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

Sunday, January 17, 2021

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

Sergeant Rick Pettigrew.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Sergeant Cournoyer was snug in his warm bed…

Sergeant Cournoyer was dreaming in his warm bed, snug in the arms of Morpheus, when his wife slapped him upside of the head. He awoke groggily, in a half-drunken state. The prescription sleeping pills he used occasionally for insomnia often had this effect on him. Grace handed him the phone with a dark look, as a quick glance at the clock showed it was after twelve. Oh, God, just this once she had been trying to sleep instead of reading half the night.

“Yes? What?”

It took a minute to sink in. What the voice was telling him was right off the wall…but maybe not.

“What? Where?” He was a little more lucid now.

Sergeant Cournoyer slammed the phone down without ceremony and leapt out of bed.

At this time of night, and since it wasn’t his shift, he whipped open the closet door and reached for a pair of jeans and a western shirt. Pure muscle memory took over. His hands knew the routine, as he flung the shirt on the bed.

“I have to go, Honey.” He dropped heavily onto the side of the bed as he rammed his legs in.

The shirt flew on, almost of its own accord, as he searched out the wallet and keys, right where he had left them on the tallboy dresser on his side of the bed.

“Have a good night, dear.” Used to it by now, she said it with no hint of sarcasm.

Grace’s blue eyes twinkled at him over the tops of her half-glasses.

He gave her a rueful grin, and then bent low to give her a kiss. Predictably, she reached for her latest romance novel.

“It’s that Gagnon fellow.”

“Ah.”

He couldn’t find his socks.

Normally she laid stuff out for him the night before, but tomorrow was his day off.

Tomorrow was laundry day. Cournoyer stood there wavering for a half a minute, just thinking.

“Try the bottom drawer. Drive careful. You wouldn’t want to get picked up for impaired.”

Ha.

Eleven minutes later he strode into the station, complete with socks, shoes and an extra-large triple-triple to battle the pill-induced half-stupor he felt.

His voice sounded a little crisper in his ears.

“All righty then.” His counterpart, the Soupy on A-shift, was Staff Sergeant Rick Pettigrew. “Watcha got for me?”

“We have your Mister Jean Gagnon in custody in the holding cells.” There was an air of triumph shared between comrades.

Rick was a good guy. They were on the swim team, the badminton team, and the chess club’s tournament team in high school.

Pettigrew handed him a file folder.

“Read ‘em and weep.” Rick gave a happy grin.

Cournoyer took the file over to his desk as Pettigrew continued speaking to his dispatcher, and through him to his officers in the field. Voices of one or two men muttered in the background, somewhere off down the hallway. Snapping open the rip-tab on the coffee after a brief but frustrating struggle, and in disgust Cournoyer finally tore loose a three-centimetre triangular chunk and threw it in the basket under the desk.

Opening the file, he began to skim through it for the first time. It was his way to get a flavor of the incident first, then go back and note the details. This repetition aided memory for some reason.

“The original call was about a person in a drop box.” Pettigrew stood there for a moment by his desk, and then moved back to the counter in response to a query.

He was busy for a moment. Cournoyer quickly took in the bare details of the incident.

An old gentleman, known to the Sergeant as a retiree and a widower, went grocery shopping at the local mall. He was the kind of guy who combined a lot of little trips when he went out. The man brought a bag of old clothes to dispose of. The fellow didn’t have the heart to throw them out. Some of the shirts cost good money, but he was losing weight and they didn’t fit anymore. He had seen something, maybe an animal, and when he was pulling up to the box, the Goodwill drop-off box was moving and he heard a sound or some noises coming from it. He assumed someone was robbing it. It was an offense, as items dropped off immediately became the property of Goodwill Industries. The sergeant recalled complaints of homeless and poverty-stricken people going through the stuff and leaving a mess. Anyway, the old guy called in the complaint.

He heard a voice with half his mind on something else. Pettigrew was talking at him.

“I figured you’d want to be first.”

The Isaacs case was his baby.

“Yeah, okay, thanks.” Sergeant Cournoyer nodded in appreciation.

Mister Gagnon didn’t have much of an explanation of what he was doing in there, according to the constable responding to the complaint, although he did offer to pay for the clothes. That’s what it said, black ink on white paper.

“He was stealing clothes?”

“That’s what it looked like.”

“Holy, fuck. Was it like a disguise?”

This with a grin.

“Hard to say. More like desperation, by the look of him.”

“Well, I guess I’d better have a word with the boy.” Cournoyer rose. “Thanks.”

***

"Have you been having some problems?"

It was one of the strangest interviews Sergeant Cournoyer had ever conducted.

“Where have you been the last few days, Mister Gagnon?”

The pair of them sat amiably enough in Interview Room Two, Gagnon dressed in oddball stuff.

“Sorry, I’ve been all tied up.”

He seemed grateful for the Coke.

