No Going Back

by Sheena Kamal

  “Which is?” Leo asks.

  “Before the head of Three Phoenix, Jimmy Fang, fled the country and the case fell apart, there was some suspicion that someone on his side was talking to the cops.”

  “A snitch?” I ask.

  Brazuca frowns. “We prefer to call them ‘police agents,’ actually. But no, I checked with a police contact and I don’t think there was anyone official who went into witness protection. The information never had a chance to come out in trial.”

  “But you think someone was talking to the cops?”

  “I’ve been a cop, Nora. There’s some information you only get from close sources. I’ve been over the case time and again, looking through Three Phoenix associates. I narrowed it down to one guy.”

  In the waning daylight Brazuca talks about what he’s unearthed on the Jimmy Fang case, which may give me a lead on Dao’s network. Maybe even a way to find him before he finds me. Brazuca tells us about his police source and the criminology reports he’s read. The countless articles and interviews.

  Rain patters against the windowpanes, turning the little yard behind the kitchen into a pit of sludge. Brazuca and Leo are both animated, both so earnest. I’ve never been good at reading Brazuca, but, for what it’s worth, he seems invested in this. Maybe I’m growing as a person, because I don’t immediately discount the instinct to trust him. Even though there still may be a betrayal or two up his sleeve. I fall into the circle forming around us, but carefully. Like a woman with something to lose. Inch by inch, bit by bit.

  Finally, Brazuca turns to me. “One last thing, Nora. You can’t stay here. The people who’ve been watching you know this address.”

  “You can use my apartment in Chinatown,” Leo offers. “Whisper will be better off here, though.” An argument ensues. There’s no way I’m leaving her behind. Finally, Leo agrees to hand his keys over.

  After Brazuca leaves, we sit in the kitchen for a long time.

  To fill the silence Leo puts on Chopin’s nocturnes, which he believes Seb loved as much as he did. He thought Chopin was “their” composer when in fact the nocturnes were only special to Seb because Leo couldn’t get enough of them. Even in this, they didn’t understand each other. Or the love they shared. The Chopin is endless, playing from the laptop in Seb’s old study on a loop, our own personal dirge.

  The rain outside turns to snow, and I am riveted by the sight as it hits me that this is actually happening. Snow in Vancouver and, in order to find the man who’s threatened my life, we are going to look for a snitch.

  6

  “You’ve never really told me about your daughter,” Leo says to me, from the foot of the stairs.

  I pause midway up. “We’re not close.”

  “But she’s the reason you won’t get out of town for a while. You’re worried about her.”

  This is what happens when you let people in. They think they know you well enough to question your motives. The trouble with Leo, though, is that he actually does. “Dao knows who she is. He can use her as leverage. The fact that we’re not close is a good thing. For her.” I try to sound upbeat but fail miserably. There’s nothing cheerful about this situation.

  “Do you need help packing your things?”

  “No. There’s not much.” Then I ask him something that’s been on my mind since he reluctantly opened the door to me. “Why are you living here? Why is it you’re the one getting rid of Seb’s stuff?”

  He looks so miserable, I almost wish I hadn’t asked. “Seb left all his assets to his son, who’s just a kid. He had no other family. His ex was going to hire a company to pack up the house before she put it on the market. I offered to do it instead.” The last part he says while looking down at his bare feet.

  I get it. This is closure for him. He’s not ready to let go.

  It takes me no time at all to gather my meager possessions from the room upstairs where I lived for about a year. There’s an envelope waiting for me on the bed with my name scrawled across it. In Seb’s handwriting. Tucking the envelope in a duffel, I pile all my belongings and Whisper into my old Corolla, which still starts, and drive over to Leo’s Chinatown apartment.

  We’re quiet as we take the back stairs up to Leo’s second-floor unit. Whisper and I, we’re used to being stealthy. It comes from the years we spent living in the basement of Leo’s small PI company on Hastings Street, back when both Seb and Leo worked there.

