Stray Bullets (English and English Edition) - Hardcover

Robert Rotenberg is one of Toronto’s top criminal lawyers and the author of several bestselling novels, including Old City Hall, The Guilty Plea, Stray Bullets, and Stranglehold. He lives in Toronto with his wife, television news producer Vaune Davis, and their three children. Visit him at RobertRotenberg.com or follow him @RobertRotenberg.

Stray Bullets 1
It was bad enough working in the kitchen of a doughnut shop for minimum wage, but having to wear a hairnet was even worse. Especially since the Tim Hortons uniform they made Jose Sanchez wear was at least a full size too big. Made him look ridiculous. Made it hard to talk to Suzanne, the pretty young server who worked out front. Not that it mattered. She had a boyfriend, a punk named Jet. And why would she be interested in an illegal immigrant to Canada whose real name wasn’t Jose Sanchez but Dragomir Ozera. And who wasn’t a chef from Portugal, as he’d told his employer, but was a Romanian linguistics student with a warrant out for his arrest. Fucking hairnet.

Suzanne and Ozera liked to hang out together on their breaks. He’d sneak her a doughnut from the baking tray, she’d snag him a coffee, and they’d head out back for a smoke. This afternoon it was almost five o’clock, and the mid-November sky was already losing its light. Suzanne was sitting in their usual spot on one of the overturned milk crates with a pack of Players in her hand. He bent down to take a cigarette, and it took three tries to light the bloody thing. The wind was strong and chilling.

He stood up, took a deep puff, and exhaled into the scant light. Then he saw it.

“Shit,” he said.

“What?” she asked, looking around.

“It’s snowing. I can’t believe it.”

Six years ago, when Ozera first arrived in Toronto from Romania, he was excited about the idea of experiencing a real Canadian winter. But now all he could think was, November fourteenth. December fourteenth. January fourteenth. February fourteenth. March fourteenth. Somehow he had to get through another four months of ice and snow.

“I guess winters aren’t like this in Portugal,” she said.

“I never saw snow once before I came here,” he said.

Of course he’d been born in the mountains of Romania and was in fact an excellent skier. These days he was having fun pretending to be Portuguese and had even grown sideburns to fit the part. At his last job he was Argentinean, complete with a long twisty mustache. Luckily, his facial hair grew real fast.

She handed him the coffee and he took a sip. He winced. At Timmy’s they served something called a “double-double.” Watery coffee with two creams and two sugars. He didn’t have the heart to tell her how horrid it tasted. Who in the world would put cream in anything you’d want to drink? he thought as he struggled to keep the coffee down.

She reached for his cigarette and took a long drag. Her shift was over. She was waiting for Jet, who always picked her up at five in his big, old Cadillac. Guy was never late. She seemed fidgety.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“It’s my ex, Dewey. Got out of jail three days ago, and I hear he’s looking for me.” She twirled her long, curly hair between her fingers.

“Jail?”

She returned the smoke, and Ozera took a puff.

“He just finished three years for a drugstore robbery. I took the bus out to Kingston every third weekend for eighteen months.” She rolled up the sleeve on her right arm to show him a tattoo on the underside. It read: “DeWEy.” A red heart was drawn over top of the “WE.”

He offered her back the cigarette, and she grabbed it.

“I couldn’t take it anymore. Those stupid trailer visits made me feel like a sex slave. And he was calling me collect every night. Cost a fortune.” She exhaled a line of smoke that danced in the wind. “Dewey’s a jealous asshole, and he’s smart. He already knows I work here, my shift, everything. And he hates Jet. We all grew up in this little place called Pelee Island.”

The name of so many things in this country ended in the “ee” sound, Ozera thought. Timmy’s. Harvey’s, a hamburger chain that competed with Wendy’s. Hockey. The manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs was named Burke, but everyone referred to him as Burkee. Now there was Dewey.

“What’s he look like?”

They shared the smoke as she described her former boyfriend. Real short. Spiky red hair and a squished-in face. Scary dark eyes. Usually hung out with his buddy Larkin, who was a foot taller and had long hair all the way down to his ass.

“I’ll keep my eyes open for them.” He butted the cigarette on the curb and headed back inside. In the kitchen, two fresh racks of cinnamon crullers were ready. He pulled them from the oven and headed out front.

