Muriel Gray - The Trickster

‘Sure. Go ahead. I’ll be right outside.’

Craig McGee closed the door on his own hessian-lined office and poured himself a drink from the water cooler. From the other side of the door came the sound of Brenner laughing on the phone.

Craig McGee couldn’t phone home and laugh because there was no Mrs McGee any more to pick up the phone and smile at the sound of his voice. The phone would ring alone and unanswered on the blue painted table by the front door, secure in its secret plastic knowledge that Sylvia wasn’t ever going to come running out from the kitchen again, wiping her hands on a dishcloth and pick it up. Why phone home when your wife is dead? In fact if he didn’t have to feed her cats, Craig sometimes wondered why he went home at all. Everything there had her mark on it, her smell on it, her touch to it. Her absence mocked him, from the coffee jars full of shells she collected on holiday in Scotland, to the ridiculous carved magazine rack she bought at a heart foundation sale. Sometimes he woke in the night and stretched out to touch her neck, only to find the empty strip of bed as cold as marble.

He wondered if Brenner knew how lucky he was to be able to perform that simple but delicious act of phoning home.

Staff Sergeant McGee let his forehead rest against the wall above the cooler. He crushed the waxed paper cone in his hand and let it fall to the floor.

* * *

‘Don’t know why they don’t just send us out in a carton pulled by a sow. Be as much use as this heap of shit in the snow.’

Constable Sonny Morris was not enjoying trying to control the Ford Crown Victoria in the thickening blizzard, and his partner Dan Small made a nasal sound in agreement. Highway patrol was a joke in conditions like these. They’d be lucky to find anyone moving, never mind speeding.

‘You got to drive fast to keep control. I keep telling you. Drive fast.’

Sonny glanced sideways at Dan.

‘Uh-huh?’

‘Sure. It works. You see, the slower you go the more traction you lose. Tried it last winter in my wife’s Honda. Got the thing all the way up to Ledmore in one go. Three feet of fresh fall, and I made it in one go. You have to drive fast.’

The driver remained unimpressed, and maintained the stately twenty miles per hour that was taking them back to the detachment in Silver.

‘Like to have seen that.’

‘God’s truth. In one go.’

‘Nah. Not the driving bit. Just the fact you were in Moira’s Honda.’

Dan squirmed.

‘Hey come on. The pick-up was bust. I had to get to Calgary. What was I goin’ to do? Walk?’

‘Better than being in Moira’s Honda.’

Dan gave him the finger and was formulating a riposte when they saw the truck. Ahead, a tear in the white curtain of snow revealed an eighteen-wheeler sitting in the viewpoint parking bay. By the depth of the snow on it, and the fact that no tracks led from the highway to its current position, it had been there a long time.

Sonny brightened considerably, moving forward in his seat as though the action would turn the Crown Vic into a Land Cruiser.

‘Lookee here. Some rough-neck’s sure going to be glad to see us.’

They glided to a standstill behind the truck, and Sonny reached for his hat on the dash. Dan got on the radio. ‘Two Alpha Four Calgary. We’re ten-seven on the Trans-Canada, ’bout two miles west of Silver. Over.’

There was a crackle, a long pause and eventually a female voice. ‘Calgary Two Alpha Four. Read you. Over.’

Dan looked at Sonny.

‘Nice to know they care, huh?’

Sonny made a wide-eyed expression of horror. ‘Oh no! Could it be that here in Alberta we’re not as professional as the detachment you worked with in BC? Now I don’t think I’ve heard you mention that before.’

Dan grabbed his hat. ‘Yeah, well you’ll eat shit when you pull over a maniac one day and no one knows you’re out here or what the plate is. That’s all I’m saying. They should make you tell them. Run it through the computer. This could be a stolen truck. That’s all I’m saying.’

Sonny looked sardonically towards the Peterbilt. ‘You know you’re right, Dan. Guess we just don’t know the half of it way out here in the sticks. Never heard of a joy-rider stealing an eighteen-wheeler for kicks. Still, police work is a learning experience. Now shall I go fetch the poor stranded hauler, or do you think we’d better call for assistance? Could be a gang of Hispanic drug dealers using a twenty-ton trailer as cover.’

‘Fuck off, Morris.’

Sonny laughed and opened the car door to a flurry of huge snowflakes. Dan followed him from the passenger door, battling to open it against the wind.

There was little sign of life from the truck, which sported a two-foot crown of undisturbed snow. The blizzard whipped mini-storms under its belly, blowing the snow out between the axles in random but concentrated blasts.

Sonny approached the driver’s door and stepped up on the foot plate. The window was more ice than glass, impossible to see through. He shouted and tugged at the handle. Frozen. Dan walked round the front, kicking his way through a drift that had built up round the front wheels, while Sonny continued to tug uselessly at the handle.

Fishing in his breast pocket, Dan found his lighter and put it to the handle of the passenger door. The ice gave way in ungracious rivulets and when he pulled on the metal the door creaked open reluctantly.

It had been a man. Now it was ice. The eyes were swollen horribly, the result of their moisture freezing and expanding, and they stared, boggling, out of the windscreen into nothing. The tongue protruded like a gargoyle, long and pointed and white, and the hands still gripped the wheel as though this man of ice was shouting maniacally at a driver who’d just cut him up bad.

Dan stared at it for a long time, his own mouth open, almost aping the frozen figure he beheld. Sonny, unable to open the driver door, joined Dan at his elbow.

‘God almighty.’

Dan stepped down, still staring at the nightmare, and let Sonny in. He climbed up and touched the figure gingerly with a gloved finger. It was hard as rock.

Sonny looked round the cab. Full of snow. Snow on the floor, snow banked up on the seat against the door, snow in a cornice along the windshield. What the hell had this guy been doing?

Why would you let the cab fill with snow, shut the doors, and then sit at the wheel until you froze to death? He cleared the dash with the back of his hand and found the driver’s ID.

Ernie Legat. Fifty-five years old.

He sighed and backed out of the cab. Poor Ernie. The guy must have planned it like this. Probably had gambling debts or something. Sonny had seen plenty creative suicides, but they never got any easier to deal with. Poor Ernie.

Keeping the yard from clogging with snow was impossible. That was probably why Wilber Stonerider had been given the task. Flakes the size of golf balls were driving through the chicken wire in the compound as though his shovel were their sole target. No big deal. He would have a drink soon. He felt the half-bottle of whisky in his jacket pocket bumping against his thigh with every thrust of the shovel and let himself imagine the moment when he could slip behind one of the dismantled buses in the compound and take a long, delicious mouthful. Inside the shed, the engineers were clattering around their machines, shouting to each other and playing the radio loud, their noise echoing round the huge tin building as though they were in a drum.

The buses that ended up here were like sick animals. They stood passively inside the shed and out in the yard, waiting to be attended by the gang of mechanical surgeons who would strip back their bodywork and probe their insides. Wilber, meanwhile, got to sweep the yard. But then Wilber was not exactly a regular employee of Fox Line Travel. Wilber was putting in some community service hours, penance for being drunk and disorderly in the Empire Hotel when he managed to smash three chairs and assault a waitress called Candy.