Chapter 1

It was going to be a long night.
Night shift.
‘Snowball’ Glen Frederick walked outside through the windowless back door of his business, GF Autobody Sales & Towing at 1665 Mountain Road, Moncton, New Brunswick.
It was the middle of the night.
His thirteen-year-old son, Derek, carried a milk crate full of supplies out to the company van.
Inside the white Econoline, Glen Frederick put the milk crate on his lap. There were three 40-ounce vodka bottles in the crate, each filled a third of the way with gasoline. Derek climbed in the passenger seat.
“Where’s the laundry soap?”
Derek opened a grocery bag he was carrying and pulled out a bottle of generic liquid laundry detergent. Snowball took it and filled the big blue cap twice for each bottle of gasoline, carefully pouring the detergent into the vodka bottles using a metal funnel. The van reeked of gasoline.
“Okay. I got the laundry soap,” Derek said. “Now what’s it for?”
Glenny didn’t speak until he was finished pouring.
“I’ll tell you.” He held up a finished bottle for Derek to see. The clear bottle was half full of thick blue liquid. “This is gasoline plus two scoops laundry soap.” Snowball swished the slow liquid around in the bottle. “The laundry soap thickens the gasoline. See? Now, when I throw it, it explodes and the flames stick better to their general target, almost like napalm, instead of just having the liquid spill and splash all over the place. If you want to do damage accurately but not necessarily burn the whole place down, you can do this. See?”
He passed the crate to Derek and started up the van, peeling out of the parking lot. They were both wearing puffy black coats and Derek looked like a smaller, chubbier version of his father.
Derek was thirteen now, an age of manhood in many cultures, including the culture of the Gypsies MC and their Moncton puppet club, the Butcher Kiddos MC, of which Glenny Frederick was seargent-at-arms.
Glenny was forbidden by international Gypsy charter rules from ever becoming a full member of the Gypsies MC, because he’s black.
As a Butcher Kiddo, and Dee Lee’s personal bodyguard, he commanded almost as much respect in the drug trade.
The reason Derek had been given such a relatively serious assignment as initiation had a lot to do with the fact that he had Glen Frederick as a father.
A lot would be expected of “little Glenny.” Unfortunately, Derek was basically a useful idiot.
At least this way, Glenny could teach his son first-hand how to be safe, how to take precautions and protect himself from the increasingly crafty RCMP.
He showed his son how to put the van up on the hoist and look for police GPS devices, and even how to make a fake license plate. They crafted a white Nova Scotia plate, complete with colour-matched blue lettering and the traced icon of the famous Bluenose racing schooner.
Glenny had bought a tin press a few years back and punched the plate out of tin sheeting and printed it on a printing table used to make automotive decals. It wasn’t perfect, but from a distance the plate looked almost perfect.
F0K 6UP.
Fuck 6-Up, which meant: Fuck the Police.
They headed toward Dieppe and got onto the highway and started out for Nova Scotia at around 2 a.m.
The sun would not be up for at least three hours, that’s all Glenny cared about. It would be dark while they did their business.
Traffic was non-existant all along the Trans-Canada Highway and on the 102 all the way to Lower Sackville just outside Halifax, but for some reason it got thicker once they got on the 101 towards the Annapolis Valley, even at this time of night.
Glen Frederick cruised at ten above the speed limit, fitting in perfectly with traffic but not passing anybody.
On a quiet stretch past Mt. Uniacke, he put one palm on the wheel and used the other to unfold the letter Derek had received last Friday from Tin-Tin.
His first mandate.
The letter and $350 cash had come to the garage Friday morning. The return address was the street number of Perry Paul “Cock” Spalding’s strip club, Lady Hercules.
The letter inside was blank except for an address and a small thumbnail photograph of a bungalow with white siding and a red clay chimney. The words “Toad House” were printed in pencil under the photograph.
Derek had to ask Glenny what the letter meant.
The nickname ‘Toad’ referred to a well-known jail guard at Burnside Jail, where ‘Cock’ Spalding was being held without bail pending the conclusion of his double-murder trial.
Derek was being asked to go to a jail guard’s home and burn it out.
Todd ‘the Toad’ Purcell was one of two guards who had been enlisted to keep ‘Cock’ Spalding happy during what was bound to be a two-year or longer stay at least in the provincial jail.
“Provincial guards have to deal with a lot of bullshit for $14 an hour,” he told Derek, always teaching. “Think about that. $14 an hour. I wouldn’t let you suck my dick for fourteen bucks an hour. That’s why a lot of them are interested in ‘extra work.’”
Toad made sure Spalding got good cuts of meat in the cafeteria, extra canteen privileges, nicotine gum, weight room time and good thriller novels to read by popular authors- not those Canadian ones nobody ever heard of.
But Spalding asked Toad to go a step further. He wanted him to ‘suitcase’ dope into the jail, which meant carrying packages in his rectum every morning as he came into work. Toad refused the offer.
“That’s what this Shitty’s about,” Glenny stressed, although Derek had already been told this. “This Shitty is about the importance of doing what you’re told. And about ass real estate. I can’t stress that enough. By the end of tonight, this guard won’t think it’s such a big deal to cram his suitcase every morning. I guarantee you that.”
“I’m gettin’ pumped up,” Derek said.
Glen Frederick turned the stereo down and pulled off Exit 4, doubling back toward St. Croix and then inland to Ellershouse via the old number one highway.