by Sheena Kamal
When Dania Nasri said she heard “London Bridge” playing in the background as she spoke to my father, it sparked something. Memories of a little red music box. I remember that my father used to wind it up for me and it used to make me happy. I think that’s what love must be.
There’s another rumble over my head and then it all falls down.
50
Brazuca is regretting the amount of coffee he’s been drinking. It should have been kombucha, he thinks. He’s been cautious about his kombucha consumption because of the steep cost, even though he can afford it now. But now is, as always, too late. He’s already fallen off his health wagon and his stomach lining is paying for it. On his way to the airport, he tries Nora’s number again. The call goes straight to voice mail, but the mailbox is full. Most likely with dire messages from him. He’s also been texting her but, again, no reply.
On a whim, he pulls into a residential neighborhood in Richmond and parks in front of a two-story house. The lights are on inside and he can see shadows crossing behind the curtains. A man about ten years younger than he is opens the door. He’s dressed in a button-down shirt and tailored slacks, and his thick dark hair is swept off his brow.
“What’s wrong?” the man asks, upon seeing him.
Brazuca raises a brow. “I’m here to see Grace. I’m a friend.”
“Oh, I thought you were a cop. Sorry,” he says. “You just have that kind of face, I guess.” The man leads him into the house and toward the adjacent living room. “Grace didn’t tell me she invited friends, but welcome.”
Grace glances at them from the couch. There are a handful of people with her, whom he assumes are relatives since she didn’t invite friends like him. The grin on her face dies. She excuses herself as she makes her way over, dragging him back out the door. It’s not subtle.
“Nice to meet you!” calls the man who’d let him in.
“That your boyfriend?” Brazuca says when they are alone and the door is firmly shut between them and whatever festivities are taking place inside.
She glares at him, hands bunched at her hips. Tonight she’s wearing a dress that fits her, but is not as interesting or sparkly as her sister’s blue number. “Are you stalking me?”
He puts his hands up. “No. I’m leaving for a bit and I wanted you to have something.” He hands over the flash drive that he’d taken from her earlier.
She reaches for it automatically, turns it over in her hands. “My research?”
“And my report on your sister’s death. Everything I have is in there. You said you wanted to know?”
“Yeah, I guess I did.” Her hands unclench. She leans against the railing. “You look like hell.”
“Had a rough couple days.” Which is a massive understatement.
“I’ve been busy, too. Finally finished cleaning out my sister’s place. This is my first night back since she died. We’re celebrating my fiancé’s new job. He’s a lawyer.”
“The guy who answered the door?”
“Yeah,” she says, twisting the ring on her left hand, a ring that had not been present in any of his previous interactions with her.
He takes her hand, passes the pad of his thumb over the cool metal band. “How come you weren’t wearing this when we met?”
“I didn’t have it when we met. After my sister died, we decided to take a break. But I guess he thought it was time to move forward. He said he didn’t want to be away from me anymore. He proposed last night.”
“Congratulations.”
She looks at him, surprised. “You mean that?”
“I do.”
She hesitates for a brief moment, then comes to a decision. She hands the flash drive back to him. “You did all this work, tracked down who her supplier was, staked out that stupid bar, and figured out where that woman got her stuff and then who her boss was and then his boss. You know what I think? What the hell was the point of any of it? My sister is gone. She was miserable, she got high, and then she died. None of this explains why she did what she did, why she didn’t ask for help for her problem.”
“Would you have listened?”
She is quiet for a moment. “Maybe, maybe not. But we’ll never know now, will we? I gotta go now, Jon. But thanks for . . .” She loses her train of thought. Maybe she just can’t think of anything she’d like to thank him for.
“Yeah. You take care.”
“You, too.” She presses a quick, furtive kiss to his cheek before disappearing inside.
He watches the living room window from his car for a while, then drives to the long-term parking lot at the airport. There is no moon out tonight. No stars to look at. It’s just as well. Apparently the Tim Hortons across the road doesn’t carry kombucha, so he’s back to drinking coffee. There’s a flight to Atlanta with a connection to Detroit leaving in a couple of hours. But he makes no move to get out of the car.
