Chapter 15 Leave It Alone
Luke
Quarter to four, and Ryan was gone.
He grabbed the coat off his chair, Reid already at the side door with his keys out. Don’t wait for me. Reid said something and Ryan laughed. The short one. The one I’d have done a lot to be on the end of.
The door shut. The room got bigger the way it does when his chair is empty.
Home was three blocks. I could have gone. But that meant sitting in the apartment alone, waiting up for a man who’d told me not to. So I stayed. Told myself it was the case. There’s always the case.
The work goes better in an empty room. I killed half the lights and pulled up the corporate registry, a tab at a time.
Paragon Capital Holdings. Incorporated 2008, a Financial District address.
The board was a row of stand-ins, a Bay Street firm and a numbered company and two more shells behind those.
The money reached Paragon through a Delaware shell that owned nothing and existed only as a name on a page.
Before that, a numbered company in Etobicoke, a mailbox in a strip plaza, no office.
I’d been sitting on that address for weeks.
I worked the director names down the list and cross-checked them. Nothing under them, same as every other night. Widened the search. Narrowed it. Ran the Delaware number against the Canadian side and hit the wall I always hit. Four names that weren’t names.
I closed the window. Opened it again. Same four.
I got a coffee from the machine in the corner. It was bad. I drank half of it at the window, the lot below empty and wet under the one lamp that worked. The rest went cold by the keyboard.
Half seven, the phone lit on the desk.
Reid’s buying me dinner. Allegedly there’s beer. Eat without me.
Reid. I turned the phone face down. Then I turned it back and read it again. I set it down and went back to the registry. The jealousy turned over once and settled. I’d been trying to starve it all day and it hadn’t gone.
The cleaner came through near eight, cart wheels and music leaking from her earbuds. She wiped the far desks, swapped the liner in the corner bin, nodded at me going past. I nodded back.
Then she was gone and I realized I didn’t know her name. All this time here, fifty nods, and I’d never asked. It bothered me tonight. I put it down with everything else.
Murphy came out from behind the glass at quarter to nine, coat already on his arm.
“Go home, Hawley.”
“Soon.”
“You said soon an hour back.” He fed an arm into the coat. “It’ll be the same wall in the morning. That’s the whole point of a wall.” He worked the second sleeve, did the top button, looked at my screen and let whatever he thought stay off his face. “You’ve been on that since he walked out.”
“I had the time.”
He held the look a beat longer than he needed to. “Night,” he said.
“Night, Inspector.”
The building emptied out around him. A phone ringing somewhere and giving up. The vents. I ran the four names one more time. Still nothing under them.
Half nine. I locked the shorthand in the drawer and lifted my coat off the hook.
Three blocks. Parliament down to Carlton, the left, the stairs. A hundred times in the dark, more than a hundred. I could have done it with my eyes shut.
Which was the trouble. So could anyone who’d stood across the street and watched me do it.
Outside it had gone cold and wet, the road throwing the streetlights back at me in long yellow runs down the block. Slow night. A couple ahead of me peeled off at the first corner. A streetcar slid past on Carlton with its windows lit and not one face turned to the glass.
The street had the late sound to it, traffic thin enough you could hear the holes in it. Wind in the gaps between buildings. My coat. A door pulling shut down some side street I’d already passed.
I walked.
A man with a dog crossed at the intersection, the lead gone tight. A car went through with one indicator blinking and the other dead.
A van sat wrong against the curb a block on.
No markings, dark cab, engine off, and the nose of it three feet off the curb instead of tucked in tight the way you leave a thing for the night. Three feet out is sloppy or it’s deliberate. I clocked it and filed it and kept my stride. You don’t slow for a van.
The first corner. The light was out.
It had been burning the night before. I’d come through here at half ten and it had thrown my shadow down the wall. Tonight it was dark, and a man was standing in the dark it left.
Hands in his coat. No phone lighting his face, no smoke, no stop behind him and no door beside him, nothing a corner has for a man at that hour. Just standing in the one patch of dark on the street with his hands where I couldn’t see them.
Set there. Placed.
I kept my pace. You don’t break stride on a maybe. Loose hands, even feet, let it grow into something or fall apart. I went past the van without giving it my eyes and put my ears on what was behind me.
His boots came off the wall.
I didn’t stop. I slowed at a shopfront, a jeweler’s with the cases stripped and dark for the night, and read the glass. My shape. His behind it, forty feet back. I moved and he moved. I eased off and he eased off, holding the gap like a man who’d been told to hold it.
Not a maybe anymore.
My thumb found the phone. Call who. Tell them what. A man is walking behind me on a public street. I’d waved off a hundred of those myself. By the time it’s more than a man walking, a call won’t reach you in time.
I put it away.
I’d want the hands.
Up ahead the van’s engine caught.
It didn’t pull off into the road. It came down off the curb slow, no lights, and laid itself across the mouth of the street sideways, long flank to me, and stopped there with the engine ticking and the headlamps dark.
Not going anywhere. Not parking anywhere.
That was the trap. Not surveillance. Habit. They hadn’t needed to tail me anywhere. They’d only needed to know me, and somebody did.
One behind. The van across the front. And between them the laneway, black, its own light dead too.
