“I can’t find the membersh…. Oh, Sergeant Parker, is it you that’s come to speak to us tonight?” The woman from earlier shuffled toward us.
“Hi, Milly.” The officer raised his voice several decibels. “The chief asked me to fill in for him at the very last minute. Sorry I’m late.”
“Oh don’t worry. You won’t hear George complaining. He’s just been yapping away up there to make up time. Come along now.”
The woman turned to me. “And you too, dear. You’re welcome to sit in and see what you think about us. And if you like what you see, you can sign up later.”
She led us down the corridor toward a double door.
“I didn’t get your name, back there,” the cop said.
Even if it was now apparent that he hadn’t been sent at the mayor’s request to arrest me, I was reluctant to say anything.
“Excuse me?” The officer bent his ear toward me.
It was pointless to refuse to answer. It was a such a small town that this cop would have had no trouble finding out my name, and to ignore him further would have unnecessarily deepened the ill-feelings I seemed to have already created with the authorities.
“Stella Jacob,” I mumbled.
“Hope we have a chance to meet again, Stella.”
As soon as the door opened, the man at the mike called out,“Ah, Detective Sergeant Parker. Not a moment too soon!”
The woman from the front table had already disappeared. Just as well, I thought. I couldn’t very well shout a request into her ear for her to point out Osgood to me.
I took a seat at the back and scanned the room, trying to guess who Osgood might be.
Because he was running for mayor, I looked for a jacket, or at least a shirt and tie. Nothing of the sort was in sight. Most men were in sweaters; two or three wore lumber jackets; and some had on thick coats.
I slid across two empty chairs to the man closest to me.
“Can you tell me who Osgood is?” I whispered.
“What?”
“Osgood. He’s a director here. Running for mayor.”
“Never heard of him. I’m new in town. Just joined the club tonight.”
The head with the blue rinse from two rows in front turned around. Severe eyes glared at us. “Do you two mind?” the woman hissed. “People are trying to listen to the speaker.”
The man held up his hands in surrender, and I slid back to my original place.
Could I wait out the cop’s talk and whatever else was to follow before the meeting ended?
I was about ready to forget about this Osgood character, the breached dam, and this entire business about radioactive pollution. My eyes stung, my head felt light, and all I wanted was to crawl into bed.
Then the figure of a woman slouched into the seat in front of me. I looked two rows ahead at the blue rinse and decided I would take my chances.
“Excuse me,” I whispered to the woman who had just sat in front of me. “Do you know who Osgood is?”
“Of course. Everybody knows Osgood.” She looked around. “There he is. Leaning against the wall at the side. He’s the one in the blue lumber jacket.”
I led the way out to the front table, which we found deserted.
He was a small-framed man, bent slightly forward. His salt-and-pepper, shoulder-length mane was tamed somewhat by a terry cloth headband, while his tapering beard reached mid-chest. Wild, shifting eyes peeped out from under all that hair. The air around him carried a slight whiff of stale perspiration.
He stood with a wide stance and folded arms, and nodded in vigorous bursts to my account of the night before and the day’s failed efforts to raise an alarm.
“Not surprised at all.” His heavily-wrinkled brow creased even further.
“You’re not?” I said.
“These greedy bastards in the mining companies only care about satisfying their lust for money. They’ll rape and pillage Mother Nature mercilessly and leave her for dead. They couldn’t care less what damage they do.”
He was right. Of course, he was right. But from the look of him, I was beginning to doubt that he was the one I needed to turn to for advice.
He stuck a bony finger in the air. “Hold on a minute. I think I know what this is all about.”
He went through the door the woman who had been at the table had entered earlier. Half a minute later, he wheeled out an ancient-looking bicycle that was covered in rust blisters and fluorescent green and orange paint. He leaned the bike against the wall and dug into a bulging, worn, leather pouch.
He took out a thick stack of papers, letting some of them fall at his feet.
“Here it is,” he said after a while. “Read that.”
He shoved a wrinkled scrap into my hand, and bent to gather up the mess on the floor.
The clipping from a national newspaper announced that the Canadian Nuclear Regulatory Authority would hold a hearing to review uranium waste management practices in Syron Lake. The CNRA’s objective, it said, was to ensure an orderly transfer of responsibilities from the mining companies to the government.
“No surprise that there’s a spill right about now.” Osgood nodded. “I bet you those greedy bastards didn’t want to wait the three to five years remaining before they get to walk away from the toxic dumps they created. They want to leave it all to us taxpayers to take care of. Must of let their facilities rot to hell. Maybe even broke the bloody dam themselves just so that they could duck out early and leave us holding the bag.”
He was shaking, as if his body could hardly contain his anger. “And you won’t get Mayor Demetriou to say a peep against them. Been in their back pockets for years. How do you think he came to have this hotel, and that motel, and this and that restaurant? All that didn’t take chump change to build, I tell you.”
