“Just one more thing. Whose taxi was it?”
Candace shrugged, shook her head and said negligently, “I can’t remember.”
“I give you two hundred bucks, and you give me the runaround? I need to know who drove you to Pic A Flic.”
“I think it was a black Cadillac taxi. One of those big old Cadillacs? You’re a policeman, ask around, it shouldn’t be too hard to find him,” she said, taking my money and sauntering towards her bedroom with it. Posed in the bedroom doorway with one knee bent, the other straight, one arm stretched up along the jamb, she said, “Say, big boy. Got anything left in that wallet?”
“Candace, when you walk away from me like that, your behind looks like two fresh honeydew melons.”
“Implants, it’s the latest thing,” she said. “Do you like ’em?”
“I certainly do,” I said sincerely.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I wasted a couple of days, wandering the street near the Pic A Flic shop, calling taxi companies and just generally trying to find Lightning Bradley, before Candace phoned me again. It was ten o’clock at night. I’d had a couple of drinks.
She said, “How would you like to give me another present?”
“What for?”
She said coyly, “Just on general principles.”
“With you, Candace, principle doesn’t enter into it.”
“Okay, how about for value given and received?”
“As long as it doesn’t involve sweaty tussling on your king-sized bed.”
“You should try it sometime. Look up at the ceiling mirrors and admire my educated ass.”
“It’s not your educated ass that I’m interested in, it’s your information.”
“Okay, spoilsport. Put another two hundred dollars in your pocket and meet me at Pinky’s.”
“You want another two hundred, and that’s it?” I said sourly. “Give me a hint.”
“I’ve given you a hint, darling. See you at Pinky’s in an hour, don’t be late,” she said sweetly, and hung up.
Unless Candace was stringing me along, it was showtime. While looking at the rain trickling down my windowpanes, I tried to make one and one equal four, gave up, and phoned Ravi. The taxi dispatcher told me that Ravi was out. I called headquarters and asked for Bernie Tapp. Second time lucky—Bernie was working late.
“It’s me,” I said, when Bernie came on the line. “There’s no time to explain but I need a wire, tonight. Right now, in fact.”
Bernie’s answer was a long drawn-out sigh.
I said, “Time is running out, Bernie.”
Another long sigh, then, “Where are you?”
“I’m at home.”
“A wire? How about asking me for something simple? A ten-thousand-dollar unsecured personal loan, for example.”
“Just a simple wire.”
“Meet me in the tool crib, but don’t make a fuss coming in because mistrustful eyes may be looking and suspicious ears may be listening. A wire will be ready when you get here. I just hope this doesn’t land us both up the creek.”
I was wearing jeans, moccasins, and a logger’s thick woollen shirt. My hair was growing back nicely. My face looked almost normal, and a lingering dread that the blows to my head might have permanently disabled my brain was fading.
I exchanged my moccasins for Magnum Stealths, put a shoulder holster on under a red Gore-Tex jacket, got my car keys from where they’d been gathering moss in a drawer and strapped a dagger to my right ankle. Loaded for bear, I went out. I’d been running the MG’s engine occasionally to keep the battery charged. The MG started immediately. The streets were dark, wet and desolate. It was a good night for dirty tricks and a bad night for motorbikes, so business was slow at Pinky’s except for a knee-walking drunk with full-sleeve tattoos on his brawny arms and a slinky woman wearing, in essence, a bikini. Of Candace, however, there was no sign. Doyle was minding the bar as usual. When he deigned to acknowledge my existence, he made an elaborate show of opening a drawer, peering inside it for a long moment, and then he was slow to take my order.
I ordered a double Chivas Regal with water on the side.
“I’ve just checked your tab, you owe me a hundred bucks,” Doyle said, leaning across the bar and giving me a sample of his halitosis. “It’s against my principles to advance credit to the unemployed.”
I raised my eyebrows.
Doyle pointed at the club’s ATM. “Your money is waiting over there, and if it’s not, you are barred from here till it is.”
