Every City Is Every Other City , livre ebook

Ecw Press - John Mcfetridge

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176 pages

English

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'Behind the scenes, nothing is what it seems.Gord Stewart, 40 years old, single, moved back into his subeurban childhood home to care for his widowed father. But his father no longer needs care and Gord is stuck in limbo. He's been working in the movie business as a location scout for years, and when there isn t much filming, as a private eye for a security company run by ex-cops, OBC. When a fellow crew member asks him to find her missing uncle, Gord reluctantly takes the job. The police say the uncle walked into some dense woods in Northern Ontario and shot himself, but the man's wife thinks he's still alive.With the help of his movie business and OBC connections, Gord finds a little evidence that the uncle may be alive. Now Gord has two problems: what to do when he finds a man who doesn't want to be found, and admitting that he s getting invested in this job. For the first time in his life, Gord Stewart is going to have to leave the sidelines and get into th

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	01 juin 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773056753
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Every City Is Every Other City A Gordon Stewart Mystery
John McFetridge

Contents Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four About the Author Copyright

Dedication
For Laurie, always.

Chapter One
New York City: the blue USPS mailbox, the bodega with English and Spanish signs in the window, and the guy selling pretzels out of a cart.
Move back five more feet and it’s a movie set in Toronto: the C-stands holding reflector boards, the lights, and a dozen crew members waiting to pounce on the “cut!”
Every city is every other city these days. The same fast-food franchises, the same big box stores, the same cars on the roads heading to the same houses in the suburbs.
That’s not really true. You scratch the surface and they’re all different, they all have their own histories and their own secrets. But this is a Hollywood movie, so it’s not going to scratch the surface. No one wants that.
The location looks good and that makes me happy because I’m the location scout who found it — a boarded-up house in a row of boarded-up houses getting ready to be torn down for condos that the crew turned into a New York bodega.
Not much street parking, though, so the walk from set to craft services was a couple of blocks and when I got there the line-up for lattes was at least six people deep.
“Hey Gordie, can I talk to you?” The production manager, Lana, was walking towards me.
“Sure, looks like this could take a minute.”
“You don’t need to be on set, do you? MoGib can handle everything, can’t he?”
She was talking about my boss, the location manager, Morris Gibson, and she was right. I said, “Did we lose a location?”
“No, it’s something else.” She pulled me aside, around the corner of the craft truck and said, “You’re a private eye, aren’t you?”
“It’s not like the movies,” I said. “I have a license and when there’s nothing shooting I do some freelance. It’s mostly just background checks.”
“But technically you’re a private eye?”
I wanted to say, I’m the kind of private eye you’re thinking about the way that boarded-up building is a New York City bodega, but I just said, “Sure.”
“OK, well, I wonder if you could talk to my aunt?”
“Is she writing a script?”
Lana looked horrified. “Don’t even joke about that, you know how many scripts I get handed? No, she needs someone to do an investigation.”
“There are real private eyes, it’s a real thing, you know. I could give you some names.”
“Could you just talk to her?”
“All right, give me her number.”
“Actually, she’s in my office.” Lana led the way along the row of trailers, past the ones being used as dressing rooms to the ones farthest from the set. “Come on.”
I waited on the sidewalk for a couple of minutes and then Lana came out of the trailer with an older woman, looked to be in her fifties, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a blue Columbia jacket. She looked a little nervous and unsure of herself, which, even more than her age, made her look out of place among the crew.
Lana said, “Gordon Stewart, this is my Aunt Barb. Mercer.”
Aunt Barb said, “I think Gordon Stewart is the most Canadian name I’ve ever heard.”
“It works as Stewart Gordon, too,” I said.
She smiled for a second and then was back to frowning.
Lana said, “You guys can use my office,” and walked away as though she had somewhere to be.
I held the door and Barb walked back up the couple of metal steps she’d just come down.
The office was small, of course, the walls covered with schedules, pictures of locations, call sheets, and cartoons. The desk was also covered with paperwork. Barb sat down and I sat at Lana’s desk. Our knees touched. I said, “So, how can I help you?”
“My husband is missing.”
Just like that. I said, “Whoa, this is way out of my league, this isn’t what I do.”
