I’m no narc

I'm Not a Narc

I pulled up, turned off the pickup, and stepped out.

The front door opened before I reached the porch.

Out charged a Rottweiler, barking, foam hanging from the sides of his mouth.

“Thor, sit!”

He stopped, stared at me, and let out a low growl.

Then Bruce Riegner stepped into the doorway. His hair looked like it hadn't seen a comb in days. A couple of days' growth covered his face, and one hand stayed noticeably behind his back.

I stopped.

Looked at Bruce.

“What, are you going to shoot me?”

“Should I?”

“Relax. What the fuck? I came here to talk.”

“Talk.”

“I'm told you think I'm a narc.”

“Are you?”

“Come on, Bruce. It's Johno. Your head's all fucked up. Let's sit down and talk.”

After a long pause, he nodded.

“Okay. Come inside.”

He closed the door behind us.

Bruce Riegner was—and is—a career criminal. Add to that a serious drug addiction that fed his paranoia.

I'd been working in Montreal when I got the call from Frankie. She told me she'd left Bruce. He was mentally abusive, and the opioid addiction had turned him paranoid. Somehow, he'd gotten it into his head that I was a narc.

She told me that, since I'd come around about a year earlier, cars had been parked across the road. One had even driven into the yard and sat there, looking around.

None of it had started until I tracked Bruce down and came for a visit.

Bruce sat down and used the pistol to direct me to the chair across from him.

I sat.

The dog sat at Bruce's side.

Bruce placed the pistol on the table, next to the pill bottles and drug paraphernalia.

I looked at that gun and thought of Spud.

I'd known him since Vancouver—a wiry little guy, always grinning, always moving, the kind who made a room lighter just by walking into it.

We used to smoke joints sitting on a plank over the bilge of a warship, laughing at nothing.

He introduced me to Bruce.

That introduction never stopped costing me.

Years later, out west, Bruce talked Spud into a score. Brinks was on strike, and Bruce had found a hole in how the replacement company moved bank money.

An easy stretch, he said.

One good night's work.

Spud said yes.

He always said yes to Bruce.

That was the trouble with him. He trusted people who didn't deserve it, and Bruce was the worst kind of person to trust because he was good at being trusted.

The night before the job, Spud was preparing one of the revolvers when it jammed.

Bruce told it different ways to different people, but the story that stuck was this: he was showing Spud how to clear it, tapping the gun against the tabletop.

It went off in his hands.

Caught Spud in the face.

Bruce never did the job.

He served seven years for manslaughter and came out talking about it like something that had simply happened to him—bad luck, bad timing, nobody's fault.

I never fully believed that story.

There was too much Bruce in the way he told it, too much convenience in exactly how it went down.

But I never said that out loud.

Not to him.

Not to anyone.

What good would it have done?

Spud was gone either way.

I never forgot that I was sitting across from a man who had been convicted of killing a close friend of mine.

No matter what we talked about that night, that never left my mind.

I looked around the room.

It smelled like weed and gun oil.

His dog was sitting beside him.

His pistol was on the table, within reach.

I kept my eyes on Bruce and my mouth shut about all of it.

He lit a smoke and offered me one.

I declined.

“Bruce, you can't honestly believe I'm a narc.”

“I know you and I haven't known each other for long—five, six years—but Spud, Young Brothers, Barney… you know I've known these guys all my life. You know how I met Spud when I was posted out west. You know I worked as a salesman in Sarnia. The partying. The drugs. How the fuck is it even possible I'm a narc?”

I shook my head.

“It's fucking ridiculous. You need to get a grip on fucking reality. Frankie left you. You're all jacked up on these fucking pills, and they've polluted your brain.”

He stared at me.

For a second, I thought he was fighting tears.

Then he stood, turned toward the kitchen, and asked me if I wanted a drink.

“Yeah, sure. Got any ice?”

“Yeah, I got some ice.”

He poured us each a drink.

“You want to smoke a bowl?”

“No thanks. I've got to drive home.”

I took a drink and looked at him.

“Bruce, we cool or what?”

“Yeah, we're cool, Johno.”

We tapped our glasses together and drank.

I could have left.

Part of me wanted to.

But something told me not to.

Maybe leaving right then would have put that suspicion back in his head. Maybe, after everything we'd just talked about, I didn't want to leave him sitting there alone with his own thoughts.

I looked at my glass.

“Fuck it. Let's smoke a joint. You got an extra bed around here?”

“I do.”

“Then let's get fucked up.”

So I stayed.

We drank and smoked a few joints.

We shared stories about the past.

For a while, the paranoia disappeared.

It was just Bruce and Johno, sitting around like old friends.

Bruce had another bottle of Southern Comfort in the freezer.

We put most of that away too.

Around eleven-thirty, Bruce was falling asleep in his chair.

I got up, found the extra bed, and went to sleep.

In the morning, Bruce was in his bedroom.

I quietly closed the bedroom door behind me.

I stood there for a second with my hand on the knob.

Then I walked to the pickup, started it, and drove away.

I didn't know it then, but I had closed the door on Bruce Riegner for the last time.

That was ten years ago.