The Specter

by Saul, Jonas

  “Got it,” Hanley said and headed off.

  “Listen, Julie. I have something to tell you. What I’m about to tell you hasn’t leaked to the media yet, but it will by tomorrow. Jan Elliot and Joanne Stevens are dead, as well as Nancy Demeers. All their bodies were found tonight with Frank and Gary Weeks’ bodies too. This is very serious. These guys don’t play games. You were supposed to be on the list as well as everyone in this club tonight.”

  Julie covered her mouth with her hand and slid down the wall to crouch on her knees. Her eyes widened in shock and tears dripped as her shoulders hitched up and down.

  “I need to know everything you know to stop the people who did this. Having you downtown at the station will offer you protection until we can figure out what’s going on.”

  Her nod was barely evident, but he caught it. Hanley returned and gestured to Julie. Folley nodded and Hanley helped her to her feet and started walking her to an empty cruiser.

  Before Folley headed to meet Angela, he gazed down the dark street where Julie had said Aaron ran.

  Aaron, where are you and what are you doing now?

  Chapter 16

  Aaron was fighting the biggest internal battle he had ever encountered in his life. Should he run or turn himself in? He could grab money and food and drive the hour and a half south to cross the Peace Bridge in Niagara Falls, and get lost in the States somewhere. Or he could drive to Folley’s office and tell him everything he knew. Would Folley lock him up for attacking the bouncers? Or would Aaron look like a hero for getting all the paying customers out before the gunmen showed up? His friends were only there to help if things went bad, and it did. What would happen to them?

  He had taken the three of them to Daniel’s house for the night and left, telling them he had to take the recording of the two men escorting his sister out of her building to the police station. The same two men from the strip club. But he hadn’t yet because he still wasn’t sure if he could.

  He had slept by the beach in Oshawa—almost an hour’s drive out of Toronto where no one would expect to find him—with the front seat reclined as far as it would go.

  The early morning ride into Toronto had been horrible as he sat in the bumper-to-bumper traffic at seven thirty that morning. It was after nine in the morning and he was parked in Twelve Division’s lot, still debating the right move as the morning sun beat in through his passenger side window.

  The fact that he was in the police station’s parking lot told him he had made up his mind, but he still wasn’t sure.

  The system had failed too often in the past. Could he trust them now, when he needed them the most? Folley had tried Aaron’s cell phone numerous times throughout the night, no doubt wanting to know where he was.

  There had been witnesses who had seen the whole thing last night. The waitress could verify Aaron’s side of the story. If only he didn’t have the attempted murder charge over his head, the cops wouldn’t look at him like he was the criminal. They didn’t know who he was. They would judge him by his actions and that was it. Whether he was found guilty or not guilty, he had a criminal charge over his head and that’s how the system treated him.

  “Screw it,” he said as he started his car. “I’m outta here. They can solve whatever case they have to solve without me. They’re the fucking cops. It’s their job.”

  He put the Nissan in drive and then stopped.

  The main doors to the police station opened and the waitress from the strip club walked out onto the cement steps. Behind her, a police officer in uniform exited the building and walked her down toward a police cruiser.

  They must have taken her statement and were going to drive her home. He wondered what she had told them. Did she bash Aaron and his friends, or did she remember that Alex had taken out both shooters and saved everyone’s life?

  Aaron wanted to know what she told the cops before he approached them. She was his chance to find out what was happening on the inside.

  The officer opened the front door of the cruiser for her, waited until she got in, and then closed it. After getting in himself, he reversed out of his spot and started for the exit.

  Aaron pulled out of his parking space slowly, waited until the cop car turned left onto Dixie, and then drove to the exit. He followed as close as he could for over ten blocks until he lost the cruiser to a red light. He waited and watched the police car in the distance, but the light didn’t change. With the police car almost lost to sight, Aaron had no choice. With a break in traffic, he gunned the Nissan’s engine, racing through the intersection. He nearly clipped the back of a pickup, the guy laying on the horn as he sped by. He accelerated his car to fifteen over the limit in an effort to catch up to the cruiser that had disappeared around a corner up ahead.

  He couldn’t lose them. He had no idea where she lived.

  Aaron scanned the cars ahead of him.

  Nothing.

  “Shit,” he said as he smacked the steering wheel.

  He slowed the Nissan back to the speed of the traffic around him. The summer sun beat down through the window. He flicked on the air conditioner and wondered what he was going to do next. As far as he was concerned, he couldn’t do anything right. Last night’s fight at the strip club was dangerous and stupid. He had a machine gun fired at him. He almost got killed and saw the DJ die. An innocent man torn apart by bullets meant for Aaron. He had never seen a man die before. The closest Aaron had been to death was John Ashcroft, the man Aaron had put in the coma at his dojo. Aaron was so pumped up on adrenaline last night, trying to stay alive, that he hadn’t considered the consequences of running from the scene of a murder.

