Tin Man looked up sharply. His already tight face went rigid. His axe rose from off the table in his shaking fist as he transfixed Jinnah with his cyclopean stare.
“Questions! Always questions! You can never ask enough, your kind!”
This struck Jinnah as being pejorative. His jelly-like spine stiffened a scintilla.
“What do you mean by that?” he said, although not too stridently.
The Tin Man held his axe at chest height and his whole frame trembled.
“Why do ya need to know? Haven’t I given enough, eh?” he cried. “Yer a dark messenger from the black forces!”
“I’m brown, not black,” Jinnah said peevishly, now convinced the Tin Man was insulting his race and heritage.
“Black!” shouted the Tin Man. “You’re all black! All shall be consumed by fire! Ye shall burn in the flames of righteousness that the Lord shall send —”
The Tin Man raised his axe over his head with both hands as high as the low roof of the shed would allow. Jinnah needed no further prompting. Live to be insulted another day, he thought. He bolted towards the door, slipped in a puddle of ooze, lost his balance and hurled headlong out the shack onto the muddy flat. The impact knocked his glasses off. Panicked, he frantically clawed at the ground while scrambling to regain his feet. His hand closed around one glass lens just as the Tin Man appeared in the door.
“And the Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire to lead the way!” he screamed, waving the axe. “A just and vengeful God is our Lord —”
Jinnah didn’t hang around to argue theology nor try to impress on the man the limitless mercy of Allah. He turned and put his glasses on in a single movement, then ran off at a speed that a heart constricted by decades of cigarette smoking is not designed to sustain for any great distance. The flow of oxygen to his lungs was further strangled by the conviction that a heavy, sharp axe could at any moment imbed itself in his skull. Jinnah ran faster and further than he had since he had been in compulsory military training back in Africa. He hung a wide, ragged right at the sawmill site, added his own set of deep tracks to the confusion of the crime scene, then fairly threw himself into the satellite-guided Love Machine. Hands shaking, he managed to find his keys, jam them into the ignition and roar away down Marine Drive without putting on his seatbelt. He looked in the rearview mirror at the rapidly receding driveway. There was no sign of his one-eyed host. That didn’t fool Jinnah. He put the pedal to the metal.
He drove furiously, alternately fumbling with his right hand to find and light a cigarette and his left to somehow pull out his seatbelt and snap it into place, his hands trading places on the steering wheel every few seconds like a punch-drunk boxer throwing his fists around wildly. He did not meet with a great deal of suecess on either front. He realized with a start that he was panting so hard he could scarcely breathe. Jinnah pulled over. Shaking, he turned the ignition off and got out of the van. His knees nearly buckled as he rolled around the front of his vehicle, putting a hand on the hood for support. He made it to the bushes at the side of the road just on time to heave.
“Son of a bitch!” Jinnah gasped, drawing his breath in deep, uneven gulps.
All he had wanted was some proof there had been someone else at the crime scene the night Sam Schuster died. He hadn’t planned on actually meeting that someone. Looking on the bright side, however, he now definitely had a story. Wait until he ran this little tid-bit past Sergeant Graham: he’d have to talk now. Feeling a modicum more composed, Jinnah wobbled back into the driver’s seat, lit a cigarette with palsied hands, and, after several attempts, finally managed to get his seatbelt on. He drove, quietly smoking, towards the Tribune, composing his story in his head. He was nearly there when a voice almost made him jump out of his brown skin.
“You should be in the left-hand lane within the next hundred metres in order to arrive at your designated destination,” said the on-board computer.
“Bastard!” shouted Jinnah and punched the off button so hard he nearly broke the console. “I know exactly where I’m going!”
Jinnah may have known exactly where he wanted to go when he arrived at the Tribune, but every avenue he tried proved to be a dead-end. He entered the building via the back, taking the alleyway entrance and trudging up the rear stairwell that took him to the corridor between the newsroom and the library. He didn’t want the hassle of going in the front way and having to show his ID card to the security people at the desk in the main foyer. He slunk in through the big double doors at the far end of the newsroom and made his way to his desk, still shaken, and sat down with a thump. He rather expected Sanderson to say something, but looking up, Jinnah noted his colleague was in full panic mode. He was on the telephone, with directories, contact lists, and a stack of story print-outs scattered in front of him.
“No, I don’t know, really,” he was apologizing to whoever he was speaking to. “I’m a bit new at this, er, subject area …”
Deprived of the opportunity to impress upon his desk-mate how close he had come to death, Jinnah decided to do the next-best thing: call Sergeant Graham and harangue him on the same matter. He had just picked up the phone when Sanderson rang off and glanced in his direction.
“Jinnah! I thought you were sick or something!” he said.
“Very nearly Or something,’ my friend,” said Jinnah, rubbing his temples.
Sanderson noticed for the first time that his friend did not look at all well.
“Good God, man! If it was possible for you to look pale I swear you’d be as white as a ghost!”
“I came rather close to being one, Ronald,” said Jinnah. “I’m telling you, my friend, I have had a brush with a madman!”
“You didn’t find Sam Schuster’s killer?” exclaimed Sanderson.
“No, but the son of a bitch I ran into has definitely killed somebody in his time. Let me tell you, Ronald —”
“As much as I’d like to hear it, I haven’t the time, Hakeem,” said Sanderson, his hands shuffling the mounds of paper on his desk, sending pages fluttering to the floor. “You’ll never believe what Blacklock and Junior did to me!”
“I hoped they used condoms.”
“Very funny —”
At that moment, Sanderson’s phone rang. He snatched up the receiver as if it were a rattlesnake. Jinnah had seen Sanderson like this before. He always got this way when faced with one of Blacklock’s mega-projects, working himself up to a state of anxiety that rivaled Jinnah’s own neuroses at times. Jinnah dialed the Vancouver Police.
“Staff Sergeant Graham,” said the familiar voice on the other end of the phone.
“Sergeant Graham, I have found the tracks of a killer!”
“Is that so, Hakeem?” said Graham cheerfully. “My goodness. Pray, where did you find these alleged tracks?”
“You know damn well where I found them! At the crime scene! A print near Schuster’s car pointing towards the river. Smoke and mirrors! A trick of the light! Son of a bitch! You knew Chan had seen someone that night.”
“Thought he saw someone, Hakeem,” said Graham, unfazed. “Now apparently you have found
