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  But Purma would not be deterred. She turned to face Harris. And she told him another version of how things might have happened. The lawyer lied. He’d been in touch with the musician as soon as he heard that the drug dealer was dead. No random encounter. He’d gone and found his old friend.

  “Why?” Harris asked.

  “To get ahead of the writer!” Purma said, eyes bright. So the lawyer confirms with the musician that the drug dealer’s money is still there. And he heads on over to the hiding place to preemptively loot the stash. “Some biker dealer getting whacked isn’t exactly CNN news. The writer totally missed it.”

  Harris didn’t remember mentioning any bike gang. But he couldn’t stop her now. “Of course, the writer finds out eventually that the dealer is dead. Only the lawyer arranges for them to both go over and discover together that the money is gone.”

  Harris’s drunkenness was moderating, replaced by unwelcome clarity.

  “They go over. Nothing there. Too bad. Back to their lives, only the lawyer now has a couple million in cash stashed in the basement of his house in Point Grey.”

  Harris couldn’t speak.

  “Clever,” Purma said.

  “Yeah,” Harris managed.

  “Only also really stupid.”

  “And, um . . .” Harris stammered. “Why’s that?”

  “Because bikers have associates. And those associates would go looking for the dealer’s stash after he died. First move: shake down the musician. Maybe they kill him. Maybe he kills himself. Either way, he talks. And that means second move: go find the lawyer.”

  Harris’s mouth was so dry it felt welded shut. Purma watched him closely for several seconds, expression now very serious. Then she pushed her chair back and stood.

  “Leaving you only one plot point remaining,” she said. “You just gotta come up with a good way to kill the lawyer.”

  Which was a mental exercise Harris had invested time in already. Harris, who was in an alley by that point. In an alley lined with dumpsters, running home.

  7

  In his apartment, blinds drawn, lights out, trembling uncontrollably. The worst part of the cascading moment wasn’t Purma proving the transparency of his plan. It was instead the sudden clarity with which he could now remember what the man on the beach had said before hitting him. Not a cruel voice exactly. Only deeply disconnected.

  “Just say the word,” the man had said. “Tell me where.”

  So Purma had only missed a single detail. It was the death of the writer that remained unwritten. And there was little doubt how that would unfold. Say the word, said the professional now waiting down there among the darkened, skeletal trees. Waiting for further conversation. Different tools this time. A pipe wrapped in cloth. A short blade or pliers. Harris weeping, feeling read to the bones.

  Three weeks. Purma had been exactly right about the timing. Three weeks ago that Harris had gone looking for Roen, found him on Cordova in his wheelchair, skinny as hell. But still with the glossy hair and high cheekbones. A woman at his side, beautiful. Dark eyes, coffee skin.

  Another lie to add to the many. It was Roen who didn’t recognize Harris, struggling even after Harris tried to remind him. The girl kept tugging on his shoulder saying, “Roey?”

  “Hey, come on,” Harris pleaded. “We all partied at that B&B on Saturna Island.”

  “Saturna Island,” Roen said, looking up through his shades. “You a friend of Jimmy’s? Dude just died, man. Pretty sad.”

  Sad, sure. Only maybe not for the two of them if they cooperated, which was exactly what Harris wanted to talk to Roen about, though not right there on the goddamn street, which meant they had to get themselves into a bar, which meant Roen would have to remember who Harris was.

  “Roey? Roey, let’s go, baby.”

  “Jimmy was a fucking rock, man. Hey, I just remembered who you are!”

  Harris smiled and nodded. Finally.

  “You’re the lawyer! Murch, man, put her there!” Roen thrust out a bony hand and Harris took it.

  “I’m Harris,” he tried again. “We hung out with Murch. The three droogies!”

  Roen’s expression was dreamy. “Murch,” he mumbled, “knew a girl named Shanny.”

  “That’s the one,” Harris said, looking around for a bar.

  “Roey? Roey, please.”

  “Get on down to the corner,” he said to the girl. “Stay there till I come get you.”

