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

Now, that's what I call a gun.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Tonight was the night…

Tonight was the night. They were going to do it. Jeff and the boys had everything all lined up and ready to go. The only question was, would the prey behave as predicted?

“Frenchie’s given us a couple of surprises over the last two days.” Jeff stated the fact.

“I don’t like all these sudden detours.” Ted agreed. “Yesterday it was crossing the boulevard, and then walking down an alley, and we had to keep going for three-quarters of a kilometre before we got turned around.”

The other guys nodded. If Gagnon had any inkling that he was under surveillance, his cool, his acting ability was of the finest. Everything he did had a plausible, ostensible reason for doing it, but sometimes the sheer arbitrariness of it, the sheer impulsiveness of it, made it look like the guy was definitely trying to shake some kind of a tail.

It had never occurred to Ted before.

“Maybe he’s just trying to find out if he’s wearing a tail.” He wondered aloud.

But that also tended to confirm the habitual behavior of a life-long wise-guy, or so Ted insisted. The whole thing revolved around Harry’s wife’s bowling night. They had a window of opportunity, a period of about four to four and a quarter hours, when they could grab Gagnon, and get him out to Harry’s and into one of the sheds. The key thing was that Harry’s wife wouldn’t be coming or going. The driveway would be empty. No one would be around. Then, when they had Gagnon secured, they could clear out the trucks. They could leave a guard on Gagnon, and no one would be the wiser. Harry was the oldest, and a lucky man. All his kids had moved out and elsewhere. Harry had started young.

“Tonight’s perfect.” Jeff was figuring. “It’s going up to thirteen degrees and tomorrow maybe fourteen. It’s foggy as hell.”

As an additional bonus, Gagnon wouldn’t freeze to death overnight. Harry’s wife habitually slept all day long.

“She won’t be poking her ugly head out, until five or six in the evening.” This according to Harry. “Fog has its problems, too. We won’t be able to drive more than thirty kilometres an hour, maybe less.”

“Yeah? Well, no one will see a fucking thing.” McCabe’s guts were tight.

There was a little nervous heat audible in the tone.

“The streets will be clear although wet…maybe.” Just then the cell phone belted onto Jeff’s waist buzzed and vibrated. “Yeah, yeah…it’s Slick. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

He ended the call abruptly.

Running rabbit for the other guys...

“He’s got to piss like a racehorse, so you better get back there.” He engaged Harry with a certain tone.

“And what do I tell him?”

“Tell him we’ll get there when we’re ready.” Hiltzy seemed calm, like a cucumber. “Look, the odds are that Gagnon will walk over to his girlfriend’s place. And then we’ll know.”

“All right, all right.” Morden muttered, as was his right, as he headed out to get into his own pickup.

His was the brown GMC, twenty years old but still going strong. That 400-cubic inch V-8 would pull a house trailer at a hundred miles an hour. He’d proven it a time or two going down to Florida when the kids were still young.

Harry’s first kid had come along when he was just turning eighteen.

***

She's back.

Polly Andrews had enjoyed her little vacation, and now it was time to go to the bus station. Ed, Stella’s husband, would drive her down. She hugged Stella and the kids one more time, and then turned to go. Ed already had her bags in the car. All she had to contend with was her hatbox and one shopping bag, a purse, gloves and hat.

“Thank you for the lovely time.” She gave Stella with a bright smile and a wave, then clambered into the little silver Honda that Ed owned.

The duo also owned a larger sport-utility vehicle, but Ed never drove it if he didn’t have to. The hiatus was complete. She would have to get back to doing some serious thinking. Miss Andrews had been down to the trailer for two weeks each winter for the last three years, and while the weather was pleasant, to a certain extent the novelty had worn off. Certainly when arriving at the trailer, certain faces, certain individuals moseyed on up and they all got re-acquainted. But those two-week friendships were as nothing to the lifelong relationships she had in Scudmore. These relationships ranged from real friendships, to casual acquaintances, to relatives, to the man who ran the gas station, or the local librarian, or the Pastor of her church. Relationships in some ways might be interchangeable, but not all of them. If she picked up and left forever, or even for six months at a time, she would have to build new relationships in her new home. Picking up where one had left off at home might have its pleasures. She knew something would suffer, something would be lost in the translation.

