A Door in the River

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  The sideroads swept past as she came closer to the Ninth Line.

  What would she do now? Bellecourt had congratulated herself for staying one step ahead of them the whole way.

  But now, finally, they were ahead. She knew where both the girl and Lee Travers were headed. She’d already dispatched cars. It had taken LeJeune less than five minutes to decipher the name Mr. Sugar. Everyone in high stakes knew him. He was a whale, not just to the casino, but in stature as well. He was allowed to eat at the tables because he bet a minimum of a thousand dollars a hand. He tipped well, too, especially the waitresses, who found him disgusting. He told them to call him Mr. Sugar. He’d made his fortune in energy drinks.

  His name was Carl Duffy.

  Now she didn’t have to fake having a plan. She could gun for Bellecourt and let the woman find out for herself what kind of rage Hazel was capable of. Nobody put a hand on anyone she cared for.

  Bellecourt planned to keep Hazel occupied with the fate of her lieutenant; she was going to keep Bellecourt occupied with the fate of her fiancé. This was their endgame. Bellecourt would have to get to Lee, or wait for him in those fields. Hazel wasn’t about to let her choose, though.

  She had to not care. The problem with a threat like the one that had been issued was that if you allowed yourself to be governed by the fear of the outcome, you might end up with nothing but the thing you feared. She had to push past it, keep Bellecourt in her sights. It was probably the only way to save Wingate and get Bellecourt and Travers into custody. She fumbled with her cell and dialled Ray Greene. “I’m not stopping,” she said to him. “In five minutes you’d better have half your hands on deck up near Duffy’s place and the other half on the Ninth Road. You’re going to need a heat sensor to figure out where James is.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Straight through,” she said. “I’m going to go get her. Then you move in and get Wingate out, and anyone else who might be under there.”

  “I don’t know, Hazel.”

  “I don’t know, either, Ray. But the longer she’s roosting on top of them, the greater the chance of an outcome I don’t think either of us can live with.”

  “Stay in touch with me. And be careful.”

  “I will. Just get James out.” She ended the call as she passed the Eighth Line and continued up Sideroad 1 toward the grove. She might have been driving over the body of her detective constable; she focused herself on the task at hand and powered LeJeune’s dark blue Maxima over the hardtop toward her destination. As she crested a low rise, she saw, in the distance, the black Mercedes that she’d seen before, coming slowly toward her, and she reached for the radio. “Bellecourt? Come in. We’re alone on this frequency.”

  She waited. The black car seemed to be slowing. Then it turned and blocked the road sideways.

  “Bellecourt?” she said into the radio. “I’m not stopping on this road.”

  “Hazel,” came the constable’s voice. “I thought I gave you my instructions.”

  “I know where Lee is.”

  “You don’t.”

  “There are cars heading to his location as we speak.”

  “Please do stop. I don’t want to have unnecessary blood on my hands. That’s Earl Tate up ahead in the car. Do you see him?”

  “I do.”

  “He has a rifle on him with a range of almost four hundred metres. I lent it to him. He’s a good shot, too.”

  “Well,” said Hazel, pulling the car onto the verge, “I’d better avoid him, then. Your commanding officer’s cruiser has got quite a bit of horsepower.” She drove far out into the field, beyond range, she thought, and then cut back in. She kept a wide berth behind the Mercedes as she drove back toward the road, through the vibrant soy.

  Gunfire erupted from the passenger window of the Mercedes as she bored down on the road and pulled LeJeune’s cruiser back sharply onto the hardtop. The cruiser hit the road with a jerk and a heave and fishtailed around a little, or appeared to fishtail – the fact was, Hazel was now pointing south on purpose. She was a hundred and fifty metres above the black Mercedes. The driver was no longer visible in the front of it. Protecting his head from a shot. “Last chance to catch a lift with me,” she said into the radio.

  “You put too low a value on life,” came Bellecourt’s voice.

