Diamond Run

by Michael Croucher

  She grabbed my hand, and moved towards the house. “We don't need to stay out here you know. Let’s get inside. Hurry, and I’ll get us each a snifter of cognac.”

  Sue stopped again and took off her shoes. “The grass is soft after that rain yesterday. These heels are digging right in.”

  The lawn area was dark. The only light came from a lamp she’d left on in the kitchen, and it was filtered by a sheer curtain. Just ahead and to the left of the house, a line of fruit trees was silhouetted against a sky that was barely illuminated by the glow from the city of Hamilton to the west.

  Even on the darkest night, someone who’s used to looking can spot movement. I did. Somebody was walking in the shadows. Whoever it was slithered into the last row of the fruit trees. No doubt about it, some jerk was prowling on Sue’s property. I stood still, and held Sue back. A light breeze rustled through the trees, and somewhere in the distance an owl hooted. Other than that, I heard nothing.

  A shadow emerged from the trees and turned towards us. It waved in a come here motion. I let go of Sue’s hand and moved towards it.

  “Who the hell is that?" I called. There was no response.

  The figure took a step towards us and stopped. I looked at Sue. “Get in the house. I'll check this out. It’s probably some yahoo from that old place near the drive-in.”

  Sue’s voice was calm. “Kids come through here all the time. Why don't I just call the local cops? Come inside.”

  “I don't want any damned druggies traipsing around your property.”

  I kept moving towards the intruder. Sue watched from the back doorway.

  When I was about fifty feet away, the figure moved into the fruit trees again and vanished. I drew the snub-nosed revolver from my ankle holster and ran towards the spot where I’d last seen the creep. I checked the orchard in every direction.

  I found nothing. Son of a bitch!

  Aside from fruit trees there was no place he could hide. I searched for ten more minutes, but came up empty. Shit!

  I met Sue at the back door. “That was frigging weird. Whoever it was got out of there in a hurry. Get me a flashlight, and I'll check out the area again.”

  “Phil, I watched. It just seemed to evaporate. It sounds strange, but believe me; I’ve seen things like that out there before. Whoever... or whatever it is, has left. Come on inside.” She clutched my elbow.

  “That's bullshit Sue, people don’t vanish like that. They make sounds and leave some kind of trail when they’re on the move. The jerk is just lying low.” I looked towards the fruit trees again, watching for any movement. “He’s out there somewhere. Get me a light. and I'll find him.”

  “No, Phil, you'll be wasting your time. Please, let's have a drink and relax.” Sue pulled me inside and locked the door behind us. We went upstairs.

  A few minutes later, Sue brought two snifters of cognac and the half-full bottle into her bedroom. She stood directly in front of me and gave me the snifters to hold. I stood there, cradling the bottom of the snifters between my fingers, gently swirling the liquor and warming the glasses with my palms. That was something I’d learned from her.

  Sue got out two vanilla-scented candles, lit them, and placed them on the night tables. She put the bottle on the floor on my side of her bed, and turned off the main light.

  She stood directly in front of me and released the flimsy dress straps from her shoulders. The dress slide to the floor. She gripped the front of my pants in her hand.

  “I’m not the least bit tired,” she said. She gave a gentle squeeze. “Oh good, neither are you.”

  She pulled me onto the bed.

  Chapter 7

  Just after dawn, I went down to the kitchen and brewed some coffee. I took a big mug of black out to the front porch and dropped my butt into one of the Muskoka chairs. The air was crisp and refreshingly cool, but I didn’t feel motivated to do any of the promised repair work. I sat with my hands wrapped around the steaming mug, savoring the view and the smell of fresh coffee.

  I felt relaxed, and stayed that way for about ten minutes. Unfortunately, I’m the kind of person who doesn’t stay mellow for long. My mind flicked back and forth between the image of the creep in the orchard and the blood bath at the Crescent Moon. I took a deep breath and tried to push both images from my mind, sipped at the coffee and started thinking. About me. Sometimes that’s a good thing, and sometimes it isn’t. I was having a decent morning until the isn’t side took the upper hand.

