The Protector

Sunday, July 15, 3:12 AM

He had no choice. It had to be done.

Still, it grated on him as he sped down the dark, deserted highway back to the city. He didn’t want it to come to this. Lord knows he tried everything he could to avoid it.

They had become so close. Like brother and sister. Mentor to pupil.

He had done so much to help her over the years. He had practically become part of the family. She had hit rock bottom more than once and it was only his loving care and support that had kept her going. But in the end, she had become another traitor to him. This was the thanks he got for all he had done for her and her daughter. Even at this point, with all the evidence he had, he still had a hard time believing she could turn on him this way. But there was no doubt. He had seen the proof with his own failing eyes.

He couldn’t help going over their last encounter in his head. Maybe he could have made one last attempt to reason with her. But there was no going back now. Besides, it might have been the best thing for her in the long run. She had suffered so much. When they meet again, she will thank him.

This evening had been particularly hard on him. He had surprising physical strength for someone in such frail condition, but this was a time he needed every ounce of it. On this night, the sticky Manitoba summer heat he normally thrived in had become a curse. The cool breeze off the lake proved to be such a blessing.

He was still sweating profusely, but thankfully he had remembered to bring a towel that covered up the front seat. This was the one time he wished the relic had air conditioning. Opening the windows did little but stir up the few remaining greasy gray hairs left on his scalp. Though a pleasure to drive and built like a tank, the burgundy sedan was so old it would likely fail an emissions test.

This was the one time he was relieved the former NDP government had not followed through on its promise to mandate emissions testing on older-model vehicles like this one. It was an item on the party’s platform he had helped draft, all part of an aggressive climate-change strategy progressives across Canada were applauding.

With everything over and done with, he could at last relax, wipe the sweat off his brow and take the time to enjoy driving once again. It had been a long time since he had been behind the wheel of a car, but like a bicycle, once you learned how, you never forgot. He so wished he could afford to rent a Mercedes or a BMW for a weekend joyride. A Chevy Malibu just wasn’t the same.

As he cast a glance down at the speedometer, he suddenly realized he was getting too carried away. The needle was well past 70 and he instantly remembered that the car had been built before Canada had adopted the metric system. Gently applying the brakes, he brought it under 60 as he passed the sign for Clandeboye, where the speed limit was 50. Kilometers, not miles, per hour.

Still racing through the tiny village, the last one before Selkirk, Winnipeg’s largest bedroom community, he was doing a mental calculation as to how much more he would have to reduce his speed. Not that he suspected any cops were out there in the boonies at that time of night, but a friend had once told him the threshold at which a garden-variety speeding ticket was elevated to a reckless driving charge. He had never forgotten it and always tried to keep his speed below that level.

He had always liked the feeling of driving fast and though he enjoyed the work he had done over his career, he had dreamed about becoming a professional driver for one of the big German automakers when he was growing up. They needed people like him who could maneuver through the test courses at high speeds on their proving grounds.

He was still puzzled as to how he crashed his precious Dodge Dart over a decade ago. It was true that he was technically speeding, but he wasn’t going that fast. Yet the investigators seemed determined to pin all the blame on him despite the fact that he was the real victim. He was still surprised the city didn’t send him a bill when the Jaws of Life had to pull away the wreckage to get him out. What a bunch of buffoons.

Making the turn south from Selkirk, he knew he had to keep it closer to the speed limit since there was much more of a police presence on this stretch of highway. It wasn’t that he was afraid of another speeding ticket on his driving record, nor the fine he could hardly afford. It was the extra time it would have cost him. There was still a lot of work to be done.

First, he needed to fill up with gas. Not just fill the tank, but he needed to leave exactly the same amount as was there when he left his friend’s house. Normally, he always made sure to give his friend a little extra for the use of the car. But not this time. This was the one time he didn’t want him to know he had borrowed the car. It was such a blessing that his friend had opted to take a taxi to the airport rather than drive.

It was why he needed to know precisely how far he still had to go and how large the tank was. He had planned the entire route using Google Maps, and a few weeks ago, when he last had the car out, he drained the tank at a station, then filled it up so he could get the true figure as to how much it held. Sure enough, the specifications in the owner’s manual were off. Not by much, but just enough to skew the numbers.

Based on the kilometers per liter he had been getting both in the city and out on the highway, he made a mental calculation to determine how much he would need. He prided himself in still being able to do all that in his head without using a calculator.

The bigger challenge was finding a station that was open at this hour. Hardly any were open anymore for fear of being robbed.