“It’s just that we wanted to talk to you about a little matter that has come up. Oh, yes, and Miss Andrews is worried about you. Have you called your girlfriend lately?”

Gagnon shrugged.

“How long have you been hiding out in there?”

“What?” Gagnon grinned.

Eyebrows rising, he was taken completely by surprise by this question.

“What have you been eating? What happened to your regular clothes?” The sergeant had many questions. “Have you been having any problems? Why did you run away?”

“What’s this other matter? What the hell’s this all about?” His face darkened in anger. “Can’t you just give me a fine? Or something? Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“I think you know what I’m talking about.”

“I already knew that you’re a dink.”

In spite of his training and years of experience, and even though the verbal harassment of police officers was a part of common routine, the sergeant’s internal temperature was rising. Taking hold of his inner self, he gained the upper hand on his emotions. Anger was always counter-productive.

“There’s a child missing. And we thought you might be able to help us.”

Gagnon’s visage darkened upon hearing this. He went rigid, and then calmed down.

“I know a guy with some pretty good hunting dogs. Maybe you should talk to him, see if he can maybe pick up a scent.”

The sergeant straightened on hearing that. It was actually a pretty sensible suggestion. The only trouble was, they had been unable to get the OPP’s canine unit onto the scene for the first couple of days, and then the experts had determined that it was already too late.

“We know you were in the neighborhood. And with your history of violent crime, and your history of mental illness, and the stress of being a stranger in town…”

“How many men have you killed?” Gagnon had to ask. “How many? Isn’t it stressful being a cop? Are you sure you aren’t suffering some mental breakdown?”

“That sort of attitude isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

The sergeant was trying to keep this non-confrontational, although it was perfectly safe as guys like Gagnon could never afford a civil suit, and the SIU was in the business of rubber-stamping police brutality…most of the time. He thought for a moment. Without a body, or any witnesses to the crime, you could only push so hard. The sergeant wondered if he should stage some kind of struggle and then Taser the bugger fifteen or twenty times. The man would be broken for life, and would confess to literally anything after that sort of treatment.

“Look, we’re just trying to find out what happened out there, and maybe we can get you some help. You know, the treatment you need.”

“Sergeant, I’m going to hunt you down and kill you like a snake by the side of the road.” Gagnon growled.

The adrenalin rush coursing through his guts was the only evidence the sergeant required that this was a valid threat.

“I’m going to pretend that I didn’t hear that.”

This guy was getting to him, when it was supposed to be the other way around.

“Would you like it in writing? You’re a fucking goof, and I’m sick and tired of this shit, Sarge.”

Gagnon’s almost-black eyes bored into his, but he kept silent now. The sergeant’s heart rate shot up markedly, and he found himself considering what he knew about the guy.

He backed off, but only for a moment.

“All right Mister Gagnon, this doesn’t have to get too ugly. That is, if you have nothing to hide. Why don’t you tell me where you’ve been for the last week?”

“For all the good it will do, why not?” Gagnon sat up, and the sergeant’s heart leapt.

Now they were getting somewhere.

“On Saturday night, a couple of guys with a really big gun grabbed me.” Jean told the cop, who would be sure it was a lie. “This was coming out of my girlfriend’s place.”

“Janet Herbert’s place?”

Gagnon: I turned myself into a wolverine.

Jean nodded. The sergeant took some notes as Gagnon continued.

“And then they took me out in the country, maybe six or eight kilometres. They tied me up in a chair, and tried to get me to talk.”

“Talk about what?” The sergeant was mystified.

This was going off on a real tangent, completely unexpectedly. But you had to admit the lies were creative. Some of the artworks by the mentally ill were actually pretty good.

He and the wife once went to a showing, although they never bought anything.

“They seem to think I have a half a million bucks buried out in the woods or somewhere.”

“And do you?”

“No, I don’t. I’m totally innocent of that robbery in Ottawa, and I’m really sick and tired of this nonsense.”

“So what happened?” Sergeant Cournoyer was no longer bothering to write it down.

It was all on video anyway. It was pure bullshit, in his opinion, which had hardened considerably in the last few minutes. People should have more respect for the police. He was just trying to do his job. These guys committed their crimes, and when they got caught, they cried like babies, and blamed their environment, and the abuse they had suffered as children.

To the sergeant, all the bleeding-hearts out there, claiming that ten to twenty per cent of the prison population had been wrongfully convicted should come out on shift sometimes and see the results of a criminal justice system gone wrong. The police were totally objective. Them wussie liberals should be drawn and quartered, in his opinion.

“Then what? You must have told them where it was, or otherwise why did they let you go?” He asked in fascination.

“So then I turned myself into a wolverine and took off when they weren’t looking. And now I got you assholes to deal with. But don’t you worry. I’ll take care of that, too.”

The sergeant glanced up at the mirrored window where the assistant Crown Attorney and a pair of other investigating officers watched this performance. He hoped they saw the significance of this behavior. The poor man was obviously insane, and it would be an easy conviction for the Crown if they could only find some witnesses.