“Lana said you find things.”
“Yes, I find things. Places. Buildings, alleys, parks. Not people.”
“But you could.”
“No, I can’t.”
She nodded, looked like she was working up the nerve to say something and then she said, “Do you know that suicide rates for middle-aged men are way up?”
Which was not what I expected. “No, I didn’t know that.”
“Single, middle-aged, white men without a college degree have the highest suicide rate of any group.”
“I didn’t know that.” I was glad my father, who fit the rest of the description perfectly, was past middle age. Sixty may be the new thirty but seventy is definitely not middle-aged. I have a degree from Humber College so that kept me out of the group, too, which might have been the first time the degree ever did me any good.
She said, “Married, middle-aged, white males without a college degree are number two. It turns out baby boomers have always had high suicide rates and now that they — we — are getting into middle age, it’s going up even more.”
“For men?”
“Women have three times higher rates of suicide attempts,” she said, kind of matter-of-factly, “but men have a higher success rate.”
“So, we’re good at something.”
She ignored my nervous joke and said, “The researchers seem to think men feel there’s a stigma attached to a failed suicide. Also they use guns more and women use pills.”
It was quiet in Lana’s office, just the air conditioning humming though not doing much good — it was hot.
I said, “You know a lot about this.”
She said, “I looked it up after Kevin . . .” She shrugged a little and then said, “Men have all kinds of stigmas, that’s part of the problem. ‘Women seek help, men die,’ that’s what one of the articles said.”
“They don’t try to get any help?”
“Not much. Not enough. They get isolated. Like Kevin, they lose their jobs, they stop going out, stop seeing their friends, they get isolated, and then . . .”
“When did he . . . when was the last time you saw him?”
“April 9th. He was home when I left for work. It was just like a regular day. When I got home he wasn’t there. That wasn’t unusual.” She was starting to choke up. “I tried to call but his phone was turned off. I didn’t think he was missing.”
“How did you find out he was?”
“Three days later the police called. They found his truck up north, past Sudbury.” She looked up at me. “They asked me if I knew where he was.” She looked back at her hands wrapped around a coffee mug. “They asked why I hadn’t reported him missing.”
I was wondering that, too, but I said, “Six weeks ago.” That was when this movie had started shooting. We only had a few more days to go.
Barb said, “When I looked I realized he’d packed up his hunting gear and drove up north, past Sudbury.”
“That’s a long drive.”
“He used to do it every year, him and his friends, spend a week in the woods and come back with a deer. He hadn’t done it for years.”
“I don’t know much about hunting,” I said, “but April isn’t deer season, is it?”
She shook her head. “No. He left his truck beside the road, what they called Old Highway 806. The police think he walked into the woods and did it there.”
I didn’t want to say anything, but it did sound like the most likely thing, so I just nodded.
“Dense woods, you know.” She was looking right at me. “They say his body will probably turn up someday, some other hunters will find him.”
“That’s possible, isn’t it?”
“But,” she said, “I also read that a lot of middle-aged men just drop out, they just leave everything and start up a new life somewhere else.”
“Really?”
“Look on the internet, it happens all the time.”
“I believe you. But I don’t think I can help you.”
“Why not? Lana said you could. She said you do this all the time.”
“Again, places, not people.”
“Person,” she said. “I only need you to find one.”
She looked like she really needed it, too. I wanted to help her but I had to be honest. I said, “What I mean is, you’d need a hunter, a tracker, someone who could look in the woods.”
“If he did go into the woods.”
“Why do you say that? You think he didn’t?”
“Well, wouldn’t it be perfect? He takes his hunting stuff, his rifle, he leaves his car by the edge of the woods and he takes off.”
“Where does he go?”
“That’s what I want you to find out.”
“This sounds like it’s a little above my pay grade.”
She looked pissed off then and said, “I called a couple of private investigation companies, they really exist, you know.”
“I know.”
“They do background checks for big companies, they work for insurance companies looking for frauds.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s what I do in the winter when there’s not much filming here.”
“They charge hundreds and hundreds of dollars a day. And what are they going to do, look at credit card records? Is that what you do?”
I thought, yeah, pretty much, but I said, “They have a lot of resources.”
“I’m sure they do, but they don’t have fifty-percent-off sales.” She drank some coffee and said, “I get it that rich people have everything they want, but can’t the rest of us have something?”
Neither of us said anything for a minute, and