And she simply didn’t know. Florida might end up being a damnably lonely place for an old spinster. It was no embarrassment to describe or perceive of herself that way. It was a truth she had comfortably come to live with a long time ago. Not that the date with Nathan was unwelcome. She had always been curious, about what a real, honest, loving relationship with a good man, a nice guy like Nathan might be. While she was sure there would be sacrifices and drawbacks, presumably the joys made up for it.

Maybe that was the key to looking at Florida. It couldn’t be all bad, she figured with a rueful grin. A sidelong glance at her niece’s husband’s set profile convinced her that he would be no help. Maybe it was the thing to do. Her mobile home was double-wide, fairly new and located in a kind of an upscale seniors retirement resort. It had a golf course, although Polly had never played in her life. That was part of the trouble, she had never really wanted to, and so it wasn’t a big draw. Her place was all-new and fully furnished in a generic, modern way. The resort also had a pool. Polly hadn’t been swimming in forty years. She never had been much of a swimmer, so she had some reservations about exhibiting her pale and pudgy body in a swimsuit anytime soon. So that wasn’t much of a draw either. She did enjoy the card games, and the dancing on weekends. Some of the sights and attractions in the area were interesting. That was true enough. By using the trailer on a time-share basis, she had covered the cost of buying it, and the lot fees and such. Even if it stood empty half the year, it didn’t cost her anything. Her realtor looked after the whole thing.

One major drawback about the resort, which wasn’t so important when it was just for a couple of weeks, was the fact that it was about fifty kilometres to the ocean, and traffic was bad, and she wasn’t very experienced at navigating alone in a strange place. She had spent most of her life in a small town, and didn’t do much driving to begin with.

It wouldn’t hurt to try it out for three months. If it worked out, maybe she could stay longer or look for a resort closer to the sea. That was part of the big dream, and she didn’t see why she should have to give it up. But, where would she live the rest of the time?

***

Keep it simple, stupid.

It didn’t go exactly as planned. It was even better than planned. The kiss-principle, otherwise known as keep it simple, stupid, had worked out better than Isaacs had hoped.

It meant that he had left fewer tracks. Even now, the city limits were ten klicks behind him.

To simply drive down the street, and see Caitlynn, four and a half years old, standing there in her snowsuit, with a red plastic snow-slider on a short rope, and looking around in speculation, wondering how far the park was, it was pure luck. To seize the moment, that was absolutely brilliant.

Steve drove up, said he was her daddy, and where was mommy?

“Mommy’s on the phone.” Caitlynn in all her innocence, and that was it.

Steve could well imagine her getting Caitlynn all dressed up and ready to go, and then the phone rang. Then the stupid bitch probably dozed off after taking the usual handful of tranks. Probably talking to her fat whore of a mom. Maybe they’d both dozed off. He grinned at that one.

The morning had started off perfectly. Steve had entered the pet shop. He bought a bowl, some kibble, a ball, and a puppy, and some litter for a shit-box. He had bought a shit-box too.

He bought a plastic carrier. While he didn’t regret the money, he hadn’t needed it for the job. He explained that he lived in an apartment.

“Otherwise. I’d just let it crap in the yard.”

She nodded knowledgably. It was a fourteen-hundred-buck sale.

Steve had it figured, that when he made the snatch, the cops wouldn’t arrive for ten or fifteen minutes, even if the call was made right away. Then it would take another ten or fifteen minutes for them to take a statement, get details, ask questions, and to send out alarms, perhaps even a full-blown alert. It would take Kiera ten or fifteen minutes just to find a picture of Caitlynn. She’d be stumbling around, all pilled-up, and virtually unmanageable. He hoped she would yell and scream at the cops. Yes, fucking yell and scream and assault the cops.

They always loved that.

With a half-hour head start, he doubted they would ever pick him up, unless they had his license plate and put up roadblocks. In the event, it was all too easy to grab his kid and belt her into the brand-new car seat in the back of the minivan, the snow-slider hastily stuffed in to avoid leaving clues. Inspired.

Caitlynn was kicking up a storm, yet somehow Steve knew that her mom was asleep on the couch in a pill-haze, or in bed enjoying the embraces of her lover, whom she must undoubtedly have by now.

“Hey, Caitlynn. I’m your daddy, remember me?”