  “I have a sliding scale,” said Hazel, and she put the car in first and floored it. That’s when her hunch was confirmed and she saw Bellecourt pop upright in the front seat of the Mercedes. Yes, my dear, she thought. She remembered the Mercedes’s driver had had long black hair, and she knew from Forbes’s report that Tate was bald. She was already going forty kilometres an hour when Bellecourt began to hurriedly back the Mercedes up. She wasn’t talking now, was she? Hazel closed the distance between the two cars, angling the cruiser to make contact with the front side of the Mercedes – fifty, sixty kilometres an hour, and she could see the determination on Bellecourt’s face. She was retreating as fast as she could, dust kicking forward from her front tires, and Hazel had the whole front right panel in her sights. She collided hard against the black car and she saw Bellecourt’s body leap up and toward her, but then the world went white and something punched her with incredible force. It took a moment to realize that the impact had triggered the airbag in LeJeune’s steering wheel, and even as Hazel punched it down and coughed out a lungful of the white powder that now filled the car, she could see the Mercedes rolling slowly away toward the ditch, smoke and steam flowing upwards into the summer air, its rear facing Hazel. The pain in her neck told her she was going to be popping anti-inflammatories later, but job one was getting out of the car. She pushed herself out of LeJeune’s cruiser and drew her weapon. There was no movement inside the black car, and the spent bladders of three airbags were hanging from its dashboard and doors. Hazel moved carefully around the back. The driver’s door was still closed. She wrenched it open and found Bellecourt lying awkwardly against the passenger seat, blood dripping from the side of her head. She had something in her hand – the radio. Bellecourt’s standard-issue Glock was sitting on the floor below the passnger seat. “Do it,” Bellecourt said into it the radio and dropped it. She lifted her head to Hazel and gave her a small, pained smile.

  “Boom,” she said.

  The fields behind them jumped and Hazel landed on her hip three feet from the car, skidding.

  She shot to her feet and looked out to where the dust was settling within the soy. Something had been detonated, but there had been no sound, only the sensation of the earth bucking and all the air in the county rushing past her. She forced herself to focus on her prisoner: the constable was struggling to get herself upright in the front seat, and Hazel leapt out with her empty hands – the gun had gone flying – and wrapped them around Bellecourt’s head to pull her out and to the ground. The constable was bleeding freely from the temple. The look in her eyes suggested Hazel had plenty of time to retrieve her gun. She grabbed it and then stood over Bellecourt, peering down the barrel at her.

  “Didn’t you wonder where Earl Tate really was?” Bellecourt asked her.

  “Aren’t you wondering if you’re going to die today?” Hazel replied.

  “I don’t worry about that anymore.”

  “You should,” said Hazel. She leaned over, her back protesting, and grabbed the constable by the front of her uniform and yanked her off the flattop into the base of her kneecap. Bellecourt’s nose exploded against the bone and a jet of blood described the arc of her head as Hazel dropped her back to the pavement. “But I can hurt you. A lot.”

  Bellecourt smiled at her.

  “What have you done to Wingate?”

  “He’s with the virgins now.”

  Hazel dropped the gun now and fell to her knees, straddling Bellecourt around the waist and trapping her arms. “Whatever they do to you in a court of law isn’t going to be enough,” she said.

  Bellecourt spat blood at Hazel, laughing. “All you can do to me is shake a fing
er. The law is nothing, not compared to other laws.”

  “You’re right about the law we both supposedly serve.” She suddenly punched Bellecourt in the mouth, splitting both lips. “It lacks certain elegance.” She punched her again, and again. Bellecourt, with her arms pinned, could do nothing to defend herself. “How do you think Lee will like you without your beauty?” Hazel asked, and she rained blows down on the constable. She stopped short of knocking her unconscious. “You thought I was bluffing, didn’t you? I know where the girl has gone. I know where Lee is headed.”

  “You know … fuck all,” Bellecourt rasped.

  “175 Highland Crescent on Gannon. Carl Duffy.” She lay her palm down flat against Bellecourt’s clavicle and levered herself to standing. Bellecourt’s face was swelling as if someone was pumping air into it. Hazel told her to get up.

