Derek lived in an old house that had been spared demolition when its working-class neighborhood was torn down. He’d bought it from a retired schoolteacher and immediately took down her crucifix and sacred hearts, replacing them with laminated Scarface and porn star posters. Mixing a Jack and Coke, he asked: “Did you go to the funeral?”
Dave said no.
Derek hadn’t gone either. At that point, the Indian had no intention of telling Derek he didn’t think Simon had done himself in. All he wanted to do was scout the territory and let Derek get smashed, so he would relax and tell too many stories. With his cocktail recipe, that wouldn’t take long. Derek made his Jack and Cokes Centre-Sud style: four ounces of Jack Daniel’s, slightly less Coca-Cola, and two lines of coke on the side. His cocaine left a strong taste of burnt rubber at the bottom of your throat, and it loosened the tongue.
Derek talked to him for hours about the balance of power in Centre-Sud. On his nights off, he watched porn with the TV muted while sweeping the police frequencies with his scanner. He was the archivist for a kingdom of bums that went from Davidson to Saint-Denis Street, between Sherbrooke Street and the river.
Before the Indian left, Derek said: “I always knew he’d come to a bad end. I hate the fucking bikers, but they’re right about one thing: you should never do the dope you’re selling.”
Derek sniffed a line here and there, but you’d never find him in the bathroom with a needle sticking out of his arm. Still, he had no business preaching to anybody. His vice was pussy and everyone knew it. He screwed the girls at Sex Mania, he screwed the escorts he chauffeured, he even screwed the twenty-dollar whores strung out on crack who no sane guy would touch with rubber gloves. He was always up for a new hustle or some crazy deal, because he spent more on hookers than what the hookers brought in.
Yes, Derek and the kid knew each other.
The summer before, some gangbangers from Saint-Michel robbed several freight trains and turned up at the Indian’s place with a box of samples. Fencing stolen goods was Dave’s number-one cover. These guys had emptied all the crates from a railcar stalled under the Rachel Street overpass. Not knowing what they were getting, they’d stolen twenty-five cases of luxury dildos — silicone brands that looked like old iMacs. Orange, pink, red, and mauve. Anal plugs, high-class battery-powered vibrators, clit ticklers — the works. Dave had a network for selling cigarettes and booze. Clothes too. He sold douchebag suits to the wannabe mobsters in Saint-Léonard, and ghetto getups to the wiggers in Hochelaga. But for dildos, Dave needed a whole other network. Simon and Derek were his best salesmen, each in his own department. Derek sold the toys to strippers, and Simon dealt here, there, and everywhere in the Gay Village. After that, Dave, Derek, and Simon kept on working together; they even went for a beer from time to time to honor the summer they’d rained down dildos on the town.
Dave got home that night thinking about all he’d learned, which wasn’t much. But he did learn one thing: according to Derek, Edmond-Louis Gingras was the interim drug boss in Hochelaga and the Centre-Sud. Gingras was an old hand who worked mainly with whores, for the Italians. He’d married into the Mafia — one of Rizzuto’s nieces. The Italians chose a perfect puppet to hold the fort while waiting for negotiations in prison to cough up the real boss. Derek believed that the power was going to Gingras’s head: “You’d think he wants to keep the job forever. Seems he’s even been doing a housecleaning in the neighborhood, checking out people who’ve been talking to the police. There’s a girl and a guy who’ve disappeared. When I heard about Simon, I even thought he might be a rat. But then I thought, no. Simon would never have snitched to the cops.”
That night Dave went to bed with a heavy heart.
Simon would never have talked to the police — neither would Derek — but they talked to him every day without knowing who he really was. The Indian followed his own strict rule: never ask someone for anything if you can make him do it without knowing it. He got information out of people by making them think he was their friend. He always told himself he was protecting them, but now he wasn’t so sure.
During the night he had another dream.
He dreamed he was Tshakapesh fighting the black bear. He had no knives and could only use his fists against the fearsome animal that was twice as tall as he was. It had a shark’s mouth, and its thick oily fur smelled of piss. He woke up in a sweat, reaching for his Glock. He remembered that his gun was at the station. He came knocking on the window of my room upstairs; he did that sometimes. He asked me if I knew anything about Edmond-Louis Gingras. I said yes, but I added that no one around here called him by that name. Because of his big fat ass and his big teats and the hair sticking out of his shirt collar, everyone called him Teddy Bear.
That was when Dave Tshakapesh realized that he, too, had someone to avenge.
After that, Dave got on Gingras’s case.
The job was almost too easy. Teddy Bear needed people. The provincial police had dismantled the Rock Machine in the fall of 2000, and in the spring of 2001 they’d moved on to the Hells. On March 26 alone they’d arrested twelve people, and not just guys who emptied ashtrays. Dons, deadbeats, crooked lawyers. A hell of a catch.
It’s not often you can say this, but at the beginning of the 2000s there was a shortage of criminals in Montreal. The Indian was a bright guy, everyone knew that, so he got work pretty quickly. He didn’t have much trouble convincing his bosses to keep the pressure on. With the war freshly won, the cops knew perfectly well that crime was like nature: it abhors a vacuum. They didn’t want a new despot rearing his head to reign over the empire’s ruins. It took Dave one week to sell the idea of laying hands on Teddy Bear. Then he spent the summer cadging more and more jobs from Teddy Bear’s men, while supplying Brisebois with information at the same time. The police moved in after him and took photos of Teddy Bear’s dope stash, cash, and bungalows on the North Shore, where his guys had hydroponic grow ops.
One night, Teddy Bear asked to see the Indian alone.
Dave didn’t tip off his boss at the provincial police. He was afraid they’d want him to wear a wire. He went to have a beer with Teddy Bear in an Ontario Street bar. They took a booth at the back, and Dave figured out that the bar was probably owned by Teddy Bear when he saw him get up and draw two drafts without asking for anyone’s okay. He made his little bank-manager speech to Dave: he very much appreciated his work; he wondered if Dave was ready to get more involved.
Dave asked him what he was thinking of, and Teddy Bear told him he was having a problem with someone — his friend, Big Derek.
Big Derek had been playing the pimp behind his back for years. Now he was dealing too. Dave asked Teddy Bear if he was looking for a temporary or a permanent solution. Teddy Bear said permanent. That would set a good example, and they’d be able to place bets on how many shitheads it would take to shoulder that son of a bitch’s coffin.
Dave pushed his luck a bit. He looked Teddy Bear straight in the eye and asked whether the kid’s OD in the spring had been meant as a warning for Derek. Teddy Bear hesitated for five seconds before answering: “Yes, but he’s a slow learner.”
When Dave’s bosses found out he’d been asked to kill someone, they were royally pissed off, since he hadn’t recorded the conversation. Then they got used to the idea, and had a secret meeting on the other side of the city with their whole on-site team, Dave, and the government prosecutors. An undercover agent being asked to commit homicide — that was the breaking point. They looked at what they had, and one of the prosecutors said: “Go. We can nab them with what we’ve got.”