Luckily, he found one and even called ahead before leaving to make sure they were going to be open. He couldn’t imagine how tough it would be to get staff to take the night shift. Even a gun-toting muscle-bound soldier like Rambo would not feel safe.

There was also the matter of rolling back the odometer, and he took his right hand off the wheel for an instant to feel the long soft-tipped needle in his breast pocket. It would have been easy enough to lose amid all the commotion, but thankfully, he had it tucked away safely. For that task, he would wait until he got back into his friend’s driveway. There, he would enjoy the cover of darkness and the canopy covering the carport.

On older models like his, it was a ridiculously easy task. But just to make sure he had all his bases covered, he had gone to a scrap yard last week to try it out. As expected, it worked like a charm.

The smug smile of satisfaction on his face began to fade as he crossed the Perimeter Highway, the beltway that encircled the city. The Welcome to Winnipeg sign just before the second traffic light removed it entirely.

He had lived there ever since his parents immigrated to Canada following the war. He never really loved the city, though he grew to tolerate it and even appreciate some of its finer qualities in spite of the long and harsh winters, which had been especially hard on him. It was only in the last few years where he truly began to despise Winnipeg. It had been unspeakably cruel to him in ways he could never have dreamed. In so many ways, it was hardly the same city anymore.

He so badly wanted to leave. His longing for the Maritimes, with its moderate climate and friendly folk, so welcoming and neighborly, almost consumed him at times. There were also other places he could have and would have wanted to move to, but right now, there was no hope. For the time being at least, he was stuck in this hole where seemingly everyone had it in for him.

But this was not the time to dwell on the past. It would only cause him more mental anguish. He needed to stay focused on the present, especially since the gas station was only a few blocks away. Once he had filled the tank, it would be all downhill from there. With any luck, he would be back in his apartment before the sun came up.

This evening, he’d make sure no one even knew he was gone. He would just have to do some creative editing on the video from the surveillance camera. He tried it out with a copy he had taken a couple of weeks ago and the new software he bought made it so easy. All that was left to do was to copy the edited video back onto the disk and no one would ever know it had been replaced.

He probably didn’t even have to bother duplicating the key to the room where the video equipment was set up, but he was leaving nothing to chance. Even without a key, it would hardly be a problem. He could easily jimmy the latch off the hook if he had to.

Once all that was done, he could take care of the police.

Your phone or mine, dear?

Monday, July 16, 2:32 AM

Brrrrrt. Brrrrrt.

Seconds later, snorts of disgust emanated from Diane’s nostrils. Buck naked and lying flat on her back with the top sheet having again been kicked down near her ankles, she turned to her right and saw her phone on the dresser flashing like a searchlight. That and the glimmer from the distant streetlight peeking through their second-floor window was all that was keeping the loft bedroom from being engulfed in total darkness.

She’d much rather have let it continue to ring and lie there snuggled up with her wife on this hot, sticky summer night and try to get back to sleep. The air conditioning was again on the fritz, and the repairman said they had to order in parts from out of town. It would take the standard four to six weeks. Likely longer. Just in time for the first snowfall. And another battle with the new home warranty program.

But she strongly suspected the caller wasn’t a pollster or some teenage kid in Bombay with only a tenuous grasp on the English language looking to sell her a low-interest credit card. In all probability, it was a call she had to take.

Your phone or mine, dear? asked Vera, whose head of thinning gray hair was tightly nestled underneath Diane’s armpit.

Mine.

You’ve got the Solidarity Forever ringtone, remember?

After peeling off Vera’s left arm that was snugly wrapped around her chest, Diane slithered over to the side of the bed. As expected, her boss’s name and number were there in big, bold letters. There was even a tiny mug shot in the center of the display, just in case she needed further confirmation. Then she turned back to her scrawny wife, lying there in a semicomatose state without a care in the world and almost purring like a kitten. Remind me again why I let you talk me into applying for this fucking job?

Switching back to the buzzing phone, she grabbed it and thrust her finger at the answer button with enough force to crack the glass.

Wilson.

Inspector?

Yeah.

It’s Irene.

As if I didn’t know. Get to the point and tell me why you’re calling at this ungodly hour.

Mmmm.

Inspector, we got a call about a missing person.

Tell me you didn’t just wake me up at two-thirty in the morning so I could run after another fucking Indian kid who got strung out on drugs and passed out in a dumpster.

Inspector!!

Memories of a case she had just finished with involving a teenage Aboriginal girl were still fresh in her mind. Too fresh, in fact. In what had become an all-too-familiar storyline during her short tenure in the homicide unit of the Winnipeg Police Service, the girl’s naked, mutilated and sexually assaulted corpse had been found washed up on the banks of the Red River near the Alexander Docks. Like most parts of the city’s downtown core, it was an area where even armed police officers were scared to venture at any time of day, let alone after dark.