  Roen back looking up at Harris. He’d taken off his sunglasses. “I remember this other girl from back then. Black hair. Shanny and that other girl and I did it all together once. What do they say—manger a trois?”

  Harris swallowed and looked away. How pathetic was it that he couldn’t even seize control of this degraded situation? Very.

  “We need to talk,” Harris said. “Let me buy you a drink.”

  Roen protested thinly about not drinking. But Harris knew that resolve was going to fail. They went into the Union Tavern. Found a table in a dark corner. Blue lights over the bar. People hunched over pitchers of terrible draft beer and shots of Jägermeister. In a nearby booth, a glowing pipe made the rounds.

  “Who else did we hang with that summer?” Roen was asking.

  “You, me, and Murch,” Harris said. “Jin and Shanny you remember. Then Calliope and Zach and Purma.”

  “Purma,” Roen said softly. “Purma I still see around.”

  Even if Harris had understood what that meant, he knew he wouldn’t have done anything differently. He went to the bar. He brought back four beers and two large vodkas.

  “Murchie, you devil,” Roen said.

  “Harris.”

  “Right,” Roen said. And he tipped a vodka down his throat.

  It wasn’t hard to do, in the end, to slide back into those very old rhythms, altered only in a minor way by the years. They had four beers and two vodkas apiece inside an hour and Harris didn’t even feel buzzed. But Roen was flying. He was laughing. He was making fun of Harris’s clothes and his books, which Harris stupidly mentioned.

  “Harvey Raven?” Roen said, eyes wide with mirth. “See, that’s a problem, right there.” Cultural appropriation, he explained. Raven sounded First Nations. And Harris himself was quite clearly not. Roen laughing. “My round?” he said. “Oh, no, wait, Murch here is buying.”

  Fuck, Harris thought. But he did not even bother correcting him. More beers. More vodka. At some point he realized that they were hunched in over the table, talking in urgent voices, Roen protesting, Harris stabbing the air with his finger. At some later point, Harris realized that they were sitting amidst that squalor of Roen’s apartment and that Harris was holding a pipe from which he was about to take a hit.

  He’d never used meth before. And as he stood trembling in his Kits apartment remembering all of this, he realized that he wouldn’t be doing it again. So terrible and wonderful had been the experience. The rush visceral, physical, enormous. He surged out of himself. He rose to the ceiling. The high was like white water rafting, followed by a steep and sheering free fall, his belly aflame and taut. He would consume the world.

  Harris holding a set of familiar keys in his hand which he’d just declared he was going to copy. Roen crying. “You can’t do this to me, man,” he was saying. His nose running and his eyes bloodred. “You cannot fucking do this. You have no idea who these people are. They will fucking find you.”

  But Harris would not be stopped. What he was taking, which didn’t belong to Roen anyway, had a broader, rectifying power, a means by which his personal history might finally and truly be cleansed after all that earlier, pointless trying.

  Time to end this. The ritual that ends in blood.

  Absolute darkness. That’s what such moments required. Harris saw it and left Roen where he sat, bawling in his wheelchair. His life didn’t last long after that. By Harris’s own best math, he was himself on Saturna Island when it happened, down in the orchard. A creak of a door to a hidden cellar opened, heavy plastic tub
s thudded down to the floor, bales of cash into black garbage bags, loaded into a rusted minivan he’d bought for the purpose. Ford Windstar. What luck to discover one of those for sale, the exact vehicle envisioned for his future. It worked for the purpose, parked and waiting in the long weeds. The whole operation took an hour, at the climax of which Roen either pressed the gun to his own head or submitted to it being applied there by professionals in that trade. Either way, Harris felt the shot in that instant. He heard it in his heart. And it knocked him to his knees in the wet grass, where he stayed a long time sobbing, one hand on a rusted fender.

  Alone in Kitsilano and trapped utterly. All that money, enough to dissolve the biggest problems, all useless to Harris now; he didn’t dare show his face outside, much less spend a single bill. Defeated in his own crafty victory, while the rain gathered, and something circled possessively, some entity in the night drawing close.

