Flush

by Sky Curtis

  “What?” Cindy smiled, calmly. Patronizingly. I hated it. “Wait for the neighbours to discover a bad smell?” Cindy was adamant. “What if he was hit but he isn’t dead? What if he’s hiding in the house and the reason why we aren’t being followed is because the shooter went back, and maybe is going after van Horner right this second? Maybe the shooter only went around the block in that white van and came back. We have to call for help.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t going to argue with Cindy when she was like this. I pulled out my phone to dial 911.

  She batted it out of my hand. “Don’t use your phone, idiot,” yelled Cindy. “You never know what sort of tracing equipment they have. We don’t know what we are up against. Two murders? Water? This could be a sophisticated crime ring. We’ll go into the food store here.” She hung a quick hard right, throwing me against the door again, and then a hard left, that had me thudding against the console. “They have a phone booth outside the back door.”

  And there it was, it’s blue Bell Canada strip across the top. The levered door was folded open and inside we could see the wire from the phone flapping limply. No receiver.

  Cindy dashed inside the shop with me schlepping behind her to the customer service desk. “I need to call the police,” Cindy announced to the startled store clerk.

  I could hear the tinny voice of the 911 operator come out of the phone in Cindy’s hand. It was asking calmly if we needed a fire truck, an ambulance, or the police. Cindy’s voice was clipped with clear diction, “Gunshot,” she snapped. And then spit out the ritzy address. She crashed down the phone and bolted back to her car with me trailing behind her. I turned around and saw the store clerk with her jaw hanging down to her chin.

  Within seconds a siren screamed north on Yonge Street. Red and blue strobe lights flashed down the side street where we had parked and then continued north, bathing the boutique-type stores in strobes. “That was fast,” I gasped. “Now what?”

  In reply, Cindy slammed the car into reverse, spun out of the parking spot, and then threw it into drive. “We go back,” she whooped as she gunned the car into the roadway, grinning like a maniac.

  “You are NUTS!” I screamed.

  She turned to me, her eyes dancing with excitement, “Welcome to being a crime reporter, Robin. Having fun yet?”

  “Oh, God.” I felt ill. The last thing on earth I wanted to do right now was head back to where the sniper had been. It must have been a sniper. But what did I know?

  “Do you think it was a sniper?”

  “Yup. There was no blood on the door, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So, the shot couldn’t have come from inside the house. Van Horner’s brains would be all over the door. No blood. The glass was clear, right?”

  I was nauseous. But, being a stickler for descriptions of houses, I mumbled, “Frosted.”

  Cindy shook her head as she drove a few blocks north, squealing a left onto van Horner’s street. “You know what I mean, asshole.”

  “I’m not an asshole. You’re the asshole.”

  We were stressed.

  She slowed down and screeched to a stop at the corner of van Horner’s street and Mount Pleasant. Looking down the boulevard, I saw immediately that the angles were all wrong for the sniper to be in the van. I could also see that the emergency vehicles had arrived in force. Bathed in rotating red and blue lights were a fire truck, an ambulance, and three darkened cruisers all parked near the house. Cindy snuck down the wrong side of the boulevard, lights off, past the police cordon, did a tight U-turn at the loop, and parked virtually where we had been before. She gave me a thumbs up in the dark: we hadn’t been turned back by the police.

  We could see shadowy figures moving around the shrubbery. Looked like they were surrounding the house. Suddenly out of nowhere two burly guys ran up the front stairs, taking the steps two at a time, their shoulders hitting the wood surrounding the glass. The door broke open and a square of light filled the almost dark street. We could hear them shouting “Police!” from the interior of the house. And then there was nothing.

  Cindy quietly opened her door and didn’t shut it all the way. She gestured for me to follow.

  I hissed over the roof of the car, “What about the guy? The sniper? The guy with the gun?”

  “Oh, he’s long gone, drove off in that van. He’s downtown by now, or on the highway heading for Oshawa. We’re perfectly safe.”

  So why was she being so quiet? Her van guy theory was crap. “If the sniper wasn’t the van guy, then what?”

  “He’s probably over there somewhere,” Cindy gestured widely with her hand over the golf course. “He’s got tons of acres to lose himself in. But I know it was the van guy,” Cindy was unbending. “And he’s gone.”

  I wasn’t so sure. I had read hundreds of mysteries, and almost every single one was emphatic that the criminal remained at the scene to admire the chaos his handiwork had caused. Was Cindy telling me that this wasn’t true? I followed her towards the police activity, just in time to see a person being carried out of the house on a hospital gurney. As I got closer I could see it was van Horner, his face pale and eyes shut. An orange blanket covered his torso and clear liquid snaked into his left arm. His feet stuck forlornly out from under the blanket. I wondered fleetingly what had happened to his shoes. Maybe he took them off when he had entered the house from the garage. For some reason this detail weighed upon my heart. The EMS worker was pressing his latex gloved hand tightly over bright red gauze on Horner’s right shoulder. He was pumping out blood. It was dripping down the steel tubing of the gurney, through the mechanism of a wheel, and onto the driveway, leaving oily splats on the cobblestones.

