don’t take it personally. You’re eligible, Charlie. The same offer’s being made to four others in Detective Services, a bunch over in administration and special services. The department’s trying to balance a budget while hiring more patrol officers. Anyway, it’s not a negative, Charlie. I’d love to see you leave this business with a good package and all your wiring still intact,” and here she tapped the side of her head for effect. “You did more than your share, and you deserve to get on with your life. I think the timing’s right, to be honest.”
“What if I don’t want to retire? I’ve got a few more good years.”
“Right now they’re asking. If you push this, they’ll be telling you.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“There’s more to this than...” She took a moment to find the right words. “Don’t sit there and tell me you didn’t see this coming. Your head and your heart aren’t on this job any more. I’ve been very patient, Charlie. I’ve let a lot of things slide. You come and go from this place like it’s a fucking train station. You stopped seeing the department psychologist. You harassed Balani while he was the lead investigator...”
“Is that what Balani said, I harassed him? Jesus Christ, Tina. I just want to keep up on developments. He hasn’t followed up on any of the angles I’ve tossed out. And now that he kissed ass and got himself recruited onto that biker task force, what happens to the file? I guess closing this one isn’t a priority.”
“You don’t mean that. We look after our own, and Gavin was one of ours. I can only imagine how frustrating this is for you, but you’ve got to leave it alone. You have this hypothesis, Charlie, but nobody else can connect the dots. Balani doesn’t agree with you, and quite frankly, neither do I. Motive, maybe, but the evidence just isn’t there. The Crown has finite resources. We can get by sometimes on our gut instinct. Crown doesn’t have the same luxury once they get to court.”
“Duguay did this,” he said, “or else it was on his word. Either way, it was him. The guys who were buying dope all say the same thing. That Duguay was running that apartment Gavin was in. Something went down, and he was seen in the vicinity.”
She went to respond but had to answer her ringing phone. She paused before picking up and said, “Talk to Caroline about the offer, Charlie.”
The first flakes of the season began to fall gently as McKelvey wound his way through the streets of the lower downtown, edging the lakeshore. Always the lake was out there, great dull silver horizon. It was a soft and slow snowfall, the kind he remembered from childhood, the snow just falling and falling so you couldn’t tell whether the sky was up or down. Winters up north were so different from here in the city. He couldn’t remember a green Christmas back home, but down here it wasn’t unusual at all.
He didn’t want to think about life back there, back at home, and so he pushed it from his mind and focused on the city streets moving with people and traffic, and soon enough his mind came back, as it always did, to the place where it got stuck, the groove worn deep. Every circuit, every synapse, every cell within the complex machinery of his grey matter seemed always to be working in the background on his son’s file. It didn’t matter what he tried to do in order to reign in his concentration; the wiring was splayed now, and the message wasn’t getting through.
On mornings like this, he could not sit at his desk without his knee pumping in agitation, his fingers drumming a meandering and aimless beat, a million thoughts running through his head. Figuring things, remembering things. He would stand up and sit down, walk to the coffee machine a dozen times, visit the men’s room and stare at his face in the row of long mirrors, anxious as a small boy waiting for something. Like a swimmer at the bottom of a pool, he could see the shimmering green-yellow lights of the surface dancing just beyond his reach, a whole universe taking place above that cloudy, formless horizon. Each morning he pointed his arms skyward, pushed off with both feet, and jettisoned himself toward the surface, his lungs aching for oxygen, fingers anticipating the first freshness of open air...
The falling flakes were hypnotic. He drove through the business heart of the city, blocks of chrome and glass, stone and concrete, University and Bay, then on down past the iconic train station with its weathered pillars and arches, the first view of the city offered to freshly landed European immigrants. This, too, had been McKelvey’s first view of life in a metropolis, a smooth-faced kid stepping from the northern train with a duffel over his shoulder and a pocketful of hope. Now the immigrant taxi drivers lined up outside the station as well-dressed men and women flowed in and out of the brass-plated doors on their way to and from commuter trains hauling them in from ’burbs that were spreading like dark wine across a tablecloth, east and west, north and south.
Across from Union Station, the old Royal York Hotel appeared frozen in time, monolithic matriarch of hospitality from a forgotten era of crisp white table cloths, heavy silverware, and doormen dressed in rich burgundy coats and hats. McKelvey moved eastward, down side streets he hadn’t been on in years, not since his days in a radio car. Back then he had known every street in his division, every corner where someone might hide. Those long ago days when he never seemed to question his physical ability to wrestle another man’s hands into a set a cuffs, to put him to the ground like a dog, knee in his back. Was this a brand of unquestioning confidence unique to police officers, or was it simply youthful ignorance or arrogance? He couldn’t say. And while he still believed he could handle himself, there were no illusions of infinite strength. He felt the energy of his life force waning.
The radio in the car thrummed and snapped with activity, but after a while McKelvey tuned it out. He noticed the subtle and not-so-subtle changes to the geography, the transformation of old apartment blocks into trendy loft condos. When you lived and worked in the city, as McKelvey had since the age of eighteen, you eventually stopped noticing any changes until they were entirely completed. Massive structures simply appeared as though set there overnight by a child building a train set village. Urban change was overwhelming in its velocity; there was simply too much of it to absorb. There was something going on around you all the time, a minute by minute transformation of the city, renovations, new glass, paint, scaffolds rising and falling like rusted skeletons, jackhammers and trucks backing up, apartment buildings blooming like strange orchids among the grasslands of the war-time bungalows and row houses. McKelvey remembered the old days of the warehouses along the train tracks, the low thick buildings that resembled concentration camps, the smashed distillery house windows staring like black empty eyes, the vacant lots where poor kids played stick ball long before there were million-dollar condos. Today wealthy young executives ate salmon steaks overlooking the train yards and back alleys where the original urban immigrants lived in shacks insulated with newspapers. Evolution.
He wound his way northward, meandering through the old neighborhoods where he had worked, specific coordinates bringing forth the memory of vivid calls: a stabbing at this corner, a bloody armed robbery at that convenience store, all the while his mind running through the meeting with Aoki. Caroline would ask about the news from the Crown, and he would tell her that not only would there be no charges brought in Gavin’s murder, but the sun had set on Charlie McKelvey’s mediocre police career. Hell of a day. So many things to think about.A man could get lost in the details without even knowing it.
And then he was stopped. Stopped and staring at a traffic light.
Red.
Flakes falling almost horizontal now, mesmerizing.
McKelvey stared at the traffic light. Green now. It had changed from yellow to red to green without his even noticing. He was staring at
