Chapter 126

The hot weather was coming fast.
Codiac RCMP had finished their investigation into the shooting of Kyle Verryn and determined that the unidentified senior police officer who gunned him down had no choice but to kill him. The officer had followed all proper procedure to the letter.
Rawle Powder read about it on the internet.
He didn’t feel quite right in Jasper anymore, for some reason.
He felt backed into a corner somehow, by events and by the fortress of the Rocky Mountains that surrounded him on all sides, and seemed to trap him here.
He wanted to leave, but was afraid he was missing something, some clue, that would lead him to Kurtis Missions.
Housekeeping, the cover job, was really starting to wear on his nerves.
He nearly puked every morning as he sprayed and scooped the phlegm, matted hair, shit, blood and discharge out of hotel room toilets and bathtubs.
He caught himself missing urine stains on dirty toilet seats and hallucinating them on clean ones.


His friend Michael told Rawle that he knew a good guy to talk to, to get information on the local drug trade from.
Olivier Something, a Montreal kid who slept at the Jasper train station off Connaught Drive. He slept in the side part, behind a set of luggage lockers, just out of the line of sight of the ticket window.
At night, the Tim Horton’s-sized train station would be dead. If anybody needed a locker they probably wouldn’t bother using the ones in the back corner, but still, Rawle had to admire the guy’s balls.
Olivier was the quiet type, but not quiet-shy, quiet-at-peace with himself.
He was matured well beyond his 17 years, by a lifetime of street travel and poverty.
He had absolutely no money, food or tobacco in the world, just a small pack of clothes worn so thin they were nearly a part of his flesh.
Had he done something? Was he running from something?
As far as Michael knew, he’d just been unhappy and treated badly at home, like so many others, so he left the house at 14, like scores of others.
He was so exposed to the elements by now that his skin made him look Arabic.
He spoke very broken English and fine Montreal French.
He had nothing and didn’t seem worried.
When Michael pointed him out, the first time, he was quietly stealing meat-sticks in the Wink’s convenience store downtown.
By way of assistant head housekeeper Kale, Michael and Rawle were able to get him a housekeeping job at the Gonquin, after convincing him it was an easy gig and a safer place than the train station.
Olivier agreed.
It turned out that all the staff-accoms were full by now, so they moved Olivier into a housekeeping closet on the first floor. He lived in the closet full of cleaning chemicals for several days and came over to Rawle’s staff-accom every day after work, for dinner.
Rawle would cook beans, fry-steak and black hotel coffee for Michael and Olivier, every night.
Olivier accepted charity graciously, but never asked for anything. He either starved in silence or had already stolen what he wanted hours earlier.
He reminded Rawle of a strip of dark, sizzled meat on a long, hard bone. There was not an ounce of fat on him, not on his flesh and not on his personality, either.
After work one day, Olivier and Rawle tucked in to one the Gonquin Inn’s outdoor hot tubs to smoke a J.
It was a warm day and Rawle felt like he was melting in the burning frothy water.
Olivier rolled a big joint on the edge of the tub, without getting it wet.
His lips were big and angular and whenever he took a drag from the joint he touched the smoky butt to his forehead, where the Eye of Shiva was.
“Why do you do that?” Rawle said.
“Res-pect.”
Olivier told Rawle about the time he stumbled on a football field-size outdoor grow-op in back of some woods on Salt Spring Island.
He had found it just around sunrise during his meanderings. Noone was around so he quickly started picking buds as if they were ripe blackberries and began filling his knapsack, trying to be so quiet. But then, just like that, the old hippy came, clang! stamping out the front door of the metal Airstream trailer with his rifle aimed and firing: Smack! Smack! Smack!
Olivier was hit. Shot in the leg with a salt bullet.
He turned and floundered intot he bushes but he had to run-run-run with the bullet burning and flaming in his thigh. And waiting out long days of pain alone in the woods until the bullet dissolved, hurting more and more the more it melted.
He showed Rawle a dark scar that looked like a melanoma on his thin upper thigh, up near the crotch.
Rawle asked him if he knew ‘John Dee.’
“I need badly to find the man.”
“John Dee? I knew him.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Now? No. How important is it?”
“It’s everything. It’s life and death.”
“Then someone you should talk about it with is my friend,” he said, in his troubled English.
“Who? What do you mean?”
“My friend was John Dee’s boyfriend.”