  A black SUV zoomed into the driveway, despite a police officer flagging it to stop at the street. The officer jumped aside when it was clear the driver was not going to obey him. A harried woman whipped open the BMW’s car door screaming her husband’s name. Three wide-eyed children shadowed her, their screams “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” filling the air. The mother was shouting “Richard,” as she clawed her way towards the gurney. A huge policeman grabbed her from behind and held her back. Her face was contorted with fierce determination and I watched in fascination as she lifted her silk stockinged knee and stomped the heel of her Prada pump into the officer’s foot. He abruptly let her go and she fell forward, almost on top of her husband.

  I nudged Cindy in the ribs, “You gotta admire that.”

  The wife stroked her husband’s face as the EMS workers carried him towards the waiting ambulance. Another officer came up to her and started asking her questions. I strained to hear the exchange.

  “Your name, ma’am?”

  “Melissa Mowbray,” she fired.

  “You the sister? Wife? Married to van Horner? First wife? Second? Lover? What’s the relationship here?”

  When Melissa Mowbray looked up at the cop, she was seething. The look questioned why this cop, this lowly rookie, dared insinuate that she was a cheap lover. An interesting reaction, considering her husband was lying on a gurney in front of her, his life-blood seeping through a bandage on his shoulder. Was she more interested in appearances than the life of her husband? Fear presented itself in different ways for different people, I guessed.

  “I’m his wife, officer, and the mother of his children.”

  Suddenly she stood up and her eyes bolted around the landscape. Where were her children? The officer, guessing the cause of her current distress, gestured towards her car. Her three children had been rounded up by another police officer and put back into the SUV. I could see their white faces pressed against the windows, their eyes wide with fright as they watched their father’s gurney being shoved into an ambulance and the doors shutting with a clang behind him. The oldest one winced and a tear rolled down the little girl’s face. The middle child, a boy, was so pale I worried he might faint.

 
At least their father was still alive, if only barely. The medics were in a huge hurry, so I knew it was touch and go. The ambulance pulled away and charged up the street with the siren yowling eerily in the quiet neighbourhood.

  I hugged my body for warmth as the sun slid behind the horizon. Cindy prodded me, “Stage right. Stokes. Creston.”

  Sure enough, the two guys who had interviewed me earlier that day were striding towards us. I imitated Cindy’s flat non-committal mask and activated the recording app on my phone. Maybe I trusted the police, but I sure didn’t trust myself to remember everything and I had a story to write.

  “So,” griped Creston, “If it isn’t MacFarland and Dale from the Express. Fancy meeting you here. What are you after?”

  Stokes, in his usual fashion, parroted, “After?” And then he covered his mouth and suffocated his snicker.

  What was with this guy? I looked at Creston who shrugged. “Now that van Horner’s been attacked, it’s looking more like the two men are victims of an international crime ring focused on the theft of our water. The two crimes are connected somehow. The autopsy on Radcliffe hasn’t been completed yet, and all the reports aren’t in, so no cause of death so far, but I’m thinking drugs. Probably a truth serum of some sort. So he’d talk about the pump’s location. With this attack, I doubt Radcliffe was tortured for the information. His body showed no signs of torture. So they probably used some sort of truth serum. And Van Horner sure wasn’t tortured. He never saw that bullet coming.”

  Cindy ignored all this speculation and answered his question. “We’re after a follow up story on Everwave and thought we’d come by and interview van Horner. Vice prez. You know, a bit of background on Radcliffe: what he thought of him, what kind of boss he was, you know, plus anything about the company.”

  Creston pulled out his notebook. “Did you have an appointment?”

  Cindy shifted her weight, “No, not really.”

  “So you were staking out the house, waiting for him to come home?”

  “Yes,” I owned up. “That’s what we were doing. We were sitting in the car, right there, right where we are parked right now.” I pointed to Cindy’s Accord.

  Creston stared at me and said nothing. He was probably waiting for me to become uncomfortable and fill the silence with a confession or something. I had read that cops do that. It was a game. Cindy gave her head a small shake. So, don’t offer anything, but answer the questions if and when they were asked. I liked it. For a brief second I had a feeling of power as I stared back at Creston.

  Creston cast his gaze skywards, as if praying for patience. “Right.” We’d won a point. “And what time did you get here?”

  Cindy said, “It was about five-thirty.”

  He wrote it down. “And what, exactly did you see?”

  Cindy, being a smart ass, said, “Tall, stone, Edwardian mansion, leaded windows, manicured lawn—”

  I thought it was hilarious and added my two bits. “Flagstone steps, European wrought iron filigree…”

  Creston’s self control was slipping. We had taken our sport too far. “May I remind you, journalists,” he said, emphasizing the word journalist as if he were saying scum, “this is a serious situation. A man’s life hangs in the balance. A father of three. I don’t want to know if there are Pella windows on the house. I want to know if you saw anything that pertains to this investigation. Let’s try this again. What did you see?”

  I was humbled. “His garage door opened about five-thirty, maybe quarter-to-six, and then a car came down the street—”

  “The door opened first? And then the car?”

  “Wireless remote opener,” I said.

  Creston looked at me appraisingly. “Right. What kind of car?” He was taking notes.

