“Oh, they got this secret policy. They don’t tell over the phone to other people. It’s like one of their services. You could request it. You could say that you want to have a meeting with somebody on the, like, premises and they won’t tell nobody you were there and they supervise the meeting—like stand outside the door and make sure everything is okay.”
“And you met Mark Hopequist like this more than once?” I asked.
“Yes. But only a couple of times. That’s when he told me he would show me a Taser if he ever got one.”
Now it was I who was finding it hard to breathe. “And did he, Kezia? Did he ever get a Taser? Did he ever show you?”
“I don’t know if he did get one, but he did get a…” She searched for a word. “What do you call those books that have the pictures of things in it and how much the stuff costs?”
“A catalogue?” Aliana offered.
“Yeah. He had a catalogue with a whole bunch of different kinds of weapons and that in there and he showed me a few of them and how they had features and that and one feature was they could tell whoever it was who shot them off and exactly what day and time it was and that.”
“Why, Kezia? Why would Mark Hopequist be showing you these things?”
She stared at me as if the answer were so obvious that she wondered why I was bothering to ask the question. “Because of my new book,” she said. “Now that I finished the recipe book, I need a new book to write. And I’m going to write it about the police. So I need all the research I can have. And I think talking to people is the best research there is.”
The look of fondness on the face of Aliana made me wonder why she had never had children. “You’re right, Kezia. You are absolutely right.”
“Did he ever say he actually had a Taser?” I asked.
“No.”
“Did he ever say where he could get one?”
The girl thought about that for a minute and I wondered whether we were about to come to the end of her willingness—or even her ability—to co-operate.
“I asked him if all the police officers were going to get Tasers soon because they were like a future weapon or something. He said some officers have them but only the bosses. He said nobody even gets to touch them except them. But then we talked about guns and things and how my brothers and the gang members, they get guns from the States and steal them from each other sometimes. And Mark, he said that if a person wants a weapon, they can find a way to get it—even with nobody else ever finding out.”
Aliana nodded, then caught my eye over the girl’s head. “That’s true, Kezia. Did Mark ever say he ordered things out of that catalogue?”
She shook her head. “I seen other catalogues, though. Ones you could buy all kinds of things from. Clothes and makeup and videos and that.” Her voice broke a little. “But now I don’t know if I could ever get nothing from a catalogue.”
“Why ever would you think that?” I asked.
“Because either my brothers will take it or break it. That’s what they say they will do.” She hesitated. “Or else they will take me and break me. That’s what they say, too.”
“Kezia,” Aliana asked, “have you ever seen guns in the possession of your brothers?”
That question was too much. The girl started to shake again, and it took us quite a while to calm her down and to get her to eat a little soup and for Aliana to run down to the nearby Walmart and buy her new underwear and jeans and a pink t-shirt with a picture on it of some exaggerated doll-like character with a big head.
We got her to lie down on the couch for a while and it was only a minute or two before she drifted off. While she was sleeping, the phone rang, and I rushed to answer it before it could wake her.
It was my daughter. “I’ll call you back, Ellen.” I heard her protesting voice as I slammed down the receiver.
“What should we do, Aliana? We can’t keep her here. And we can’t turn her out on her own.”
Before she could answer, her cell phone rang. It took her a couple minutes to find her purse, and by the time she did, the ringing had stopped. But she checked the number on the display. “Ellis,” she said, her fingers hovering over the keyboard, it’s my contact with an answer as to what, if anything, was on the display of the Taser. Whatever he found, we’re going to have to get down there and pick the thing up. And we can’t keep it much longer. It’s evidence. We have to turn it in.”
“Evidence of what, Aliana? If there’s something on that thing that incriminates somebody, I want to know who before I turn it over to Matt West, knowing I’ll never hear about it or see it again. And if there’s nothing on it, it’s just garbage, just something somebody threw in the river because they felt they had to for one reason or another.”
“Right. But what do we do? We can’t take the girl with us….”
“We take her home. She may be right that she’s in danger there, but she’s in danger anywhere she goes. At least we can put her mother’s mind at ease.”
“If her mother’s even there.”
“If her mother is there, we’ll leave her. If she’s not, you can stay with her and I’ll meet your contact.”
Aliana shook her head. “No. He won’t talk to anybody but me. He won’t give the Taser to you. It has to be me.”
“Then I’ll stay with the girl. It can’t be helped.”
“What if they come after her? What if she’s right about the war between the brothers?”
“Aliana, we are wasting time. We have to move one way or the other. If anything leaks, if anybody finds out that we have a valuable piece of the evidence, it’s all over for us.”
“Okay. We take Aliana home. If her mother’s there, we leave her and we go get the Taser. If the woman’s not there, you stay and I go.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know about ‘then’, Ellis. I don’t know at all.”
It was hard to wake Kezia and harder still to convince her to come with us back to her apartment. She reached a state of near hysteria.
“They’ll kill me. I’m telling you, they are shooters. They will shoot you, too.”