Dewey and Larkin must have come in while Ozera was outside with Suzanne because he saw the two guys she’d just described to him right away. They were sitting by the door. Larkin, the one with the long hair, was chatting up some black girls at the next table. Dewey, short and red haired, stared out through the front windows at the dimly lit parking lot. He wore a blue-and-white striped British football scarf around his neck and was rubbing the tassels at the end between his fingers.

The place was busy. Line-ups at both cash registers. Off to the side, the shift boss was dealing with some Chinese customers who didn’t speak English. He was trying to explain to them that the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Yuen, weren’t in today.

Nobody noticed Ozera. He looked through the front windows into the parking lot and saw a pair of headlights approach as Jet’s Cadillac drove in.

Dewey was watching it too. Ozera saw him tap Larkin on the elbow, say something to him, point out the window, and jerk his head in that direction.

Ozera dropped the cinnamon crullers on the counter and rushed out back. He opened the door and looked around. No one was there.

“Suzanne,” he yelled.

No answer.

“Suzanne, Dewey’s here with his friend.”

Silence.

He closed his eyes. Be smart, Dragomir, and stay out of this, Ozera told himself. The last thing he needed was more trouble.

Back home, after he’d graduated from university in Bucharest, there’d been absolutely no work. He was the oldest of five kids, and his mother was alone. His father had left long before. Ozera joined the Romanian International Football Team, a fake team that had never played a game of football—or soccer, as they called it in North America—and was a perfect way for twenty men to sneak into Canada. At the time Toronto was booming, and there were tons of construction jobs, even for a linguistics student who’d never picked up a hammer in his life.

Things were fine until the recession hit. Overnight the work dried up. He scratched out a few jobs, and then he got stupid. Got caught stealing some food. It wasn’t something romantic as in Les Misérables when the guy stole a loaf of bread to feed his family. He’d hidden some imported French brie, lovely-looking goose pâté, and two thin boxes of expensive Belgian crackers in his satchel. That’s what you get for trying to impress a girl. The cops released him, and gave him a piece of paper with a date to go get photographed and fingerprinted, and another date to go to court. He never went. Couldn’t risk it with immigration.

Ozera turned to head back inside. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted the milk cartons where he’d just been sitting with Suzanne. He thought how nervous she looked smoking her cigarette. Her tattoo, the “WE” and the heart above those two letters. Her ex-boyfriend Dewey staring out the window, tapping his buddy Larkin on the elbow to go outside.

He heard male voices coming from around the side of the building nearest the parking lot. He sighed and closed the door quietly. He tiptoed to the corner and peered around it.

Dewey and Larkin had their backs to him. They were standing in the shadows, beside a row of low bushes that ran all the way along the wall, watching the Cadillac. Ozera took a few silent steps closer.

Out in the corner of the parking lot, Jet was standing beside the front door of his Cadillac. Ozera couldn’t see Suzanne anywhere.

A fat man holding the hand of a little boy walked up through the middle of the lot. “Daddy, daddy,” the boy said as they walked toward the front door. “It’s snowing.” The child’s sweet voice carried well in the early-evening air.

“First time in your life,” the father said. He sounded ecstatic.

Ozera braved a few more steps forward. He could hear Dewey and Larkin talking.

Suddenly Suzanne emerged from the other side of the building, running across the lot behind the father and son, rushing toward Jet.

Ozera looked back at Dewey and Larkin.

Then he saw the gun.

It happened so fast.

Bang. Then bang. Then bang.

Ozera’s ears were ringing from the sound. He couldn’t believe what he’d just seen.

For a moment there was this weird silence. Like that space in sound and time after the lightning, before the thunder rattles down on your head. The air filled with an acrid smell.

He jumped back, stepped through the bushes, and slammed his shoulders against the nearest wall.

“Oh God! Help!” the father screamed from near the front door.

Car doors slammed. Wheels squealed.

“What the fuck,” Dewey hissed.

“My son!” the father cried out. “He’s been hit!”

Jet’s Cadillac peeled out of the lot.

Ozera wished he could disappear into the wall behind him. The rough bricks dug into t...