She hardly needed the autopsy and toxicology reports to tell her the victim had been a heavy drug user. There were more holes in her arm than in a block of Swiss cheese. If the three boys she knew from Pukatawagan hadn’t killed her, any combination of the cocktail of illicit drugs and alcohol in her system would have.

She had turned to prostitution to support her drug habit and given her choices of lifestyle and occupation, it was remarkable she made it to her 17th birthday. Despite having only been on the job for less than a year, Diane had already seen a laundry list of kids just like her who hadn’t been so lucky.

Diane again refused her superintendent’s order to use the phrase involved in the sex trade or street-involved woman in her report. The kid was a prostitute. A whore. A drug whore. She had no use for the politically correct euphemisms so adored by the higher-ups, especially the good-for-nothing chief. The former chaplain, Amiir Gunawardena was little more than a social worker who had made law enforcement a thing of the past at the WPS. Another shining testament to the wonders of Affirmative Action. Or the Employment Equity Program. Whatever they called it these days.

Not long after the bloated body was discovered, as if on cue, in came the grieving family. They shed so many crocodile tears she was surprised they didn’t need to use the Floodway to keep the Red River from overflowing its banks like it did naturally every spring. Flown in from Pukatawagan and The Pas at taxpayers’ expense, they played the part better than any Academy Award winner while the media lapped it up like thirsty little puppy dogs.

No one dared ask why the girl’s own mother hadn’t even cared enough to make contact with her for the past two years. Or mention that most of the so-called grieving family hadn’t even known their dearly departed relative. Instead, they blamed the cops and Child and Family Services. The CFS worker who had found her in an alley a month earlier should have done more. The cops who talked to her a week before her body was found just let her go. It apparently didn’t occur to anyone to lay the blame at the feet of her killers.

The perps at least made Diane’s job ridiculously easy. She did seem to have a talent for the job, but anyone with half a brain could have found them in a heartbeat just as she did. The three of them seemed quite proud of having bagged the poor girl when they posted the gruesome and incriminating pictures on Facebook. It was more proof as to how the social network was more concerned with censoring politically conservative viewpoints than stopping thugs from using their service to brag about a murder.

Of course, with Manitoba’s catch-and-release justice system, it made her wonder why she even bothered to send a unit to pick them up. They didn’t spend more than a couple of days behind bars, and she knew that when the judge eventually heard the sob stories about their bad upbringing, even without the Gladue principle that gives Aboriginals special treatment, they’d probably get off. At worst, they’d be sent to one of those healing lodges for a month or two.

Yeah?!

You know you can’t say things like that!

Doesn’t make them any less true.

The two had been down this road before, so rather than beat her head against a stone wall, Superintendent Irene Porter settled for letting out an exaggerated sigh before giving Diane the details on the case.

The missing person was Doreen Halverson, a 61-year-old Caucasian female who lived on the ninth floor of Jamison Manor, a low-income block where many of its residents were on welfare. Or what the Manitoba government more euphemistically called Employment and Income Assistance because it was less stigmatizing.

Diane punched up the address on her phone as Irene was speaking. It was located at the northeast corner of Munroe and Watt in North Kildonan. Across Munroe to the south was the Holy Eucharist Ukrainian Catholic Church, whose steeple was almost as tall as the 12-storey block itself. Across from the church to the west was their parish center, which, in reality, was a bingo hall. Bingo was a bigger business to some of those churches than religion.

To the west across Watt from the block was the yard for an elementary school, and to the north was a maintenance yard for the city’s parks branch. The whole area was backing a small industrial park to the east whose most prominent tenant was a window factory.

The surrounding neighborhood was one of many hotspots in the city for residential break-ins, with the 7-Eleven down the street acting as Ground Zero for the perps. There, they gathered openly to plan which of the nearby tiny but well-kept single-family homes they would break into next. All while guzzling down Slurpees and puffing on cigarettes, the latter of which Diane needed to do urgently as soon as she got off the phone.

Break-ins had become so commonplace in Winnipeg that they hardly even qualified as a reportable offense anymore. Long gone were the days when they actually used to send a black and white out to the house. Today, homeowners were just directed to submit a form online so they had something to give their insurance company.

But it wasn’t just the break-ins that made it an area of specific interest for Diane, a data analyst and criminal profiler for the WPS before getting the job in homicide. There were the muggings. Particularly disturbing was the increase in the number of seniors getting pushed off their wheelchairs and walkers and stripped of their pension money before being savagely beaten.

