Up in Smoke

by Ross Pennie

  He steadied himself against the doorjamb. He’d nearly had a stroke when the Badger had brought out the red-eyed loon and insisted they share a smoke. What should he have done, stormed out in a huff, lost all semblance of rapport with the Badger, and risked catching a bullet in the head on the way to his car?

  He’d kept a healthy distance from the Badger in high school, but now he was deeply entangled with the guy. And with the Badger came contraband tobacco, the liver epidemic, the explosion at the ROM, and the apparent execution of three Native rivals in a clash for possession of the legendary loon. The guy was more than a canny businessman, he was a pirate in a pinstripe suit and a deerskin jacket. And Zol had shared a ceremonial smoke with him from a hot, two-thousand-year-old artifact.

  Max waved distractedly without looking away from his screen. “Hi Dad.”

  Travis ventured a shy smile, the briefest flash. He was an unusual kid, but completely loyal to Max. A purple birthmark, a flame nevus, covered the right half of his face. He was clumsy on the soccer pitch because he often lurched to the left. The two boys had been drawn together since kindergarten, each with a physical distinction that set them apart: Max with his spastic left arm, Travis with his birthmark. Neither considered himself sick or handicapped, but between them was the bond of the outsider. Calling the mark on Travis’s face “the map of Norway” was Max’s way of describing it in complimentary terms, especially since Travis claimed his mother was descended from the Vikings. There didn’t seem to be a father in the picture. The boy was a great gamer and pulled his weight when he and Max did school projects together.

  “Did you phone Grandma?” Zol asked Max.

  “Yep.”

  “And?”

  “She’s fine. Said she’s having a good day.”

  “Did you actually call and speak to her, or just send a text?”

  “I called. Like you said.” Max looked at Travis and rolled his eyes. “My grandma is old fashioned. She thinks texting isn’t polite.”

  “She didn’t sound too tired?”

  Max kept clicking at the keyboard. “Nope. She had rocky-road ice cream for lunch.”

  At least she was eating. But then, she always put on a good face for Max.

  He left the boys to their project and zapped the rice and curry in the microwave. He managed a few bites, then poured himself a Glenfarclas. He slumped into his recliner chair in the sunroom and closed his eyes.

  In a flash, something grabbed his arm. A giant bird had his wrist in his beak. It was flapping its wings, smoke was billowing from its nostrils, and it was trying to sever his hand from his arm. He struggled to scream but nothing came out.

  “Zol. Zol . . . wake up. Come on, wake up.”

  The giant loon took off across the water.

  Colleen’s face appeared from behind the smoke.

  “There, now,” she was saying. “That’s better.”

  “Oh . . . thank God. I’m so glad it’s you. That was so . . .”

  She kissed him on the forehead and caressed his cheek. “Take a deep breath. It was a dream.”

  He scanned his surroundings and was surprised to find himself in the sunroom. A glass of whisky was sitting on the table beside him, mostly untouched.

  “Back so soon?” he said, rubbing his eyes.

  “It’s gone nine o’clock.”

  “Everything okay?”

  She leaned in for a kiss, a proper one this time. “I got what I needed.”

  Sometimes, she had to stay out most of the night on a case before she got what she needed. He’d learned not to ask for the details.

  He took a swallow of his Glenfarclas and asked her if she’d eaten. She insisted she was fine and pressed him to tell her about his meeting with the Badger.

  “Dennis Badger reckons he’s got you where he wants you,” she said, once he’d finished the story. “That’s how criminal gangs operate. They use fear, debt, and obligation to manipulate their rivals and associates.”

  The reheated curry was sitting unhappily in his stomach. “I guess I’ll have to manipulate right back.”

  There was a sly smile on her face.

  “What?” he said. “You don’t think I can be as manipulative as the next guy?”

  “You’re too honest.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Actually, in you, I’d call it cunning.” She helped herself to a shot of Amarula Cream from the liquor cabinet. “It happens that I might be able to help with that concrete proof Dennis Badger says he may be willing to hear about.”

