I found forty grand missing in the city budget and all I got was this damp pamphlet.
The air conditioner in the basement of the Corydon Community Center sounded like a dying lawnmower. It was July in Winnipeg. The kind of wet, heavy heat that made your clothes stick to your skin the second you stepped outside. The basement was supposed to be a refuge from the humidity, but the AC unit was just pushing the hot air around, mixing it with the smell of old floor wax and cheap urn coffee.
I sat in a folding chair in the third row. The plastic was digging into my shoulder blades. There were maybe eight other people in the room, mostly local freelancers and a couple of bored interns from the free weekly papers. None of us wanted to be here. We were here because City Councillor Van Klint had promised a major announcement regarding the city's new summer tourism push.
At the front of the room, a crooked vinyl banner hung from a metal stand. It read: WINNIPEG. THE MIDDLE CHILD OF CANADA.
It was a terrible slogan. It was supposed to be self-deprecating and charming, but it just felt sad.
Van Klint stood behind a folding table. He was a man who always looked like he had just run up a flight of stairs. He was wearing a light gray suit that showed massive sweat stains under the arms. He tapped the microphone. It let out a high-pitched squeal that made the intern in front of me flinch.
"Testing," Van Klint said. "Is this on. Great. Thank you all for coming out in this heat. We are very excited to launch the Middle Child initiative. We believe it captures our civic spirit."
I stopped listening. I picked up the press kit they had left on the chairs. It was a glossy folder. Inside were a few generic photos of the Forks, a timeline of summer festivals, and a breakdown of the campaign budget. I flipped to the budget page. My eyes felt heavy. I had slept for maybe three hours last night. My apartment faced west and caught all the afternoon sun, turning my bedroom into a slow cooker.
I skimmed the numbers. Billboard space. Radio spots. Graphic design fees.
Then I saw it.
At the bottom of the page, under a section labeled 'Infrastructure Redirect', there was a line item that made me stop breathing for a second.
Digital Engagement Dynamics: $40,000.00
I blinked. I rubbed my eyes. The print was small, but it was there. Forty thousand dollars. I knew for a fact that the city had frozen the summer road repair budget for my district. My street, Maryland, looked like the surface of the moon. I had blown a tire on a crater just last week. The city claimed they had zero funds for asphalt allocation. But here was forty grand, skimmed from the infrastructure reserve, handed over to something called Digital Engagement Dynamics.
Van Klint was still talking. "We want people to know that Winnipeg is more than just mosquitoes and construction. We have culture. We have digital reach."
I raised my hand. I didn't wait for him to call on me. "Councillor."
Van Klint stopped. He looked at me. His left eye twitched. "Yes. Darren. Good to see you."
"What is Digital Engagement Dynamics," I asked. My voice sounded flat in the dead acoustics of the basement.
"It is a modern marketing approach," Van Klint said. He reached for a plastic water bottle on the table. His hand was shaking slightly. "We have to meet the youth where they are. We have to be online."
"It says here you took forty grand from the pothole repair fund to pay for it."
The room went quiet. The dying AC unit rattled loudly. The intern in front of me turned around and looked at me.
"It is an investment," Van Klint said. He unscrewed the cap of the water bottle. He took a sip. Water dripped down his chin. "Infrastructure is important. But so is our civic brand. We hired an independent contractor to boost our social media metrics. It is highly technical work."
"Who is the contractor," I asked.
"A local firm," Van Klint said quickly. "Very innovative. Now, if we look at the next slide—"
"What is the name of the firm," I pushed.
Van Klint set the water bottle down. He looked at the back of the room. He looked at the door. He looked at the tray of stale Nanaimo bars sitting on the side table. He walked over to the tray. He picked up a Nanaimo bar. He took a bite. The yellow custard filling squished out the sides.
"The firm is confidential," he said, chewing aggressively. "Proprietary methods."
I stared at him. He swallowed hard. He looked terrified. It was not the look of a man who had masterminded a massive corruption scheme. It was the look of a man who had done something incredibly stupid and was just realizing the walls were made of glass.
I looked back down at the press kit. I pulled out my phone. I searched for 'Digital Engagement Dynamics Winnipeg'. Nothing came up. Zero results. No website. No business registry.
I looked back at Van Klint. He was eating a second Nanaimo bar. He was sweating profusely.
I needed to know where that forty grand went.