  Leo’s apartment is noisy, a far cry from the sleepy Kits town house. There’s a covered balcony from which Whisper and I watch the goings-on beneath us. She’s still startled at my sudden reappearance in her life, so we go for a long midnight walk. It’s still snowing, lightly now.

  I listen as the sounds of the city find me in the darkness. Feel its beating heart.

  I let Whisper off-leash because I sense she’ll stay by my side tonight, and we walk until my mind clears.

  It’s not that I don’t want help. It’s that I don’t want the baggage that comes along with it. The responsibility of putting other people in danger.

  Brazuca had been nudging me earlier, testing me. He wanted to know my intentions with Dao. I’ve been thinking about that, too. Protecting Bonnie is number one. Making sure that it doesn’t spread any further than it already has is another.

  But his safety was on my mind also. His and Leo’s.

  When I was in Detroit, I was being followed by a gang member or two who’d been hired to kill me. I’d suspected Dao had been behind it, far too late. Brazuca confirmed it tonight. Dao, through his connections, had been having me watched. Biding his time until it was somehow easy. A murder in Detroit? Nobody would blink an eye. He knew that. It’s why he set those young men after me.

  They found Nate Marlowe instead.

  Shot him one morning as he stepped into his kitchen, before I could warn him, or move, or speak. I watched Nate fall to the ground, and I saw the light go out of his eyes. I sat by his hospital bed and told him how sorry I was, but it wasn’t enough. He had been the first man I’d let inside me in a very, very long time. It wasn’t a decision I’d made lightly, and I made it only because it was him. A musician who saw straight through all my bullshit and wanted me to sing with him anyway. I didn’t deserve him, but I didn’t need a bullet to take him away from me. Now, according to a new radio update, Nate is recovering at home. But his voice will never be the same.

  Dao has taken something beautiful from the world.

  The blues song I sang with Nate Marlowe, the one I’ve been hearing on the radio, is about a woman who is nothing but trouble. As much as I try to run away from it, hide, bury my problems or drown them in a barrel of whiskey or one of its substitutes, it always finds me. I’m caught unawares, with my pants down.

  I’m going to have to start paying better attention, taking stock.

  By Leo’s bedside I find a selection of healing crystals hanging from leather thongs. I take one down and hide it in his bedside table by a half-empty box of condoms, making sure to keep the condoms in front for when Leo goes looking. Safety first. Then I thread the brass key from my pocket through the strip of leather and tie it around my neck.

  Taking stock goes badly, worse than I could have anticipated:

  Intuition, jacked.

  Strength, poor.

  Cardio, not impressive but better than your average citizen.

  Dark circles, under eyes.

  Excessive mucous, nostrils.

  Old gunshot wound, shoulder.

  Old sprain, ankle.

  Fresh scratches, arms and legs.

  Fresh purple bruises, ribs.

  Fresh scarring from smoke inhalation, lungs and throat.

  Spite and vengeance, heart.

  Continuous battering, soul.

  I heard a stoned hippie say once that a complete body transformation is possible after seven years. We shed dead cells, can repair or erode tissues along with general health and well-being. After seven years it is possible to be a whole new person. Imagine that. But
seven years seems like a long time. I might not be alive to experience this new me.

  Sleep eludes me after coming up with this impressive list. I flip through one of Leo’s old magazines and read about cosmetic solutions for the dark circles. In the bathroom mirror I see a stranger in need of some eye cream staring back at me. This face could scare away any teenager, the hollows beneath my eyes more like shadowy pits, but I don’t linger on that thought. I’d caught a glimpse of the price of the cream in the magazine, and there’s no way I can afford to do anything about the circles just yet, maybe ever.

  Most of the things on the list are unimportant in the grander scheme of things, and I can always start doing something about my strength. My soul is what it is, and there’s nothing to help it. As to my heart and the trouble I’m in, that’s another story. But not one for tonight.

