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| Freaking out. |
Chapter Twenty-Six
Isaacs’ gold Caravan suffered a breakdown…
Steve’s gold Caravan had suffered a breakdown, and in a really bad place, too. He was literally going nuts, groaning and cursing while paying no heed to the yapping and growling of Mister Doggie or the strident calls of Caitlynn as she squirmed and wriggled in a determined effort to rid herself once and for all of the restriction of the car-seat. His mind was literally frozen in panic. One thing at a time was all he could deal with.
“Argh.” He groaned, momentarily taking a pause to pound his fists up on the sides of his head above the ears, the knocking and the thumping giving him some inner solace of pain-wracked narcissism, the thin rubber band that was his self, stretched and twisted to the snapping point.
Blue-white vapors emanated from all around the rim of the van’s hood, the sickly sweet smell of burning radiator fluid, ethylene glycol, making itself known beyond contradiction. His engine was burning up. If he didn’t shut down soon, he would end up with cracked cylinder heads. His beautiful three point three litre V-6 would then require thousands of dollars in repairs. It would never be the same again, and he just didn’t have time for this shit. He abruptly pulled to the side, grateful for the dry road.
“Daddy? Daddy?”
“Bark. Yap. Yap.” That was the dog, and hiss, that was the engine, and Steve was freaking out, all the stress, all the tension, the exhaustion of the last few days coming to a head. Steve was about to boil over himself. But he just couldn’t afford to freak out.
As he sat there with his moody, panic-ridden thoughts all in a turmoil, there came a pounding at his window, and a tall figure wearing an ominous uniform was right there in his face. For a brief second he considered the possibility of shitting himself, but controlled the extreme physical urge.
“This just keeps getting better and better.” The thought mocked him.
As snowflakes buzzed in through the widening slot of his electric window, Steve clamped down hard in an attempt to restrain a rising sense of panic. The thing to do was to be totally and completely relaxed…if you can do it.
“You’ve got some sort of engine problem, sir.” The cop was RCMP by the badges and uniform.
“Yes, sir. I sure do.”
Stall for time. Volunteer no information that isn’t asked for. Thank God it was early in the morning. He had a full business day ahead.
“Well, we can call for a tow truck, uh, sir, and get you some help. Any preference? No? We’ll see who’s available.” The cop ambled back to the cruiser parked behind the minivan, which he could see in his rear-view mirror.
What with all the baby-puke, dog-shit, Steve in a cold sweat, and the van smoking like an aircraft in flames, the cop’s sympathies were fully engaged. Steve’s rectum loosened up a bit, and the oxygen returned with more calm, rather than fighting for each breath.
Hopefully, it wasn’t total disaster. Probably just a water pump or something. He had to relax his sternum and diaphragm, and just breathe like a normal human being. All he had to do is accept a tow-truck, pay for it out of his cash, and shake off this damned cop. He figured he could do it. Confidence is everything, he decided.
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| Some sort of engine problem, sir. |
“When he comes back, I’ll try to talk his ear off. I’ll pour out my troubles, and we’ll see how long he can fuckin’ stand it.”
While his own temper tantrum was gone but not forgotten, he was sure the cop had his limits, too. We all do. Steve imagined hanging around in some service department waiting room with Caitlynn for the next fourteen hours and sighed. Still, it could be done.
The cop was right back at the window now.
“Might as well take it to the dealers.” Steve sounded cool, surprising himself. “The wife’s been plaguing me to fix that, and I guess I’m in deep shit now.”
The cop grinned in acknowledgment, happy to be of assistance. Not all stops were so easy or rewarding. The baby was sure cute.
“Don’t sweat the small stuff. It could have been so much worse, sir.”
***
Jean and Slick sat there watching each other, Slick with his eyes and Jean with his ears, his nose, at times he even felt the warm breath of the man on his face. The very thumping of boots on the floor could tell him something. Deprived of his sight for days now, all of his other senses were fully engaged. His consciousness had expanded to something he didn’t quite recognize or completely understand anymore. His visual deprivation seemed to have freed up some extra brain power.