I drew money out of the ATM, plunked a hundred on the bar, and added another twenty. When my drink came, there wasn’t any change.
I tasted the Chivas, put my glass on the bar and said, “Doyle. I’m waiting for the ten dollars that you owe me.”
Doyle scowled.
“I’m his witness. Better give him the money, Doyle,” Candace said, sliding onto a stool beside me. “Silas will need it to buy me a drink.”
Doyle’s scowl deepened.
I said to Candace, “Where did you spring from?”
“We’re having a party in the back room. Just me and a few very close and dear friends. Feel like joining us?”
“No thanks.”
“Do you have my little present for me, Silas?”
I handed her two hundred while Doyle wasn’t looking. When Candace’s champagne cocktail arrived, and Doyle withdrew to the end of the bar, she drew a scrap of folded paper from between her augmented breasts and gave it to me. Warmed by her body, the paper had an address written on it. I finished my drink and went out.
≈ ≈ ≈
I drove into a street of neat middle-class houses located near Victoria’s Craigdarroch Castle and did a U-turn before parking so that I could make a quick getaway if necessary. I reached beneath the dashboard, took my Glock from its clip and put it in my shoulder holster.
The house that interested me was a 1960s colonial with white cedar siding. Four slender octagonal pillars supported its long porch. The doors and window shutters were painted pale blue. Wooden stairs creaked as I walked up to the porch and put my finger to a buzzer. After a couple of minutes, curtains moved in a side window and Lightning Bradley materialized behind the dark glass. His face seemed disembodied, like a ghost summoned up by black magic. When he recognized me, Bradley’s eyes widened. A grin spread across his white face like a thin smear of black paint. The face receded into darkness. After a few seconds, the front door opened. I went into an entrance hall, where Lightning was waiting for me with a gun in his hand. I became aware of low voices in the background.
Lightning was wearing a rumpled dark navy suit and he had lost weight. I smelled liquor on his breath. Gazing at me with a mixture of hostility and apprehension, he said, “Sorry, pal, I’ve got to ask you to unbutton your coat and put your hands behind your back.”
Lightning took my gun away and put it in a drawer in the hall table. Patting me down, Lightning was careless. He missed the wire. His hand closed around the wallet in my pocket, but he missed the dagger strapped to my leg.
After checking my wallet for improvized explosive devices, Lightning dropped it on the hall carpet. “Now you can pick it up,” he said, with a fraudulent grin. My neck hairs prickled when I stooped for the wallet and exposed my back.
“I’ve been half-expecting you,” he said. “Candace told me that you might show up tonight, but you know what women are. You can’t always trust ’em, can you?”
“I ought to have known,” I said, giving vent to a spasm of irrational disgust. “Candace is playing both ends against the middle, like everybody else in my goddamn life. She charged me two hundred. How much did you give her?”
“Money and fair words,” Lightning said with a widening grin.
He pointed down the hallway. “We’ve got a little catching up to do, you and me. So let’s talk. You first, it’s that room on the left.”
I preceded him into a dimly lit living room. Jeopardy was playing on a widescreen TV. He swit
ched it off. “Game shows are all I watch these days. I used to like National Geographic, but what with one thing or another, I don’t have the attention span any more. There was a show on last night, about these mist gorillas. African gorillas that live in the mist somewhere. Poachers keep shooting them, it’s a shame. Why doesn’t somebody do something?”
Lightning sat down in a straight-backed chair. A bottle of Bombay gin and a blue glass tumbler stood on a side table at his elbow. I parked myself on a chesterfield, facing Lightning across the room.
Lightning placed his gun within easy reach on the side table and poured himself another gin. Old acne scars that must have shattered his adolescence and poisoned the rest of his life ravaged his skin. Gravity and late middle age was giving him bulldog jowls and a corrugated neck. Some guys have all the luck. Feeling almost sorry for him, I watched Lightning sip a little gin.
He said flippantly, “So, Silas. What do you know?”
“I know how this whole mess started. I know how it will end.”