  I’ve been avoiding the envelope Seb has left for me, but now there’s nothing else to do but open it. He has left me a copy of the manuscript for his memoirs and nine thousand, four hundred, and eighty-seven dollars in cash. The manuscript I put aside because I can’t bring myself to read it. The money I keep handy.

  I think Seb must have known me better than anybody on the planet. The year I spent looking after him coated our bond in steel. I watched him deteriorate, took him to his appointments, picked up his meds, helped him with his syndicated news blog and the freelance assignments that came his way—along with the research and organization of the memoirs. He gave me the money from the blog and assignments. And I guess he stashed some extra as well.

  If it had been officially bequeathed, the lawyer wouldn’t have been able to find me or I might have even been required to declare it on my taxes, if I ever decided to file them. Seb must have known that. He was likely also aware how far I can stretch money like that. Certainly long enough until I can figure something else out. It isn’t a fortune, but it’s enough to buy me some time. For what, though? He didn’t know about the trouble I’ve found myself in when he left it for me, but he must have sensed it. That I might need some cash to tide me over.

  I don’t deserve this kindness.

  I miss him suddenly. In our study, where we worked on his memoirs, he sat by the desk or on the couch. We talked everything through before a word was written. He got sicker and sicker as the days went by, but his mind was still lucid. I wonder how he was at the end, but I don’t have the right to know that. I wasn’t there for him during his last days because I went to Detroit. How alone he must have been.

  My phone rings.

  I’m tempted to ignore it because I’m depressed and because it’s late, but the call is from a Toronto number. That can mean only one thing.

  “Are you okay?” I ask Bonnie, as soon as I answer. “Did something happen?”

  “Hi . . .” She takes a moment here to think of what to call me, then settles on nothing. “I didn’t think you’d answer.”

  “Why did you call, then?”

  She hesitates. “To say goodnight.”

  I check the clock on the phone. “It’s two a.m. there.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay . . . goodnight.” I can’t think of what else to say, but this is clearly the wrong choice because she replies with a curt “’Night” and hangs up.

  What was that about? I have no idea, but I know that I handled it—whatever it was—badly. There’s no winning with teenagers.

  With the brass key around my neck, I sit in the darkness with Whisper at my side and watch the neon pink light of the Szechuan place across the street stream from the open window into the room.

  Dawn can’t come soon enough.

  7

  That was a mess, Bonnie thinks, after she hangs up.

  She’d called Nora for a reason, and it wasn’t to say goodnight at two a.m. Like an idiot.

  In her room, propped up on her bed with her sketchpad in front of her, Bonnie frowns at the bit of nothing she’s drawn, an uneven attempt at sketching Nora’s face. She’s been at it all night, and it’s still the worst drawing she’s done in years. The only reason she’s even doing it is because she’s regretting the way she treated Nora when she’d just showed up out of nowhere.

  Bonnie hadn’t expected to see her birth mom in front of her all of a sudden.

  She’d just gotten off the streetcar and was putting away her headphones because she rarely wore them while walking alone anymore. Then she’d looked up from the knot of wires and there was Nora, looking beyond tired. This woman, this stranger that she didn’t immediately recognize as her mother.

  She didn’t know what to do, so she didn’t even say hello. Didn’t even ask her inside.

  Instead there was some rambling about her nightmares from the time she’d been kidnapped. It sounded as though she blamed Nora for what had happened to her, but she didn’t mean it like that at all. She was scared for Nora. Seeing her there in person did nothing to calm her fears. She’s as scared for Nora as she is relieved that her real mom, Lynn, had adopted her. It’s a bad thought because Nora isn’t a terrible person. She just struggled and was hurt and couldn’t look after Bonnie even if she’d wanted to. Bonnie knows all that, she does.

  She was just too surprised to remember it all on the phone. The sound of Nora’s voice like sand. Empty as the desert.

  Bonnie flips through last month’s sketchpad and takes a couple of photos of the tattoo she’s been drawing, the one she’d seen on her birth father. It’s of talons, dripping with blood.

