Читать книгу B.C. Blues Crime 4-Book Bundle - R.M. Greenaway - Страница 14

The Walk

SUNRAYS SLASHED ACROSS the village in the morning, but Leith had a feeling it wouldn’t last. Still, there were sparrows twittering in the bushes and at least a remote sense of spring on its way. He stepped into the diner downstairs off the Super 8 lobby, which was empty except for some old guy by the window — no colleagues, no Dion — and had a quick breakfast.

Across the highway at the office, a fresh-faced Renee Giroux handed over an occurrence report for himself and Bosko to look at. Leith went first, scanning over a single paragraph so riddled with typos and incomplete sentences that he had to read between the lines. “‘STELLA MARSHAL,’” he read out, “‘Avised Constable Dion that KEIRA RILKOFF spilt up a few months ago with FRANK LAW. It was by mutual content and.’ Okay, sure.”

“Split, I think,” Giroux said.

“He spelled Rilkoff right,” Leith said. “And mutual. Impressive. Ends the second sentence with ‘and,’ which is probably grammatically incorrect, but hey, what do I know?”

“Mm-hmm,” Bosko remarked, taking his turn reading the report. As he did too often, he seemed to catch Leith’s words but not the inflection, and Leith could never figure out how much of the misunderstanding was deliberate. “Interesting. Dave, you want to talk to the girl, get this story nailed down?”

Leith did not. There weren’t many people he dealt with who made him feel foolish, but Stella Marshall was one. She only had to roll those pale blue eyes in his direction and he felt oversized and dim. “Sure,” he said. “No problem.”

He argued with her on the phone. She was at work and couldn’t come in, so he agreed to meet her at her place of employment.

She was a teller at the Royal Bank in Old Town. The bank wasn’t yet open when he arrived within the hour, but she unlocked for him, let him in, saying, “Good morning, Officer Leith.” She locked the door behind him, mentioned that it was an exceptionally cold morning, and offered coffee.

“No, thanks,” he said. “This’ll be quick. I wanted to talk to you about the statement you gave to Constable Dion last night.”

There was nobody else in the bank, and Stella led him to the manager’s office, a posh little set-up. She lounged in the big leather chair, and Leith sat before her like a man seeking a loan. A man without equity, in his case.

“I haven’t anything to add to what I told Constable Dion,” she said.

“Well, I have things to ask.”

“So do I.”

He paused, already thrown.

She said, “I understand you want to see my phone records. Am I a suspect?”

“Ma’am, you’re definitely not a suspect. We’re looking at everybody’s records right now, not for anything incriminating, but to help piece together Kiera’s day around the time of her disappearance. It’s a procedural thing. No worries.”

“Okay. Thank you. Your turn.”

He wanted her to pinpoint the date of this alleged lovers’ break up, and she couldn’t, since it was more a slow dissolution and nothing official, and probably nothing Frank was quite ready to admit, at least not to the world at large. “But think about it,” she said. “It was inevitable. He and Kiera have known each other since they were ten. How can you stay in love with someone when there’s nothing left to discover? They both wanted out, and they were very cool-headed about it, and they remained close friends.”

“I heard they were engaged.”

“It was just talk.”

“You say she was seeing somebody else, a married man. It sounds like you know who that person is.”

“No, actually, I don’t. I’m not supposed to know any of it, and I have to say, maybe I’m way off base. It’s just stuff I pick up. Big ears. As I told Constable Dion.”

“You think Kiera met this guy on the Matax on Saturday? Is that what you’re saying?”

She shook her head. “I really don’t know.”

But it was what she wanted them to think. She could be lying, Leith realized, about all of it. Frank Law was under the gun now, and one way she could deflect that suspicion would be invent a new suspect and throw him into the mix, like nuts into the cookie batter. The mystery man on the Matax. He said, “Did Frank have a love interest of his own?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Was Frank upset with her when she left rehearsal on Saturday?”

“Yes, just like Chad and I were. It wasn’t great timing on her part. But what could we do? The demo’s a bust anyway. I think we all knew it.”

Leith heaved a sigh. “How about giving us some names we can discreetly check out, at least. There can’t be that many local men she could be seeing on the sly.”

She only shook her head, swivelling in her bank manager chair, eying him in that way that made him feel so foolish. “I have no idea. He may be an out-of-towner, a travelling businessman, say. Or a cop. He may be yourself, for all I know.”

Leith was done, and he stood. “Thanks,” he said. He felt absurdly like a man who’d just been turned down for a loan, stiff and offended, as he turned and walked out of the bank.

* * *

The phone records hadn’t yielded much of interest. The ream of paper was more a bog than a useful tool. There had been a flurry of calls between all subjects on Saturday evening, after word spread that Kiera was missing. Leith was more interested in the hours and days leading up to the disappearance.

As far as he could see, communications between Frank and Kiera had been fairly frequent and friendly. The texts printed out from Kiera’s phone neither proved Stella Marshall’s story of a rift nor disproved it. They weren’t steamy texts at all, but neither were they cool.

