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If you had stayed, I could have told you about W.

W. was a big, hulking First Nations guy who straddled this cement rail of the Burrard Bridge on a cold December day, just after Christmas. I saw one of his legs from below and when I reached him on the bridge deck he was bloody and sobbing. The bike gang he belonged to had ordered him to kill his best friend. As cars flowed past, he was preparing to jump off the bridge and kill himself instead.

“If people knew what was happening in the shadows of this city,” he told me later in a Mr. Sub over hot coffee and cigarettes, “They would be terrified.”

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