The Devil's Dust

by C. B. Forrest

  “Well, his timing for a breakdown is impeccable.”

  Nolan digs into his coat pocket, pulls out the keys to the cruiser, and hands them to McKelvey. “The OPP contact is Inspector John Churchill.”

  “I’ll take the scenic route back, buy you some extra time.”

  “There’s only one way to Saint B from the regional airport.”

  McKelvey smiles. “I’ll drive slowly.”

  Eighteen

  McKelvey enjoys the open space on the highway and the time alone, but most of all he enjoys being behind the wheel of a police cruiser again. He knows he will never admit the fact to anyone, but once he has cleared the town limits, he glances in the rear-view to check for traffic and then he hits the lights. He scans the dash console and finds the switch for the siren, too, and lets it wail for a few seconds before deactivating. The sound of the siren and the strobe of the lights does something to his insides — like electrodes hooked to his heart, the amperage shocks him back to life, real life, the here and the now, the stuff that matters.

  He sits up straighter, grips the wheel with both hands, and the first thing that crosses his mind is his duty here to help Nolan, and even Gallagher, however he can. (And he can’t get Peggy’s goddamned Prayer of St. Francis out of his head. He is neither religious nor particularly spiritual, so he is left wondering if he is going soft as he contemplates illness and loneliness and an end he has for so long now convinced himself he will embrace.)

  The second thought to cross his mind concerns Caroline and the call he owes her. He is an asshole, to be sure. That much has not changed, at least, whether in sickness or in health. Oh, Caroline, sweet Caroline …

  He is enjoying the freedom of the wheels rolling beneath him when it swings back and hits him with the force of a sucker punch: this rising tidal surge snaking through his intestines, cold chills that make him shiver with an instant malevolent fever. He clenches his teeth and rides the nausea that makes his mouth water, and he thinks for a moment it is possible he may need to pull over to the side of the road. To shit or vomit, it’s a coin toss. But he swallows the wave of malaise, takes a deep haul of air. He glances in the rear-view and sees the sheen of sweat shining on his forehead. Fucking pills. The throat-clutching, ball-kicking strength of this stuff. And for the first time in a long time — perhaps not since the day of the shootings at the harbour — McKelvey is truly afraid of what lies in wait around the next corner.

  He shakes the unease and gets his mind back on the situation at hand. While the latest developments would seem to indicate a neat and tidy closure to the issue of meth in Saint B, McKelvey knows from experience the mistake of making assumptions before the last card has been placed face up on the table. If the body found at the trailer is indeed identified as that of Wade Garson; if Garson was indeed manufacturing the drug in his trailer, which led to the explosion and his own death, then chances are good Nolan and Gallagher have found the root cause of this recent surge in crime. With the key producer and dealer out of the picture, the local cops will be free to implement an enforcement program and an educational campaign going forward to ensure meth does not again find a foothold in the town.

  The question is, did Wade Garson act alone?

  Is the dead body Wade Garson or someone else?

  If Garson didn’t act alone, the root problem still exists.

  If the body isn’t Garson, then who is it?

  A ways to go yet before Nolan will get to stamp CASE CLOSED on this one, McKelvey thinks as he spots the highway sign for the airport: five kilometres ahead and to the right. He is slowing to take the turn as he hears and then sees the small passenger plane coming in from the southwest for landing, this graceful steel bird that seems to simply get swallowed by the treeline. McKelvey is lost in thought, scanning the woods for sight of the plane, when the radio squawks. The sudden trill of white noise causes him to startle and he jerks the wheel a little, almost hitting the snowbank that wants to suck the vehicle into its unforgiving mass.

  “Base to McKelvey, over.” Nolan’s voice fills the cruiser.

  McKelvey keeps a hand on the wheel and fiddles with the mic.

  “McKelvey. Over.”

  “I took the Chief home like you said. He lay down on his couch and fell asleep right away. He said he’ll catch up with the investigator after he gets some rest. I poured a bottle of rye down the kitchen sink. He had an empty one and a mostly full one out on the table with a gift card from Celluci. Over.”

