Crime Machine jc-5

by Giles Blunt

  “Go on, why don’t you. You shot Henry. You’re going to kill me too.”

  Jack narrowed his eyes at him. “Not on your say-so.”

  “No, it’ll be when that insane man you call Papa tells you to.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You do everything he says.”

  Jack tapped the truck with his gun again.

  Lloyd waded through the snow toward the passenger side. When he got to the door, he tried to run. Jack reversed and cut him off with the Rover. The passenger-side window rolled down.

  “Back to the house, old man.”

  “Let me go. Tell that man I got away while you were out hunting.”

  “Nossir. You’re mistaking me for some kind of Third World customs official-some pathetic, no doubt Negroid flunky can’t wait to violate his own integrity for two bits and a pair of Ray-Bans. But at this moment I am the keeper of life and death, and I will not be corrupted by you. You’re suggesting I be derelict in my duty and then tell lies about it. I never lie.”

  “As if that’s something to be proud of, when you go around killing people.”

  “Some people need killing.”

  “Well, shoot me here, why don’t you. I don’t want to be chained up day and night, terrified about when it’s going to come.”

  “It’ll come when it comes. Stop trying to control it.”

  “Is this how you want to live your life? Hiding out? Running from the law?”

  “Appears so. Otherwise I wouldn’t do it.”

  Lloyd started around the front of the truck, but it lurched forward, cutting him off.

  “Understand something, Lloyd. If you force me to shoot you, it’s not gonna be in the heart or the head or anywhere quick and convenient. I’ll place a round somewhere it’ll hurt bad, and you’ll have to sit there watching yourself exsanguinate. Blood and pus everywhere. Now you march up that road ahead of this here truck before I put one in your bowels.”

  –

  The far side of Black Lake. Papa and Nikki moving through thick woods. They each carried a rifle and wore light down jackets of a white and brown wavy pattern. When motionless, they were almost invisible. On their feet, gaiters, boots, snowshoes.

  Papa led the way off-trail. He knew without being told where Nikki and Lemur had set the leghold trap. At the top of a small rise, he beckoned and she joined him, awkward on her snowshoes. He had been right about the light jacket: with the fleece top she was wearing underneath, Nikki was as warm as if she were indoors. Papa had taken her shopping in Manhattan, the best shopping trip of her life.

  But now, having come so near to the place where they had set the trap, she was thinking about Lemur. The newscast had spoken of him as if he were just a common criminal. They didn’t even know his name, and it bothered Nikki that they dismissed this brave and friendly young man as if he were just some loser who got what he deserved.

  She asked Papa about it. He didn’t tolerate questions in the normal course of events, but he was in teaching mode now, and it was like being gathered into his strong arms.

  “Lemur knew the risks,” he told her. “He came into this organization knowing full well what lay ahead. You get killed, that’s just part of the life. That’s what keeps your heart pumping, and the blood pounding through your veins. You want an ordinary life? Don’t join the family. You fear danger? Don’t join the family. You want to work in an office? Punch the clock? Draw a regular salary? Don’t join the family. Is that what you want? You want to be ordinary?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’m your Papa, not your ‘sir.’”

  “I don’t want to be ordinary. Neither did Lemur. Do you really think Jack killed him?”

  “Jack would never have come back if he had. He knows I’d know.”

  “You think it was just some psycho?”

  “I have my theories, but let me worry about that. Later on, if it’s the correct move tactically, you may be called into play. How are your boots holding up? Are your feet okay?”

  “They’re really warm.”

  “Hands?”

  She was wearing thin gloves under large mittens. Her hands had never been warmer. “They’re almost hot.”

  “All right. Which way is Algonquin Bay?”

  She took off her mitten and held a compass in her right hand. The needle found north and she pointed in the opposite direction.

  “Good. And Toronto?”

  She pointed again.

  “Good. How about the airfield? You remember from the map?”

  She pointed west.

  “And the railhead?”

  A couple of degrees east of due south.

  “Bus station?”

  Same.

  “Good.”

