lunch, fired up Harriet's ancient
Chevrolet and headed for open country. Everlast had drawn the tail. The kid had
driven the Celebrity inland, away from the scenic vistas that attracted tourists
in their hordes each summer. After months of inactivity they were eating up the
miles. As familiar coastal wildflowers and leafy trees gave way to upland ferns
and pine forests, the Mountie found himself wishing he had thought to bring
along a sandwich, too. One hundred and twenty miles rolled by as the drive
headed for the mountains. At last at an isolated upcountry hillside school, they
pulled in to the empty playground. Everlast held his breath. Was this the
rendezvous, was here where the money was hidden away? No. They could never have
gotten away unnoticed to stash it. They had to have brought it with them.
There had been some times over the past months—was it months now?—that their
private project had had manpower problems. Champion, Everlast and Quigley had
got clogged up on availability to continue the stakeout. The demands of their
day jobs had left holes in their once careful pattern of surveillance, and the
holes were becoming more frequent as the job grew stale and their enthusiasm
flagged. Stale and sour, their private lives had gone all to hell. Time for
partying, racquetball, soccer scrum and getting laid had all been pissed away in
the golden quest—filling ninety-eight cent notebooks with doodles. But the three
and made a commitment to glory and each other. Plus a heavy investment in time
and effort. None wanted to be the first to quit, besides there had developed
that magic attachment between the keepers and the kept. Ozzie knew who they were
and what they were doing and was playing the game with them—a sure admission of
culpability. Oh, he was their man all right, no doubt about that. But to make a
collar that would stick they had to nail him with the goods—in flagrante
delicto. But when, oh Lord.
Everlast had lost sight of the pursued Chevrolet and leaned on the accelerator.
He was in a scenic tame wilderness where the forest came right down to the
twisting roadside, overwhelming the ditching. Whoa! There they were, just ahead
negotiating the next turn. Everlast hit his brakes and fell back out of sight.
The duty-mandated lapses of the Mounties and the trooper had left some cracks in
the watching of Ozzie and Harriet sufficient for them to have made a local move.
But this far? Out of the question. Conclusion, they really are on a picnic or
are here to dump the stuff away from the heat. Anyway, thought Everlast, the
subject's taking advantage of the cracks in their net assumed he knew when the
watchers would be loosening up.
That Ozzie could not know. But there was no way he could be sure. He knew he was
being watched and they knew he knew it. Any exercise, any move with the money by
Oswaldo would therefore have been prompted by fear. They had got the kid
jumped—so unnerved him that he was forced to an act of desperation or stealth.
Either way was okay; we are the besiegers of his waking hours. Endless patience
and grinding boredom—the litany of the stakeout. Any change in the observed
behavior patterns, any deviation from the usual routines of the day-to-day flow
that had established itself as the rhythm of the lives that were Harriet Hopwood
and Ozzie O'Rourke and the flag went up. If the kid got into a panic and ran or
got sighted tippy-toeing around by night in his Chuck Norris Delta Force get-up
he was bound to panic. You slip and you don't get caught you get careless and
slip again. One careless oversight leads to another. Then another. One slip too
many and they had him.
And this was it. Everlast could feel the punctuation of his glands, a thrill he
had before only felt when hunting, a fine doe in his sights. At the moment of
conception, a knot in the twisted rope of the genes, our parents too busy to
notice and otherwise passionately involved, inadvertently pass along to us,
their children—along with race, sex, handedness and eye color—an endless
capacity for self delusion. This is the human condition, and it sets us apart
from the lower animals.
Everlast was indulging this gift. He made a mistake undercover agents of every
stripe make early on in their careers—young cops, too. Everyone is young once
and kids make mistakes. It's not that the guys in the stories don't make
mistakes, it's that the guys who make mistakes don't live long enough to have
stories written about them.
Loved by women and admired by men, a quip ready to his lips, the slick,
wise-cracking private eye who survives to tell the tale is standing atop the
pyramid of natural selection. For every James Bond there are a thousand Joe
Blows who mix up the gelignite with the Milky Way bars or rip open their
client's letter bomb after a couple of fast martinis—'Here, honey, let me. You
can't be too careful.' Statistically speaking, the size of the prize dictated
that there would be higher odds for failure, and with concomitant risks.