My apartment smelled like hot dust and cat food. The fan in the window was pushing hot air from the street directly into my face. I sat at my desk. The laminate was peeling at the edges. I had my laptop open. I had spent the last four hours trying to track down the missing forty thousand dollars.
I had called the city clerk. I had called the zoning office. I had called a guy I knew in accounting who owed me a favor. Nothing. The money had been authorized by Van Klint's office and wired to an empty numbered account.
I stood up. I walked out onto my balcony.
Sheila was on her balcony next door. She was smoking a cigarette. She was wearing a faded black t-shirt and gym shorts. Her hair was tied back in a messy bun. She looked like she hated the world, which meant she was in a good mood.
"It is too hot to be alive," Sheila said. She didn't look at me. She flicked ash over the railing.
"I need you to run an IP address for me," I said.
She took a drag. "I am off the clock. I work in IT for eight hours a day. I do not want to look at a screen right now."
"It is about the potholes," I said.
Sheila stopped. She looked at me. She hated the potholes more than I did. She had broken the suspension on her Honda Civic in May. "Give me your laptop."
Five minutes later, we were sitting in her living room. The AC in her place actually worked. It felt like walking into a refrigerator. I shivered.
I opened my laptop. "I found this TikTok account. It is the only thing linked to the name 'Digital Engagement Dynamics'. It was in a hidden meta-tag on the city's new tourism site. Just a stray string of code."
I clicked on the link. The browser opened to a TikTok profile. The username was @WinnipegPotholeKing.
"What is this," Sheila asked. She leaned in. She smelled like tobacco and mint.
"Watch," I said.
I clicked the first video.
The video started with a shaky vertical shot of the Assiniboine River. The water was muddy brown. The summer sun was glaring off the surface. A pair of hands came into frame. The hands were holding a large, jagged chunk of broken asphalt.
The audio was just the sound of the wind and traffic.
The hands threw the asphalt into the river. It made a loud splash.
Text popped up on the screen: Engagement dynamics. We are building the future.
The video ended. It had twelve views.
"Okay," Sheila said. "That was stupid."
"Watch the next one," I said.
I clicked the second video. It was exactly the same. Different angle. Same muddy river. Same hands holding a chunk of street asphalt. The hands threw the rock. Splash. Text overlay: Middle Child Energy.
This one had nine views.
I kept scrolling. There were hundreds of these videos. Uploaded every day for the past two months. Just hands throwing city infrastructure into the river. Over and over and over. No voiceover. No music. Just wind, splash, and corporate buzzwords.
"Forty thousand dollars," I said quietly.
"Someone paid forty grand for this?" Sheila asked. She picked up her pack of cigarettes from the desk. She tapped it against her palm.
"Van Klint redirected the road repair budget to this account. To this 'firm'."
"Find the IP," she said. She pushed me out of the chair and sat down. Her fingers started moving over the keyboard. She opened a terminal window. Black screen. White text. She typed fast.
"He is hiding behind a proxy," she said. "But whoever set this up is an idiot. They left the recovery email exposed in the source code of the link tree. It routes back to a private server."
I watched the screen. The text scrolled down rapidly. I didn't understand any of it. My stomach felt hollow. I hadn't eaten since the community center.
"Got it," Sheila said. She hit the enter key hard.
An address popped up on the screen.
I stared at it. I read it twice.
"Sheila," I said. "That is a residential address in Charleswood."
"Yeah," she said. "So?"
"That is Van Klint's house."
The room was quiet. The AC hummed.
"Wait," Sheila said. She turned around to look at me. "The city councillor stole forty grand to pay himself to throw rocks into the river?"
"Not just rocks," I said. "The asphalt from our streets."
"Why?"
"I don't know. But I am going to ask him."
I didn't go to Van Klint right away. I needed backing. I needed leverage. I called Dave. Dave was the managing editor of the Winnipeg Independent, the only paper left in the city that actually printed physical copies. Dave was fifty years old, constantly stressed, and lived on antacids.
I stood in my kitchen. The linoleum was sticky. I held the phone to my ear. It rang four times.
"Dave," I said when he picked up.
"Darren. Make it fast. We go to print in three hours and my layout guy just quit."
"I have a story," I said. "A big one. Corruption at City Hall. Embezzlement."
Dave sighed loudly into the phone. The sound was mostly static. "Who."
