No Going Back

by Sheena Kamal

  Kristof keeps his eyes on her face, but she doesn’t restrict herself in that way. She lets him know this is her home, her castle, and she’ll send long, lingering glances to anyone she damn well pleases. She gives him a slow look up and down. Taking in his slim, strong physique, the air of strength, the gray eyes like a Vancouver day, and the cheekbones that belong on a fashion model.

  “Nice, but not my type. Thanks anyway, Nora,” she says.

  When she goes, she leaves behind a sexually charged tension that neither Kristof nor I are in the mood for. We’ve both had a long day.

  It’s impossible to tell how Kristof feels about being nice but not nice enough. “The problem with using someone as bait is that if a person senses a trap, it’s over,” Kristof says.

  “Is Kristof a first name or a last name?” I ask.

  “It could be both, depending on a person’s culture.”

  “What’s it with you?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Even if Dao senses a trap, he might still take a chance. He despises me, remember?”

  “He doesn’t know about this place? About this . . . friend?”

  “No. He knows about another friend who I used to work for. Leo Krushnik. He has his own investigation operation on Hastings Street. The bikers watched Leo’s apartment and his office, but I’m not sure their people will still be on the job if Dao killed Curtis Parnell.”

  “I’ll have my team take a look at the place to see if anyone is keeping an eye on it.” Kristof looks through me, toward the door. I think he only came in to see where I was staying, to enter another line of data into the report he has created for me.

  “I’ll be in touch tomorrow,” he says.

  When he leaves, Simone comes back in. “That man needs a little excitement in his life.”

  I begin to laugh, out of sheer exhaustion. I take off my jacket. “You’re exciting.”

  “He should be so lucky. Who is he, anyway?” she asks, following me into the bedroom.

  I fill her in.

  “Everything is moving too fast. We’re trying to figure out who Dao is, where he is. We’re trying to keep up with the investigation to see if the authorities find him first. We’re trying to keep you and Bonnie alive while we do it. It’s too much. I’ve been looking into Van Nguyen, and since he doesn’t live at his West Van house, I’m assuming he has another property, maybe purchased through a shell company. I’m still working on it. Also not much on his alleged girlfriend, the restaurant manager. She’s still overseas, rumor has it in Dubai. Whoever these people are, they know how to lay low.” She shakes her head. “Okay, maybe it’s time to get Brazuca in here.”

  “No,” I say quietly.

  “Don’t you think he’d want to know you’re alive? And, more importantly, wouldn’t he want to be involved?”

  “I know he will. He always has before. But it’s still too dangerous.”

  “Is my favorite misanthrope growing some kind of conscience? I’m shocked and delighted. Alright. Give me an hour and let me finish up some work. Then we’ll go over everything we know about Van Nguyen.”

  Simone doesn’t know what happened between Brazuca and me in Indonesia, and after. Or that I’ll do anything to keep him from getting hurt worse than he already has been.

  Time passes, I don’t know how much. I fall asleep waiting for Simone to finish her work.

  The smell of fresh coffee jolts me awake.

  “You have to see this,” Simone says. She’s crouched in front of me with her open laptop, much too close. “They found him.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Her eyes are dark pools. There are currents of emotion flowing behind them. She’s trying to explain something to me and keep her feelings in check all at once. Though I’m groggy and part of my brain is still asleep, I understand this with a glance. Then I see why when she speaks next. “Dao. I think they took him into custody last night.”

  62

  I sit up. “How do you know? Did they release the information?”

  “Nothing has been released. The police aren’t saying anything. This was posted to the comment section of a news blog.”

  “Hard Facts?” It was infamous in certain circles for having a comment section that was used by criminals themselves. Seb used to work with the excellent journalist who ran it. Krista Dennings used to work with her, too. Calling it Hard Facts was a bit of an insider joke. The blog itself was solid, but the gold was all the useful speculation and shade in the comments.

  She hands me the laptop. “That’s the one. The Fugitive Squad or whatever they call themselves rolled up on a biker bar in Surrey. Apparently, it’s the second time in a week they’ve been there. They found a man matching Dao’s description and brought him in.”

  “Positive ID?”

  “No. Apparently, he didn’t speak—according to three separate comments. There was some horrific racial abuse on the part of the people commenting, saying that he wasn’t speaking because he’s an immigrant and doesn’t know English. Nora? What’s wrong? Please don’t look at me like that. This is good—it could be him. Nora?”

  I try to respond, want to respond, but it’s like some kind of fever has gripped me. Since I survived that burning warehouse in Detroit, I’ve thought of nothing but finding Dao and finishing this. But they caught him. It’s over. It just doesn’t feel that way right now.

  “Hey,” says Simone. “Hey, you.” She sets down her coffee mug and puts her arms around me.

  Edison Lam’s Point Grey mansion is a graveyard. All the lights are off, and Kristof is nowhere to be found. A little Chopin wouldn’t be out of place here. I buzz at the gate. There’s no answer on the intercom. The security cameras at the gate clock my every move, though.

