B.C. Blues Crime
Cold Girl
Undertow
Creep
Flights and Falls
Copyright © R.M. Greenaway, 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover image: ©shutterstock.com/rdonar. Select image edits by Chaz Greenaway.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Greenaway, R. M., author
Flights and falls / R.M. Greenaway.
(A B.C. blues crime novel)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-4150-8 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4151-5 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4152-2 (EPUB)
I. Title. II. Series: Greenaway, R. M. B.C. blues crime novel
PS8613.R4285F55 2019 C813’.6 C2018-903984-1
C2018-903985-X
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19
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Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
One - TONY
Two - AMELIA
Three - HIT AND MISS
Four - NIGHTFALL
Five - TOUCH AND GO
Six - LOVE LOST
Seven - STEEL
Eight - SHOT IN THE DARK
Nine - THE MAN WITH FLIES
Ten - GUNRUNNER
Eleven - TROUBLE
Twelve - BLUE
Thirteen - HIGH
Fourteen - STONE WALLS
Fifteen - INTO THE MIX
Sixteen - UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS
Seventeen - BIRDS
Eighteen - A BEAM OF LIGHT
Nineteen - LOOK UP
Twenty - FELLRIDGE
Twenty-One - HIGHER
Twenty-Two - RUSH
Twenty-Three - RIPPLES
Twenty-Four - THE GHOST AND MRS. VLUG
Twenty-Five - WINGS AND THINGS
Twenty-Six - SWERVE
Twenty-Seven - SUGAR AND SPIES
Twenty-Eight - STAR LIGHT
Twenty-Nine - STAR BRIGHT
Thirty - THE CONTROLS
Thirty-One - HEIDI
Thirty-Two - IN THE WINGS
Thirty-Three - GHOST
Thirty-Four - RED
Thirty-Five - MOVING TARGET
Thirty-Six - UNSTITCHED
Thirty-Seven - SPOOKED
Thirty-Eight - THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS
Thirty-Nine - WINGOVER
Forty - BLUE MURDER
Forty-One - FLYING
Forty-Two - FALLING
Forty-Three - FALLEN
Forty-Four - DASHED
Forty-Five - INTO THE BREACH
Acknowledgements
For Judy
One
TONY
November 26
CONSTABLE KEN POOLE wasn’t at his station, and his desk was a mess. File folders in a slithering heap, Post-it memos stuck to other Post-it memos, a half-empty bag of nachos. Pens and bull-clips, and to top it off, a caped action figure of some kind overlooked it all, hands on hips.
Still no sign of Poole. Dion’s eyes wandered from the action figure to the file folders, to the label on the topmost folder. It read, “Tony Souza.”
Souza was the mystery on everybody’s mind these days. Young, handsome, healthy, a new recruit on the North Shore and on the job for less than a month before taking sudden leave, right off the rail of a high bridge. Dion had been shocked by the news, and like everybody else, he wondered why the man had done it.
Jumped.
Back at his own neat desk, he dropped into his chair and tried to work. He couldn’t recall ever meeting Souza, and only knew his face from the photographs in the paper. Maybe he had seen the man in passing, a hello in the hall?
Curiosity drove him back to Poole’s desk. Using his knuckle, as if a light touch made the act less culpable, he lifted the folder’s manila cover, just to see, and clipped to the front leaf was a photocopy of Souza’s last words. One short paragraph.
Don’t worry about me. I have gone to a better place, it started.
At yesterday’s service, snatches of conversation had told Dion more about Souza than the eulogies did. Souza had broken from his family’s strict religious tradition, had shrugged off heaven and hell, simply wasn’t a church-going guy.
Dion read the rest of the note, and saw it contained anger: To mom and dad and Sonny, I’m sorry. To everybody else, I’m not. Sonny was Sonia, Tony’s sister. She had spoken at the service, saying her brother was much loved and would be missed. If she had any idea why Tony had ended his life, she hadn’t shared that knowledge. Nobody had.
Neither did anybody ask Dion to care — but how could he not? Death by suicide was always tragic. It was the crime that so often went unsolved. It was worrisome, too. What if the person had stepped into oblivion because they had stumbled upon the fundamental, bottom-line truth about the meaning of life, like a message in a bottle, and that truth was too awful to bear?
He shrugged. As pointless as it might be, he would go over the note in his mind for a while, as he lay in bed or ate breakfast or warmed up his car, trying to understand its incongruities. If Souza had found God, as the “better place” suggested, the discovery had not done much for him. The proof was in the fall. Souza blamed everybody but his immediate family for his unbearable pain, but Dion suspected that the everybody could be narrowed down to a somebody.
Still, Souza was not his brother, not his case, and none of his business, and his death would not haunt him for long. In these moments of pondering, though, he had to wonder if the new recruit blamed the force for his troubles. He wouldn’t be surprised.
