before disappearing into the night.
Jake lay on the edge of the lawn, immobile, straining to hear every sound until, soaked to the skin and covered in mud, he slowly pulled himself to his knees. Hearing nothing but the idling cars, the wind and the rain, he scrambled back up to the laneway.
“Got to get those lights out', he told himself, or “I’m a sitting duck.” Crouched low, he scrambled up the embankment, slipped to the rear of his car, paused to listen, then edged his way along the driver’s side to the open door. Reaching inside, he switched off the headlights, slammed the door shut and dropped to the ground. If they were still out there, now was when they would shoot. They would have seen him silhouetted momentarily against the car’s interior light.
Hugging the ground, he could see the outline of the knoll from where the rifle had been fired. Nothing. The only sound was Grant’s car idling a few feet in front of him. The rain had stopped.
Alert to any sound or movement, bent almost double, he crabwalked his way to the driver’s door of Grant’s vehicle and without pausing, vaulted into the seat, slammed the door shut and jammed the gearshift down. In a spray of gravel and mud, the car shot down the driveway towards the house. Jake tucked his head so low he could barely see over the dash.
The gate, with the dog still pinned to it, was only partially open. The car’s left fender slammed into it, shattering the headlight and splintering wood. Something on the seat beside him slithered off the leather onto the floor. He was too preoccupied to notice.
The house was in pitch-blackness, but Jake had been there often enough to know where he was. Turning sharply right as the tires hit the edge of the bricked patio, he braked and ducked even lower behind the dash, ready to fire. For an instant, the single headlight caught a man lying on the floor of the house, sprawled halfway out the kitchen door. A shotgun was aimed directly at the car. Jake recognized him.
“Grant,” he shouted, “it’s me, Jake. For Chrissakes point that thing someplace else. We’re okay. I think they’ve gone.”
To the south he could hear sirens coming closer.
* * *
The friendship between the radio broadcaster and the rookie cop began more than a decade earlier in the handball courts of Ottawa’s Argyle Street “Y”.
Beale Broadcasting Ltd. had just begun feeding Grant’s show to its seventeen radio stations across the country. Money was pouring in. Everything he touched seemed to turn instantly to gold. He began to consider himself more or less invincible.
Jake, on the other hand, had just joined the Ottawa Police Force and was walking one of the toughest beats in the city. He was just getting over a very messy and costly divorce, and if anyone had bothered to ask, he’d have admitted to feeling about as bad as it gets. The one level playing field he could find was the “Y” handball court, and anyone who tried to beat him there was sure as hell going to pay for it. Especially some rich asshole radio personality!
They were ready for each other.
Their battles in the handball court bordered on the vicious. They shouted obscenities, usually only partly in jest, and more than once they hammered the ball so hard at each other that Grant’s wife Carol playfully asked him who the bony broad was he was screwing on the side.
“Get one with some meat on her,” she giggled, “this one’s going to beat you to death.”
It was Grant who first suggested that they extend the relationship beyond the handball courts. When Grant called to change the time of a game, Jake sounded more dejected than usual. With alimony and child support on a rookie cop’s pay, Grant knew handball was about the only luxury (if you could call it that) he could afford. Small wonder he hammered the ball so hard!
“Jake,” said Grant, “I’ve got an idea. My wife’s away, my daughter’s off on a school trip; what say you and I suck back a beer and a steak at Al’s tonight?”
There was a pause.
“Man oh man, I’d love to,” groaned Jake, “but you know I can’t afford that kind of stuff.”
“Make you a deal,” said Grant. “Let’s you and me screw the government. Got anything against that?”
“Not so’s you’d notice.”
“Okay then, join me for dinner tonight and I’ll tell Revenue Canada I was interviewing the prime minister so it’s fully tax deductible. But Jake...one thing.”
“Yeah, what?”
“No sob stories okay...? We get shit faced, but none of your boring sob stories.”
Jake chuckled. “Works both ways, pal. Works both ways!”
They did invade sob story territory however, and they didn’t do badly on the beer either. Grant, for the first time since university, didn’t care to stop knocking it back. At some point in the evening, he was astonished to find himself admitting that his marriage was falling apart and he was devastated. “Jake,” he said, as the beer began to short circuit inhibition, “you’ve been through it, does the pain ever really let up?” Jake gave him a look of startled disbelief.
“Wait a minute,” said Jake. “Wait just a minute. You’re rich and you’re famous, it’s true you can’t play handball worth a fiddler’s fart, but you’re still in pretty good shape for an old guy of forty or so. Some women, God knows why, think you’re kind of sexy with the Paul Newman eyes and big brain and all, and you’re telling me you’re hurting! Man, you have no idea what hurting is! Let me tell you what it’s really all about. Pain is when your wife walks out on you with a guy you thought was your friend, takes your house, your car, your kid and more than half your salary. Pain is living in a crappy bachelor apartment so your wife and her new boyfriend can keep the fridge, which used to be yours, filled with beer which isn’t even your brand. Pain is...” Jake stopped abruptly and peered at Grant with a wry look that danced back and forth between puzzlement and suspicion. “Sorry about that handball remark. I guess I always thought guys like you had it made. Silver spoon and all that.”
“Silver spoon! Silver spoon!” Grant exploded with laughter. “You’ve got to be kidding! Silver spoon my ass! Jake, we were so piss-poor when I was a kid, my mother used to send me along the railway tracks to pick up unburned coal so we wouldn’t freeze to death. And in northern Ontario, believe me, that wasn’t impossible. I played soccer wearing an old pair of ski boots. It was all we could afford. You can imagine what that did to my social standing in school. Hell’s bells, I played high school football one year without a jock. Belly flops at practice were a lot of fun, let me assure you. You want to try it some time! Jake, every bloody thing I ever got in this life I earned with no help from anybody.
“Even when my old lady inherited a bundle, she was too damn mean to drop a dime on me. My old man was too lost in his dreams and crazy schemes to notice if I had pants, let alone a jockstrap. I went without eating for one full week in Sudbury once; my mother wouldn’t loan me ten bucks even though she was loaded by then. I arrived there for a new TV job without a dime in my pocket, too young and stupid to realize I wouldn’t be paid for a week. There was no silver spoon anywhere near me, believe you me. I swore a long time ago that no kid of mine would ever have to scrounge coal or anything else, but I’m telling you Jake, with all the crap I’ve been through, nothing hurts as much as my marriage breaking up, absolutely nothing.”
In the