Another call stood out to Leith. At 12:25 that Saturday, soon after Kiera had so inexplicably walked out, around the time Chad and Stella had left the house as well, and possibly Lenny as well, Frank had made one short call. The number turned out to belong to Scott Rourke’s landline, and it lasted about half a minute.

“Gotta get Rourke’s records too,” Leith told the wall, and made a note to self.

Frank Law had spoken to his Legal Aid lawyer, Jack Baker, and now he was brought into the New Hazelton interview room, sat down, and given his warnings once again.

Leith put it to Frank that he and Kiera were no longer a couple, and watched the response with interest. It was odd. Frank yanked his mouth out of shape, blushed, and said, “What? That’s bullshit.”

Yet he wasn’t completely surprised by the allegation. It wasn’t news to him at all. So, was it true? Maybe, maybe not. Leith followed up on a new suspicion. “Your band is on hold for now, I know that, but do you guys still hang out, you and Stella and Chad?”

“Not much.”

But some, and some was enough. “It’s Stella’s idea, isn’t it? She told you to tell us that you and Kiera have broken up. Right? Why would she do that?”

Frank remained pink-cheeked with anger. “She never told me to say that.”

“Maybe to throw us off what really happened, d’you think?”

Frank pulled in a breath and then inclined his upper body forward to give thrust to his question, loud, bitter, and sarcastic: “And what really happened, d’you think?”

The last thing Leith wanted to do was rile the man up. The interview was being videotaped, and he knew what defence counsel would do with footage of an interrogation that started to climb the walls. There would be endless app-

lications and voir dires and nasty cross-examination, and he didn’t need another lawyer in his face any more than he needed another ulcer. He backed off and changed subjects, asking Frank instead about that brief call to Scott Rourke.

“Oh, that,” Frank said, sullen now, the heat seeping away from his cheeks. “I thought I’d call him up after practice shut down early, see if he wanted to go for a beer. Got his answering machine. Didn’t bother leaving a message.”

Leith looked at the phone records. “Thirty-two seconds. You waited through his recorded spiel, did you?”

“In case he was screening calls. Said ‘pick up, asshole, it’s me.’ But he didn’t.”

“He screens his calls? Why?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.”

Leith closed the interview.

Chad Oman was brought in for a third round of questioning and said he didn’t know anything about the breakup or another man in Kiera’s life. He seemed genuinely surprised at the very idea.

Nobody the investigators spoke to over the course of the day, friends and family, Kiera’s parents and her sister Grace, knew anything about it. In the late afternoon, after a long and tiresome day, Leith told his colleagues that frankly, in his opinion, the whole thing was a fiction in Stella Marshall’s head, and she should be charged with mischief in the first degree.

In the late afternoon he chanced to run into Constable Dion in the detachment hallway that led to the rear exit and staff washrooms, and at the time it struck Leith as a good time to chat about that man’s certain weak-kneed questioning of Stella Marshall last night, a witness who’d been apparently eager to talk and might well have had something important to divulge, even if it was an elaboration on a lie. “It’s just one damn good example of when you should have pressed a witness for more information and didn’t,” he finished.

Dion listened through the advice, wide-eyed, and when Leith was done he gave a short yessir that sounded more like fuck you, and tried to trade places in the narrow hall and move on toward the men’s.

But Leith wasn’t done. He called after him, “If you hate this job so much, why don’t you do yourself a favour and quit?”

“I love this job.”

“You could fool me.”

“I noticed.”

“What?”

“Excuse me. Need to use the washroom.”

Leith returned to Giroux’s office with a scowl, just in time to hear her new theory, which was just a rehashing of an old theory, that maybe there was another man in the picture, and that his sin wasn’t that he was married but that he was somebody too close for comfort. Namely, Frank’s older brother. “Look at it,” she said, standing by the large Google Earth printout they were using for a map, posted up on the wall and marked with points of interest. She moved her finger between points. “The Matax is halfway up the mountain, not far from Rob’s worksite. What if Rob and Kiera agreed to meet halfway?”

“There’s no calls between them in the phone records,” Bosko said.

Giroux had an answer for that too. “Phone records are notoriously easy to check these days, so they thought they’d better set up their meetings the old-fashioned way.”

“Smoke signals?” Leith said.

“Ha-ha,” she said. “No. With good old-fashioned words. Set up in advance. They’re both at the house often enough. Brush by each other in the kitchen, pretend to talk about the weather, but they’re actually setting up a time and place. Saturday at 1:00 p.m. at the Matax trailhead, wink wink, slap on the ass. And next thing you know they’re up there, sitting in his truck, whispering sweet nothings and managing to get their rocks off across the console.”

Leith doubted it. He recalled getting his rocks offs with girls in vehicles — or one girl, one vehicle, one time — in his early twenties. It was an uncomfortable memory, in every sense of the word. But whatever was happening between Kiera and Rob, if anything, wasn’t necessarily lewd. That was just Giroux, who had a way with words. Maybe the two were just talking, figuring out how to break it to Frank. Maybe they argued. Maybe one of them was putting some kind of pressure on the other. Maybe things went terribly wrong.