“I see,” I said.
I knew enough about slander laws not to say anything to encourage him further.
I returned the article to him. He folded it and placed it back in the pouch.
“Why don’t you write and try to get in on the hearings to expose this and stop them in their tracks?” Osgood said. “The deadline for applying is long gone at this point. But, with what’s happened, there’s a chance they could slip you in at the last minute.”
I walked briskly back to my house. The quarter moon on a cloudless night was enough to light my way.
My eyelids felt like they were ready to fall off and my head throbbed. But the first thing I did after I got in was switch on my computer.
There was a CNRA hearing that I needed to Google.
Chapter 17
Dromel left the Riverside Drive condo he and Bernice had bought several years before in a show of dedication to the idea that they would stay together forever.
Friends who were on second or third marriages often marveled at how the two had managed to keep the fires burning since they had met as undergrad law students. Bernice often joked that the secret to their success was in not getting married.
Since she had accepted a position with the International Criminal Court just over a year prior, she had been spending most of her time between Europe and Africa. She came back to Ottawa only a few days at a time. Dromel had spent his summer vacation with her in Europe. The arrangement would be temporary, she had said. If all went well with this two-year contract, she could be made permanent, in a higher position. Even on her salary alone, they would be able to relocate to Europe.
Well, the arrangement suited him just fine. While she was off on her high-flying career, he would have his fun.
He took a taxi to a park-and-ride on the western edge of
the city. At ten o’clock on a Friday night, the place was deserted, except for three cars. In the far corner of the lot, a figure slouched against a black sedan.
“Hey, Mr D.” The figure stood erect as Dromel approached.
The individual lifted his right arm, with his elbow bent and palm showing. Dromel lightly slapped the fellow’s palm. He had long ago given up all efforts to make a proper handshake their form of greeting.
“How’s it going, man?”
“Fine, fine,” Dromel said abruptly. He didn’t like that the skinny kid didn’t get it that they were not friends.
Dromel took out his cell phone. “Tell me, how easy would it be for you to find this man?”
The two pictures on the phone were terrible. One showed the subject’s right shoulder and the right half of his face. The other, more blurred, showed more of the face, but was cut off at the eyelashes.
The second time he had met the stranger who had slipped him the scribbled offer in the bar, Dromel had pretended his phone had vibrated and that he took the call; the shots were the best he’d managed to secretly take.
The skinny kid grabbed the phone.
“From the way he spoke, I have a feeling he’s some high-priced lawyer.” Dromel folded his arms. “I figure he’s from Ottawa. He seems familiar enough with the place as far as I can tell.”
The young man squinted as he focused on the tiny screen in the dim glow of the street lamps. “Nice threads.”
“Well?” Dromel said.
“I don’t know, man. I don’t move in those kinds of circles.”
Dromel scrunched up his mouth.
“Now, for a price,” the fellow said, “maybe I could kick things up higher, up to people who would know people. But, it would come at a cost, you understand.”
“The keys,” Dromel said curtly, stretching out an upturned palm. He would not be drawn into negotiating with this nineteen-year-old who increasingly seemed to think he’d come across an unending fount of money.
The fellow took the car keys from his pocket and dropped them into Dromel’s hand, along with the phone.
“And the stuff?” Dromel said.
“In the glove compartment.”
“Okay. I’ll call you when and if I need you again.”
“Chill,” the figure said. “Everything’s cool, man. Till next time.”
The fellow raised his arm and showed his palm again. Dromel raised his hand to meet it with even less enthusiasm than before.
He drove toward Island Park Drive to cross over to the Quebec side of the river, cursing himself for bringing up the subject of the stranger in the expensive suit with the skinny kid. It was a foolish plan to begin with. If by some stroke of luck the kid had found the stranger, what would he, Dromel, do? Call up the stranger and say he wanted more money to get the job done? No, that would only have come off as desperate.
A better plan now came to him. He would give them a surprise. He would send strong signals that he couldn’t approve what Syron Lake Resources was asking for. That would surely flush out the stranger with the fancy suits.
They would come to him…begging. Then, he could name his price.
At a stop light, he opened the glove compartment. He took out a small packet. He counted. Two dozen round, white pills. The skinny kid hadn’t tried to cheat him this time; not like the last occasion when he was two pills short.
He was growing increasingly disturbed with his majordomo, as he called him. But he couldn’t just get rid of the guy. The Ontario car lease and the Hull bachelor pad were under the kid’s name. Dromel felt this precaution necessary to ensure there would be no paper trail that would lead to him.
It was also the reason he paid for everything with cash whenever he was with one of his lady friends. If Bernice were to ever suspect anything, there would be no evidence for her to point to.
Guys who got caught and paid for their fun in a painful and expensive split were simply careless or stupid, he thought. He would not be one of them.
