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"We're in the discoveries process..."
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Chapter
Thirty-Four
They were in the
discoveries process…
“We’re
in the discoveries process.” Paul Watts explained rather superfluously to
Gagnon.
The
professional lawyer didn’t have any idea how far Gagnon had gotten in his
studies. Locked up in a cell for seven years, court procedure might not have
been a high point in his self-education. Reading books was no substitute for
courtroom experience.
“How
are you doing with Jason and Ashley?” Gagnon demanded without preamble.
“Let’s
just concentrate on today.” The counselor gave his arm a quick pat.
Jean
looked around at Janet for about the umpteenth time. Each time his guts
wrenched at the look of calm, yet determined dignity on her face, chin set and
eyes glittering coldly. To see her trying to smile encouragement was ghastly.
Once
again, the courtroom was packed with spectators, and this time around the media
had a heavy presence. The incessant dull murmur of the crowded benches, rows of
unwashed humanity, all sitting cheek by jowl, acted to obscure and make their
talk private.
“This
is a preliminary hearing to determine if there’s sufficient evidence to bind
you over for trial.”
Gagnon
nodded his comprehension.
“In
my opinion, there isn’t, but of course judges are aware of public feelings in
the communities they serve.” Watts went on, unaware that he sounded a little
like a community-college professor.
Angela
Maginn was just winding up a previous case while they waited.
“Yes,
sir.” Gagnon sat there.
“They’ll
make a motion on the bail, but I’m pretty sure I can talk our way out of that.
The fact that your house almost burned down, in an act of arson, may help us there.
Anyway, I’ve got another little surprise up my sleeve.”
Gagnon
was hardly listening.
“They’ll
try to blame me.”
He
had been re-arrested in his own garage. Jean was showing the auctioneer all
through the house.
“Ten
grand for the piano, and four grand for the hutch, but of course those are
retail—I can’t give you anything like that.” Stuff like that—
Sooner
or later they had made it out to the garage.
Reginald
Schumann, a middle-aged balding man with a paunch, had simply shaken his head
at the cars.
“Not
my area of expertise, I’m afraid, although the big one’s definitely worth a few
thousand.” There was the XJ-S, a kind of V-12 powered two-door coupe, very low
and sleek-looking. “As for the other one. Some of these little English cars of
the fifties and sixties could surprise you.”
But
he couldn’t be certain of anything, and he didn’t take chances with stuff he
didn’t know.
As
for Jean, he knew next to nothing about cars. Most of the ones he had owned in
his life were just half-decent looking vehicles picked up off a used-car lot.
You kicked the tires, listened to it run, and you took a chance. But when the
cops arrived at his house, and came walking up the driveway, he wasn’t
particularly surprised.
Mister
Watts explained further.
“You
shouldn’t have slept at the Herbert woman’s place. You should have let Victim’s
Services direct you to a homeless shelter for the night.”
Apparently
if someone with the police department made him go, how could the Court argue
with that?
“How
the hell was I supposed to know? Yeah, it’s funny how no one bothered to tell
me.”
He’d
also been nailed for not carrying the bail agreement on him when out of his
home. The wallet was on his dresser, and he had taken nothing with him to
Janet’s, as he freely admitted to the cops. If only he had thought quicker on
his feet, he never would have told the buggers anything. That was the trouble
with having a clean conscience.
You
tended to cooperate in your own destruction.
Jean
considered himself extremely lucky to only do three weeks in jail this time
around. The hearing had already been scheduled. Thank God it wasn’t three
months away. Jean had lost about a pound a day while in the bleak and
forbidding maximum-security county jail. It was a place not conceived as a
minimum-risk country-club kind of
facility. The men and women inside were to be held for a minimum length of
time, pending trial or serving short sentences. Notions of recreation, or any redeeming sort of program for the
prisoners, had been overlooked. The place was a ninety-year old, over-crowded
shit-hole.
As
for Jean, in the alleged hospital ward of cells, he was allowed outdoors into
the tiny fenced-in walkway for a half an hour a day. The rest of the time he
went quietly nuts.
The
clerk of the court was giving Watts a nod. Maginn was rummaging through a stack
of file folders, and the figure previously under examination by the Court was
bent over the clerk’s desk, signing some documents, and looking relieved.
Then
Maginn was speaking.
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Maginn. I don't see the relevance.
