by John Farrow
‘I’m not,’ Sandra replied, and they both smiled at one another before returning to a different conversation and their meal.
iii
Their joy carried them into Émile’s room. The physical had been absent from both their lives for some time. His muscularity surprised her, although it should not have, she realized, this man who’d worked with horses since childhood and had attended to a farm before becoming a cop. For Émile, the electricity on contact with her skin astounded him. Mutual surprise and discovery yielded to passionate intensity, then later, their tender explorations.
They were lying curled and contented, in the shock of love, when the first violent volley occurred outside. The sound was startling, and in their state, disorienting. They did not know that the shattering sound came from a baseball bat missing a head and smashing a car window instead. The night erupted.
By the time he reached the window, peeking around the blind due to his nakedness even though the lights were off, Cinq-Mars saw about two dozen combatants arrayed in the street below. Kicking, punching, swinging chains. Growling and grunting. He felt it prudent to dress. Sandra flicked on a light switch and covered her breasts with the top sheet. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Bedlam. A fight. It’s the bikers.’
‘Do you have to go?’ He was tugging on his pants.
‘Their fight. Not my town. But if I’m pulled into it somehow, I’ll want my pants on.’ He was trying to take the edge off his alarm.
‘Should I call the police?’ Sandra asked. ‘In case?’
‘I’m the police.’
‘Should I call anyway?’
‘Call.’
Dressed, he raised the blind and peered below.
‘The front desk won’t answer,’ Sandra reported.
‘Dial nine. Get an outside line.’
‘I tried that. Nothing happens.’
‘Stay here,’ he instructed her. The room’s safe was in the closet by the front door. He opened it and extracted his holster and weapon. Cinq-Mars went downstairs where he showed his badge to the biker on-duty. ‘Out.’
‘You want to fuck with me?’
‘Not sure. Maybe I’ll kneecap you first, then decide.’
The thug noticed the pistol and obediently slumped out the door.
The night manager was sitting on the floor like a dog who’d suffered a reprimand. Sheet-white but he could still function and was beginning to stir with the biker out of the building. ‘Hook up the phones. Call the police,’ Cinq-Mars instructed him. The old guy had seen a few things in his day although this night was taking the cake. He made the call. By the time Cinq-Mars stepped outside, sirens wailed. A citizen had probably alerted the police sooner than did the clerk.
His call though put more units on the streets and ambulances as well. The night became a jeremiad of wailing sirens.
Men slammed one another to the pavement. Punched, kicked, kneed, elbowed. More than one combatant moaned in the dirt and held on to his testicles. Blows hit home; jaws popped. Cinq-Mars noticed a telling difference between this brawl and any other he might expect from men like these: the total absence of serious weaponry. A couple of bats and a couple of chains, but even those tools had fallen to the pavement and no one took an interest in retrieving them.
Curious, that.
The lack of weapons made the battle seem benign, and whatever it was about, the fight appeared to neutralize itself. A tussle between four men was being broken up by six, and two guys remained locked on the ground bound by each other’s grip. Three men lay on the pavement unable to rise from the damage done to them. Their injuries apparently took care of whatever score needed to be settled.
The first police unit wailed on to the scene and from the opposite direction a pair of ambulances followed.
Cinq-Mars maintained his position on the front stoop of the hotel. He leaned against a post. A uniform suggested he move back as more cops arrived. He showed his badge; otherwise, he did not impose himself on the proceedings. One ambulance peeled away with a victim; a second was loaded and a third showed up. Cinq-Mars displayed his badge again as he strolled through the battalions of bikers and cops right into the rear of the second ambulance. ‘Give me a minute,’ he told the medic before the next guy was loaded in. ‘Put him in the other one.’
He sat down opposite a bloodied man.
‘Well played,’ he told Paul Lagarde who was holding a towel to his bloody head.
‘What you mean by that?’
‘I counted twenty guys. Only fourteen were here at first. Then you. That’s fifteen. Five more showed up. I presume those five include the men who stayed at our motel a few nights ago.’
