The Weight of Stones Read Online Free PDF

McKelvey saw himself connecting with that big Teutonic chin, a blow for glory, a blow for every goddamned neighbour within earshot of those barking sons of bitches. His gaggle of thick sausages was already curled into a tight fist, jaw clenched. He looked up at the morning beginning to spread across the skyline in a deep, dark orange of early winter, then looked back to the old man standing before him, and said, “You know, Carl, it’s a very thin line. A very thin line.”
    â€œWhat is?” Seeburger said.
    â€œThe precise location,” McKelvey said, “where your right to own dogs intersects with my right to a peaceful sleep.”
    McKelvey closed the door and put his seatbelt on. Seeburger stood there wagging a finger and said in a hoarse voice, “I’ll find out who called the city. That is my right as a tax-paying citizen!”
    â€œHave a nice day,” McKelvey said, smiling broadly and waving as he rolled away.

    He felt like a tourist at the office these days, somebody passing through. The police headquarters had at one time been located in a little shithole over on Jarvis Street, but now it was next to a Starbucks on College. There remained very little of the “old” building McKelvey knew from his first days on the force. Back then, the interview rooms were choked blue with smoke, and more than a few lockers in the change room held a pint of rum or brandy tucked beneath a pair of dirty gym shorts for an end-of-shift “happy hour”. And women were just beginning to make their bold entry into the strange universe that was “The Police”. Hard to believe. A lifetime ago and just the other day.
    Now the interview rooms were painted in soothing pastels based on psychological consultations, and McKelvey’s boss was a thirty-eight-year-old woman named Inspector Tina Aoki. A university graduate with degrees in criminology and law, Aoki was right now working on her own time towards some sort of Masters. While many of his silver-haired peers were genuinely frustrated, perhaps even angered, by the seeming tendency to put greater stock in framed degrees over hours spent in the blood and filth of the streets, McKelvey took it all in stride. He accepted the fact that everything in life, if given time, changes to the point where you eventually don’t recognize it. We look upon our lives in a sort of warped hindsight, he knew, everything taken in our own unique context, set against our own criteria. He knew any tradesman was declared obsolete if he didn’t keep up with the latest tools. The knowledge didn’t prevent a man from longing, from time to time, for the old days, the old ways.
    Detective-Constable Charlie McKelvey made his second coffee of the morning at the refreshment stand in the Hold-Up Squad. This place had been his home for five years now, having transferred from a half dozen years on the Fraud Squad and, before that, a lifetime on the beat across four divisions that spanned the full spectrum of a city that never stopped growing. It was only the nature of the crime that changed with each transfer. The people he dealt with were invariably the same; whether he was pulling a guy over for running a red light, or forcing a known drug dealer to empty the pockets of his cargo pants across the hood of a cruiser up at Jane and Finch, everybody thought he was born last Sunday. They believed with a fervent religious conviction that their lies and excuses were brilliantly unique. It got to the point, and pretty soon into the job, where McKelvey went into every situation—whether a break-in at a hardware store or a stabbing at an after-hours booze can—ready to offer absolutely zero benefit of the doubt. It got to the point sometimes, he knew, where he took this view back home with him. And to Gavin. A teenager with a goddamned cop for a dad. You never believed him. And so, through this lack of trust or faith, the boy necessarily wandered and