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“If
it please the Court, in the case of the Crown versus Jean Gagnon, the Crown
asks that Mister Gagnon be held in custody pending trial on the charge of
homicide in the first degree. Mister Gagnon has demonstrated an inability to
comply with Court-ordered bail conditions, within days of release. It is still
the Crown’s position that Mister Gagnon represents a danger to the community,
and as a life-long offender, he represents a strong risk of flight. He’s
already done it once.”
She
distributed copies of the motion to Watts and the clerk.
“Do
you have any evidence, counselor?” Watts adopted his usual calm and urbane
manner. “Permission to introduce evidence?”
Judge
Jack Slymingham peered over his bifocals, while holding a sheet of paper in his
hand. He nodded indecisively, as Maginn scowled at this unwelcome development.
All she wanted to do was to keep Gagnon in jail while the police built a case
against him.
“We
would like to introduce this newspaper clipping, and these sworn affidavits.”
Watts had an air of contempt. “These show that someone other than Jean Gagnon
robbed a bank in Ottawa, and that Mister Gagnon must have been wrongfully
convicted, and that the money he allegedly stole has been recovered.”
“What?”
Jean gasped aloud, as the room erupted in a cacophony of disbelief.
A
hundred voices all spoke at once. Watts stood there like a leopard poised to
spring.
“Permission
to approach?” The highly-confident lawyer called over the hubbub.
Watts
slid a sheet of paper over to a stunned Jean Gagnon, and then made his way
along with Maginn to the bench for a quiet consultation on procedures and such.
Whispers
in the background, the people all excited and amazed by this turn of events,
distracted Jean as he attempted to read the thing. While the light in here was
okay, it was a rather murky photocopy and lately he was starting to think that
a pair of reading glasses might be in order. He squinted at the tiny typeface,
wishing it had been enlarged.
He
was completely disoriented as he plowed his way through the story, the echoing
murmur of the lawyers attenuating and distorting as it circled around the room.
The
clipping was from the Saint-Marie Monde
if he read it right, that meant the world. He had no idea where the place was.
According to the story, police had found the money in a submerged vehicle.
Recovered along with the money were the partially-decomposed bodies of Franco
Di Fazzio, age thirty-nine, and Guiseppe Di Angelo, age forty-one. The money was
in an alligator-skinned briefcase. And some of the numbers, several packets of
which were sequential…some of the money had been identified and linked to the
robbery that he was convicted of. With a rising sense of excitement, Jean
blocked out all other distractions and focused on what the trio at the bench
were saying.
Filtering
out other voices over the din, he heard Paul Watts talking to the judge.
“And
the Quebec police are still looking for a certain Carlo Di Rocca.”
Jean
sat rigid, listening carefully. Holy crap.
“But
I don’t get the relevance.” The Maginn woman was telling the judge.
Watts
snorted.
“Don’t
play stupid. The man’s so-called criminal record should be thrown out.”
“Has
he been granted an appeal? A re-trial?” Maginn butted in with a snarl. “Surely
this has nothing to do with the case at hand.”
Gagnon’s
sentence would have to be set aside, and that took years. Slymingham couldn’t
resist the urge to teach a young lawyer a little bit about their job that maybe
didn’t get covered enough in law school.
“You
brought the man’s previous record up yourself, counselor.” Jack the Judge told
her with a snippet of a smile. “Surely the gentleman has the right to challenge
it.”
He
thought for a moment.
“I’ll
tell you what.” He nodded. “I’m going to strike the record. Now, what else have
you got for me?”
The
glittering orbs that were his eyes looked upon Paul Watts in speculation, and a
kind of anticipation. Looking back, he hadn’t had this much fun in years.
“I’ll
strike it provisionally.” He smiled at the young Crown attorney.
“Mister
Gagnon was abducted by a person or persons unknown, who attempted to acquire
that five-hundred-thousand.” Watts laid it out. “It is Mister Gagnon that is at
risk. In that single sense, we actually agree with the Crown.”
“When
did we say anything like that? We don’t agree.”
“You
said something remarkably like it at the last hearing.” Slymingham’s response
betrayed just a hint of glee.
Finally,
something to do with actual law that he could get his teeth into. He looked
forward to digging out the old books and doing the research. Slymingham loved
the law, in all of her majesty, in all of her grandeur. Human relationships
needed regulation.
“Justice
is blind, counselor.” Slymingham reminded her. “You said Gagnon was at risk for
suicide. It’s probably a lot worse for him in a jail cell.”