  Why did those men come in so heavy with such firepower? How did vodka fit in to all of it?

  He was in a serious amount of trouble. The only option was to drive back to the police station and try to make things right. He couldn’t live on the run. He wasn’t that kind of guy. He didn’t know the first thing about obtaining fake ID, living under a false name and assuming a new identity. It was better to face the music, get it over with and then go on living.

  But what about my sister? Does she get to keep on living?

  The light ahead turned red at Hurontario Street. He considered running the red for a brief moment. Maybe a huge dump truck would take him out and all the pain would end right then and there.

  He stopped at the light and checked his rearview mirror.

  Sitting directly behind him was the police car he had been searching for. The waitress sat in the passenger seat staring out the side window, appearing to be uninterested in what the cop was saying. The cop stared straight ahead at Aaron’s Nissan, his mouth moving.

  What the hell happened? Did they stop for gas? Or is the cop tailing me now?

  The cop moved in his seat. The police car’s horn sounded, and Aaron jumped. The light was green, the cars around him already through the intersection.

  Aaron eased forward and got up to the speed limit while glancing in his mirror as often as he could without swerving. His speed stayed slow, making other cars go around him. He kept it that way, hoping the cruiser would follow suit and pass him.

  He assured himself that the cop held no interest in him. It had been a simple delay of some kind. They must have stopped off for gas or to buy a drink.

  Another traffic light turned yellow. Aaron gently applied the brakes and stopped as the light turned red. The cruiser moved out from behind him and pulled up alongside. Aaron fiddled with the dials on his car radio so neither occupant of the police cruiser could see him. He looked at the traffic light and back to the radio, the air conditioner vent blowing cold air directly into his face.

  The light changed to green. As he pulled forward, he snuck a quick glance at the cop car and saw the waitress staring out the window. She wasn’t looking at him. He saw bags under her eyes and the bloodshot sclera that said she had had a rough night. They all had a rough night after living through the fear of two men with machine guns coming to kill everyone. S
he must have been through an extra tough evening as she probably spent the whole night telling cop after cop what had happened in the club.

  He fell in behind the cruiser and let a little distance open up between them so as not to be noticed, but not enough distance that he would lose them again.

  The cruiser entered the Queensway block near Royal York Road and turned right, heading north. Aaron sped up to the intersection and turned right fast, almost hitting the cruiser that had parked on the side of the road, his four-ways flashing.

  Aaron tapped his brakes and swung the wheel hard to the left to miss the stopped car without having a chance to check his blind spot. Luckily, no vehicles were coming, and the driver in the police cruiser didn’t look his way as Aaron drove by.

  He watched in his mirrors as the waitress got out of the car. The police cruiser performed a U-turn and drove south on Royal York Road.

  Aaron turned into a driveway about ten houses up and waited for the waitress to walk toward him. He had no idea what he would say first, nor did he know if she would freak out at the sight of him, but he needed to talk to her. She had to know something about the night Joanne was taken. Aaron assumed that was the reason the two thugs had shown up at the club—to destroy all the evidence, even witnesses.

  Three houses short of where Aaron waited, she turned up a driveway, but not before looking in all directions to see if anyone followed her. She lingered on Aaron’s idling Nissan a moment and then walked behind a white house with an empty driveway.

  Aaron headed north one block and parked on a side street.

  He wondered how many laws he was breaking. Following a police officer had to be against the law somehow. Usually it was the other way around. Stalking the waitress to her home with the intent of questioning her about something that happened almost four days ago had to be a form of harassment.

  He dismissed all the negative thoughts, thinking only about his sister and knowing she had been killed, he turned off the Nissan and got out. He slipped the Kubaton on his keychain along the inside edge of his pocket so the keys could remain exposed. He needed it easy to grab in case of trouble. Lately that’s all that came his way.

  He started along the backs of the houses that fronted onto Royal York Road one block over. If there was a way to enter from the back, he wanted to find it. Coming in from the front left him too exposed.

  Lining himself up with the white house the waitress had entered, there was a house with yellow siding and bars over the windows in the basement. The yellow house had a backyard that appeared to be a large cage. Signs told intruders to beware of dogs. In the few seconds he stood in front of the yellow house, he heard three barks, two of them from different dogs.

  I guess I’m not going in this way.

  He walked back around the block and up to the front of her house. What was he going to say? He had no idea what she had discussed with the police, nor did he know what they had told her about him. Would Folley, or any other officer, tell her about the criminal charges pending against him? If they had, the waitress was going to be quite scared if he simply walked up and knocked.

