LITMIR.BIZ

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for a sunset cruise out past the quaintness of Toronto Island. Some of them stopped what they were doing and looked around, unaware of what exactly was taking place. McKelvey spotted a woman in her early thirties pointing frantically at the green-blue water.

      “My daughter fell in!” she screamed. “I can’t swim! Please!”

      McKelvey saw it, the flail of arms, tangled dark hair like a mess of seaweed out there in the water a few metres off the bow of a yacht painted blue and white. He beat a young man who was taking too long to kick off his sneakers and jumped feet first into the space between the boats. The water was colder than he would have guessed. When he broke the surface, he saw the girl had slipped under, likely having panicked and swallowed a mouthful. He took three or four strong strokes and reached beneath the water with both hands, raking the darkness. His own breath was coming short now. He took a long haul and let himself drop beneath the water line. He opened his eyes to the murk, the silt too thick to see more than a foot in front of his face. It stung his eyes like vinegar. The world shimmered above in the dull silver of muted daylight. His fingers made contact with a patch of hair, and he pulled the girl to himself, using his legs to propel them this last distance to the surface. He came up, vacuumed air into his lungs like life itself and coughed a little. He pulled them towards the dock with a one-armed breast stroke, his other arm locked in a V around her head to keep it above the water.

      The girl was limp in his grasp. She was light, maybe forty-five pounds, and McKelvey guessed about six or seven years old. A mop of thick black hair that for an instant, just a flicker, reminded him of his own boy’s head of hair. The young man who had taken off his shoes was already in the water, halfway down a wrought iron ladder. He accepted the girl as McKelvey held her up, the frantic mother already there. He pulled himself up the ladder just as the girl turned her head to expel a mouthful of Lake Ontario, then immediately started crying in a loud, shivering wail, teeth chattering, the mother threatening to crush the girl with her hugs. He heard the girl let out a belly-empty belch and knew that she’d be all right.

      When it was done, he crouched on the hot pavement at the end of the dock to catch his breath, drenched clothes chilling his skin despite the strong sun. He could smell the stink of the lake on him, motor oil and algae, poison and piss. People were gathering in a large crowd now, tourists and passersby drawn by the current of human tragedy and excitement. The EMS workers came through with a folding stretcher and black medical kit that looked more like a large fishing tackle box. A middle-aged man from one of the sailboats came over and handed McKelvey a bath towel. He dried his hair and cleaned out his ears and wrapped the towel around his shoulders.

      “That was a quick response,” the boater said, looking over at the mother and the daughter. He was dressed in pressed khaki shorts and navy golf shirt, the tanned face of a Bay Street trader who had retired at fifty to a life of sailing and country club golf. “Let me guess, you were a lifeguard when you were younger.”

      “Something like that,” McKelvey said.

      It was the six hundred and twenty-third day of his official retirement. And thirteen hours. Not that he was counting; not exactly. But still, he missed it. Getting wrapped up in the details of the work, the drive. That was it mostly, the sense of purpose the work had provided in his otherwise meandering life. Once again his mind’s eye conjured an image of himself dressed in a blue smock, pushing shopping carts toward idiotic shoppers at the crack of dawn, a sickening smile plastered on his face. Have a nice day, asshole!

      The Sun the following day carried on Page 5 McKelvey’s reluctant picture and a brief article with the headline: ‘Shootout Copper Pulls Girl from Harbour’. A young reporter intent on bringing McKelvey’s history into the story asked how it felt to save the life of a child, considering his own son’s life had been taken by the hand of another almost four years ago. It was a good question. But McKelvey didn’t have an answer. He could have told the fresh-faced scribe there were no scales at work in this conundrum. We trust in the laws of karma because we need to believe that what goes around does indeed come back around. In McKelvey’s experience, it was a line of thinking that had delivered disappointment more often than not. Not that he was keeping score; not really. Sometimes it came easy, sometimes it came hard. Life was just what it was; no exchanges, no refunds. Down here, your good luck charms hold no sway…

      “You’re my hero,” Detective Mary-Ann Hattie said when she called the next morning. “You just can’t stay out of the papers, can you? Are the paparazzi camped outside?”

      A little more than a year earlier she had presented him with the laminated front page of the Sun featuring news of the shooting at McKelvey’s house. ‘Shootout in the Beaches’. The tabloid had jumped at the opportunity to conjure images of the Wild West, gunslingers settling old scores. It made for good copy. At least in this instance it wasn’t too far from the truth. McKelvey and Duguay in that darkened hallway, pistols drawn. The smell of gunpowder, the ringing in his ears.

       Reputed Quebec-based biker Pierre Duguay was shot and seriously wounded yesterday morning as he allegedly broke into the home of a recently retired Toronto police detective. Sources indicate Detective- Constable Charles McKelvey was conducting his own unauthorized investigation into the unsolved murder of his son, Gavin McKelvey, who was killed almost three years ago over alleged involvement with the now-defunct Toronto chapter of the Blades biker gang. Unconfirmed reports suggest McKelvey had fingered Duguay for the killing even after the courts dismissed charges against the Montreal native due to the suicide of star witness and fellow biker, Marcel Leroux.

       The province’s Special Investigation Unit has opened an inquiry along with the force’s own Professional Standards Unit.

      “They’re going to make a movie out of you one day, Charlie,” she said. “You know, like The French Connection. I wonder, who do you think should play you?”

      He shrugged, standing there in his boxers in the kitchen of his small apartment condo, early morning light catching the dust in the air. Hearing her voice made him want to see her, for her to come and stay the night. It had been a week or so. He remembered what it felt like to be with her, how they seemed to lock together. But this was the bargain they had struck, and he had to stick to the conditions. “I love you to death, Charlie,” she had said finally, after trying for nearly a year to negotiate a space in the man’s life, within his stubbornness and his dual afflictions of guilt and grief, “but I can’t live with you… ”

      “I don’t know,” he said now, “how about Steve McQueen.”

      “Cool guy,” Hattie said, “but last time I checked, he was still dead.”

      “I know,” he said. “Perfect.”

      The truth was, the only thing McKelvey was thinking when he dove into the water of the harbour was the same thing he was thinking when he raised his pistol in that dark hallway to fire at Pierre Duguay: I am fully prepared to accept the consequences of my actions. It was about getting lost in the intent, within those seconds during which time slowed, wherein everything was brought into a sharper focus—life, in all its ragged promise… and yes, in that single instant, Charlie McKelvey had a purpose.

      In McKelvey’s evaluation, if modern history were a book, things were whittled down to the last few chapters. There was little left for the human race to turn against except itself, and a quick scan of the headlines proved that’s precisely where they had come to as a collective multitude; like a bunch of half-drunk tourists, too ignorant to ask for directions or consult a map, they were lost and stumbling in the hills beyond the safety of the resort complex. The morning the twin towers fell to dust in New York City, McKelvey sat and drank beer in his boxer shorts watching the anchors on CNN grapple with the enormity of the moment, the sheer unspeakableness of it, and he knew something had shifted within the entire mechanism of the western world. This was the coda of the modern times,

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