Two
AMELIA
December 13
DAVE LEITH CAST A TAll shadow as he set coffee cup and newspaper on his desk and said “Morning” to whoever happened to be within earshot. The December sunlight was intense and yellow, the rays low and blinding. It was his favourite time of day, early morning, kind of a mini chance at redemption, a new shot at the old to-do list.
His greeting went to waste. JD Temple, leaning over paperwork at her desk, didn’t respond. Neither did Jimmy To
rr one desk over, chatting with a stranger. Or rather grilling the stranger, by the sounds of it. The stranger being grilled was no civilian, but a constable in patrol gear, a pale, lanky kid, the only one to return the greeting. And he did so with a peace sign, which struck Leith as disrespectful.
Torr was saying to the kid, “So what the hell were we talking about here, before you sidetracked me?”
“The MVA, I do believe,” the constable said. He had a full, loud voice, and a bit of an accent. Irish, Scottish?
Leith dropped into his chair. “And what MVA is this, Jim?”
Torr indicated the Irish or Scottish kid with a thumb. “I’m interviewing him. He saw a single-vehicle up on the Squamish about one a.m.”
The Squamish was the informal name for the Sea to Sky Highway, which traced the cliffs toward the winter wonderland of Whistler and beyond. Leith said, “Since when does GIS care about an MVA?”
GIS stood for General Investigations Section and dealt with the more serious crimes. MVAs, motor-vehicle accidents, were only serious crimes if you happened to be involved in one, where even a fender-bender was serious, if it was your fender that got bendered, as Leith well knew. But from the police perspective, an MVA was only serious if there were guns, drugs, or kidnappees in the mix. That, or hit-and-run casualties. The lanky kid stretched his legs and said to Torr, “Lookit, I really don’t see why we have to go through it all again, anyway. I already gave a full statement at the scene. It was ghastly and something I’m going to do my best to forget soon as we’re done here.”
Ghastly was not a word Leith often heard from the mouths of police officers, especially ones who were barely twenty, and somewhere in the back of his mind he decided the kid was out of his league. Or above it. Torr cranked his neck to reply to Leith. “I’m not on an MVA. It’s a personal favour for Anderson downstairs. He’s up to his arsehole with the latest intolerance campaign, and since, lucky us, Craig Gilmartin here is one of ours —”
“Anybody die in the crash?” Leith asked.
“As of eight thirty-five this morning, yes. The driver.”
“Amelia Foster, just turned thirty,” the kid added, darkly.
Torr waved at him to mind his own business. “Amelia Foster,” he told Leith. “Thirty years old. And all I need to know from this punk is one simple thing: did he see the crash? A simple question he can’t seem to answer without doing the scenic tour runaround. Seems like someone around here loves the sound of his own voice.”
JD muttered something Leith didn’t quite catch. He directed his next words at Constable Gilmartin, trying to abridge the bullshit. “Did you see the crash?”
“Like I haven’t asked him that ten times!” Torr exploded.
Gilmartin crossed his arms and said loudly that actually Torr had not asked that very simple question, not once. “If he had, I would have answered, no, I didn’t see the crash. Some guy ahead of me saw it and waved me down. He said this little red car just veered off” — Leith heard veered warped to verred and thought, Definitely a Scot — “just like that, bam. We jumped down the ditch right away, and there it was, wrapped around a tree. There was a woman inside. Like I told Sherlock here, we first considered pulling her out —”
“Fresh out of Regina and no respect for his superiors,” Torr exclaimed, and pointed a warning finger at Gilmartin. “You smarten up and watch your tongue, hear me?”
JD Temple shouted at Torr that everybody could hear him, and to keep his fucking voice down. Torr shouted back at her, quoting some memo on the use of bad language in the squad room, and Leith raised his own voice louder still to ask them both what side of bed they’d each fallen out of this morning.
Torr grunted an apology and turned back to the task at hand, grilling his witness, and Leith turned back to his own task, which right now was getting the lid off his coffee cup without spilling it and burning his thigh, as had happened yesterday.
“You know what?” he heard Gilmartin say, in the same hammered English. “If she’d have veered to her right, she’d have gone into the ocean. I thought she was lucky that she’d gone left instead. But maybe the ocean would have been a far faster and kinder death, I’m thinking now.”
Leith turned away from the MVA hubbub to face JD. “How’s it going?”
JD had short dark hair, fierce dark eyes, a cleft-lip scar, and an edgy attitude. “It would be a whole lot better if I had some earplugs,” she said.
The phone on Jimmy Torr’s desk rang, and Torr lifted the receiver. “Yeah? Uh-huh.” He grabbed scrap paper and a pen. “Okay, yup. Go on.” Phone squished between chin and chest, he scribbled a note. “Uh-huh. No problem.” Receiver dropped, he smirked at his notebook. “Yeah, right.”
Gilmartin leaned forward with interest. “Something to do with the dead girl, was it?”