  He took to the window, pulled back the blinds. His breath was coming in ragged tears. There was only a single path open now, only a single decision possible in that blackest of moments.

  He was on the street. He was in the park. He slipped through the trees and out onto the sand, running now, a shape moving behind him. Footsteps that were not there. Between the logs and to the water’s edge, where the world tipped away from what it was into the airless blackness of a world that was not.

  A whisper behind him: Tell me where. Nobody. But Harris still moved forward into the waves, up to his knees, his thighs.

  Absolute darkness.

  8

  The body on Kits Beach made news. It was a bigger deal than a drug dealer dead in a burning Viper. He was a local writer, after all, if not that well known. And he’d drowned off one of Vancouver’s most popular beaches, pulled onto the sand by a Portuguese water dog whose owner did not wish to be interviewed. Drunk swimming, they said. But who swam drunk in March at two in the morning?

  No one. Not the lawyer either. Found dead in Crab Park. One shot to the back of the head.

  The headlines screamed: “THEY KNEW EACH OTHER!”

  Didn’t matter. They were dead. They couldn’t talk. Neither did anyone else who mattered.

  Purma, for her part, went directly to the police. The three of them had met not long before the two men died. It had been a memorial for yet another friend who’d apparently committed suicide.

  All this was very confusing. Lots of speculation. But she was clean. The cops liked her. She did good work in the Downtown Eastside and they left her alone. Last question she fielded from the detectives was if Harris owned a car.

  No, Purma said. He used a car service, Car2go.

  Which was curious, the cops thought, given they found a car key in his apartment but nothing registered in his name. What kind of car? They sent it out for identification and waited almost six weeks. The results did not inspire any kind of follow-up.

  Purma went back to what she had been doing. Three old friends gone in a couple of months. It was the kind of thing you tried to forget if you had people dropping all around you, which she did, literally. The Downtown Eastside was not getting better. Her work wasn’t getting any easier.

  Three years passed.

  And one day, it was time. A year per loss? Maybe. Purma on a ferry. Purma in the swell, in the rolling waves. Purma on an old road with a backpack, walking those two kilometers to the place where it all began, or where it had all stopped. Thinking back on it, she couldn’t be sure.

  Purma on a morning hike that they had themselves done so many times before. Up the ridgeline to the back road. Around to the lip of trees. Left into the auto graveyard. Purma had no reason to be there other than having been many times before, long ago. Rotting vehicles consumed by moss or sprouting trees. In some cases, the salt air had whittled the frames down to intricate carvings.

  To the back. To a car in the middle of the last row wedged in tight against a Garry oak. Nothing special about this one. But she rubbed the moss clean off the grill to find the word: Windstar.

  Frozen. Remembering. How awful had she been back then? And in an impulsive instant, she acted on the thought. She hefted a rock. And she heaved it through the windshield.

  “Whoa.” Said aloud as the glass dissolved. As it folded away. As the van’s interior was torn open to view, revealing that it wasn’t empty. That is was chock-full instead. Bales of something wrapped in black plastic, stacked to the roof.

  She held some of it her hands, leafy, smelling of crime. She said aloud: “You fools.”

  Eight Game-Changing Tips on Public Speaking

  by Sheena Kamal

  Financial District

  1. Smile, motherfucker.

  It relaxes you on stage. You will not need to take a Xanax and fall asleep on top of Bridget the night before your big presentation, the one that you are flying into Seattle from Vancouver specifically to give. She has put up with too much of that shit already and girlfriend deserves a break. If you play your cards right, she may be compelled to share her suspicions that someone has been stealing from you for the past year, but whether or not that will happen depends entirely on your willingness to search for the mythical clitoris—which, let me tell you, actually exists. I can find it blindfolded with my arms tied behind my back. It’s right at the top of the—you know what? I’ll draw you a diagram.

