The lead vehicle, a mudbrown Ford Crown Victoria driven by a traffic cop named Jamie Furth, had cut through a Toyota dealership and was half a block behind the Caddy, keeping pace. One of the flank vehicles had gone astray but was closing fast. The other unmarked flank car had rear-ended a burgundy-colour late-model DeVille. The DeVille’s driver was described by several independent female witnesses as a blue-eyed, curly-haired redhead who was movie-star handsome. Add hot-tempered to the description, for the man had drawn a shiny semiautomatic pistol and shot out the police vehicle’s front tires before vanishing down Forty-First Avenue in a haze of exhaust fumes and gunsmoke.
Was the gunfire another random act of aggression, or was the shooter a member of the snatch team?
It wasn’t Willows’ problem. All he had to think about was Joan Wismer and the tartan suitcases full of cash that were almost certainly in her Cadillac’s spacious trunk.
Oikawa called in.
Joan had made a left on Oak. Willows and Parker had already fallen a full three blocks behind. Parker lit up the fireball. Traffic moved aside. She put her foot down hard on the gas, killed the fireball as they swung onto Oak and sped north towards the downtown core.
High-speed pursuit, no lights or siren. Parker was running on pure adrenaline. If she bowled over an unwary pedestrian, the press would crucify her.
The radio popped and crackled.
Oikawa said, “See me, Jack? Half a block up, curb lane. She’s slowed to fifty and I’m right on her ass.”
Jamie’s Furth’s Crown Victoria was in a holding pattern at the northeast corner of Oak and Thirty-third. Willows told Oikawa to fall back and let Furth take the Caddy as soon as it had passed the intersection.
At Oak and Thirty-third, Joan signalled a right turn and then made a sharp left. She drove east on Thirty-third past Cambie and into Queen Elizabeth Park. Furth dropped back a little as she drove slowly through the parks winding road to the asphalt lot over the reservoir at the park’s low summit. Furth parked and got out of the Crown Victoria and walked towards the plexiglas dome of the Bloedel Conservatory. He contacted Oikawa via his walkie-talkie. There was only one road out of the parking lot. Oikawa waited.
Joan retraced her route, left the park and drove north on Cambie to Sixth Avenue. She cut under the bridge and turned left on Sixth.
She cruised sedately down Sixth to the Granville Street Bridge, swerved sharply into the curb lane.
By now the surviving police vehicles had traded positions a dozen times.
Oikawa said, “She just turned into Granville Island.”
Willows ordered the other units to fall back. Granville Island was a very large cul-de-sac. Once again, Joan Wismer seemed to have deliberately boxed herself in.
Oikawa said, “Okay, she’s stopped. She’s talking to a guy wearing a black suit. Six-footer, short blond hair, orange-tinted sunglasses ... Looks like that football player, used to play for the Raiders ... Howie Long!” Oikawa’s voice tightened. He said, “She just popped the trunk ... The guy’s got the suitcases, three of ’em, he’s walking away, he’s at the door of a pottery shop called Stone Pony. He’s going inside ...” Oikawa suddenly yelled, “She goosed it Jack, she’s gone!”
“Follow the money!” yelled Willows into the mike.
But Oikawa was already out of the car, the heel of his right hand on the butt of his Beretta, the coffee and Tim Hortons donuts that had passed for lunch pulling at him like a thirty-pound anchor.
A short block away, the Caddy’s brake lights flashed as it turned into an old flat-roofed wooden building that had been converted into a parking garage.
Oikawa’s shoulder hit the shop’s door hard, sent it crashing against a cleverly arranged stack of small wooden packing crates. Displayed on the crates were numerous important pieces by the area’s most prominent artists. These works of art were as delicate as they were expensive. In a moment, the shop was filled with brightly glazed shrapnel. A chipped raku teapot rolled into Oikawa’s path. He might as well have stepped onto a swiftly moving bowling ball. His feet went out from under him. He crashed headlong into the first of several parallel six-foot-high walls of glass shelving upon which hundreds of smaller pieces of pottery had been artfully arranged.
There was, predictably, a domino effect.