‘Maybe,’ Lagarde submitted. ‘In the confusion what do I know?’
‘Confusion, my ass. Those four were in the fight and like everybody else, their faces are bloodied and bruised now. That part was convincing.’
‘Can’t say,’ Lagarde admitted.
‘The total lack of knives gave you away. But like I said, well played.’
‘Something on your mind, Cinq-Mars?’
‘DNA. Off the carpets where Officer Isaure Dabrezil went down and from the cuts on your guys faces.’
‘Yeah, if it still exists. That DNA, I mean. That sort of thing gets lost or bungled in the system sometimes. I don’t trust it.’
‘More where it came from.’
‘You think? The grapevine – you know about the grapevine, Cinq-Mars? I heard those carpets got removed. Where they are now, you think?’
The man’s confidence staggered him. ‘So much for being the peacemaker,’ Cinq-Mars noted.
Lagarde removed the towel from his head, rested his wrists over his thighs and leaned in closer. Blood popped along his brow, sticking to his long and stringy hair. He needed stitches. ‘Like I told you, it comes down from the top, a hit like that. Like you told me, or you made me think about it anyway, maybe somebody wanted me to look bad for it.’
‘You said,’ Cinq-Mars reminded him, ‘that it had to be an outsider. That could be. But you’re an outsider, Paul. Living in a motel. Same with those close pals of yours.’
‘Let’s say that I didn’t like the fucking guilty arrow pointing right between my eyeballs. If an order comes through the door for a serious hit, if an outsider is brought in to carry it out, that don’t point an arrow at nobody. Especially not me. I get it now, what you said. I didn’t before.’
Cinq-Mars knew that he was catching him at an opportune moment. ‘The vote.’
‘My buddies are not my enemies. But here we are. At war.’
‘This show tonight wasn’t war.’
‘Tonight was nothing. Wait for what comes.’
‘No stopping it?’ Cinq-Mars inquired.
‘Not by you. Like I said, cops will like it. Lots of dead bikers. Seventh heaven for you guys.’
‘And you can guarantee that no innocent bystanders will also be killed or maimed, even accidentally?’
Lagarde shrugged to acknowledge the issue. ‘It’ll be a mess,’ he prophesied.
Cinq-Mars leaned in closer himself. ‘You’ve taken sides, Paul. You were a full-patch member of the Hells Angels yet I see you’ve torn yours off. You’re Rock Machine now.’
‘I been moving that way for a while.’
‘Take whatever side you’re on and help me with my case by giving me something – a truth, it has to be true – give me something that goes against the other side. You’ll be protecting your own. Anyway, all’s fair in war, right?’
Lagarde nodded and rotated his head from side to side. ‘Run down where you’re at so far.’
‘Isaure Dabrezil is dead. Florence is dead. Why are they dead? That’s one question. Here’s another. Jodi and Courtney are kids, but Jodi has knowledge of what’s happening.’ A bluff. But a substantive one. He wouldn’t want to be on a witness stand himself. He didn’t know it for a fact, but Courtney told him that Jodi had told her that everything turned around Abi. To know that, Jodi had to be
in a loop, and he had assessed her background which had been a revelation. With some confidence he asked Lagarde, ‘How come?’
‘The Hells sent Jodi in,’ Lagarde said. ‘My old gang. She shot up a store, something like that? Not what you think. She didn’t panic. She did it on purpose. The whole point was to get arrested. The Hells would take care of her in prison. We – they, I should say – run the prisons, right? Then we – they – worked her through the system to arrive here. They worked Abigail through the system to arrive here, too, after her. For a different reason. Follow me so far?’
‘I follow. What else? What do you know about Temple? Or Rozlynn? Anything? How are they involved?’
‘Temple’s a helper for the new side. My side. Leave her alone in this.’
‘Temple’s buying guns for you, or showing you how,’ Cinq-Mars pointed out. ‘How do I leave that alone?’
‘Don’t judge.’
‘She’s not coming off the radar screen.’
