Up in Smoke

by Ross Pennie

  “Consider yourself officially involved,” said the chief, stifling a chuckle. “I smell a drinking-water emergency that needs your immediate attention before it gets out of control.”

  “Thanks for the heads up. As it happens, I’ve been doing business this morning in Caledonia, which puts me in the vicinity. I can be there in a few minutes, make my assessment, and notify the appropriate government partner agencies immediately.”

  The Spills Action Centre at the Ontario Ministry of the Environment would be delighted to get a Sunday-morning call from a concerned MOH from Norfolk County. They had a twenty-four-hour Spills R Us hotline.

  Next, he called Natasha.

  “Dr. Zol! You missed all the excitement.”

  “I gather. Where are you? Tell me you haven’t entered Dennis Badger’s compound.”

  “Of course not. We’re following your orders and staying out of trouble. Hamish and I are still in my car, across the street from the action. It’s like being at a drive-in movie.”

  He was almost scared to ask: “And Al Mesic?”

  “At home in bed.”

  “Hamish didn’t tell him where —”

  “He told Al he had to go to the hospital. A patient was crashing in the ICU.”

  “Good thinking. We can’t let Al . . . well, you know. Look, you two sit tight. I’m coming in.”

  About twenty minutes later, he slid into the back seat of Natasha’s little Honda. Sweat matted the curls at Natasha’s neck; Hamish’s cheeks were ashen.

  “Have you seen Matt and Father Stoyan?” he asked them.

  “Not since seven-thirty,” Natasha said. “We saw them leaving after setting up.”

  “If Matt doesn’t stay away from this mess, he won’t be able to show his face on the rez for a long time, maybe never.” It was essential that no one tied Matt to today’s events. Not even with the cleanup.

  Hamish rubbed his eyes. “Another priest? Who’s Father Stoyan? We only know about Dylan.”

  “Same guy,” Zol said. “Stoyan guides the flock, Dylan sets the fireworks.”

  Hamish thought about that for a moment, then said, “Well, I suppose one way or another he has his eyes on the heavens.”

  “How many fire trucks responded to the alarm here?” Zol asked.

  “Four,” Natasha said. “All from Brantford. Three of them did what they had to do and returned to base.” She gestured across the road. “The fourth is still here. The other one you see is from Norfolk. It came later and hasn’t had to do anything. Maybe it’s for backup. I recognized Chief Dyment from our meeting on Thursday.”

  “He still here?” Zol asked.

  “There he his,” Natasha said, “by the side of the building, holding a garbage bag.”

  Hamish made a face. “What are they doing? They can’t hope to clean up all that mud by shovelling it into garbage bags.”

  “I think they’re collecting evidence for the fire marshall,” Natasha told Hamish, then turned and winked at Zol. “You know, to determine whether arson was involved.”

  Zol winked back at her. “I’m sure they’d like us to hold it for safekeeping.” He opened his door. “I guess I’d better go and perform my assessment. And face Dennis Badger when he gets here.”

  Natasha looked disappointed. Hamish looked relieved. There was too much mud over there for his liking.

  Zol walked across the road, then picked his way around the worst of the puddles. The stench of mud mixed with smoke got stronger with every step, and before he knew it Mumford & Sons were treating him to an energetic chorus of “Little Lion Man.” It was a terrific tune from one of his favourite folk-rock bands, but their lyrics predicted pure doom. God, he hoped they were wrong about how his inevitable face-off with the Badger was going to turn out.

  He had almost made it to the front door of what used to be the main part of the factory when an authoritative voice boomed from behind him. “That’s far enough, sir. The building’s unstable. Could collapse at any time.”

  Zol turned and introduced himself to the stocky, ruddy-faced man behind him. He was an impressive figure, dressed in full firefighting gear — hip waders, heavy pants secured with suspenders, bulky yellow coat stained with mud and soot, and the classic firefighter’s helmet.

  “Glad to have you aboard, Doc,” said the firefighter, removing his glove. “I’m Grant Dyment. We spoke on the phone.”