Aloud, he said, “Rob is alibied all Saturday, but that aside, you have to consider this. He’s got access to a few acres of ripped ground and a backhoe. The ground’s frozen, but if he banged at it long enough, found a soft spot, he could bury her so deep she’d never surface.”

They all stood looking at the map and talking over Rob Law’s alibi for Saturday in the hours of Kiera’s disappearance. Six employees with a clear line of sight on him, or at least on his office trailer and his pickup, made for one solid alibi. If he’d gone anywhere that day, those six would have known it.

Leith said, “What about this one hour he had after his crew left at 6:00 p.m. and before he headed down the mountain at seven?”

“Doesn’t work,” Giroux said. “He’d have travelled down, stopped at her truck to call her name, and was home half an hour later. All that time would be taken in travel. Not enough time to deal with the body. And of course, soon after that the search began.”

She was probably right; it didn’t work. So it was earlier in the day or not at all.

Leith brought in the file box, and they looked through statements and evidence. There were loading slips that Rob had signed when rigs were loaded up and left the site, and there were times on those slips, and in all the scribbles the only window of opportunity emerged, a block of time when Rob Law had signed nothing and supposedly been in his trailer. Bosko wrote that window of opportunity on the whiteboard. One fifty-seven to two fifty-two, just under one hour, and all that time his truck had remained in place alongside all the others.

“So much for that,” Leith said.

Giroux said, “Unless he walked.”

Leith laughed aloud, but Giroux was once again running her finger along the map, not along the lengthy switchbacks of the Bell 3, but skimming over the pines as the crow flies. And suddenly it was not 12.7 kilometres between the cut block and the Matax trailhead, but perhaps three.

Leith was still smiling, arms crossed, but Bosko had his specs fixed on the new path she’d etched. “You think there’s a way through, Renee?”

“Who knows,” Giroux said. “Deer make paths. Winter brings those paths out nicely. Maybe it’s a trail he’s used before. The guy practically lives up there. Maybe he puts on his hiking boots and goes walking for exercise. Maybe he’s gotten to know the lay of the land like the back of his hand.”

“Lot of maybes,” Leith said.

“Life is full of maybes,” she said sharply. “Sometimes it’s all we’ve got.”

He couldn’t deny that one. He looked at the Google Earth view again. He looked at Bosko, checked for skepticism, and saw none. He said, “Sending planes up for more aerials isn’t going to help any, with this dense tree cover. We’ll have to check it out on foot. But first firm up the theory before we go any further. I’ll make some inquiries.” To Giroux he said, “Can you organize a couple pairs of legs to walk the woods?”

“I’ll put out a bid for volunteers,” she said, and added with smug confidence, “My boys will be fighting over the chance to get outside and play in the snow. Just watch.”

* * *

Sergeant Giroux stood at the threshold, asking who wanted to go for a nice hike in the woods on this beautiful winter day. She already had one volunteer, Jayne Spacey, but she needed one more. Everyone looked to the window, including Dion. The morning sun had been blown away by fast-moving rain clouds, and shrubs and treetops were thrashing about as if frightened by what was moving in. Giroux ignored the silence and went on outlining the assignment for them to find a route between the RL Logging site and the Matax trailhead — much like the intrepid Sir John Franklin, except without the ships, she said. Dion didn’t know much about history, but he knew the Franklin expedition had not ended well.

Maybe everyone else was thinking of Franklin too. Giroux lost patience and snapped, “If nobody puts your hand up in two seconds, I’ll have to raise it for you. I need somebody big and healthy and just bursting with vim.” Still, nobody’s hand went up, and just as Dion feared, she was looking at him. “Big and healthy, anyway. You’ve just volunteered. Thank you very much.”

* * *

They gathered their gear and drove together up the mountain in the SUV, Spacey behind the wheel. She seemed to have gotten over her hatred enough to make small talk, but it was just speckles of cool commentary, and he didn’t bother responding much. Up at the cut block, the rain had stopped but the temperature had plummeted. Rob Law was away, but his crew was at work. Spacey advised the foreman that she and Dion would be looking around the site for a bit, if that was okay. She didn’t pose it as a question so much as a fact, and the foreman only rubbed his muddy nose and nodded.

The two constables walked up to the ridge behind the office trailer and explored its perimeter for twenty minutes before Spacey gave a victory shout. Dion worked his way through the brush toward her and they stood looking downslope together, facing southwest. There were mature conifers above and beyond as far as the eyes could see, giving the place a cathedral feel, and uninvitingly thick undergrowth, mostly bare-branched shrubs. Spacey had found what might be called a track leading through the undergrowth, just wide enough to allow a man through.

She said, “Deer trail. This is as good as it gets, and it’s headed in the right direction. Stick close, and if you see anything at all of interest, notify me right away and I’ll flag it. Got that?”

Dion zipped up his jacket and followed on her heels.

The jobsite fell behind, and with it the noise, and they soon were walking in wild isolation, through evergreen woods that rushed and creaked at the upper reaches, leaving a darkened dead zone below. They didn’t talk, the only noise of their passage the soldierly thud of boots on soggy earth and the occasional muttered curse as they untangled themselves from low-hanging branches.