Everlast, who even in his young career had seen too many yellow police ribbons
and chalked his share of body outlines from impact to eternal rest, forgot the
spattered hard-luck gonzos and their tales of failure. Low blood sugar combined
with the elation that this might be It—months of yeoman grunt-work climaxing in
a full bingo card—made him careless. As Everlast drove one-handed, fumbling in
the glove compartment for cheese crackers or a forgotten candy bar, he fell into
the error a statistically significant number of gumshoes make just once. He had
come to believe his own cover story.
He had been following at a distance and seeing them pull off into a schoolyard,
thought he would take a closer look. Against all common sense, the small voice
in his head told him they hadn't noticed him following. Hey, I'm just out for a
drive, right? There was one slow-moving vehicle between him and them, a late
model sedan with a blue-hair at the wheel. A sweet smell of transmission fluid
and partially burned hydrocarbons blew backwards. A brake rider—she needed a
head gasket. The terrain was steep and except for the clear stretch of a quarter
of a mile near the school, the ascending switchbacks made for dangerous passing.
His options were to pull off and join the picnic or step on the gas, look casual
and keep on going.
Everlast, trying to look like a tourist in a hurry to get to some scenery,
flashed his lights, signaled for a turn and pulled out to pass. The two cars
lined up passing the school, the senior citizen in the sedan giving him some
cover, but not enough to spoil the view. The dandelions were high in the school
lawn; a week of rain had shot them up well past the grass. Summertime and the
livin' was easy. Everlast estimated the maintenance man had not been here to mow
for at least three weeks. A rusted merry-go-round with oak seats teetered on its
pivot in a gravel play yard. This was it.
Half a mile further on, Everlast took the first downhill fork and circled back
to rejoin the switchback, park and come in close on foot. He fished his service
revolver from the glove compartment to lay it on the seat at his side. You never
knew.
Concrete block construction and white clapboard siding starting to peel, the
building was not more than a few years old. It was a single story building with
a punched out metal weather vane someone had liked in a catalog stuck atop a
colonial cupola. Patent awning window units were cranked shut against sudden
weather. Throughout their freelance gumshoe work there had been an increasing
fear of getting caught and scolded like naughty boys. Quigley had stated the
obvious one day in a deep depression. "If we win this one, we're heroes, but if
they catch on to us before we have some concrete evidence, we're going to look
like complete assholes. "Talk about blowing cover - having some high octane
legal talent descend on their activities with a peace warrant, a cease and
desist order - was infrequent. The game was still on, but it was a game only so
long as their prey played bythe same rules they did and didn't pull the panic
lever. He had not complained to the authorities about the tail they had stuck on
him, as any innocent citizen would. Champion, Everlast and Quigley viewed that
as an admission. Hunter and hunted were playing by the same rules and neither
was going to let the grownups know what was happening. A tacit admission of
guilt. Quigley's distrust of lawyers was deep and abiding. It was shared though
not to as great an extent by Champion and Everlast. The Canadians had a
different system. Over there, a cop didn't have to read a suspect his rights, he
didn't have any. On paper at least. Things were different in practice Quigley
knew, but the Mounties had a freer hand in day-to-day operations. Not so here.
And they were here—all three of them. As far as American jurisprudence was
concerned, Champion and Everlast were tourists—no hot pursuit—and poking their
noses into the private lives of citizens. Quigley had a rough and ready respect
for the forms of civilized society. Lawyers were the errand boys of the
Establishment, and the Police were its muscle, and he was damned if he was going
to let months of work go to waste. They knew the kid was their mark, it all came
down to the question of who was going to give out first. Champion, Everlast and
Quigley had the iron wills and unwavering attention spans of policemen born.
They were in this for the long run. But if it came to iron wills versus brass
balls, a nosy lawyer could really mess things up for their investigation. If a word was whispered into the right ears in the corridors of
power whence came their salary checks, mileage and uniform allowances, they
could conceivably all be back at barracks doing grounds patrol and waiting on a
panel of inquiry.