  They shook hands and took the measure of each other. It seemed they both admired what they saw. Zol pointed to the half-dozen garbage bags lying next to one of the fire trucks. “I see your men have done most of the environmental sampling already, Chief. Terrific. Makes our job a lot easier.”

  “Be my guest. I’m turning them over to you. The fire marshall’s staff will want to gather their own samples. They’re fussy about that.” He touched his nose and threw Zol a knowing look. “But I’m sure they won’t find anything out of the ordinary here.” He shrugged. “An industrial fire like this? Probably an electrical short in a neglected piece of machinery.”

  There was a splash as an SUV hit the puddles by the gate. It was a Porsche Cayenne, the colour of cinnamon. An interesting mix of culinary metaphors. Zol could see the Badger riding shotgun. He was wearing his deerskin jacket.

  Dennis couldn’t have spent last night on the rez. If he had, he’d have stormed onto this scene long before this. His fortified mansion was only two side roads over. No, he’d come from somewhere a good deal farther away. Perhaps the brand new Four Seasons in Toronto.

  As the Porsche inched through the open gate and into the flooded compound, Zol could see four men inside: Dennis, the driver, a henchman behind him, and Chief Bob Falcon.

  The Badger had his door open before the driver pulled to a stop. For a big man, he moved quickly, though the mud was doing its best to destroy his Gucci loafers. He threw up his arms. “Holy shit,” he shouted to no one in particular. He turned to Chief Falcon, who was struggling to keep up with him as they marched toward Zol and the fire chief.

  “Look what they’ve done,” Dennis shouted to the Native chief. “They’ve fucking killed my operation. Some bastard is going to pay for this.”

  Any semblance of traditional Native diffidence, learned or hardwired, had vanished from the Badger’s face. He was charging like a bull bison stung by a thousand wasps and out for blood — crimson cheeks, bulging blue eyes, and foam on the mouth.

  “Who’s in charge here?” he demanded. “And it better not be you, Szabo.”

  Zol felt the weight of the Badger’s fist pressed against his chest, but he stood his ground.

  The fire chief took a step forward. “That would be me, chief of Norfolk Fire and Emergency. Grant Dyment.”

  “I don’t give a shit what your name is, but I do want my factory fixed. At your expense.”

  Zol exchanged looks with the fire chief.

  “That’s not the way it works, sir,” said the chief. “We put the fires out. Any restitution is up to you and your insurance company.”

  “This is goddamn arson. Has to be. Three Native cigarette factories on fire at the same time? You don’t have to be a friggin’ genius to see arson when it’s staring you in the face.”

  “You own all three factories, do you, sir?”

  For a second or two, the Badger lost his momentum. His eyes flashed up and to his right before he answered. “No. Just this one.”

  “I’ve made a preliminary inspection of the other two sites,” Grant Dyment told him. “No owner or manager has shown any interest in the damaged properties. No one has come to have a look. No one’s come to claim anything that might be salvageable. That got me thinking — maybe the owner lives out of town. Or is ashamed to show his face on account of some funny business going on inside.”

  “Don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  The fire chief took his time eye
ing his boots and scraping them against the gravel. “Let me think . . . the processing of cannabis maybe?”

  “Don’t be absurd. We just process tobacco, and have been for two thousand years.”

  The Badger loved pulling that race card. Trouble was, his God-given, unrestricted right to sell tobacco was looking pretty soggy at the moment. He frowned and looked away. Clearly, he was as surprised as anyone that the Asians hadn’t shown up to inspect the ruins of their investment.

  Dennis straightened his shoulders and set himself back on the offensive. He glared at Zol. “What are you doing here anyways, Szabo? Joined the fire department, or just come to gloat?”

  “I called Dr. Szabo in,” said the fire chief. “To assess the situation from a public-health standpoint. All this water, full of factory pollutants, could poison the wells on your reserve.”

  “And whose fault is that?” The Badger turned to the Native chief, standing granite-faced beside him. It was impossible to tell what Bob Falcon was thinking. He hadn’t moved a muscle during the Badger’s entire tirade. “Come on, Bob,” the Badger said, taking a step toward the factory. “Better see what’s left of the operation that funded all those good things I brought to your reserve.”