“Did you figure it all out by yourself, or did somebody have to tell you?” he said with a patronizing sneer.
“I don’t put a lot of credence in other peoples’ opinions, because most of what I’ve been listening to lately is lies. Including your lying lies.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“Of course, I am because you are a dyed-in-the-wool liar,” I said in a mild conversational tone. “You are a liar and a fraud. You are an asshole front, back and sideways.”
He smiled as if I’d paid him a compliment.
I said, “Let’s start with when you and Constable Ricketts answered a suspicious-persons call. You were in a blue-and-white. Constable Ricketts was driving.”
“Sure. We were looking for a couple of your Native sisters who’d been spotted walking on Collins Lane.”
“When you spotted the two women, Ricketts stopped the blue-and-white, and the pair of you followed them into the bush. You lost them. Instead of just giving up the chase, which is what you did, Ricketts kept looking. You went back to wait in the blue-and-white.”
Lightning had a faraway expression. “Go on,” he said, “this is better than Jeopardy.”
“After a while, Ricketts called you on his cellphone. He’d stumbled across a murder. I guess you were in a hurry to join him, because while you were driving over there you ran the blue-and-white into a sports car. It was an unlucky accident, but maybe you were a little careless as well.”
Lightning nodded. “Right. I came to your office and I told you about that accident myself. Maybe I shouldn’t have.”
“I remember that visit well, and you were half-right for once. The car you ran into wasn’t a black Mercedes, which is what you said it was. It was a white Nissan. You should have kept the accident business to yourself, though. Still, what you told me that day and what I know now, are two different things. I know that there was more to your story than what you told me.”
“Thirsty, Silas? There’s a glass on the mantelpiece if you want a drink.”
I shook my head.
“Well, I’m having another,” Lightning said, topping up his glass.
“How long have you known Tubby Gonzales?”
My question caught Lightning like a physical blow. He gave a sudden involuntary start. Gin from the bottle slopped onto the side table instead of into his glass.
I said, “Victoria’s cocaine market is growing every day. Tubby Gonzales had been supplying a share of it, but nothing lasts forever. Outsiders have been watching Victoria’s skyrocketing drug trade, and they all want a piece of the action. Then Tubby Gonzales did some nosing around and found out that a Big Circle Boy had just moved from Vancouver to Victoria.”
“How did Gonzales know that?” Bradley inquired negligently.
“Hell, Bradley, you know the answer to that as well as I do. The VPD is full of blabbermouths. Cops who’ll call the press when something juicy happens. Traitorous cops with friends on the street . . . ”
Lightning tried to interrupt me, but I kept talking. “The drug scene is wall-to-wall with finks. The ordinary crackster will sell his own mother for a five-dollar rock. Somebody blabbed, Tubby got to hear about it, and he traced Raymond Cho to that house on Echo Bay. Raymond Cho, alias Ronnie Chew. Tubby Gonzales murdered Cho by cutting his throat.”
“Cho’s isn’t the only throat that Gonzales cut.”
“I know, Lightning. I know more than you think I know. So just be patient, I’ll get around to that in a minute.”
A lopsided sneer pulled Lightning’s mouth out of shape, but he kept quiet when I said, “Tubby Gonzales just happened to be watching Cho’s house on the night that Cho brought two young Native women home. Gonzales bided his time till the women left. Then he went in. Gonzales suspected that Cho had cocaine stashed in the house. Gonzales tortured Cho until he told him where the cocaine was. Then Gonzales killed Cho and drove away. Things spiralled out of control almost immediately.”
Lightning was gazing at me with rapt attention. He said, “Keep talking.”
“Things went out of control because the car that Tubby was driving ran into your blue-and-white. Gonzales lost control of his car, and it veered off the road. You escaped injury although your car sustained heavy damage. When you stopped and checked, you found Gonzales behind the steering wheel. I assume he was either knocked out or dazed temporarily. You found Cho’s cocaine in Gonzales’ car and stole it. Coke worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. You left Gonzales to fend for himself and drove to the murder scene. How am I doing so far?”
