"James Bond. Actually, some candy-a.s.sed villain speaking to Bond."

"Right."

He looked sick and preoccupied.

"How about faint heart never won fair maid?"

He didn't seem to hear me. Ahead of us and down the marble hall, the cops were still keeping the reporters at bay.

"That's poetry. There's also the SAS motto, 'Who Dares, Wins.' "

He was pushing me erratically down the hallway, weaving from side to side in preoccupation.

"Or 'Carpe Diem,' seize the fish. Never understood that one, though."

Thompson stopped and came around to face me over the briefcases. He looked drained and exhausted.

"I have something I have to talk about."

"Go ahead."

Thompson wheeled us over to a bench, where he sat and accepted the briefcases off my lap. He stroked his chin for a moment and then pointed a finger right at my face. "Last night I got a phone call at home. It was Walsh. He had found my private phone number and all your records."

"And ..."

He leaned against the back of the bench. "He was pretty direct, pretty vivid. You wanna tell me your side?"

"Sure. I used to be bad. Now I'm not."

"Bad?"

His bloodshot eyes shifted to the side and back again.

"When I was sixteen, I robbed a pharmacy for product and cash. When the owner wouldn't open the poison box, where the narcotics are stored, I shattered his collarbone with the flat of a hatchet."

Thompson nodded.

"A year later I was dealing ecstasy to an undercover cop out of a hotel room in Banff. She pulled her piece and tried to cuff me. By the time the other cops had broken the door down, I had stabbed her three times with a filed-down screwdriver I'd hidden in my sock."

Thompson swallowed audibly.

"There's more. Got caught with a duffle bag of sawed-down shotguns. a.s.sault, goes without saying. Dangerous driving. Resisting arrest. Attempted murder. Smuggling. Fraud. Drugs. s.h.i.t like that."

"I see."

"Been addicted to cocaine, methamphetamines, crank, heroin, and PCP. Alcohol too. Abused and used acid, gra.s.s, ether, peyote. You name it."

"You making excuses?"

"Nope. Don't care what you think of me."

He thought about that and I tapped his knee to get his attention. "I've lied. Cheated. Stole. Killed. Dishonored my parents. Worshipped false idols. Coveted. Committed adultery."

The cops were still keeping the reporters away and I smiled bitterly. "Now, I've got a wife. A son. Pets. A home. It's a long way from everything I knew before. And I'd like to keep that distance."

"I see. Was it really that bad? Being a crook, I mean?"

"Yes, it was that bad." I opened up a little. "You do the math. If you're a bad guy, you don't have a job, no bank account, no apartment. You live in hotels, move around a lot, eat in restaurants. But not expensive hotels because you might be noticed in those and you'll need ID."

He was riveted on me.

"You need maybe sixty bucks a day for food and a little more than that for the hotel and maybe another thirty to fifty for incidentals. That's every day."

I tried to find a comfortable spot in the chair but my whole lower back ached where a band of red and blue bruises still circled my kidneys. The rainbow of pain filled every moment.

"That's about one-eighty each day. Life gets stressful, though, so you start doing a little something to deal with the stress. If you drink or do gra.s.s to level you out, that's another twenty or forty per day. But you can't be level all the time, you might have to move fast so that means keeping cocaine or crank or meth handy, and that's another fifty to one hundred a day and that's if you don't have friends. That's a total of about three Cs per day. Every day. That means two grand one per week, or eight grand four per month, and that means one hundred and nine thousand, two hundred dollars per year. Period."

Thompson's eyes were staring into the middle distance.

"It's fun to do for a week, a month, even a year. But do it for year after year after year and it gets stale. I'm not depressing you, am I?"

He had no answer, no comment.

"The lifestyle means nothing is permanent. You can't even do laundry. You can't bring anything with you. You can't even follow a TV series you like. You're too busy."

I breathed deeply. "No friends and no love, either. You can buy tail, though, and that'll add to your bill. And there's always the chance that the drug dealer or the hooker or someone else is going to rat you out."

Thompson was waiting for me to finish.

"Your other option is to build a fake life. That takes money and time. A few hundred hours and dollars for the driver's licence, the same for a birth certificate, social insurance card, banking history, it can all be built but it takes weeks and months to do it right. Anyhow, you put in six months and maybe ten grand and then you can buy a car, rent an apartment, do whatever, just like a civilian."

He brushed his hair from his eyes and a fine rain of dandruff came down.

"Of course, anyone, and I mean anyone, who knows just a little bit about you can crack the whole thing open and you're back on the run again at twenty-one hundred per week."

Thompson was only half listening to me. The rest of his attention was focused somewhere far away and I wished I knew where.

"To pay for your two choices of lifestyle, you steal, you hustle, you deal. The math there is rough too. An average bank by a solo operator nets between one and three grand, a good bank nets up to twelve. An armored car is worth thirty plus but it's almost impossible to do it by yourself, which means partners, which means someone's going to rat you out. You also have to split the take. Dealing drugs requires capital and the profit for a gram dealer is maybe only ten dollars per unit, and when you're dealing in bulk, that brings its own problems like bodyguards and bribes and other s.h.i.t. If you deal gra.s.s, it's not so bad and not so profitable but c.o.ke dealers deal with c.o.keheads and those guys are just s.h.i.t. They also call you at all hours asking for a taste on credit."

I was getting tired and yawned. "Pimping is fine but requires a fine touch and a fair number of women and they are hard to keep under control. Smuggling is okay too but you've got to develop routes, which means you become a stationary target. Professional killers exist only in books and it doesn't pay that well, anyway. It goes on like that."

Thompson finally snapped out of it and started to laugh. "So what you're saying is that you stopped being a crook because it was too much work."

I had closed my eyes but at that I opened one and grinned widely. "That and I fell in love with my wife."