Everlast's nose pulled up short as the restraining web of his seat belt grabbed
his belly, the shoulder harness crushing his chest. He had been doing 80
kilometers per hour, about the legal speed and, coming around a blind corner
where the road ahead was obscured by a tight turn and a rock escarpment too near
the highway for the builders to blast, piled into a car parked—parked! God
damn it!—right in the fucking road. In fractional milliseconds, the pliant
webbing of Everlast's restraining harness stretched not enough to help crushing
his chest, driving the jagged edges of several broken ribs into his right lung.
There was a concussion too, as his head punched out the safety windshield,
starring it in a snowflake pattern. And a bloody nose, his only external
bleeding. In the moment of recognition before the impact, Everlast had the flash
of Ozzie jumping from Harriet's Celebrity. They had picked up on his tail. They
had seen him gunning by the school and set up a roadblock. He carried the
realization with him into a short period of unconsciousness with red, furry
edges.
Oswaldo felt a sudden thrill of fear chasing down his back as he jumped from the
car dragging the folding chair he had gone back to retrieve. He stopped to savor
it. This was it. The time of resolution, forced upon them by this one foolish
act—a childish act of spite done without any regard for its consequences. Too
late now to ask why he had left the car in the road. He had been
taunting them with his innocence; why had he become so outraged when they had
picked up the challenge, risen to the bait and moved in after him? Had it been a
shadow of malice hovering over them when Harriet and he had planned this picnic?
A weekend getaway. A drive in the country. It was boyish mischief that made
him prepare a decoy for the titillation of the watchers. He sat that morning in
the hours of dawn while Harriet slumbered on, meticulously packing a shoe box
with a discarded pair of sneakers. He packed them in tightly with wadded tissue
and newspaper; then sealed the box with a cruciform of many windings of wide,
silvery duct tape. Ozzie had made no great display of carrying the wrapped
package of sneakers to the car. But he had been uncharacteristically open in his
actions, let them make of it what they would. After packing their picnic gear,
the styrofoam bait cooler, thermos bottles, blankets, hamper and the two folding
aluminum beach chairs snugly against one another in the back seat, he returned
to the house for the final package. This he made a small but significant display
of wedging in the wheel well of the trunk along with their spare tire. That
should give them something to think about.
From the schoolyard they had watched the mountie speeding past. Ho, so he would
play at detective games with us, eh? We will have a surprise waiting for him the
next time he comes around. And he would be back again, and again—perhaps on
foot. It was the same flair for the gallant gesture that had commanded his
actions when he engaged the shadow in making small talk at the convenience store
checkout counter. Tweaking the tail of the cat. That the mountie would be
actually so confoundedly ignorant as to drive into the car parked there on the
highway was beyond comprehending. Harriet's Celebrity was a powder blue shade,
its showroom gloss oxidized by many salty winters and pounding summer suns. An
air freshener shaped like a little green pine tree hung from the rear view
mirror. An old car, all Harriet could afford, she had kept it well. The impact
emptied the ashtrays and put an accordion fold in the frame, forever locking the
driver's side door. From a standing start, the Celebrity took the hit and flew,
a textbook application of ballistic power factors and billiard table kinetics,
the mechanics of the cushion shot. The Celebrity leaped sideways up the hill,
jumping a drainage culvert, coming to rest embedded in the soft earth of the
school's approaches. For Everlast, propelled by idle curiosity and wishing he
had after all, stopped to buy a sandwich, the curve was too tight. Impatient and
hot on the trail, nosing in for a big finish to this caper, his speed was too
great and there was simply not enough time to avoid a crash. The mountie's
reflexes had the speed of youth, but nothing could have saved him. Cartilage,
tendon and bone welded together in the desperate death pressure of his foot on
the brake pedal—down, down into and through the metal floor. His brakes must
have locked at the moment of impact, desperation fusing flesh and metal.