  It’s these photos she sends to Nora because something tells her that this is what their bond is based on. The time that she was kidnapped, the hurt and the fear, then the hope when she’d learned that her birth mom had come looking for her after all. That she did care.

  So what if she couldn’t ask Nora inside? At least they had something. They both faced the people who had taken her, both faced that fear. Her mom Lynn had been scared, too, but it wasn’t the same. Lynn hadn’t gone searching the way Nora had. Lynn thought Bonnie had run away, which was fair because she’d done it so many times before, but it had been Nora who’d tried to rescue her.

  And Lynn doesn’t know what it’s like to feel as though you’re being followed.

  After hip-hop class this evening Bonnie felt eyes on her the entire streetcar ride home, but she couldn’t figure out who’d been looking. It was the same feeling she got some mornings before heading to school.

  It was just a feeling, but after she’d been kidnapped, feelings like this were impossible to ignore.

  This is what she wanted to talk to Nora about, something she instinctively knows Nora will understand. But she couldn’t find the words when it mattered. It hasn’t even been two years since she first saw her birth mom. When she’d been younger, she thought they would have so much to talk about. She’d imagined the conversations they’d have. It was stupid, but she always felt that talking to the woman who brought her into the world would be easy.

  Easy doesn’t even come close.

  Every now and then they’d send photos, though, and for a while it had been enough. Images from their days, their lives. It was something. But maybe it’s not enough anymore.

  Bonnie turns off her light and takes a peek out her bedroom window.

  There’s no one out there.

  Just like the other hundred times she’d looked, waking in the middle of the night with an unsettling feeling, only to peer into the darkness. “Stupid,” she mutters to herself.

  She doesn’t see the car lingering farther down the street, engine off, driver masked in darkness. Hadn’t noticed it had been there for a few hours. Doesn’t see it pull away several minutes after her light goes off.

  No, by then she’s fast asleep.

  8

  When Brazuca opens the door to the Hastings Street office the next morning, the dog lifts her head, assesses him, and finds him unworthy of further contemplation. She puts her head back down. Not surprising. He’s never had much luck with females of any species. Why should this be any different?<
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  He finds Nora slumped over Leo’s desk, Leo’s laptop in front of her. Within a moment of him entering the room, she wakes. A switch that’s instantly flipped on.

  “Did you come in through the back?” he asks.

  “Of course. No one saw me.”

  He goes into the kitchenette and puts on a pot of coffee. He has spent the past several weeks obsessing over Nora’s safety, and here she is, sleeping in the office. Seeing her at Leo’s desk gives him a sense of relief that he refuses to analyze too closely. He tells himself that what he feels for Nora could never be sexual, except it had been, once.

  He hears Nora leave with Whisper, but they’re back in about ten minutes, Nora brushing the snow from her fall jacket. She joins him in the kitchen, somehow knowing the moment when the coffee is finished. They take their mugs of hot coffee back to Leo’s office.

  “Bonnie sent me photos of the tattoo she remembers. She’s been drawing it. It matches the Three Phoenix ink. I also found this.”

  On the computer screen she shows him an image he’s well familiar with. Of Jimmy Fang standing in front of a shrine with his shirt off, the distinctive talon tattoo inked on his chest.

  Brazuca nods. “That’s the old school of gangsters. I hear some of them are moving on from identifiable tattoos. Which is why Dao must have been upset to see Three Phoenix ink on Kai Zhang. Not only did he not earn it, but it’s also not the way some of them do business anymore. Stands out too much.”

  “I’ve been catching up on Three Phoenix,” Nora says. “There’s not a lot about them on the web. They went underground twenty years ago. And, you’re right. The last time they were on anyone’s radar was when Jimmy Fang was arrested. He jumped bail, disappeared. I was just getting into the charges.”

  Brazuca sits across the desk from her and rubs the ache out of his bad leg. “The police were looking into money laundering and extortion, but the main case against him was based on a shootout in front of an underground gambling den in Chinatown. He was identified at the scene, and his fingerprints were found on a weapon used at the shooting.”