In the end, she agreed that she would go home only if Mark Hopequist was there to meet her.
“He’ll keep me safe, even if he isn’t a cop anymore.”
The request confounded me, but when I thought about it, it seemed it might work. I had no intention of leaving the girl alone with him, not now that we might have powerful evidence against him. Nor would he provide much protection if Kezia were right about her dangerous brothers. Like me, Mark had no weapon. His police automatic was gone, and even if the Taser were his, he certainly didn’t have it anymore.
“I don’t know if we can get him. I don’t know whether he’s somewhere that he can leave to get here right away….”
“Call his iPhone. Text him.” Kezia insisted, and she spewed out the number she had memorized.
The phone rang three times. I considered letting Kezia talk to him, but that didn’t seem wise. It was essential that Aliana and I control this situation. “Hopequist,” I said. “We need your help here. Right away.”
Within minutes, we had formulated a plan. Mark would meet us in the lobby of Kezia’s building. Aliana and I would go in separate cars. She’d drive Kezia home in her car, then when we got to the building, I would meet Mark and together he and I would take Kezia up. We didn’t know whether Kezia’s mother was home because Kezia didn’t know whether she’d be at work that day and when we’d phoned, no one had answered.
So we met Hopequist. Kezia was different in his presence—easy, smiling. And he was easy in hers. Dressed in his civilian clothes, he didn’t look like a cop at all. He didn’t even look like an ex-cop.
I waved Aliana goodbye as she pulled out of the drive of the apartment building. I had the horrid feeling that I was sending her off to some kind of doom. But the doom of what or of whom my instinct didn’t tell me.
So we turned and headed for the elevator, the three of us. I hadn’t yet figured out what
was supposed to happen next, because it seemed to me that everything depended on what that Taser told us. Did it reveal a killer or did it reveal that an old fool and a woman who should have known better were on a wild goose chase?
Yes, we headed toward the elevator and toward the execution of our plan to save Kezia and to bring a killer to justice.
The best laid plans.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
When we got to the apartment, the door was already open. I thought Kezia would give it a push and usher us in. At first I couldn’t hear anything but the TV tuned to some sports station or other.
Then I heard a gruff, low voice sounding as though it were issuing some sort of order. I couldn’t make out the words, and I was about to move closer to the door when Mark reached out and motioned Kezia and me away. The gesture was so commanding, so practiced, so effective that I knew it was a police gesture. Move aside. Stay out of danger. I’m trained to handle this. Those were the things Mark Hopequist was saying with his whole body. Despite my fear, I felt a jolt of pity for him. How close he had come to being a fine police officer. How totally he had failed.
He made another gesture, and I could see that it was a gesture he would have made had his hand held a gun.
But it didn’t. We were completely vulnerable. Of course the best thing to do was to leave—and to take Kezia with us—no matter what was going on in the apartment. It had been foolish to come here. But it was clearly too late now….
“Get away you bitch. Get out of the damn way.”
“He’s talking to my mom!” Kezia shouted. “He’s got a gun on her.”
“Stay back,” Mark warned.
But he had nothing. No gun. No baton. No radio to call for help.
I reached into my pocket. Once again I had left my cell phone sitting on the shelf by the door, the shelf on which I always put it so that I wouldn’t forget….
“No!” Kezia shouted. And she sprinted past Mark and me, shoved the door wide open and dove into the apartment.
What happened next happened so fast that I was never sure of the order of events. Mark kept close to her, kept her from running to her mother who was standing in the middle of the living room surrounded by four men with guns drawn. He pulled the girl aside, toward the wall, and as he did so, he reached into his pocket, pulled out his cell phone and tossed it to me without a word, keeping his other hand tight around the girl’s arm.
I dialed 911, but before I could say a word, a loud shot shattered the silence and the phone flew out of my hand and landed at the feet of the shooter. “Get back you old asshole. Get the fuck out”
“Stop!” Kezia shouted. “Please stop. You don’t have to be enemies. You can be brothers—like you really are!”
Only one person, one of the young men, paid any attention to her, or for that matter to us. “Get out,” he repeated. “For fuck sake just get the fuck out.” He waved his gun in the air, but he didn’t aim it at us. He could have shot us down in an instant if he had wanted to.
I saw Mark’s eyes scanning the small living room for a position of advantage, but there was none. Kezia’s mother had disappeared. Whether she was lying on the floor behind the couch or had escaped the room altogether, I couldn’t tell. My eyes were riveted on the four gun-wielding men who faced off, three against one.
They began to shout at each other in a slang I just could not make out. They were belligerent, threatening, accusing. As their shouts rose in pitch, Kezia became more and more uncontrollable, until she finally tore away from Hopequist. Another blast of gunshot rent the air. In an instant, Mark lay on the floor, shot through the chest. And beneath him, shielded by his body, lay a screaming Kezia.
At that precise moment, the apartment door swung open.
I prayed that it might be the police. But it wasn’t them. Not yet.