‘Temple’s invisible. She does what she does. She knows how to do. She is an asset. Who you call Rozlynn, I know nothing. Anybody else?’
‘A woman named Doi. Another called Malka. Older ladies.’ He expected no reaction. He was surprised when Lagarde hesitated.
‘Them I don’t know,’ Lagarde said, but why so slow to say that?
‘I know quite a lot about Abigail,’ Cinq-Mars told him. ‘I arrested her. Tell me something I don’t know.’
‘She made friends with Flo,’ Lagarde told him as though that was a serious matter.
‘She did.’
‘Some people maybe thought that could be a problem.’
‘How so?’
‘Think about it. Maybe Flo was supposed to be trouble for Abigail. Instead they became friends. You see? Somebody somewhere might’ve figured out that that wasn’t right. Not the way it should be. Not Flo’s purpose. If she wanted to get off the hook for throwing acid in the face of a biker’s moll, because she needed to get off the hook for that, or the alternative—’
‘The alternative?’
‘Whacked. She didn’t want to be whacked, she had to make up for the acid. Her job? Making friends, not part of it. You follow?’
Sort of. But yes, he did.
‘Maybe she was asked to switch sides and didn’t. Or maybe she wasn’t asked and did. Listen to me, Cinq-Mars, the SQ thinks Isaure Dabrezil was one of theirs. Right? It won’t be the first time in history they might be wrong.’
As instructed, he listened. He said, ‘That doesn’t get your people off.’
‘Time will tell. It might. But don’t miss the point here. If Flo was in with today’s Hells, then Temple or Malka might’ve been against her. Leaning that way anyhow. If she was in with what is now the Rock Machine, and remember, it didn’t exist then, so it’s hard to know what side was her side, and which side she was on, then Jodi and Marie-Philomène could’ve lined up against her. Hard to say. Even for me. Look, my head hurts. Kinda bad right now. I need to get to a hospital. Stitched up to keep me a handsome motherfucker. Scars, I got enough. If you don’t mind too much, time to piss off.’
Cinq-Mars was willing to let him go. He knew that the man had secretly loaded his responses with a clue.
iv
Upon his eventual return to his room, Cinq-Mars found the bed abandoned and a note on his pillow.
Émile,
Totally beat. You will be too whenever you’re back.
Take care. See you in the morning.
Love,
San
He didn’t know her room number. He resigned himself to sleeping alone again, although he wasn’t certain that sleep would come easily given how his head buzzed. He was not long for the pillow – hard to judge as he fell asleep quickly – when his phone rang. He snapped it up, expecting the call to be from Sandra and hoping that she had changed her mind.
‘Hi,’ he said. A modicum of sexiness infused his tone.
‘Sergeant-Detective Cinq-Mars?’
He gave his head a shake. The voice sounded familiar, but in his sleepiness, he couldn’t place it. ‘Yeah. Who’s this?’
‘DesSaulniers.’ Alexandre DesSaulniers, Chief of Police. His boss.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘You’re still alive.’
‘I am. Why? I’m not necessarily fully awake, sir.’
‘Maybe my news will change that. I had a hard time tracking you down.’
‘Yes, sir. I booked out of the motel for a hotel. Better digs. Eighteen bucks more a night. The department can afford it, I’m sure.’
‘Why move?’
‘Long story, Chief.’
‘Good that you did, maybe. Are you aware? Somebody broke into your old room and shot up the mattress. Twenty rounds. The question is, did they know the bed was empty or did they think you were on it. Either way, a cause for concern, no?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Cinq-Mars agreed after a pause. Concern was an understatement, but he could not improve on the opinion in his current state of surprise. He had to assume that the assailants believed he was sleeping there. Which meant the bikers who had escorted him into town were not the mattress killers. They wouldn’t ask for that kind of trouble.
Still. A chill coursed through him. Never mind that he might have been in that bed. Under slightly altered circumstances, Sandra could have been in it, too.
But no. Thank God. He’d never have the bad sense to take her out to that dump.
Still.