The trail lost definition and blurred into many small clearings. Sometimes it petered out and they had to wade through bushes until it picked up again. Sometimes it meandered in circles. Spacey marked their progress, tagging each fork with a strip of fluorescent ribbon, sometimes green, sometimes pink, occasionally blue. Sometimes she replaced the ribbons, one colour for another. She checked her compass and made notations in her log, and when Dion lagged for a third time, she told him if he wanted to go back, it was fine with her, she’d carry on alone.

Downhill rose to uphill, and the trees thinned and the path branched again, radiating every which way. Spacey stopped to catch a breath, damp and irritated. “It’s a frickin’ maze,” she said. “Up or down?” It was herself she was asking, and herself who answered. “Up, I guess. Follow the compass needle, right?”

She started to climb, as if she’d never stop. Dion stopped to take off his jacket, tying it around his waist and elbowing sweat off his brow. He called out that she could take the upper trail and he’d take the lower, maybe they’d narrow it down faster.

“Oh, that makes a helluva lot of sense,” she called back. “Let’s get separated and when you get lost we’ll just call in another search party. Giroux will be madly impressed.”

“I wouldn’t get lost,” he shot back angrily. But he followed after her. A few minutes later, the trail became difficult, then impassable, and they had to double back, and to allow her to take the lead he needed to back himself into the bushes, scratching his face and hands as she edged by. He stood wiping blood off his cheek and swearing, and Spacey looked back at him with disgust. She said, “Tell you what. Go back to the truck and put a Band-Aid on that, then have a doughnut or two. I’ll radio if I need you.”

The doughnuts she spoke of were the half-dozen ass­orted that Giroux had given them to take along for the ride, what she must have thought of as a reward. He didn’t need a Band-Aid and didn’t want doughnuts, but he did want to stop trailing after a woman who treated him like pocket lint. He said, “We’re supposed to stay together.”

“It’s a formality. Go on. I’ll get in worse trouble if those cuts get infected and you die. Anyway, I’ll get this done a lot faster on my own. Go.”

He returned alone to the logging site and walked down to Spacey’s SUV parked in the mud with sev­eral other vehicles. He stood looking for his keys. They weren’t in his trousers, but they were in his jacket when he untied it from his waist and went through it. He also found something missing: his personal notebook.

“God,” he said, standing in the parking lot, being stared at by passing workers. He tried beeping open the SUV to check if the book had fallen in there, but the doors remained locked. He looked at the keys in his hand and realized they were the wrong ones. These keys were to his cruiser. Spacey had the keys to the SUV.

He radioed Spacey and asked if she’d found a notebook on the trail. She said she hadn’t. He told her about the keys, and she said he’d just have to come back and get them. He returned to the narrow little deer trail and headed down it, following the fluorescent ribbons and keeping an eye out for the little notebook in its black leather cover. Most likely, though, it had fallen when he’d taken off his jacket to tie around his waist. So why hadn’t he seen it when he doubled back?

Because Spacey had seen it first.

The ribbons began to confuse him. He didn’t understand Spacey’s complicated system of colour-coding, and they soon led him into the middle of an unfamiliar glen, surrounded by trees, all identical and dizzying. He backtracked, looking for the flutter of neon plastic that had misled him, but now even that had disappeared in the maze.

Something seized in his chest, and the pain in his stomach began to cinch and twist. He radioed to Spacey again, and her voice, breaking up over the air, asked him where the hell he was. He said he didn’t know. She called him a jerk-off. She asked if he had his whistle on him. He did. She said to blow it, hard, and to blow it every minute or so until she located him. He did as she said, and eventually heard her voice calling through the trees. He called back, and minutes later she stood before him, puffing out jets of vapour.

“Sorry,” he said.

Spacey was sweaty and rosy-cheeked, stripped down to her shirtsleeves, jacket slung crookedly around her waist, but she looked pleased. “It’s okay. I got through to the Matax. It’s all ribboned out. We can head back.”

“You didn’t find my notebook?”

She walked backward to look at him. “How could you lose your notebook? My goodness, you’re a dumb fuck, aren’t you?”

Following her, also in his shirtsleeves, cap off and hooked to his gun belt, sweat soaking his back, he made it back to the SUV and climbed in. His faint hope that the notebook had fallen here died as he groped about under the seat. Spacey wasn’t speaking to him at all now, not even in those cold soundbites, which suited him fine. In silence, they returned to the detachment, found it all but empty, and Spacey put the box of doughnuts, untouched, onto the table by the coffee machine.

Dion was searching his workstation, and it wasn’t here either. Of course it wasn’t, because he took it with him everywhere. He heard his name and turned around. He saw the notebook fluttering in the air, attached to Spacey’s hand, being held up and flickered like a taunt. She was standing within punching distance, grinning at him.

“This is great stuff,” she said. “My god, I didn’t realize you were so good at listing things. All kinds of things that are so good to remember, like the names of the people you work with every day. There’s maps to help you get around this very complicated village. Even a cute little diagram here, how to tie a tie. I thought you were dumb, but you’re a very smart little boy, aren’t you?”

