The Judas Plot - Part Seven

What's left when everything is gone?

Image by Midjourney. Text and design by the author.

We’ve almost reached the end of the line. Looking for the rest of the story? You can start reading here: Somewhere In Forge City.

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Liberty General Hospital. 18 October 1932.

“Did you get enough supper, Monsieur Burback?”

I turned my head on the pillow. The lovely Nurse Belanger was at my bedside, hands clasped against her starched white skirt. She was pretty, mid-twenties, with chestnut hair styled in finger waves under a softly folded white cap from one of the French Canadian nursing schools, distinct from the crisply angled caps the English nurses wore. She was distant and professional, but I was working on that.

I patted my belly with my free hand. “Stuffed. My compliments to the chef. And my lovely waitress.”

Madeleine stifled a smile.

“I’m glad,” she said.

I tugged sharply at the handcuffs that tethered my left wrist to the iron bed frame.

“Any way I could eat with both hands at breakfast tomorrow, Madeleine?”

Her dark brows came together and she shook her head.

“Hospital policy for prisoners, I’m afraid,” she said. “And for the fifth time, Monsieur Burback, my name is Nurse.”

Ouch.

Two days ago, fever had gotten the better of me in the CN railway police office and I passed out. The ambulance ride over to Liberty General was foggy, but I clearly remembered being admitted and Garrett demanding my clothes as they undressed me.

“Evidence,” was all he said.

The cubicle enclosure had been his idea, too. He demanded a private room with a guard, but none of either could be spared, so he ordered curtain dividers instead to keep me isolated from the other patients in the ward and a constable posted at the door. Hospital staff complied without much protest.

Nurse Madeleine Belanger was the one bright light in the whole ordeal. She wheeled the bed table aside and leaned over me to adjust my pillows. In a ward that smelled permanently of carbolic soap, Madeleine smelled of clean spring air. She retrieved my thermometer from the small bedside table, wiped it with an alcohol swab, and shook it down.

“Ouvrez la bouche,” she said.

I obeyed and she slid it under my tongue, checked the watch on her delicate wrist, then left to tend the other patients in the ward.

I lay there behind the white curtains and listened as she did her work. It was clear from the banter from the other patients that I wasn’t the only man in the ward with a thing for Madeleine. Five minutes later, the curtain jerked aside and she returned. She lifted my wrist to time my pulse.

“Bien,” she said. “Steady pulse. No fever. You’re getting stronger, Monsieur Burback.”

She removed the thermometer, read the temperature and wrote it down on my chart.

“I feel great,” I said. “Good as new. What do you say we make tracks and head down to Tamblyn’s for a soda?”

She replaced the chart in the wire holder. The corner of her red lips lifted ever so gently before she clamped it down, hard.

“Big time thief like you and the only good time you can show a girl is a soda at Tamblyn’s?” She tsk-tsked, touched my forehead. “Maybe your fever has returned?”

I half shrugged.

“You haven’t caught me at my best, Madeleine.”

“No matter. If the inspector has his way, we won’t have time to enjoy soda at Tamblyn’s. He wants you in a cell in Russell Street headquarters. After that…well, it will be a long time before you see another Tamblyn’s.”

I’ll give her this: Madeleine knew how to shut a guy down.

“Don’t be so sure,” I said. “Garrett doesn’t have anything on me. Three times held. Three times released.”

“On technicalities. It doesn’t make you innocent. Don’t look surprised. I read the papers. I read English very well.”

I was beginning to really like this girl. Too bad I was going to have to break her heart.

“Monsieur Burback, may I ask you a question?” she said.

This was new. “You can ask me anything, dear.”

She pulled a chair over and sat down next to the bed.

“Why this?” she asked.

“What?”

“This? You’re a smart man, and your family is so rich. You could be anything, but you chose…this.”

Her directness was unexpected.

“You were almost septic,” she said, “from a wound received by a cop. You could have died. Because you wanted some, some stupid jewels? You could have been a prince of Forge City, but instead you’re a failed thief making passes at a simple nurse from Trois-Rivières. Why?”

Her wide brown eyes held genuine concern for me, and I was unprepared for it.

“I worked in Farfield when I first came to Forge, Monsieur Burback,” she said. Her face clouded. Her shoulders trembled, trying to shake off a horrible memory. “They break men there, much harder men than you. Alors, I ask you again, knowing Farfield was always your destination…why?”

I opened my mouth to respond, scrounging around in my brain for the words she wanted to hear, but I’d be tugging on threads I didn’t want to pull with her.

“So that’s a no to Tamblyn’s?” I asked, feigning disappointment.

“Mon Dieu!”

She shot to her feet, replaced the chair next to the bedside table, removed the meal tray and left.

“Ma belle Madeleine,” I muttered. “I’m going to miss our talks.”