A call comes in on his speakerphone. A Toronto number. Relief flares for a moment. Toronto is close to Detroit. Maybe Nora made it there and she has finally decided to call him back.
“Hello?” says a young female voice, when he answers.
“This is Brazuca.”
“Um, listen, I don’t know if you remember me. I saw you in the hospital last year when they found my mom . . . um, my birth mother I mean. Nora? You gave me your card and told me to call you if I remembered anything from . . .”
“From when they took you,” Brazuca says to Bonnie, Nora’s estranged daughter.
“Yeah. Look, I remember something. It’s a tattoo I saw on my—on his arm. My—”
“I understand,” he says softly. It was her own father who had kidnapped her last year when she’d gone missing. That’s what she almost said. My father. “Kai Zhang.”
“Yeah. I’ve been drawing his tattoo without realizing it. It just came back to me, really.”
“What was the tattoo of?”
“Talons. I can send you a sketch if you want?”
“Yeah, please.”
She goes quiet for a moment, then Brazuca sees an alert message on his screen as the text comes through. “There’s something else,” she says, when she gets back on the line. “The other guy, the bald one who was sometimes in charge of watching me?”
“His name is Dao.”
“Oh. Dao. Well, he got real mad when he saw it. I thought maybe my . . . Kai . . . he wasn’t supposed to get this tattoo. They fought about it for a while, but I didn’t understand what they were saying.”
“Okay, that’s good that you remember it all. Thanks for telling me.”
“Yeah, it’s just . . . I’m worried about Nora,” she says. “She sent me a photo. Of, like, her face. She took a selfie. Usually it’s of Whisper and now . . . it’s just weird. I have this feeling . . .”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” he says lightly, even though he can’t imagine Nora taking a selfie to save her life.
“It says on your card that you’re an investigator? Can you find her and get her to call me? She’s not answering her phone and I would do it, except I’m in Toronto.”
“I’m retired, love.”
“Don’t call me that,” she says, her voice going high. “I’ll pay.”
Last year at the hospital she’d been recovering from her own trauma, her own captivity at the hands of her biological father—a man that she’d never met before he’d kidnapped her. Bonnie had just gone in to see Nora, who was in and out of consciousness, talking nonsense when she woke. Bonnie came out of the room looking devastated. Her adoptive parents, Lynn and Everett, had their arms slung around her shoulders and there were tears streaking her face. Nora hadn’t recognized her. Bonnie had looked up then, and met his eyes. So he gave her his business card and muttered something about getting in touch if she remembered anything.
After a moment of silence, she sighs and says in the most aggravated tone, one only a teenager would have the balls to use, “Whatever. I’ll just find someone else.”
After she hangs up on him,
Brazuca stares at the sketch she’s photographed and sent. It is riveting. A sinister talon with what looks to be blood dripping from it.
If he was the kind of man to make charts, there would be a line connecting the Triple 9s to Parnell’s bikers, and another connecting both the bikers and the Triple 9s to the disappeared Jimmy Fang and his Three Phoenix group, based out of Hong Kong. Representing Three Phoenix would be a symbol of three bloody talons. Like the one that he’d seen on Lam’s laptop, in the photo of Jimmy Fang. The three-talon tattoo was Fang’s most prominent ink. Bonnie had only seen part of the design—but it was enough to send Dao into a fury. Dao, a man so dangerous that even Bernard Lam had looked like he was about to piss himself when talking about him. A man who, like Jimmy Fang, could disappear without a trace. He was that connected.
Brazuca has no doubt that Dao is still alive, and holding a grudge against Nora. She is, after all, the woman who killed his employer’s son Kai, and was somehow involved in the death of Kai’s wife. If she’d been involved in Ray Zhang’s death, however indirectly, would that have sent Dao into a rage?