He was silent so I pointed straight ahead down the hall. "Home, James."

8.

Officially it took the Crown three days to decide. I knew it was coming; I could tell when the cops pulled the handcuffs off the day after the meeting with McMillan-Fowler. They left one guard on duty at the foot of my bed but that didn't bother me as much, it certainly guaranteed me a private room.

Every eight hours a new cop came but I just focused on breathing through the pain without whimpering. If I made noise, the cops called the nurse and she brought the blessed-hated pill and that brought surcease. That I counted as a loss.

On the third day the new cop in the morning was the woman that Stiles had drugged. I hadn't had a good night, maybe thirty minutes of shallow sleep, and when she came in, I spoke up. "Morning. How you feeling?"

She gave me a hard look and then came over right beside the bed. Her eyes were bright with caffeine and her skin was grayish and taut. She watched the corridor and spoke very quietly. "h.e.l.lo, killer, I've been told I have you to thank for dealing with the a.s.shole who drugged me."

If she thought I was going to say anything, I disappointed her.

"So. Thanks."

I still didn't say anything so she stared some more and then sat down and opened a copy of the Winnipeg Sun Winnipeg Sun newspaper. In the bed I squirmed and felt my bladder cut painfully loose. They'd put in a catheter and I was still p.i.s.sing blood and it hurt but so did breathing, eating, sleeping, and being awake. My teeth caught my tongue and held it while a brilliant noise only I could hear started and peaked. When the noise was gone and I was emptied, I exhaled through my nose and trembled a bit as the shock cut out. newspaper. In the bed I squirmed and felt my bladder cut painfully loose. They'd put in a catheter and I was still p.i.s.sing blood and it hurt but so did breathing, eating, sleeping, and being awake. My teeth caught my tongue and held it while a brilliant noise only I could hear started and peaked. When the noise was gone and I was emptied, I exhaled through my nose and trembled a bit as the shock cut out.

"What about you, killer, how you doing?"

The pain had preoccupied me and the cop was back, leaning over me with her crossed arms inches from my head. She looked pleased.

"Peachy."

My voice cracked and Thompson came in. Apparently, the cops had been given orders about his presence so she just started past him to her chair without a word. When he raised a hand, though, she paused in mid-stride and looked at him incuriously with her right hand on her holstered pistol.

"Hold it. Officer, you can go. Sam, the Crown's dropping the charges so you're free."

Free, I almost laughed. My kidneys were ground round, I had a fever of a hundred and change, and I had a plastic tube running into my d.i.c.k, but I was free. Capitalize that sucker, FREE!

The cop sounded petulant, though. "Sorry. I have to be relieved by a superior. Until then your client is in my custody."

He fumbled out his cell phone and handed it over. "Call your boss."

She went to her chair and Thompson sat down. His overcoat flapped open as he yawned and I turned my head away from his breath.

"Did you call Claire?"

"First thing. Now, the shooting is still up in the air, but the Crown has dropped the murder charges and pitched the confession. You might still do some time for discharging a firearm within the boundaries of the city, something like that. I'm not sure about that."

The cop still had the phone.

"What about Stiles?"

"The felon you stopped from a.s.saulting a cop? They just want to forget about that entirely. It's a b.i.t.c.h of a thing to try to explain to a jury."

"Um, Thompson? That's the cop who got drugged behind you."

"Oh."

He turned and looked at her and then back at me. "Did she say thanks?"

The cop blushed and focused on talking to someone on the other end of the line.

"Yes. So how long I am looking at for the shooting?"

He made a big deal about thinking about it. "A month. Like that."

"Nah. I don't think so, it's in their best interests to let it slide. All or nothing."

The cop came over and dropped the phone on the bed. Then she removed the restraints and slapped them against her leg. "It's true. See you around, killer."

My lawyer watched her go and yawned again. "I don't think she likes you."

"Breaks my heart. So you're still representing me?"

"Yes. I thought about you. You're a pretty reprehensible human being."

"Yep."

"Not gonna try to defend yourself to me?"

I grinned and shook my head. "f.u.c.k you. I'm not responsible for your morals. That's your problem. I have enough trouble with my own."

Thompson patted my arm. "Right. Anyhow, the reason I'm still here is because I hate being forced to do anything. I hate being conned. I hate being manipulated. I hate being threatened."

"Which is what Walsh was doing? Is doing?"

"Right."

He stared at me. "Plus, I believe you. Part of the way, at least."

"Thanks."

He left and I turned on the TV at the end of the bed. I'd been watching it a lot, not enjoying it but watching it. The local stations, the morning shows, the afternoon talk shows, the early afternoon news, the soap operas, the kids' shows. At first the cops had monitored what I'd watched, but soon their interest had waned and they'd started to ignore both it and I. Or is it I and it? Me and it?

In their minds I had become meat they had to watch. Nothing more.

I'd watched the TV but hadn't paid attention to anything but the credits at the end of the shows. Producers, directors, writers, researchers, the faces in front of the cameras, and the people behind the machines, proper spellings, names, t.i.tles. Those I had remembered, repeating them endlessly and silently until they became my mantra.

When the nurses had given me newspapers, I'd memorized more names. Not the crime reporters, those guys had to be in the pockets of the cops in order to do their work effectively. So I concentrated on the political reporters, the guys doing the town hall work, not the guys doing the editorials or the opinion pieces. Opinions I could get anywhere. They were like t.i.ts and b.a.l.l.s, everybody had two, and I needed facts.

A very shy nurse-in-training came in and froze when she saw no cop.

I said, "C'mon in. Charges have been dropped."

She was pretty and olive, a Filipino girl with a beautiful complexion and the movements of a dancer. She blushed and changed the plastic bag that the catheter fed and then she danced out on the tips of her toes.