Two men came out of the van. Gloved, both of them, the doors shut quiet behind them, no rush in any of it. Three now, with the one at my back, and they fanned to their places the way men move through something they’ve walked before. Each one taking an angle. Each angle one more way out, closed.
Three. A crew and a message.
I went for it.
Off the curb on the angle, no tell, no wind-up, everything the coat would give me.
The one behind me was quicker.
I heard the sprint open up and did the thing the sprint hadn’t booked for. I planted and spun into it.
He was all the way committed, weight thrown forward, nowhere to put it. My forearm caught him across the throat and folded him. His feet went out from under and he hit the wet road flat on his back and stayed there making the sounds a man makes learning to breathe again.
One.
The pair off the van were on me before he landed and I got my spine to the laneway brick. Their ground, but the wall was mine now. You don’t outrun three and a vehicle. You shrink the math. One side open. One good hand. One of them at a time.
The first brought a bat. Big men love a tool.
I caught the load in his shoulder before the swing came, stepped in under the arc, and let it whistle itself out behind my head.
Put my right hand into him below the ribs with my legs stacked behind it and the noise he made wasn’t a yell, just everything in his lungs leaving at once.
Took the nose with my elbow coming back.
He folded to the ground. The bat rang off the asphalt and rolled.
Two.
The third had a head on him. No swing. He came in low and got both arms locked around my middle and ran me back into the brick. The back of my head hit hard and the street blurred for a second. He had me wrapped, both arms pinned, his weight pasting me to the wall.
I got his ear. Hooked it short and vicious, twice, every pound left in the right arm. His grip stuttered, slid down to the hem of the coat, his head torqued away, and for one clean breath the road in front of me opened.
The store. Twenty feet.
I ran.
Six steps was as far as it went.
He peeled off the wall and took my legs from the flank, low and fast, his whole weight and the length of Parliament behind it, and the ground swung up at me sideways.
All three were up again.
I got the forearms over my head, knees up into my chest, made the smallest shape I could and held it.
Cost them their footing when a boot drifts in close.
Don’t roll flat. Stay tight, stay awake, take the ones you can’t slip and be alive at the bottom of it.
The yard taught me that. The gym taught me the rest.
The boots came in level and unhurried. Ribs. The base of the spine. The left forearm took something hard twice in the same place and went numb to the fingers. A heel came down on my laced hands and pressed, slow, like a man checking a fire’s out.
I made a sound I didn’t know I had in me and bit down on the next one.
A car alarm went off over me somewhere, the yellow hazards strobing the wet road, on, off, on. And over it, I could hear a few different voices, coming closer.
The boots stopped.
The alarm cycled out and quit, and the street folded back into its own low noise, traffic two streets over, the city not noticing.
The boots backed off. The way men back off a job that’s finished. One of them stooped and lifted the bat off the road.
Then one crouched down level with my face. His breathing was even. No heave, no shake. He’d done this before. It cost him nothing.
“Leave it alone,” he said.
No what. No or. He stood, and the three of them walked back to the van at the pace of a shift letting out, unhurried, nothing to run from. The signal came on. They pulled off the curb and vanished.
The street kept its quiet.
I lay there a moment, working through the pain.
Right palm flat to the wet road. The left arm was slow to answer. I pushed off the right, got one knee under me, then the other, and reached the brick. The first full breath pulled hard at my ribs. I breathed shorter after that.
Up the wall an inch at a time until I had my feet.
I stood and waited for the street to quit moving.
The phone was eight feet off in the gutter. I took a step for it and the world tipped, so I caught the wall and breathed through it, short and steady, till it came back to level. Then down, slow, and I had it, and back up.
The crack ran corner to corner. Lit underneath, everything working behind the break.
Not 911. Not the division radio. What this was about sat locked in a drawer two streets back. It couldn’t end up in a call log with my name on it.
I called Murphy.
Two rings.
“Hawley.”
“Keep it off the radio.” It came out of me low and wrong at the edges, wet where it had no business being. A television behind him, then no television. “Parliament. The laneway above Carlton. Three of them and a van, five minutes gone. I’m up.”
“How bad.”
“Up enough to argue. No ambulance. Come get me yourself and run me home, or I’ll make it on my own. No hospital.”
The quiet on his end changed weight. When he came back the give had gone out of his voice. “Say that again.”
“No hospital. It goes in a system the second they wheel me in. Assault on a detective. A report, my name on it, every reason I’m down here on a file someone can pull. Weeks I’ve left no paper. I’m not starting tonight.”
“You’re going to listen to me.” Flat and hard now.
A door slammed on his end. Keys off a hook.
Fast feet. “I’ve watched you do this. Walk it off.
Swallow it. Call it nothing. That’s why you’re in a gutter and those men are driving home under the limit.
You think the silence keeps the work safe.
The silence is what put you on the ground. ”
“Inspector.”
“I’m not finished.” He didn’t raise his voice. He bore down instead, which was worse. “The ambulance is rolling and you’ll be in it. St. Michael’s, off the air. The paper is mine to handle and I’ll handle it. Your job is to stop bleeding and do as you’re told. Are we clear.”
I didn’t answer fast enough for him.
“Hawley. Stay on that wall and wait for me. Don’t get up. Don’t wave them off. Don’t talk those medics into letting you walk. You wait. For me. Say it.”
“I’ll wait.”
“Good.”
He was gone.