The Pickton File by Stevie Cameron

Author:Stevie Cameron [Cameron, Stevie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36861-4
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2007-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

NINE LISTENING IN COURT

Prelim or no prelim, I couldn’t ignore the problems with my waterlogged car any longer. I’d had to stop offering anyone a ride. Trying to hide a smirk, the service manager at a repair centre in PoCo diagnosed the problem as a major leak all around the top of the windshield, owing to rust, a fact of life for drivers in Toronto. The windshield needed to be taken out, the rust removed, the window put back and sealed—and it would all cost several hundred dollars. I said I’d think about it. After all, the basement garages at the courthouse and the hotel kept the Jeep dry most of the time; maybe it would eventually get dry enough to mend itself.

The following evening, when I got back from court, I parked the car under the hotel, walked to a nearby restaurant to meet a friend and, later on, walked back. I needed to run an errand, so I took the elevator down to the parking garage and headed over to my designated space. The Jeep was gone.

It was an odd moment. I couldn’t believe it. I immediately thought I’d made a mistake and left it somewhere else and just forgot all about it. Except that I also remembered driving down the ramp, swiping a pass card through a reader, entering the code the hotel had given me and parking in the place they had assigned to me. I looked around the garage—maybe in a fit of absent-mindedness I had parked in another spot. Except I hadn’t. The place had threatening signs for cars parked in the wrong places; they would be towed. Okay. Someone had stolen my car. That meant someone had stolen all the stuff in it as well, including my new digital camera, which I kept in the glove compartment because I couldn’t take it into court. Leaky or not, the car had a noisy alarm and, according to the reassuring notices upstairs, the garage was monitored by video cameras.

The men at the counter looked bored. No, no one had reported an alarm going off downstairs. And no, the video cameras didn’t record anything; they simply showed what was happening at the time. No, they hadn’t noticed anyone leaving in my Jeep. No, there was nothing they could do. Maybe I should call the police. Which I did. All they said was, “Noted. Now you’d better call the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia. Your report number is …” ICBC, the provincial government agency responsible for auto insurance in B.C., took the report and told me to call my insurer in Ontario. And that was that. As far as everyone was concerned, the car was gone for good.

This unpleasant and infuriating event confirmed everything I’d suspected about the hotel. Of course their video cameras were useless; I should have known that.

Budget Rent A Car had something they called an Echo Special, a deal on rentals of their smallest cars. I took one right away and renewed it every month until the preliminary hearing ended.

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