  A car turns onto the street. I step into the shadows, not bothering to get into the Corolla, which I parked at the curb. It’s not even five a.m., and the sun hasn’t yet made an appearance. It’s too early for a house call, but Simone’s news has changed my plans.

  The car pulls into a driveway four mansions down.

  I cross the street and keep walking. An early-morning stroll without my dog is anathema to me. It feels wrong. We should be on these pristine streets together watching the world wake up. But I won’t go to her before I feel some kind of closure. Life is too precious.

  After circling around the block, I find myself in front of Lam’s house again. There’s still no answer to my buzz on the intercom. But I can feel someone there. It’s one of those rare moments I feel a certain level of sentience coming from an inanimate object. It’s not just a camera. It’s a window. There’s someone on the other side, watching.

  “Is it him? Is he the one they picked up last night?” I ask, speaking into the box. I turn to look directly at the camera mounted on the outer wall, the one closest to me. “Answer me, goddamn it! It feels too easy. Doesn’t it feel too easy?”

  The last question comes out as barely a whisper. I can’t explain it any other way. I’m thinking of Dao, knowing he wouldn’t go down without a fight.

  Something isn’t right.

  My calls to Bonnie go unanswered. Lynn and Everett, too. I’m so desperate I try Adele’s office, but it’s Saturday and nobody answers the company line.

  Then I do something out of character. I call the police, the Whistler RCMP. I tell them my neighbor’s house has been broken into and give the cabin’s address. I hang up and get into the Corolla.

  There’s one more call it occurs to me to make. “I’m going to Whistler,” I say to Simone.

  “Wait, Nora,” she says. “They’ve got to make a statement soon. They’ve already said there’s a suspect in the manhunt in custody. Let’s just hang on for a bit, okay? The weather is terrible. There’s another foot of snow coming our way. Don’t drive in these conditions.”

  “I have to,” I say. “I can’t reach Bonnie or her parents. I’ve already called the police to take a look. I’m just . . . I have to check.”

  She�
�s silent for a moment. Of all people, Simone realizes what it has taken for me to call the cops. “Fine, okay. What’s the cabin address?”

  I give it to her and hang up.

  After starting the car, I run back to the intercom. “I’m going to Whistler.” Once again, I give out the address. Just in case there’s someone listening.

  It’s snowing, a light down that drifts more than falls. It’s only until I get onto the highway that I remember I don’t have winter tires.

  There’s traffic approaching Squamish. On the radio they say the road closure has just been lifted about an hour ago. In the dead of the night, when police were apprehending a suspect at a biker bar, a minivan crossed the center line and collided with an SUV. Two people were killed and two airlifted to a hospital in the Lower Mainland. No names are being released at this time, authorities say.

  So it’s not really my fault that I’m driving faster than I should, on a road so dangerous that two people were killed on it just hours ago. It occurs to me if I drive a little faster, I could solve the problem of my existence once and for all. I’m so tired, so strung out on adrenaline, that a swerve into a railway doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Bam. It would be over. But not until I make sure Bonnie is alright.

  This drive, this treacherous road, it all seems to be leading to something inevitable. I just don’t know what it is.

  63

  I feel old. It’s entirely possible that I am old, but I keep hearing things like thirty is the new twenty, forty is the new thirty, and if you’re not dead by fifty then maybe you should be. There have certainly been enough attempts on my life for me to consider my own mortality. I’m like a cat, though. A worn-out, mangy thing that is dragged through life kicking and hollering up a storm while she sharpens her nails.

  I’m feeling mean like a cat, too, now that things are becoming clearer.

  The aggressive holiday cheer does its best to distract me. As does the weather, which is holding steady below zero degrees Celsius. We’re experiencing February-like temperatures and it’s not even Christmas. People think because there’s snow on the ground now, that there will be snow on December 25. Maybe it will happen. I’m not the person to ask. I’m not sure I’ll live that long, but I’ll do my best, if only for spite and vengeance.

  I’ve had it with this tired old film. It needs to be over. But there was someone watching Bonnie. Someone who figured she’s important to me, this daughter I’d given away.

  This child I never wanted to be born.

  How important, I never truly realized until I find the back door of Adele’s family cabin unlocked. I enter as quietly as possible.

  It’s too cold inside, even though the thermostat in the kitchen tells me the heat is on. A draft snakes its way through the house. The source, an open bedroom window. Bonnie’s window.

  The alarm has been disabled.

  Nobody’s home, but there are footprints going in and out from the unlocked back door. Not the front. The police haven’t left a friendly note saying whether or not they’ve been by to check on an alleged burglary.

  Bonnie’s and Lynn’s belongings are still here.

  I sit at the kitchen table. It’s snowing. Light flakes that drift down from above. The snow becomes heavier. Some of it has found its way inside through Bonnie’s window and the back door, bringing the damp inside. Memories of the last time I sat here come flooding back. There’s Lynn and her warning, of course. But there’s also Bonnie telling me about her new girlfriend, flushed with the excitement of young love. There’s me talking about Lebanon and Palestine, places I’ve never been to but are in my blood. About Winnipeg, where my father was born, and all the things I don’t know about that, either. I explained to her my confusion about it all, so she’ll know she’s not alone in hers.

