left the studio at a little past three, hoping to catch a short nap, a shower, and a bite to eat before meeting Greg Matthias at the hospital at six. There were a number of things I wouldn’t miss about the Davie Street studio: the creaky, unreliable freight elevator; the leaky windows; Dingy Bill, the incontinent homeless man who occasionally camped out in the stairwell; and clients’ complaints that they could never find parking. One of the things I would miss, however, was the twice-daily commute to and from work. The half-kilometre morning walk from my house to the Aquabus dock by the Public Market, the short ferry ride across False Creek, and the slightly longer hike from the ferry dock at the foot of Hornby Street to the studio gave me time to switch mental gears and prepare myself for the daily grind. The return trip at the end of the day helped me relax and recharge my depleted psychic batteries. And it was about the only exercise I got. The new studio space was at most a five-minute walk from home, hardly time at all to change modes, recharge batteries, or burn off a pint of Granville Island Lager.
Disembarking from the tubby little Aquabus ferry at the dock by the public market, I climbed the steps to the quay and trudged toward home along Johnston Street, past the Ocean cement plant, one of the last vestiges of Granville Island’s industrial past, and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, where a pair of students were wrapping another in clear plastic packing tape while a fourth video recorded the process. I might have paused to watch, just to see if I could figure out what the hell they were doing, and why, but I was so tired that all I could focus on was the siren song of the sofa in my living room. As I angled across the parking lot toward the ramp down to the Sea Village docks, I saw Loth sitting on the end of the raised pad of the old freight crane in the middle of the lot, drinking something from a brown paper bag. Unfortunately, Loth also saw me.
Loth — I didn’t know if it was his first name or his last — had been loitering about Granville Island since the New Year. He was a huge old man, seventy if he was a day, two or three inches shy of seven feet tall and weighing in at three hundred pounds or more. He was immensely strong. I’d seen him lift the rear end of a Ford Focus clear off the ground, for reasons known only to him. There was a rumour making the rounds that he was an ex-con, recently released from the Kent Institution, the federal maximum-security prison in Agassiz, the Corn Capital of B.C., where he’d been serving time for manslaughter. I’d never put much stock in it.
“You, mister man,” Loth called out as he dropped his paper bag with a glassy thud onto the pavement and heaved himself off the crane pad. He loomed toward me, his stout wood cane bowing under his massive weight. “Any work you got?” “What?” I asked.
“Work. You got work?”
“For you, you mean?” I said, backing away from him.
He kept coming and I kept backing away. He was huge. And he had a body odour that would peel paint, an overpowering mix of dried sweat, urine, and what smelled like rotting meat. I imagined that the only reason he wasn’t surrounded by flies was that any fly that got too close would instantly drop dead from the toxic stink.
“O’ course for me. Who else you see, yeah?” He waved his cane. “I paint good. Carpenter, too.”
“Sorry,” I said. “No.” He accepted it with a shrug.
“I hear about yer fran, yeah?” he said.
“My what?”
“Yer fran,” he repeated. “Mouthy cunt with no tits. Someone beat her up good, yeah.” He laughed and the alcohol fumes on his breath made my eyes water. “Mebbe now she learn to keep her mouth shut, ’cept when she sucks on men’s dicks, yeah.”
He howled with laughter and, leaning on his cane, shambled off across the lot toward the Granville Island Hotel to entertain the guests there. My heart was thudding and I realized I was holding my breath. What part of fight or flight was that? I wondered.
I picked up the bottle and paper bag he’d discarded and headed toward the ramp down to Sea Village and the safety of home. Home was a small, two-storey cedar-plank cottage, painted forest green and built on a reinforced concrete hull. The roof was flat, a deck surrounded by a cedar railing, the access shed sticking up in one corner like an afterthought. It had three bedrooms, one and a half baths, a practical kitchen, and a small sunken living room containing the aforementioned sofa.
As I started down the ramp, someone called, “Mr. McCall, oh, Mr. McCall.” I turned to see a man striding toward me along the quayside, briefcase dangling from one hand, BlackBerry clutched in the other. His name was Blake Darling and he claimed to be a real estate broker. He was as slick and slippery as he looked in his natty yellow jacket. Ignoring him, I started down the ramp again.
“Wait, sir, please,” he called. “Just a moment of your time.”
“I have nothing more to say to you, Mr. Darling,” I said. “Nothing has changed. I wasn’t interested in selling yesterday, I’m not interested today, and I won’t be interested tomorrow. Neither are any of my neighbours. Give it up. You’re only wasting your time, and your client’s money.”
“I never waste either,” he said. His voice was high-pitched and grated on the ear like feedback from a cheap guitar amp. “Time is money, as they say. Feel free to ask any of my clients if they’ve gotten their money’s worth. My list of satisfied clients is quite long.”
“You’re becoming a nuisance,” I said. “Some of my neighbours are talking about applying for a restraining order against you.”
“They’d just be wasting their time,” he said.
“Look, why can’t you get it through your head that none of us is interested in selling our shares in Sea Village?” Which was the only way to acquire a house moorage, as there was no room to expand along the quayside.
“My client is a very determined man, Mr. McCall. He usually gets what he wants.” He chortled and smiled, as if at some secret joke. “He didn’t get to where he is today by taking no for an answer. Neither did I.”
“Well, I hope he — and you — can handle the disappointment,” I said. “But even if someone was willing to sell, your client, whoever he is, would likely never be approved by the board, of which we are all members. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, Mr. Darling, anyone who’d hire someone like you to represent him isn’t the kind of neighbour we want.”
“There’s no need to be rude about it.”
“Nothing else seems to have worked.”
“You haven’t heard the latest offer.”
“I don’t want to. It doesn’t matter. Go away.”
“It’s a very good offer,” he said.
“Whatever it is,” I said, knowing it was pointless to try to get the last word, “it won’t be good enough.”
“How will you know until you hear it?”
“Good day, Mr. Darling.” I turned and walked down the ramp to the floating docks.
“I won’t give up, Mr. McCall,” he called out to my back.
I wondered if Loth was available for part-time security work.
“You think this Loth character might be the one who attacked Bobbi?” Greg Matthias said quietly. We were in Bobbi’s room. She was out of intensive care, but
