Читать книгу Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - H. Mel Malton - Страница 14

With a breathtaking Doppler whoosh

your image spun in,

sleep-wrapped still,

and dangled perfect from my rearview,

spread-eagled like a plastic Jesus.

—Shepherd’s Pie

Rico's espresso left me totally wired. After I said goodbye and climbed into the cab of George’s truck, I could see that my hands were shaking.

Sooner or later, the health Nazis, who have marginalized smokers to the point of desperation, are going to turn on coffee drinkers. I figure that caffeine is the next frontier—they’ll raise coffee-taxes, overwhelm our teenagers with anti-caffeine slogans (JUST SAY MILK) and then vilify the public health system for treating caffeine addicts with money from the pockets of clean living taxpayers. After that, they’ll focus on television addicts. That’s when I’ll be dancing in the streets.

I stopped off at Gretchen’s Petrocan Diner to fill up the tank before hitting the highway and nodded to Bert, the gas guy. He was the one who had attended Dream-Catcher’s workshop and subsequently claimed the cougar as his power animal. He was a weedy young man, so thin you could see daylight through his wrist bones, and he kept his long, mouse-coloured hair pulled back in a pony tail. He was wearing those baggy trousers that are hip these days—the idea being to wear them so big that your butt disappears completely, leaving about a yard of wasted material. He was always quick with a hamster joke, but I didn’t mind it coming from him. I figured he needed all the self-confidence he could get.

“Fill it up with regular, please, Bert.”

“Hey, Polly. Got something for you.” He poked the nozzle of the gas pump into the tank, scurried over to the secret glass booth, where only gas guys are allowed, and returned with something in his hand.

“What is it?” I said.

“I found it at the Lo-Mart last week. I couldn’t resist.” He handed it to me closed fisted, and I opened my palm to receive it. It was a small stuffed animal on a key chain, perhaps designed to look like a koala bear, but I could see why Bert had thought of me when he saw it. It was no koala, for all the designer’s efforts. It was a hamster, and it was really cute.

“Oh, gee, Bert. A mascot.”

He grinned, studying my face to make sure that I wasn’t mad. “I thought you could, you know, hang it on the rearview or something,” he said.

“It’s adorable. Better than a St. Christopher medal. It’ll protect me from the lumber trucks.”

“What’s a St. Christopher medal?”

“Never mind,” I said. What did they teach them in those schools, anyway? “Thanks, Bert. I really like it.” I handed him the Petrocan card (it’s in George’s name, like everything else) and waited, chewing my fingers, while he ran it through the authorization machine in his booth. George and I share a special relationship with Petrocan. We get into debt up to our eyeballs and skip the monthly payments, then Petrocan sends us a kneecapper letter and cancels our card. So we send them a small cheque, at which point they send back a note telling us we’re a preferred customer and activate our account again so we can get deeper in debt.

We were, as it turned out, a preferred customer that week. I reminded myself to pay the bill soon, waved at Bert and chugged off to Laingford. The hamster mascot swung merrily from the rearview and I felt invincible.

The highway between Cedar Falls and Laingford is treacherous. It’s a two laner, with sporadic passing lanes disguised as paved shoulders. Every six kilometres or so, there’s a “keep right except to pass” sign, and if you don’t move over, you’ll get a lumber truck up your wahzoo.

George’s truck was almost as old as me. I was born in nineteen-sixty-two, and his truck was pulled howling off the line in sixty-three. It “ran good,” as they say around here, but it was not designed to gobble up the tarmac the way these plastic, Smartie-coloured compacts do. If I pushed it, the truck would do a hundred and ten clicks, but it would set up a whine like a dog who needs to pee, and I preferred to do the limit. Doing the limit on Highway 14 was not a popular tactic and driving to Laingford was always a lesson in self control. When you’ve got people passing you doing a hundred and thirty, it’s hard to keep cool.

I was just huffing and puffing up the long hill before the exit ramp to Laingford when I saw the cruiser in my rearview, cherry-flasher spinning and headlights pulsating like a demented Christmas tree.

“Oh, terrific,” I said aloud. Maybe I was going to get a ticket for loitering. I’d been doing seventy kilometres an hour on the upgrade, slow enough to warrant putting the hazards on, but it always embarrassed me to do that. I felt that if I did, the truck would know that I had no faith in it, and it would conk out in sheer disappointment. I pulled over and waited, trembling. Cops, as I’ve said, scare me, even if I’ve done nothing wrong.

