Ice Lake
Page 43
“Counsellor?”
“Yes, sir?” the attorney asked.
“Do you have any children?”
“What does that have to do with our discussion?”
“Indulge me. Do you?”
“Two. One of each.”
“Don’t drive in with Honigwachs. See that he comes in alone. Our body count is high enough. If he gets whacked, don’t be in the vicinity.”
“A little dramatic, don’t you think, Sergeant-Detective?”
“Maybe. But think of your kids, counsellor, that’s all I’m suggesting.”
Cinq-Mars put the phone down and nodded to Mathers, McGibbon, Recchi, and Lieutenant Tremblay, all gathered in his cubicle. “Late this afternoon, between three and four, according to Honigwachs’s lawyer, BioLogika shares were savaged by a steep decline,” he announced. “The company has experienced a sell-off on heavy volume. Honigwachs is coming in. Dead or alive—that remains to be seen.”
Eleven days later, Sunday afternoon, February 27, 1999
Emile Cinq-Mars was alone in his house—his wife had gone into the local village with their weekend house-guest—when he received the phone call he’d dreaded the most. Snow was heavy in the fields as he gazed out the second-floor window and listened. The day was unseasonably warm, and the horses shuffled around in the outdoor paddocks closest to the barn, relishing the breezy air that, weathermen were saying, had originated in Texas. He caught sight of a squad car turning onto the lengthy drive up to the farmhouse and stables, and after he had hung up he went downstairs and stepped outside to greet the unknown visitor, not bothering with a coat. Only when the vehicle turned sideways to him and stopped did he see that it belonged to the local police department. He identified the officer behind the wheel as the Chief of Police.
The man had to work a little to get himself out of the car and upright. Expecting trouble, Cinq-Mars was surprised when the chief, wearing sunglasses to protect his eyes from the bright glare off the snow, approached him with a smile. “Jean-Guy Brasseur,” the visitor announced. He had adopted a different voice from the cranky tone he’d employed during their first meeting on the ice lake. Apparently, whatever chip had been on his shoulder then had eroded away.
Cinq-Mars met him at the bottom of the stairs and shook his hand. “I remember. How are you, Chief?”
“Good enough. Sick of winter. Detective, I have some news.” He shuffled his feet around. He raised his head when a horse snorted, and Cinq-Mars looked across at the animal. The horse was gazing at him, probably wondering if he was coming over with a sugar lump or an apple.
Cinq-Mars shrugged. “What’s that?”
“We’ve made arrests that might interest you.”
“What’s the crime?”
“Car theft.”
He looked around his yard. He was thinking that he would remember this day. That the sadness in his heart and lungs and belly, the pain behind his eyes, would never completely vanish. He was thinking that after this cop left he’d go over to the horse who was still watching him and hug his neck. Then, he’d weep. “Okay. I’ll bite. Why does that interest me?”
The chief grinned. He bobbed his chin continuously as if the information he was hoarding might pop a valve. “Same MO as before, Sergeant-Detective. You’ll remember we had a snow squall Friday night. Lasted an hour or two. During the blow a Jeep Cherokee was heisted off a farm about twenty clicks down the road. One set of tire tracks left the farm, one set only, the Jeep’s. Snowmobile tracks crossed nearby. Same thing could’ve happened to you, bud. A perp figured these farmhouses run so far off the roads nobody bothers locking doors. Let’s face it, farmers run ten different types of machines, leave the keys in the ignition every time. Until now, they had no cause for concern. But somebody’s out there stealing. No bomb that night. There wasn’t any dynamite. No bikers. Just a couple of rough boys out to score a four-wheeler.”
“Ah,” Cinq-Mars cottoned on. “You’re telling me that the attack on my house was random.”
“It no longer looks isolated, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Thanks for driving out with this.”
“Just filling you in, bud. I’ll see you, Cinq-Mars. You take it easy now.” The chief got into his car and rolled down the window. “You know what it means?” he asked.
Cinq-Mars nodded slightly. The chief had done his best to mask his pride, and a measure of his disdain, although he had not been wholly successful. He was taking pleasure in the news, as the information was meant to belittle the city cop, knock him down from his high station. The chief was telling him that he was not such a vaunted legend of law enforcement that gunmen vied to be his assassin. He was not the target of the worst criminals in the land. Gangs were not willing to risk everything merely to take him out. He had been the random victim of an auto theft, like thousands of others, and the fact that he hadn’t figured that out suggested that maybe he wasn’t such a hotshot detective after all.
Cinq-Mars had been willing to let Chief Brasseur have that satisfaction, but then he changed his mind. He walked across to his car. “Do you understand it, Chief? Do you know what just happened here?”
The chief smirked. “Sure I do. You’re not on anybody’s hit list.”
“No,” Cinq-Mars told him. “I just got taken off.”
“What do you mean?”
“They came at me, the mob did. Andrew Stettler, before he was killed, talked them into that. Not out of revenge, they’re not that stupid, but because I was about to interfere with a major part of their business. Then Stettler got bumped off. As it happens, I solved that murder for them. Now, I have no way to interfere with their business any more, I have no way to disrupt their cash flow. Plus, I did them a favour. So they arranged that little heist Friday night, and somehow they put a bug in your ear to come out here and tell me about it. Am I right?”
The chief’s eyes shifted to one side, then back again, as though he didn’t know where to hide.
“So I’m right about that. Do you know what it means now? The mob sent me a message. I’m off their hit list. I was on, and now I’m off. They want peace between me and them. You, sir, you were their messenger. Nothing more than that.”