He held out his hand, said, “Give it to me.”

She flipped a page, searching. “I bet you’ve got instructions on how to make toast, too.”

He grabbed for the book, and she stepped backward, but he was faster, and stronger, and had her wrist in his grip and was pressing her arm back, ready to break it if that’s what it took. With a cry, Spacey let it fall. Dion shoved her hard, another bad call in a string of bad calls, and she crashed against a desk and from the desk to the floor. The clerk Pam popped her head around the corner and rushed over to help Spacey to her feet, but Spacey seemed winded, unable to move. I broke her back, Dion thought, dazed. Down the hall a door opened, and a man appeared saying, “What’s going on here?”

Dion leaned to pick up his notebook where it lay near Spacey’s shoulder, but was pulled upright by his arm, spun around, and propelled away, back against the nearest wall with a thud. Constable Leith had him pinned and was staring at him, close-up and angry, asking him what the hell was he was doing.

Spacey was back on her feet, supported by Pam, and he stared at her, knowing he hadn’t broken her spine but finding no comfort in it. “He tried to break my arm. Look.” Spacey exposed the pink friction burn on her wrist that was already starting to bruise. Dion twisted out of Leith’s grip and looked with longing at his notebook on the floor. Not that it mattered now. She’d read it, she knew, and she’d tell everyone.

“You going to press charges?” he heard Pam asking her. It sounded not so much a question as a recommendation. He looked at Spacey and saw her face twisted like a gargoyle.

“Hell no, I’m not going to press charges. I’m going to have you crucified, that’s what, fucking maniac.” She scooped the notebook from the floor and thrust it at Leith. “I found this. I opened it up to find out who it belonged to, and he went berserk. Pam saw it all.”

Leith took the book and shook it at Dion. “Is that right?”

“No,” Dion said. “She —”

“You want me to read you your fucking rights?” Leith’s finger was pointed at Dion, in case he wasn’t clear enough who was in trouble here. He said, “Better yet, get out. I’ll book you tomorrow. You’re fired. Get your shit and go. Guns, keys, badge, on the table, now.”

Still damp and gritty from the mountain, Dion unloaded the key to his cruiser, his .22 Smith & Wesson, his RCMP ID card, on the desk in front of Leith, punched the front door open, and left the building. His face was wet with sweat and the tears of frustration, and the wind coming off the mountain seemed to turn him to ice as he crossed the highway to the Super 8.

* * *

Actually, Constable Leith had no authority to fire him, Dion knew. It was just a hotheaded temporary suspension. But it hardly mattered. The real shit would hit the fan over the next few weeks, and he wouldn’t work another day. Criminal charges were unlikely, but the notebook would be examined, and the investigation into who he really was would be long and painful. He should have known, should have backed off, taken early retirement when it was offered. It wasn’t just a matter of rebuilding muscle and reconnecting the synapses. It was his mind, not a missing limb. He’d lost depth, and now he finally understood that depth could not be restored at will.

He changed into his civvies and left the motel. His mind was oddly blank and carefree, or maybe he’d just blown a fuse. After some wait, he flagged the town’s lone cab on the highway. There were only a couple of bars in the area, and he directed the cabbie to the one out in Old Town, which he’d stepped into briefly once before. The Old Town bar wasn’t a cop hangout. The customers were mostly native, mostly young, all strangers. The music was too loud and too country, but he didn’t care. The cavernous interior smelled of beer and deep-fried everything. He was eyed as he passed through, as if they sensed who he was or what he represented, but that didn’t matter either. From experience he knew that if he ignored the world, the world returned the favour.

He chose a small round table near a side exit, where a low dividing wall and a fake palm tree buffered some of the noise, far from the pool tables where the brawls usually broke out. He had a simple contingency plan if a fight should break out: he would pick up and go.

With a double Scotch on order, he sat back to study the beer coaster. When he’d done with the coaster he watched the big-screen TV, which was tuned in to curling. The sound was muffled, so he couldn’t hear the play-by-play or catch the rules, but the object of the game was simple enough: get the thing to land in the bull’s eye.

He was on his second double, still fixed on the curlers, when Scottie Rourke slung into the chair beside him, a mug in his hand of that pale gold draft that everyone up here seemed to favour.

Rourke said, “Hey!”

“Evening,” Dion said, not pleasantly. He hadn’t expected company and didn’t want it except in the most hands-off way. But company had found him, and he hadn’t sunk low enough to get rude and tell Rourke where to go.

“Firstly,” Rourke said, “I gotta tell you, I don’t hold it against you personally, pulling in Frankie like you did. It’s that SOB Leith out fishing. Gotta find his bad guy at any cost, right? Guilt or innocence? What’s that? Nothing. It’s the bottom line that matters.” He waved his beer glass about, and he’d had a few already, by the looks of it. “You ran out of worthwhile leads, is that it? Just wanted to harass the locals, show you’re earning your keep?”

“Maybe,” Dion said. Flatly, to show he wasn’t playing.