“Thank you, Mister Gagnon. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind signing this?”

“Go to hell.”

***

Steve Isaacs.

Isaacs cruised into the outskirts of Vancouver with a rising sense of relief. Despite all of the travails, all of the little wonders discovered along the way, they had made it.

He felt a lot more relaxed, examining the cityscape around them as he drove.

What he needed to do first, was to find a hotel, and then as quickly as possible find a real place to live. When he stopped making his court-ordered payments, instead of going sick with the money and living like a king, Steve just kept on at the boarding-house and kept it in a credit union account. The local credit union accepted the bogus identification he provided, bought for less than five hundred bucks right here on the streets of this city.

Cruising the outskirts.

He had a whole new name, a different driver’s license, one from British Columbia. Steve had a new social insurance number, new credit card, everything. Steve had a post office box in a strip-mall postal outlet. At home, he would be Dave Evans, and at work, Steve Isaacs. It was funny—there seemed to be no real way, not easy, anyhow, to fake a union membership. Maybe it just took a bigger bribe—food for thought. Steve had tried to think of everything, although he was aware that he was strictly amateur at this sort of thing. The key was to have enough money, and to avoid the clutches of the system. He and Caitlynn were free.

He looked forward to living here, with so little snow, and Lilyann over at the realtor’s ought to have a good list of upscale apartments ready for him by now. But, first things first as opportunities presented themselves. He pulled into the first car wash he saw.

In the neighborhood where he planned to live, an unwashed vehicle was bound to attract attention. All he had to do was to make a good first impression, have a simple but unbeatable cover story, and be prepared to bore potential listeners with a long list of complaints about a system gone mad. He would talk about a drunken and abusive ex-spouse, and essentially, you could get away with murder. Vancouver was a beautiful city.

He had it all figured out.

***

The owl and the coyote were mystified by what was happening to Jean Gagnon.

“That poor guy just can’t seem to win, what with losing all the time.” The owl sat on a branch.

He had just dined on a plethora of field mice, who in spite of their best efforts to stay beneath the snow, revealed themselves by the hummocky trails they left just under the surface. As for the world of men, it was incomprehensible sometimes.

“I just don’t know. The way they treat each other is kind of disgraceful.”

This in spite of the fact that the coyote had just stolen a fresh-killed rabbit from a rogue timber wolf, cast out of his own pack for the crime of being male.

“I hate to see a good man go bad. But sooner or later the guy is just bound to lose it.”

“I don’t know. He seems fundamentally incapable of becoming evil.” The coyote gave his wicked grim. “He’s not even a little bit evil.”

“I wish there was something we could do for him. He isn’t going to be much good to us inside of a jail cell.”

“Hold onto that thought.” The coyote was seldom discouraged. “Maybe something will come up.”

“We know damn well he didn’t have anything to do with the child. And I’m beginning to have my doubts about that alleged bank robbery.”

Too many eye witnesses.

“Too many eye witnesses.” The coyote thought about it. “But you know what they’re like.”

“What if he didn’t do it? Where does that leave us? A half a million, or even just the two hundred fifty thousand. We could have done a world of good.”

“If he didn’t do it, we’ve lost any hope of finding the real guys.” The coyote knew that much. “It’s in the history books. Jean Gagnon is the perpetrator, and everyone wants a piece of him.”

That money had to be somewhere. Somebody must know something.

“You know what I just thought of? Maybe the robbers only got about forty thousand, and the bank manager took the rest. Or even the Ottawa cops.” The owl’s head rotated, hearing some extraneous sound.

“Nice thought, but what good that does us, is beyond me.” The coyote thought it over. “If only there was some way to spring him out of jail. Maybe in sheer gratitude he would let us in on the secret.”

“Would you? After all those years behind bars?” It was an interesting question.

“I don’t know. You have to admit, he’s earned his money.”

The owl was a philosopher first and foremost, the coyote the practical one.

They chuckled at that one.

“What a crazy world we live in. The nice guys are all busy finishing last, and the worst dregs of humanity rise to the top, to positions of trust and authority.”

“I don’t know about that.” More owl philosophy. “It seems the one common denominator in all of human experience is suffering.”

“You got that right. So what you’re saying is that God created men to suffer?”

The coyote digested this bit of half-baked moral philosophy.

“But why? What purpose does it serve?”

They learn something, and then they die, the experience wasted on the dead?

“Huh. How the heck would I know?” The owl was getting grumpy with all this talk.

While he was known for his wisdom, he didn’t know everything. No one could. Perhaps God created men to suffer and maybe to learn something along the way—perhaps forgiveness, a little humility. They could learn to love one another.

“It’s all a big mystery to me, sometimes. Still, we’re doing all right.” A full belly, interesting talk with a good friend, and your self-respect went a long ways.

At least that was the coyote’s opinion.

God created men to suffer...

END

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