The
three of them noted in annoyance that a woman in the front row had forgotten to
turn off her cellular phone. They could hear it, as could everyone in the room,
when it went off in some kind of techno-hip-hop ring tone as Maginn sought for
inspiration.
Embarrassed
by the attention, Kiera Isaacs reached into her purse to shut it off, but
first, simple curiosity made her touch the button and read the number on the
display. With a shake of her head, she impulsively hit the screen and held it
up to her ear, ready to push the button and shut it off instantly if it wasn’t
anything really important.
Only
the fact that the Court was in some interminable hiatus led her to do it in the
first place. All of a sudden, Kiera Isaacs let out a blood-curdling scream,
almost dropping the phone in shock.
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"It's my baby!"
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“Oh
my God.” She shrieked, holding the phone out at arm’s length, as if in some
unspoken plea for the onlookers to verify it. “It’s my baby. It’s my baby.”
Pandemonium
reigned in the courtroom as flashes and cameras went off, and everyone was
asking questions at once. Poor old Jean Gagnon just sat there galvanized as
Watts, Maginn and the judge stared at him, at her, each other, and the
documents in front of them.
Ringing
through all the din, one anonymous male voice spoke in disgust and resignation.
“Well,
that’s fuckin’ torn it.”
Pandemonium
reigned supreme in the courtroom, as the cops on special security duty made a
beeline for Kiera, as she stared at it with tear-swept face, and tiny little
noises came out of the thing.
***
Steve
Isaacs was having a bad dream. He moaned softly, wondering in this hazy state
just exactly what he was doing in this tiny car. Who was driving it? He should
know this person. The dim impression he had was of two buddies, out for a
cruise on a summer’s eve. But his friend’s face was just a blank. A hypnotic
sense of dread kept dragging him along behind it. There was an inevitability at
work here. Had this happened? In the past, perhaps? Was this one of those
amphibious cars he kept seeing on TV? Steve’s subconscious mind kept driving
the pictures forward. In fascination he watched himself as they pulled up in
front of a building. The two of them got out and walked across the graveled
parking lot. His dream-state wouldn’t let go, as the pair of them walked
through what looked like a seafood restaurant. It was a dingy and dirty-looking
bar, built out on a wharf overlooking a basin where luxury speedboats and
commercial fishing boats tied up together right in front of the windows. But
there was no place like this in Vancouver. It was too rustic looking, too
isolated. Too run down for the town as he knew it. Someone would have bought it
and thrown up a thirty-story high-rise executive condo.
Following
the other man right, and down the hallway and into a separate room, he saw
sturdy fisherman-types at a table, smoking pipes and sipping greenish liqueur.
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A dream that just won't quit...
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His
friend knew these people, but he was completely mystified. Looking under the
table, Steve became uncomfortably aware that everyone else had boots on, big,
black rubber boots with yellow strips around the tops. Rain boots, work boots,
his buddy had shoes on. Why was he the only one with no shoes? Craning his head
upwards, he saw the ceiling was really the underside of the roof. The nautical
theme of the premises even extended to the rafters and roofing boards being
painted, spray-painted by the looks of it, with a kind of sickly-green paint.
Moldering old fishing nets were stapled to the underside of the roof beams,
with brown, trailing ends of dusty spider-webs dangling down from them. And
everywhere that penicillin-green paint.
The
man to his left was big, and bluff, and hearty, to the extent that Steve felt
somehow inadequate, if not outright effeminate. The other’s blue eyes, grey
spade-like beard, and white roll-neck fisherman’s sweater, exuded a highly
individualized smell of tobacco and sweat. The man’s ruddy face was split in a
wide grin, and manfully Steve tried to guffaw along with the joke, which he
hadn’t actually heard. The huge guy was slapping him on the arm, talking to
Steve, but he couldn’t comprehend what the man was saying as he gazed in
fascination at a real-live captain’s hat, replete with gold braid.
In
his dream, Steve looked to his right. Doug Bernardi. His old elementary school
buddy. How had they gotten hooked up again? And why hadn’t he recognized him,
in that distinctive black leather jacket—yes, that was Doug all right—when they
were in the car? The rickety old table, the chairs, had all been sprayed green
by some amateur.
In
his highly-subjective state of awareness, this seemed to be going on forever,
and his will was being sub-ducted by some other form of control.
His
dream state was an unusual type of consciousness, as Steve found himself to be
wandering through the restaurant, opening up rooms to see the vague stares of
customers blinking back at him in tolerant amusement. It was a horribly grubby
little restaurant, like it had been converted from something else, a fishing shack
or the residence of some old wino…wandering around barefoot.