“You’re doing fine, Silas. I couldn’t have described things better myself.”
Lightning wasn’t looking at me then. He was staring into a deep dark hole. His gun was within easy reach of his right hand. I could see the safety catch, and it was off. He may not have been listening when I went on, “Unfortunately for you, Gonzales probably wasn’t totally unconscious when you robbed him. He either knew then or figured out later that you had taken the cocaine. Gonzales wanted it back, so he went to your house. You weren’t there. Gonzales found your wife Maggie instead. She was helpless and alone, in a wheelchair. He tortured Maggie to death.”
“Yes, he did,” Lightning said. “Gonzales tortured my wife. He thought Maggie would know where the cocaine was, but she didn’t know.”
Lightning’s voice sounded normal, but a single tear squeezed from the corner of his left eye and trickled down his cheek. “Maggie didn’t know anything about the cocaine. It was one of the few things about me that she didn’t know. Maggie knew about my womanizing, she knew a lot of bad stuff about me.”
“Yeah, right,” I said derisively. “You’ve done a lot of bad things in your time.”
“I came home and found Maggie dead. It was horrible,” Lightning said. “I knew that Gonzales must have done it. But what goes around comes around, and then it was my turn. I caught him unawares in his apartment. I treated him the way he’d treated my wife. I enjoyed every minute. I enjoyed watching him bleed and squirm, I kept him alive as long as I could, till his heart stopped.”
“I know you did. I can even understand that part of the story, in a way. But I don’t understand the rest of it. Maybe you’d like to tell me.”
He looked at me without making eye contact, and shrugged.
“Go on, tell me,” I said, “try to make me understand.”
“It was a dirty trick I played on you, Silas. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” I said, revulsed. “What did I do to deserve it?”
“Nothing,” Lightning said, pouring himself another drink. “You didn’t do a goddamn thing to deserve it. But I was a little crazy back then, Silas. I thought it was my way out. I thought I could get away with it.”
Disgust must have shown on my face. I stood up and took a step towards him. Lightning picked up his gun and said, “Make another move towards me and you’re dead. You’re more use to me dead than alive.”
I sat down again.
/> “You were wrong about some of the details. Cho had four kilos of cocaine in his house,” Lightning said. “It was worth a fortune, a million bucks at least, if I’d only known how to market it properly. I had the coke, but it became a curse. I was trapped. I knew that Bernie at least would figure it all out and get me eventually. Then I had an idea. I threw Bernie a patsy.”
“Yes, me. I was to be your patsy.”
“Yeah, why not?” he grinned lopsidedly. “It was either my ass, or yours.”
“You’re the one who mugged me from behind when I came ashore off Twinner Scudd’s boat. You’re the one who put coke up my chimney.”
“Correct. After stashing the coke, I called the Times Colonist. The TC called Nice Manners. Manners hates your guts, he was only too ready to believe the worst of Silas Seaweed. Manners would love to hang this whole case around your neck, because you’re not everybody’s best friend, are you?”
“You’re crazy.”
“Crazy or not, I’ve made plans. I’m flying out of here tomorrow. Me and Candace.”
“Does Candace know about that yet?”
“Not yet. But she knows that I’m worth big money, which is what interests her. She’ll do whatever I want her to do.”
He was right. I said, “Manners wants to see me fall, but Bernie Tapp doesn’t. I cut corners, I tell the odd fib, but I’m not a murderer. Bernie will get you eventually. You might be on top of the world now, but the only way you can go is down. You’ll spend the rest of your life running and worrying. Worrying and fretting. Because every time you hear a knock on the door, it might be the police.”
“I’ve given that a lot of thought too,” Lightning said.
With the gun in one hand, he reached into his pocket and brought out a wrapped candy. He struggled ineffectually, trying to get the wrapping off with one hand, and then he gave up trying and threw the candy across the room for me to catch. “Here, Silas,” he said. “I’m not all bad. Have a breath mint, maybe it’ll sweeten you up a little.”
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