She kept crying, but that was probably just from the way Steve had grabbed her. It was just shock at the sudden transition.

“I’m sorry honey. It’s just that we’re in a hurry.”

He tried to focus on the driving for a moment. He figured ten or fifteen percent over the speed limit was safe enough. He would be all but invisible. Throttling back took some willpower, though.

“Do you see who’s in the box?” He called Caitlynn in a falsetto, cartoony voice. “There’s a puppy in the box, honey. And it’s yours, if you’re a good girl.”

Steve, crooning away in some bogus falsetto voice to his daughter.

With a little luck, it was three to four hours driving to North Bay, where he could stop and gas up. And if no one had seen him, and if no one had given a description of his vehicle, he was pretty much free and clear. The road was good.

The street had been empty, but there was no way of knowing if anyone was looking out through their living room curtains. A vehicle sitting in a driveway may have had occupants. With all his nerves screaming on high alert, he might still have missed something. He didn’t have eyes in the back of his head, and the snatch was pretty impulsive. Thinking back, he had scoped it out in a micro-second. His instincts felt good.

He specifically looked for vapor coming out of tail-pipes, curtains twitching in the homes across the street, et cetera. While the moment was already tending to fade and become hopelessly jumbled up back and forth in time, Steve was sure he had gotten away with it.

He relived it in his head, going back and forth over it as he drove.

When he turned in at the end of the street, and saw the forlorn figure of Caitlynn standing at the end of the driveway, he got such an adrenalin rush he could barely think straight.

He would show them now. He would make them pay, instead of him for a change.

By this time the town should be in quite an uproar. It would be a seven-day wonder.

Steve had popped in to the motel and thrown all his clothes in the bag, and was cool enough to remember his razor and shaving cream, the shampoo and stuff. Steve casually walked in to the office, handed in the key to a silent and inscrutable Missus Yan, and waved goodbye. She definitely had not offered a refund, nor had she glanced at the register. She didn’t even glance out the window, and in any case the van was parked out of sight, in front of the unit, not in front of the office. Mr. Yan hadn’t bothered to confirm the fake license number Steve had written down. All in all, they were pretty slack.

He had the impression it had all gone very well. Now all he had to do was to get out of the immediate area. Caitlynn’s tears had dried up, and she was poking a finger at the slats of the pet-carrier box on the next seat.

“Who’s that?” He cried gaily over his shoulder. “We need a name for your new puppy, Caitlynn. What do you want to call him?”

Numbly, Caitlynn just shook her head, wide-eyed in the mirror, unable to comprehend that her life had just changed forever. Steve loved his daughter so much. It was good to be together again, and when they got out to Vancouver, they would make a new life. Just by themselves, with no one to criticize or tell them what they could and could not do. To his right, a curve of the Ottawa River sat under leaden skies, but Steve saw a much brighter future out west. The release of tension could be quite giddy, he discovered. He was all wrought up over such a little thing. He had done some hard thinking regarding his escape route. The police would initially look in the immediate vicinity of the park, and then the town. They might search the river banks, freshly flooded with the high temperatures.

But only after a couple of hours would they stop to think of abduction. They had some kind of standard operating procedure.

He wondered briefly how he knew that, but he must have picked it up from somewhere.

Movies and books could be so helpful. In Isaacs’ opinion, the police would lack imagination, and strictly follow routine. They would assume the kid was in the creek, or in the woods, or at a friend’s home. If he averaged about a hundred kilometres an hour, for a couple of eighteen-hour days, he could be in California, for Christ’s sakes. That took imagination, but he wasn’t ready to try the border just yet. For now it would be British Columbia, where there were fewer unknowns. His union would find him work, and he didn’t need a green card. It would just be the two of them.

“Daddy’s grown a beard.” He eyed his daughter in the mirror. “Did I scare you, honey?”

She stared at him. It was a year and a half since she had seen him last.

Caitlynn wondered who this strange person was, and why was he giving her a puppy?

She began to cry again. He said he was her daddy, but her mommy said all kinds of bad things about daddy. Caitlynn was scared, but she didn’t know why, or what she was afraid of.

“I want to go home. I want my mommy.” She wailed in tearful frustration.

“We are going home, honey. It’s just a long ways away, and then you can play with your puppy, and everything will be all right.”

Steve had faith.

END