Montreal Noir by John McFetridge

Author:John McFetridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2017-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

The Crap Magnet

by Peter Kirby

L’île Sainte-Thérèse

My buddy Mike brought me over to L’île Sainte-Thérèse in his boat. It was two in the morning. Pitch black. The only light came from the stars. I needed a place to hide out for a while, and Sainte-Thérèse was the perfect spot. Only a ten-minute boat ride from Montreal, but it’s another world, a tiny island that no one controls, except the squatters who have been living there since the fifties. The police and the authorities gave up on the place years ago. Mike said the cottage was empty and I could stay there as long as I wanted.

That bastard cop, Luc Vanier, was pissed at me. He had me marked for a double murder, but couldn’t prove anything. So instead of letting it go and moving on, he put out word that I was cooperating, that I was going to make a deal with the prosecutor in exchange for a free pass and a spot in witness protection. In my line of work, that’s a death sentence.

That’s why I needed to drop out of sight. I needed to figure things out.

The first night, I took a quick look around outside but it was darker than a blacked-out basement. I locked the doors and put chairs against them. I slept in a sleeping bag under the dining room table but I didn’t sleep well.

In the morning, I took a good look around. The cottage was surrounded by trees that had been cleared back, like a bunker in a green parking lot. In two hours, I counted about twenty different ways people could approach the cottage through the trees. If you’re sneaking through the woods trying to find someone, you won’t be hacking a new path, and I wasn’t expecting Indiana Jones. If anyone was going to show up, it would be guys as freaked out by the forest as I was. I found a spot on the deck where I could see the approaches funnel into the clearing, a spot where it was still a short run into the woods if anyone showed up.

Mike’s father must’ve been some kind of handyman; he had a nice collection of tools in the shed. There was a wrench the length of a baseball bat, with most of its weight at the business end. There were a couple hammers, a mallet that could crush a skull, and an axe. I dropped them onto the forest floor, covering them with leaves and making sure I remembered where I hid them. I also hid two old baseball bats in the undergrowth beside some trees. I found a serious chef’s knife in the kitchen that I wrapped in a dishrag and stuffed into my pants. I had to cut a small hole in the pocket to get it to sit properly.

I kept the sleeping bag under the kitchen table. Every night after I finished eating in the last light, I would turn on the television in the living room and sit in the kitchen.

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