  But what else could he do? He didn’t know how to break into a home. Adding more criminal charges to his resume wasn’t in the plans. Talking to the waitress and leaving was all he wanted.

  The front door of the house opened. Aaron hesitated on the first few steps of her walkway as she held the door.

  “I was about to make a cup of tea,” she said. “Care to join me? Or are you going to stand out front of my house until one of my neighbors calls the police? I assure you, I’ve had enough with the cops to last a lifetime.”

  She went in, the screen door shutting behind her, the inside door left ajar.

  She had seen him in the Nissan. If she thought he was a threat, she wouldn’t have issued an open-door invitation.

  Aaron shut and locked the door behind him.

  Chapter 17

  Jessica knocked on Clive’s door as he was about to fall asleep in his chair.

  “Come,” Clive called, rubbing his eyes. He lowered the chair and dropped his feet to the ground in an effort to sit up.

  The door opened a foot and Jessica stuck her head in. “Sorry to bother you, but I have Nick on encrypted line four.”

  Clive waved her away and grabbed the phone.

  “Nick?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Are you still in the Toronto area?”

  “How is that important?”

  “Something went wrong in Toronto four days ago and I need it cleaned up.”

  “Send your ex-Mossad dogs in.”

  “I did.”

  Nick stayed silent. In always infuriated Clive to listen to someone breathing on the other end of the phone. Nick was the only one he allowed to do it.

  “My Mossad team may have failed. I need your services.”

  Clive waited, but Nick still didn’t respond.

  “You there?” Clive asked.

  “Yes. Explain what you need?”

  “Witnesses are in need of accidents. Jackson and Hugh may have to go, also.” Clive was sure he heard the subtle intake of breath as Nick heard that Clive’s two pets were to be euthanized. “I’m serious. The Toronto job was important and they haven’t checked in. My guess is they’ve been arrested but I haven’t been able to find out yet. Is this something you can handle?”

  “I’ll call you back. Give me five minutes.”

  The line went dead. Earlier, when Clive had waited for Jessica to get Nick on the line, he had called his contact at the RCMP in Ontario to see if he could get anything on Jackson and Hugh, but he hadn’t heard back from him yet.

  Clive had built up contacts over the years with the FBI, the CIA, Interpol, MI6, the RCMP in Canada, France’s Police Nationale, the Mossad and even Belgium’s Police Fédérale. There were a number of times when he had avoided arrest due to a well-placed call at the right time. In his business, the business of wealth and making it at all costs, he needed allies. He knew Interpol and the FBI were tracking his whereabouts, a few hotshot agents gunning for him, but they never got enough to press charges. At least not charges that would stick.

  Clive stayed under the radar, getting his mercenaries to do the work for him. He remained elusive because whenever someone like the Weeks brothers learned something damaging about him, Clive was decisively responsive, removing whoever was in his way. He had learned young that dead mouths don’t talk.

  He eased his considerable bulk out of the chair and walked over to the liquor cabinet. Uncapping a bottle of Scotch, he poured himself two fingers.

  Everything would be fine now. Nick Sturnam was the consummate professional. He wasn’t just good at what he did, he was the best. He was also the most expensive, otherwise Clive would use him more regularly. Clive was rich because he wasn’t stupid with his money.

  Nick had proved himself worthy over the years. Even the Mafia, the Cosa Nostra, had used him for a few jobs in the past. At least that was what Clive had gathered through his information channels a few years back when he was first introduced to Nick.

  Clive sipped his Scotch. The silent TV displayed images, but he had muted it before dozing off.

  The phone rang. He sat in his chair, saw it was line four again and picked it up.

  “I’m here,” Clive said.

  “Your boys are being detained. I’ve been told they aren’t talking and no one can figure out who they are.”

  Clive felt his stomach drop. If either one of the ex-Mossad mercenaries struck a deal and flipped, he would be finished. They knew too much.

  “Both must be silenced immediately,” Clive said.

  “They’re in the police station in a cell.”

  “I don’t care if they’re at the space station, they have to be silenced and fast.”

  “That’s going to cost you.”

  “I know it will, but I need you to do it. Also, all the staff at the House of Lancaster must be taken care of too.”

  �
��All the staff? The dancers too?”

  “No, only the bouncers and the waitresses.”

  “That’s a tall order.”

  “That’s why I called you,” Clive said as he shot back the rest of the whiskey. “I will have Jessica send you an email with the list of names and addresses of the staff. Find them all and close this chapter for me. Name your price?”

  “That depends on how many people we’re talking.”

  “I don’t know right now but it could be at least six, maybe eight.”

  “Wire me half a million deposit and I’ll get started. We’ll talk money when I have your Mossad boys. They may be trouble.”