The clock on the far wall ticked off the endless seconds. I passed the time by listening to the radio from the nurse’s station down the hall filter through the open doors and rehearsing the escape I’d been planning for two days.

Lights out came and went with Madeleine’s night round. She met my charm with her usual bemused reserve, and for a single heart-stopping moment she leaned over me again to adjust my pillows.

“Good night, Monsieur Burback.”

I reached up with my free right hand, pulled her down by the back of her neck, and kissed her on the lips. They were soft and warm and as her body went rigid, I kissed her more deeply, my fingertips caressing the ridge of her ear and her perfect cheekbone. Madeleine shot upright, eyes ablaze, and slapped me hard across the face.

“Maudit cochon!”

Her face and neck flushed the deep red of a woman embarrassed and enraged, and the heat from her slap prickled my cheek.

“You…!”

Madeleine clamped her mouth shut, blinked, and swiped impatiently at her eyes. She turned her back on me, wiped her face again and smoothed her uniform, then quickly restored the messy wave over her ear. She faced me again, barely composed, her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides. She spoke professionally, but her voice trembled with outrage.

“You are a foolish, shameless man, Monsieur Burback. I am your nurse and I will do my job as far as it goes, but make no mistake, I will be happy when Inspector Garrett arrives to take you off my hands.”

She turned on her heel and stormed out of my cubicle.

“Good night, Madeleine,” I said.

From across the room, a chorus of snickers and chortles erupted.

“Way to take one for the team, pal!” one of them called over.

“Shut up,” I said. I lifted my right hand, uncurled my fingers, and gazed at the black bobby pin that had held her wave in place, and cost a chunk of my pride to get. I closed my hand and slipped it under my pillow.

After what felt like an hour, snores rose from the other beds. It was time.

I reached under my pillow for the bobby pin. I slid it out and pried open into an L with my free hand and my teeth then I leaned over and worked the makeshift pick into the key way. The pin was the wrong tool, too thin to properly apply tension, so it was slow going. I had to pause a few times to let my stomach uncramp, but on the third attempt the tension on the cuff released with a gentle click.

I threw off the covers, swung my legs over the edge of the bed, and sat quietly for a moment waiting for dizziness to pass, but none came. I was tired and my jaw hurt, but I was strong enough to move under my own steam. But how fast, and how long?

I took stock. Garrett almost certainly had my money locked in a safe at the back of the Property Room in Russell Street headquarters. Might as well be on the moon. He had my clothes, too. I cursed to myself. A man on the lam wasn’t going to get far in the city wearing a Liberty City General Hospital nightshirt. I was unfamiliar with the hospital’s internal organization, but that didn’t matter.

“Just get the hell out, Walter,” I muttered. My pride was all I had left from this job.

Breaking out felt a lot like breaking in. Apprehension crackled through me. It was good. It kept a thief alert, but I couldn’t let it grow into fear. Fear shut things down and you made dumb mistakes. I closed my eyes, took a few deep breaths, then slipped out of my little enclosure.

I stole a pair of slippers from the patient sleeping opposite my cubicle, and padded barefoot to the double doors. The only sound in the ward was the ticking of the clock and the snoring of the other patients. I pulled the slippers on then risked a glance through the doors’ square windows but couldn’t place the constable.

I pushed the right-hand door open a crack. A third of the lights were on in the corridor to the left, except at the Nurses’ Station. It was lit up bright as day. Madeleine sat behind the high curved desk with her head down, charting. A young constable leaned on the desk chatting her up with no success. The other end of the wing receded into dim shadow with more of the same straight ahead.

Madeleine got up from the desk and I held my breath. I counted to three, but she never appeared then the constable followed her out of sight.

“Time to go,” I muttered.

I pushed the door open and crossed the hallway into the corridor ahead. I passed utility rooms, darkened labs, and empty break rooms. There was a Men’s Restroom sign on the left near the end of the hallway, and I pushed through the door into the dark.

On my first day, during my ten minutes of exercise, Madeleine had walked me down to the restroom under the watchful eye of the constable. A line of frosted windows ran along the wall over the toilet stalls. I found one in the dark and stood on the toilet seat and worked the window crank. It swung open from the bottom and stopped, leaving an opening about twelve inches wide.

Cold October night air spilled through the open window. I pushed out the screen and heard it clatter on the roof below. I listened. Seconds passed without a sound then I stepped on the flush valve and pulled myself up to the windowsill, pushing one arm and shoulder through, then my head and other shoulder. I held onto the exterior brick sill and wormed my hips through until they were free then lowered myself to the roof. Loose gravel shifted underfoot and I squatted low to avoid being seen while I caught my breath and got my bearings.

The night was cloudy and the wind carried the sound of traffic and smoke from the smelters in Steel Town and The Foundry to the west and southwest. I had to get off this roof and into some warm clothes before Madeleine made her next set of rounds.