Could it be that when Nora left the country, keeping tabs wasn’t enough anymore? That maybe he’d seen an opportunity to exact revenge—in a city that was so notoriously dangerous that a murdered Canadian woman wouldn’t raise eyebrows?
The longer Brazuca thinks about it, the crazier it seems.
As he sits in his car watching a plane approach, another photo comes through from Bonnie. It’s of Nora’s face. Tired, drawn, a lock of hair falling over her brow. Her mouth tilts up at the corners, a shadow of a smile there, though her eyes are direct and without any semblance of light. As usual.
He looks at the photo for a long time, not able to place why he is so disturbed by it. Then he finds it. What haunts him, what makes him get out of the car and onto the shuttle to the terminal, is that she tried.
51
In the distance I hear a woman ask, “She alive?”
A man replies. “Found her in a doorway. Wall collapsed all around her.”
“Squatter?” says the woman.
“Nah, Angel’s Night volunteer.”
I have visions of a neon shirt. I’m on my back, being wheeled somewhere. The stretcher continues its journey but it’s rough going. The ground beneath the wheels is uneven. They catch on something and refuse to budge. Near my head I hear the man curse. “Shit,” he says. “Goddamn piece of junk.”
I hear him move away. There are bright lights flashing beyond my eyelids. I don’t want to open them, but I suddenly remember that I’m in Detroit and I seem to be strapped onto a stretcher. Images of exorbitant American medical bills float through the air. Going to a hospital in America on my budget isn’t an option. My hands instinctively undo the straps holding me down. I get off the stretcher and immediately fall to my knees. My legs don’t want to work. I see the smoldering wreckage of a building nearby and everything comes back to me.
I wonder where Ryan Russo is.
When I blink the heaviness away from my eyes, I find my answer. To my left is another stretcher, but this one has a body bag on it. The image of medical bills is replaced by jail bars. With it comes the realization that although Russo is gone, I have a very powerful enemy in this world. My imagination makes a few connections that appear unlikely at first, but I can’t seem to let go of them. A kind of certainty blossoms within me. All along I was thinking that I was being pursued because I was looking into my father’s past but this has nothing to do with him. I’ve brought this on myself. There’s only one person who would want me dead badly enough to put a hit out on me, who would even have the resources to find me here in Detroit. I was responsible for the deaths of two people last year, both belonging to the spectacularly wealthy and well-connected family he worked for. Dao. Only, a man like Dao, if he was back stateside, would do it himself. So he’s not here in North America, but he is alive. This is the only explanation I have, crazy as it seems. But it feels right. It feels true.
The lights from a car coming down the street remind me that I called Sanchez back at Nate’s house. But I don’t know where my phone is.
I have to get out of sight.
My legs are useless, so I crawl on my hands and knees to the end of the lot where the grass is near waist high. The unmarked car pulls up to the curb and Sanchez gets out. He’s on his cell phone. Hidden from sight, I watch him shake his head at the empty stretcher and look around, confused. He calls something to a fire fighter in the distance, then moves cautiously toward the warehouse. The back of the building is still on fire.
From the grass outside I watch it burn. There’s something so wrong, and so beautiful about it. In the distance there is the wailing of another fire truck.
I begin to laugh. Something has come apart inside me.
For me hell is cold. What is happening here is a cleansing. Soon this building will crumble and something new will take over. I close my eyes, and wait for it to happen.
52
The last time Brazuca searched for Nora, it was in the wilderness of Vancouver Island. His limp had been so bad he was hardly able to walk the trails without slivers of pain slicing up his leg. He’d been prompted by Simone to go looking and aided by Whisper in his search. He would not have found Nora if not for the dog and now he wishes he’d thought to bring her with him to Detroit, if only for the company. It had been blind, stupid luck that he’d managed to get a tip from the first motel in Midtown Detroit he’d visited. The squinty-eyed woman at reception was much more talkative in person than she’d been over the phone. A business card led to a detective who’d talked to Nora about a robbery attempt in her room. An overworked detective who, Brazuca discovered, thought Nora’s life was in danger but who also believed that she was no longer his problem.
