"Oh."

"What did you think I said?"

All my purchases went back to the van and then I went to the party supply store.

"Greetings."

The place was a two-storey brick building with a bright neon sign reading PARTY HEARTY PARTY HEARTY.

The clerk was a fairly unattractive, black-haired man wearing a French maid's outfit. I didn't answer his first greeting so he tried again.

"May I help you?"

"Umm. No. I'll just look around."

He nodded serenely and went back to data entry. I found a plastic pail with handle to hold my selections. The store was big, maybe twenty aisles, and I wandered back and forth until I had found what I needed.

"Did you find everything you needed?"

"Yep."

He rang it through and came up with a big chunk of money. Press-on instant tattoos good enough to look like homemade ones, cheap sungla.s.ses in a variety of styles, cheap gla.s.ses with plain gla.s.s in the lenses, a fake scar and two fake warts that looked surprisingly good, a plain black eye patch, cotton pads for changing the shape of a face, some good-quality buck teeth to fit over real ones. Even a decent wig of short, graying hair and a novelty voice changer, an idiot toy to make you sound like an alien.

On my way back to the car I detoured to the hardware store, where I picked up a new Dremel and a selection of cutting, drilling, and other heads. At a donut shop inside the store, I got the morning edition of the newspaper, and at the key-cutting place by customer service, I had two extra copies made of Walsh's car keys and one of his house keys. On my way out I saw a small kiosk selling cellular phones and I stopped and stared.

An idea was coming to me. Now, you have to understand that professional crooks don't like cell phones. There's no security, anyone with the right equipment can listen in.

Like Scott MacKenzie, a bank robber I'd worked with once or twice, used to say, "Just lie down and spread your legs. You will be getting f.u.c.ked."

He'd believed in tailored dark suits, good guns, magnum sh.e.l.ls, eight-cylinder engines in big cars, hollow point rounds, buckshot, and stocking masks. The cops had caught him in a crossfire outside a Regina credit union and put more than eighty rounds through his suit.

But cell phones did have their uses. I walked up to the guy there getting ready to shut down.

"Hi. Just a few questions, how do the payments work?"

He was about eighteen and tired of standing in a hardware store selling technology many of his customers only had contempt for.

"Hi. 'Kay. You pay for the phone here. You pick the plan you want off the list. You sign up for three, six, or twelve months. That's it."

"What kind of ID do I need?"

"Nothing really."

Five minutes later I walked out two hundred poorer with the cheapest model cell phone possible in my pocket and the cheapest possible plan in place. I had registered as Ken Graham with a fict.i.tious address, job, and other pertinent data.

The only thing that had been real had been the money I'd paid.

Back at the van, I closed the door firmly before looking over my purchases. Most of the bulk was made up of cardboard boxes, plastic wrap, and so on. When all that was removed, I was left with a very full backpack and a slightly less full canvas shoulder bag. First I took the garbage out and stuffed it into a big bin behind a bakery, then I drove the van to a parking lot serving a restaurant across the street from another shopping mall.

With the bags in hand, I cleaned the van down with a rag soaked in gasoline siphoned from the tank. It made my head hurt but was guaranteed to ruin any fingerprints. Then I propped a copy of the current Winnipeg Sun Winnipeg Sun on the steering wheel and put my new copies of Walsh's keys in the ignition. The original ones went back into the case under the van. I unfastened the stolen licence plates and dropped them into a bag for later disposal. on the steering wheel and put my new copies of Walsh's keys in the ignition. The original ones went back into the case under the van. I unfastened the stolen licence plates and dropped them into a bag for later disposal.

Then I came back and took a Polaroid of the paper with the keys prominently visible.

On the back I printed with the pen held straight up: "The son of a b.i.t.c.h Walsh is lying, he lent me the van, how could I have stolen it if he gave me the keys?" That went into an oversized envelope, which I addressed to the Manitoba Public Insurance Agency and dropped into a mailbox on my way to the bus stop. I had ten minutes to spare so I went into the mall and bought a bouquet of roses. Only then did I get on a bus towards home and sleep.

Moving through town towards home, I went from hedge to hedge and down alleys and across small parks and it took more time than I'd thought and twice I had unpleasant almost-encounters with dogs. I started to wonder about my sanity and desire to avoid surveillance. By the time I got home, it was past eleven and Claire was asleep on the futon upstairs with Renfield on my side of the bed. Her arm was thrown possessively over the dog and I had to nudge him hard before he left.