42
The bloated corpse drifted into the middle of the channel. Shortly past noon the massive, slowly rotating bronze propeller of a passing freighter caught it a glancing blow. The corpses left arm, jacket sleeve and all, was rudely torn from the decomposing body.
The remains cartwheeled diagonally across the ship’s broad and foamy wake, lonely hand rising and falling repeatedly, in manic salute.
An expatriate North Korean smoking a cigarette on the ship’s aft deck made a snap decision not to spend his shore leave describing what he’d seen to a brutal police interpreter.
A quirk in the current pulled at the corpse and made it spiral into the depths. It hung suspended at a depth of twenty feet in a mottled green-and-black twilight, head down and almost motionless, the ruined shoulder socket trailing pink tendrils of flesh.
Then, imperceptibly, it began to work its way back to the surface.
43
Ozzie, unaware that Dean was about to piss off a strange blonde in a Mercedes-Benz and fail to get through to Joan Wismer, stood in the doorway waving a cheerful goodbye as the lamebrain drove off in the rental.
The way he stood there, muscular body tilted at a slight angle, splayed left hand perched on his hip and his right arm raised high, fingers flapping in the wind, he felt like some sicko pervert’s idea of domesticity gone dreadfully astray.
The van passed from view behind a row of spindly evergreens. Ozzie went back inside the house, shut and deadbolted the door behind him.
He musically cried, “Ho-ney, I’m ho-ome!”
Melanie was watching TV. As always. The soaps. He sat down on the arm of the La-Z-Boy and put his arm around her.
She leaned into him, rested her head against him. She’d taken a shower a half-hour earlier, changed into a semi-translucent blouse and flower-patterned summer skirt Ozzie had found in a drawer. He hadn’t been able to find a bra or panties, unfortunately. But Melanie was no slouch. She’d washed her sweet nothings by hand, in the shower, and put them on clean but damp.
Ozzie stroked her silky hair. They’d had a few intimate little talks, during those brief moments when Dean wasn’t hovering.
Melanie had made it clear she was not overly attached to Harold, except maybe at the wallet.
She had indicated in ways that made it impossible to misunderstand that she preferred younger men. Men of approximately Ozzie’s age.
He kissed her warm throat, felt the racy thump of her pulse beneath his butterfly mouth, the fast beating of her heart. He nibbled gently at an earlobe.
The problem was, she didn’t want him to kill Harold. Or Dean, either. Ozzie told her not to worry, that he’d take care of the messy part. Melanie said it didn’t matter who pulled the trigger, she’d be equally guilty in the eyes of the law. Where did she get all this stuff? From the soaps. Ozzie tried to laugh off her squeamish concerns. Melanie told him she felt the way she did because that was how she felt, and she wasn’t about to change her mind.
Well, duh.
He trailed his hand across her shoulder.
Squeeze, squeeze.
He’d told her the mock-cable guy was trussed up in the basement. But not that he’d been stored in the freezer, turned into a human popsicle. He had a feeling that, if Melanie knew the whole awful truth and nothing but the whole awful truth, she might not be so receptive to his sly advances.
But what choice did he have?
Dead men don’t stand up in court and point accusing fingers.
Dead men don’t plea-bargain with tricky cops.
Dead men spill blood, but they don’t spill the beans.
The way Ozzie saw it, those same rules applied to Harold. And he had plenty of excellent reasons for drilli
ng Dean, too. Five million dollars split down the middle was exactly half of five million dollars not split down the middle.
Ozzie leaned into Melanie, let her take his weight. His fingers probed the bones of her spine, trailed across her ribcage, the rounded firmness of her hip, her thigh. He tried to make sense of his attraction to her, the reality of his feelings for her. She was a feisty woman. Snatched at gunpoint by ruthless men, she’d managed to stay rational, keep her cool. But once Joan paid out, he could have his pick of women.
So, why Melanie?
Maybe just because she was there. Conveniently located. He needed a partner. A special person to watch his back. Why not Melanie?
Maybe it would be cheaper, in the long run, to stick with Dean. Melanie was better-looking, but she was also a lot smarter. Dean’s strong suit was his relentless predictability. You wanted to know what Dean was thinking, all you had to do was look at him.