  “That’s good, Nolan. Looks like the flight just landed. I’ll give you a call when we’re fifteen minutes from the station. Listen,” he says, and pictures this woman he has never met, Shirley Murdoch, listening to their every word as she sits at her kitchen table dressed in a housecoat, dispatching police business from the comfort of her home. “Never mind. I’ll talk to you offline. Over and out.”

  He hangs the mic back in its clasp. As the cruiser rounds a curve, the woods open up to reveal the regional airport. Located about half an hour south and west of Ste. Bernadette, it is a single swath of clear-cut forest serving the nearest four municipalities. There is a large hangar built of gun-metal grey siding, three or four garages and sheds painted orange, a three-storey air traffic control tower, and a terminal about the size of two family bungalows pushed together.

  McKelvey pulls up to the front of the terminal where six or seven cars are parked at an angle. He leaves the cruiser running out of habit from his years in a patrol car. They had it drilled into them to keep the car running when you stepped into a coffee shop, just in case you had to take a call. Nowadays this is frowned upon because the hundreds of vehicles in the Toronto Police fleet running around the clock collectively produce enough greenhouse gas emissions to end all life on the planet. He steps outside and stretches. The day is growing warmer. It could be early March, and he wonders if the storm will pass them by. He makes his way to the front doors and reaches into his coat pocket for the piece of paper that Nolan handed him with the name of the OPP investigator.

  Inspector John Churchill, the note reads in Nolan’s neat block printing.

  But as he comes through the doors, as he lifts his head, it is not Inspector John Churchill he sees crossing the terminal with a garment bag slung over one shoulder and a thick black briefcase clasped in the other arm. In fact, it’s not a man at all, but a woman of perhaps forty-five. McKelvey stops. She looks around the terminal, empty save for a young man reading a paperback at the only airline counter. She looks at McKelvey. He can’t see her hair beneath the OPP black sheepskin trapper hat, and her form is well concealed beneath a black heavy parka with yellow flashing and insignia. It matters not that she is wrapped from head to toe, that only her face and clear eyes are visible. McKelvey knows that she is beautiful.

  Perfect, he thinks. Just what I need.

  McKelvey is putting the investigator’s bags in the back of the cruiser, taking his time, wondering if it is really possible that she does not remember him after all. Her face betrayed not even a hint of recognition. Perhaps he is a victim of his own grandiosity, this notion that she would certainly recall having worked together, albeit briefly, when the bank robber D.J. Chasson wound his way from Toronto up through Barrie and then Orillia, eventually holing himself up in a highway motel in the Muskokas. It was in Barrie that he worked with this woman for about a week. He believes she had just made the Major Crime Unit on that growing city’s force, and she was green but steady and had a good instinct for the work. He is not mistaken, for her name is unique — Euphenia Madsen, but she “goes by Finn,” as she would always say. He closes the back hatch and gets in the cruiser where she is fiddling with a cellphone.

  “I can’t get any service,” she says.

  “Comes and goes,” he tells her. “Out on the highway you might catch a signal.”

  He sets them in motion. She rummages through the thick black briefcase at her feet, riffling through papers, pulling out file folders, and he sees from the corner of his eye that her bag i
s a mess. It looks like a teenager’s school backpack in there. She pulls a paper from the quagmire and smoothes the wrinkles.

  “I’ve got a few questions I wrote down on the flight, if you don’t mind running through them. Are you the lead up here?”

  He turns and looks at her, really looks at her. She has removed the ball of sheepskin from her head and unzipped the parka. Her hair is shorter now, and perhaps even a different colour, a deeper chestnut. He can’t recall the specifics. It is driving him crazy that she doesn’t remember him at all, as though he could be so utterly forgettable. Or perhaps he has become one of those people he likes to mock, the sort who pretend they are not balding or gaining weight. But more likely, he realizes, she has no reason to place him up here in the Far North, a thousand miles and years removed. The context is all wrong.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” he says. He feels better right away. Like opening a valve. He can feel the pressure leaving his body in a slow and silent leak.