"You have an unnatural relationship with that dog."

She sounded sleepy. "Means nothing to me. Nothing. There's only you."

"Likely story."

She cuddled up to my naked back and kissed my neck. "Have a good day?"

"Well, I met a nice man in a French maid's outfit. You'd like him."

She laughed. "I let you out too much."

"I also bought you flowers."

She practically purred. "Good boy."

36.

I woke up before four and crept out before Claire and Fred woke up. Renfield noticed but accepted a large piece of cheese as a bribe for silence. The night before, Claire had made up a half-dozen sandwiches for lunch with a gallon plastic jug of weak tea with lemon. That went into the backpack and then I headed out the rear door and cut through yards and down alleys.

It took me ten minutes to reach the park near the river, where I found an overgrown thicket of brush. There I settled down and watched my back trail for the next hour. While I waited I ate a sandwich and watched to see if anyone was following and when I was sure I wasn't being tailed, I cut out across alleys and backyards. I moved that way as long as I could until the river started to have houses and then I cut back towards Main. Once, to my surprise, I startled a deer along the riverbank that bolted abruptly into the false dawn, its tawny hide speckled with dew and its fat, little, white tail flashing a warning I couldn't understand.

At a grubby motel I phoned for a cab. A half-hour later I was crouched in the empty and sere field behind Walsh's house, getting ready to start generating some pressure.

A smart German general named Model once told his subordinates to "Attack, regain the initiative, impose your will on the enemy." He had used the line during a war he lost but it struck me as good advice.

Later on, he and his army ended up surrounded so he surrendered his troops and shot himself in the head. But it was still good advice.

I was about two hundred yards out and had the Bushnell scope from Walsh's house focused on his property. Nothing was happening, though, so when I got bored I would flip the scope over to the house two doors down, where an anorexic-looking woman in her early twenties was doing aerobics naked in front of her wide-screen TV showing CNN. When she was done, I guess she was over-stimulated because she climbed onto her bed and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed with a big yellow vibrator she kept in the top drawer of her bedside table.

At that range and with that magnification I could see she shaved everything-and the phone number on the cell phone propped up on her purse. I noted the number down.

It was about eight when she finished and I was trying to decide if I should buy Claire a vibrator when Walsh came out of his house and climbed into the Corolla I'd seen before, his second car, probably. The scope was so good I could even read the little sticker by the rear licence plate, "Don't Mess With Texas." When he drove away I flipped the scope back onto the bedroom of the self-help girl and left the scope there before retracing my path about half a mile to where the Schmengis brothers had their auto-wrecking and salvage yard.

There were crows in the sky cawing for love, and seagulls too, but those were looking for food and much quieter about it. I had decided that Claire didn't need a vibrator, and if she did I'd get her a smaller one, the other one intimidated me. Around the front of the Schmengis yard was a narrow access road but a chain stretched across the entryway to the yard itself. Hanging from the chain was a large sign that read "Closed. Back in fifteen minutes," but it was old and tattered, as though it had been there for a long time.

Which was fine with me. I used the cell phone to call a cab and made it back downtown in forty minutes. Right beside the police station was a half-open concrete parking area, full of ramps, elevators, s.p.a.ce for anything up to and including an SUV. I figured Walsh would either be parking there or in the parking lot under the station house itself.

Inside the building, security was pretty good with wide-angle-lensed cameras in the corners and more outside the elevators and fire doors. Across the street, though, was an open area with a phone kiosk so I went there and dialed Crime Stoppers.

The novelty voice shifter filled my hand and to the end of it I had taped a cleaned-out soup can to add resonance. To top it off, I spoke in a nasal, atonal voice, turning me into a nasal, atonal Darth Vader talking out of the bottom of an empty well.

"There's a guy called Sam Parker who lives in the North End of Winnipeg, I don't know where. He just scored a Taurus 44-magnum pistol off me along with a half box of Teflon-coated rounds. I think he's gonna use it to pop a cop."

The old woman on the other end became real excited and I waited 'til she shut up.

"How do I know? 'Cause Teflon rounds are for busting up Kevlar vests, you ..."

I let it trail off.

"Right. So what's the number I need to get my reward?"

She gave it to me and I hung up and went home.

37.

I spent the rest of the day cleaning house with Claire and making plans for the barbecue. My new purchases stayed in the bags and I figured there was no chance the cops would be doing a surprise raid on the house. Not after last time.

In fact, I imagined Atismak getting the report and putting a little tick against Walsh's name and going about his business.