Carefully listening, really listening, could tell you a lot about another person. You could read a lot between the lines, read the pauses, the inflections, note the questions and subject matter. Listening is nuance. Once you achieved a certain state of mind, you could fly up in the air and see the road going by outside, or look inside of the other man.
You could almost estimate his pulse and respiration after a while. Jean might find out what made the other man tick. Say it with words. The trick to breaking prisoners is isolation. But all these guys wanted to fuckin’ talk.
“So you guys think I have half a million buried out in the woods, and you want it. Actually, I could probably lend you a couple grand, if you were really hurting.”
“That’s what we figure, yep. But we’re not interested in a loan.”
“Well, you sure are going to be disappointed. Imagine your despair. When I’m dead and there’s no money. And sooner or later, you are bound to get caught.”
Listening carefully to the silence, Gagnon could see that Slick didn’t like that idea.
"You can't fool us. We know the facts. One or two accomplices, dead now, probably. The other guy in the bank, and probably a driver."
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| We know the facts. |
“Any idea why they gave you the number Four?”
“It’s just a number.” Slick, chuckling a little too loudly, seemed defensive about it.
“It’s because you’re a piss-ant. And you think I killed my partners? Then you must also agree that you can’t let me live, whether you get the money or not? Right? You do know that—right?”
His voice was soft, cool, non-judgmental. Non-coercive. He was just trying to reveal the facts to the guy. He was working them all over, one by one, taking a different tack with each, knowing that each was an individual, with different hopes, expectations, and fears. These psychological profiles would be as different and distinctive as fingerprints.
He had been debating just when to play the trump card. After all, he had plenty of time to think of late. Now was as good a time as any. He would let all of them hear it, in one form or another. Sooner or later they would seriously begin beating him. At that point his chances of survival went down markedly. It would be an important psychological threshold for the perpetrators. As for the biological aspect of violence, it could be smelled sometimes. Slick was sweating quite a bit.
“Really, the only way to save yourselves, is to let me go now before someone gets hurt. That way it’s just my word against yours. The cops won’t even lay a charge, that’s my bet. It’s fucking pointless for me to even call them, and I know it.”
Jean thought for a moment, or pretended to do so. Timing was important to the process. Lead him up slow to the trough, but let him decide to drink on his own.
“After a few years, you’ll be able to tell the story, even brag about it to your buddies when you’re out drinking.”
Calm, cool and collected, just another observation, an option to be considered, one among many. He could see—or imagine in his mind’s eye—Number Four chewing on that one.
“So you’re saying you don’t have any money, then?”
“Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. Ah, once you realize that, it really just doesn’t seem worth it, does it?”
“No. I suppose it wouldn’t.” Slick agreed, but then he’d been doing that a lot.
Gagnon could tell he was grinning from ear to ear. Fucking idiots. These guys were going to get him killed, and all for nothing. Son of a bitch. Words failed Jean Gagnon at that point, and he slumped in silence.
“So tell me about this kid, this Jason.”
“Do you have children?” Jean asked in a subdued, beaten tone of voice.
“That’s no concern of yours.”
“Of course not. You wouldn’t tolerate anyone threatening them, would you?” Gagnon struck up a higher, bolder note, trying to drag himself more upright in the hard, wooden chair.
The bonds kept pulling him back and down, but he wriggled at it for a time. Then he subsided. Why not play for sympathy?
“Well, he’s about nine. He got a model car for Christmas, and I was helping him build it. He just seems like a really good kid, you know? He needs a dad, that’s the fucking truth of it.”
“We’re not going to do nothing to the kids. But the other guys feel like the threat should be made. Maybe the chick, too.”
“Oh, really.” Gagnon appeared to be grinding some serious enamel off of his teeth in anger.
