Читать книгу Undertow - R.M. Greenaway - Страница 12

Aweigh

First thing in the morning Dion climbed on the midsized jet to Calgary. He sat next to his travel companion. Leith had the window seat and didn’t seem to want to chat, from the way he exchanged a few lines about the weather, then opened his Maclean’s magazine and stuck his nose in it.

Dion reclined the aisle seat and closed his eyes. Sitting next to David Leith forced him to think about David Leith. They had known each other only months, not the years it felt like. February, in New Hazelton. The Catalina Café was their first introduction, getting briefed on a missing woman as the world outside was muffled in snow. Dion had been posted in Smithers, was new to the north, a stranger in the Hazeltons sent to help in the search. He was in bad shape then, worse than now, and his first interactions with Leith had not gone off well.

He didn’t blame Leith for disliking him. If anything, it was a break. Like Torr’s attitude, it spared them both from having to expend energy on being chummy. But unlike Torr, there were gears turning in Leith’s mind. And he was perceptive. Dion could tell by Leith’s occasional moody and penetrating stares, shot at him like lasers, that he could see through disguises. Which was unsettling.

“Afraid of flying?” Leith asked, still reading.

“No. Are you?”

“No.”

An hour later, as they soared toward the jagged rip line of the Rockies, Leith shut the magazine. He said, “I’ve never lived in biker territory. Started out in Slave Lake, did time in Fort St. John. Didn’t face much big-time gang action. Maybe these days Hells Angels are trying to set up shop there, but not so much back then. Spent the last seven years in Prince Rupert, where we had some HA port crimes, but it wasn’t my department. And that’s it. So not much experience with the two-wheeled species. What about you?”

“I’ve dealt with a few bike gangs. Never head-on. They’re more a Surrey problem, Abbotsford. They seem to like wide open spaces.”

“Huh,” Leith said, after a moment’s thought. Then, “I’m thinking I’ll go at this one straight up, what d’you say? Hell with the friendly approach.”

“Sure,” Dion said. “What did you do before you became a cop?”

Leith looked at him with some mistrust. “Who says I did anything? Maybe I joined the force straight out of school.”

“Maybe you did. But I doubt it.”

“Okay, sure. I worked a few years first.”

“In construction,” Dion said.

Leith lowered a brow. “That’s pretty much it.”

“Till you were thirty, then joined up.”

“Twenty-eight. Also pretty close. How d’you figure?”

“It’s easy. I did the math. Two postings, averaging four years each, then seven in Prince Rupert, that’s fifteen years. And you’re about forty-five, so you joined up around thirty. Which is kind of late.”

“I’m forty-four. But how do you figure construction? For all you know I was an accountant.”

Dion laughed. “No way you were an accountant. You’re like me, not the academic type. But you’re hard working, so you probably got a job straight out of school. Best job guys can get straight out of school is in the construction industry. But you felt there was more to life than bending nails. You wanted to make the world a better place. So you joined up.”

Leith gave him a smile, then looked out the window and downward. “Look at all that range,” he said, but more to himself. Then he went back to his magazine.

* * *

They had lunch with some Calgarian police officers, more social than business. Dion enjoyed the neutrality of it, and wondered if he should try for a transfer eastward instead of north. He and Leith then spent the afternoon in an interview room talking to Phillip Prince. Physically, Prince wasn’t overwhelming, but he was a bully, complete with bully tattoos, bully facial hair, and bully attitude. Leith started out by asking him what he had against Lance Liu.

“What d’you mean?” Prince said.

“People have been telling me you wanted to kill the guy. What was the gripe? How’d he step on your toes?”

Prince’s face knotted defensively. “The fuck you talking about?”

Dion saw it coming, the usual let’s-get-acquainted song and dance, and zoned out. It went on for about an hour, as he noted on his watch, before the talk became substantive, and in bits and pieces dense with obscenities, Prince told the story.

