Free Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor

wrong with amanoeuvre so simple, he then deposited a personal cheque into his Monkey’s Paw account to cover outstanding obligations.
    He was still sweating, but the cheques would clear.
    Nobody was the wiser until his maxed out TD Visa statement arrived at the end of the month. Then Quan phoned Dante, Dante phoned Jeremy, and Jeremy had to sort everything out again with another deposit that nobody could have anticipated. He had a bit of cash on hand by then, but he also had several new credit cards which he had applied for in the meantime.
    “Do we need to talk about anything?” Dante said. But he was busy, Jeremy knew, and happy not to.
    And with that, The Monkey’s Paw kite was aloft and pulling hard, a ring of minimum payments chasing minimum payments. Jeremy paid the interest on the line of credit religiously, before any other obligation (and Dante was still his friend), so Quan continued to provide glowing credit references. Two credit cards became four, and those cards flushed out solicitations from still other credit cards until there was a cast of six, then nine unwitting lenders.
    Things finally stabilized after the Dickie review. The Monkey’s Paw began to break even about two days in three, a significant improvement and not too soon. By that time Jeremy had a petrified $200,000 line of credit, four Visas, three MasterCards and a Diners Club. He had other, unused cards in his wallet, which he had no clear idea he would ever need: Canadian Tire, Household Finance Corporation, cards that were sent to him pre-approved at unlikely levels. It occurred to him these might be needed in a crisis to make minimum payments on the ones that had come before. But as long as nobody cancelled a card on him or demanded immediate payment in full, Jeremy desperately calculated that he could keep this whole thing flying until The Monkey’s Paw actually became profitable. Then he would slowly reel the kite back to earth.
    What he needed was a break, some kind of special exposure to get the mainstream foodies into Crosstown.
    His big chance in this regard might have been Brollywood, Vancouver’s rainier version of the L.A. television and movie scene (and so christened by the flattered local press corps). The Monkey’s Paw was no Le Cirque but, since the Dickie review, recognizable faces had been appearing occasionally from the cast and production staff of a television show shot largely in the Crosstown neighbourhood.
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was a show about all things paranormal, paranoid, concerning aliens, conspiracies or the sudden appearance of large amounts of ectoplasm. All this activity supposedly taking place in the new-millennial glow of an American city for which Vancouver was a cost-effective stand-in.
    Jeremy had never watched the show, but that was hardly the point.
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was an international hit; it spawned rip-off shows, many of which were also filmed in Vancouver. It was all he could do to resist phoning the newspapers when one of the stars appeared at dinner and ordered something not on the chalkboard. One picture on page three, he thought. Michael Duke in The Monkey’s Paw Bistro, Chef Jeremy serving. One Malcolm Perry thumbnail snap and they’d be made.
    “Greetings friends.” Jeremy had seen Michael Duke’s car pull up and was ready for them. Duke was suited in brown chalk stripe, fedora pulled low, adhering to celebrity convention by being smaller than you’d expect. He wore unusually pale blue contact lenses.
    “Hey there,” Duke said, seeing Jeremy and extending a limp hand. As always, he adopted a sleepy expression and tone, which one assumed Duke felt was removed and sensual, but which veered dangerously near to making him sound like he’d sustained a head injury at some point.
    Michael Duke was with Luke Lucas, no relation to George. Lucas was the producer of
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, a normaloff-camera-sized man, but clearly Brollywood. You could tell from the black suiting with sterling silver bits. He was