  “Really?”

  “I reckoned there had to be a smart guy in charge of operating those factories on the rez. You know, a mechanical genius who’d worked for one of the big-name cigarette manufacturers. Someone well familiar with the shop floor, after years of experience in the industry.”

  She’d made a good point. Dennis Badger and his cronies could never have set up those factories on their own. Nor could they be the ones keeping the equipment so finely tuned it churned out thousands of cigarettes every hour. “You’re thinking a scientist of some sort? An engineer?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But why would he talk to us?”

  “I can’t see how else we’re going to suss out what’s unique to the rez operation and makes their cigarettes vulnerable to — let’s say — contamination by something more noxious than normal?”

  He let go a cynical chuckle at the irony and pulled the loonie from his pocket. “Yeah, but any smart guy would know that the first rule of working for organized criminals is keep your mouth shut.”

  She no longer looked so confident. “I’d hoped the person might be in some way disillusioned. Or have an Achilles heel.”

  “Or kids who smoke Rollies and have a classmate dying of liver failure?”

  “Our person doesn’t have kids.”

  “What? You found him? The Badger’s mechanical genius?”

  “At this juncture, a name. And a home address.”

  “How did you do that?” When she gave him her you know you’re not supposed to ask me that look, he took another mouthful of Glenfarclas. He let the warmth of the whisky linger for a moment, then pressed, “Are you going to trust me with the name?”

  “Colborne. Olivia Colborne.”

  “A wo—”

  “Yes, Zol. A female mechanical genius is working for the tobacco mob.”

  “Sorry. It’s just that . . .”

  She raised her hand to stop him. “Don’t dig yourself in any deeper.” She sipped a mouthful of Amarula Cream — she called it the taste of her African homeland captured in a bottle — then held him with her steely green gaze.

  When she was sure he’d got the message, she rolled her eyes and cracked a smile. “She lives in Simcoe. Norfolk Avenue. In a nineteenth-century mansion that looks like it’s tumbling down.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “And the two dozen Southern Comfort bottles in the recycling bin.”

  “She doesn’t sound too happy.”

  “Perhaps she has a conscience that needs to be soothed — so she can sleep at night.”

  He eyed his whisky and felt a pang of guilt. Too much of this stuff could soothe a conscience into oblivion. Or reduce it to tears.

  “Dad?” said Max, shuffling across the carpet and staring into his cellphone.

  “Hi Buddy. Travis still here?”

  “What are obli . . . oblig . . . obligations?”

  “That’s when you owe someone a favour because they did something special for you. Why?”

  “Someone sent me a weird text about you smoking a pipe. But Dad, you don’t smoke, do you?”

  Zol glanced at Colleen. She’d put down her drink and had stiffened her shoulders.

  “Of course not.”

  “It says I’m supposed to remind you about
your . . . obligations.”

  “Let me see.”

  The message was blazed across the screen.

  The second time through it, the Glenfarclas turned to nettles on his tongue.

  MAX: REMIND YOUR DAD THAT SHARING PIPE SMOKE CARRIES CERTAIN OBLIGATIONS.

  CHAPTER 25

  The next morning, Colleen gunned the Mercedes along Iroquois Road, through the centre of Grand Basin Village. By the look of the car park at the Helping Hands Dialysis Centre, Saturdays offered no truce in the war against kidney failure. Further on, she shuddered as she passed the neoclassical facade of Dennis Badger’s arena. What a wicked man. He must have spies everywhere. It was the only way to a control a criminal empire of such magnitude.

  She glanced at her handbag. It contained a tiny piece of him — his DNA on the Tim Hortons cup that Zol had stashed in his blazer pocket toward the end of their meeting. Zol had jokingly said they should stick pins in it, voodoo style. But she had other designs. The police lab would never fingerprint Dennis Badger’s DNA without probable cause and a six-month waiting list. But there were private labs who would, for a reasonable fee, look for matches between samples of DNA you submitted to them — for instance, they could compare the DNA on the well-chewed rim of Dennis Badger’s coffee cup with the DNA recovered from the assailant’s skin beneath Tammy Holt’s cold, dead fingernails. Her savage attacker had been scrupulous about his condom and not left behind a single drop of semen.