At ten I asked if Claire minded making a phone call from any downtown club she chose to name.

"Any particular phone call?"

"Yep. A very specific one to a very specific lady. Don't leave a message, though, either talk to her directly or hang up."

"Right ..."

"And it would help if you sound drunk ..."

"Sure."

I spent ten minutes explaining while she dressed in blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater.

"So I'm a neighbor to this woman, I saw someone in the field behind her place with a big camera pointed right at her place. I don't want to be involved but feel that girls have to stick up for each other. Right?"

"Bingo."

"Don't say that. I'll call from a gay bar, then."

"A gay bar?"

She smiled sweetly. "Yep. It's a great reason not to give a name. Repressed lesbian longing ..."

After she left I realized she was enjoying this far too much.

The next morning I was up before dawn and put together a bag before catching the bus downtown. I changed into a new jacket, hat, sungla.s.ses, and pants in a restroom under a big mall and then slipped into the service area through a locked but poorly sealed door in the corner. Twenty minutes later I called for limo service out to the Winnipeg International Airport and then from there to the downtown Delta hotel. From the hotel I made it to St. Norbert by bus and foot. No way anyone followed me.

The rest of the day I spent wandering around Robillard's neighborhood but the house was tight. No one came in or out, the garage door was down, the yard was serviced by an agency, they had a satellite dish for TV, along with a short-wave antenna for either ham radio or a CB receiver. A working-cla.s.s neighborhood.

Every hour or so I changed clothes. This hat with this jacket. This jacket with those gla.s.ses. Those gla.s.ses with this hat.

For half an hour I borrowed a poodle from a house down the block where it had been chained up under a dying tree. We walked around, she peed on everything, sniffed everything, and licked me a lot. When I left to go home, I put her back in her yard and she whined.

After supper Claire and I checked the house for bugs or surveillance, didn't find anything, and finally bundled Fred up in the uber uber-stroller for a walk. The dog came too.

"Stay. Sit. Wait."

Claire laughed.

"You better not be laughing."

"Right."

I untangled the dog from a tree and we continued. When Claire had caught her breath, she leaned into my arm. "So what happens next?"

"Walsh's life is becoming strange. His van is stolen but someone had the keys so it can't be stolen and they send a message to the insurance company saying exactly that. That's a problem. Walsh is receiving grief from the cops because he didn't get in trouble for beating me but two other guys did. That's a problem. Atismak is probably asking some questions about the first call to Crime Stoppers and he's definitely asking questions about the second call. And that's a problem."

I untangled the dog from a woman in a wheelchair and apologized, then we went on.

"Then some neighbor calls the cops and says there's some pervert peeping her. The cops find his scope with his fingerprints in a field behind his house. That's a problem."

Claire listened well. "But it's going to get worse?"

"Yep. Now, Robillard's not so easy. I can't see him giving up and walking away."

"That's another problem."

"Yeah."

"So deal with this one first."

The next morning I took a bus to a new mall and used one of the bank of phones outside a restaurant. In quick succession I made calls to the major crimes unit at the police station, victim's services at the court, and then Walsh's home. The results were that the cops told me that Walsh was at the courthouse, the courts told me he was scheduled to testify and, to top it all off, no one answered when I called his home. Which all made up my mind for me.

A new bus took me to within ten blocks of the Schmengis junk yard. From there I walked until I was outside the front gate, where I didn't pause at all.

Without thinking about it, I pulled a balaclava down over my eyes and crossed the invisible line into someone else's property. With an eighteen-inch length of heavy-gauge iron pipe, I was ready for anything. I had padded the striking surface with duct and electrician's tape in case I had to cosh someone. In the backpack was the fully charged Dremel, a selection of heads for it, a length of bike chain, and another padlock still in its plastic case with the price sticker neatly affixed.

Seagulls and crows and ravens picked over the piles of neatly organized piles of garbage as I walked towards the rear of the yard. I could see most of the crane I was interested in. It hung motionless in the sky with its round, hockey-puck-shaped cargo swaying not at all in the wind. Finally I saw the cab of the crane itself. I had seen it before and it had been moving sc.r.a.p machinery around but now it was simply sitting there on big caterpillar treads with the control booth stuck on like an afterthought. Beside it was a tiny lean-to built right onto the back fence of the lot and there was no one around that I could see. The pipe slipped into my gloved hand and I listened but could hear nothing, no voices, no radio, no movement, nothing. Was there really no one around?