Leith left him, then, but not without a final, piercing stare.
Eighteen
A BEAM OF LIGHT
December 18
AT THE START OF DION’S weekend, the weather gods had banged together warm fronts and cold, draping low-lying fog all over the North Shore. In the late afternoon he walked through the heavy mists on the Spirit Trail seawall, doing his best not to search passing faces. Searching faces and patterns in traffic, reading signals in the air, it had all become habitual over the years. Like the retired carpenter he’d once met, who had complained that he’d go to his grave mentally tape-measuring every board he laid eyes on, would Dion die searching faces?
God, he hoped not. He tried to focus on the West Coast scenery, to relax and “be recreational,” as Sam Kerr had put it. Be present. Be real.
He sat on a park bench, insulated in his leather car coat, and watched the ocean heave. He could hear the wet hiss of traffic up the hill and the voices of passersby muted by the cold.
The world is not so full of criminals as you think, Kerr had told him. Kerr the shrink, who may or may not see through his act. The bad guys are a minority, believe it or not. Let down your guard, she told him. Step out of your comfort zone. Believe in life and love.
Eyes closed, he inhaled deeply, pulling in life and love and a lungful of briny winter air. A shadow passed by, doubled back, sat down on the other end of the bench. Dion opened his eyes and studied him a moment before looking again to sea. His seatmate, a youth in a dark hoodie, remarked it was kind of a crappy day, wasn’t it. “Looks to me like you got a bad case of the winter doldrums,” he added, and Dion realized this was going to be a sales pitch.
He assured the kid he was just fine, thanks.
“Could’ve fooled me,” the kid said. “But that’s okay, ’cause I got for you the guaranteed picker-upper. Or looking to mellow out some sweet lady on your Christmas list? This here is the perfect stocking stuffer.”
“I’ve got a line on all that, thanks,” Dion said.
“Sure thing. But a deal like this, man. An eighth — thirty-five bucks, if you can believe it. Or if you want, a single, two singles, however many singles, pre-rolled, extra potent, just fucking bursting with THC. And at liquidation prices!”
Dion considered the boy’s face, considered the offer. “Who’re you muling for?”
“No, man, just unloading something for a buddy. Personal supply but overstocked, strictly a one-time offer.”
“Ray Boland?”
“Ray who? No, never heard of him,” the kid said, which made sense, since Ray Boland didn’t exist.
“Then who? I only trust Ray’s stuff.”
The kid shrugged. “So I guess you gotta wait for Ray.”
“Fuck off, then,” Dion said, and hoped the kid would do just that.
“Your loss,” the kid said, but instead of fucking off, he shifted a few inches closer. “If Ray’s stuff is so good, why you look like shit? Here, give this sampler a try. If you like, four bucks apiece, you can’t beat that. And they’re fully loaded, with a little something special on top.”
A mini joint lay on the park bench between them. The kid should be in retail. Dion crumbled a bit off the end, peered, and sniffed, unsure how pot aficionados tested their product. He asked the kid what exactly the “something special” was. The kid said, seal the deal and he’d reveal, and if this went down well — and he was confident it would — they might exchange numbers.
The mysterious something special had sold Dion. He dusted his hands and gave a nod. “Give me the eighth.”
He handed over two twenties, and the kid handed him change, along with a baggie of weed. Dion brought out his ID and placed the kid under arrest. Not easy, because the kid had springs in his legs and tried to flee, so it became a short chase up the grassy slope, a tumbling haul back downhill through the squishy wet grass, a bit of a skirmish on the pathway, and in the pat-down process, Dion was nearly taken down himself by two passersby who mistook him for a mugger.
The men unhanded him only after he shouted loud enough about who he was and what he was doing. He’d won no respect from them, though, and from a distance they threw insults, letting him know what they thought about the pot laws in this country and what he should do to himself. “Get lost,” he told them.
With the boy subdued in his grip and the hecklers gone, Dion called for backup, then sat himself and his prisoner on the bench, regretting his grass-stained clothes. Without handcuffs available, he had to make do with a firm grip on the detainee’s arm.