The chief stared up at him, his teeth clenched, and then stepped lightly on the gas and turned the car away. Cinq-Mars watched him go down the drive, amazed once again by the pettiness of human relations.
As he was watching, the squad car passed his Pathfinder returning. Cinq-Mars waited outside for the return of the two women. He felt the eyes of his father upon him. When he looked over, the horse continued to observe him. Cinq-Mars looked down again, and his eyes filled.
The vehicle parked in its usual spot and Sandra jumped down from the driver’s seat holding up a little white bag. “I filled your prescription!” she called. “Celebrex, Emile! No more achy hands!”
“Yeah, well,” Cinq-Mars grumbled. He’d been deliberately procrastinating on that one. Lucy Gabriel was stepping out of the vehicle also, and she let Sally the dog free from the back seat to bark at the departing car.
“What did he want?” Sandra nodded toward the driveway.
“To break my balls. Typical police behaviour. Lucy! Tell me, how many lab rats had to get sick for that little bottle of pills?”
“Human or rodent?” She smiled, for the first time in ages.
Sandra spun the cap off. “Come on,” she coaxed, “open up! Wouldn’t you rather shoot straight? Do you still want to be a cop or not, Emile?”
The question was a good one—did he still want to be a cop?—and Emile Cinq-Mars gave it more serious attention than perhaps his wife had intended. Apparently, he was already losing his partner, although he hadn’t given up on that front, and that was more than he could stomach. At least Mathers was continuing in the force, for his photograph had been published holding little Carole Choquette in his arms, and his wife, affected by that, agreed that it was important that some people take risks to protect others. That he himself had encoura
ged the newspaper to publish the photo was knowledge Cinq-Mars was keeping to himself.
In the end, to answer his wife’s question, he opened his mouth wide, and she popped in the pill. He gagged on the tablet, and made a face, and hugged his chest as he choked on it, but he managed to swallow it down, and the women laughed at his pantomime.
Muddied, Sally was circling the yard, wanting to play. Lucy found a stick, a branch that had come down during the last storm, gave it a good long toss, and the dog took off. They watched Sally run, then scamper back with the stick, and Cinq-Mars put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. The dog begged Lucy to throw it again, and she teased the animal, feinting in various directions before lofting her precious stick high and far. Emile Cinq-Mars and Sandra watched as the young woman entertained the dog, and Sandra frequently shot a glance at her husband, noticing his red eyes.
Cinq-Mars smiled a couple of times when Lucy laughed. She was recovering from her trauma, but she had also educated them all concerning the gravity of the ongoing situation. She told them that Darkling Star could teach other firms the technique to accelerate an illness in order to track, isolate, and comprehend its progress. A pharmaceutical firm had already reported that they’d been approached. So the mob was out there, getting into a new business, offering death for sale, and the possibility was very real that soon someone might buy for the sake of the knowledge they’d gain.
Death had been put up on the auction block.
Cinq-Mars was sufficiently knowledgeable about humankind to know there would be bidders.
He whispered to Sandra, “Dad’s gone.”
And he wept then. His body shook. She put an arm around him. While the dog and the young woman played, while the horses lifted their heads and snorted, while the breeze prevailed, warm and brisk, Sandra and Emile Cinq-Mars turned and held one another in their arms, in the peace of their barnyard, silently, and they remained clasped, long after Lucy had taken the dog inside to leave them to their private sorrow.
PRAISE FOR
CITY OF ICE
Rich descriptions of Montreal in winter … blend well with the bone-chilling plot …
THE NEW YORK TIMES
John Farrow has written a tour de force … in terms of popular genre fiction, [this] might be the best book ever produced in Canada.
THE VANCOUVER SUN
[It] has a heart pounding with crime, sleaze, and venom. And intrigue, greed, and betrayal mark the boundaries of this thumping story.
NATIONAL POST
Farrow, who admires the morally complex thrillers of John Le Carré and Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park), achieves much the same high ground.
MACLEAN’S
… Farrow’s Montreal is a dirty old town, and City of Ice is as noir as it gets; noir with a hard glaze of frost, unforgiving as January.
THE GAZETTE (Montreal)
City of Ice may be a thriller, but it’s one with more than a little literary skill behind it. You won’t find any breathless prose in Farrow’s fast-paced book. Instead the writing is seamless, the plotting intricate, and the characterization generally first-class.
THE EDMONTON JOURNAL
Farrow’s novel has enough grit to satisfy fans of the genre and enough intelligence to be a welcome addition to the ongoing exploration of Canada’s solitudes in the context of a changing world.
QUILL & QUIRE
About the Author
JOHN FARROW is the pen name of Trevor Ferguson, who has written nine novels and four plays and has been named Canada’s best novelist in both Books in Canada and the Toronto Star. Under the name John Farrow, he has written three novels featuring Emile Cinq-Mars: City of Ice Lake, and his most recent book, River City. He was raised in Montreal and lives in Hudson, Quebec.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Copyright
Ice Lake
Copyright © 2001 by John Farrow Mysteries, Inc. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Epub Edition © July 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40876-9
Published by Harper Weekend, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
First published in hardcover by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd: 2001
First mass market paperback edition: 2002
This Harper Weekend trade paperback edition: 2011
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
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Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4W 1A8
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information
Farrow, John, 1947-
Ice Lake/John Farrow.
Originally publ.: 2001.
ISBN 978-1-44340-529-4
I. Title.
PS8561.A785I23 2011 C813’.54 C2011-902422-5
RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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