  Grant Dyment held the Badger by the arm. “You can’t go in there, sir. It’s not safe.” The fire chief’s tone was fatherly and respectful.

  “Take your hand off me,” the Badger said, trying in vain to evade the fire chief’s grasp.

  Dyment stood firm. His arm didn’t budge. He must have been in this situation many times before and prevented countless people from dashing into burning buildings to retrieve their belongings.

  The Badger’s eyes filled with hate. “I said, take your hand off me. This is sovereign First Nations territory.” He looked at the Native chief, “Tell them, Bob. Tell them to get the hell out of here, to get off our land. They have no business here.”

  Five of them — Zol, the fire chief, the Badger’s two silent bodyguards, and the Badger himself — fixed their gaze on Chief Falcon, waiting for the man who said little to give the final word.

  Falcon’s face remained impassive, his thoughts hidden. If he was facing inner conflict and turmoil, he wasn’t showing it. But he couldn’t be missing the fact that the bodyguards had their hands hovering beside their holsters.

  Finally, Chief Falcon looked at the Badger and said, “These men came to help us, Dennis. Of course they got business being here.” He gestured toward the soggy factory. “And if that place is gonna fall down, I’m not gonna be inside it when it does.”

  Dyment released the Badger’s arm, and Zol felt the tension drop a notch or two. Seconds later, everyone turned toward the thud-thud of two doors slamming. A couple dressed in business attire began walking toward them from a blue-grey Chevy Malibu. The pair looked like a middle-aged woman and her twenty-something son in need of directions to the local Baptist church.

  From five paces away, the woman called out, “Dennis Joseph Badger?”

  “Who’s asking?” Dennis said.

  “Sergeant Bergman,” said the woman once the pair had reached the group. She gestured to the young man beside her. “And this is Constable Holloway. We’re with the Ontario Provincial Police.”

  “Good,” Dennis said. He pointed at Zol. “Arrest this man for arson. Look what he did to my factory. And put three hundred of my people out of work.”

  “Mr. Badger,” said the woman, “I don’t do windows and I don’t do arson.” She paused, flashed her badge, and let everyone feel the weight of her words. “But I do investigate homicides. In fact, I’ve been looking for you for more than a year.”

  She pulled a pair of handcuffs out of nowhere, and while the athletic-looking constable stood with his handgun poised for immediate action, she yanked the Badger’s arms behind his back and slapped on the cuffs.

  “Dennis Joseph Badger,” she said in a clear, loud voice, “I’m arresting you for the murder of Dr. Tammy Holt. You do not need to say anything, but anything you do say may be used as evidence.”

  She dipped into her jacket pocket and held out a clear plastic bag that had OPP: CRIME EVIDENCE written across a seal at the top. Badger glanced at it and looked quickly away. Inside was what appeared to be a beaded star on a disk attached to a strip of leather. Was it a necklace? Whatever it was, it had the well-worn look of a keepsake or a Native artifact — and the detective looked triumphant to have it in her possession.

  “You have the right to retain and instruct a lawyer right away,” the detective said, returning the bag to her pocket. “Do you understand?”

  Dennis looked too stunned to answer. He flashed Chief Falcon a look of utter confusion that morphed into revulsion as he stumbled toward the unmarked police car at the hands of the officers.

  No one in the group said a word. The bodyguards gawked at the departing unmarked police car like bewildered sheep who’d lost their shepherd. Now that he looked at them, Zol saw that they were identical twins. One had a big ugly sore on his lip.

  Zol’s phone beeped in his pocket. An incoming text. He flipped it open and read the message from Colleen: NICE WORK WITH HIS TIM’S CUP. POLICE SAMPLE ALSO PERFECT MATCH. JUDGE GRANTED SEARCH WARRANT FOR BADGER’S HOUSE. BERGMAN MUST’VE FOUND EVERYTHING SHE NEEDED. XO

  He looked up from the screen. A silver Mercedes had joined the huddle of cars parked across the street. Colleen gave a wave from behind the wheel. Al Mesic, smiling beside her, raised his notepad and his camera, then gave an appreciative thumbs up. Clearly, he was delighted with this scoop. His story of the Badger’s arrest, complete with photos, would be huge for him. But hell, he better never discover that the firefighters’ destruction of the factories was premeditated.