He headed to a tiny, out-of-the-way restaurant to meet Cynthia, his latest paramour. He was onto his fourth romance since he had entered this world of intrigue that added excitement and a sense of danger to an otherwise disappointing life.
The first one had been exhilarating. She was whirlwind of pleasure and recklessness. It was she who had introduced him to the OxyContin, and to the weekends of wild escape it brought.
In fact, she was the one who started the whole affair when she ran her shopping cart into his in the frozen dinner aisle and slipped him her cell number after a brief, flirtatious chat.
But as suddenly as she had started it, she had pulled the plug on their dalliance, disappearing without warning out of his life, to return to her husband and children.
He had made the mistake of letting his emotions run away with him that first time. He had sulked for weeks trying to figure out how to find her. Then he realized he was wasting time that he could have been spending with someone new.
He had discovered the deliciousness of married women out for extracurricular fun. They were utterly discreet, totally abandoned, and in no way clingy. He’d come to accept that after what amounted to scratching an itch, they would all eventually retreat back into their anodyne existence of suburban backyard barbecues, SUVs full of kids, and endless trips to swimming pools, hockey rinks, and soccer fields.
Cynthia was nowhere near there yet. He could look forward to a couple of days of fun this weekend, and many more yet to come, whenever she could manage it.
Already, he could feel his pulse increasing at the thought of how she would undo the bun she usually wore and would shake loose her luscious, long, auburn hair that smelled of vanilla and almond.
He suspected Cynthia was not her real name. To her, he was Francis Aube, a government bureaucrat in an unspecified agency.
He had made the mistake during the first adventure of giving his real name, though he had said little about what he did for a living. That first lover had never asked about it; had never seemed interested. When she had broken things off, and he in his crazy despair had gone searching for the street in Fallowfield Village where she had said she lived, he couldn’t find it. It didn’t exist. That’s how he had learned how this game was played.
And, this night, he would dedicate himself to continuing to be a master at it.
Chapter 18
Eric Tremblay saw the bar where he was supposed to meet the Americans, up ahead, on a seedy Ottawa street, between a pawn shop and an adult video store.
He was already nervous about his connection with the two men. Their choice of locale for the rendezvous was not improving matters.
He wasn’t familiar with Ottawa. He had been there only once before. It had been just a few weeks prior, when he had come down from Syron Lake with his nephew, Jacques, to help the boy settle in at college.
Tremblay had chosen the city for his meeting with the Americans because Jacques was there, and because it was far from Syron Lake. He was now regretting that he had let the Americans name the exact spot for their encounter.
Tremblay found the capital oddly desolate at eleven o’clock, on a Friday night. Only the occasional car rumbled down the street. But he welcomed the desertedness of this stretch. His near encounters with others along the way had made him jittery. The dimly-lit pavements, the steps of crumbling tenements, and the alleys he had passed had seemed to him to be crawling with human derelicts. He pretended not to see anyone and kept up a brisk pace.
He was of average build and maybe his waistline had expanded a bit too much over the years, but, still, he considered himself a tough guy. He was sixty-seven, had been a miner all his working life,
and had witnessed and been part of some crazy things in his day. But that had all been small town stuff. He walked tall, but, inside, he felt no match for the gun-toting dealers or the drugged-up zombies he imagined prowled the mean streets of a big city.
The events of the previous thirty hours had left him on edge. Hell, the events of the past six weeks had turned his world upside down.
Now he wasn’t certain he had any hold on reality anymore. He was operating on auto-pilot and he wasn’t sure that pilot could be trusted.
He pushed open the door and was immediately hit by a wave of hot air. It was just mid-October, he reminded himself; it was crazy for the place to have the heat on.
He scanned the dimly-lit room. The narrow hall had fewer than a dozen white, melamine tables surrounded by plastic lawn chairs. An elderly man seemed to be asleep as he sat at one table, clutching a beer bottle. The bar was unmanned.
Tremblay recognized the muscular American with the dirty blond flat top haircut and grizzled jaw at the back of the room. A jacket hung from the back of an empty chair opposite him.
Tremblay sighed and walked over to the table.
“Look, if it isn’t the man of the hour,” said the American, whom Tremblay knew only as Quinn.
The man stood up and noisily dragged a chair out for Tremblay.
He slapped Tremblay on the back and squeezed his shoulder so firmly it hurt.
“Take off your coat and sit down,” Quinn said. “Damn, crazy owner has it sweltering in here.”
Tremblay didn’t have a choice. The American virtually yanked his leather jacket from his shoulders and draped it on the back of the chair before pressing him down into the seat.
“So! Mission accomplished!” Quinn said. “Time to celebrate. I say we get this man a drink.” He walked over to the bar. With both hands cupped at his mouth, he shouted, “Hey, we need another beer at the back here.”
Quinn returned to his seat.
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