Rourke snorted. “And in the end you had to let him go, no charges laid, right? Well, am I right?”

“If you say so.”

“Know what I think? I think you pulled him in just to stir things up. You were desperate. Maybe he’d crack under pressure, or maybe he’d confess just to get you off his back, hey? And who cares if he’s innocent. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. Well, am I right? Am I?”

“Don’t ask me.” Dion spoke with the huskiness of rising anger. “Could I just sit down and have a drink for once in my life?”

Rourke flipped his hands in startled surrender. “Okay, okay. Don’t shoot, Officer.”

“It’s okay. Just don’t grill me.”

They sat quietly for a minute. Then Rourke wanted to know if Dion wanted to play some pool. Dion didn’t, thinking sooner or later the man would get bored and leave. Instead, Rourke sipped his beer and looked settled. After a bit more silence he said, “How’s the ticker?”

“Dead.” Dion showed him his new multitasking miracle of technology. “Fifty bucks. Works like a charm. Should have done it in the first place, like you said.”

Rourke frowned as he leaned forward, booze gusting out on his breath. “Gosh, no. I’m sorry. I really am. That thing means a lot to you.”

“It’s not your fault. Can’t put the fucking thing on life support, can we? I threw it in the river.”

Rourke was thrown back in his chair again, he was so shocked. “What? Why? You shouldn’t have done that, man. That’s kind of an antique. Maybe somebody else could have fixed it. And even if they couldn’t, you could have got a few bucks for it, for its historical value or whatever.” He sighed and dug in his pocket, bringing out his wallet, drawing out bills. “Here’s your money back. No, I insist. I’ve been accused of a few things in my life, but I’m an honourable man.”

“Keep your money,” Dion said. “I don’t care.”

“No, hey —”

“I said forget it.”

“Then I’ll buy you a goddamn drink, how’s that?”

“Fine.”

Rourke bought a round and raised a toast. Then he sulked. Then he said, “Totally wrong place to throw something you love, the river.”

“Seemed kind of poetic to me.”

Rourke shook his head with conviction. “People say the river’s beautiful, and it is, like a woman. But it’s also a mean, dark bitch. Just try to step into it, even in midsummer. It’ll freeze your nuts off then rip you to pieces. No, you want a good send-off, go upward. There’s so much paradise around here to inter your loved ones, if you know where to look. You want somewhere open to the skies. The Gates of Heaven, that’s where my ashes are going when my time comes.”

On Dion’s good days, he caught glimpses of paradise here in the north, but mostly he found it cold, badly lit, and monotonous. His own ashes, he had hoped, would sail out from the balcony of his North Vancouver high rise and join the city smog, and maybe a few molecules of him would drift farther out and be taken away by the ocean. But that wasn’t going to happen. Even unemployed, he didn’t have the heart to return to the Lower Mainland. He’d stay in the north, get some shitty job, end up in a no-name urn, buried in a grotty little graveyard in Smithers. “Gates of Heaven,” he said. “What’s that?”

“It’s self-explanatory is what it is,” Rourke said shortly, and Dion didn’t care to pursue it. To take the small talk in a less tedious direction, he asked how come Evangeline hadn’t come out barhopping with him.

Rourke swiped the air dismissively. “Evie’s not the catch you seem to think, bro. She’s a Calgarian whore, and I’ve told her to pack her bags, get the next bus back to Cowtown.”

“That’s a bad idea. Whatever kind of catch she is, she’s probably your last.”

Rourke was pleased, maybe because he too wanted off the topic of failure and death. Or maybe because fielding insults was more up his alley. “Fuck you too.”

“So you picked her up in Calgary?”

“God, no. She was hitching through to Rupert to visit an aunt, so she says, and I gave her a lift, and she asked if I could spare a few bucks while I was at it, and I said ‘Not for nothing, my dear.’ So she came along to my trailer, and lo and behold, has been here ever since. But like I say, she’s leaving. The thrill is gone. Brains of a chickadee, but she eats like a horse. And you’d think she’d pick up a broom once in a while and give the place a dust. No, I can’t afford to sustain a duchess on my wages. Anyway, cheers. Here’s to girls.”

They clinked glasses.

“She’s free then?” Dion said, half joking. “Single, available? Up for grabs?”

“All of the above. But if you hook up with her, take my advice and lock up your valuables.”

It was getting late. Dion had come to the bar by taxi, and Rourke, who said he was temporarily without a proper vehicle for reasons he’d rather not get into, had come on his bicycle, a regular old one-speed of metallic blue. The two men stood outside the front doors around midnight, parting ways. The rain had let up by now, and for once the night was not so bitterly cold. Rourke said he could feel spring in the air. Dion said he couldn’t. Rourke pushed off through the puddles on his two wheels, spraying mud and slush in his wake, and Dion started toward town on foot. He had enough cash for a cab ride back but felt he could use the walk.

Half an hour later he didn’t feel like he could use the walk anymore, and had his phone out to call for the town’s sole cabbie, but realized he didn’t know the number. His was a regular cellphone, not a 3G with a brain that could pull information out of thin air, so he was stuck.