  “How come you know this area so well?” Nikki said. “Is that just from the map?”

  “I used to work in the fur industry. Business brought me up here more than once. Now get out your knife and cut me down a lot of pine boughs. Shake the snow off them and spread them here.” He indicated a hollow just below a fallen log.

  For the next twenty minutes, Nikki hacked off pine boughs, shook them out and laid them on top of the snow. Papa collected boughs as well, spreading them fussily in the hollow. When there was a thick bed of them, he told her to stop.

  He knelt on the boughs and sighted along his rifle over the top of the fallen log. Nikki got down beside him. Papa spoke to her in a low voice, as if they might be overheard. “The boughs are important,” he said. “You’re warm in your layers, right? Well, doesn’t matter how warm you might be, if you lie against a surface with a temperature of thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, it’s going to leach the warmth right out of your bones. You’ll be shivering in no time. The boughs keep you insulated.”

  “They’re kind of soft, too. How did you learn all this stuff-was it from the army?”

  “Some. But you know, it’s really through families that knowledge and traditions get passed down. My father taught me a lot before he died, and now I’m teaching you. Okay, get into position.”

  Nikki copied Papa’s pose, sighting with her smaller rifle over the log. Both of them wore white woollen caps pulled low. The silence was so thorough that Nikki felt it press in upon her, an urgency around her rib cage.

  “It’s so quiet,” she said.

  “Way I like it.”

  “I can hear my own breathing.” And that was all she could hear, unless you counted the rustle of her jacket, the barely audible click of her trigger as she adjusted her grip. Her right hand, wearing only the glove now, was beginning to get cold.

  They stayed that way for maybe fifteen minutes.

  “How do you know we’ll see anything?”

  Papa pointed off to the right.

  “What?”

  “Tracks.”

  Nikki squinted in the direction he had pointed. Faint V-shaped marks, not even fresh. “Wow. I didn’t even notice them.”

  “Rabbit. You can tell by the V shape and the close grouping. Front paws go down, back paws come forward and hit the ground either side. The short drag mark is the tail.”

  “Papa, I don’t think I can kill a rabbit. They’re too cute.”

  “I’m teaching you survival, Nikki, not aesthetics. You want to go back to working the streets, that door is always open.”

  “I don’t. But I don’t want to kill any rabbit, either.”

  “You eat chicken, don’t you? Turkey? Pork? Beef? You wear leather belts and shoes. You drink milk. All of those things involve pain and suffering for animals. You don’t mind it because you don’t see it. You may think you love animals and that’s why you don’t want to kill one, but the fact is, you are responsible for the deaths of a hundred or so animals a year, and that’s just from eating, that’s not counting shoes and gloves. You’re just squeamish because you’re not used to taking responsibility for what you eat.”

  It wasn’t a subject Nikki had given a lot of thought to. All she knew was, it didn’t feel right to be waiting
for a rabbit in order to kill it. Anxiety stirred in her belly. She needed to pee, and she didn’t fancy doing it in the snow, but she didn’t want to irritate Papa by mentioning it.

  Papa shushed her, although she hadn’t said anything. He nodded slightly, the smallest incline of his chin toward the trail. A grey rabbit rose on his back legs, sniffing the air, pink nose twitching with the thoroughness of a connoisseur’s. He was maybe twenty yards away, slightly below them.

  “We’re downwind,” Papa said, barely audible. “He won’t smell us. You have him in your sights?”

  “Uh-huh.” He was cute, this bunny, but Nikki felt that consideration leaving her as tangibly as someone slipping out of a room. The mechanics of getting his torso between the V of her sights, setting the bead on him, pressed other thoughts from her mind.

  “You’re too loose,” Papa said. “Pull the stock into your shoulder. Hard. You want the recoil to pass through you, not kick you.”

  She did as he said. The rabbit made three hops and stopped once more to sniff the air. Nikki was on him. Her heart was beating hard, insistent.

  “Any time,” Papa whispered. “No point waiting.”

  “I can’t.”