He
opened up a door, and a man he somehow knew to be the manager was in bed with
some girl he took to be his waitress. He could hear the kitchen in the
background.
“I’ll
be with you in a minute.” She hurriedly threw back the covers and swung her
bare legs out of bed.
No
wonder the service around here was so bad. The rooms off to each side of the
bleak hallway took on new significance. What was this place? Horrid, dirty,
cramped little bedrooms with no one in them, just a sagging bed.
Steve
heard low voices, a murmuring that tugged at the corners of his awareness. This
was like the worst little whorehouse on the Gulf Coast or something…reality hit
with a bang.
“Caitlynn?
Caitlynn?” He was in a bed and with a start of understanding, he saw that the
sunlight streaming across his bedspread was angled all funny.
The
shaft of light went in the opposite direction from what it should be.
In
stark fear, he tumbled out of bed in a rush, heading for the other room, noting
in shock that the glowing red numbers on his clock-radio said it was
three-thirty p.m.
He
could hear his little girl’s voice talking to someone, his heart thumping like
breakers on a stony beach as he rounded the corner into the living room.
Adrenalin shot through him when he saw she had the cell phone up to her ear.
“Caitlynn.”
He hissed. “No. Bad girl. No.”
Grabbing
the phone, he heard a voice coming from it. The name and number on the screen
was a familiar one. A fucking Ontario number. No. Caitlynn had called her
mother.
“Sir?
We’d just like to speak with you for a minute.” A strong male voice close
inside his ear.
Steve
rammed a finger at the switch, and fell backwards onto the couch, as Caitlynn
stared up at him. Something about his posture, her childlike instincts told her
that daddy wasn’t very happy right now. Steve grabbed a handful of hair, and
began pulling it out, the pain the only link with reality to hang onto right
about now. His daughter stared.
“Argh.”
He groaned.
The
cell-phone could be tracked, unlike the van, the apartment, et cetera. That one
small detail overlooked, and it was coming back to haunt him.
“Oh,
Caitlynn, what have you done?” He moaned, as she looked on wide-eyed, with the
beginnings of a crying fit stealing over her little features.
All
Steve could do was to sit there and try to think it through. How much time did
he have? What kind of a trail had he left? How long would it take for them to
trace the call?
There
were so many questions he wished he had asked sooner. Steve had heard something
about repeater stations. They could narrow it down. But how long did it take?
How precise could they get? There were so many unknowns. He didn’t know what to
do next, except panic and get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. All
his instincts were screaming at him to grab Caitlynn and go. Otherwise it would
be too late. And now all of a sudden his phone rang. Someone had used caller ID
or the call-back option. His heart felt like it was going to come ripping right
out of his chest.
“Jesus
help us now.”
***
Carlo
Di Rocca didn’t believe a word of it as he lay in the exposed grass, where a
snow-drift curled over and kept just a hint of sunshine captive, warming his
guts a little.
The
Gagnon character had been yanked out of the gaping maw of the furnace of hell,
as if some mean and arbitrary Fate had him on a string. While the man had
suffered, the owl said, he should be glad he wasn’t born in Cambodia. Pol Pot’s boys would have piled his skull on
with the rest of the heap, or something like that. His thoughts raced.
The
owl was going hunting, or so he said. Carlo Di Rocca didn’t trust that owl one
bit, for all of his thousand or fifteen hundred years. He had grown up a lot,
since the early dawn hours when he was invoked by the shaman. Poor fool. The
silly bugger had bitten off a little more than he could chew, in the end. In
the end, we all have it coming to us, and we all deserve our fate. Fate is the
most democratic institution of all, the coyote part of Carlo Di Rocca submitted
to his Wintke selves, for not only
was he a shape-shifter, he was also a person with two human souls.
Coyote
had learned that he had the soul of a man, and the soul of a woman, both
trapped within him in some eternal struggle with a third self, a soul-less,
animal self. The battle could never be won, and it could never be lost. But the
fighting would continue. So be it, and if one had to have a fate, surely the
fate of coyote, the fate of Di Rocca was the worst fate of all, for it lasted
for all of eternity, timeless, without form, and existing before even that
first memory. His internal struggle would eventually drive him mad. He just
accepted it, and worried about it from time to time.
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Carlo Di Rocca, a.k.a. the Coyote.
|
The
shaman had come to a bad end, though.