It turned out that in Prince’s mind, Lance Liu was a clumsy motherfucking spark plug whose truck, while backing out of the driveway, had knocked over Prince’s custom Harley Wide Glide. Liu and Prince weren’t friends or associates, had never met before that day, were just thrown together by that one twist of bad fucking luck. Liu had been hired for an electric panel upgrade at the Prince home, that’s all. He’d put in his hours and was done for the day, and departed. Prince was popping a Budweiser, heard a crash, ran outside, and after a bit of a fistfight, the two men had settled, off the books. Liu went away with a bunch of death threats thrown at his back, but he got off lucky. Prince used the settlement to repair his bike, but he was never happy with the machine after that. “It’s just not fuckin’ the same,” he said. “When you fuckin’ go over one fuckin’ ten, something fuckin’ rattles.”

“So stay under one ten,” Leith said. “Anything over, you’re breaking the fuckin’ limit.”

“You’re a fuckin’ cunt,” Prince said.

Next Leith put to Prince that Prince had hopped on his bike last week, driven to B.C., and wiped out the whole Liu family, all over one damned rattle. The accusation nearly popped a vein in Prince’s temple, and on that note the interview ended.

* * *

They were put up in two rooms on the fourth floor of the Holiday Inn. Dion unloaded his travel bag. He had a shower, then took time by the big window to admire the view. He saw a flattened version of urban sprawl, lit up as far as the eye could see, and imagined living here, not as an RCMP officer, but a city detective. Because that was definitely an option.

When his watch beeped nine, he closed the blinds. He went downstairs, as agreed, and found Leith in the bar, waiting for him. They had dined separately because Leith had accepted an invitation by a few of the Calgary officers who wanted to hear the coastal perspective on crime, and Dion hadn’t. Now they were here to talk over the Prince interrogation, compare notes, and kill some time before the flight home tomorrow.

The Holiday Inn’s idea of a bar was fairly minimal. Leith was at a tall table, getting a head start on the drinking. The server brought Dion’s order for a glass of beer and promised Leith the nachos were on their way. Leith thanked her, then said to Dion, “So what d’you think?”

Dion had gone into the interrogation knowing what he thought, and nothing of what he had seen or heard of Phillip Prince changed his mind. He shrugged and sucked the froth off his beer.

“I’m thinking he’s not our bunny, and you know why?” Leith said. From what Dion knew, Leith was a beer-drinker, but tonight he was enjoying a Scotch. By the looks of it, he’d enjoyed a few already. “’Cause I’m gonna tell you why.”

“Why?” Dion said.

“I have a two-year-old,” Leith said. One eyelid hung slightly lower than the other, and his focal point seemed to drift in and out. “Well, she’s about to turn two. And when she breaks something, and you go, Izzy, did you break that? she says no, like this. Nooo. I mean, since when do two-year-olds lie? What’s the matter with this world? I thought you don’t learn to lie till you’re, what, five, six? Anyway, this is my point …”

But the nachos came just then, and he forgot his point. Once the waitress was gone, Dion prompted him back on track. “He’s not our bunny why?”

Leith munched on a glob of chips, melted cheese, and hot peppers. “My point is, when you accuse her of doing something that she actually didn’t do — my kid Izzy I’m talking about — she’ll flip out. I mean, she’ll crawl the walls screaming, she’ll be that mad. There’s something about being falsely accused, it’s like a deploy button. And it’s the same with Prince. He’s kind of at your two-year-old level, and he flipped out, too, when I put it to him he’d killed the Lius, right? You saw that, right? Kind of more subtle with him than with Izzy, but I caught it. Yup, I’d bank on it, he’s a bad apple, but he didn’t kill those people.”

Leith was finished with his reasoning, and his mood seemed to dip. “But you haven’t told me what you think.”

“I totally agree,” Dion said. He sat forward, glad they were now on the same page, and he could share his thoughts, which had been punching at his brain on and off all day. “’Course he didn’t do it. It felt wrong from the start, because of the missing phone, right? Why would Prince take Liu’s phone? Doesn’t fit. So Lance Liu got attacked first, then whoever did it got the info off the phone — and he’d need the passcode to access it, Sig Blatt confirms Lance used a passcode — and then went after his family on a follow-up basis. Doesn’t matter the pathologist says they died around the same time, Lance and Cheryl. Doesn’t say anything about the time of the attack. Fact is, Lance Liu was lying there for a while before he died. If it was Phillip Prince who went over there to kill him in revenge for wrecking his bike — which, give me a break, even Prince isn’t that shallow — it would be the other way around. He’d get to the family first and then carry on with his mission of finding Lance. At worst, and it’s even more unlikely, he’d kill the wife in looking for Liu. I don’t believe it. If you work through the whole thing backward, there’s loads of information there, but it’s like it’s just out of reach. This guy was looking for something. How did he get the phone passcode? Did Liu give it to him? Was it forced out of him? And who’s the woman who shut the kid in the cabinet? It’s bizarre.”