"Van Klint. He diverted forty grand from the pothole repair fund. He paid it to a fake marketing firm. The firm is just a TikTok account of someone throwing asphalt into the Assiniboine River. And the IP traces back to Van Klint's basement server."
Silence on the line. I could hear Dave chewing on a Tums.
"You have proof," Dave asked.
"I have the budget document. I have the IP trace. I have the videos."
"Darren," Dave said. His voice was heavy. "It is July. It is thirty-five degrees outside with the humidex. The mosquitoes are the size of birds. Everyone is miserable."
"So let's give them a villain," I said.
"No," Dave said.
I gripped the edge of the counter. "What do you mean, no? He stole public money."
"We need to boost civic morale," Dave said. "The 'Middle Child' campaign is getting a lot of local business sponsors. If we nuke Van Klint right now, we nuke the campaign. The advertisers will pull out. I lose ad revenue. The paper folds."
"Dave. It is forty thousand dollars."
"It is a rounding error," Dave snapped. "Find me a story about a kid opening a lemonade stand. Find me a story about a rescued dog. I am not running a hit piece on a city councillor over a TikTok account."
He hung up.
I lowered the phone. My hand was shaking. I felt a hot, tight pressure in my chest. It wasn't just anger. It was exhaustion. The sheer, grinding exhaustion of trying to care about a city that aggressively refused to care about itself.
I walked over to the window. I looked out at Maryland Street. The pavement was cracked and jagged. A massive pothole sat right in the middle of the intersection. A blue Ford pickup hit it going forty. The truck bounced violently. I heard the metal scrape.
I looked up at the sky.
The sky was changing. The oppressive, hazy white heat of the afternoon was vanishing. A massive, bruised cloud bank was rolling in from the west. It was moving incredibly fast. The bottom of the clouds looked green. A sickly, bruised green.
Summer storms in Winnipeg do not mess around. They drop out of nowhere and try to kill you.
The wind hit the windowpane. It rattled the glass. The temperature dropped ten degrees in five seconds.
My phone buzzed. It was an emergency alert. Severe thunderstorm warning. High wind. Large hail. Take cover immediately.
I didn't care. I grabbed my jacket. I grabbed my keys. I was going to confront Van Klint.
I ran down the stairs of my building. I pushed the front door open. The wind nearly tore it out of my hand. The air felt cold and wet. The sky was completely black now, except for the violent flashes of sheet lightning.
I started walking toward Portage Avenue to catch a bus. I didn't have a car. I couldn't afford one on freelance pay.
I made it two blocks before the sky opened up.
It didn't rain. It hailed. Chunks of ice the size of golf balls slammed into the pavement. They shattered on the concrete like glass. The noise was deafening. A piece of ice hit my shoulder. It felt like being punched.
I ran. I sprinted toward the bright fluorescent lights of a glass bus shelter at the corner of Portage and Sherbrook. The wind was howling, a high-pitched scream that drowned out the traffic. I ducked into the shelter.
I stood there, panting. Water was dripping from my hair into my eyes. My jacket was soaked. I wiped my face with the back of my hand.
I looked up.
I was not alone in the shelter.
Standing on the other side of the glass bench, clutching a leather briefcase to his chest, was Councillor Van Klint.
He looked pathetic. His gray suit was ruined, plastered to his body by the freezing rain and melting hail. He was shivering. He looked at me. His eyes were wide.
"Darren," he said. His teeth were chattering.
"Councillor," I said. I stepped closer. The bus shelter was small. The smell of wet wool and fear was strong.
Outside, the storm was absolute chaos. The hail was pounding the glass walls of the shelter so hard I thought they were going to shatter. The streetlights flickered and died. We were lit only by the harsh, strobing flashes of lightning and the headlights of cars crawling blindly through the flooded intersection.
"Crazy weather," Van Klint yelled over the noise. He tried to smile. It looked like a grimace.
"I tracked the IP address," I said. I didn't shout, but my voice carried in the small space.
Van Klint stopped shivering. He froze.
"The TikTok account," I said. "Digital Engagement Dynamics. It traces back to a server in your basement in Charleswood. You diverted forty thousand dollars to yourself to throw rocks into the river."
He stared at me. He backed up until his shoulders hit the glass. "You do not understand."
"Explain it to me then," I said. I pulled my phone out of my pocket. I opened the voice memo app. I hit record. The red timer started ticking. I held it out between us.