Everlast shot across the road and down the hill, spinning one full turn with
screaming tires and smoking brakes against his careening rush. Allowing for
power lost as heat by the impact, Everlast's Lemans and Harriet's Chevrolet
parted at about 35 km/h, sharing the ride, each their separate ways till gravity
dragged them down. Harriet and Oswaldo were climbing the hill to the school,
arms full. Their picnic regalia installed in the playground, they had returned
for the folding chairs. At the report of crunching metal and screaming brakes,
they turned and stood immobilized, dropping the chairs. "Oh, my God!" Harriet's
fist went to her mouth. They watched as the Lemans nosed over in the ditch
opposite and rolled over two times.
Oswaldo felt remorse and a thrill of guilt as he ran down the hillside to help
if the man was not beyond helping. He had not thought their foolish pursuer
would have such small sense as to go speeding around the blind turns of these
mountain roads. He had left the car in the road as a gesture, not a death trap,
and now this damned fool had gone and hit it. It was a good hundred meters to
the car lying on its side, wheels spinning. Oswaldo covered the distance in
seconds. It had come to rest with the driver's side down. The man was pinned
inside, still strapped in his seatbelt, his face covered with blood. There was a
smell of gasoline and he feared fire. Standing with his feet braced on the sides
of the passenger's side door, he used his legs for leverage, forcing it open.
The mountie stirred. He was alive then.
The first shot took Oswaldo in the chest, jerking his body up into an arc, still
holding onto the door handle. The shock of the bullet brought a memory of when
he had been hit in the face during a soccer match, oh so many years ago. Half
conscious and through a haze of blood, the mountie had found his gun.
"So this is death," thought Oswaldo. "I am shot in the chest but I feel the
impact behind my nose. How peculiar." He thought of Harriet and the crucifix
above his bed at the lycée of the Sisters of St. Dominic. More bullets came and
Oswaldo could not move. His body wanted desperately to get itself away from the
hail of death but his fingers would not release their grip on the door handle.
The bullets came regularly, each a body blow, a shuddering spasm. Cock and fire,
cock and fire, the mountie slowly, painfully, emptied his pistol.
Oswaldo died, sprawled across the shattered side window, his legs jerking
fitfully. Everlast had managed to fire four more shots before passing out. He
hung trapped in his safety harness, his lungs filling with blood.
Harriet had not moved. I can't stop crying, just look at that—like rain on the
windshield. And real tears, too. How feminine. A voice not hers, of comfort and
irony, spoke in Harriet's mind: "I never recite the truth. Ineluctable
pronouncements, yes; facts, sometimes. This is policy, a perquisite of godhead,
and not open to question. I leave a hole where truth would fit if it were
available, and whomsoever feels up to slipping in his version of the way things
are is welcome to have a go at it. Religion is made not by the gods but by their
self-anointed interpreters. Sometimes they even come close."
Harriet sank to her knees in the tall grass and dandelions gone to seed, her
fist still in her mouth and heard what was her voice, she thought, saying "Ooooo..."
Later that afternoon, the man came to mow the schoolyard. He lifted her to her
feet, took her hand from her mouth and led her to the office. There he gave her
a glass of water and called for the police.
"Who says nothing ever happens in Willipaq." Tim Quigley, Maine State Police,
stared at a formica countertop. He sat in the WilCo Diner with Ed Hurley,
Champion. Champion was just in from patrol, pulling kittens out of trees and
ticketing speeders. Quigley had no nickname; he spilt stove wood and ran seven
miles a day.
Everlast was expected to live. He lay immobilized in the intensive care ward of
a Canadian hospital, his every want supplied under National Health. Of the
free-lance pursuers of Oswaldo Patricio Meléndez O'Rourke y Nuñez, that left two
to carry on, Quigley, the Maine state trooper, and Champion, a Mountie.
Champion and Everlast were constables of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the
Gendarmerie Royale du Canada, yellow-stripers. Their mothers called them Etienne
Cyr and Ed Hurley, and it was as Etienne Cyr and Ed Hurley they were recognized
by Canada Post, who brought them Christmas cards and catalogs and carried away
their income taxes.
Nothing had happened until Etienne Cyr shot their potential meal ticket: an
empty clearing, a collapsed airplane fallen on one crumpled wing, a hole in the
ground and a loose parcel of unapprehended fugitives. Nothing. With the crippled
wisdom hindsight brings, April had been their cruelest month, starting with the
sirens of spring: the scanners had been hopping and the world took on a glossy
finish. The prospect of pinning down drug fugitives and millions in cash had
shone for them brighter than the polyurethane at the Border Duckpin Lanes. The
money―their money―was thousands of miles away by now and with it, dreams of
stripes and plum postings.