He continued walking until headlights coming from behind fanned a glare over the road ahead. A dog started to bark somewhere in the darkness, racing closer, a territorial warning but not aggressive enough to worry him. He turned to stick out his thumb at the approaching vehicle, the raised headlights of a large truck, the lights on high beam expanding at a speed that said it was going faster than anybody should be travelling on this kind of backroad, especially with a pedestrian here glowing like a jack-o-lantern.

The dog came pelting out of a driveway, and the truck veered away from the dog and straight at Dion, and his instincts already had him heading for the shoulders of the road. Drenched in light, he scrambled up the high snowbank, and the truck’s bumper sheared off a great swath inches from his leg, straightened out sharply and kept going, fast.

Dion watched its tail lights disappearing. He heard a yelping and looked at the road and saw blood.

He stood over the injured dog, a shaggy black animal, middle-sized. The dog was no longer yelping, its eyes rolling at him sadly. The damage was bad. There were guts and crushed limbs, and he had his phone out to call 911. But you don’t call 911 for animals, do you? You bundle them in your car and take them to the vet. Or as a last resort, you shoot them in the head.

He crouched down. An injured person shouldn’t be moved, but did the same go for dogs? Out in the middle of the road like this, it posed a hazard. He scooped his arms carefully under the creature, embraced it, and with difficulty got to his feet, smelling feces and blood, feeling its rear end hanging heavy. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said, rushing up the driveway from which the dog had appeared. The house at the end of the driveway was a tall A-frame with lots of fancy detailing, its front smothered in oversized, soggy looking bushes. The windows were lit with cold white light. He had no hands free, so he gave the door at the top of the steps a thump with his boot. A medium-strong thump, loud enough to be heard, not so loud as to frighten.

The door opened, and a woman looked out at him. She looked at his face, and then at the dog dying in his arms. “Oh my god, Coal,” she said.

* * *

He knew who she was, Mercy Black-something, who managed the band. Coal lay on a blanket in the living room, beyond help. The woman was of average height, and slim and elegant, even in a thick bathrobe over long johns. Her long hair was light brown, clean and shiny and combed sleek. She knelt over the dog now, murmuring what sounded like a prayer.

The dog was no longer squirming and lay still. Dion looked around at the large, fairly bare living room. There was a two-seater and an armchair of white leather and chrome, which belonged more in a West Vancouver condo than a dilapidated Victorian in a tiny northern village. Three of the rough walls had been partially stripped down to show thin strips of wood nailed up at a diagonal, and the battered wood floor was strewn with old plaster. Sheet plastic lay here and there, and there was the strong smell of some kind of chemical in the air, varnish or paint stripper or glue thinner. A small wood stove crackled, but the room was cold. Or maybe it was just him, chilled by his close call with the truck, his horrific experiences with the dog. He looked from the woodstove to the one unmolested wall. A series of black-and-white photographs were up in frames, hanging over the blocky white-leather-and-chrome seating. The photographs were a series of some kind, some group shots, some showing individuals posed for the camera, and at a glance he knew they weren’t family photos but stills from her professional life. The musicians she had managed in her past, probably.

The setup confused him. She’d been active and prosperous. She’d left the city with her furniture and photos, so she was here for a prolonged stay. It wasn’t a happy stay, judging by her drawn face, yet she was undertaking renovations. By the looks of it, the renos were a DIY project and not gone at with any kind of expertise or organizational skill. Didn’t she have the funds to hire a pro? From his quick scan, it felt to him like a mild form of madness.

“He’s dead,” the woman said. She stood.

Dion went to crouch down by the animal and double-check. He was no doctor, but he’d dealt with enough deaths over the years to know when a being wasn’t coming back. He nodded at Mercy, and she said, “Could you please put him out on the back deck for me?” She crossed the room to an exterior door with a small square window and held it open for him. Dion lifted the dog again, wrapped in its blanket, and took it into what turned out to be a small, enclosed verandah. “Put him there,” the woman said, pointing to a place on the floor between a chest freezer and a basket chair. “I’ll call somebody to take him away. Can’t bury him here, his home, unfortunately. Ground’s too hard. Poor Coal. I rescued him from the pound, you know. Just hours before he would have been put down.”

Dion laid the dog down where she indicated and stood, rubbing his mucky hands on his mucky jeans. For the first time Mercy looked at him, and she gave a start, and reached out both hands, as if she wanted to either grab him or keep him at bay. “Oh no, you’ve got blood all over you.”

He stepped back. He said, “It was a pickup, with a raised suspension, I think. Dark, quite new. Know anybody around here drives something like that?”

They were staring at each other, like two actors from two different plays on the same stage, confused but determined to get through it. She raked her hands through her hair, blinking. “Everybody,” she said. “And everybody drives crazy fast on this road. You’ll never catch him.”

Dion wondered if the truck had veered to avoid the dog or was gunning at himself. He wondered if its bumper had smeared any identifying evidence into the snowbank. Jayne Spacey drove a little Rav, so it probably wasn’t her. Her ex maybe, Shane. He could do some checking, but wouldn’t. Not enough data and not enough interest to bother.