“I should have known,” the kid said. “The haircut. But I figured if you were a narc, you’d do yourself up like a drug addict needing a fix. Reverse psychology, right?”
“Don’t talk till you’ve been read your rights.”
With time to kill, they ended up talking anyway — about self-driving cars, drone technologies, solar-powered highways. A man and a woman appeared on the pathway, heading this way, and Dion did a double take. Even at a distance he recognized the woman with the streaming blonde hair: his ex, Kate. She was snugged up against the man, who he guessed was Patrick, the lover he had heard of but never laid eyes on.
He tried to go invisible. But Kate saw him, and it was her turn to do a double take. Crap, he thought. How would it look, him holding on to this guy’s arm like a possessive lover. Misleading, that’s what.
She stopped as if to call out hello, boyfriend paused at her side, but before she could speak, two uniformed members arrived to take custody of the dealer, and Dion stood to conduct the prisoner exchange.
When he was done, he turned to see that Kate hadn’t moved on, was waiting patiently for him to come say hello. He didn’t return her smile as he approached. No way would he smile with that guy on her arm. There was still hope for himself and Kate, he thought, and smiling at her in a situation like this would send the wrong signals of acceptance and closure. He wasn’t even close to closing anything when it came to Kate.
She made introductions, and Dion and Patrick nodded at each other. Patrick wasn’t the barefoot Hercules that Dion had pictured when Kate had talked about him in the summer, but still, not bad looking. There was a touch of flint in his greeting smile, Dion noted, and it pleased him. It meant the foundations of that relationship could be pushed with a foot, tested. He returned the flint, but no smile, to say the fight was on.
If Kate noticed the war manoeuvres, she ignored them. “How’ve you been? Last time we talked you were looking for a new place to live. Any success?”
“Apartment on 14th,” he told her. “It’s pretty good.”
“And you’re working undercover now?”
She was referring to the kid on the bench. “That was a mistake,” he said. “I’m not undercover, and it wasn’t a sting, and I probably should have laid off.” Maybe it wasn’t so much a mistake as a screw-up, he was thinking. He had thought twice before making the arrest, but three times would have been better. For all he knew, some fine-tuned operation was underway, and he’d just stepped in it. On the other hand, fentanyl was everywhere, killing people like the plague, and the kid had suggested there was something special in the mix. That meant he had to be stopped cold, and the operation, if there was one, would just have to be rewritten. “He tried to sell me some weed. Wasn’t much I could do about it. He seemed to be asking for handcuffs.”
She tilted her head, caught his eye. “But you two seemed so friendly.”
“We were passing time.”
“That’s good.”
He didn’t think there was anything good about what had happened here this afternoon. His nerves were still revved from the experience, the dirty trick he’d pulled, the scuffle, being shouted at by the good Samaritans, and now worry about being reprimanded by the drug squad. Nothing good at all. “What do you mean, good?”
“I’d never have caught you chatting with a prisoner before. You’d be grinding his ear with your boot, if anything.” She caught his warning glance and changed the su
bject. “Anyway, you’re looking fine.”
“You look great,” he replied, because she really did.
Patrick interjected. “We’re going to miss the show, Kate.”
She told her boyfriend to give her one second, and extended another peace offering to Dion. “We’ll have coffee one of these days. This time it’ll go better, right?”
As they walked away, Patrick turned to say, “Nice to meet you, Cal.”
Kate didn’t look back, but fluttered her hand goodbye over her shoulder. Which was nice in a way. Un-final.
* * *
The crew had failed JD. She was sitting at Rainey’s alone, just her and her beer, which was kind of a twist, since she was the least sociable of the bunch, usually the last to arrive and the first to leave. She wished Leith would show up, because she didn’t mind him as a workmate. No, that was unfair. She liked him. He was a bit of a mother hen, but what was wrong with mother hens?
She also liked Dion, who was on her mind a lot, lately. She had known him well for years before he had crashed his car, back when he had been a lot of fun. He was no longer fun, but he was a lot more interesting. She was fairly sure that he was hiding something, and his claims of head trauma and recovery and all the rest of it were just the armour he had put on to avoid detection.