Ahead of me in the dark loomed the silhouette of the heating and ventilation equipment. A gas line, pale in the weak moonlight, dropped back from the heating equipment along the roof to the hospital’s wall and then disappeared over the side. A way down. I followed it, hugging the wall.

I paused at the edge of the roof and peered over, shivering as the wind caught my night shirt and clawed at my back with its icy fingers. The back of the hospital campus sloped away from the buildings down to a small park filled with ornamental trees, a couple small pavilions clustered around a large pond, and a marble statue of Saint Brigid. Beyond the trees, I could see into a row of backyards the size of postage stamps. Lights were on and blinds were drawn. A few wives had forgotten to pull in their laundry. Shirts and pants fluttered like flags in the stiff wind.

The gas pipe dropped straight down the side of the building, attached every few feet by braces screwed into the wall. Here, the ground was twenty-five, almost thirty feet below me. If I had my usual kit, gloves, rubber-soled shoes, rope, the height wouldn’t have been an issue because I was used to roaming the city’s rooftops and rappelling down walls, but I was completely unprepared and I didn’t want to end up a dead man in a night shirt and slippers on the front page of the Herald Gazette.

I tested the pipe, shoving my whole weight against it. It was solid, enough. But did I have the strength to support my weight for the climb down? That pipe was freezing and I wasn’t operating at one hundred percent. Probably not even sixty percent.

I hooked my hands behind the pipe, swung one leg over the ledge, and then the other. I balanced myself on the balls of my feet straddling the pipe, pushing against the wall to put tension on my hands.

Suspended almost thirty feet above the ground, the wind tore at my hospital night shirt, and the pipe froze my hands. I put all my weight on my left leg and shifted my weight to step down with my right. Both feet skidded out from under me and I slid down the pipe until the first wall bracket stopped my descent.

“Jesus Christ!” I gasped, clinging to the pipe with my whole body. No way I could climb back up to the ledge. “It’s downhill all the way, Walt.”

The cold October night had turned the slippers’ leather soles hard and slick. Useless. I kicked one off, braced my bare foot against the rough brick and eased my weight onto it. Better, but not by much. Keeping three points of contact, I kicked off the other slipper and planted my foot then slowly leaned back.

Legs and shoulders burning, I crab crawled down the wall. I made it to another brace and tried to perch but the cold metal dug into the soles of my bare feet. My feet slipped and gravity tore the pipe from my hands.

Seconds later, the ground slammed into my back with the force of a truck. Air rushed out of me and I blacked out.

I came to on my side trying to suck in a breath, but my lungs didn’t work and I blacked out again.

My eyes opened on a patch of clear night sky. Stars twinkled and went out as the wind smeared a cloud across the open space. I wriggled my toes, turned my ankles, shifted my legs and arms. No permanent damage, which meant I was now fresh out of miracles.

Madeleine drifted across my mind, like the clouds. Had she started her rounds again? All she’d find in the bed assigned to me would be her disfigured bobby pin amid the rumpled sheets. Hospital security wouldn’t be far behind. Maybe they had already locked down the hospital and were going room to room, flicking on lights, ignoring the protests of patients.

Every second I lay in that cold grass cost me. The ground was sucking heat from my body, stiffening my muscles. There wasn’t much gas left in the tank, but I had to get moving. My shoulders and thighs felt like they were filled with burning static. Rolling onto my side felt like a monumental effort and I rose unsteadily to my feet and shuffled barefoot across the park.

At the fenceline, I found the house that had left out its laundry and felt along the boards until a metal latch rattled on the other side. I reached over and found the latch. There was no lock. The gate swung inward and I slipped inside, crouched down next to a lilac bush and closed the gate, then crept along the side of a wooden shed and paused at the front.

In the narrow driveway was a Model A. A small covered porch protected the house’s back door. The windows glowed and the blinds were still down. The grass was cold under my feet and I couldn’t stop shivering as I crossed to the porch where the clothes line was attached to a wooden post that supported porch roof.

A pair of mud-crusted leather construction boots sat on a mat beside the door. I sat on the step and measured them up against the soles of my feet. Close enough. I set them aside and scanned the clothesline. Floral dresses, slips, a couple pairs of bib overalls and a few men’s undershirts and button-up shirts flapped on the line.

I glanced at the house. Nothing about it stood out from its neighbours. I crept up to the rear window beside the porch and peered through the inch-tall slit into a dining room scene.

In the center of the table was a plain glass vase with a homemade arrangement. At the end of the table sat a teenaged boy with his schoolbooks open, pencil in hand, papers in front of him. A middle-aged woman in a red floral dress swept into view and set a cup of something hot beside him and stroked his light brown hair. A middle-aged man, dark and broad shouldered in a plain cotton shirt, removed his reading glasses and leaned back from the newspaper laid out before him. He stopped his wife with an arm around her waist and said something that I couldn’t quite make out. She laughed, full-throated and joyful, and rewarded him with a kiss.

