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Another summer disappointment

The setting was familiar, the voice was familiar.
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The setting was familiar, the voice was familiar. But the combination of the two, juxtaposed in time and space not meant to be mixed, was distinctly unfamiliar other than in the way bacon, lettuce and tomato are familiar… but shouldn’t be blended together into a soup instead of a sandwich.

It was a soul-sapping grey day in a summer of identical days. What miserly heat the sun provided — awol from these parts long enough that residents who haven’t already fled south have tacked up Wanted posters around town — came in all too brief flashes as it peakabooed out from behind thunderheads, leaving the few townsfolk left behind to either scurry like roaches in an unexpectedly lighted kitchen, so unprepared for the dual assaults of heat and light, or fall to their knees, arms raised up as though preparing for the long-awaited rapture.

Just another disappointing B.C. summer.

“Nice morning… for November,” I heard from behind.

The sarcasm, the dark humour inherent in the statement, coming as it did at the end of August, should have been sufficient to identify the speaker who had tiptoed up behind me. But then, everyone I encountered had, by now, resigned themselves to the Summer That Never Was. The path to sanity was strewn with morbid jokes about the weather.

The voice was unmistakable though. It was a voice that could make “Have a nice day, eh?” sound threatening, as though failing to have a nice day could very well be taken as a personal insult to the speaker, an insult resulting in retribution if not the complete annihilation of you, your family and everyone who ever knew you. It was a voice that sounded as though it gargled whisky and ground glass in the morning and lived on whatever nutrition it could suck out of unfiltered cigarettes the rest of the day. It was a voice that was all too familiar, much as a nasty scratch in the back of my own throat foreshadowed a cold to come.

“JJ… tell me it ain’t true,” I said without turning around, hoping if I didn’t see it, it wouldn’t be so.

“Too true, oh my brother. Too true.”

“I’d say you were the last person I expected to run into in beautiful downtown 100 Mile House but somehow running into you is always an unexpected…”

“Pleasure?”

“Experience.”

“But a pleasurable experience, no?”

“Well, sure. A pleasant enough experience. How come it sounds threatening when you say it, JJ?”

“We all have our crosses to bear, oh my brother.”

JJ Geddyup was one of my crosses. I bore him as well as possible. We’d met at Dusty’s shortly after I moved to Whistler and, like many après encounters, he seemed bizarrely interesting. Whistler’s self-proclaimed only private eye, JJ was as close to derelict as a workingman could be. He claimed to be a fellow expat American, a former black ops CIA agent in southeast Asia during the Vietnam quagmire, and a man without a country, living in Canada under curious circumstances and unable, or unwilling, to venture south of the border for reasons only hinted at. I’d come to believe every word of it.

Eking out dirt for a living, he was however useful to a guy with a page to fill in the local paper each week and not particularly fussy about how he filled it.

But there was no doubt JJ had gotten darker and somehow more threatening as the years progressed. And now, looking uncharacteristically businesslike, he oozed foreboding.

“What are you doing up here?” I asked.

“Delivering bad news.”

“Well, if ever there was a job for which you were particularly suited…” I let the sentence tail off in silence.

“Yeah, I’m pretty good at that,” he shrugged.

“For whom are you playing the heavy?”

“VANOC,” he answered.

“I thought you were joking about working for VANOC. Are you really serious?”

“Deadly serious, oh my brother.”

“I wish you’d drop the ‘oh my brother’ shtick, JJ. It’s creepy. Reminds me of Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Unless I’m the one to whom you’re delivering bad news…. It’s not me, is it JJ? I haven’t pissed ’em off enough to have ’em sic you on me, have I?”

“No. It’s not you. Not yet anyway.”

“Good joke, JJ. Good joke,” he wasn’t smiling.

“So who gets the bad news?”

“Some log guy. Can’t remember his name without looking. Was involved with the Canada House gig in Torino and now he’s building something for 2010.”

“Oh yeah. I remember that outfit. What’s the bad news?”

“Whatever he’s building, it needs to be bigger.”

“Of course it does. After all, this is the green, small-scale Olympics. And hey, what’s more flexible than a log structure. Add a bit here, add a bit there. Just butt up the logs and squirt in a little construction adhesive.”

“Not my problem, dude. I’m just the messenger boy.”

“And we wonder why costs keep rising like a geezer with a pneumatic blonde and a handful of Viagra. I’m certain he’ll be overjoyed to alter the plans. Shouldn’t cost more than double the original estimate.”

“Not my problem either. Not my employer’s either. They’re not offering to pony up more money. Haven’t you heard? We’re in post-contingency fund mode.”

“So if he wants to play the game he has to pay the price?”

“Something like that.”

“There’s something that’s just not jiving here, JJ. Normally, delivering news like that would, well, if not make you happy, at least not put you in the funk you seem to be in. What gives?”

“I think the hammer’s about to fall on me. Hard.”

“I thought having anything at all to do with the Olympics offered unlimited deniability — ‘Hey, they were only initial budgets.’ — if not blanket immunity from responsibility. Greater glory in the name of sport and all that.”

“It’s not about the Olympics. It’s about that schmozzle in Quebec with the Sûreté and the Montebello summit. You know, the cops posing as protesters thing.”

“What’s that got to do with you? On second thought, do I want to know?”

“Where do you think they got the idea to egg on the protesters by picking up rocks?”

“I don’t know. I just thought dirty tricks like that were in the basic cop handbook. The chapter on underhanded entrapment. Sandwiched between the primer on planting evidence and the one on lying to investigators from your own department. Besides, I thought you were already employed doing Olympic dirty work.”

“So a guy can moonlight, can’t he? After all, a couple of more years of this and it’s EI time again.”

“But with a sweet severance package, I hear.”

“I’m worth every penny of it.”

“I’m sure you are. I’m sure everything Olympic is.”