False Witness (2 page)

Tom’s old man had been fond of saying his middle son wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he was right. It took a few more moments for Tom to realize this wasn’t some sort of accident, the kind where you filled out a yellow form and let the bureaucrats sort out the rest of the shit. He’d been attacked, most likely by the guy who was now talking to him in a friendly, shooting-the-breeze tone. He was injured – badly, if his pain was any indicator – and The Voice was the cause. That meant whatever The Voice had done to him, he’d probably do it again if Tom didn’t go along.

He wasn’t sharp, but he wasn’t stupid either, and he quickly decided that sixteen bucks an hour was most definitely not worth another round of whatever the hell had happened to him. Not in a million years. Tom had never been in anything more serious than a bench brawl in his life; whatever was going on here was way out of his league. Whatever this guy wanted, he could have. Hell, Tom would gift wrap it for the dude if it meant he could walk away from this with his balls intact.

Tom nodded slowly, wincing at the dull ache it produced in his head and neck. He tried again to speak; it wasn’t easy without teeth.

“Wight,” he said shakily. “Ooer wight. I doe wan any hwubble.”

“Glad to hear it, Tommy,” The Voice said amiably. “This Taser is a real bitch; I don’t like using it, believe me. You believe me, don’t you, Tom?”

Taser.
That explained Tom’s strung-out muscles, and why he hadn’t been able to break his fall. “Unh-huh,” he said. “I buheewhe eeoo.”

“That’s great, Tom. So we have an agreement? Don’t bother nodding, I know it hurts. Just give me a thumbs-up.”

Tom raised his right thumb. Fucking-A-rights they had an agreement. He vaguely remembered reading once about hostage negotiations or some such thing, where they said if the bad guys kept using your name, they probably weren’t going to kill you. It meant they were in it for the money. The thought gave him enough strength to push himself into a wobbly sitting position with his legs out in front of him like a couple of petrified logs.

It didn’t occur to Tom then to wonder how The Voice knew his name; that would come later. He swayed a bit and wished again for that faraway Percocet.

“Could we please stop fucking around and get on with it?” said another voice behind the flashlight’s glare. It surprised Tom, and a heavy shot of adrenaline surged through him, prompting a fresh wave of agony in the rubble of his mouth. He groaned miserably.

“Shut up,” The Voice told the guy behind him. Even in his addled state, Tom could hear the underlying coldness in the tone, and was glad he wasn’t Voice No. 2. “I don’t need to remind you that Tom here is very important to us. We need to make sure he’s capable of doing what we need him to do, and that means we let him get his bearings.”

Tom felt cautious hope at the way The Voice was dealing with the other guy. The Voice was in charge, and The Voice was taking care of him. Josh’s face, so wide-open and bright, filled his mind’s eye for a moment.
I’m gonna see you soon, buddy.

For the next handful of minutes, the only sound was bootheels clip-clopping on concrete behind the light – Voice No. 2 was pacing. Tom’s heart rate slowed to within a few beats of normal and, while he still felt like a bag of rocks and his head was still a symphony of pain, he felt in control of himself again.

As if sensing this, The Voice said: “Okay, Tom, now we need you to do something for us. When you’re done, this will all be over. Sound good?”

“Unh-hunh.” Truth be told, nothing had ever sounded so good to him in all his forty-one years on Planet Earth. Whatever these people wanted, he was going to do it with gusto. If The Voice dropped his pants and told Tom to gobble his disembodied crank, then by God, that’s what he would do, busted teeth or no.

It didn’t come to that. The Voice, still hunkered next to him, dropped Tom’s log book on the concrete in front of him. The pages glowed an unearthly white in the blue-tinged glare of the flashlight. The ledger was open to tonight’s date, and the words he’d written earlier seemed to float on the page like scribbly black pinworms:
4 p.m. Foot patrol - all secure. 5 p.m. Foot patrol - all secure. 6 p.m. Foot patrol – all secure.

“I just need you to do that a few more times, up to nine o’clock,” said The Voice. “Just let everyone know that all is secure, right as rain, peachy keen and all that good shit. Do you think you can do that? Is your hand steady enough?”

Tom sat there stupidly for a moment. Blood trickled from his open mouth, down his chin and onto his Stampede Security shirt.
That’s it?
he thought, astonished.
Finish my log book?