Ozzie reached inside his shirt, found the handcuffs key.
He dangled the key in front of Melanie’s eyes, moved it as if he meant to hypnotize her.
She gazed up at him with the hint of a smile.
He said, “Where would you like to go today?”
Her eyes were dark, serious.
Ozzie said, “You look kind of tired. Maybe you’d like to go upstairs with me, take a little nap.”
Melanie leaned back in the La-Z-Boy, considering. She turned her body so she could look squarely up at him. “If I let you ...”
Ozzie tilted his head. His eyes were bright.
Melanie said, “Are you going to let me live?”
“Cross my heart,” said Ozzie. A split second too late.
Melanie stared at the television screen, a Ford Taurus commercial. She said, “Harold told me he’d buy me a white one, as soon as the lease ran out on my Acura.”
Ozzie’s hands flitted here and there. His breath washed hot and damp across her ear. He said, “Wanna go upstairs, Melanie?”
“I’d rather do it to myself with a dead trout.”
Ozzie’s hands fell away. His mouth sagged open. A dead trout? His imagination took a snapshot. Lack of discipline made him look at it.
Jeez.
He went into the kitchen and got a beer from the fridge. He looked out the window at the lake. He drank some beer. He consoled himself with the thought that, even if she had agreed to go upstairs with him, it’d be all over by now anyway. He checked his watch. Harold had been quiet all morning. Not a peep out of him since breakfast. He slammed the beer down on the counter and sprinted for the stairs.
Ozzie was pretty sure he’d left Harold’s door wide open, after he’d delivered his morning cereal. But now the door was shut tight, and when he turned the knob and pushed, it didn’t give an inch. He stepped back, kicked hard. The door trembled but held. He yelled Harold’s name, told him in no uncertain terms what he’d do to him if he didn’t open the door immediately. Harold was silent. He kicked the door repeatedly. Wood splintered. He put his fevered eye to a one-inch gap. The angle was all wrong — he couldn’t see the bed.
*
Harold had listened in as Ozzie and Dean popped tabs on cans of beer down there in front of the TV. He’d heard them chatting about various news items — a downed jet in Venezuela, a random drive-by shooting and multiple deaths in Miami Beach. He’d listened carefully as they’d debated the best brand of audio tape, what to have for lunch and whose turn it was to cook.
He heard them chatting about what the mock-cable guy had looked like after twenty-four hours in the freezer.
Hard-bitten. By frost.
Yuk yuk yuk.
Harold listened in as Dean and Ozzie argued spiritedly about how many mock-cable guys it would be possible to stuff into a freezer.
Five mock-cable guys, they decided.
Five mock-cable guys or three-point-eight grossly overweight stock promoters.
Yuk yuk yuk.
Harold decided he wasn’t going to just lie there, passive and helpless, while they worked their way around to killing him. He considered his situation for hours. How to escape? Finally it occurred to him that, if he couldn’t break free of the bed, he’d take it with him.
It seemed, at the moment of inception, a brilliant idea. The heavy brass headboard and footboard were connected by a pair of six-foot-long iron rails that supported the box spring and mattress. The bulbous ends of the rails fitted into U-shaped slots. All that held them in place was gravity.
Harold waited impatiently for his kidnappers to relax their vigil. He spent a lot of time thinking about Joan. What if their positions were reversed? What if somebody had kidnapped her, threatened to kill her if he didn’t pay millions in ransom money, but he knew for a fact that she’d been having one affair after another for years and years? What if he knew for a dirty fact that she owned an apartment where she kept her sexy boyfriends? Would he put his own life — his financial stability — at risk to save her?
No way.
With him out of the way, Joan would be independently wealthy, free to do whatever she wanted for the rest of her life.
Downstairs, there was silence. Was he alone in the house? Where was Melanie?
Harold decided that if he was going to make a break for it, there was no time like the present.
*
Ozzie backed up, charged. Wood splintered. Chips of glossy white paint skittered across the hallway’s pine floor. The door abruptly collapsed. He spun sideways, stumbled, landed on his ass and rode a small carpet across the floor, bounced off a wall.