  “If you can eat chicken, you can kill a rabbit.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t doesn’t cut it. Can’t doesn’t contribute to the common good. Can’t doesn’t feed your brother. Can’t is for weaklings and hypocrites. Take responsibility for your life. You’re flesh and blood, and you live on flesh and blood.”

  “I’m gonna feel like shit if I shoot him.”

  “Do it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Do it.”

  She squeezed the trigger, and then everything happened at once: the recoil shoving her shoulder back, the slam of sound in her eardrums, and the rabbit, lifted off his feet and flung sideways, red spray hitting snow.

  “And that’s dinner,” Papa said.

  He turned and looked at her, but Nikki stayed motionless, still sighting down the barrel as feeling returned to her shoulder.

  “He’s still moving.” She could hear the panic in her voice, the higher pitch and the approach of tears.

  “Go and finish him off.”

  Nikki was on her feet, kicking at snow, looking for a rock, a large stick, anything. Everything was hidden under snow. The rabbit was struggling to get up, but he was hit in the shoulder and his forepaws wouldn’t work.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Nikki said. “I can’t find anything. There’s nothing here.”

  “Shoot him again. Get close and give him one in the head. And don’t shoot your foot.”

  Nikki climbed over the log. It was difficult in snowshoes, and she nearly twisted her ankle. She went down the slope and the rabbit struggled harder. His whole left forepaw was slick with blood and there was a red bloom on the snow around him.

  Nikki sighted down the barrel. The rabbit’s black, glistening eye looked at her wildly, and even though she was only thirteen, Nikki recognized the universal cry of nature for more life. She took aim, but before she could pull the trigger, the rabbit laid his head back down on the snow and whatever it was that had made him a living creature and not a rock or a stick or a stone left the small body. The black, glistening eye went dull, and ceased halfway in its final effort to close.

  33

  On Thursday, Cardinal and Delorme flew to Toronto and drove a rental car to the morgue. The pathologist had no surprises for them. Irv Mendelsohn died as a result of the bullet wound to the head. The chest wound would have killed him by itself had the cranial devastation not done the job first.

  In Firearms, it was Cornelius Venn’s conviction, expressed with his patented mixture of paranoia and hostility, that the recovered slugs had been fired from a Browning Hi-Power nine-millimetre-the same make and model as the gun that killed the Bastovs, but not the same individual firearm. It was, however, the same weapon that was used to kill the boy at the ATM.

  Half an hour later, they were driving up the 427 toward the airport.

  “We know the kid was with whoever killed the Bastovs. And whoever killed him also killed Mendelsohn, making it likely it was either the guy who helped him steal the car from the airport or someone else who joined them later. But why would he or they kill him while he was robbing a cash machine?”

  “Thieves fall out,” Cardinal said. “It happens all the time.” He changed lanes and made the turnoff to the airport.

  Delorme continued thinking aloud. “How did this person or these persons even know about Mendelsohn?”

  “Well, they’re not dumb,” Cardinal said. “Obviously, they know how to find people. I didn’t tell you, but the other night that American reporter was followed-or at least thought she was-by a guy in his mid-fifties.”

  “She was? When did she tell you this? And why wouldn’t you mention it at the morning meeting?”

  “Because she admitted she was probably just being paranoid. She’s been writing about the Russian mob, and maybe the horror stories got to her.”

  “How would they even know about her? It’s not like she’s Diane Sawyer.”

  “She’s been following the Bastovs. Following the fur business. She’s tenacious, same as Mendelsohn. Maybe these characters knew the two of them were closing in. Maybe they were even interviewed by them at some point-who knows? The Bastovs were at least partly connected to Russian organized crime, and those people kill cops and journalists whenever they feel like it.”

  Delorme pointed to the sign for rental returns, and Cardinal drove into the underground lot. He parked under the Avis sign and an attendant trotted over to take their mileage. While they were waiting for him to print out a receipt, Delorme said, “I still don’t see why you didn’t tell me about Donna Vaughan being followed.”

  “I have no explanation, Lise. Maybe I was just overwhelmed with Scriver.”

