Louis Shalako: The Shape-Shifters, Chapter Twenty-Five. Louis Shalako.

Friday, January 15, 2021

The Shape-Shifters, Chapter Twenty-Five. Louis Shalako.

So, this chick is the real thing then?

Chapter Twenty-Five

Jean and Hiltz sat there waiting…

Jean and Hiltz sat there waiting. It was quite warm now in the shed, Jean realized.

“So in a case like that…literally, you got to ask what the heck Jesus would do.” Jean explained to Number Two.

Arms still bound with bloody great circles of rope, just like something out of a cartoon, as in that Snidely Whiplash guy. Jean was still blindfolded, while the boys were now removing their masks. They could hardly come and go in daylight while masked, although Morden did have a full-face balaclava. Mostly they came and went wearing dark glasses and hats and scarves. Whether or not that would fool the neighbors wasn’t his problem…

“If you don’t want them, don’t take them. Women are just too much trouble. It’s not worth it.”

Frenchie was divorced, he knew. Hiltz considered this sage advice, pistol in his lap, although Frenchie couldn’t see it.

“So you’re saying this chick is the real thing, then?” He asked as a flash of insight flooded his features in a sudden grin.

A kerosene heater brought steam up off the floor.

“Yeah, she’s real.” Jean shook his head in awe, sighing deeply. “I didn’t know it was even possible.”

“So how did you know? I mean like, really know?” Hiltz was bored, as much as anything else.

Gagnon sat in consideration a moment, thinking back. When had it happened?

Surely not the first time they met. And the process was more or less complete by last night, or was it the night before, now? Somewhere along the line, he had decided that if nothing else, Janet was worth having, and therefore worth trying for. Worth loving.

“I’m glad you asked that question.” He mused aloud for the other’s benefit.

“It’s good to sit here and watch your mind go.” Hiltz broke off a yawn to answer.

It was pretty obvious, at least to him, that Gagnon wasn’t ready to break yet, and he was going off shift in another twenty minutes or half an hour from now. Assuming that Slick and McCabe showed up on time to relieve him. Let them guys take Frenchie to their hastily-improvised shit-can for a change.

The big old granddaddy of all handguns...it's too bad Gagnon can't see it.

To say the least, Ted Hiltz was enjoying the process of matching wits with this villain, this malefactor, this old miscreant. He had the sense that the man was feeling them out just as much as they were poking and prodding at his psyche. Maybe the other guys couldn’t see how dangerous the man was, but Teddy did. Of that he had no doubt. The other guys claimed to have read the stuff he provided them. Each had a thick dossier on Gagnon and each had promised to study it. He had his reservations about their willingness to actually do it, that’s for sure. They had grabbed Gagnon Saturday night, just after leaving his girlfriend’s house. Gagnon refused to give her name, but Jeff was supposed to try to check that out at the county land registry office, or maybe even just ask around, if that didn’t work. When confronted by a nickel-plated forty-four magnum pistol, Gagnon had reluctantly agreed to go for a little ride. On that warm and foggy night, the security of the operation was well-nigh perfect, especially with Jeff and Morden running rabbit, giving speed-trap interference with the other truck. And if they broke down by the side of the road, it wouldn’t be a complete disaster. Ted was pretty proud of the way the operation went, having personally story-boarded it so the boys could follow the plan by the numbers. It was all in how you explained it. Call it a honey-trap, they all shook their heads with blank looks.

“We grab him coming out of his girlfriend’s.” Teddy had patiently explained, and then they caught on pretty quick.

Sooner or later Gagnon would have to realize that he could very well die here, right here in this shed. No one would ever hear it, not from the nearby road, or even the house.

“Maybe I’ve been explaining this wrong.” Ted tried again, the blindfolded Gagnon seemingly ready to go on all night.

***

Is Mr. Gagnon at home?

The sergeant was on the phone a lot lately. It was like he never got off the thing. He had a list in front of him, a list of phone calls to be made, and another pad with numbered items, and notes taken from calls already made. It was the Isaacs case.

