Chapter 148

The next morning, he woke on another rooftop, in another alleyway, feeling achey all over his body.
He walked to the edge and looked down the alley to see anyone was around, then climbed down.
He was near Gastown. He walked carefully to the nearest street and felt safe as soon as he mingled in with the morning pedestrians.
He walked a few blocks, and then stopped and had coffee at the Starbucks across from the Gastown steam clock, then slowly walked up to Hastings and across to Granville Street.
He walked up a little bit at a time, looking for any sign of the murder he’d committed. He expected to see police lights and news vans…. There was nothing.
There was nothing.
When he reached the exact spot of pavement in front of Willy’s where Kurtis had been struck by the cinder block, there was police tape.
Rawle was relieved. For a moment, he questioned his own sanity. The tape was blocking off a small square of beige sidewalk. A Vancouver Police constable was chatting with a worker in one of the 99 cent pizza slice shop windows.
A faint blood stain was still there, surrounded by pink spraypaint markings on the concrete of the sidewalk.
Rawle passed by, just like everybody else.
Now he could see a few news trucks, and a Vancouver Sun car parked along the street, but there were no reporters around, that he could see.
He turned left on Robson. After a few minutes walking, he ran right into Olivier, from Jasper, walking down the street with some other longhaired Montreal kids.
“It’s Pow-der!” Olivier said, in his stilted English.
“How are you, man?”
Olivier introduced Rawle to his friends and they all went together to Crosstown Traffic, a café on the marijuana side of Hastings, just before the Main Street intersection. It was one of three or four cafés in downtown Vancouver where marijuana smoking was encouraged, although pot is still illegal inVancouver.
They found a dark table at the back and smoked a few joints over potent organic coffee.
Olivier said he had just arrived in the city the night before.
Him and his friends were heading to Salt Spring Island, an island just off Vancouver Island. He was going to something called a ‘Rainbow Gathering,’ where all kinds of hippies came together from all over the country and camped for a few months together on Crown land, and partied.
“Where did you sleep, last night?” Olivier said.
“On a rooftop,” Rawle said. “Right downtown.”
“Oh. We slept on Wreck Beach.”
“Where?”
“It’s a nude beach, at UBC. We all got caught and got ticketed, so early in the morning. Not very smart. I’m so tired now.”
Rawle laughed. “I’m telling you, man, rooftops is where it’s at.”
“So, you want to come with us, to the Island?”
“No thanks, man. I need to make some money.”
“Didn’t you make any money in Jasp-er?”
“No. It’s all gone. Didn’t take me long to spend that.”
“There’s a temp agency on Commercial Street, where you work for the day and they print you out a check the same day,” one of Olivier’s friends said. “You just hop the Skytrain, two stops. You can ride the Skytrain without a ticket, but there’s a slim chance you might get busted. The guys come around and check tickets like, one in ten times. But what are they gonna do, arrest you?”
Rawle touched a napkin to his left eye, which was watering for some reason. “I said I wanted to make some money, not work for it.”
Everybody chuckled.