‘Very least it’s a warning,’ DesSaulniers continued, another understatement. ‘Take care, Cinq-Mars. I know you’re fucking religious. If you say you left the motel on a whim, that could make me religious, too.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
‘Strict vigilance, Cinq-Mars.’
‘Yes, sir. No question.’
Strict vigilance. Somebody shot up his old mattress. The one he was now sleeping on felt less safe.
He had an idea. Cinq-Mars dressed and went downstairs. He had gained the trust of the night manager by kicking out a biker earlier. He parlayed that connection into receiving Sandra’s room number then had the clerk scrub her name from the hotel’s register, adding a Mr Alphonse Lemay as the occupant. He’d knock first. She might admit him. Under the circumstances, her bed was the preferred option for the night, not the one under his name.
A preferred option. Perhaps that might be true for the rest of his life.
He went upstairs after talking to the night manager. Went to his room and retrieved his pistol. Then went to her room on the next floor up. He knocked. She admitted him.
He made sure the lock was secure with his pistol on their bedside table.
DOI
i
Their wish for a languorous morning in bed vanished before they roused themselves for the new day.
The telephone jarred them awake.
Startled from his dream state, Cinq-Mars swore under his breath. A call this early meant trouble. Doubly so if someone had taken the trouble to track him down in another’s bed.
Sandra lit out for the washroom. Cinq-Mars sat up and answered with a perfunctory, ‘Bonjour,’ as though warning the caller that this had better be good.
Warden Paquet. The alarm in her voice was unmistakable even as she fought to exercise control. ‘We have a situation, Émile.’
‘What sort of situation?’
‘Whose room are you in?’ she wanted to know first.
‘I’m lying low.’
Paquet wasn’t buying his story. She made a sound similar to a snort that may have been a snort.
‘Not low enough if you located me.’
‘I live here. I know people in this town,’ she explained, then filled him in on her crisis. She didn’t give an order, she didn’t have that authority, and yet she let him know that he was expected back at the penitentiary lickety-split.
As he put the phone down, Sandra detected his disquiet. ‘What’s up?’
‘A hostage-taking. Inside the pen. I better go.’
They kissed quickly and he rushed out the door, then poked his head back in. ‘By the way, you’re now here under an alias. You are Monsieur Alphonse Lemay. Just so you know.’ Then he headed first to his own room for a fresh shirt and his badge. She didn’t tell him that these interruptions, sudden emergencies, and even the ludicrous name-change were intriguing, an add-on to why she was interested in him. She didn’t mind the excitement or the danger. The sense that critical matters should be at stake in their lives felt about right to her. Perhaps she’d been immersed in the pastoral ease of the horse farm for too long. The change was enticing.
When she thought more deeply about it, though, she recognized that she was romanticizing the risk. To live a life where she did not know if her man would remain alive come nightfall was probably too severe a counterpoint to a quiet rural life. She reminded herself to think this whole deal through, upside down and inside out, and to permit her persistent doubts a voice.
ii
Cinq-Mars zipped across the countryside in his Beetle. Not the gentlest of vehicles on a ridiculously rough road. Quebec blames its weather, cold snaps and sudden thaws in winter for the plentitude of potholes and ripped surfaces. Cinq-Mars shuns the excuses but braced himself for the jarring, bone-splintering shocks. He figured his car’s undercarriage wouldn’t survive another two weeks driving out to the prison.
Not at this speed.
He arrived famished and once through the security checks asked for a donut, a croissant, an Oh Henry! – if they had to choose a candy bar from a machine – and coffee. He missed his customary lox on a Montreal bagel. While he was waiting to be led to the scene of the incident, a guard brought him an egg-and-bacon sandwich on an English muffin. Brilliant. The paper cup for the coffee was large and full. Sensational.
A different guard took him through the gauntlet of opening and closing locked doors until he stood at the entrance to the unit that housed the crew he’d been investigating. Heavily armed guards at the ready, both men and women, had stood down. The unit guards had evacuated the premises under threat of a hostage – in the warden’s words as she brought him up to speed – ‘being sliced and diced.’