  Sometimes, a homicide detective with whom one had a mutually cooperative relationship — and who was desperate to solve a case now a year old and looking hopeless — could be persuaded to use private-lab DNA evidence to get her case back on track. On the hush-hush, of course. Such results could never be admissible in court — the samples lacked any semblance of integrity in their chain of custody. With luck, the informal lab findings would point out the guilty party to the police, who could collect and test samples of their own. One would hope they could then obtain a search warrant for other evidence they might need to secure a conviction, all by the book.

  Poor Zol — he’d tossed and turned all night, more certain than ever that his only choice was to take on the Badger, but worrying himself sick over Max’s safety. They’d talked about hiding Max at the farm, but Kitti’s cancer treatment had become a full-time occupation that left the senior Szabos little room in their lives for an active pre-teen. As adorable as he was, Max needed a fair bit of feeding and watering. For today and tomorrow, Zol wasn’t going to let the boy out of his sight. But then what? With her track record, she certainly wasn’t going to try hiding someone she loved at her place. And she did love Max; she hoped it was safe to admit that now.

  Two hundred metres farther on, she turned right at the entrance to Mechanically Sound, Matt Holt’s garage. She wasn’t worried about parking her Mercedes here, even for the entire day if it came to that. Waiting their turn to be serviced were a Lexus sedan, two Cadillac SUVs, an E-Class Mercedes, and a herd of battered Fords and Chevys. Matt ran an equal opportunity repair centre. Colleen had seen his books when she’d investigated Grand Basin’s chop shops. Her client at that time was a Hamilton dealership whose cars were being stolen with alarming regularity. Though she hadn’t made much headway with the chop shops, she’d seen that Matt Holt kept his place in perfect order: the workmanship, the accounts, even the sales taxes. He ran the Vehicle Identification Number of every vehicle he serviced; this was no place to bring a hot car for a makeover.

  Today was her first time back since the fire. They’d done a nice job of the rebuilding, even added a fourth work bay. Perhaps the chop-shoppers had done him a late-night favour with their petrol and rags. It could have been worse, but Matt’s fellow firefighters on the Grand Basin volunteer brigade had rallied quickly. They’d contained the damage to the right-hand side of the building. And now everyone knew that Matt Holt was under the protection of the big shots on the rez who appreciated an honest and gifted mechanic as much as anyone. Perhaps more.

  As she entered the shop, he acknowledged her from behind the counter with a flick of his eyebrows. Though he couldn’t muster a smile, understandable under the circumstances, he’d gussied up for their meeting. Freshly laundered blue jeans hugged his slim hips, and a blue-and-white dress shirt looked smart under his black leather bomber jacket.

  He held up his keys. “I’ll drive, okay? I know the place.”

  So did she, after scouting it yesterday, but she was happy to let him drive.

  They climbed into his Ford-150. He must have special-ordered it or had the paint job done in his shop. She didn’t think she’d ever seen another one this rich a shade of British racing green.

  “You’re sure you’re up to this?” she asked him.

  “Better than pacing outside Donna’s room at Toronto General.” He explained that the transplant unit’s visiting hours were restricted and they let only two family members in at a time. “I’m better doing something positive, like helping you guys nail the bastards who did this to her.”

  As long as the truck was moving, he seemed in his element. Distracted, perhaps, by thoughts of his sisters — one murdered, the other in a coma — but confident, born to control a turbo-charged machine. But whenever they stopped at a turn or a crossing, anxious crinkles puckered near his eyes. He kept looking in the rear-view mirror, as if worried they were being followed. Frequent glances in her side mirror told her they had the road to themselves.

  “Half of me is driven crazy by my own people,” he said, wiping a sweaty palm against his blue jeans. “The other half is worried about being an Uncle Tom, you know, a stoolie.”