  She looks at him and squints. And then she smiles a little and shakes her head.

  “Sorry,” she says. “Should I?”

  And so he tells her about his visits, two of them, to her small city on the lake. Seven or eight years ago now. The over-achieving bank robber D.J. Chasson, who robbed twenty-six banks in eighty-four days, two of them in Barrie, and his last in Orillia. How it was the guy’s M.O. that got him snagged in the end.

  “He was obsessive-compulsive, had this thing about jacking the same colour of car before every heist,” McKelvey says. “We set him up with a navy blue Ford Escort we had wired so we could track him. Found him holed up in that crappy motel out on Highway 69.”

  “That was my first serial bank robber,” Madsen says. And she looks at him again. She squints as though she is trying to read the words on a sign that is too far away. And then her eyes light up.

  “Oh my God,” she says. “Yes. You were the Toronto cop. The Hold-up Squad. Oh my God, I’m so embarrassed. I’m sorry. McKelvey, you said. Of course. Yeah, I remember. God, what are you doing up here?”

  “I grew up in Saint B. This is a temporary assignment, you could say.”

  “Sounds like the local guys could use all the experience they can get. Three times in a week this little place came across the provincial wire. Police officer assaulted, kid stabbed, and now a suspected meth lab blown up. The body, it was in pretty bad shape?”

  “It’ll be a dental ID. They’ve got a good cop, Nolan. He’s on the ball.”

  “And the chief? This Gallagher?”

  McKelvey has lived and breathed the Blue Code so long that his response comes instinctively. The same response he would provide to the Special Investigations Unit or Professional Standards. He doesn’t say a word.

  He looks down at the speedometer and eases off the gas. He is bringing them back to the station too quickly. Nolan needs the time to straighten things out, get Dr. Nichols on the page, and let Gallagher freshen up. “So you switched from city force to provincial, eh?”

  “Nine years with Barrie, I had an opportunity to try out for the OPP’s Criminal Investigations Bureau. Pay increase, better pension. And anyway, I like the uniform pants. The yellow stripe really does it for me.”

  She smiles at him. And then she frowns. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Oh, sure,” he says, and he glances in the rear-view and sees his face is blanched.

  His palms curl into the wheel as he swallows down another rivulet of this torment.

  Nineteen

  Chief Gallagher comes to on the couch in his living room. He opens his eyes and blinks at the ceiling. His mind is addled, groggy, thick with the booze he drank foolishly on an empty stomach. He is not a boozer, never was. Something he has turned to only and always at exactly the wrong time. He can’t handle commotion, that’s the thing. He has sought to control the weather, the temperature of things, since he was a boy in a home of chaos. And now the dial has moved right around to the other side, and sooner than later they will find out how he has been running this small operation. The books are a mess. Expenses have been padded, petty cash has been abused. He doesn’t need foreign eyeballs rummaging through his business; he’s been a sheriff for Christ’s sake. Sat on the executive of the Oklahoma Sheriffs’ Association, four thousand members. This place was supposed to be quiet, good fishing, better hunting, little more than a paid retirement. He saw himself moving into the little mayor’s office. Sign that deal on the landfill with Celluci, and Jesus, the municipality wouldn’t know what to do with the infusion of tax dollars. A hero, that’s what they’d call him. A new recreation facility: Gallagher Complex. Closing on seventy years old and he rides in and saves a goddamned shit-ass town from closure, from a drug epidemic, from the clutches of hell itself.

  He lifts up and swings his still-booted feet to the floor. He holds his head in his hands and steadies himself. A hero. Sure, and with money in his own pocket to burn. What was so wrong with a plan like that? Public service for a lifetime ought to result in something more than a paltry pension less deductions. Celluci had taken him on that fully-paid trip on a fishing boat out on the Gulf; yes sir, bobbing out there in the blue water with the sun and salt burning his eyes, catching kingfish, mahi, amberjack, barracuda shooting like silver muscle from the water. He didn’t feel a bit guilty about accepting that gift, or others to come. He will pay for that trip one way or the other, anyway, for Celluci and the men he works for always get paid in the end.