“But they won’t do nothing, I’m telling you that. You got my word on it. But just so you know, one of them will probably get around to it…at least talkin’ about it.”
“Well, thanks for the tip. That will be a big help, I’m sure.”
The guy was trying to tell him something, and it wasn’t good. He wanted to get the money, and he also wanted Jean to accept the fact that it was nothing personal. They were all just really nice guys, Jean included, but it was just business, like in The Godfather.
They still wanted to like themselves, to think of themselves as all-right-guys. Insane as it sounded, they all wanted Jean to like them…to understand them. You don’t know what it’s like to be me, as one of them said about the crack of dawn this morning.
The days of suspense were dragging on. Frankly, Jean was beginning to wonder how much more of this bullshit he could take. These boys were all puppies. Piss me off.
“Yeah, but who the fuck are you?” Slick muttered, as if in answer to his unspoken thoughts.
“I am the walrus.” Jean, light-headed from hunger, convulsed as best he could within his enveloping ropes, somehow sensing that Four was burning beet-red around the neck and ears.
“Ha. Got you going now.”
“You’re a son of a bitch.” Slick nodded. “But you will tell us, sooner or later.”
“I keep telling you, I don’t have no fucking money. And when you guys finally figure that out, it will be too late. For all of us. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
***
The doughnut shop gossip was rampant with the possibilities.
“Well, I think it’s awful.” So said the elder of two Ed Jones’ in town.
He was the butcher. He looked around for support.
“All these young single moms these days, all hooked on crack, and they can’t look after their kids.”
There were a few nods and murmurs around the immediate vicinity where he and his cronies held their impromptu meetings about the same time every day.
“It’s just a terrible thing.” Shirley was putting on two more pots of water to begin heating.
It looked to be a busy day in the coffee-and-doughnut business.
“They say the police are looking for some guy.” Jasmine Boisvert-Schiller asserted to all concerned. “My friend Janice’s husband Eddy is with the cleaning company that does the cop-shop.”
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| Scott Boisvert-Schiller offers an opinion. |
The assembled crowd of senior citizens, unemployed construction and mill workers, welfare recipients, mentally ill persons, and busy shoppers were pretending not to listen intently to this intelligence. A flurry of forms milled and mulled about while waiting to be served at the counter. The people at tables muttered and murmured together. The debate raged on, but quietly, by mutual consent. One or two thought Kiera Isaacs had done it herself. They tried not to put two and two together. That one was better left unsaid.
“Guys like that should be shot and pissed upon." Jasmine’s husband Scott had it all figured out. “There’s no fate too bad for them.”
Any reservations anyone might have had about this were kept silent.
“These guys should be locked up for life, at the very least. They can’t help themselves, it’s a scientifically proven fact—look at that Bernardo guy—but the courts keep letting them off with a slap on the wrist.” Expanding on his theme, Scott pontificated further. “I hear the guy is a real nut-case, a real basket-case.”
“The newspaper said she was drowned, or maybe lost in the woods and froze.” That was according to Vanessa Brent, a divorced waitress in her early forties.
The creek searches had been called off, and pretty much every nearby patch of forest had been thoroughly combed by volunteers. Now the snow was falling again. The usually sunny blonde looked sadly out the window.
“If she’s out there, they won’t find her until spring, now.” This was a guy named Phil. “It’s just a terrible thing for the mom.”
And all those grandparents, and aunts and uncles and nephews and cousins, but he didn’t say it. It was too obviously implied in a small town like Scudmore. Phil was here every day, a retired school board maintenance employee.
Half the people in the room had some dealings with one or another branches of the Isaacs family, or the Henri family on the mother’s side. Scott Boisvert-Schiller had put a roof on the place three years ago, and Ed Jones had sold meats to the Henri family for decades. They lived on the next block, and belonged to the same golf club.