Sitting beside Sanchez on a hard bench in a Detroit hospital, Brazuca listens to a recording of Nora confronting two armed attackers in a house that belonged to a young blues singer. The message cuts off abruptly to her running footsteps.
After the recording ends, Sanchez glances over at Brazuca. “This was last night. At first we thought she was injured and would seek help. We think the fire that burned down the building she was found in was started by a couple of kids a witness saw in the area, watching. They poured gasoline all over that building, used a candle to ignite the fire, and put metal drums of paint thinner around to heat up, explode, and keep the fire going. Crude, but it worked. Whole place went up in fucking flames. There was debris all over that dump. The paramedics we spoke to said she was lucky to survive—she’d crawled into a doorway and part of the ceiling collapsed around her. They thought she’d find her way to a hospital eventually.”
“But she didn’t,” Brazuca says, because it’s Nora, and she wouldn’t.
Sanchez shrugs. “Not her style, I’m guessing, to seek help. We got the guys who were responsible for the attack on Nate Marlowe from a tip. One of them confessed and gave the other guy up as the shooter. So that case is closed.”
“But.”
“But whoever put the hit out on your woman is in the wind. These guys won’t talk about anything higher up. They know they’re dead if they do.”
Down the hall there’s a man fighting for his life because of this mess. Brazuca had been reluctant when Sanchez arranged to meet him here, seeing how he can’t get the image of Seb Crow’s still body out of his head. Can’t forget Krushnik in his grief. But he understands now this choice of location. Sanchez is likely hoping this will give Brazuca a dose of clarity of what someone like Nora can do to a man who lets his guard down. As if he doesn’t already know.
The Detroit detective could also be hoping for some insight to tie up loose ends.
They watch a nurse wheel a sleeping boy down the hall and disappear around the corner. “She’s not my woman,” Brazuca says eventually. Even the thought caused a certain amount of anxiety. “I’m looking for a triad connection here. Ever heard of Three Phoenix? Based on the west coast, but tied to Hong Kong.”<
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Sanchez shakes his head. “Not that I can think of, man. I can tell you one thing, these guys weren’t professional enough for triad, especially one that operates internationally. They missed Nora going on three times now. It was sloppy work.”
Brazuca gives him a thin smile. From what Sanchez has explained, it seems that Curtis Parnell had contracted the hit out to the wrong people. And that there would be hell to pay for a fuckup of that magnitude.
“Maybe, but you don’t know Nora.”
He isn’t surprised that she found a way to escape. He’d once called her a survivor and that’s exactly what she is, but not without consequences. Proof of her uncanny ability to avoid death lay on a hospital bed down the hall from them. The detritus she left in her wake.
“Is Marlowe going to make it?” he asks Sanchez.
Sanchez seems to weigh his words carefully. “I don’t know. That’s what I’m here to find out. I’m not even supposed to be on this case, you know. I’m with Robberies. This whole thing is now out of my hands.” He pauses, seems to wrestle with something internally. “So you have no idea where she would go now?”
“No.”
Nora on the run wasn’t something Brazuca wants to think about. Nora scared, alone. With a powerful enemy at her heels, one who has underestimated her yet again. But she is alive. This, at least, is something to hold on to. Something that he can tell her daughter.
With an abrupt farewell, he leaves the Detroit detective on the bench and follows the path taken by the nurse and the sleeping child. Making sure to avoid the room where Nate Marlowe lies in critical care with a perforation in his lung. A stark reminder of a life in the balance.
He’s not sure about Marlowe’s relationship to Nora, never bothered to ask Sanchez, but that he was almost killed because of her dangerous past is enough to make Brazuca move quicker. If he was a different man, he’d stop to think about why . . . well, he’d stop to think, period. His new leaf is withered by the coffee he’s been downing like it’s the elixir of life. Then buried under a mountain of calories from a cheeseburger an hour ago.