  My life was going through a transition and I knew it. I had to come to grips with where it was going. I felt unsettled, not so much about the job, despite what had happened to Zip, I loved police work, and all the garbage that went with it. Maybe I wouldn’t always enjoy it this much, but even after fifteen years on the job, the nastier the assholes were, the tougher the cases, and the dirtier the crime scenes, the harder I dug in. Bring it on.

  Something else was eating at me, something I’d missed or overlooked. I was determined to pin it down. After a few more minutes and a few more sips, a thought occurred to me. Maybe my blinders had gone on during the investigation of Nathan, and had caused me to miss something important. Had I got too wrapped up in my feelings for Sue, his former girlfriend, and overlooked something obvious? Hell, there was a fortune in diamonds still unaccounted for, diamonds that had come through Nathan. Fortunes like that don’t just disappear. They get concealed. Smaller lots would have been dispersed easily, and without too much risk, but the quality and quantity of diamonds that we’d traced to Nathan would have needed time to cool down, a few years perhaps. Either that or a sophisticated fencing operation to move them quickly.

  I was starting to think that after we’d arrested Nathan, we’d backed off on our search for those goods too quickly. We had our big bust and sat back, satisfied. But we’d dropped the ball, ignored the bigger picture. And, that incident with the prowler last night had me thinking. Maybe others in the know hadn’t backed off. There had to be scumbags and heavies on the hunt. Something in Nathan’s background could point us in the right direction. All of a sudden, I wanted to get going. Wanted to start drilling down.

  I was frustrated. Not with Sue. I truly believed she knew nothing about her respectable boyfriend’s shadier business activities. This was on me. I should have moved the investigation along. I should have ordered a forensic audit on Nathan‘s books. I sat in the chair and stewed. If Sue had stayed upstairs for thirty minutes longer, maybe I’d have thought myself into a better frame of mind, dismissed my dislike of Charles, and gone back to enjoying the fresh air and the view.

  Sue arrived, coffee mug in hand. Looking relaxed and cuddly, she sat in the chair next to mine and rested her mug on the broad arm of the chair. She patted the back of my hand. “Nice sunrise, don't you think?”

  My head was still in the wrong space. “Yeah, nice. Did you sleep alright?”

  “Fine... how about you?”

  I sipped the dregs of my coffee and didn’t make eye contact with her. “Not bad, I guess. I couldn't sleep in though, a little restless.”

  Her eyebrows knitted. “Were you thinking about the party, or our visitor in the orchard?”

  “Neither,” I lied. “I haven’t given the party or that prowler a second thought.”

  “Good. But I think there’s something else bothering you, Phil.” she swirled the coffee in her mug. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  She’d brought the party up, and I was still a little miffed about it. So, I decided to go with that. It was a better option than talking about my frustrations on the job. Why the hell would she want to hear that I’d dropped the ball when I’d investigated her boyfriend, that with a little more legwork I could have added five years to his sentence? She definitely wouldn’t want to hear about Zip’s bloody corpse, and the shards of his skull littering The Crescent Moon. The party thread was the obvious choice.

  I zeroed in on Charles. “What does he write about?”

  “Who?”

  “Char
les.”

  “Spirituality and its importance to soldiers during combat. Right now, he's doing research for a book on the War of 1812.” She looked towards the road and shifted in the chair. “Charles thinks dying is a spiritual thing. His book is about the religious backgrounds of soldiers who fought in this area during the war. It’s fascinating.”

  “The guy sounds like a bag of hammers. Has that tracing on the desk in your study have anything to do with his book?”

  Her voice stiffened, and she let me have it. “Oh, so you’ve taken some time to snoop around, or were you looking for tools to fix the shutter?”

  “Level with me here, Sue. That guy was panting all over you last night. Has that etching got something to do with him or not?”

  “Grow up, Phil. And yes, actually it does, it’s a tracing we took from a soldier’s gravestone, down near Lundy’s Lane.”