As if she was so blind.
Maybe, she dared to speculate, whatever he was hiding had something to do with the thing going on between Leith and Bosko, that peculiar telepathy she couldn’t help but notice, strung so tight it practically twanged.
Or maybe she should get a life and mind her own business.
Mike Bosko materialized beside her, asking where everybody was, and she stared at him in surprise. Speak of the devil, or at least one of them. How had he snuck in when she had been watching the door? Either her surveillance skills were rusting or he was a leprechaun.
“I don’t know, but good thing you’re here,” she said. “I was starting to feel snubbed. Sit down and have at least one drink.”
“With pleasure,” he said.
He took the chair across from her. His beer showed up a moment later. JD clinked her glass against his and said, “Well, have you got your buddy’s house all lit with Christmas cheer?”
“Stage one is a wrap,” Bosko said. “Most of the lights are up. But he’s saving the new pièce de résistance for next week. Did I mention he’s retired?”
“You did.”
“Retired and regressing, I think. Last year it was just the reindeer prancing along the roofline. This year he’s adding Santa Claus. Stuck in the chimney.”
“I’ve seen those. Really tacky.”
“Super tacky,” Bosko agreed. “But his Santa is state of the art, homemade, life size. People are going to crash their cars when they get a load of that up there.”
“That’s not good.”
“There’s nothing good about Arlo’s mania. Thankfully it will be short-lived, just till Boxing Day, when it all comes down again.”
“What brought on this mania, besides retirement?” JD asked.
“A batch of grandkids, all under the age of six. He wants to be the best granddad ever.”
“That’s sweet. But don’t break your neck helping him out. Roofs aren’t good places to be, especially when you’re full of Yuletide cheer.”
“I’ll be staying on solid ground,” Bosko said. “And I’m paid well for holding the ladder, by the way. His wife Sylvia is the best cook I know. Hey, speaking of Arlo …”
Bosko had a way of segueing through topics with metronomic precision, JD noticed. It was kind of awesome, sitting back and watching it happen.
“I had a dream last night,” he went on, “after reading Dave’s report of his talk with Craig Gilmartin. My dreams are about as dry as dust, for the most part, but this one was a little fancier than usual. For some reason I was in Arlo’s basement, looking for something. It’s something I’ve actually seen there, amongst all his junk. But my dream version of this item was quite different. It was yellow, where the real one I think was blue. And it was up on a plinth, with a beam of light shooting down on it from above, as if to make sure I got its significance. Strange things, dreams.”
“Wow,” JD said, trying not to sound puzzled. Even stranger than dreams, she thought, was Mike Bosko. “What was it, on the plinth?”
“Oh, a plane,” he said, and spread his hands about three feet apart, demonstrating wingspan, JD supposed.
“Interesting dream,” she said. “Symbolic. Of something … I’m sure.”
“Well, no,” Bosko said. “Not a symbol. Just a theory.”
Nineteen
LOOK UP
December 20
THE FOG CONTINUED overnight and into the morning. Dion was late to work, his temples throbbing from a drug-induced sleeping binge. He dropped into his desk chair, swivelled about in such a way that nobody could look at him directly, and prepared to attack the day’s tasks. Today would be another stretch of hours under the fluorescents in GIS, in plainclothes suit and tie. He had once preferred the suit and tie — he’d been a sharp dresser — but now he preferred the uniform. It was easier. He hoped he would be sent back downstairs soon, back out on patrol. Upstairs was no longer his goal.
He pulled documents from his in tray and had to blink hard to bring the words into focus. At only twenty-nine, his eyes were starting to go. He slumped like an old man, too. Seeing Kate and her boyfriend had put buckshot in his morale. The small lift of optimism she had left him with had fizzled away overnight. Life was over. He just didn’t care.
Doug Paley walked up to his desk with something to say. “Would be a good idea if you started showing up on time.”
Dion didn’t look up, but could sense Paley there, the shape of him, could see him in his mind’s eye, squarish and big-bellied, thick neck, small ass, belt too tight around his waist like it was to blame for the distortion. “I know that.”