  She leaned over to retrieve Bellecourt’s gun. She tossed it out the window and onto the road. “Let’s go find your man,” she said. Then she dragged Bellecourt back to her Mercedes and shoved her into the passenger seat. The cruiser was toast.

  ] 33 [

  Star was asleep under Wingate’s jacket, a thin windbreaker he’d decided to wear, recalling the cool of the tunnels. Now, as the cold seeped into every part of him, he wished he’d brought a parka. She’d more or less panicked herself into exhaustion, and Cherry had translated her keening wail: Now there is no one to help us. He’d tried to reassure her that the law was steps away from releasing them, but as time passed, her anxiety consumed her, and finally, she had slid down the wall in a heap, her eyes unseeing, and Wingate had settled her on her side. Cherry had given the younger woman the windbreaker earlier. She was made of sterner stuff, but he could tell how cold she was now. She paced, trying to keep warm, beating her hands against herself. They’d been trapped for more than an hour now.

  His eyes had adjusted and it was like dusk in the underground pit. Looking up through the pipe, he saw daylight hovering high above him. Thin filaments moved back and forth over the mouth of the pipe twenty-five or so feet above his head and he realized they were leaves and stems of the soy plants in the field above. In the tomblike room, everything had a greyish hue, but he could make out details in the wall, on the ground, and he could see Cherry’s expression. The muscles in her face were slack, but she was alert and alive. He felt a bond to this woman, whose real name he finally knew: Katrina Volkov. From Elizavetgrad.

  “I am worry for Stoya,” she said, using Star’s real name. “She is smaller.”

  “I’m going to get you both out of here alive,” said Wingate. “You’re going to go home.”

  “In a box,” she said. “Silly to take us out of one grave and put us in another.”

  “My people know where we are and they’re coming. All you and Stoya have to do is not panic.” But she knew what he knew: the room was inescapable. The door set in concrete was four inches thick and had to weigh half a ton. The room itself had been excavated from within and the structural integrity of the earth on all sides and above and below made it almost as hard as brick. The seams of the room – its edges and corners – were slightly loose from being disturbed, but there was no chance anyone could dig their way out of here. He’d already tested the wall at various points with his fingers and only where three seams met was there any give at all. These were the eight sort-of corners: four rounded ones on the ceiling and four on the floor. It was overall hopeless.

  He kept examining the steel lattice that held the pipe closed. It was level with the roof of the room. Why would they have put a grille on that pipe? He’d been worrying this question for an hour now. There was no way up the pipe, of course, but closing the bottom of it off could present the possibility that someone would drop something into it. They were meant to die slowly in here, but the pipe could ensure a quicker demise in an emergency. There would be no escape from water or gas, and an explosive tossed into the pipe would sit at the level of the ceiling and bring tons of earth down on them.

  This case had gotten worse and worse. He’d heard of things like this happening, and there had certainly been cases like it in Toronto during his time there, but this operation had been so rustic that its cruelty and deviousness took his breath away. Literally. The illegal casinos were a fact of life everywhere, but to hide something else inside of one, like an afterthought? This was more than a sideline, though. It was the work of a person who could convince others to follow. Wingate wondered now if he would survive to learn if this case would be solved. It would be a pity to die in an unsolved case. Hazel would see to it, though, that his body was recovered and given a proper burial.

  When he heard something land in the lattice with a dull clank, he realized, ruefully, that his surmise had been accurate. He’d been good at his job. It made him think ahead. He’d had about half an hour to prepare, but it wasn’t going to be enough. He’d used his belt buckle, but he was fairly sure, when he heard the fuse sizzling in the ceiling, that he was passing his last moments on earth. He thought of David.