He saw as soon as the room came back into focus that Harold had taken a hike.
The mullioned doors leading to the balcony were shut, but even so, it wasn’t too hard to figure out which way he’d gone. Ozzie yanked open the doors, rushed out on the balcony. Where was Harold?
Right there in front of him, close enough to touch. The blunt end of an iron rail turned Ozzie’s ear to mush. His head snapped sideways. His brain rattled against his skull. His knees buckled. He fell against the balcony’s wooden railing. The length of the iron hit him again, in the chest. He noticed that the sky was very blue, but off to the south there was a huge bank of fluffy white cumulus clouds. They were the kind of clouds you might see in a film about dreaming. The iron hit him again. The clouds vanished behind the roofline.
It was a twelve-foot drop to the cedar deck. Ozzie landed flat on his back. His head bounced off the boards repeatedly, but with diminishing force.
The sky was pink now, hazy and blurred. His eyelids were stuck in the open position. The sun burned him. He could feel his eyeballs dehydrating.
He tasted blood.
He tried to take an inventory of the damage he had sustained, but his body was beyond numb — it simply wasn’t there. He wondered if he had died or was about to die. Had he slipped out of his corporeal body? Was it his spirit that was doing all the thinking? Was his spirit in a holding pattern, like an airplane waiting for clearance to touch down, or fly away forever?
The pink clouds evaporated. The sky turned blue. His vision cleared. Harold was leaning over the balcony, staring at him. Now he shuffled along the length of the balcony, the brass headboard glittering in the sunlight, throwing off firefly sparks of golden light. He carried the six-foot length of iron rail like a spear.
He raised the spear high above his head, took aim.
Ozzie found that he’d started breathing again. He sucked air deep into his lungs. His back was on fire. His legs ached. Both his arms felt as if they’d been ruthlessly broken. A lifetime of brawling had taught him how to accurately self-diagnose a concussion. He was, no doubt about it, concussed.
Harold’s eyes bulged. His arm was a blur. He grunted with the effort, as he threw.
The iron rail, ten pounds of lethal metal, shot directly towards Ozzie. As he scrambled and clawed at the deck, his thought processes were about as complicated as those of an immature woodbug.
The iron rail caught him in the ribs. The sound that reverberated
through his body was the sound of an hysterical grizzly rushing through a tight-packed stand of saplings. His ribs popped like corn in a microwave. From deep inside himself he heard a brittle splintering.
Harold was leaning over the railing, screaming at him.
No, he was doing all the screaming.
No, wrong again. It was both of them.
He advised himself to shut up. He reminded himself that five million dollars was worth all the pain in the world.
He gritted his teeth. He sat up, inch by agonizing inch. It felt as if he was falling apart, pieces of him breaking loose, tumbling into the void.
Where was Harold?
Back inside the house. Ozzie could hear him going down the stairs, the brass headboard banging and thumping against the walls.
He tried to work out what Harold would do when he made it downstairs, to the sundeck. Beat him to death with the headboard? Or take the Ruger away from him and shoot him to pieces?
Ozzie spat. A silky gobbet of blood sizzled on the deck. The Ruger! Where was it? Over there, not ten feet away. He spat again, spat a pink froth laced with bright scarlet threads that looked a lot like candy floss.
Maybe the situation wasn’t so grim after all ...
44
The cellular warbled as Joan drove into the twilight zone of the old wood-frame parking garage. The building was the size of a barn, and it was full almost to capacity, the cars parked in orderly rows. Rectangles of hard white light fell through large, glassless, chicken-wired windows. Joan picked up the ringing phone and said hello. Jake told her to use the remote, pop the Caddy’s trunk. She did what she was told, glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the trunk lid rise up and wobble.
Jake told her to drive straight through to the far end of the building, make a right, and stop.
He told her to sit tight and wait patiently.
Not just wait, but wait patiently.
A man wearing a dark suit slipped out from between two cars, pushed the trunk lid all the way up and was lost from view.
Jake croaked into her ear, muttered further instructions.
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