Corporal William Tipple was elated because he too was involved.
He had his foot in the door.
12:42 p.m.
Junk recognizes no holidays, no break in the daily routine. For in the world of the junkie, life is measured out in eye-droppers full of heroin solution. To the body cells of the junkie, life is but a continual pulse of shrinking and growing and shrinking again, the never-ending cycle of shot-need for every shot-completed. Junk is a prison guard: junk controls the cells.
Per capita, Vancouver has the highest percentage of junkies in all of North America.
Not so many years ago the wise ones who sit on Vancouver City Council decided to close off Granville Street, the town's main drag, and turn it into a mall. A solid concrete mall stretching for many blocks.
Now the city fathers and mothers have never been known for their musical taste, and five'll get you ten that none of them listen to the Rolling Stones. For it is rumored that they prefer instead the sort of classical sound that one can hear played again and again and again in any high-rise elevator. Of course if only they had listened to Exile On Main Street they might have understood a bit about the junkie's frame of mind when it comes to environment. And if they had really listened, well then they'd never have built that mall. And Vancouver would not now have for its main thoroughfare a slab of concrete with down its center a single weaving bus lane just about as straight as the snakes that curve down the inner aspect of every junkie's elbow.
Vancouver can thank its Council for creating an instant slum.
The RCMP ghost car came slowly down the mall.
From the window on the passenger's side Katherine Spann peered out through a light gray mist of rain to probe the face in each doorway.
She dismissed the woman with deep-sea eyes who seemed to stare out vaguely as if through a murky medium that she carried around with her.
She turned from the boy who jerked about like a marionette on a string, his slack jaw making him look like a ventriloquist's dummy.
She let the man go who was dressed in women's clothing and whose fleshless hips twitched as if to say, "You should see me in the nude."
She cast aside the peripheral dopers, the ones high on angel dust or benzedrine or knocked out of their skulls on goofballs.
She paid no attention to the fellow who staggered out of an alley with his face jerking at intervals like dead flesh coming alive, who fell down like some galvanized corpse with a toothless mouth pursed to give the impression that it had been sewn together with thread, his limp arm flopping in the gutter while a drop of blood bubbled up at the crease of his inner elbow.
For she had no interest in any of the regular junktown people today. Today she was searching for either the Indian or John Lincoln Hardy.
"Nothing here," Spann said. "Let's go back to Gastown."
It was as the ghost car entered Gastown's Maple Tree Square that afternoon — with its quaint narrow alleys and antique restaurants and liberal lawyers' offices — that Katherine Spann yelled suddenly: "Turn right. Rick! It's him!"
The Indian was running before they were even out of the car.
He had been walking on the north side of the square about five feet away from Gassy Jack's statue when the screech of tires on pavement told him: "Run, you fucker, run."
He ran.
By the time Rick Scarlett's feet hit the cobblestone pavement the Indian was climbing a wire-mesh fence at the end of Carrall Street and making for the water. The fence was eight feet high and it separated the City of Vancouver from the CPR lands that ran along the harbor. For one brief moment the cop caught a glimpse of the Indian outlined against the snowy ski-fields of Grouse Mountain across the Inlet, then the man vaulted the fence and dropped like a cat to make his way in leaps and bounds across the rain-slick railway tracks. Fifteen feet behind him, Scarlett hit the wire fence at the exact same moment as Spann.
They both scrambled and clawed with hands and feet to swing up and over the top. As he crested the barrier, Scarlett's uniform caught on a wire barb and ripped from his crotch to his knee. He ignored the fact and was running the second his shoes touched the ground.
"Watch out for the train!" Spann yelled, as she too completed the leap. She had just seen the Indian ahead of them throw himself under a boxcar.
Not a second later, with an ear-splitting slam, a CPR diesel engine hit the car next to the boxcar as it shunted the rolling stock together. With the grate of steel on steel the boxcar lurched forward. Luckily for him, the Indian was lying parallel to the tracks.
The instant the cars slowed down enough, the fugitive — seeing a break — rolled out between the moving front and back wheels of one of the boxcars to gain the other side. His left leg missed being pulverized by a distance of one foot. Then he was up and running.
Scarlett grabbed the ladder of a tanker and swung himself onboard. Within five seconds he had climbed up to the loading spout. It took one more second to slip over the top of the cylindrical tank. Then less than a second to let go and drop down to the ground.
He landed ten feet down the track from where he had climbed on.
His right foot slipped on the gore of a seagull squashed by one of the trains and he fell down on his face.
In the meantime Spann — playing it safe — had run to the right and around behind the shunting CPR engine. There was another train beyond but it was standing still. Twenty-five feet off to her left she saw Scarlett down on the ground.
On the far side of the second train lay a road that ran parallel to the harbor. It was the woman's guess that the Indian had made for it, turned left, and was now running west toward the CPR station. To turn right would take him into the hands of the National Harbors Board Police.
By the time Rick Scarlett had caught his breath and was struggling up to one knee, Spann had scaled the side of the second train and dropped down on the ground beyond. She ran across an old cobble road to a four-foot gravel bank. As she crested the embankment the peaks of the North Shore Mountains loomed up in front of her. Today the summits were cloaked with cloud and rain pockmarked the choppy purple waters below. She turned to her left and began to head for the office buildings of the city core that jut up out of the ground a quarter-mile away. The fleet-footed Indian was already halfway there.
Spann picked up the chase.
The driver of the CPR engine was mildly surprised when Rick Scarlett burst into his cab. Were it not for the uniform he would have reached for a wrench. Milt Molesworth was getting on in age but he still had a memory like a trap. Back in the 1950s he had seen the very same situation that he was now living on TV in the program Follow That Man. He truly expected this tattered Mountie to throw out one arm and shout those words.
Scarlett disappointed him.
"Let's move! Fast!" he yelled, pointing toward the station.
Molesworth replied, "You're the boss," as he reached for the throttle. After thirty-five years of shunting boxcars it was nice to have some action.
With a lurch, the engine moved forward.
As the diesel ran parallel to the stationary train on the right, Scarlett craned his neck for a look between each join of the cars. At one point he saw Katherine Spann running and wildly pumping her arms. Through the gap at another connection he saw tugboats chugging out of the harbor as the Seabus came in to dock. Then at yet a third point he caught a glimpse of the Indian frantically pulling at a door. The door was on the lowest level of the Seabus terminal and it was obviously locked.
"Stop this thing!" Scarlett ordered as the Indian once more took off running.
"You're the boss," Milt said, and he jammed on the brake.