  “I don’t think —”

  “Dennis Badger keeps harping on about the three hundred jobs his Hat-Trick factory brought to Grand Basin. They’re low-level positions, and he should be paying his workers better, but if he’d stopped there, things would’ve been fine. He’d have made a lot of money and thumbed his nose at the government.” He ventured a chuckle. “Can’t blame us for that, after hundreds of years of White guys stealing our land, our lives, our buffalo, our artifacts, our kids, and especially our dignity.” He turned to her and softened his tone. “No offence, but you know what I mean.”

  Like every South African, White or Black, she knew exactly what he meant. And she didn’t have to say it; he was bound to see it in her face.

  “White people look at me and automatically see a drunk who beats his girlfriend, abandons his kids, and gets unlimited government freebies. They refuse to let themselves see a university-educated engineer with a bonus built in.” He paused, saw the puzzled look on her face, and made a sweeping motion over the landscape with his arm. “Twenty thousand years of intimate knowledge and understanding of these lands.”

  She hadn’t looked at it that way before, but a man like Matt Holt did embody modern expertise imbued with traditional intuition. Intellect and instinct could be a powerful combination. “It’s going to take guys like you to demonstrate that Natives can run clean and reliable businesses as well or better than anyone else.”

  He turned to her and slapped the steering wheel. “You know what really pisses me off? People who come to my shop and give me that look that says Nice to see an Indian doing well for a change.”

  She felt herself blushing and looked away. Was it possible to show that she was on his side without appearing patronizing? Perhaps the gulf between Whites and Natives was so wide that any attempt at bridging it could seem false.

  “I’m sorry, Colleen. I didn’t mean to unload years of cultural baggage on you. I appreciate what you and Dr. Szabo and the team are doing. And don’t think I kid myself. I’m still in business only because Dennis Badger, Chief Falcon, and their cronies don’t trust their cars to anyone else. Not because I’m a good mechanic — though I am that.”

  “Nothing wrong with being good at what you do, is there?”

  “You mean like Dennis Badger? He had a ni
ce business going there, with his Hat-Tricks. Really nice. Then he got greedy and brought in Asian gangs to distribute his smokes not to other reserves, but to stores and street corners in every city and town in the country.”

  Zol had told her about the Asian angle. Their presence in the business was like a fire accelerant that turned a campfire into a conflagration.

  “Those guys are super-organized,” he continued, “and they’ve got no right to be profiting from our land and our special status. They brought in their assault rifles, their hard drugs, their hookers, their loan sharks, and who knows what else. And now, after five hundred years of being victimized by White colonialists, my people get hard-ons when Asian criminals promise them easy money.”

  She let Matt simmer for a while and watched the speedometer slowly fall after peaking at one-thirty, fifty kilometres over the limit.

  When Matt got it down to one-oh-five, she said, “Did you tell Olivia what this meeting was about?”

  “Said you were a client.”

  If he meant her to play a role, she’d better get it right. “What sort of client?”

  “My guys installed a home theatre system in her basement. Custom job. The works. I told her you were a fussy client who was thinking about getting something similar.”

  She wasn’t so good at fussy, but she’d do her best to fake it. “So, I’m having a look to see if your workmanship is up to scratch?”

  “That’ll do it.”

  It was going to take some creative talking to move the conversation from home theatres to home-grown cigarettes. She’d faced tougher assignments, such as persuading a Baptist minister to seek help with his Internet porn addiction after she’d supposedly shown up to redecorate his office and caught him red-handed.

  She came up with an idea as they were approaching Highway 3. Matt said it sounded fine, and that no, it didn’t trivialize the danger his sister Donna was facing.

  At the outskirts of Simcoe, Erie Christian Collegiate appeared on the right. The place was deserted, and had been since yesterday. She could imagine the panic that had consumed the place when the paramedics arrived to cart the delirious principal, yellow as mustard and raving like a lunatic, off to Emergency.