  The Native chief was the first to stir. He turned to Zol. His dark, deep-set eyes were glistening, on the verge of tears. He cocked his head toward Dennis’s SUV, not so gorgeous now with mud smearing its alloy rims and cinnamon side panels. “Doc?”

  “You want to talk?”

  Falcon nodded and without a further word led Zol to the suv. He swung open a rear door and motioned Zol in, then climbed in beside him from the opposite side.

  Seated in the back seat, staring at his hands, Robert Falcon looked like a man filled to bursting with a lifetime of bottled up opinions and no idea how to let them out. After a long silence, he said, “Donna Holt,” and let her name hang in the space between them. And then he began. “She died ’bout an hour ago, eh?”

  Zol didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry wouldn’t begin to cover it. For a long moment, he said nothing and hoped reciprocating the chief’s initial silence conveyed the depth of his own regret. Finally, he ventured, “Donna’s death is going to be very hard on Matt. Both his sisters were so —”

  “Her mother called me. From Toronto. She’s my sister, eh?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Tammy and Donna, they were my nieces. My sister’s kids.”

  “Oh Chief, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  “Looks like Dennis killed them both.” Falcon turned and stared through the window at the charred remains of the cigarette factory. After a while, he dropped his gaze to his hands and studied them intently, as if contemplating his own culpability.

  The elected chief of Grand Basin Reserve raised his head and, for the first time, looked into Zol’s eyes. “Us guys were blind, eh? On the rez, Dennis’s greed was like an infection. You know, contagious, eh? Like the White Man’s smallpox that killed so many of us in the old days.”

  Talking like this was tearing the chief apart. But it was clear that an inner strength was compelling him to continue. He smudged the tears on his cheeks with the back of his hand. “It took me far too long to see that. I shoulda listened to my sister and her husband. We knew that Dennis brought bad people to the reserve — gangsters, gamblers, loan sharks, and, yes, even hit men. And my sister knew her daughter’s
death had everything to do with Dennis Badger’s trade in pirate smoke. But all those dollars Dennis was throwin’ around, they blinded me.”

  The chief put his hand in his pocket and pulled out what looked like a wad of newspaper. “I can’t keep this any longer, Dr. Szabo. Dennis was showin’ it off in Toronto last night. Told me to put it back somewheres safe in my office. I figure you know what to do with it. Give it to the right people. I heard you’re the one that found it in the first place.”

  Zol didn’t need to unwrap the paper to know what the chief had passed him. But when he saw those garnet eyes, his own stung. He caressed the smooth stone and remembered the autumn day when he’d got all excited after finding buried treasure with his dad’s metal detector.

  He passed the pipe back to the chief and said, “Hold him for a sec, will you.”

  Zol reached into his own pocket and pulled out the black-eyed mate. She hadn’t left his side since Thursday night.

  He’d expected the chief to be stunned at the sight of the pair of legendary birds sitting beak to beak. But the chief simply nodded, as if all along he’d known Zol was the custodian of the second loon.

  “Do you have any pipe tobacco with you?” Zol asked. “Mine’s at home, but I think we could both do with a smoke.”

  The chief swept the leather-and-maple interior of the Porsche with his discerning gaze. “Dennis doesn’t let no one smoke in here.”

  “That’s okay,” Zol said. “He won’t ever know.”

  Recently retired from medical practice, Ross Pennie has been a jungle surgeon, an intensive-care pediatrician, a specialist in infectious diseases, a university professor, and a prize-winning author. His first novel, Tainted, won the Arts Hamilton Literary Award for Fiction and has readers cleaning out their fridges, fearful of artisanal sausages. Tampered, his second novel, also won the award and has readers fearing for Grandma’s safety in her retirement home. Ross is the father of two grown children and lives with his wife in southern Ontario.

  Copyright © Ross Pennie, 2013