  “A Lexus. Gold. It pulled into the driveway and went into the garage. Then we saw lights come on in the house as he walked through it.”

  Creston interjected, “Let’s back up a bit. Did you see anything inside the garage when the door was up and when did the garage door shut?” A two-pronged question.

  “We couldn’t see much inside the garage because of the angle we were parked, and yes, the door slid down, almost immediately, well, a few seconds later, behind the car.”

  Stokes nudged Creston, “You’d think that would be the time he would have been shot, while he was out in the open.”

  “Not really. No chance for a head or torso shot with the door coming down.” Creston looked at Stokes with his head slightly cocked, as if he were trying to figure out how this guy had made it through the police academy. Then he turned back towards us. “Now tell me about the lights.”

  Cindy pointed at the double-fronted house. “First there was a dim light in the right-hand window. Then a bright light came on in the same window. And then the light behind the front door came on. It looked like he was leafing through his mail.”

  Stokes frowned, keeping up. “How did you know that?” he asked, “The glass in the front door is frosted.”

  I was surprised that he had noticed the detail about the glass. I said, “We could see his silhouette. He bent over, probably to pick up the mail from the floor, and then stood up. His arms were moving, so we thought he was going through it.”

  Creston asked, “And then what happened?”

  “Well, nothing,” Cindy nodded in agreement with me.

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “We thought he’d go upstairs and we were waiting for some lights to come on in the second floor. But they never did.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “We got out of the car and were about to knock on his front door when Robin noticed that there was a small hole in the door’s frosted glass and a spider web of lines radiated out from the hole. It looked like a bullet hole.”

  “Had you heard a gun being fired?”

  I volunteered, “I have never heard a gun shot, so I don’t know what one sounds like, but we did hear what sounded like a car backfiring.” Cindy looked at me, her eyes widened in contempt. I had given away the story! To the police!

  “Where did the noise come from?” asked Creston, suddenly looking interested.

  Fuck Cindy. That backfire was not a gunshot. It was merely a coincidental noise. I waved my hand randomly behind me. “The noise came from down the street, but I think the bullet came from over there, across the street from van Horner’s house. The junky old van was parked down the street. White.” I pointed at right angles down the street.

  Cindy had turned her back and crossed her arms. What a baby. A man had nearly been killed and she thought we should keep information from the police?

  Creston called out to a couple of officers. He stepped away from us and spoke in low tones to the cops who then took off towards the trees across from van Horner’s house. So, he believed me. I thought I recognized the uniforms, but wasn’t sure. One had a typical short cop haircut and the other sported a thin pony tail. Where had I seen them before?

  Creston then turned to us. “In case the shot came from the van, did you notice anything unusual about it? License plate? Stickers? Dents? Anything distinguishing?”

  “No, nothing.” Cindy spoke with authority, still angry at me and trying to keep whatever crumbs of information were left to herself.

  I offered sweetly, “But the van was covered in pock holes of rust on the sides, near the bottom.”

  Creston spoke as he wrote, “White van. Rust in rocker panels. Okay, then what?”

  Cindy and I glared at each other. I didn’t care what she thought. I would be cooperative and I had my little recorder on to prove that I was. I stared at her and twitched my thumb to my chest. It was my story. She backed down first and averted her eyes. Okay. She was going to do the right thing. The disagreement was over as soon as it had started. But the trauma of the night was scattering our thoughts. What had happened next?
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  Creston saw our confusion and put us back into the scene. “You were at the front door and you saw what looked like a bullet hole.”

  “Right,” I said, as I remembered the sensation of being watched. “I felt like someone was watching us so I took pictures of the knocker, you know, covering up what we had seen and acting like I was doing a piece on mansions for the paper.”

  Cindy took over. “Then I banged on the door. We didn’t hear a thing, so I knocked again.”

  “Then we turned and left. I pretended to berate Cindy for not making an appointment. We used fake names and talked about not getting the story for the Toronto Times, not our paper, the Express. We spoke loudly so whoever was listening would be misled.”

  Creston flipped through his book and found a clean page. “Then what?”

  “We got in the car and left.”

  “You didn’t stay? Check it out? Call?” Stokes was disbelieving.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “And get shot at by him?”

  “No way,” said Cindy, “I drove to the supermarket just south on Yonge to call. I knew there was a phone behind the store, but it was broken, so we called 911 from the courtesy desk. And now, here we all are.”

  “Why didn’t you call from your cell at the outset?” Creston was writing it all down.

  “Because,” Cindy pronounced her words slowly, as if she was talking to someone who didn’t speak English, “I didn’t want the call picked up by someone’s tracing equipment.”

  Creston gave her an appraising eye. “Good thinking,” he said. “Did you see any other vehicles around? Other than your own and that van, I mean?”

  I spoke up. “No, not one.”

  “Or her,” said Stokes. He was trailing the conversation by about twenty sentences. “A woman could have been the shooter.”

  I knew it was a “he.” There had been a male aura emanating from the stare I felt at the back of my head. Almost sexual and somehow mannish, brutish. It was the feel of animal testosterone. Nothing female.

  Creston looked at his right hand man blankly.