“Would be a good idea if you looked a smidge sorry for being late, too,” Paley added. “Maybe even throw in an apology, eh?”
Dion straightened to glare at him. “I’m sorry for being late. It won’t happen again.”
“Good. Now go tell it to the boss. He wants to see you.”
Dion remained sitting upright, watching Paley. A part of his mind was wondering, what if Paley transformed emotionally for some reason, say a death in the family — would his physical presence also mutate, enough that Dion, who knew him so well, could perceive the change without actually seeing him? Through a pane of rippled glass, say? The question filled him with self-pity, as it related to his private line of inquiry into the near-fatal shooting of Craig Gilmartin. If he proved himself right, whatever his intentions, he would end up in the mud, because no way would Ken Poole go down without a fight. He’d pull his accuser down with him.
“What, is it about that collar yesterday?” he said. “Did I mess up something?”
Paley grinned. “Probably, but all’s well that ends well. I hear the mule’s spilling drugs like a birthday piñata. And he’s talking, too. Maybe he’ll crack the network.”
“So what does Bosko want from me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he wants to pin a medal on you. Maybe he wants to ship you back to Tuktoyaktuk. Whatever it is, just make it snappy, before he freezes his nuts off out there.”
Dion paused on his way to the door that would lead to the hall that would lead to Bosko’s office, and Paley explained his last mysterious comment. “He’s not in his office. He’s down at Waterfront.”
“Why?”
Paley walked away without an answer. Dion pulled on his coat and left the building. He drove an unmarked cruiser downhill to the seaside park, not far from where he had nabbed the dope dealer and met Kate yesterday. He parked by the marine school, next to a black police SUV, and walked around to Waterfront Park. The field was nearly empty, he saw. The paths were quiet. No Bosko in sight.
Never had Dion been called to meet a superior outside the walls of the de
tachment.
It had to be really bad news.
Maybe this was the edge, the drop-off, where he would be told, the game’s up. The girl with pink hair had finally broken her silence, the body had been dug up, and he would now be reborn into the penal colony, where he belonged.
There was Bosko, not sitting on a park bench twirling handcuffs as he waited, but standing on the grassy verge, his bear-like shape silhouetted against a backdrop of morning mist. He seemed to be frowning at something in his hands, a device with an antenna, and for a moment Dion thought it was a detonator. But coming closer he saw the radio-controlled toy airplane parked at Bosko’s feet — blue and white, three-foot wingspan — nosed into the open stretch of lawn, but not going anywhere.
The sergeant turned to greet him. “There you are, Cal. I take it you know how to work these things better than I do. I can’t seem to get it going.”
Dion looked down at the plane. In his younger years he had been quite a hotshot flyer, but how could Bosko know that? Doug Paley must have told him. “It’s a bad place to run a plane, if you don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. “Too many people around, not enough runway. And what if it went in the water?”
They both looked at the nearby waves. “That one didn’t even occur to me,” Bosko admitted.
“Give it here. Let’s see.” Dion took possession of the box and fiddled with switches and toggles, and still nothing happened. He crouched to check the plane itself. Some people walking by stopped to watch. On one spectator’s advice, he snapped open the panel on the underside of the control unit. Sure enough, one of the batteries was in wrong. A hotshot he was no longer.
He sat on a nearby bench to fix the problem. Now a red light on the control box flicked on. He repositioned the plane on the grass and tried once more.
“It’s pretty old,” Bosko told him. “A friend loaned it to me. Arlo. He bought it at a garage sale way back when, and he’s never flown it, but he assured me it’s in running order. Of course, he could be wrong.”
But Arlo was right, and the plane began to whir. Above Dion gulls wheeled and screeched, and on the footpath the chatter of the audience was friendly. The sun tried to break through the grey, and the wind was sharp and cold. He thumbed the throttle again, and the plane rolled toward him, gathering speed. He steered it away, ran it in a wide arc, into the wind. It would need a good thirty feet for liftoff. With a nudge of the controls, the plane nosed up. It lifted! He watched open-mouthed and ducked as it buzzed noisily overhead. He turned on his heels to follow its path.
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