“All righty then.” He hung up.

He made more notes. He looked at the list, and decided to take a coffee break. The department was under a lot of pressure, from the public, the press and the politicians, in no particular order. The fact that Caitlynn’s body hadn’t been recovered, meant that the mystery was big news locally, and nationally on cable news. Speculation was rife, not so much in the paper as on the street. No crime could be solved without the cooperation of the public, and tips were flooding in. So far, they had sent a cruiser around to a certain Mister Jean Gagnon’s domicile, and the housekeeper, a certain Miss Polly Andrews, kept denying any knowledge of his whereabouts. Either she was being no more than perfectly honest and open, or maybe the old woman was covering for him. The fact that she had openly stated a pretty high opinion of someone who was after all an ex-convict, contributed to the Sergeant’s misgivings about the woman’s veracity. It was nothing you could put your finger on. But, he wondered what she thought, as opposed to what she safely felt she knew, or what it might be safe to tell.

That sort of help was harder to weasel out of people. You had to take time to build a relationship. According to reports on his desk, she seemed quite mystified as to where poor Jean could be. Her own words, taken down in Constable Puslinch’s neat, didactic hand-writing. But there were a lot of sightings of a mysterious stranger, all over town, and most of the descriptions jived. The big dark parka, the jeans, the boots and everything right down to the snow shovel. One or two reports varied as to the footwear, or the pants, or the hat, but lots of people had seen the figure of Gagnon. Certainly the Sergeant remembered Gagnon, and in the absence of any other concrete leads, the possibility of foul play had to be taken into account. At least three people had seen Gagnon right in the neighborhood where the child went missing.

That didn’t prove anything, but the Sergeant just wanted to talk to Mister Gagnon and form some kind of impression. Often the answers to a few simple questions were enough to rule someone out as a possible suspect. The major difficulty with this case was the total absence of facts. There was no evidence one way or another to indicate a drowning, or exposure out in the woods somewhere, or abduction by a lunatic, one of those would-be adoptive parents, or ransom, or what? Infants were abducted right out of maternity wards by the occasional disturbed person. Mothers killed their own kids with depressing regularity.

Or what? The thought came to him. Or what? A sexual predator? A relative? Or what?

Cournoyer sat thinking, sipping coffee and wondering. He once heard of a case where a child missing for three days was hiding in a closet. He jotted that down quickly. Food for thought. All you could do was to pray that it was that simple. Three days was a long time. Three days was a hell of a long time, statistically speaking. The Sergeant had a real bad feeling about this one. The basic assumption for now was that her body would turn up. They would proceed from there.

He could put the phone work off for a while and go check on some of the search details. Looking at the wall clock, the volunteers and the extra constables called in on overtime should have gotten a good start by now. The teams were working outwards in circles from the place of reported disappearance. As he grabbed his overcoat, checked his belt equipment, and headed for the exit, the desk phone rang again. Just then Bukovski stuck his head in the door.

“Let the dispatcher get it. Let’s go.”

***

The owl and the coyote conferred. The owl sat and watched from a branch five metres up in a massive oak tree in Harry Morden’s back yard. The coyote lay curled up in a niche burrowed into the curve of a snowdrift, wrapped around the base of the tree.

These dinks don't know what they're getting into...

It was a meeting of the minds. They knew each other well enough that words were not necessary at times. There were times when their thoughts were open and readable to each other. They could see through each other’s eyes to an extent, with the result that both agreed that the one known as Frenchie faced an uncertain future. Their limited telepathy did not cover all eventualities, and so from time to time they would emit small vocal utterances, with the owl far safer hooting in the soft light of the haze-filtered moon, than the coyote, who had to content himself with small yips and snuffling grunts to make response to the owl’s comments. The owl was safe on his tree-branch, and while sure of his abilities, evading a pack of half-starved hunting dogs wasn’t on the cards for the coyote. While he didn’t consider himself a lazy fellow, it was simply avoidable.

