Free Your Friendly Neighborhood Criminal by Michael Van Rooy

trash were needles, condoms, loose cash, homemade crack pipes, a few sawed-down rifles, lots of no-name baggies, a bunch of stolen electronic equipment and CD’s; even a couple of stained mattresses and cheap lawn chairs.
    And people. Young people. Old people. Middle-aged people. Now broken and battered. Bruised from the water pressure. People scratched as they’d struggled against each other to find a door and escape. However, the main door had stayed locked. Pushed shut by the tons of water as the people were battered and smashed against it.
    No one had drowned or otherwise died, although many were hospitalized.
    “Probably not one of your better ideas.” Claire had her arms crossed.
    I looked her over and smiled while patting her hand. “I could have burned the place down. Or blown it up. Or, since the people inside are really the problem, I could have just gotten rid of them, I could have pumped carbon monoxide into a window. Or gone in with a shotgun and a bag of double-ought buck shells and cleared it out room by room.” She flinched and I turned back to my generic corn and rye flakes. “At least this way no one died.”
    On the radio it described the cops on the scene gathering money and guns and drugs and knives and clubs.
    Claire stared at me and I shrugged and turned off the radio. “The place was an eyesore and needed to be cleaned up. Water’s clean.”
    That drew a smile from her.

#11
    W ith the drug house out of the way I could focus on the smuggling. Which was what was paying the bills, so I spent the next three days with tools and an overactive imagination turning Marie’s house into a fortress. I did nothing too obvious because there were limits to what I could and couldn’t do. I couldn’t tear the place apart and rebuild it; Marie was renting and Claire couldn’t allow that. I also couldn’t be too obvious about what I was doing because a variety of innocent people had access to the place, people like meter readers. If I was too obvious, someone would call the cops because Winnipeg, like most communities, had some fairly strict (and unenforceable laws) about defending your home and the cops would come down like a ton of bricks.
    Marie might need a fortress to stash her cargo once her route was running and the route itself would be valuable and therefore worth protecting. Lots of people were always looking for a clean way across the border without having to deal with guards and other inconveniences. Some things were
worth more on one side of the border than the other and that simple truth was behind all smuggling everywhere. Guns were cheaper and more available in the States than in Canada, so those came north. Hydroponic grass in Canada was cheaper and better than in the States, so that went south. Cocaine was cheaper in the States, so that came north. Methamphetamine precursors were more available in Canada, so those went south. Booze was cheaper in the States, so that went north.
    There were lots of examples like that.
    The route was valuable and Marie might need protection. I thought about that as I worked on Marie’s house, installing motion alarms on the windows (battery powered in case the power was cut). I also put hanging bead curtains in all the doorways (to break up sight lines; no one, bad guy or good guy, moves into a place they can’t see) and plastic horizontal shutters on all the windows, backed up by heavy black canvas drapes. I replaced the doors throughout with solid core ones (harder to break down) and each of the three exterior doors (front yard, back yard, garage) had six big bolts installed (four on the right side of the door, one on the jamb side of the door, one coming down from the ceiling).
    When all that was done I went into the basement and knocked together some forms with two-by-fours and made shelves to cover the windows. Although they were lousy shelves they made excellent barricades and didn’t look too obvious. Battery-powered smoke alarms went onto the