I did a quick personal inventory. I was clean. I’d had not a drop of booze, not a puff of smoke, my license was up-to-date and the stickers on the plates were fresh that month. The insurance papers were in a plastic folder, paper-clipped to the visor. There were no empty beer bottles in the cab.

My pulse rate was still off the scale, and my palms were slicked up the way they used to get when I held hands with a boy in the Laingford Odeon.

I checked the mirror and cursed the hamster, who leered at me. Some mascot. Getting out of the cruiser was none other than Morrison the Large.

He took his time sauntering over to the truck. I couldn’t see anyone else in the cruiser, so I guessed that Becker had managed to steal a few moments away from his partner.

“Afternoon, ma’am.” He tipped his hat.

“Good afternoon, Officer. To what do I owe the pleasure?” My voice was shaking.

“You were going awfully slow, ma’am. I wondered if you were having some trouble with your vehicle. Stopped to see if you needed some assistance.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Well, yes, ma’am. Actually, we’ve been trying to get in touch with you, and as you have no telephone in that shack I hear you live in, and Hoito never answers his, I thought I’d just pull you over. Give you the message myself.”

“Mighty thoughtful of you,” I said. I wasn’t buying it. He pulled me over because he knew it would bug me. I was intrigued, though.

“We always try to be thoughtful,” Morrison said, smiling cheerfully. “Mrs. Travers show up yet?”

“No, Constable Morrison, but I have reason to believe that she’s safe and not wandering around in the woods somewhere.”

“Now how would you know that, unless you’ve talked to her?”

“I found another note from her after Detective Becker left my shack, as you call it. She signed it with a happy face.”

“So?”

“So, it’s kind of a personal code. We write each other notes all the time. A happy face means everything’s okay. So I figure she probably had a place to go, although of course I have no idea where that could be.”

“Uh-huh. Well, if you find out, you’ll let us know, right?”

“Of course. Can I go now?”

“Just a second. Becker was worried about that mutt at the Travers’ place. He said that if Mrs. Travers isn’t hiding out at home, the animal will probably starve. We could call the pound, but Becker thought you’d be willing to take it instead. I saw the way you acted with it. Real cute. Reminded me of that mountain gorilla movie.”

“Oh, golly. I forgot all about poor Lug-nut. Yes, of course I’ll look after him. I’ll go get him as soon as I finish my errands in town.”

“What errands would they be?” Morrison said. “Taking supplies to Francy Travers?”

I let out an exasperated breath. “Look, I’ve told you I don’t know where she is,” I said. “I can’t lie. It’s not in me.” He narrowed his eyes at me. They were very blue, set deep in the fleshy folds of his face.

“As for my errands,” I said, “I’m going to the Co-op to pick up some grain for the goats. Perhaps you’d care to accompany me. I hear they’ve got a special on pig feed.” I don’t know what made me say it. I was ashamed, instantly, when I saw the look on Morrison’s face.

“Watch your mouth, little lady,” he said. “You may think you have a friend in Becker, but I’m not such a pushover.” He was talking big, but he didn’t look angry, he looked hurt. Like Aunt Susan always said, retaliation only feels good while you’re doing it.

“Hey, just kidding,” I said. “Sixties flashback, eh? Won’t happen again.”

“Sixties? Hah. You couldn’t have been more than six when the seventies started,” he said.

“Seven,” I said, doing a quick calculation. “My aunt took me to rallies, though.” Aunt Susan was the one who had planted in me the notion that cops were, well, swine. Fascists. Nasty men. She had experienced their oppression, she told me, and she knew whereof she spoke.

“That would be your aunt that runs the feed store?”

“Yup.”

“Figures. She ran for parliament a while back, didn’t she? For the NDP?”

“More than twenty years ago,” I said. “How did you know that?”

“My Dad ran against her. Victor Morrison, MPP.”

“Tory,” I said. “That was your Dad? You don’t look like him at all.”

Morrison smiled. “Nope,” he said. “Don’t think like him either.”

He leaned against the cab of the truck. It looked like we were in for a chat, and what surprised me was that suddenly, I didn’t mind so much.