Behind them on the wall hung a colour lithograph of King George V in his coronation robes. Below, next to a handsome walnut sideboard, was a big Philco floor model radio. On the sideboard was a gleaming tea pot, a coffee urn, and a creamer and sugar bowl sat on a tray. Almost certainly a wedding gift. Silver plate, but ornate and worth something to the wife. Next to that were a few books, and some framed family photos.

I smiled to myself. A working man in 1932 who still had his job and the love of his wife and family. There wasn’t a God damned thing in that man’s honest life that I could steal from him.

I retreated to the porch, reeled in the clothes and folded what I didn’t need into the wicker basket by the porch rail and kept an undershirt, the button-up shirt, some underwear, socks and the patched and mended bib overalls. The boots were a size and a half too big, and I felt like a boy trying on his father’s clothes. No damned coat, though. It would have to do. I left the yard, still shivering, and made my way down the narrow driveway to the street.

Ten minutes later I found a street car, its windows aglow, and hopped on. I kept my face turned away from the driver, a man in a black uniform with a peaked cap.

“Five cents,” he said. He did a double-take. “Where’s your coat, son?”

“I just got mugged. They took my wallet, my coat. Everything.”

He shook his head in anger and sympathy.

“This God damned town. Where’s a cop when you need one, right?” He shook his head. “Okay. Sit down. This one’s on the house.”

“Thank you.”

I sat down on a seat in the middle of the car, directly under the heater vent, and drank in the warm air. The old lady next to me leaned over.

“I heard what you said to the driver. It’s just terrible what people get away with.”

“Yeah.”

On her lap was my father’s broadsheet, the Herald Gazette. MANHUNT CONTINUES FOR DUNBAR CO-CONSPIRATOR. She noted my gaze and tapped the paper.

“They caught that young Burback man who stole the Dunbar jewels,” she said. She leaned close. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Sure.”

She glanced around the streetcar, scoping for eavesdroppers, but everyone was lost in their own thoughts.

“I was secretly rooting for him,” she whispered. “Those Founders, sitting up in the hills on their piles of money while the rest of us down here have the scraps. So what if the Dunbars have lost that sapphire. They have more than enough. They could buy another one next week with the interest on a fraction of their fortune.” She folded her thin arms across her chest and nodded to herself. “Serves them right.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Serves them right.”

I rode the No. 7 along Brant and got off at Selkirk and took the No. 3 to Talbot where I got off and continued on foot toward Carol Street. I circled the block until I came back to the other end of the service lane and followed it to the back of the shop. The truck was gone, but that was to be expected, but had Garrett done his due diligence and canvassed the area? Had he investigated the ownership my old shoe shop and found it bogus?

The undisturbed grime and dust around the concrete steps was a promising sign. I swiped the tail of my shirt around the handle. No lingering fingerprint dust. I folded the tail and slid it up and down the seam between the door and the frame. Also clean. I glanced at the apartments above the shops on the cross street that overlooked the service lane. Everybody was sleeping. Or so it was meant to appear. I bit my lip.

I took the chance and reached up to the black metal shade above the door and felt around until my fingers found it. The spare key was painted black on one side to camouflage it against the shade. I pulled the magnet off and dropped it in my pocket then unlocked the door, slipped inside, and listened. Silence.

I reached right and flicked on the light. The barren stock room was exactly as I’d left it and I did a quick inspection of the shop. Empty.

“You disappoint me, Garrett,” I said.

I dug out a spare change of clothes from an old armoire in the corner, stripped, and changed, then heated up a can of stew in the kitchenette and ate. It wasn’t much but it was warm and I started feeling human again.

As I ate, I thought. The five grand was gone. For good this time. What was left? Jimmy had broken the faith that had held our partnership together. Settling that account was the mission now.

I finished the stew, rinsed the pot, the bowl, and the spoon and left them on the small metal rack by the sink and headed to the makeshift bedroom. I picked the army blanket off the floor, shook it out, and draped it across the cot then lay down in my clothes.

I picked up my battered copy of The Boy’s King Arthur from the rickety nightstand and thought about Madeleine and the infamy of being Forge City’s most wanted man. I flipped through the dog-eared pages by the light of a bedside lamp until I landed on a tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney. He might have approved of the escape, but he would point out it had been a trap of my own making. And he’d be right.

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Kevin Coleman writes crime fiction from the cold edges of Canada. Some of his best wisdom has come from old ladies riding streetcars.

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© 2026 Kevin M. Coleman

Disclaimer
This article is an original work by Kevin M. Coleman. All rights are reserved. No part of this article may be copied, stored, or reproduced in any form — including but not limited to use in training artificial intelligence or machine learning systems — without the author’s express written permission.