McKelvey said, “it’s a guarantee.” Then he opened the door and held it there for a moment before sliding behind the wheel. Something within himself, a coiled spring or a bottled surge, wanted his neighbour to do something wild and crazy, take a swing perhaps. McKelvey saw himself connecting with that big Teutonic chin, a blow for glory, a blow for every goddamned neighbour within earshot of those barking sons of bitches. His gaggle of thick sausages was already curled into a tight fist, jaw clenched. He looked up at the morning beginning to spread across the skyline in a deep, dark orange of early winter, then looked back to the old man standing before him, and said, “You know, Carl, it’s a very thin line. A very thin line.”
“What is?” Seeburger said.
“The precise location,” McKelvey said, “where your right to own dogs intersects with my right to a peaceful sleep.”
McKelvey closed the door and put his seatbelt on. Seeburger stood there wagging a finger and said in a hoarse voice, “I’ll find out who called the city. That is my right as a tax-paying citizen!”
“Have a nice day,” McKelvey said, smiling broadly and waving as he rolled away.
He felt like a tourist at the office these days, somebody passing through. The police headquarters had at one time been located in a little shithole over on Jarvis Street, but now it was next to a Starbucks on College. There remained very little of the “old” building McKelvey knew from his first days on the force. Back then, the interview rooms were choked blue with smoke, and more than a few lockers in the change room held a pint of rum or brandy tucked beneath a pair of dirty gym shorts for an end-of-shift “happy hour”. And women were just beginning to make their bold entry into the strange universe that was “The Police”. Hard to believe. A lifetime ago and just the other day.
Now the interview rooms were painted in soothing pastels based on psychological consultations, and McKelvey’s boss was a thirty-eight-year-old woman named Inspector Tina Aoki. A university graduate with degrees in criminology and law, Aoki was right now working on her own time towards some sort of Masters. While many of his silver-haired peers were genuinely frustrated, perhaps even angered, by the seeming tendency to put greater stock in framed degrees over hours spent in the blood and filth of the streets, McKelvey took it all in stride. He accepted the fact that everything in life, if given time, changes to the point where you eventually don’t recognize it. We look upon our lives in a sort of warped hindsight, he knew, everything taken in our own unique context, set against our own criteria. He knew any tradesman was declared obsolete if he didn’t keep up with the latest tools. The knowledge didn’t prevent a man from longing, from time to time, for the old days, the old ways.
Detective-Constable Charlie McKelvey made his second coffee of the morning at the refreshment stand in the Hold-Up Squad. This place had been his home for five years now, having transferred from a half dozen years on the Fraud Squad and, before that, a lifetime on the beat across four divisions that spanned the full spectrum of a city that never stopped growing. It was only the nature of the crime that changed with each transfer. The people he dealt with were invariably the same; whether he was pulling a guy over for running a red light, or forcing a known drug dealer to empty the pockets of his cargo pants across the hood of a cruiser up at Jane and Finch, everybody thought he was born last Sunday. They believed with a fervent religious conviction that their lies and excuses were brilliantly unique. It got to the point, and pretty soon into the job, where McKelvey went into every situation—whether a break-in at a hardware store or a stabbing at an after-hours booze can—ready to offer absolutely zero benefit of the doubt. It got to the point sometimes, he knew, where he took this view back home with him. And to Gavin. A teenager with a goddamned cop for a dad. You never believed him. And so, through this lack of trust or faith, the boy necessarily wandered and pushed the limits of a life, real or imagined...in this way did you fail your son...
“Morning, Detective.”
McKelvey looked up from the cup he was stirring and stirring, endlessly stirring, and he smiled at the youthful face of the administrative assistant who had been hired just a short while ago. Amy—he couldn’t remember her last name. She was standing in the hallway, a stack of files clenched under an arm. She was a striking young woman dressed in a form-fitting skirt and blazer combination. The guys were always giving her a hard time, kids in a playground. They disguised their lust for her behind jokes and pranks, and McKelvey believed she didn’t mind the attention.
“Good morning, Amy,” he said. “You look nice today.”
And she did. She was beautiful and young. She was perfect. And McKelvey felt a twinge of sadness for something he had lost within himself somewhere along the way.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, and McKelvey thought she blushed.
Sir. That’s what she called him. It stung, but he was pleased with the show of respect.
“I’m just on my way to see the boss,” he said. “Is she in a good mood this morning?”
Amy smiled, rolled her eyes, and continued on down the hallway without a word. McKelvey took his coffee to Aoki’s office. Her door was always open. She was talking on the phone when he popped his head inside. She motioned him in, and he took a seat across from her, sipping his coffee. The office was small and unglamorous—beige—but he knew she wouldn’t inhabit it for long. She would be heading up Detective Services before her hair began its turn toward grey, that was his bet.
“Morning, Charlie,” Aoki said, setting the phone down.
“You look pissed,” he said.
She shook her head, leaning back in her chair. “These prosecutors, they think we can just pull evidence out of our assholes. They say ‘is that all you’ve got?’ and I feel like saying ‘no, we thought we’d keep some of the good stuff until we get to court’.”
Aoki made him smile. She was wiry, all sinewy muscle, her dark hair cropped short. And she swore like a longshoreman. It was as though every movement, every mannerism was aimed at destroying the myth of her diminutive stature. She had confided in him over a drink a couple of years earlier about how her father had been interned at a camp on the west coast during the Second World War. She spoke of how he hadn’t been angry with his new country for assuming he was a possible collaborator, saying instead that “everyone has a role to play when their country is at war”. McKelvey believed she both admired and detested this vein of deep stoicism within her father. Knowing Aoki, she wouldn’t have taken it on the chin for king and country.
McKelvey was anxious, and he caught himself chewing at his ragged thumb. In a matter of weeks, the Crown would kick off the trial of a bank robber, drug dealer, extortionist, suspected killer and known biker named Pierre Duguay. The trial was attracting media attention due to Duguay’s alleged connections to the Blades, an upstart Quebec biker gang with roots in the southern United States and South America. The Blades had battled the Hell’s Angels in Quebec for a few years at the closing of the nineties, fighting to control the lucrative drugs, prostitution and fraud rings. The body count was high. Car bombings, pipe bombs, shootings. The Angels were too big, too well-entrenched, too well-organized and managed, so the war eventually ran out of steam, and a large faction of Blades patched over to their rivals rather than face certain annihilation. But there remained a faithful few who drifted from Quebec in search of new frontiers out west and up north in the mining towns, places like Sudbury and Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, but like all pioneers, they stopped somewhere to catch their breath, and it ended up becoming home for a while.
The Blades bought a house in the west end of Toronto,
