James Heneghan - Fit to kill

The glasses he wore magnified his watery eyes, giving him an owlish, scary appearance at odds with the friendly smile. “They call me the Pope,” he explained in a high voice. “I’m the general busybody around here.”

Casey shook his hand. “Casey,” he said.

With his bald head, Pope looked about sixty but could have been older. He moved like a much younger man.

“Here, Casey,” said Pope, “I want you to meet Sam Jackson. Sam’s just back from the Yucatan. Got a girlfriend down there. Sam, this is Casey.”

Sam, a trim, gray man in an armless and ragged white T-shirt, looked like he could be anything between fifty and eighty. He crushed Casey’s hand in a killer grip. “You Irish?”

“From Belfast, fifteen years ago,” Casey admitted, nursing his fingers behind his back.

Another man joined them. Deeply tanned, medium height, middle-aged, his muscled chest bursting out of a similar ragged sleeveless T-shirt.

Pope said, “This is Doc. Doc, meet Casey, striving for perfection like all of us.”

The two men shook hands. “Hi, Casey,”

Doc said in a gruff voice. “It’s Stanley Blunt, but everyone calls me Doc.”

“Doc, why don’t you tell Casey the story you just told us about the finger,” said Pope.

In the breezy manner of a stand-up comedian, Doc said to Casey, “Patient comes to see me this morning, wants his finger off-middle finger, left hand. I say no way. A finger’s a finger, once gone you never get it back. But the problem with this finger is it’s got no feeling, nerves all gone from an old injury.”

Pope explained to Casey, “Doc’s a surgeon.”

Stanley Blunt ignored the interruption. “You won’t take it off, Doc? this guy says to me. No, I won’t take it off, I tell him. Let me explain why I won’t take it off. No, says this guy, let me explain to you why I want it off. I’m leaving for South America a month from now in a sailboat, right? I’ll be away a year. Sailing can be rough, and I don’t want to take this finger with me. Why not? Injury, that’s why not. Or infection. Where there’s no feeling, there’s more chance of injury. I could get it cut or crushed real bad, and then what? I’m a thousand miles from the nearest hospital. I’m bleeding to death, and I don’t know it. You see what I mean, Doc? The thing’s a fuckin’ liability. I want it off. So I say to him, Okay. You convinced me. I’ll take it off.”

“So you cut off the guy’s finger,” Pope finished for him.

Doc nodded. “I cut off the guy’s finger.”

“Yeee!” said Sam, shaking his head.

“Watch your fingers around here,” Pope advised Casey with a mirthless laugh.

The group dispersed. Albert Kayle, finished with the rowing machine, came over. “Say, Casey! Haven’t seen you in here before.”

“I’m only looking, Albert. Doctor thinks I should lose a few pounds.”

“Well, you came to the right place.”

A man of shorter-than-average height, with dark hair and eyes, Albert spoke softly, with a slight English accent.

They exchanged a few more words, and then Albert drifted off to a cardio machine.

People on cardio machines made Casey think of gerbils. Still, he stepped up onto a StairMaster, looking about the room as he worked. Busy place. Men and women. All ages. All shapes. Spare tires on a couple of the men made him feel better. A pretty woman dressed in black tights, black top and what looked to Casey like tiny shamrock earrings was stretching on a mat.

“If you drop in at the same time of day, you meet the same crowd, more or less.” It was Pope again, standing close to Casey, watching the pretty woman. “Get to know people. Makes working out less of a chore.”

“Hmm,” said Casey.

“The road to physical perfection is an arduous one,” said Pope, still watching the woman. “Right,” said Casey.

The woman stood and stretched her arms above her head.

Pope shifted his attention away from the woman and looked up at Casey on the StairMaster. “Most folks work out for an hour, then sauna and shower.” He raised himself up and down on his toes. “Ain’t this Vancouver rain really something? I lived in Toronto most of my life.”

“Hmm.” Casey found it hard to work and hold a conversation at the same time.

“Bus driver,” said Pope. “Forty years. Retired and came out here to the wet coast.” He chuckled at his own joke. “Straight to the West End. Lived here ever since.”

Casey’s machine put him a foot or so higher than Pope’s head. He looked down at the older man’s shoulders with their slabs of muscle moving under freckled skin.

“You didn’t get those muscles driving a bus in Toronto.”

Pope laughed. “I like to keep fit. What do you work at, Casey?”

“Journalist, West End Clarion.”

“You’re not Sebastian Casey!”

“I am.”

“Hey, I read your stuff all the time. You’re a funny man.”

“Yeah?” Casey’s legs were tiring.

“You got anything new on this lunatic who murdered that woman?”

“Nope.”

The pretty woman with the shamrock earrings walked by. Pope introduced them.

“Casey, this is Emma Shaughnessy. Emma, meet Sebastian Casey, ace reporter with the Clarion.”

“Hey, Sebastian.”

“Call me Casey,” he said, conscious of two things, her Irish accent and his own ugly body.

Emma Shaughnessy’s smile was warm and friendly. Her soft, dark brown hair was tied back with a black ribbon. Freckles crossed the bridge of her nose like a sprinkling of sand, and she had the pale blue eyes of her Norman-Irish ancestors.

“Your first time here, Casey?” she asked.

He had only come to the gym on a scouting expedition, to take a look, to get a sense of the place. But he now heard himself saying, “Just started,” as though he’d committed himself to working out in the gym for the rest of his life.

“Emma’s a schoolteacher here in the West End,” said Pope, his magnified eyes on Emma’s chest.

“Yeah?” said Casey. Emma Shaughnessy’s smile had caused his brain to slip into neutral. He knew he sounded like a tongue-tied fool, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

Emma jerked her chin toward Pope and said, “The Pope knows everyone’s business.”

“I take an interest in people, you might say,” said Pope. “Casey is here because he yearns for magnificence, like all of us. Ain’t that right, Casey?”

He knew he should be joining in with something light and humorous, but his gears had jammed. He felt fat and clumsy in front of this woman, who, as far as he could see, had already achieved perfection.

“Keep up the good work.” Pope wandered off.

Casey looked into Emma Shaughnessy’s blue eyes and said the only thing he could think of. “You come here often?”

She laughed. “Three times a week.”

“Three,” he repeated stupidly.

She laughed again. “Usually.”

Her eyes unmade him. She was a witch.

She was laughing at him. He tried to think of something intelligent to say. “I don’t like these things much.” He nodded down at his StairMaster. Brilliant! he told himself.

“Me neither. I run the seawall and the park trails instead.”

“Seawall.” He tried to think of something interesting to say. “Park trails,” he said. If he had a gun, he would shoot himself. “The great outdoors,” he continued, hoping his brain would kick in soon or this woman would never speak to him again. An echo of this thought in the deeper recesses of his paralyzed mind made him realize that he very much wanted her to speak to him again.

“When I use a machine,” she said, “it’s exercise. But for me, running is recreation.”

“Is that right, now?” He sounded in his own ears like an Irish country bumpkin.