  Ray Greene had a force of ten men and two mechanical teams descend on the soy fields. Helicopter support had been ordered in from Mayfair, and he could hear them in the distance, closing. The incendiary team blew the door in the grove open and five men went in. The other mechanical, using the gridmap Howard Spere had created, brought an excavation digger to the place they believed the underground hold was. There was no need for Spere’s map: there was an indentation in the wave of soybeans and it led to a small cave-in about two by two metres and ten centimetres at its deepest point. A little scoop in the field. Dust and smoke was still floating up from a circular opening they found in the middle of the plants. Greene called in his other team and told them to collect evidence, but not to enter the tunnels. He sent a second team into the farmhouse. But if Wingate was under the soy, they were probably going to have to dig him out. He sent three more officers to the grove and told the other two to go up on Sideroad 1 and see what LeJeune’s cruiser was doing in the middle of the road.

  “Try to go easy,” Greene said, and the guy in the digger gestured at the giant metal scoop he was operating. “Well, try anyway!”

  The man let down the head of the digger and scraped a groove in the dirt. Greene winced. When the operator dumped his load, it looked like a beach pail’s worth. Anyone who was down there had a long wait ahead of them, unless they were already dead.

  LeJeune rang him on his cell. “Are we still radio silent?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “And is the detective inspector there?”

  “No,” he said, “but your car is.”

  “My car? Where is – ”

  “She traded up. She’s in your colleague’s Mercedes. They’re headed north in it.”

  “She dumped my cruiser?”

  “Did you know Bellecourt drove a Mercedes?”

  “No,” she said, after a moment.

  He took a few steps toward the road, where he could see LeJeune’s car better. The two officers were circling it, and one of them was putting his firearm away. The other kneeled at the front of the crushed hood. “It seems to be shorter now.”

  “What?”

  “We’ll have to work this out later, Commander. I’m trying to dig a hole here.”

  “Seems the one you are standing in is deep enough.”

  The digger was down almost a quarter of a metre in the middle of the depression. It scraped something, and the operator came out onto his step. “Skip?”

  Greene came back to the excavation. “What is it?”

  “There’s a pipe down there.”

  He waved the digger back as well as the two men returning to the middle of the field. He tested the surface of the indentation as he walked across it to where a plain five-inch pipe was bent against the dirt. He leaned down to it. “Fried banana.”

  “Meaning?” asked one of the returning officers.

  “Dynamite,” Greene said. He put his eye to the opening and then pulled back, blinking furiously.
Before anyone could inquire what had happened, he’d put his face back down and was talking into the pipe. “My name is Superintendent Raymond Greene. Can anyone hear me?”

  He turned his ear to the pipe. After a moment, he repeated his message.

  There was a faint whisper in his ear. He bolted upright, then anxiously settled himself again. The voice was faint and weak. “My name … Katrina … Volkov.”

  “Hello! Hello! Can you hear me?”

  “I hear …”

  “Are you injured?” he asked. “Can you see or hear anyone else down there?”

  But there was no further reply. Greene stood and backed away from the opening. He waved the operator back into his cab. “Get going,” he said. “Do it as quickly and safely as possible.”

  He made room and drew his other officers back with him. There were voices in the distance, men emerging from the stairway that led down under the grove.

  Wingate had not been alone down there. He’d either been put with other prisoners or he’d been trying to effect a rescue when the place had been blasted. Either way, he was due for a commendation. Greene only hoped he wouldn’t be giving it to him posthumously.

  ] 34 [

  Approaching dusk

  Constable Lydia Bellecourt slumped in the passenger seat of her battered Mercedes. Hazel had thought of putting her in the back, but the woman was surely capable of doing something that might have killed them both. She wanted to keep an eye on her.

  She alerted incoming cruisers not to go all the way to the house; she wanted to be left alone with Bellecourt as the sole bit of stimuli. But officers were to cut off every point of exit from the escarpment, including sideroads that led down and away from the lake. There were to be no sirens. She was relaying her play through Wilton, who conferenced in Ray Greene as well as five cars on each of her calls. She had entered the escarpment. Bellecourt, who had become moribund with defeat, now seemed to rouse, a faint but rapt look on her face. Hazel had never made a large-enough allowance for the madness of others. She had been subject to any number of moods in her life, but never had she been anything but bitterly sane. Surely there was a place in every person where the spark of their insight into what they really were was present, and viable.