  She told me about her abortion last year and how Lynn knows about it, but Everett doesn’t. Then she asked why I didn’t do one of those ancestry DNA tests and laughed at my suspicion of data harvesting. Then stopped laughing when her mind made the connection between blood harvesting—and the troubles she’s been through in the past.

  We talked all night while in the back of my mind I thought about Brazuca.

  Because my defenses are already shattered by what I’ve found in this cabin, I think about him now. The inch of skin like a distant memory. The gray at his temples. The long fingers and his limp, which he stops trying to hide the more exhausted he becomes.

  In this cold kitchen I think about all my actions that have led to this point. I’m shivering, so I get up to adjust the thermostat, an instinct I would have questioned in other circumstances, when I notice that the footprints outside lead not to the driveway where I parked but into the woods.

  Three sets of footprints. Into the woods. Three unholy sets, one larger than the others.

  Breadcrumbs. Leading away from the house.

  Snow falls. A black cloud blankets the sky.

  Something is waiting for me out there. It could be my daughter.

  Please don’t let it be her. Please.

  The snow sends light up from below as I continue on.

  64

  The little guesthouse looms up ahead. Nobody told me it was here, but it makes sense. Where are you supposed to stash in-laws and other unwanted guests but a place out of sight, hidden by the trees?

  I follow the footprints right up to the door.

  There’s a drop of blood on the snow. Crimson on white.

  The front of this guesthouse is protected by an overhang. This door, too, is unlocked. I push it open but don’t enter right away. There are no sounds coming from inside. It’s as cold in there as it is outside.

  I can’t move.

  Two shapes are huddled in the entranceway. One body covering another. Protecting it, even in death.

  It’s Lynn and Bonnie, of course.

  65

  This is even worse than Vancouver, Dao thinks. Rain he could put up with, but snow isn’t something he ever wanted to see again.

  He’s upset by what happened in the little cabin where he’d found the woman and the girl hiding. Their location was Nguyen’s last gift to him. They must have seen his car from the street and ran to the second cabin just in case he came knocking. As if he wouldn’t look. It had been snowing, too, so their footprints might have been masked—but they got it all wrong. There wasn’t enough fresh snow.

  Speaking of wrong, the cabin. Them running away from him. Him raising his gun. The woman, Nora, with the hood of her parka up. He only saw her from the back and his anger took over.

  When she fell he saw the red hair.

  It wasn’t Nora.

  His belly cramps up, almost doubling him over in pain. But it’s a pain that he’s become accustomed to. He goes back to his car, hidden farther along the street. That’s when he sees someone pass him and pull into the driveway of the cabin he just left.

  And he thinks he knows who it is.

  66

  Lynn’s dark red hair spills over Bonnie as she slumps over her, our daughter, soaking in the blood around them. She was trying to do the same thing I couldn’t. It’s a mother-daughter image I want to scrape from my brain.

  The hands of the clock above their heads creep forward.

  I hear music, but it’s no Chopin. With a start, I realize the sound is coming from me. It’s inside my head. It’s all around me.

  It’s a voice behind me, shouting.

  What’s the voice saying?

  I’ve slipped to my knees. When did that happen?

  “Get your hands up!” the voice behind me shouts.

  My hands go up.

  They’re yanked viciously behind me. I identify the RCMP officer by the yellow stripe running down the side of his black pants.

  Why is there only one?

  Then I remember the car accident. Death. Loss of life. More bodies and resources to the big bang-up on the Sea-to-Sky, the major crash. Nobody to investigate little burglary calls until now, when they send one lone officer.r />
  It’s cold, and he’s not wearing gloves. Maybe that’s why he drops the cuffs. As he bends, he sees something and begins shouting at someone in the distance.

  I know who it is before I look up.

  Dao has killed yet again in a fit of rage and returned clearheaded to see the damage he’s wrought. To see if I would come. And I have. I’m right here.

  The officer has his weapon drawn, but he’s too late.

  Dao shoots him. Three bullets. Forehead and two body shots. A professional job because he’s a professional.

  I find my balance and stand.

  “Why?” My voice doesn’t sound like my own. It’s a strangled, dying thing. I gesture to the house, to the scene just inside the door.

  He stares at me. He doesn’t look like the same man I’d remembered. He’s aged a decade since the Indonesia video, stooped, obviously in pain. Wearing clothes that are far too small for him and bareheaded in this weather.

  But when he speaks, it’s the voice I remember from my past. “Jin died because of you. And my son . . . he died because of you, too.”

  “What are you talking about?” I look back at him, slack-jawed, with absolute, mind-numbing horror.

  Because I see. I see now, what this is all about.

  67

  After seeing Bonnie and Lynn in the cabin, it becomes all too real. I remember with crystal clarity snow-covered mountains almost two years ago. A ritzy chalet. In the reflection of a window, an erotically charged look passes between a man and a woman.

  I followed the family to the wilderness of Ucluelet on Vancouver Island; I stood outside the Zhang residence and looked up. The waves of the Pacific Ocean crashed against the rocks, the surf coming far too close to my feet, but I was too arrested by what I saw to move.