“Tell me more, said the fly to the spider.” The owl, not really trying to be funny.

“These dinks don’t know what they’re getting into.” The coyote chuckled after his fashion. “It’ll come back to haunt them. It always does.”

Jean could lick ‘em by smiling, but violence would get him killed. The shed where Gagnon was being held was no more than forty metres away. The pair’s vantage point was beside an old-fashioned hip-roofed barn, and away from the kennels, where a pack of hounds kept vigil. Harry Morden came and went from there, but not the others.

They could keep an eye on the situation, which was a most curious one. When necessary, the coyote could slip behind the barn, into the trees and go about his business. As for the bird, he was practically invisible, whether in flight or not. They each had their own skills, which complemented the other’s. Morden’s story and a half frame house sat fifty metres back from the road, in an open pasture surrounded by brush and woodlots.

***

Janet and Molly were talking on the phone again. Janet was quite upset about Jean.

Molly listened sympathetically, as she had pushed Janet into this situation.

Wondering where the new boyfriend went.

“It’s just weird. I hardly know the guy. I admit that, but you’d think he would have said something.”

“Like if he went off to get a job in Toronto, or something. Yes.”

“Miss Andrews says she hasn’t seen hide nor hair of him for two days. She got back Sunday afternoon and he wasn’t around.”

Janet realized that she didn’t own Jean, or anything like that. They really didn’t even have a proper relationship, not yet. It’s just that she had had such high hopes. The first half-decent man to come along in so long. Looked at that way, maybe it did seem a little too good to be true. In retrospect. Not at the time, she realized.

Her heart hung heavy in her chest, yet she couldn’t quite believe it. Jean couldn’t have run into some other woman, perhaps bolder than she when it came to getting what she wanted? Was it possible Jean stepped into a pub and went home with some other woman, and even now was busily engaged with her? Would he be too embarrassed to call, or have the manners to even think of it? How long should she reasonably wait for the guy? Had she misread him? It was easy enough to do. His charm would work on other girls, wouldn’t it?

“Maybe I’m getting my tail in a knot over nothing. But I am worried about Jean. I’m sure he would have told me if he was going somewhere. We’ve been together every couple of nights for a week.”

One week.

It sounded silly when put that way, but still. Was it a game? Was he telling the Andrews woman not to let on that he was home? Jean wouldn’t just disappear like that.

“He’s been gone over forty-eight hours, but I don’t have any legal rights with him.” Janet was a friend, not a next-of-kin.

Perhaps her fears were unfounded, but just when she and Jean were so close to acknowledging something deeper. It was like they were becoming soul-mates, each aware of the process, and each hungering, yearning for more. All of a sudden he was just gone. Was her heart creating a mystery, blowing it out of proportion, where none existed?

There were much simpler explanations.

“What would you tell the police? He walked into town with a back-pack, and I’ve known him for ten days, two weeks maybe, but I think he might have disappeared?”

It did sound pretty flaky. But what if something had happened to Jean?

“I haven’t been out much, but I haven’t seen him around town or anything.”

So she was really worried, then, and not just hurt, concluded Moll. It’s not like Jean had much to hold him here. Some eternal wanderlust might have come over him, for all she knew.

Molly: oh, shit, what have I done.

Molly decided this was not a good time to tell Janet that the police had been to the house on River Road looking for Jean, and that they were asking around about him in a few other places as well. She didn’t have the heart to break it to her. Molly would have to be very gentle with Janet over the next while. What with this guy being a criminal and all, and yet he seemed to have made a big hit with her girlfriend. She should have known better than to meddle.

Now Janet was going to get hurt. Shit. But what could you do about it? Molly was just trying to help. That’s what friends were supposed to be for. Fixing her friend’s love life was a bad idea in the first place.

“All the police can really do is make a report. It’s up to you.”

In a town like this, keeping a secret wasn’t exactly an option. Sooner or later, the cops would come to Janet.

END