  “We took?”

  “Yes, we took. I’ve joined him on the occasional field trip. I find the topic intriguing.”

  “And his whack job girlfriend, Gloria, does she join you?”

  Sue scowled. “Damn you, Phil, not always, no. A couple of times it’s just been me and Charles... Why?”

  “I see, so it’s just you and Charles, both on your knees in some field rubbing stones. That’s lovely, Sue. Just lovely.”

  “Sometimes you can be such a jerk, Phil. I’m an anthropologist, the study of people and their activities at different points in history is one of the things I do. I’m interested in his research, and I have access to people and other resources that may help him.”

  “Sure, that’s it, Sue. Just a field trip. Any luck, and you’ll turn up a big bone.”

  She stood, leaned forward, and snatched the mug out of my hand. “It’s time you went home.”

  I heard the screen door bump shut behind her. Then the inside door closed and locked. I’d had it coming. But with all the crap that seemed to be piling up around me, I’d needed to let off some steam. I usually felt a hell of a lot better when I did that. Not this time. I knew I’d damaged a relationship that was becoming important to me.

  Sue was right. Sometimes I can be one big asshole, an idiot who destroys the good things that come into his life. What should have been a pleasant morning had blown up. She would need time to cool off. Maybe she never would.

  Screw it. Even though it was my day off, I needed to get my mind off the argument. Suddenly, I was in the mood for work, and I was going to start with a closer look at Nathan’s file. Moments later, I pulled my car out of her driveway. Without a wave, I turned onto Ridge Road. I would be back in Toronto inside an hour.

  Chapter 8

  Ten minutes after arriving at my desk, I received a request from Inspector Jack Duggan, who’d heard I was in the building, to report to a conference room on the fourth floor. I did. Jack was a big man. A rugged RCMP veteran with years of experience in prairie policing, international drug enforcement, and several organized crime task forces. He was a street cop, and a good one.

  Prior to coming to Ontario, he had served in Saskatchewan and Alberta. The RCMP was contracted in eight of ten Canadian provinces to provide regular policing in addition to their federal mandates. The two non-contract provinces, Ontario and Quebec had their own provincial police services. In other words, the Mounties in contract provinces, like Saskatchewan and Alberta, patrolled the highways, small cities, towns, and reservations that didn’t have their own forces. They got down and dirty, sometimes as often as big city cops. I knew Duggan thrived on that kind of police work. He could be counted on to patrol back alleys, booze cans, or city slums to further a case file – whatever it took to nail a bandit, Jack was all in.

  I found Jack studying a flip chart in the conference room with a young corporal. The minute I walked in, the corporal turned the flip chart to a blank page, concealing what had been written on it. Jack turned to him. “I’m gone for about an hour. We’ll pick up on this later.”

  He steered me to a carafe and stack of Styrofoam cups on a table at the side of the room. “Grab a coffee, Phil. Come down to my office. I need to go over something with you.”

  THE FIRST THING I NOTICED in his office was a Uher tape player, and a tape box sitting on his desk. Likely a work tape from the Zephyr project. Usually, if Jack needed to listen to a tape, he went right to the project rooms to do it. So, unless he had decided to do some transcribing, and there was no chance of that, something else was going on.

  “Read this report, while I set this damned thing up,” he said.

  He handed me a supplementary report on the interrogation of our prisoner Clifford. While I read the report, I watched Jack out of the corner of my eye. He took the work tape out of its box and dropped it onto the player. It was pretty evident to me that someone had put a stinger up his ass. He was in control, like he usually was, but I could tell he was pissed.

  The report held no surprises. The bus run to Montreal had been a decoy. The drop was actually made in Toronto, at Union Station. A gym bag containing some of the bigger pieces had been placed in a rental locker. It was to be picked up by someone who would get the stones removed from their mounts. This was stuff I already knew.

  Jack had given me the supp to keep my mind occupied for a minute while he prepped for the real reason he wanted to see me. He closed the office door, sat down, and tapped his pen rhythmically on the desk.