Van Klint looked at the phone. He looked at the storm. He let out a long, shuddering breath.
"I just wanted to be relevant," he whispered.
"What."
"I am a city councillor in Winnipeg," he said. His voice was cracking. "Do you know what that means. It means nothing. Nobody cares. I go to meetings. I argue about snow removal. I argue about garbage collection. Nobody listens. Nobody watches. I have zero engagement."
He dropped his briefcase. It hit the concrete floor with a wet slap. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. His hands were shaking so badly he almost dropped it.
"I hired a consultant last year," he said. "They told me I needed to build a personal brand. They told me I needed to be disruptive. So I started throwing the asphalt."
"You stole forty grand to throw asphalt into a river?" I asked. My brain felt completely static. The absurdity was suffocating.
"I didn't steal it," he said defensively. "I reallocated it. To myself. As an independent contractor. To build the civic brand."
He unlocked his phone. He opened the TikTok app. He held it up to me.
"Look," he said.
He tapped the screen. The front-facing camera opened. But it wasn't his face. It was a cartoonish, exaggerated filter. It gave him massive anime eyes and a tiny mouth.
"I use the filter so people won't recognize me," he said. The cartoon eyes on the screen blinked when he blinked. "I was going to do a massive reveal. Once I went viral. I was going to show them that the Pothole King was actually their elected official. A man of the people. Taking the broken streets into his own hands."
I stared at the screen. The cartoon face was tracking his movements perfectly.
"But you didn't go viral," I said. "You got twelve views."
"The algorithm is shadowbanning me," he said. He sounded completely serious.
Lightning flashed. Thunder cracked right above us. The sound vibrated in my teeth.
Suddenly, Van Klint's hand slipped. His phone tumbled from his grip. It hit the concrete. The screen spider-webbed instantly.
He stared down at the broken phone. The white light from the cracked screen illuminated the puddle of water at his feet. He looked up at me. He looked broken.
"Are you going to publish it," he asked. His voice was hollow.
I looked at my phone. The voice memo was still recording. I had him. I had the confession. I had the evidence. I could destroy him. I could ruin his career, face the apathy of my editor, post it online myself, and watch him burn.
But what would that change. Dave wouldn't print it. The city wouldn't care. They would just elect another idiot to replace him. And my street would still be broken.
I looked out through the rain-streaked glass. The storm was starting to break. The hail had turned to a freezing, miserable summer rain. The street was a mess of ice and slush.
I pressed stop on the recording. I saved the file.
"No," I said.
Van Klint blinked. "No?"
"I am not going to publish it," I said. I put my phone back in my pocket. "I am going to blackmail you."
He opened his mouth. He closed it. "What do you want. I do not have the forty grand anymore. I spent it on server hosting and lighting equipment."
"I don't want the money," I said. I stepped right up to him. "I live on Maryland Street. Between Broadway and Portage. There are exactly fourteen massive potholes on my block. One of them broke my suspension. I want them fixed. By tomorrow."
"The city crews are booked until September," he stammered.
"I do not care," I said. "Call them. Threaten them. Bribe them. I don't care how you do it. If I wake up tomorrow and there is a single crack in the asphalt on my street, I send the audio file to every news outlet in the province. And I send it to the ethics commissioner."
Van Klint stared at me. He swallowed hard. He nodded slowly.
"Good," I said.
I turned away from him. I walked out of the bus shelter and stepped into the freezing summer rain. The slush soaked through my shoes instantly. I didn't care.
The next morning, the sky was clear and aggressively blue. The humidity was already climbing back up. I stood on my balcony with a cup of coffee.
Down on the street, three yellow city trucks were parked in a line. Six workers in high-visibility vests were shoveling steaming black asphalt into the craters. The smell of tar mixed with the damp summer heat. It was a terrible smell, but right then, it was the best thing I had ever experienced.
Sheila walked out onto her balcony. She lit a cigarette. She looked down at the street. She looked over at me.
"How did you do that," she asked.
I took a sip of my coffee. "Civic engagement."
Down below, a steamroller moved over the fresh patch, flattening it out. The asphalt steamed in the freezing rain, and for the first time in months, my street was perfectly, horribly smooth.
“The asphalt steamed in the freezing rain, and for the first time in months, my street was perfectly, horribly smooth.”