Having
changed once too often, the coyote was saving energy for one last change…if he
could do it. The magic had its limitations, its own immutable laws of
conservation. It used up your life-stuff to make the change. Even that
accidental amateur Gagnon, however he came by the skill originally, had enough
self-preserving instincts not to try to change into a tit-mouse or anything
that could be potentially irrevocable. He had discussed it once with the owl,
(strange how you could be friends and enemies at one and the same time.) There
was a case where a shaman had changed into a huge snapping turtle. While
escaping from the main threat, an angry grey wolf, the shaman inadvertently
went into hibernation, having forgotten to take into account his actual
surroundings. Laying there all winter, he was quickly found and dispatched by
other prowling spirits. Shamans were often very manipulative, and made enemies
as fast as they tried to make friends with the powers of the land. No, Di Rocca
didn’t believe a word of it. Someone had fucked it up. Someone was lying to
him.
He
hadn’t invested all of this time in this operation, not to see it come off.
No
way. It wasn’t going to happen. One way or another Gagnon owed Di Rocca a half
a million bucks. If he couldn’t get it, he’d take it out of his hide.
The
cops must have put Gagnon in jail for some reason, and Di Rocca was convinced
that he was somehow being betrayed by his very best friends. Everything else,
all this stuff, it was just a blind. The bogus stories were planted by the cops
and their buddies the news guys. The cops had had enough evidence to convict
Gagnon. That told a story. If the owl wanted to chicken out at the last minute,
that was fine. He could take care of him later. He would invite the owl down
for dinner. He was always a sucker for a fresh-killed jackrabbit.
“Done
like dinner. Tee-hee-hee. Yes, by this time I must be quite mad.”
A
tired wind stirred the branches above him, rattling the thin scattered screen
of dry, dead leaves against one another.
***
From
Slick’s point of view, the world held a lot of very unpleasant uncertainties.
All
he wanted to do was to get out of town. He found himself shitting razor blades,
as the saying went, or to use another expression, on tenterhooks. Now Slick
knew exactly what that meant. With no money in the bank, and no way to sell
anything in any kind of a hurry, he was forced to sit there, day after day,
unable to confront what might be his fate.
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Slick: a lot of unpleasant uncertainties...
|
Frenchie’s
luck was holding good, or rather bad. Word coming back through the grapevine
was that Gagnon’s insurance people had gotten real ugly while he was in jail, and, since he was in jail, now the
insurance company’s investigator was suggesting that Gagnon himself had torched
the place. It might take two years to pay off. They were like that.
Still,
Frenchie would be damned glad to be out of the bucket. From Slick’s point of
view, Gagnon would be looking out for certain individuals. He might want to
have a word with them. The police in Vancouver were still looking for the
Isaacs guy and the daughter, that Caitlynn kid. So far they hadn’t been
located, and at some point the search would peter out. All they could do was to
wait until he made another mistake. The cell-phone thing wasn’t likely to
happen again. All the police had was a radius. In a case of parental abduction,
a Canada-wide warrant was unlikely. There was too much likelihood of lawyers
getting involved. The whole parental-rights thing was a nightmare to the cops.
It
seemed hard on the Isaac’s lady, that’s for sure, but there was nothing Slick
could do about that. Thank God he hadn’t been forced to choose, between
Gagnon’s freedom and his own. Almost certainly, he would have failed that test.
All Slick Wilson wanted to do was to sell his shitty little house, and move to
Arizona, where he had some elderly female relatives down near Reno. How could
he have ever been so stupid?
END
Chapter
One.
Chapter
Two.
Chapter
Three.
Chapter
Four.
Chapter
Five.
Chapter
Six.
Chapter
Seven.
Chapter
Eight.
Chapter
Nine.
Chapter
Ten.
Chapter
Eleven.
Chapter
Twelve.
Chapter
Thirteen.
Chapter
Fourteen.
Chapter
Fifteen.
Chapter
Sixteen.
Chapter
Seventeen.
Chapter
Eighteen.
Chapter
Nineteen.
Chapter
Twenty.
Chapter
Twenty-One.
Chapter
Twenty-Two.
Chapter
Twenty-Three.
Chapter
Twenty-Four.
Chapter
Twenty-Five.
Chapter
Twenty-Six.
Chapter
Twenty-Seven.
Chapter
Twenty-Eight.
Chapter
Twenty-Nine.
Chapter
Thirty.
Chapter
Thirty-One.
Chapter
Thirty-Two.
Chapter
Thirty-Three.
Images. Louis.
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