  It’s the drugs, he thinks, the goddamned scourge of the lazy and the weak-minded. Methamphetamine. And now it has come to this small and isolated place, an island on dry land, and choices have been made, the wrong ones. On his watch. He has been so busy with his own plans, people will say he has lost touch with the community. He can admit that much, and it is a sin for any sheriff. Perhaps he should have hung up his badge years ago. He looks at Eddie Nolan sometimes and he doesn’t know whether to be proud or jealous. He knows that Nolan waits for him to lead, to step out and show the way. Wear a big star on his vest like some goddamned vision of Wyatt Earp. But it doesn’t work that way. He has tried to teach the kid as much as he can. Being a sheriff, being a chief, isn’t about wearing a gun on your hip and throwing people in jail. It’s about managing expectations. It’s about delivering the illusion of safety and comfort, prosperity and peace. Knowing when to chew and swallow that mouthful of shit with a smile on your face. Is this the hill you’re prepared to die on, he asks Nolan three times a week.

  And anyway, he left the Midwest not for any of the reasons the townies here had whispered upon his arrival. No sir, just a story as old as the Bible. A man broken in half by a love turned sour, a man lifting his eyes to some new horizon. He thought of her all the time in those first long weeks and months adjusting to the Canadian winter that was beyond a definition you could put into words for the few friends he still talked with back home. He grew to respect and even embrace the cold, hard change that winter brought each year. Standing in the open, that biting ice and northern wind was strong enough to scour a man right clean, blow away the parts of himself he didn’t want to keep fastened down.

  It is rural men like Wade Garson that Gallagher best understands. The same version of a slightly different model found down in the small towns of Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa. Men born of desperate families boiling with bad blood like a poison in the DNA, rich histories of violence and bred-in disrespect for the law and order of so-called square society. That Garson’s place has blown up, that it appears to be the centre of production for this new entry of methamphetamine, it is so utterly predictable that it makes Gallagher wonder. It is the intelligence of Wade Garson, not the criminal motivation, which he has to consider. What it boils down to, there is no way in goddamned hell that Wade Garson has the wherewithal to mastermind the production and quiet distribution of meth on his own.

  The phone rings from the kitchen. He lifts himself and gains some new energy as he puts himself in motion. He grabs the receiver, speaks hi
s last name.

  “Chief,” Nolan says. “McKelvey’s here with the investigator.”

  “Does he look like an asshole?” Gallagher asks.

  “Uh, no. Not really,” Nolan says. “She looks nice enough.”

  “She?”

  “Correct.”

  Gallagher whistles. He spreads his thumb and forefinger across his moustache.

  “Well, I’ll be there in a tick,” he says. “I need a shower and a shave, throw on a clean shirt.”

  Twenty

  The squad room in the police station is sombre, the mood palpably dour as McKelvey walks in. Finn Madsen lingers just behind, briefcase in hand. Mayor Danny Marko and Dr. Nichols are slumped in chairs, heads bowed, and Nolan stands against a wall, arms crossed at his chest. The room smells strongly of the fire, wet cinders and a thick taste of burnt metal that settles like a coating on the tongue. Dr. Nichols is still wearing the hip waders, mucky with a milky grey ash that he has tracked across the floor. He is a tall and wiry man of sixty-five, silver hair thinning across a shining dome, and his round face is daubed in soot like a kid who has been playing in the mud. He looks up and blinks from behind thick wire-rimmed spectacles.

  “Mark Watson died early this morning,” the doctor says. “Septic shock settled in from the stabbing.” His voice, weary from the long night and this recent news, make the words sound more like a question, as though there might be some room yet for negotiation. “Scotty Cooper will face charges for killing his best friend.”

  “Jesus,” McKelvey says. He is yanked back to the middle-of-the-night phone call, sitting in the darkness on the edge of the bed with his wife just waking, clawing her way from the last good sleep she will ever know, the death of his own boy, this chain reaction of drugs to blades to bodies. “Where are the parents?”