  “You haven’t spent five minutes on Scriver since this case hit the fan.”

  “Lise, I was kidding.”

  “Ouais, ouais-t’es bizarre, tu sais?”

  “I do know what that means.”

  “Good.”

  –

  The Peel Regional Police, Airport Division. Cardinal had arranged to meet Rob Fazulli in Terminal One. He took them into his office, which managed to be glass-walled and claustrophobic at the same time. Flight announcements echoed beyond the walls.

  “Funny thing,” Fazulli said. “I was convinced I would hate working at an airport. But you know what? Airports are great places when you don’t have a flight to catch. You truly get to watch the world go by.”

  He put a disc into a player and turned on the monitor. The image was surprisingly sharp: a line of travellers with shoulder bags and carry-ons in postures of weary resignation.

  “Passport control,” Fazulli said. “Terminal Two. Twenty-seven minutes before your suspect vehicle was stolen. Note the guy with the hoodie and the backpack. Parking lot image was too low-grade for facial recognition, but he could be one of your perps, right? Guy who jimmied the car?”

  “Could be,” Delorme said. “But lots of people dress like that. Practically everyone under twenty dresses like that. Certainly can’t tell from this distance.”

  Fazulli looked at Cardinal. “She always this impatient?”

  “Always.”

  Fazulli hit fast-forward. Now the kid was before the immigration officer, maybe four feet from the camera.

  “It’s him,” Delorme said.

  “Such certainty all of a sudden,” Fazulli said.

  “We’ve seen him up close,” Delorme said. “He got himself killed robbing an ATM. That’s definitely him.”

  “I don’t suppose you have the flight number,” Cardinal said.

  “You seem to have forgotten what an ace crime fighter I am,” Fazulli said. He picked up a folder, opened it and read aloud, “Liam Rourke. Age sixteen. American Airlines flight 592, La Guardia to Toronto.”

  “Fantastic,” Delorme said. “You guys’re be
tter than TV cops.”

  “Better-looking, too,” Fazulli said.

  “This is great, Rob,” Cardinal said. “Now all we need to do is look for two single male passengers on that flight who purchased their tickets probably at the same time.”

  “We already did that. And it’s a good thing we did, because we could never have matched up the images from that parking lot video. I’ve been pushing for new equipment over there, but car theft is not exactly a priority with the TSB. Here’s what we got.” He switched the video to another image. A man in his fifties, salt and pepper hair, close-cropped. Handsome and fit.

  “Facial recognition any good on this one?” Cardinal said.

  “Totally useless. So much for TV cops. Those guys can extract DNA from a postal code. But almost as good-same flight, same ticket purchase. This is Curtis Carl Winston, fifty-eight.”

  “Winston?” Cardinal said. “Winston sounds kind of familiar.”

  “I believe there was a British prime minister by that name. Fat guy with a cigar?” Fazulli handed over the folder with a flourish. “Sir? Madam? Thank you for using Peel Regional Police, Airport Division. We accept MasterCard, American Express and most forms of alcohol.”

  Cardinal thanked him. “And listen, Rob. Next opening comes up in our department, I’m starting a Draft Fazulli campaign.”

  “Appreciate it, but I could never live up north. Too much crime.”

  –

  “Is there something going on with you, John?”

  They were sitting at the Air Canada gate, waiting for their flight to board. Cardinal watched a little boy stumble toward the window, gripping a teddy bear. He told her he was fine.

  “You seem distant.”

  “This case is taking up a lot of mental space.”

  “But suddenly you’re not talking to me, you don’t want to watch videos together, you’re not calling. And when I call, you’re either too busy or you don’t answer. Have I done something to upset you?”

  “I’m just preoccupied with the case, that’s all.”

  Delorme pulled out her BlackBerry and scrolled through her messages. After a while she said, “I know we’re just friends, but we see each other a lot-twice a week usually, outside of work. We’ve been doing that for, what, nearly a year now? But suddenly you change the rules, and you won’t even talk about it. Just because you’re seeing Donna Vaughan doesn’t mean you have to stop talking to me.”