The waitress knew Ashley Issacs and her mom by sight from when they came into the family restaurant where she worked. They went out once a month on cheque day, regular as clockwork. Vanessa Brent went to school with her aunt. Shirley once employed the little girl’s mother as a counter-helper in busier times. Virtually all of them remembered Caitlynn from the Teeny-Tots Revue segment of the Scudmore Ice Follies, put on annually by the local figure skating club. She was dressed up as a bunny, and had fallen on her bum to unanimous applause and a standing ovation during a cute little dance number. Ralph Henderson would probably bury the girl out of his funeral home on Dufferin Avenue when the time came. That’s the kind of town it was. Everyone among its thirteen or fourteen thousand acknowledged residents would feel and respond to the tragedy. It looked to be the best-attended funeral in years, when the time came.
***
The three of them were planning strategy while Slick Wilson guarded the prisoner.
The group was using Harry Morden’s basement, which had become a kind of operations centre, except when Harry’s wife wanted to do the laundry. In which case they cleared out and went to Jeff’s, but that was a bit too far out of the way, now that they actually had Frenchie in their custody.
“He slept about three hours yesterday afternoon, and then an hour after supper.” Ted was reviewing their carefully-compiled notes. “Since then he’s had a couple of short naps, but he’s essentially been without sleep for forty-eight hours. According to Harry, he’s getting a little giddy.”
Ted nodded at Morden and Jeff.
“We’ve been wetting him down, from time to time.”
They had made Frenchie piss himself a couple of times, but so far hadn’t had the stomach to make him shit himself. They agreed it would make the shed unlivable for an interrogator.
Frenchie got fed one good meal a day and Slick would pretend to sneak in an apple or a chunk of cheddar cheese when he came on shift. That way they got to be like buddies.
Ted had all kinds of ideas, but he understood these were for long-term application.
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| Yeah, just don't forget, this is my basement. |
Unlike the Americans with their Guantanamo Bay, they couldn’t keep Frenchie for years and years, hoping he would finally spit out something that they could actually use.
“Unless anyone else has any big ideas, it seems we got to start the physical stuff.” Jeff, alluding to what Ted was dubbing, phase two.
Remarks about Teddy going through a phase were kept to himself.
Bleary-eyed, they placed that one under consideration. Sooner or later, they must run out of time. The very fact that they were working shifts to keep the guy guarded, meant that their lives were disrupted. Routines were hard to maintain, and questions from their spouses and parents and children were becoming harder to answer or evade.
“We have to be careful not to break all of his fingers, or anything.” Jeff wanted to make certain things clear. “What if he can’t draw us a map? Also, we should be careful not to put out an eye, and smashing all his teeth or breaking his jaw probably isn’t a good idea either.”
Think of the evidence.
Teddy’s cheerful demeanor belied and contradicted the gut-level instincts this aroused in Harry Morden. He couldn’t believe it. They were really going to do it. Teddy stepped up to the plate.
“We have to be careful not to snap a cervical vertebra, that’s in the neck. So, no kicks to the head.” Hiltzy continued the briefing. “Watch his kidneys, you can kill a man that way, and watch out for the Adam’s apple and throat area. It should go without saying that severing any of the major arteries would quickly lead to death, and long-term hypothermia is also likely in certain scenarios.”
The gist of it was, applying small amounts of pain wouldn’t work. They couldn’t just sit around and poke pins in the guy. Morden had the sudden urge to vomit. He leapt up and bolted for the laundry room, so he could puke into the big white plastic tub beside the washing machine. No question, Harry was puking his guts out in there. It seemed to go on forever, graphic in its sound.
“Fuck. For fuck’s sakes.” Ted Hiltz groaned as comprehension hit.
“Jesus Christ.” He bellowed through the door at Harry.
They could hear the water running. It seemed unlikely Harry cared.
“Well, it’ll rinse down.” Jeff pointed out reasonably enough.
It was Harry’s house for shit’s sakes.
