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 end, Jake had to drive him home, Grant with his head out the window, puking his guts out for the better part of thirty kilometres. “Like some stupid high school kid”, Grant told himself in one of his more lucid moments.
It had been raining that night too, pouring.
After that, their handball games remained as hard fought as ever. The shouted obscenities continued, but the bruising, save for the occasional “miss,” ended.
Hull 1:08 AM • DAY ONE
Chief Superintendent Marcel Charron of the Quebec Provincial Police (Sûreté du Quebec, Hull District) was, above everything else, a Montreal Canadiens fan. Along with almost every male raised in Quebec, he had dreamed about playing for them when he was a boy. Charron’s affinity for the Canadiens was common knowledge in the department, the subject of countless jokes. What wasn’t as well known was that Superintendent Marcel Charron was a separatist. Not a rabid and vocal one, as were some of his wife’s university friends, but he had been convinced for some time that Quebec’s independence from the rest of Canada would be the best for all concerned; the only thing which would ever resolve the differences driving many Canadians crazy.
Fluently bilingual, he often listened to Grant Henry’s two-hour weeknight talk show. It was broadcast from just across the river in Ottawa, but as one of his wife’s friends remarked, “Only a few metres from here, but like the rest of this crazy place, we’re light-years apart!”
In recent months, Grant, along with most of his Anglophone callers from across the country, had been complaining bitterly about the manner in which English speaking Quebeckers were being treated following the third referendum defeat for the separatists in fifteen years. He shared a growing belief with many that the separatist government was intent on driving the Anglophones out of the province in order to assure themselves of a victory in a fourth referendum.
The inspector didn’t believe a word of it, and was convinced that the growing threats of partitioning off federalist strongholds and Indian lands in Quebec after a separatist victory were nonsense. As for the Cree Indians in northern Quebec