“It’s hundreds of thousands,” Mark said, pretending he wasn’t out of breath as we carried the body around to the backyard. “Those were hundreds, down to the bottom, I swear. They’re coming back for it.”
“They’re not,” Esther said, as we arrived in the tent and set the body down. “They’re sending a signal to other dealers that they don’t care about the money. This is about the territory. Cops and the papers will report that the cash was just left there.”
“That’s some TV crap, Esther,” I said.
“No, that’s some my-father-is-a-lead-investigator-on-gang-related-crimes-in-the-Lower-Mainland crap,” Esther replied. “Phil’s car’s not here, and if there’s no cash and no drugs and no body in the apartment, then he’s a missing person to the cops. It can work.”
“If Rivko knew he was dealing, then other people know,” I said.
“And that helps us,” Esther countered, impatient. “Means that the same guys who took the drugs killed him and made him evaporate, and the cops will either look for him through those connections or just not bother. They won’t look where we’re going to put him.”
Instead of steak knives this time, she had shovels, but just two. Mark and I dug, the booze sweating out of us and the tent getting incredibly hot, Phil facing away from us until we rolled him into the four-foot-deep hole and put the dirt back on. Esther came out to arrange the rolls of grass back over him: she was better with the precision stuff.
I had Crissie’s number in my Razr, and I texted her when I got out of the shower. It was too quick to be doing that, desperate, but I wanted to do something normal and human.
hungover as fucc / glad you came
She didn’t answer for another three hours, but it was nice when it came. Sincere. She even punctuated.
Me too.
When the cops came two days later, driven by desperate calls from Phil’s parents, they barely bothered with us, it was so clear that this was unsavory drug gangster shit. I don’t know the story they pieced together — Esther wasn’t afraid of much, but she feared her dad’s perceptiveness, even though she’d inherited it. She never asked him anything so we don’t know what the official take was, just that they asked us about the party, took a look around and in the tent. (Esther had insisted we leave it up, said it made sense of any disturbance in the dirt they found. She was right, they barely looked.)
“What do we do with this money?” I asked Esther when the cops left.
“I told you, we buy this place with most of it, keep some to spend,” she said.
“I mean now, what do we do with it? How can we spend it without—”
“We clean it through the after-hours, through Rivko,” Mark said. “He barely claims any of his income, he knows this shit.”
“Exactly,” Esther said.
And that’s what we did.
Rivko asked very few questions, just took a little cut and did the work for us. I asked my dad for the rest of the cash we’d need to buy out the landlord, which was less than we’d worried when we approached the old Sikh guy who owned the place but still drove a cab fifty-five hours a week. A vanishing-likely-drug-murder knocks a high five figures off any property value. And my dad was so proud to see me making a strong practical move that he signed the check the same day I asked.
The party worked too. The money I brought to Rivko plus the crowd we got out at the Landecker thing and the next few gigs gave him enough faith in me to ask for a trial run as VP of his new events company. Within six months I was barely deejaying at all — just booking Diplo, Aoki, Oizo, and taking a slice of profit, instead of trying to be them. Mark quit too, finishing his conversion into the housing game by taking his real estate licensing exam. It was Esther and Crissie who kept going, joining up to play shows, flying out to Europe on Phil’s dime, eventually getting bigger in town and huge in Germany and Italy, packing out mega-clubs over there. Mark, Esther and I used a second mortgage on the place to buy and flip our first house, then our second, and just kept going.
Esther and Mark now live out on Saltspring, on some enormous compound they designed themselves. Crissie and I live in the place on 16th. We refurbished the shit out of the inside, of course, but I lied to Crissie about the yard.
“Permitting hell to relandscape. I’ve tried with the city a half-dozen times,” I told her last year.
“We can’t have a garden?”
“Two more hoops and we can.”
So tonight, with Crissie playing a solo gig in Vegas, Esther and Mark came over. I’d bought a bottle of Landecker for the occasion, but wasn’t sentimental enough to demand that we kill it. I already had the tent set up, exactly the way it was before, pulling it out of the storage shed in the yard.
Esther got there ahead of Mark, wearing a YSL sundress. She rolled her eyes when I looked at her questioningly.
“I’ve got a tracksuit in my bag.”
“Should have known, sorry.”
Mark got there a second after her — he’d been nostalgia-eating a slice from Zaccary’s. We just sat there in the living room for a second, and right before I was going to make a joke about the Landecker, Mark spoke up.
“Is he bones yet? He must be by now.”
“Yeah,” I said. He must be.
Burned
by Yasuko Thanh
Yaletown
Paula’s always been a hard case. She’s got those eyes. A.C. is her pimp and she makes bank even though there’s something dead about her: like I said, those eyes, and her laugh is cold and hollow. A meanness hides beneath her top layer of pretty, fragile as a porcelain doll.
Paula’s features are so perfect they look painted on. Deb, my best friend, is beautiful in every way that Paula is not. Deb’s shorter than me and has hair in different shades of blond that spikes in all directions, and apple-red cheeks even when she hasn’t been outside. Paula’s body is willowy and Deb’s body is warm and soft, the kind of body that makes you think she’d be a great mom someday.
Paula’s been A.C.’s woman for years. Deb got with him just a few months ago.
I’ll confess, when A.C. bumped Deb, I started hanging out with her just to get under Paula’s skin. I was tired of how the other girls fawned over her. She reminded me of all the girls I’d hated in high school. I’d been an honor roll student, and the popular girls who’d once been my friends had stopped hanging out with me when I started smoking, stealing, and getting arrested. Paula reminds me of my old life too, but not in the same way Deb does. Paula reminds me of the bad parts. The parts I wanted to leave behind when I quit school three weeks into the tenth grade and ran away from home, a town house in the slums of the city on a street with no trees.
So I looked right at Deb, and asked her how she was getting along with her wife-in-law.
She looked at me, stunned, and then decided what to do. She snorted. The kind of over-the-shoulder snort that works best when you toss your hair at the same time.
Later I discovered I really liked Deb. I told her I used to be a gymnast and she said, “I used to do gymnastics too,” and she said it so quiet, with a bit of a smile, it was like she was telling me a secret.
We worked the high track bounded by Nelson, Seymour, Helmcken, and Richards. We shared the block with a pub where people threw their peanut shells on the floor; a strip club with the oldest, most washed-up dancers you’d ever seen; a corner store that sold single condoms, cigarettes, KY lube, and scratch-and-wins; a nightclub for yuppies; and a pretty wooden two-story house. A little old man lived inside. Outside are birdhouses. Tons of them. He’d built them to look like little people houses, human bungalows and ranchers and country inns, this man with thick hands and a headful of white hair. His hand-painted sign read, I’d rather be happy in my crazy world than to be sane and sad.