“Tom? You all right with that?”

“Yeth,” he croaked. Excitement over his impending freedom allowed him to ignore the pain in his mouth. “Ah can oo hat.”

“Then write away, my good man, and we can all get the fuck out of here.”

“Thank Christ,” muttered Voice No. 2. Tom thought the guy sounded like an asshole, the kind of person who used to bully him in school. “He can’t be more than five minutes out.”

Tom wondered who the man was talking about as he fished the pen from his shirt pocket. He finished his updates with a remarkably steady hand. “Heah.” He held the book, pages up, into the flashlight’s corona.

“Nice work, Tom!” The Voice exclaimed. “Gold star for penmanship, too.”

Tom preened in spite of himself. He felt a sudden lightness throughout his body, like some of the damage had been miraculously repaired. As if reading his thoughts, The Voice curled an arm around Tom’s torso. Tom could feel steel cable muscle in that arm as The Voice lifted Tom’s considerable bulk to his feet. He listed a bit, but The Arm kept him from falling over.

“Separate your feet, Tom,” The Voice instructed. “I can steady you, but you’ll need to be able to walk on your own. Can you do that?”

Tom nodded carefully. Pain still permeated his head, but it seemed less urgent now, a message light on the answering machine instead of a ringing phone. The more he moved, the better the muscles in his legs felt, and he managed to shuffle a few steps forward. The Arm was still around him but was no longer holding him up.

“Atta boy,” said The Voice, which was now coming from beside him instead of above. The flashlight was trained on the concrete path that criss-crossed the labyrinth of warehouses. “Just keep walking until I tell you to stop. It won’t be much longer now.”

Tom shuffled faster, buoyed by The Arm and his own sense of relief. It was almost over. He’d have to get to the hospital, of course, and Kathy and Josh would have a sleepless night for sure. He’d be off work for at least a few days, and he was probably going to need dentures, both of which would set them back a bit financially, but it didn’t matter; all that mattered was that he was
alive
.

I think I’ll be looking for another line of work, too,
he thought, without a trace of regret.

Tom heard Voice No. 2’s boots clocking ahead of them on the path as he shuffled along with The Arm. For no reason in particular, the image of his watchman’s clock flashed in his head. He didn’t know where it was. He must have dropped it somewhere. He wondered if he should tell the Voices about it; it was clear they were trying to make it seem like they’d never been to the Highland Storage Yard. And Tom was eager to help them finish whatever the hell it was they were doing.

Before Tom could speak, Voice No. 2 stopped abruptly ahead of him. “He’s here!” the guy hissed. They were stopped at the north end of the compound, just around the corner from the main entrance.

The Voice, now at Tom’s ear: “This is where we part ways, Tom. There’s a guy coming through the front gate right now. I want you to walk around this corner and head towards him. He wants to talk to you.”

And I want to talk to him
, Tom thought.
If he’s got a cell phone, he can call an ambulance and get ahold of Kathy and Josh and tell them to meet me at the hospital. Foothills is probably closest.

He turned the corner and sure enough, there was a man near the entrance. The guy was wearing a sport coat and jeans, and carrying some kind of shoulder bag. A camera, maybe? Why would he have a camera?

The arc-sodiums cast hard shadows on the man’s face, but Tom could make out that he was probably in his early thirties. The man was looking around as if searching for someone. Tom guessed rightly that he, Tom, was the one the guy was looking for, and he shuffled out of the shadows and into the lighted area of the entrance. Tom was about fifty yards away when the guy finally caught sight of him and turned to face him.

“Tom?” the man shouted. “Tom Ferbey?”

Tom had just enough time to wonder
How does everybody know my name?
before a .44-caliber hollow-point slug entered the back of his skull and exited through the front, expanding on impact and erasing the lion’s share of his face in a cloud of red mist and bone fragments. He dropped like a pile of bricks for the second time that evening.

Tom Ferbey would never see another of his son’s hockey games. He didn’t even get to see the explosion that happened next.

Alex Dunn was doing his level best not to smoke. He paced, dug his hands into his pockets, fingered his keys and change, and drummed out a minor tattoo on the top of the rusted blue Dumpster next to the stairs. Nothing worked. It didn’t help that he was in an alley doorway, that great gathering place for smokers of all socio-economic backgrounds, where they could get together, have a puff, and share the silent burden of being the only acceptable pariahs left in modern North American society.