It was Aliana. She stood in the doorway for a moment, a look of complete shock on her face. “Go back,” I whispered. “Get out.”
I should have known. I should have realized that backing away from a story was not something that Aliana would ever do.
Instead she moved forward into the room.
I dashed forward and I grabbed her. I pulled her into the hallway and up against the wall.
“What…?”
I couldn’t answer. She wouldn’t have heard me if I’d tried. Because there was such a volley of gunshots then that all other sound was obliterated. And it stayed that way for as long as it took for the police to arrive and for a couple of them to rescue a shaken Kezia who could only say over and over, “They’re dead. My whole family. They’re all dead. There’s nobody left. And I don’t want to be left either.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
We were taken away by the police and questioned for hours as to what we were doing there and what we had seen. They took Kezia first and we weren’t given any information as to where she was going or who would care for her.
Aliana went in one cruiser and I went in another. We were, of course, only witnesses, but we knew as well as the police knew that witnesses in a gang shoot-out were few and far between.
Maybe I should have been afraid to tell what I knew about Kezia and her brothers. Maybe I should have feared for my life as other witnesses in such cases did. Maybe I should have still kept in mind the day that Aliana and I had been shot at—accidentally or otherwise. Maybe I should have kept wondering about the person who had followed me that now long-ago day in the valley—the one that had or had not left me a note telling me to mind my own business. But I was tired. I was so tired that I went home—it was now the middle of the night—and lay down and I thought of nothing until I awoke at noon the next day to the scream of the phone, followed by the buzz of my cell phone on the shelf by the door.
I couldn’t get to the cell, so I answered the land line. It was Aliana. Of course it was.
“Are we done and done for?” she asked. She sounded chipper. If there was one thing in the world I did not need on that morning, it was chipper.
“Aliana, how did you make out with the police? What did they ask you? What did you say?”
“Ellis, I told them everything I knew and everything I saw. But I was careful to present the whole thing as though I were merely a friend of the family—I mean the good people in Kezia’s family.”
“Yeah, I guess you’d have to be careful to point out exactly what family you were talking about.” Seeing people shot in front of me was not something I’d ever experienced before, and I was pretty sure that the memory of it was going to make me feel sick every time for a long time.
“It was horrible,” Aliana said, “but it’s over.”
“Is it?” I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. “Or is it just starting? I don’t know Aliana, and I don’t care. Sooner or later, we’ll have to go to court on this, you and I. Sooner or later we’re going to be forced to learn what happened to Kezia. Sooner or later it’s going to occur to one or both of us that we really screwed up royally letting ourselves get involved in this mess.”
“Yes, but…”
“There is no ‘yes, but’ about it. I’m finished. I’m finished with Mark Hopequist whoever or whatever he was. I’m finished with Kezia. I’m finished with the other three cops and I’m finished with the Juicer.”
I didn’t have to tell her that I was finished with her, too. She had already hung up.
Fine. And as for Queenie, I was finished with her, too. How had she let me get into this situation? How had she made me think that there was a murderer here? How had she left me to solve insoluble mysteries? How had she left me here? How had she left me? How had she?
I didn’t call Aliana or hear from her in any way for the three weeks it took the Toronto police to arrange for the very public and very grand official funeral for Officer Mark Hopequist, the hero.
It was a bitter December day, and I hoped that what was being carried that day in the front of the procession of more than a thousand officers from all over the world as it made its way across
College Street west from Headquarters, was ashes. Because I didn’t see how anything could be buried in ground that was frozen, though I knew nothing about modern undertaking procedures.
I was standing shivering just inside the gates of the cemetery when I felt a hand on my shoulder through the heavy wool of my coat. I thought it might be a guard asking me to move on and not block the entrance.
But it wasn’t.
“You never stuck around to see how Matt West acted when I gave him the Taser.”
I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to see her face. I didn’t want her to see mine. Because I was glad she was there. Because I had missed her. Because we had a great deal of unfinished business between us and I didn’t want to think about how in heaven’s name we were going to finish it.
“I’m sure he was displeased,” I said without turning around. The freezing winter breeze caught my words. I wasn’t sure Aliana had heard me. That she even knew I’d answered her.
“Surprised, angry, ultimately dismissive, as if it couldn’t possibly make a difference to anything or anybody whether we’d found the Taser and discovered what was on it.”
I turned then. Against the white winter, she was wearing a bright red coat with a hood. Its broad red faux-fur edge set off the sparkling intensity of her dark eyes. I thought she looked beautiful, but maybe that was just because I’d gone so long without seeing her. Not that it mattered to me.
“What was on it?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“There was some damage, of course, it had been under the water at least for a few days—maybe for much longer. They were unable to tell exactly how long. There was a battery in it of course and a time-keeper. Two time-keepers as a matter of fact. One was a clock and it had stopped at some time during the submersion of the Taser.”
“So didn’t that tell when it had been tossed?”
Aliana shook her head and the bright red hood fell away revealing her sleek dark hair. “Inclusive.”
Don't Forget You Love Me Page 22