Quigley was spinning a Canadian dollar coin, absently tracking it through a
coffee spill. Eleven-sided, anodized aureate bronze minted on a nickel blank, it
had the shine of new gold. The many flats of its edges made it great for
spinning. "You Canadians make pretty money."
"We spend it here. And don’t forget hockey."
"Ohhh, shit!." Quigley groaned and pounded his fist on the counter.
Behind them and across the aisle in a booth, the
Orange Virgin listened. She had shed her tears along with Harriet's and stirred
her steaming coffee with a dainty finger, pondering the human condition. "What
fools these mortals be," she quoted Puck, the Comics Weekly man, letting fall
some few forensic tears to her checkered flannel vest.
"Faretheewell, my little ones," was her whispered investiture to the departed
droplets. Her evocation carried an allusion not lost upon the tiny glistening
pearls; for they lingered longer, abiding on Morgana's heavenly lashes, hoping
to hear more before their trip to the buffalo plaid bosom, thence to evaporate
into the world of foolish men. Lifting the diminished teardrop by the tip of a
perfect finger, Morgana traced a pattern among the yellow strawflowers of the
restaurant's wallpaper. A wry smile wrinkled her nose. "So, we have till
Thursday to recreate the universe. And the tyranny the living exercise over the
non-living will continue and be called 'History'."
Bright paint, bright wallpaper, bright colors, a song of joy to the eyes, she
thought and was pleased. All through the bleak, unrelenting monochromal sameness
of winter, they celebrate me with the colors of spring. "You little sisters are
the last I shall weep for men on this caper," was her valediction to the
waterworks, a farewell to the crystal pearls of compassion. "Midsummer Night's
Dream, my dainty droplets. Am I not indeed a Shakespeare quoter, quotha?"
Morgana giggled. "Or perhaps a spearshaker, a wagglestaffer, a buxom enchantress
who knows not poppycock from floppycock. Ohhh! How ribald I have become! Go
girls―make your sacrifice―and hurry to join your sisters in the River of the
World."
Picking up the phrase as it nudged affectionately at his mind, Champion gestured
expansively. "That ocean out there," he expostulated, "Is the River of the
World."
"Oh Jesus, not you, too," said Quigley, giving the dollar coin with the bird on
its backside an extra hard flick, propelling it through the coffee spills and
over the edge of the counter. The bird was a loon, the lonesome augur of misted
mornings, a shivery cry low on the waters of the inland lakes, below the mists
calling the fish to rise. The Canadians called the coin a ‘Loonie’ when they
thought about it, which was seldom. The Americans never thought about it. Hardly
the stuff of magic.
"Tee-hee, gotcha!" Morgana scooped the loonie from the air. The goddess strode
to the deck of the diner on posts above the bay. Pulling the pins from her
coiled hair, she shook free the nine three-stranded braids to fall below her
waist. "Oh Womb of the Universe, give me strength that this throw be true." With
a twist of her shoulders, elbow high and lined with her ear, hip and elbow
snapped together, her whole body a catapult, a mighty engine of propulsion in
the best form of the Canadian fast-pitch softball leagues.
Morgana dusted off her palms, a meat-and-potatoes enchantress well pleased with
a job well done. So it flew.
The wind was rising to follow the flight of the loon and, on the rocky shore
below stood a young moose. Sensing her presence, Morgana entered her mind, and
pleased with what was there, stayed a while to chat. While a cyclonic spiral
whipped about the feet of the moose, Morgana cried out to the flying golden
coin.
"Go, Oswaldo Patricio Meléndez O'Rourke y Nuñez, follow the loon, but in spirit,
for you are too rare a treasure to spend. Stay with us and share your thoughts,
for there is a long, hard winter of the soul coming on and we shall take some
comfort from their innocent wonder."
Leaning on the rail, she watched as her whirlwind joined the flight of the metal
bird.
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