“Don’t worry about it.” Jeff shook his head.
Ted just didn’t want to have to smell it.
“How the hell are we supposed to get through this? We talked about all this beforehand.”
Jeff put a hand up.
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
But what could you do about it at this point? They were committed. The unwritten law of the jungle was about to come into play, and for some crazy reason, it felt good. Really good.
***
The beating was intense but brief. One minute Slick was checking his watch and stifling a yawn largely due to boredom, then came a flurry of footsteps and a trio of voices, soft yet insistent, and that’s when the thumb-latch rattled.
There was a moment of silence as each of them regarded the figure of Gagnon for a long, drawn-out breath. Then it began. Jeff whacked him on the top of the head with a bamboo pole, about four feet long. It cracked and splintered as it hit. Teddy poked him over and over again with a broom-handle that had a nail inset into the end, and taped into position, making the prisoner yelp, and squirm, and attempt to evade further poking, but to no avail. The quiet was uncanny. Even Gagnon seemed afraid to make too much noise.
He obviously knew it would be the death of him…
Harry stood close for a minute, and backhanded him across the face a few times. Jeff closed in next, and whacked him across the shins repeatedly while gasps and sobs broke from the prisoner’s obstructed face. There were dark, wet stains on the cloth, white cotton sheets torn up to make the strips of his blindfold. The man grunted with each blow, as Slick sat there mindlessly, afraid to speak into the fury that had erupted quite unpredictably. It was the suddenness, the silence, the savagery of it. Somehow it was becoming personal despite their best efforts. Ted punched Gagnon in the head, and the chair went over. Jeff and Morden rushed to right it again, and Slick noticed that Gagnon’s head and form seemed pretty limp. The sight shocked and sickened him.
“He’s out of it—you’re wasting your time.” Slick wanted to save himself from a further display of animal bloodlust.
These guys were his friends, but he had never seen anything like that before. He couldn’t reconcile what he was seeing here with the guys he knew. The flurry of blows literally made him flinch in reaction.
Now Jeff was making a fist, and poking out the middle knuckle, and knocking on Gagnon’s skull, saying, Frenchie-Frenchie-Frenchie, and giggling like a mad whore on LSD.
This wasn’t about the money anymore, it was about frustration. Teddy poked and prodded with the stick, some involuntary movements on the part of the subject convincing them that Gagnon was still mostly conscious. Teddy smiled and nodded, how he loved this man right now.
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| Hey, Frenchie. |
“He’s faking.” He grinned. “Still trying to fuck with our heads, eh, Frenchie?”
The reek of booze was oppressive, stagnant.
“Wakey, wakey.” Morden, giggling and obviously drunk—as usual.
Slick sat dumbfounded on his chair in the corner by the door, unable to break into their mood, momentarily forgetting which was One, and who was Two, Three et cetera—he knew he was Four, though. His jaw hung slack in amazement. He wouldn’t have believed it of these boys. In a moment of fierce pride, he realized that they were tougher than they looked.
His shift was over, and he beckoned to Teddy to take the gun, noting in fascination a small pool of dark, glistening fluid puddling up between Gagnon’s feet. It was right under where his head hung. He didn’t quite know how to react, what to think. Finally he tore himself away, exhausted and yet exhilarated by the adrenalin rush he had experienced, and was still experiencing. The thoughts revolved around and around in his head as he drove to the Burger King on Olivia Boulevard, to get thirty bucks worth of grub to keep the boys going for the night.
“I just can’t believe this is us.” He kept thinking. “Is this really happening?”
It was something out of a dark nightmare, a surreal world of twilight, and suffering, and misery. He cracked an involuntary grin in admiration. That Frenchie guy really knew how to suffer. The thought came unbidden and unwanted. His smile faded. He would get the food, and then he would go home and think about things. Forgetting would be better, but that just didn’t seem possible.
END
Images. Louis.
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