  For someone who has written astute in his web profile, you have a lot to learn. Not just about the female anatomy either, although it does show a certain lack of respect for the women in your life. I’m talking about the little details. I’m talking about the drips of money that have become a nice, steady river into someone else’s pocket.

  We have worked together for two years now. Me in my Beyoncé-inspired wardrobe and you in your . . . how about we get to that later? For now, let me just say that the first day I walked into your corner office in the Financial District, overlooking Coal Harbour with the trees of Stanley Park edging the frame of your view, I knew something would give with this job. Or someone. I gave first.

  Now it’s your turn.

  2. Use the stage, but don’t pace.

  It makes you look like an asshole when you do that. All those years you spent dodging the homeless and the addicts on Hastings has made you surprisingly agile for a man your age, but you don’t need to advertise this during your speeches. Plus, your fashion sense can’t hold up to that kind of scrutiny. It’s amazing when people who have earned as much shady money as you have refuse to invest in a decent suit. Off the rack is not a good look on you.

  People don’t talk about the Panama Papers anymore, they really don’t. But they should. It boggles my fertile, college-educated mind that the biggest white-collar corruption scandal of our day—with sexy highlights such as tax evasion, front companies, doctored communications, financial havens—seems to have disappeared like a puff of quality BC kush. Unsurprisingly, a haze of collective amnesia has set in. Nobody remembers that a company heavily involved in advising on these illegal havens for the yacht owners of this country was based in Vancouver. Your old company, in fact. You have stayed off social media and, because your family barely talks to you anymore, it was difficult for me to make the connections that I have recently made—but not impossible. Oh, the thrills of working for a tax planner!

  Please don’t think I’m judging, even though, according to my nan, this kind of behavior is clearly not beyond me. I have done my share of pacing, so I know it is a sign of a guilty conscience. But you really shouldn’t reveal that much of yourself to a paying audience. They want the tips, not the guilt. That burden is for your battered soul alone.

  3. Tone down the gesticulation.

  Repeat after me: “My arms are not windmills.” Keep them at your sides, bent at the elbows. This will allow you to highlight important points with a little flourish, but will prevent you from getting too worked up. Like the time you surprised me in the office with Juanita. We both knew that Juanita wasn’t helping me find my contact lens while we were half-naked under your desk,
but you didn’t have to increase my workload by 30 percent because of your barely disguised homophobia.

  What was I talking about?

  Oh yeah, your arms. Keeping them at your side will also hide your pit stains. Honestly, I don’t know what Bridget sees in you—except for piles of other people’s money. She held the less-than-exalted position of being your executive assistant before leaving to work on her back. Make no mistake about it, it is work. I happened to see that nightmare video on your phone, which is not password protected for some ludicrous reason. How many times have I forwarded you those HuffPo articles about the security of your personal devices? I mean, people keep their entire lives on their phones these days. Terrible sex videos, appointments you haven’t synched to your official schedule, logs of shady phone calls to contacts at what seem to be shell companies, screenshots of certain account balances . . . you haven’t let go of your past yet, have you?

  If Bridget has any sense, and obviously she does, she would have noticed the exact same discrepancies. Do you really think your phone sits untouched on your desk during your epic morning bathroom visits? It may seem that those bran muffins Bridget makes are your friend, but they truly are not. And, since we’re talking about Bridget, is it weird that she hired a lesbian to replace her? So that nobody else would get any ideas about her cash cow?

  Please. She didn’t need to worry, bro, honestly. I wouldn’t touch you with someone else’s dusty vagina.

  4. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

  I can write your speeches for you (like the good little executive assistant I am), but I can’t make you good at giving them without a little effort on your part. Don’t practice in front of a mirror, do it while you’re puttering around the house—excuse me, golf course. Get the speech in your body and it will stay in your mind.

  You know what stays in my mind?

  The night you found me in your office with Juanita. That was when I first realized something was off. A late-night visit to the office isn’t exactly your style. You hadn’t forgotten anything—I made sure of that. And you haven’t burned the midnight oil in years. You needed to clean up a mess, didn’t you? Later I looked over your accounts.