He followed Mercy to a bathroom, and she left him to wash off at the sink. The bathroom was large and its fixtures had once been grand but had become loose and rattly, the finish rubbed flat. The toiletries looked pricy and the towels were white and fluffy, too good for a filthy man to be washing off dog shit and blood, so he filled the sink with hot water and used his palms to scrub his face and neck. He used the hem of his T-shirt to dry off.

When he came out she was in the living room, and she had a tumbler of Scotch in each hand. She held out a glass and said, “You look like you need this. I know I sure do.”

He took the drink and drained half the glass. He was studying her face, looking for signs of trauma. He’d never owned a dog, but Looch had, once. It was a terrier. The dog had died of old age, and it was the only time Dion had seen Looch break down and bawl. It had taken at least a week for the man to regain his spirits, but he’d never wanted another dog, that’s how painful it had been.

Mercy seemed depressed, but he had the feeling she’d been depressed before he kicked the door. She said, “I put some more wood in. I’m already running low and rationing. This is my first real winter here, and I thought two cords would be plenty. It’s impossible to keep this house warm. It’s impossible to stay warm anywhere in this horrible place.” She gave a shiver and then frowned with what he took to be anger at herself. “I’m sorry if I offended you. I didn’t mean to insult your hometown. You’re from around here?”

He wasn’t offended. He wasn’t actually listening, much, his mind still full of headlights and tail lights, and a dog in pain, a dog gone quiet, facing its own death but looking up, making contact in its last moments. He was still thinking of Looch’s terrier, and close to tears, and hating himself for it. He hadn’t cried in his life till waking from coma, and now look at him. Disgusting. Weak and weepy and afraid of everything, he couldn’t get through a day without his eyes welling up, sometimes without warning. Sometimes out of the blue.

To hide the tears, he looked at the walls, fixing on the photographs, all those people and their instruments. Mercy featured in many of the photos. There she was in an outdoor shot, a casual but posed group photo. She stood between two men, an arm around each. The lighting was strange, not quite natural.

He was touched on the arm by icy fingers, gave a start, and looked aside, down, into her eyes. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you want to sit down?”

He finished his Scotch and handed her the glass. “No, thanks. I need to call a cab. I don’t know the number.”

“Oh, of course, you mentioned you were walking back to the highway.” It was about all she knew of him, which way he was heading. She didn’t know his name or that he was with the police, and since he actually was no longer with the police, it didn’t really matter. She had a cellphone in hand, ready to call that cab for him, but paused and said, “I’m getting the feeling you’re from elsewhere. What’s your name?”

He didn’t answer, distracted by her stare. It was unsettling. She was attractive, somewhere in her forties. She had clear skin and well-defined features, but most startling were her probing grey eyes. She was concerned about him, he could see, but the concern was scientific. She said, “Have we met? You look familiar.”

“I doubt it. I live in Smithers.”

“And what are you doing on this lonely road in the Hazeltons in the middle of the night?”

“Just finishing a job,” he said.

“Oh. Who do you work for?”

“Odd jobs,” he said, admiring his own ability to lie on the fly. Better yet, to lie without actually lying.

“That’s kind of serendipitous,” she said, with a lift of her brows. “Because as you can see, I’m in desperate need of an odd-jobber. I’m tackling this house on my own, and not too well. Maybe we can work something out.” She didn’t allow him to answer, moving on to a more immediate problem. “You’re still quite dirty, you know. And you stink. You’re welcome to have a shower. You’re welcome to stay the night, if you’re in no big hurry to leave.”

True, he stank, and he took her words at face value. There was nothing scientific in her manner now, only concern. She said, “Sometimes a person can be more traumatized than he knows. I think you’re traumatized. I probably am too, it just hasn’t hit me yet.”

He had a shower, but he didn’t stay the night, though she offered again, almost insistently. Instead she drove him back to the hotel in a silver Beamer that might have been glamorous once but now had a cracked windshield and a great dent on one side. She kept her eyes on the road the entire way, as if enemies might pounce, and he wondered if her nerves had been shot by a recent MVA. Like his. She repeated her suggestion of hiring him to help with the renos.

“Also, I’ll need Coal taken care of,” she said. “Poor Coal. How about it? There’s at least a month of work for you, with that drywall. You could stay at my place, of course. It’s huge. You could have the whole top floor to yourself. I’ll pay well, better than what you usually get.”

“I don’t think I’ll be back this way,” he said.

Her profile looked tense, angry. She said, “Still, take my number, in case you change your mind. And give me yours.”

“I saw some ads on the bulletin board at the IGA, men looking for work.”

“Hm,” she said. “Okay.”

At the parking lot of the Super 8, she idled the engine, wrote her number on the back of an old business card, and handed it over. He didn’t offer his number in return. Then he climbed out and the Beamer scudded off, slithering on the entrance to the highway. One thing was for sure, he thought, watching the tail lights disappear: her send-off of Coal was about as moving as the flick of the fingers.