  I put the report down. “Get on with it, Jack.”

  “I’m getting pressure to take you off the Zephyr project.”

  “From who?”

  “The only two people, other than a few of our squad members, who know about this tape. My Superintendent and one of your Deputy Chiefs.”

  “Why the fuck would they know about one of our tapes? And how is it connected to me?”

  “If a cop’s name comes up on a tap, and raises one hair on one eyebrow, the project CO has to inform those two specifically. They’ve both been in the building, listening to this tape. I’ve got to have some answers, Phil. Listen up.”

  “It’s those two assholes, Vince and Paulo from Sure Clean, on a FAM tape,” he said. “They were pretty careless about what they said...grousing about the Nathan Borg takedown. Some good intel, but there’s other stuff the brass wants answers to. Stuff about you, Phil. The pertinent parts have been spliced together.” Jack handed me a set of earphones. I connected them to the Uher. He pushed down the play button and sat back in his chair.

  Hearing those two assholes talking about me and Sue hurt like a knife in the gut... Other comments twisted the knife in ways I could never have imagined. I mean, what they said about Sue was all bullshit, but there it was. The stuff about me is on a permanent recording that will linger on the case files, and my personnel record for the rest of my career...if it lasted past today. One part of their conversation, even though it was garbage, I knew would gnaw at me for awhile.

  “...word from the pen is she knows about the rest of the shit from New York...deposited shipments into safety deposit boxes for him...he’s hoping to keep Lustre happy, making a show that when it’s safe to move the stuff, he’ll be able to pay off the loans...Whatever he did with the stuff, it puts his girlfriend right in the spotlight.”

  Jack was watching my every reaction. With that last comment, I’m sure he noticed me go pale. Another comment on the tape could be career changing.

  “...she’s banging one of the cops who took down her old man...a guy named Mahood. I bet the jeweler was a little pissed...”

  Depending on how those senior officers reacted, my CFSEU stint could be in jeopardy, or I could get a shitty transfer. Christ, they already told Jack they wanted me off the Zephyr file.

  Jack took the tape off the Uher.

  “My ass is in a damned wringer here, Phil. How you answer my questions on this, and how I respond to your answers could determine where we both spend the next few years of our careers. Judging from your Deputy Chief’s reaction, it could have nasty consequences for you. I don’t want to lose this p
osting, and I don’t want to lose a friend and great investigator from the unit. So how the fuck can I win? I’ve got to get this right. So, answer me straight. No shading, nothing held back.”

  “No matter what, Jack, you won’t lose a friend. Ask the questions and do what you’ve got to do.”

  Duggan fiddled with the tape box. “You knew the brass was nervous about your involvement with Sue, despite her apparently spotless background.” He tapped the box. “But this has really raised their hackles. They were willing to wait on any decision until I’d met with you. And they left the final call to me, providing I drill down into this relationship, and that I come out one hundred percent certain of your girlfriend’s innocence.

  “You know what’s at stake here, for both of us, Phil... Did Sue have any involvement in Nathan’s scams?”

  “Jack, I swear to God, she didn’t have a clue. Not a clue.”

  Duggan looked at me for a few seconds and grabbed his deck of smokes from a drawer. We sat in silence while he lit up and took a huge drag. I knew he’d already made a decision.

  “By rights, I should transfer you off the Zephyr files,” he said. “But I want you and Ernie as the leads on this Marco thing. Just do me one huge favor.”

  “What’s that, Jack?”

  “If you get one hint, anything at all, that causes you to think differently about Sue, I want you to pick up the nearest goddamned phone and let me know. Then I’ll scramble and try to save both our asses.

  “In the meantime, get back to the Hammer, and set up a ring around her place. I’ll detail a dozen guys from our unit to start with, and order a surveillance crew from Mobile Support, just in case we spot this clown.”

  I nodded. Jack spun the deck of smokes on his desk.

  “We should take him down the minute we see him, but now we have this information.” He tapped the tape box again. “We could give him some rope, watch for his stashes, and recover what we can.”