With the light industry nearby, commercial robberies were also regular occurrences. As indifference within the WPS rose like a tidal wave, many shop owners across the city had begun taking the law into their own hands. Even Diane’s dentist openly kept a baseball bat next to the chair ready to knock some scumbag out of the park.

Naturally, rather than focus their attention on the criminals, justice officials instead went after those who had the audacity to defend themselves. Diane almost cried when she heard that the North End convenience store owner who fought back against some thugs who tried to rob him had been jailed.

In addition, there were plenty of robberies at nearby apartment blocks and, of course, the usual rash of auto thefts. Without question, Winnipeg was the auto theft capital of North America. A car left on the street overnight in Harlem was probably safer than it was on Langside or Furby at any time of the day.

The ever-increasing number of stolen vehicles sprung Manitoba Public Insurance, the Communist Crown corporation with a monopoly on auto insurance, into action. The army of bureaucratic empire-builders running the province’s most reviled organization figured it could make auto theft a thing of the past by forcing every car owner to have an immobilizer installed. At their own expense, of course. Anyone who refused was simply not allowed to insure or register their vehicle.

To no one’s surprise, it hadn’t worked. In fact, it barely made a dent in the figures. But it was no skin off their noses. As long as their monopoly wasn’t threatened, they could have cared less.

All in all, it was the medley of crimes that made the area particularly fascinating to someone who loved to crunch numbers as she did. And still does and would much rather be doing than listening to her superintendent’s voice at this hour of the morning.

Jamison Manor was also just only a few blocks away from where her ex-mother-in-law still lived. Someone she only wished would go missing one of these days once she was able to engineer an airtight alibi. With all the bad blood between herself, her ex-husband and his family, she’d be the prime suspect if something happened. Maybe even the only suspect.

Doreen had apparently been last seen on Friday night. She had gone to a Goldeyes baseball game at the downtown ballpark, then called some guy in the block after she got back. When she hadn’t called over the weekend, he went to check her apartment and called police when he didn’t find her there.

Normally, this would have been a case for the missing persons unit, but homicide got the call when there was a vulnerable person involved. The only thing the WPS were masters of was covering their asses, so when in doubt, think murder. And the guy who called it in made quite a stink. Bent the duty officer’s ear for over an hour. The poor woman was so distraught she went home crying.

So now I’ve got to find the missing woman and deal with this nutbar too. Remind me again why I let you talk me into applying for this fucking job?

After getting a few more details, Diane hung up, put the phone back on the dresser and reached for her pack of cigarettes. Export A was her favorite. The green packs. Full flavor. Strong. But like every other smoker, she had to settle for whatever she could find. Life as a smoker was growing increasingly difficult. She was sick of the lectures. She knew smoking was bad for her. But she couldn’t give it up. Nor did she want to.

As she lit up and drew her first puff, Vera snuggled up behind her and again wrapped her left arm around Diane’s firm, toned upper body. One that was indicative of someone who spent a fair bit of time working out. With her right arm, Vera reached up and began stroking her wife’s jet-black hair. That and her olive skin were dead giveaways of her pure-blood Italian heritage.

Oh, dear, I wish you’d quit, said Vera while unsuccessfully trying to suppress a cough as the first wave of the thick, acidic smoke began invading her nostrils and lungs. Being a human chimney for so long had left Diane’s lungs so coated that her doctor said it was as if she’d inhaled a bucket of tar. But it was a different story for Vera. She had not smoked since she was a teenager. Despite having lived with Diane for almost three years now, her lungs were still fighting back.

Bite me.

Mmmm. Can I? asked Vera as she drew ever closer alongside her wife, nuzzling her cheek against the smooth skin on Diane’s back.

Diane recoiled slightly while drawing another puff. Don’t.

So do you have to go?

Yeah. A woman went missing. They think something happened to her.

Oh, dear. I hope she’s all right.

If she is, I’ll kill the bitch for getting me out of bed so fucking early in the morning.

While again cursing the rigors of her new job, Diane plied Vera’s arm off her for the second time, then swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Sitting upright, she began madly puffing away, making up for lost time while she was asleep.

Mmmm. Wish you didn’t have to go, said Vera while stroking her wife’s back.

Diane sure didn’t want to go either, but she knew she had to. Well, maybe not had to. She was in a position where she didn’t have to work, as there was more than enough money in their portfolio for the two of them to live on comfortably for the rest of their lives.

In addition to her savings, Vera made