“Nope. It’s something about a missing guy,” Torr told him. “Rory Keefer, forty-five years old. A missing husband, actually, which raises flags in my head.”
“How so?” Gilmartin asked.
Leith could see one of Torr’s tasteless jokes coming.
“When husbands go missing,” Torr said, “it’s only till they call with a forwarding address. Right, Dave?”
Leith shook his head and fired up his computer. He mentioned to Torr that people were trying to work around here and to keep it down a bit. Torr went back to his questioning of young Gilmartin, and did keep it down — a bit.
Three
HIT AND MISS
AFTER A LONG DAY, Leith found himself glancing too often at the little clock he kept on his desk, so he reached over and knocked it face down. He was studying surveillance photographs, trying to pin an identity on a couple of violent offenders caught on a drugstore’s CCTV, when a voice called out to him from behind, and the words were alarming: “Sir! I’ve just been shot at!”
There was a distinct Scottish lilt to the words, but Leith’s brain tended to wind down by day’s end, and he didn’t quite connect the voice to the face until the MVA witness–rookie stood squarely before him. It was young Gilmartin, dressed down in civvies now, ruddy and sweating and out of breath, as if he had run several blocks.
Leith gestured at the visitor’s chair across from him and asked for a repeat.
The constable dropped into the chair like a dead weight. “Somebody took a shot at me just now, as I was going down Rogers,” he said. “They just missed my skull, sir. Just missed by this much!”
Leith sat back in his chair and looked at Gilmartin’s finger and thumb, held about an inch apart. The boy’s face was still rounded out with baby fat. He wore a cap, a flat mess of green and red, shoved to one side of his head until he pulled it off to wring in his hands.
“Shot of what?”
“A shot of lead, no doubt,” Gilmartin blared. Static created by the swift removal of the cap had sucked his fine brown hair upright. “Sir, I’m dead serious. I was walking down to the Quay to get flowers for Sophie, and a white van drove by, and the bullet whizzed right over my head” — he skimmed his hair with a palm — “and hit the wall beside me. It left a hole this big. Sir? What are we going to do about this?”
Leith looked at the photographs on the desk in front of him: shots of miscreants, faces he should be focusing on. Instead he was thinking about home, and his soon-to-be three-year-old’s birthday party, a place he would dearly like to be heading toward in about five minutes. “You should advise your supervisor,” he said.
“I already did, sir, and he sent me up here.”
“You’re sure it was a bullet? There’s something called backfire —”
“Backfires don’t take chips out of concrete.”
Craig Gilmartin had made his point crisply, and Leith was forced to shelve his doubts. Taking potshots at pedestrians was about as serious as it got. What crappy timing, though. Ten minutes later it would have been someone else’s crisis. He stuck the photographs into his file cabinet, banged shut the drawer, pocketed the keys. “Okay. Let’s go take a look.”
&
nbsp; * * *
The pockmark was situated at about throat level on a high concrete wall that paralleled the road. The hole, as Leith gauged it, was palm sized, somewhat in the shape of a bowled-over heart, with a deeply cratered centre. Raw-edged, clean, fresh, it could certainly have been caused by a small metal projectile flying at high velocity from the area of the roadway.
The constable stood nearby, back against the wall. Leith placed his thumb beside the bullet hole, which he eyeballed as about 5.5 feet off the ground, and looked at Gilmartin, who was tall — at least Leith’s own height, maybe more. “You said it went over your head, so you must have been ducking. Right? You had some kind of warning?”
Gilmartin burst out laughing. He dug in his pocket and presented a shiny silver coin. “This. Would you believe? I was picking it up off the sidewalk. Sophie’s lucky penny!” He looked at the coin and tittered. “A lucky penny. Jesus, it’s too funny!”
Lying in the kid’s palm was not a penny, Leith saw, but a quarter. “Sophie,” he said. “Who’s that?”
“My girlfriend, who is angry with me, which is why I was going to the Quay,” Gilmartin said. “To get flowers.”
“And she was with you?”
“What, sir? No.”
“You said it was her lucky —”
“I’m saying she’s deadly superstitious. It’s the Italian in her, I’m thinking. Black cats, birds in the house, misfortune coming in threes, all of it baloney, I tell her. And of course she picks up coins and calls them lucky. I told her it’s not lucky; it’s unsanitary. I said, how lucky is a nasty virus? But she still does so. And when I saw this coin shining on the sidewalk, I was about ready to step on it, but because she’s pissed off at me, and I feel so shitty about it, I picked it up, like on her behalf, sort of thing. Scooped it up, germs and all, and the bullet missed me.”
Leith looked at the coin again, still on display, and at Gilmartin’s face. “You’re kidding me.”
“I’m not.”
“Keep that coin.”
“I will.”
Leith went to study the tarmac. From inside his car he made a brief call, then returned to Gilmartin to get more details for his notebook, and when all was said, they stood looking at the pockmark.
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