“Huh,” Leith said, setting down his empty glass. He rubbed his gut and winced. “You know what? I should go to bed. G’night.” He tapped his watch face. “Early tomorrow, right?”

“Right. See you,” Dion said.

He watched Leith rise unsteadily to his feet and make his way to the till, pay with a credit card, nearly forget to collect a receipt, then leave. Alone, Dion stayed another ten minutes, finishing his beer. People came and went around him. He said no thanks to a second drink when the server came by. She took away the plate, the barely touched heap of nachos under its layer of congealed cheese not much touched by anyone.

* * *

On the flight home Dion had the window seat. He watched the dusty-green foothills fall away as the plane lifted, and observed aloud that they were going the wrong way. Leith said they were looping around to gain altitude, which was preferable to driving nose-first into the mountains. Leith seemed nicer today, but maybe depressed. He was clean shaven and reeked of aftershave. Over breakfast he had chatted some, get-to-know-you type stuff, but just filling time. Dion had mostly focussed on eating.

Now, buckled into his airplane seat, Leith apologized for last night. “I think you were trying to tell me something, and I couldn’t follow. Had a bit to drink over dinner, and a few more in the lounge. Sorry about that. Want to try again?”

“No. I typed it up in a full report.”

Dion thought about the report glowing on his laptop late last night. He had sat on the bed, referring to the online dictionary for every word he had doubts about. Even ran a few through the thesaurus, for variety. Worked extra hard on the thing, to make it readable, almost poetic, still trying to impress Bosko. He thought of Bosko’s advice to stick it out for a month. He thought of Bosko saying I’d hate to lose you.

He tried to imagine sitting here next to Leith on this one-point-five-hour flight, telling him everything. He shook his head and looked out the window. Now he saw clouds and the planet far below, squares of green and grey, snaking rivers, as their aircraft drifted toward the Pacific.

When he was twenty, he had gone autumn hiking with friends up at Hollyburn. High on the trails he had argued with someone, which led to him getting separated from the group, which left him lost on the mountain, walking half a day and into the evening, shouting and stumbling through wilderness. By nightfall he was cold, wet, tired, and sure he was going to die up there alone. When he found his friends, or when they found him, he sat in the car, somebody’s arm around him, and dropped into the deepest, happiest sleep he’d ever known.

Would telling Leith be something like that? Would he disclose, and then fall into a dreamless sleep? No, it wouldn’t be like that. Maybe at first there would be relief, but it wouldn’t last. Wouldn’t last beyond the snap of the handcuffs.

* * *

Leith, never a great fan of flying, was glad to be back on terra firma. He and Dion arrived at the detachment midafternoon, walking into a hubbub of exciting news. The excitement seemed to centre around a suntanned, white-haired couple who were trying in a frenetic way to tell Doug Paley something obviously important. Before Leith could get a sense of what it was, Paley began to usher the couple out of the GIS office and away to an interview room.

“Nance spotted it to starboard,” the white-haired man was saying, and Leith saw him gesture at the ratty-looking plastic shopping bag Paley held. “We were drifting. She grabbed the long net, nearly fell in fetching it up.”

“Bombay Sapphire,” the woman said. “But I didn’t know that at the time, did I? With the cap on, of course. Or not a cap. A cork. Like a funny little homemade cork.”

“Great,” Paley said, for the third time. “This way, folks.”

“Floating out in the middle of the Burrard Inlet,” the man put in.

The three turned the corner and disappeared from Leith’s view, but the woman’s shrill voice floated back. “Like a message in a bottle!”

Then there was silence as a door down the hallway clicked shut.

Leith asked anyone within earshot, “What was the message?”

JD Temple said, “A baby bootie, that’s what.”