In Laingford, if you get pulled over by the cops, it’s all around town in two minutes. Traffic slowed as people drove past, craning their necks to see who was in trouble. I’d hear about it, later.

“You found John’s truck yet?” I said.

“Nope. Still looking. Damn thing’s disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“Too bad. No luck at Kelso’s, eh?”

“No point in asking,” Morrison said. “He drove home before he was shot, remember?” I was surprised that he was talking to me about the case. I thought he and Becker were trying to keep me out of it. Still, I wasn’t complaining.

“Are you sure he did that?” I said.

“The Schreier kid swears it. Travers died at home, with his truck in the driveway.”

“So you think somebody used his truck to move his body to the dump, then drove it somewhere and left it,” I said, carefully.

“You think so too, don’t you?” Morrison said. “Yes, but constable, Francy can’t drive. So it couldn’t have been her.”

He winked. That was all. By now I was thoroughly confused. If he was going to start playing Good Cop, who would that cast in the role of the Bad One?

“Now, you hear anything at all, you let us know, okay?” he said. “And try not to get involved.”

“If you don’t want me involved, why are we having this conversation?”

“Insurance,” he said, enigmatically. A Toyota buzzed by, way over the limit, honking loudly. Several young men wearing baseball caps leaned out and yelled something as they passed.

“Morons,” I said. Morrison was squinting at the retreating car. “PZI 952,” he muttered. Then he turned back to me.

“Mayors kid,” he said. “Gotta make a phone call.”

I started the truck, then remembered that I had some new information. “Hey, Morrison,” I said loudly, over the chugging of the engine. He looked back.

“John Travers was hurting for cash. He sold some stuff to Rico Amato and didn’t haggle over the price. Wonder why, eh?”

Morrison grinned. “Atta girl,” he said.

Aunt Susan’s feed store was busy when I arrived. There were plenty of cars in the parking lot and a Co-op truck was backed up to the loading door, delivering the week’s order. If I wanted to visit privately with my aunt, I’d have to wait.

Feed stores always smell wonderful, sort of a cross between a brewery and one of those brass and incense gift shops. Susan stocked hers with more than just feed. There were rubber boots and racks of work gloves, overalls and buckets, nursing nipples, milking pails, water heaters, bird feeders, tractor parts and tools.

If you were into agriculture, there wasn’t a thing she wasn’t happy to get for you, except American goods. She enforced a strict buy-Canadian policy, and although she would order items from the States if you insisted, she’d fill out the order form in icy silence and never look at you the same way again.

Theresa, her assistant, was at the cash desk, ringing in a big bag of low-priced, economy dog food for a man wearing a furlined coat. If Susan had been there, she would have made him buy a better brand. Cheap, high bulk dog food will make your animal poop twice as much as it needs to, without much benefit. The guy in the coat probably knew that already, though. Probably poured the cheap stuff into a bag of Martin’s Best kept on display in the pantry. Rich people really bug me.

Theresa gave me a little wave as I came in, gesturing towards the back where Aunt Susan would be loading grain. Susans five-foot-three and 68 years old, but she’s built like a Massey Ferguson.

I excused myself past a woman and two small boys who were trying on rubber boots in the aisle, and headed for the door marked “Feed Bin”.

Susan was slinging fifty pound sacks of feed around like down pillows, her short iron-grey hair standing up on end like the feathers of a startled rooster. Her hat was on the floor and her sleeves were rolled up to expose the kind of muscles that I only dream about.

“Hey,” she said, “catch.” A bag of feed came sailing towards me. Susan was always doing that kind of stuff when I was living with her, but I was in better shape then. Back then, I would have tossed it back. I had to catch it—or lose face, and I did both. The bag bowled me right over and I landed on my butt with the feed sack in my lap like a large, unwanted baby.

“Thanks, Susan,” I said.

“Not at all. Toughen you up. You okay?”

“I’m fine.” The feed truck guy had come around the corner at the moment of impact and looked mildly surprised, but very kindly did not laugh. I scrambled to my feet and put the feed onto a storage rack. I can’t say I tossed it. Not really. But I tried.

“Can you give us a hand?” Susan said, and I spent the next twenty minutes acting stronger than I am, which I would undoubtedly pay for the next day.

It was just as I was easing the last sack into place and Susan was signing the invoice that I heard a noise from Susan’s apartment upstairs. It was the cry of a baby.