Finally he gave up and went to work on the pacifier that had taken the place of cigarettes a little over a year earlier: the ragged nail on his right middle finger. He’d almost picked up a pack of DuMauriers last October, on the night he watched Tom Ferbey’s head explode not fifty yards from where he, Alex, had been standing. Then the warehouse had vaporized in a ball of orange heat, like something out of a Michael Bay movie. That was enough to send his body into heavy shock, and for a while he had felt like he’d never be able to get himself under control again. In the end, though, it wasn’t so much will power that had kept the smoke out of his lungs as it was confusion and exhaustion. By the time he’d finished his statement to the cops, and the fire crews had finally wrangled the flames from the warehouse explosion, and the other reporters had finished fishing for quotes that they should have known they weren’t going to get, Alex had simply forgotten to buy a pack on his way home.

That night had been the beginning of everything that led to him standing in this alley, not-smoking and wondering what the hell was going to happen next.

As it turned out, what happened next was that Leslie Singer, all five feet of her, suddenly swung the heavy door open so hard it bashed into the brick wall behind its hinges, startling Alex so badly that he was pretty sure he let go a couple of drops of urine underneath his good blue suit pants.

“Jesus!” Alex yelped, clutching the railing next to the stairs to keep himself from pitching onto his head on the asphalt below.

Singer poked her round head into the alley, eyeing Alex through comically oversized glasses as if he was some strange new species she’d just discovered. Once again the old gal reminded Alex of Judi Densch’s M in the James Bond movies, although he was pretty sure the MI5 director’s nose wasn’t covered in the telltale gin blossoms of a veteran alcoholic.

“What in the world are you doing out here?” Singer asked, sounding both baffled and indignant. “Get inside this minute. Justice is afoot!”

Alex blinked three times in rapid succession. He was still gripping the railing in a white-knuckled fist. “What do you mean, justice? Why can’t you just talk like a normal person?”

“The verdict is
in
, my boy!” Singer cried. With that, she spun on her heels like a round little top and strode back the way she’d come, into the halls of the downtown Calgary courthouse, her prosecutor’s robe billowing behind her blocky frame like a black sail.

Alex stood in the doorway a moment to process this.
How could the verdict be in?
Closing arguments had wrapped up less than an hour earlier. His own testimony had played a major role in the arguments of both the prosecution and the defense, and he’d watched the morning’s summations with the uncomfortable feeling that his ass was trying to eat his underwear.

He finally decided to follow Singer into the courthouse. Despite her stubby legs, she had a major head start, and Alex had to jog to catch up. As he did, he tried to puzzle out the turn of events: This had been one of Calgary’s highest-profile murder cases in recent memory, and they’d drawn Gregory “Let-‘Em-Walk” Larocque as their judge. Larocque was famous for being a liberal judge in the grassroots conservative stronghold of Alberta, where even the communists drank Old Style Pilsner and preferred George Strait to Leonard Cohen. Larocque berated prosecutors over what he saw as civil rights violations, and had a reputation for being soft on defendants who had been through the foster care system, or who had grown up with a father who drank, or who had ever been bullied, yadda, yadda, yadda. Alex was pretty sure that Rufus Hodge – organized crime figure, bike gang leader, executioner of security guards, and all-round psychopath – could tick off a check mark in any number of those categories.

It was possible that Larocque had rejected the prosecution’s first-degree murder charge in favor of manslaughter, which meant there would be a chance – a tiny one, certainly, but when it’s your life on the line, tiny chances tend to look as if seen through a microscope – that Hodge could walk out of the courthouse with a suspended sentence. If that was the case, Alex might as well go out and buy a bucket of paint and slap a big red bulls-eye on his jacket.

He caught up to Singer outside the courtroom that had served as the trial’s home for the last three weeks. Alex was glad to see Chuck Palliser was already there, watching the media outside the building with his trademark smirk as they struggled to get into position. They were obviously caught as flat-footed as Alex was by the quick verdict. As usual, the TV and radio people were frantically searching for someone to stick a microphone in front of. Alex saw Barb Foster, an aging but still pretty reporter from one of the local news affiliates (Chuck liked to call her “the Talking Tits”), fixing her makeup in the side mirror of the station’s mobile van.